skygiants | (no subject)

So I saw the Veronica Mars movie to say, and -- somewhat to my surprise -- besides general enjoyment (I have lots of general enjoyment!) I actually have some thoughts about it?

So I've seen a lot of discussion of the class stuff in the movie, and so I'm not going to talk about it much except to say that I thought pretty much all of it was great, and re-focuses the show where it ought to be focused -- on abuses of power and privilege, and the uneasy role Veronica takes in the middle, trying to fight against them while always a little too close to falling into them instead. Obviously, in Neptune, class and race are the big divisive axes, and Weevil's storyline highlights that, as Weevil's storylines have always highlighted that (which is why Weevil's storylines are the best storylines). But there's another big axis of privilege too, that the show always danced around a little bit more, and that, of course, is gender.

I've seen a couple of posts wondering why Carrie Bishop and Susan Knight were at the center of this mystery, when they couldn't get Leighton Meester back to play Carrie Bishop -- but personally I think it's actually kind of a stroke of genius that Carrie Bishop and Susan Knight were at the center of this mystery.

So the thing about the Carrie Bishop and Susan Knight episode of Veronica Mars is that this case, maybe more than any other, is the one where internalized misogyny bites Veronica in the ass.

Veronica Mars is a noir. A noir with a female PI, but still very much a noir -- and Veronica is extremely self-aware about her genre. Historically, noir is not a genre that likes women. Noir believes in femmes fatales; it believes that sexuality is a weapon that women use against men, not the other way around.

Veronica believes in femme fatales. Given an ambiguous situation in which a woman is either a victim or an evil mastermind who needs to go down, Veronica usually chooses to believe the woman is the evil mastermind. This is what happens with Carrie Bishop and Susan Knight in Season 1 of Veronica Mars. In the noir movie that Veronica's living, she casts Carrie Bishop in the role of the bitchy femme fatale who uses her sexuality to ruin an innocent man's life, and screws up big time when it turns out that actually, no, in the real world that power dynamic is a lot more likely to go the other way around.

So then what happens in the Veronica Mars movie? Given a choice of villainous masterminds, Veronica picks Gia. She makes the same mistake as she did in Carrie Bishop's case -- she assumes that Gia is using her sexuality to control the men around her, when actually Gia's a victim too. A complicit victim, certainly not free of guilt, but a victim all the same. And Veronica's assumptions get Gia killed.

(And the resolution of the mystery of course has to do with class, too, and with Gia's privilege there, and the ways in which her wealth and social status do force her into complicity with evil, because these things are all related. INTERSECTIONALITY.)

Veronica Mars is a character with a lot of flaws, which of course is one of the things that makes her a great character and one of the reasons I love her. Her internalized misogyny is, I think, one of her most important blind splots. Veronica just does not want to deal with the fact that the world is usually harder for women to navigate than men; she holds grudges against other women for acting in the ways that they do, without considering why.

The fact that it's the Carrie Bishop case that they chose to call back for the movie makes me think it's not an accident that Veronica's assumptions about women have the consequences they do in the film. It makes me think that if there's ever more Veronica Mars, in whatever form, this is something they do intend for Veronica to have to think about and deal with and confront, in the same way she has to confront societal problems and her own privilege when it comes to class and race. And that actually makes me feel a lot better about a lot of things that we saw in the show.

(...Season One of the show. I've forgotten almost everything I saw of Seasons Two and Three, so for the purposes of this discussion we're pretending they don't exist.)

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/373316.html

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From:

lunamystic

Yesssss. This.

For similar reasons, I've been flailing my arms a bit at people upset that Veronica goes back to Logan and leaves Piz high and dry. Yes part of it is fan service, but it felt in character to me. It is a noir, and even Veronica couched the move in addiction terms -- more of her self-awareness. Everything about her decision to stick around Neptune -- the job, Logan, her past -- is potentially self-destructive and dark on her part, and it fits.

From:

skygiants

Yes! One hundred percent. Like, the thing is (and the reason I loved it!) it wasn't even about Logan and Piz at all (fanservice aside), it was about Veronica's New York life versus her Neptune life. And as soon as we saw the smarmy lawyer job that Veronica was interviewing for, it was one hundred percent clear that Veronica was never going to choose the New York life. She wants to keep fighting the underdog fight, and probably it will inevitably destroy her. But it's still ... a good fight.

From:

next_to_normal

She makes the same mistake as she did in Carrie Bishop's case -- she assumes that Gia is using her sexuality to control the men around her, when actually Gia's a victim too.

Ooooh yes. I've always liked the Carrie Bishop ep precisely because of the way it calls out Veronica's assumptions, but I hadn't made the connection to Gia in the film.

I do hope they explore her internalized misogyny more in the novels/potential sequel films. It's a striking character flaw for someone who would ordinarily get labeled a feminist role model or strong female character.

From:

skygiants

Yeah! I mean, I think it's a very IC issue -- and

aberration's comment below does a much better job explaining why than I could! -- so, like, I'm kind of glad she has it, you know? Or, I'm glad as long as they explore it and deal with it. Because I feel like it's so common -- especially when you look at the "strong female character" trope, which so often has the ugly subtext of "not like the other girls."

From:

next_to_normal

Yes! I love that it's treated as a flaw and not just Veronica being a SFC who isn't like other girls. Like

aberration mentions, the narrative calls her out on it - more explicitly in the series than in the film, but the entire reason she left Neptune is because her "get tough, get even" approach came back to bite her in the ass.

And although she acknowledges that in the beginning of the film, I don't know that she truly understands it - because I don't think she ever learned how to not blame herself, or to stop transferring that blame to other victims. She just removed herself from situations where she had to SEE the victims by not taking their cases.

I've seen some criticisms of the movie along the lines that it feels like Veronica isn't being allowed to grow up because she can't get away from Neptune and her high school boyfriend and her teenage detective career. But I think it's actually the other way around. The nine years away are what allowed for her arrested development - she avoided her issues instead of dealing with them and maturing through them. She's stuck in high school because it was a traumatic experience, and she got hard and angry and when that didn't protect her, she tried to forget it and pretend none of it mattered. Now that she's back in Neptune, she can't keep running away. If she's going to fight for the underdogs, she has to face her own trauma and the way that bleeds into her perceptions of others, especially other women and other victims.

From:

aberration

Warning now for discussion of rape and sexual assault -

The thing is, I don't think you can really get into Veronica's internalized misogyny without touching her own personal history, and the fact that the kind of strife and abuse she faces is so often sexual in nature. (Including in this movie, when a repeated plot point was a tape of her having sex that had been recorded and distributed without her consent.) I can't speak to her experience, but I know after I had incidents on the severe end of sexual harassment, it took (and takes) a lot of work for me to unlearn self-blame. I blamed myself for being too shy to stop it, for not being like a badass woman in a movie who screams or fights the other person off, for not really realizing at all moments what was happening, for not acting in some perfect way, for letting it happen.

Veronica didn't just chop off her hair to go from sweet-wig-wearing Kristen Bell to cold outcast season 1 Veronica Mars. She also forced herself into a hardened exterior. You get tough, you get even. Anything to limit not only getting hurt, but the potential to get hurt. The only way she sees to do that is to make sure everyone knows that if you hurt her, she'll hurt you worse. And there are many times throughout the show when the other characters tell her hey, maybe that isn't the only way to do things, and the narrative backs them up.

But my point is that I don't think it's just about internalized misogyny. It's about self-loathing. She emotionally hates this version of herself that let this happen to her, even when she objectively understands that she's not to blame. All the logic and correctness in the world can't entirely overpower the emotional wound that's further pried and poked at constantly through rape culture. She doesn't want to deal with the fact that the world can be harder for women to navigate than men because she can't accept that she could be hurt again, no matter how hard and angry and tough she becomes and no matter how brutally she lashes out at those who might hurt her. She'd rather live in a world where the worst is true of everyone, especially women, than emotionally accept the pure injustice and nonsensicalness of what she went through. And for that matter, continues to go through. It's similar to why she yells at victims of bullying (even when she's helping them) – she sees her own vulnerability and she feels the need to absolutely quash it. There's a cruel but understandable irony to how Veronica's own experiences with society's sexual violence toward women are what can help her perpetuate it.

Or maybe I'm getting overemotional and over-identifying-y, but. Yes, she holds grudges against women for acting the way they do without considering why, but we can also consider why she herself does that?

Edited Date: 2014-03-20 11:19 pm (UTC)

From:

skygiants

I was hoping you would come leave this comment, because we talked a bit about this the other day, and I didn't want to start bringing it up in the post itself because these were all your insights, not mine, and it would have felt weirdly like plagiarism. But yes -- I think all of this is true. Well, this, and the other thing you said at that time, which is that I think it's easier for her to think of women as in control and evil than to think of them as not in control. Because she wants to be strong and in control herself -- and if bad things happen, of course that's on her. She takes responsibility for it, even for things that aren't her fault (see also: ...like, the entire choice to stay in Neptune and clean it up) because she needs to believe she can control it. So of course the same goes for the women around her.

But I also think, at the same time, as I said above -- and this may seem like a contradiction, but people are contradictory -- Veronica has invested a lot in her identity as "not like the other girls." Like, her best/only female friend is Mac -- and that happens in that episode with the purity test, which is explicitly an issue of Mac pulling a pretty awful prank on "the other girls" that neither Mac nor Veronica are able to see as awful, EVEN THOUGH it directly affects Veronica and Sympathetic Meg in ways that are directly related to rape culture. It's a prank that doesn't work without rape culture. But the "other girls," you know, they're stupid and mean, so they're getting what they deserve, right? And again, that's where the self-loathing comes in. Veronica isn't that "other girl" anymore. But she used to be.