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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This post discusses plot points from the April 28 episode of Mad Men.

During last night’s episode of Mad Men, the most hotly-contested point between viewers I saw discussing the show on social media was whether the show’s white characters would have reacted to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. the way they did, experiencing emotions from Peggy’s anxiety about how riots might affect the value of her first apartment to Pete’s outraged expression of grief. But what struck me about the episode was less the idea that it was an illustration of the relative goodness and racial progressivism of the characters we’ve come to know over the years, and more that it was about those characters adjusting to changing standards of whiteness. Rather than treating the civil rights movement as something rather distant, and perhaps something to get involved in only if you have personal reasons to do so, as was the case with Paul Kinsey’s Freedom Ride, Mad Men‘s core characters sensed that King’s death wasn’t an event confined to the black community, and not just because of the riots that it inspired. His murder was something they were supposed to have a reaction to if they were to be seen as compassionate people. But unaccustomed to honest discussions with black coworkers and wholly unfamiliar with the idea of genuine cross-racial solidarity, their reactions to King’s death ended up coming across as awkward and contrived, because, of course, they were. Opposition to racism, and genuine comfort with people who don’t share your race, it turns out, are things that take practice.

Many of the white characters on Mad Men treated King’s murder as if it were personal to their black coworkers, a death in the direct, rather than extended, family. “You should go home,” Peggy told her secretary Phyllis. “In fact, none of us should be working.” Don encouraged Dawn to go home, too, and only accepted that she would prefer to be at work, her persistence and dependability a deliberate counterexample to the rioters Phyllis called “these fools, running in the streets” whether Don recognizes it or not, when Dawn told him firmly “I’d really rather be here today.”

The decision that black employees should be allowed time to grieve, whether they wanted it or not, also inspired some of the first physical familiarity between Joan and Peggy and their African-American coworkers, though their hugs were markedly different affairs. Peggy and Phyllis, we know, have at least some sort of relationship other than a simple employer-employee one. Phyllis has told Peggy to be as encouraging to the men in the office as Peggy has been to her, though it’s not clear whether Peggy is encouraging Phyllis to try copywriting, or simply being a good boss. She feels comfortable enough with Peggy to watch the television in her office. They’re capable of talking about King’s death, at least a little bit, Peggy offering up Abe’s assessment that the riots “could have been a lot worse,” and Phyllis tearfully telling her boss, “I knew it was going to happen. He knew it was going to happen. But it’s not going to stop anything.” And when they hug, it’s a direct, if slightly brittle embrace. There is real feeling there, even if Peggy isn’t capable of being as open with Phyllis as Phyllis is being with her.
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This post discusses the ninth and tenth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

One of the things I’m coming to really enjoy about Veronica Mars is the way, compared to other television shows and movies about being a teenager, social groups are relatively fluid. This was an insight that Mean Girls, which made its bow in theaters five months before Veronica Mars debuted on television, made brilliantly at its conclusion: that being a Plastic was a temporary condition rather than an ontological one, and it could pass with the end of a school year or on the occasion of a momentous bus accident. Veronica Mars actually takes that idea a step further in these two episodes, which serve as an illustration of how porous the 09ers are as a clique. They’re people, after all, rather than rigid a fraternal order, and their social group can’t actually provide everything they want, whether it’s support in being more compassionate than their parents or someone who’s willing to ante up for a genuinely high-stakes poker game. Veronica herself has always been a reminder of that fact, but these two episodes are a reminder that she’s not an exception—she’s actually more of the rule at Neptune.

The Moon Calves subplot in “Drinking The Kool-Aid” is a little half-baked, unfortunately—it’s an over-the-top way to get at a concept that might have been fleshed out on a smaller scale, that being one of the 09ers, and being part of one of Neptune’s wealthy families, is actually a corrosive and disillusioning experience. Casey (Jonathan Bennett, who played Aaron Samuels in Mean Girls), has come to realize that, as he puts it, “I wrote the Jackass Bible, the Jackass Koran, the Jackass Talmud.” His parents, who have been wealthy their whole lives, let the desire to keep consolidating their wealth corrupt their interpersonal relationships, particularly with Casey’s grandmother. “My parents, who call her Grandmonster behind her back, stopped paying attention to her,” he explains. Having him work out those issues through a cult gives Veronica and her dad a case, but it’s also a kind of quick way to dispense.

By contrast, the person who appears to be working out those issues on a relatively large scale and over an extended period of time is Logan Echolls. The show’s taken time to establish the misery that lies behind the gates to his family home, some of the tension between him and his friends, and the ways in which managing his pain at Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried, another link to Mean Girls) has lead him to tweak Neptune’s establishment by helping Veronica subvert the whitewashed memorial the Kanes had planned for her. And one of the things the show is doing now that we know these things about him is showing how his relationships with Weevil and Veronica, the main people he hangs out with who aren’t 09ers, are shaping up like fencing matches, shaped by the participants’ needs and the ground they’re willing to surrender.

“What if I run into a pack of you white boys on some clean, well-lit street? I could be bored to death,” Weevil tells Logan when he’s trying to get in on his poker game. The language of the negotiation between them is similar to what it was when Weevil was going after Logan’s car in the pilot. “You people can hand-roll like nobody’s business,” Logan tells him of the Cuban cigars he’s passing around, and when Weevil wins big, Logan tells the other player “Sean, the money box so I can pay the pool boy?” But the fact that Weevil’s seeking out the invitation at all, and that Logan’s willing to grant it—and that when the theft goes down, Logan’s willing to let Weevil search his friends rather than calling security and having him tossed out—demonstrates how far the two of them have come. I’m not sure how their relationship will shape up long-term given that there seems to be a great deal we don’t know about Weevil’s relationship to Lilly, and how Logan might react when he—and we—find out what the truth is there. But the fact that they were both drawn to the same girl, that they both have parental figures who are willing to sacrifice them for their own good, whether it’s Logan for his good name or Weevil’s grandmother who believes he can do shorter time as a juvenile, suggests a similarity to them that is obvious to us, even if they can’t see the extent of it.

And that’s also true for Logan and Veronica as well. Of course, they were friends for real, once. And it means that Logan’s willing to let Veronica back in when she volunteers to investigate the poker game theft. “Annoy, tiny blonde one! Annoy like the wind!” Logan tells her, more affectionately than anyone else. “You are a natural at this,” Weevil tells Veronica when they stop by the Echolls’ ill-fated Christmas party. But the truth is that it’s just as normal for Logan to want people like Weevil and Veronica in his life as it would be for Weevil and Veronica to want in to the mansion, with its catering and its horribly over-the-top Christmas decorations. As Sean’s experience faking it as a member of the 09ers illustrates, it’s exhausting and ultimately unsustainable to posture all the time, even when you do have the money and social position to back up your bravado. Negotiating the minefield of high school is tiresome no matter who you are. And sometimes the best friendships can survive in the clandestine spaces in between cliques, where nothing is clearly expected, and as a result, everything is possible.

Race has always hovered around the edges of the storytelling in Mad Men, though the racial politics of the sixties have usually served to illustrate characters’ personalities, rather than driving the storytelling. When Pete Campbell notes the emergence of a distinct black market, it’s an illustration of his sharpness as an advertising executive, and his inability to push the insight forward through conversations with the office building’s elevator operator serves as a reminder of his social deficits. Paul Kinsey’s decision to go on a Civil Rights organizing trip with his girlfriend is more about demonstrating his desire to simultaneously ingratiate himself and prove he’s on the cutting edge than about him actually having particularly evolved racial attitudes. Lane Pryce’s dalliance with an African-American Playboy Bunny was an act of fairly childish rebellion against his father, as much as his wife. And Peggy’s willingness to take Dawn, her replacement as Don’s secretary, home for the night, only then to worry that the more junior woman might steal from her, is an illustration of the struggle between her desire to be kind and her self-interest.

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s been actively resistant to the idea that he has to tell stories about the Civil Rights movement on the show in the past, even though he’s obviously made a choice to depict a segment of Madison Avenue that’s whiter and more male than the industry was overall. So Sunday’s episode of the show, in which we both learn more about Dawn Chambers (Teyonah Parris), Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first African-American employee, and see racial and gender strife come to the firm not through a racial incident but through the kind of petty office politics that have driven so much of the show’s drama for the past five years, feels both like a response to long-running criticism of the show and a rebuke to the critics, Weiner showing us that his show would get to a key subject in what he determined to be good time, and in his own way.

What Weiner decided to do was make Dawn’s race a factor in a conflict that was simultaneously larger and smaller. While Dawn wasn’t willing to skip out on work to help Scarlett (who must be named for Miss O’Hara, in a great nod to pop culture’s influence even on these pop cultural characters), she did agree to punch her fellow secretary’s time card. When Joan found out, she fired Scarlett for effectively stealing wages from the company, setting up a confrontation between her and Harry, who resents that Joan is a partner, while Harry’s work on television hasn’t earned him the same thing—”It’s a shame my accomplishments happen in broad daylight,” he spits at her in public, ignoring that what earned the partners that title was sacrifice and investment, not personal accomplishment—and bringing up the question of Dawn’s race as one factor, along with her lower level of complicity in Scarlett’s offense, in the decision about whether to fire her.
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Joshua Alston has a terrific piece at the AV Club about how white critics have treated Tyler Perry movies and television shows. He argues that there’s been a strong tendency to treat Perry with deference because white critics either feel a need to extent points to Perry given that he’s one of the primary filmmakers who is interested in serving African-American audiences in general, or feel that their whiteness disqualifies them from specifically discussing Perry’s treatment of race. And Alston suggests that the dam has broken on Perry in recent weeks in part because his treatment of HIV has given critics another way in to criticize Perry on content grounds:

Temptation has given white critics free rein to trash Perry with impunity, because it allows them to skirt the racial implications of the work, and instead go after his harmful messages about HIV and women’s bodies. Even that is kind of an accident; the reaction to Temptation doesn’t exist in a bubble. The movie was released less than two weeks after the verdict came down in the Steubenville rape case. Any other time, Temptation might have won the types of confused, perplexing mainstream reviews Perry’s movies usually get, but at a time when rape and the politics of women’s bodies were commanding the zeitgeist, Temptation’s implication that women are complicit in their victimization by men couldn’t have been a more unwelcome message. It was so unwelcome, it was enough to encourage white critics, who are generally all too happy to stay out of the knottier conversations about Perry’s work, to attack once the dialogue moved to a topic they felt more comfortable engaging.

I’ve written a great deal about white television and screenwriters’ reluctance either to create characters of color at all, or to design characters of color who have any personality elements or perspectives drawn from their experiences as people of color, out of grave—and not necessarily misguided—fears of giving offense, speaking for others, or getting wrong experiences that are not their own. And I’ve also argued that the best way to give over that fear is to recognize that whiteness is a race rather than a neutral default. In other words, it’s as easy and thoughtful to think about what a Southern African-American family might serve at a typical dinner as it is to consider whether your Jewish characters keep kosher, or about how an Irish-American family might handle their kid getting in trouble in ways that are different from a Chinese-American family.

I think this is an approach that might serve white critics well, too. This is not to say, of course, that white critics should be some sort of final arbiters on the handling of race in America—critic corps need to diversify as much as the writing staffs of the industries that we cover. But I think we’d do well to write more about how shows constitute various kinds of whiteness as well as they do any other race, and to be intersectional in our approach when we write about class, gender, and sexuality. The construction of cops as Irish in The Wire—even to the extent of Lester Freamon singing The Pogues at a wake—is as important and interesting as the many conceptions of blackness on that show. One of the reasons Max on Happy Endings is so striking is not just that he defies physical types and standards of behavior for gay men, but in the way he defies physical types and standards of behavior for Jewish men. Justified has made strong use of Boyd Crowder’s racism, as well as his stints as a miner and a preacher, to depict a man in search of an identity, and who treats his race as a potential source of it. I’m excited to catch up on Shameless at some point precisely to see how the Gallaghers are treated. One of the reasons I think Mad Men would be a better show if it was willing to bring the racial friction of its time period closer to the center of the show, or even to just once treat it as a significant plot point, is because I think it would be interesting to see it explore gains and losses of privilege not just along gender lines, but racial ones as well—what did it really mean for Paul Kinsey and Lane Pryce to be people who could pursue relationships with black women? Is Peggy mentoring her African-American secretary, or merely treating her well, something that was implied in the last episode and that I’d like to see explored in greater detail.

If white critics or film and television writers are afraid of writing about race because we’re afraid of speaking for or about other people, the simplest solution is to stop and realize that writing about race means writing about ourselves as well.