Life on Mars

After Buffy ended, I was pretty chary about giving my heart to another TV show. Two cruel cancellations — Serenity and Wonderfalls, call it the Tim Minear effect — later, and I was even more averse to commitment. What if the show that I loved faltered and fell? Or what if it never attained the dizzy heights of those burnished twin peaks of Buffy and, well, Twin Peaks.

I loved Twin Peaks. Partially because my dad banned me from watching it. I was obsessed. So were all my friends. On Tuesday nights, from 9 til 10, any other family member could use the phone freely because we were all under embargo, locked to the television (there’s no commercials on some channels in the UK. Imagine!), puzzling out the eternal battle between good and evil. I was thinking recently about why we all loved it so much, and I reasoned, perhaps it was the first show I had ever seen that put a group of teenagers at the centre of that battle, and showed that adults had as little clue as we did — but that somehow, young people were central to it.

At the time, the thought moved me, and made me smile on my adolescent self as she was emerging into a complex world. Now, it kind of creeps me out. Because what’s at the centre of this epic battle — and what Buffy so appealingly and brilliantly avoids and inverts — is the (raped, disfigured) corpse of a wealthy, blonde teenage girl. That epitome of the American dream.

And you know what — there it is again at the heart of Veronica Mars, the only show that I’ve risked getting close to. Honestly, I just thought it would be a fling, given that it’s totally preoccupied with a bunch of whiny rich kids and has no hot lesbian witches. But it’s gripped me, kind of like stomach cramps in the middle of the night. Part of that is, I want to know who killed Lilly Kane and I want that person stomped to death by wildebeest. But the other part is, I want to know why I care so much.

Don’t get me wrong. I am well aware that hundreds and thousands of young women are unacceptably and often unreportedly harmed or violated or killed in domestic or acquaintance violence every year. What I don’t get is why it has to be made out to be such a mystery — by which I mean firstly, why we have to fetishise the corpse (which is, of course, the cadaver of the Hollywood reverie of perfect desire) and secondly, why we act so surprised and yet unsurprised. It’s both "Who would want to kill Laura Palmer?" and "Who didn’t want to kill Laura Palmer?" The poor little rich girl is initially seen as an innocent surrounded by wolves — but as we learn how she strayed from the path through the woods to granny’s house, it becomes an individual tragedy, and more a tragedy for the detective embroiled in the seamy side than for the victim herself.

To be fair, on Veronica Mars, the detective has every right to as much sympathy — the victim, Lilly, was her closest friend, and the murder case has subsequently destroyed her social life (although the viewer may think, "Dude, Veronica, the best thing that ever happened to you was those knick-knacks dropping you so you saw what kind of ugly asses their souls had anyhow." Or you might think, "Which one of the identikit blonde boys were you so into again?").

Also, it’s Veronica, not Lilly, who has been raped. Interestingly (ugh, weak word, but moving on to the interesting bit), the initial flashbacks to Veronica’s Roofied rape show a scene not dissimilar from the poolside where Lilly was killed — it’s a different house, and there’s the stars and sparkles of a rich kid party, but there’s the swimming pool and the stone flags and the loungers. It seems pretty obvious to say that, with their long, blonde hair Veronica and Lilly are doubles in many ways (if you haven’t watched the show, look away now): they are half-sisters (as Veronica learns) and Veronica ends up smooching Lilly’s ex, Logan. Veronica is Lilly’s smart side, as well as her good side — but she’s also surprisingly tough, whereas Lilly cracked, went soft.

I read a posting on Television Without Pity (I cracked too, I had to know who raped Veronica before I watched the episode or I would have found the tension unbearable) that argued that Veronica was raped by 09er (rich kid) culture, with its alcoholic licence, amoral ability to buy off bad deeds and lack of parental flying-fuck-giving. And I thought, yeah. Rape is not an act that happens between two (or more people) in the way that the law and TV movies would have us believe. It is, as the Master says to Spike in "Lessons" (7:1) about power — the confrontation between the insurpassable force of the human will to be intact and self-contained and the immoveable object of patriarchal society’s desire to conquer and possess.

Veronica doesn’t die after what happens to her, and at least that’s some small sign of a change. Unlike Laura, she is given the opportunity to face her past without the intervention of a white male professional (however cute and surreal), although Lilly isn’t. Is that because Veronica was a virgin whereas Lilly (like Laura) enjoyed sex? Without giving away the Veronica reveal (yeah, I had to read that summary as well, it was starting to drive me crazy with the not-knowing), it’s also fair to say that Neptune is a little less weird than Twin Peaks when it comes to family fun, and a little more head-on-shoulders about personal responsibility — but no less in thrall to the idea that attractive young women want to fuck ugly older men.

And that way badness lies. At least Buffy kills Angel, not the other way around. And she kills him because she knows that his actions are symptomatic of a worldview that sees dumping your girlfriend after you relieve her of her virginity and ending the world because you believe that you’re all powerful as pretty much on a moral continuum. Power is power, but it’s all too rare to see it played out in a forum where the emblem of power over (both its power over the imagination, and being the thing that others have power over) is anything but the violated body of a teenage girl.

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