This post discusses the eleventh and twelfth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

Halfway through this first season of Veronica Mars, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t necessarily care very much about the cases themselves that Veronica is investigating week-to-week, but that I care a great deal about getting a better sense of Neptune, California. When the cases serve the setting and the characters, I tend to find myself much more engaged by the procedural elements of the show, which happened to varied extents in these two episodes.

The first—featuring a welcome appearance by New Girl‘s Max Greenfield—does that in two different ways. The bar murders that Keith and Veronica investigate open up an area of Neptune’s economy that we haven’t heard that much about before. In addition to being an enclave for wealthy Californians in the tech and entertainment industries, it’s apparently also a tourist haven. “Oh, but it was so important for the mayor and the Chamber of Commerce to put that scare behind us,” Keith complains of the rush by other city officials to pin the earlier stranglings on a suspect whose method was similar, but not identical to, the killer who reemerges. “This is all about tourist revenues? God bless America,” Veronica snarks when the mayor and Sheriff Lamb pull her father back into the case, using him for his knowledge, but without any promising of redeeming him.

The case also provides an opportunity for Weevil to deliver a hilarious, angry monologue at the police station that serves as a distraction, but that’s also a penetrating look into unequal policing in Neptune.
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It’s absolutely true that the Kick-Ass franchise is cartoonishly violent, and the plotline in the first movie in which Dave saves a white girl from menacing black drug dealers was downright racially irresponsible. That said, I’m really relieved that there’s at least one franchise out there that’s focused on the problem of escalation between superheroes and supervillains:

In a way, the arms race between superheroes and supervillians is like the real-world cycle in which police forces get more militarized in response to the perception that they’re outgunned by criminals, something that’s been a glancing subtext of pop culture since Hans Gruber took out the LAPD’s armored truck with a rocket launcher. In the end, nobody wins. You just get fireballs. Or two women in a pickup truck getting shot up by the cops, and a police department that then can’t even be bothered to replace their vehicle. Kick-Ass 2, like all superhero movies, will end up shying away from the idea that shutting down this escalatory cycle is a good thing, if only because the entertainment value—or, shall I say, kick-ass value—of it is so high. But more than most other franchises, Kick-Ass is comfortable at least acknowledging that there’s real ugliness there, and testing how comfortable we are embracing that.

David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, nominated for eight Oscars, is hardly the first movie to find critical acclaim with a searing portrait of the impact of mental illness. But unlike many films, which portray people who suffer from mental health issues as either saintly or pitiable, Silver Linings Playbook, about Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper), a former high school teacher who is returning home from eight months at a mental hospital after he beat his wife’s lover and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, is savagely funny and often disarmingly sweet. It’s also a subtle vehicle for larger ideas about mental health care in America, ranging from the damage done by late-in-life diagnoses of mental illnesses, to the fact that for some people, treatment comes only after they come into contact with the criminal justice system, to training about mental health that could help everyone from teachers to cops do their jobs better.

I spoke with Bradley Cooper, who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, and Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen, the president of Give An Hour, which coordinates with volunteer mental health providers to get free treatment to American veterans, about the stigma around mental illness, the intersection of mental health care and law enforcement, and what kinds of conversations they hope Silver Linings Playbook can start. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length:

I wanted to ask you about the structural story of the movie, because the real tragedy of Silver Linings Playbook is that Pat’s biploar disorder doesn’t get diagnosed until it’s completely unmanageable. It’s awful that it gets to this point, but it’s also a way that he finally gets care, and that’s not a story we see very often.

Cooper: But reflective of what’s happening. I mean, that’s the whole point. Patrick Kennedy, he likens it to a diagnosis which happens at stage four of cancer. When that’s occurring, it’s a bleak horizon. The whole idea is to have it be diagnosed before he makes a plea bargain with the courts after he beat the hell out of a guy. That’s the only reason he even went to a hospital in the first place and was diagnosed there. But, if somebody recognized, or he had a venue when he was a teenager, to talk about the fact that his brain is working in such a way that make him feel like an outsider, like he’s not belonging, then maybe that would have been prevented, then maybe he wouldn’t have had to serve time and had a 500-yard restraining order out against him, and have no job.

At the same time, the movie treats the ongoing law enforcement involvement in Pat’s life—a local police officer is assigned to check up on him and respond to calls about him—as a good thing in Pat’s life. He doesn’t have a case worker, he has his therapist appointment once or twice a week, but the cops are actually doing a fairly good job of dealing with him.

Van Dahlen: That’s an unusual situation. The issue is having people in someone’s life who are consistent, who care. The police officer in this story was somebody who actually was willing to try when he could to be helpful, rather than just “Okay, I’m taking you back in.” And unfortunately, that’s not often the case in communities, nor is it the case that we’ve got teacher who have the knowledge, even though they care about the kids, they may not understand. So they’re not going to be the one that says “Maybe something else is going on here.” It’s educating all the way down the line in our communities so these folks are identified and have access and it’s part of our normal conversation. It should not be the case that someone has to keep feeling like “I’m going to try to keep it together, I’m going to try to keep it together.” We see this obviously with the service members, that whole culture, trying to keep it together when they can’t. Our society, unfortunately, puts a tremendous amount of pressure on people, and sometimes, they blow.

Cooper: The police officer for our story in the movie, he serves the same way that his friend Ronnie serves, his brother Jake and his parents, who say “You look great. Just adhere to the rules and you’ll be fine.” There’s no investigation into what’s going on. The cop doesn’t pull him aside at the movie theater and say “Explain to me what happens.” He goes “The restraining order. You want to go back to Baltimore?” Those aren’t ways of actually understanding the situation. And that’s the device we use in the movie to then introduce Tiffany Maxwell, who is Jennifer [Lawrence], and that’s the whole idea of somebody understanding him. And that’s where we can then use this movie in terms of spreading an awareness of people actually needing to investigate, and to inquire in what’s going on, so people feel free to share, instead of adhering to a set of rules, and that’s the way it is.
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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched all four seasons of Sons of Anarchy. And while shotgunning the show’s episodes may not be for the faint of heart (so much grotesque violence!), it’s given me a lot to think about with the show. So every day this week, I’ll be considering another aspect of life in Charming, California. The previous posts in this series appear here and here.

While Sons of Anarchy is deeply immersed in a conversation about institutions, one of the things that distinguishes it from a show like The Wire is that it’s not equally interested in all of the interlocking institutions whose friction produces most of the show’s drama. The focus is always on the MC, and U.S. Attorneys, cops, and businessmen are only important when they wander into the frame that Kurt Sutter’s set up. That’s an interesting choice, and it means the show has, thus far, left a central question unaddressed: how do the citizens of Charming feel about the deal Police Chief Wayne Unser struck with SAMCRO? And about the presence of the MC in their midst in general?

We meet a fairly narrow band of Charming residents who have no formal involvement with the MC or their various rivals: in law enforcement, we’ve got Wayne Unser, David Hale, and Eli Roosevelt; in the business community, we’ve got Jacob Hale, Elliot Oswald, and Mrs. Roosevelt; and in the medical establishment, we have Margaret Murphy. In other words, we have no broad-based sense of how much the ordinary citizens of Charming interact with SAMCRO, or what they feel about their town’s entanglement with a deeply criminal enterprise. Do you bring you minivan to the MC’s shop if you’re a mom with engine trouble? Are you angry about crime on the fringes? Do you think the relationship is worth it to keep the drug trade away from your kids? And if it’ll create jobs and increase property values, would you support the development of Charming Heights?

The people whose perspectives we do have tend to to provide more personal insight than institutional narratives. We understand that Chief Unser is personally entangled with Gemma Teller Morrow, and that he benefits personally from his relationship with the Sons of Anarchy. But given the timing of the club’s founding and its formalized relationship with Charming law enforcement, it makes sense that Charming might have accepted SAMCRO’s protection as service cuts took a toll on California in the wake of the passage of Proposition 13, which severely limited California’s ability to raise additional tax revenue, in 1978. If Sutter does make a First Nine spinoff of Sons of Anarchy, it would be fascinating to explore how SAMCRO burrowed in to its position in Charming. It’s not just that decision that’s obscured: killing David Hale deprived the show of a legitimate counterweight to Unser’s understanding with the Sons and the opportunity to see a Charming native, who perhaps represents more mainstream citizens, work out a new relationship with SAMCRO. Eli Roosevelt’s arrival in Charming could have been an opportunity to see how the Sons responded to a law enforcement structure that wasn’t solely concerned with the crime rate in that one town. But Lincoln Potter’s arrival again derails the development of a new dynamic. I understand that having a single representative of a threat makes for more economical storytelling, but it does deny us the opportunity to see a show balanced between SAMCRO and the cops, and to fully explore the implications of that shifting relationship.
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