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Mar. 18th, 2014 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsSo 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.)
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.)
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Date: 2014-03-21 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-21 05:56 pm (UTC)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.