This post discusses the fifth and six episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.*

Since I started this project, people have been telling me how terrific Veronica Mars is as a depiction of a relationship between parents and children. As someone who followed in my father’s footsteps in a general way professionally, I’ve enjoyed watching Keith and Veronica banter about, but what finally made that section of the show work for me was a scenario where Keith had to be more of a parent to Veronica than a partner, and where Veronica was hurt enough to act more like the teenager that she is than an adult in cargo pants and pigtails. What made this pair of episodes particularly powerful is the examples of bad parenting the tension between Keith and Veronica are juxtaposed against, both of which stem out of the kind of privilege that marks Neptune. Wealth may buy nice cars and gated mansions. But it doesn’t seem particularly capable of purchasing values or emotional connection.

Veronica and Keith run into trouble when both of them overestimate her maturity. Veronica, after hearing Rebecca James, her guidance counselor, leave a voicemail for Keith that makes it clear that the two of them are dating, tries to convince herself that she’s cool with what’s happening. “Next time, could you shoot for an actual teacher, because this has no impact on my grade-point average,” Veronica jokes with her dad. But her feelings about her mother, and the possibility of her mother’s return, remain entirely unresolved. Veronica’s still mailing burners to her mother’s friends, trying to figure out why she was drinking so heavily and acting so terrified. And because her father has treated her more like a partner than a parent, Veronica acts on her conflict in a way that reflects her confusion about their respective roles—by investigating Rebecca.

What made the confrontation between Veronica and Keith so painful was that it was a necessary readjustment for them after eight months of seemingly refusing to adapt to a new normal. “This is what we do,” Veronica told him when Keith reacted with fury to the news of her investigation. “This is how we survive. I was trying to protect you…You have let her into our life like it’s no big deal.” Acting like a private eye has made Veronica feel like she has the tools to handle her mother’s disappearance, and ideas like the burner phones certainly come from spending so much time with Keith. But sorting logistics isn’t the same way as resolving your feelings. And in this case, they’ve made Veronica’s confusion worse because of the contradiction between how hard Keith looks for other people, and how little he’s done to drag Veronica’s mother home for her. “You can find anybody. If she was a criminal, you’d make a couple of grand tracking her down, and you’d find her in a week,” Veronica sobs to her father in Kristen Bell’s most convincing bit of teenaged acting on the show.
Read more

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the pop culture insistence that while women may get badly messed up before a divorce, men get wrecked in the aftermath. Free Agents fits squarely in that model, though it’s a bit more balanced, about a man, Alex (Hank Azaria), and woman, Helen (a wonderful Kathryn Hahn), who find precisely what they need from each other in the aftermath of staggering emotional blows: in his case, the divorce, in hers, the death of her fiance.

The show works almost entirely on the strength of Alex and Helen’s characters as they both struggle to maintain their equilibrium in a semi-brutal office culture. Alex’s coworkers haze him to get back on his game after the divorce that’s flattened him; an obnoxious coworker pressures Alex to act as his wingman; his boss, an unfortunately grating Anthony Head tells him to focus less on his life and more on his work before showing him sex acts on his iPad. Helen gets anxious after a younger coworker warns her that she’s facing vaginal death. The supporting characters are, one episode in, dangerously grating, and the show risks souring easily if it doesn’t elevate them beyond stock tropes.

But Azaria and Hahn make me willing to forgive a lot. “You’re, like, making a statement there,” Alex remarks on the number of condoms in Helen’s bedside drawer the first time they sleep together. “I can buy bulk on the Internet?” she asks. “No, more like it’s 2011 and I’m an independent woman and I can buy hundreds of condoms,” Alex says thinking he’s come up with a compliment. “Doesn’t make me a slut.” Helen is taken aback. “Is that what I’m saying? Or am I saying it’s 2010 and I’m going to buy condoms to have sex with my fiance,” who is, of course, now dead. When a date tells Alex his new, Helen-approved shirt is nice, Azaria sells his anxiety beautifully when Alex asks “Really?” And I liked the specificity of Helen’s shopping list when she freaks out at a supermarket clerk she thinks is judging her. “I am buying wine, and frozen pork medallions, and sherbet, and wine. I’m not having a party,” she tells him in a huff. “I’m going to eat my pork medallions, and my sherbet, and drink my wine alone. And I’m fine with that.”

There are good things here, and I’m interested in how the show’s going to explore Alex and Helen’s grief and loss. I appreciate that Alex isn’t totally emasculated by the agony he’s clearly in — he’s funny and functional, even if he can’t keep it up all the time. And Helen’s self-aware about the ways she’s holding on to her fiance, even if she starts taking pictures of him off the wall to, for whatever reason, “Fernando.” (“I’m not sure what you think ‘Fernando’ is about,” Alex tells her. “It’s about two old Mexican men who are reminiscing about the Mexican American war.”) These are real people. Everyone else around them should be, too.

Adam Serwer closes out his blog on a very smart culture note, musing over why comic book companies are skittish about married superheroes:

The decision to eliminate their marriages, I think, has a great deal to do with the level of vicarious aspiration involved in comic-book fandom. An essential part of the fun is being able to imagine yourself having Superpowers. There’s a reason the X-Men remains such a blockbuster property–giving superpowers to social pariahs makes the fantasy even more believable, because after all, most comic book geeks–including myself–have a vivid sense of what it’s like to be picked on.

A marriage then, adds an additional hurdle to the fantasy, and not just because it makes the character seem older. I suspect much of the backlash from white geeks to the new Blatino Ultimate Spider-Man has to do with assumptions about blackness being “cool,” and the fear that the new Ultimate Spider-Man will require more suspension of disbelief than they can muster…Divorce by reality altering retcons then serve a secondary purpose beyond making these characters more relatable. They preserve the idealized standard of monogamous heterosexual relationships (no infidelity, no falling out of love, no messy divorce) while giving the heroes access to their female supporting characters and their impossible, pornstar-like bodies. Because what’s the point of being a cool, superpowered social outcast if you can’t use it to get girls?

That strikes me as a core conflict at the heart of male fantasies, and an emerging conflict in some female fantasies. Marriage is desirable, but also the source of pretty profound fears about whether someone will care to stick with you until death do you part. Pulling girls (or guys) lowers the stakes to the level of whether someone will have you until breakfast the next morning, but it doesn’t actually satisfy that long-term goal of settling down.

Most of our romantic comedies succeed by reconciling these disparate impulses: we meet a hound, usually of the male variety, towards the end of his long period of carousing and womanizing, and follow him through the process of finding The Woman. One of the things Sex and the City does that it does not get nearly enough credit for is to have Samantha, the main character with the most active sex life, go through this process, settle down in a monogamous relationship at the end of the series, and then to have her walk away from that relationship in the movie to return to the single life. The reason these stories work is that they generally last from 90 minutes to a decade; the timing feels sort of realistic, and you don’t get tired of the characters either as serial or as happy couples. Superhero stories, by contrast, last for decades. Over that span of time, serial dating or one-night stands can feel like arrested development, while that many years of happy marriage might seem dull, or worse, smug to core audiences. Having superheroes get stuck in terrible marriages might be in keeping with the trend of putting people with powers through the perpetual wringer, but that might be a bit too on the nose. Better to get overwhelmed by world-consuming power than go through the agonies of martial stultification and divorce. At least that’s a way to go out in a blaze.

Frank Stasio was kind enough to have me on his WUNC show yesterday to talk about divorce in pop culture. You can hear the full audio of the show here. But in prepping for it (and we talk about this a bit on the program), I realize there’s a weird gendered dichotomy to how divorce appears on television. For women, the damage happens before the divorce, while they’re still married, and divorce is an opportunity for renewal. But for men, the damage comes afterward, as they try to recover from the failures of their marriages.

In Happily Divorced, as Heather Havrilesky wrote earlier this summer, Fran Drescher’s amicably divorced from her gay husband, a situation in which the failure of her marriage is something she can’t possibly be responsible for. In The Starter Wife, Debra Messing obviously had been through hell at the end of her marriage, but her stylish single life made divorce look pretty good. The Real Housewives may be fooling themselves, but whichever unlucky woman has her marriage fall apart on-screen generally appears ready to rock and roll once she’s kicked out her husband or signed the papers.

By contrast, in Louie, Louis C.K. can’t find a new girlfriend, his daughters don’t want to stay at his apartment, and when he tries to be the cool parent, he gets them scared on Halloween. This season on Entourage, it seems like Ari can’t do anything right, including finding a way to spend time with his kids. This fall on Free Agents, Hank Azaria will attempt to get over his divorce by sleeping with a coworker who doesn’t really want to be with him.

There are exceptions, of course. On Modern Family, Jay seems pretty happily divorced and remarried to Glorida, and his ex-wife is supposed to be a bit of a mess because she still hasn’t gotten over their split. And in Good Christian Belles, Leslie Bibb’s divorce looks like it’ll affect the reception she gets when she returns to Dallas, giving all the people she tormented back in the day an excuse to judge her:

But it is interesting for all we lionize men on the prowl before they’re married, but if they get married and their marriages break up, we think of men as totally adrift.

American divorce and annulment rates have been ticking downwards since 2001, so I was interested to read the always-excellent Heather Havrilesky’s piece on the odd turn towards cheery depictions of divorce in popular culture, riffing on everything from Happily Divorced to Real Housewives to Men of a Certain Age. I’d have expected the opposite, that if divorce was becoming more common, that we’d have a stronger need for positive images of divorced people that would help folks who are already divorced or going through splits convince themselves that they’re going to be okay.

As Heather puts it, “These children of boomers may be avoiding (and denouncing) divorce more vehemently than their parents did in part because they know, from personal experience, the blunt emotional impact it can have on children. And the current cheery cultural take on divorce may be an odd product of this renewed stigma. We don’t want our kids to repeat our experiences, and we certainly don’t want to relive those experiences on our TV or movie screens.” But if that’s true, wouldn’t we have more depressing visions of divorce in our popular culture, not fewer ones? And wouldn’t we have more pop culture that’s skeptical about marriage in the first place? Instead, most comedies still abide by the traditional definition of the term, steering happy couples towards the altar or toward the implication that it’s in the future. Instead, something like NBC’s Whitney still feels sort of fresh and surprising for its open skepticism of marriage:

Maybe the folks who are making pop culture don’t want their children to make their mistakes. But there’s something odd about the idea that the only mistakes that can lead to divorce happen after folks get married, instead of before decide to march down the aisle.