In These Times takes on Veronica Mars

Christopher Hayes hagiographizes VM as scenes from the class struggle in Neptune, albeit with the ambivalences and complexities of beaucoup de "Stockholm Syndrome" (great Yo La Tengo song, by the way.) I'm trying to churn out some very overdue reading responses and failing miserably at the moment - probably need to get out of the library and work at home for the afternoon, but I'll take a few first to post some of my own thoughts on the class politics of Veronica Mars, which I find somewhat more problematic than Hayes does.

Class fissures lie at the core of Rob Thomas's fictional Southern Californian drama. Veronica and her father are declasse flotsam in a "town without a middle class," in which you are either fantastically wealthy or you scrub the toilets of the people who are. Hayes argues that the series deftly explores the pathologies of class and the antagonsims and resentments of those who look upward from beneath the impenetrable glass ceiling.

Yet i question this analysis on several grounds. First, Neptune's class politics are themselves deeply fanciful. The rich are rich because they were magically swept along in the dotcom boom or made a lot of bad movies. The corporate criminal (Richard Casablancas) is the rare exception. Most of Neptune's nouveau are simply the honest beneficiaries of Jake Kane's streaming video patents. Class is a striation, a marker of difference, here, which functions like a dehistoricized ethnic category or mystical syncretic racial identity rather than as a structure of exploitation. To hypothesize that class difference breeds resentment is not a particulary revolutionary suggestion, yet this is what Hayes thinks is so wonderful about the show and this is the thrust of his article. Yet Veronica Mars fails to present a more nuanced articulation of what class is and how it works. The dehistoricization and mythologization of Neptune's class politics at times makes the series into a sort of Windfall noir. But more importantly, confine class to a manifestation of difference and even inequality but not a structure of exploitation. Though there are moments when the world of the wealthy and the Weevil are tantalizingly intertwined - especially in the series's second episode - for the most part the series understands the underclass as atomized detritus severed from the Whopper McMansions of the elite save for some Crash-styl;e moments of crisis and the occasional Ellisonian Bumfight.

Unlike Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show's antecedent, which offered what i believe was a more nimble and less stereotyped, if quieter exploration of high school as a central locus of the imaginary of American cultural production, Veronica Mars attempts to deal with race as an ordering mechanism and social force in the lives of Neptune's inhabitants. If Buffy's Sunnydale seems to exist outside the racialized faultlines of California politics for the most part, (with the possible exception of "desde abajo te devora,") Veronica's Neptune seems at first glance to rest solidly at the epicenter of the tremors of violent racialized political exclusion, exploitation, and reaction. From Logan and Dick's racist banter to the sneers of the corrupt, self-aggrandizing Sherriff Lamb, to the machinations of Celeste Kane, the thrillseeking "jungle fever" of Paris Hilton Caitlyn Ford, or Weevil's chivalrous defense of Carmen, Racialized frictions and fissures are constitutive forces in Neptune's social imaginary. Yet Veronica's racial politics not only suffer from a dehistoricized and toothless multiculturalism, but also seem at times to employ problematic, even racist constructions of peoplehood in order to attain an "iconic" representation of southern California which all too often instead stumbles into the clumsy stereotypes of CSI and Law and Order and the criminalizing gaze of Cops. There are also moments where the series does exactly the opposite, and I don't want anyone to mistake me for someone who doesn't think that the show's first season is absolutely fantastic (well, except for the resolution of "A Trip to The Dentist," which was a total and deeply fucked-up cop out of dealing with sexual violence in a serious and complex way.) And whatever my disgust with the many failures of the sophomore season, I will continue to watch season 3 religiously. But if we are going to talk about the class politics of the series, I think our tone has to be much more meditative and critical than that which Hayes adopts.

(As an aside, I played Ollman's Class Struggle board game with Will and Cathy in college. I was the students, and I was allied to the workers. Somehow, I won, which is against the game's rules, but I guess we were playing a post-Seattle variant or something.)