Sarah Stringer – Bitch Flicks

The Relationships of ‘Veronica Mars’

It’s common wisdom that maintaining relationships requires constant work, but there’s often an assumption (in TV, movies, and real life) that this only applies to romantic relationships. Platonic relationships are rarely the focus of a story, and when a storyline deals with issues in these relationships, they’re often easily dealt with, and the friendship goes back to being simple. Exceptions to this are problems that are caused by romantic relationships. Veronica Mars is an exception to this; for its first two seasons, it depicts many platonic relationships, and explores the many issues involved in navigating them (some of these problems are related to romance, but many are not, showing platonic relationships have their own complexities, separate from romance).

This guest post by Sarah Stringer appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

The opening monologue of Veronica Mars makes it sound like this show is going to stick very closely to the trope of the jaded heroine, whose job has shown her so much lying and cheating that she’s closed off to the possibility of relationships. This idea is reinforced throughout the show, as various characters make jokes about Veronica’s cold cynicism. She’s snarky and sarcastic, and does have trouble getting close to people, largely because of all the trauma she went through before the beginning of the show.

Veronica with her trusted camera and jaded attitude

However, Veronica Mars ends up subverting our expectations. Far from being a show about an aloof hero who can’t work with others, it ends up being largely about Veronica’s various relationships. It’s a running joke throughout the show that she’s constantly asking her friends for favours, but it’s also a running joke that people are constantly asking Veronica for favours, and the favours she asks for are usually to help her help others.

Her friends complain about constantly having to come to her aid, but they never refuse her requests, because they know the favours will be returned when they’re in need. This creates complications, as Veronica finds the line between relationships based on mutual usefulness and reciprocity, and relationships built on genuine caring and respect. As the first couple of seasons progress, she gets better at navigating the second kind of relationship, and mixing it with the first kind.

It’s common wisdom that maintaining relationships requires constant work, but there’s often an assumption (in TV, movies, and real life) that this only applies to romantic relationships. Platonic relationships are rarely the focus of a story, and when a storyline deals with issues in these relationships, they’re often easily dealt with, and the friendship goes back to being simple. Exceptions to this are problems that are caused by romantic relationships. Veronica Mars is an exception to this; for its first two seasons, it depicts many platonic relationships, and explores the many issues involved in navigating them (some of these problems are related to romance, but many are not, showing platonic relationships have their own complexities, separate from romance).

Veronica starts season one with no friends, but in the pilot episode, she befriends the new kid at school, Wallace Fennel. Her very first meeting with him involves her helping him out, by cutting him down from the flagpole where some bullies had duct taped him. She immediately lets him know that sitting with her won’t help his social standing, and he doesn’t need to be her friend just to reciprocate her gesture. He sits with her anyway, not because he feels like he owes her for the help, but because he likes her as a person.

Wallace and Veronica become best friends, and they’re a rare example of a show seriously dealing with the complexities of platonic relationships. As Wallace spends more time at the school, he starts to befriend other students, and get quite popular as a result of being a star on the basketball team. This creates problems in his relationship with Veronica, as they both try to navigate the jealousy, resentment, and time conflicts that come from vastly different social statures.

Another issue in Veronica’s relationship with Wallace is the same issue that exists in all her relationships: the balance between genuine friendship and trading of favours. She often uses his job in the school’s office to get information for her cases, and he’s put himself at risk in that way and other ways to help her. He grants all her requests, sometimes with no knowledge of why he’s doing it (and no questions asked), but he knows her resources will be put to his use anytime he’s in trouble.

Sometimes the balance starts to tip too far, and Wallace feels like she’s taking him for granted. This comes to a head several times, especially when his mother gets in trouble at her job because of something Veronica had him do, without telling him how dangerous it could be. He calls her out several times when she starts neglecting her friendship with him, blowing him off to work on her cases and just using him for the assistance he offers. Veronica tries to make up for this by doing things like baking spirit cookies for his locker, telling him she may have no school spirit but he does, and what’s important to him is important to her.

Veronica and Wallace, figuring things out together

The issue of one partner taking the other partner for granted is one that often comes up in relationships, and little gestures to show affection is a common (partial) solution to it. The depiction of this as a constant issue between two platonic partners is quite refreshing.

This dynamic is seen in several of Veronica’s other relationships, particular with Weevil, a local biker, and Mac, a computer nerd. She gets Weevil and Mac out of trouble when they need it, and they both help her out whenever they can. Working around the inherent potential for taking advantage of each other, as well as Veronica’s own cynicism, they forge genuine friendships that grow as much as any romantic relationship.

The show also devotes a lot of time to Veronica’s relationship with her father, Keith. She works for him at his private investigator practice, and there are times when it’s difficult for them to navigate the dual dynamics of father-daughter and detective-receptionist/junior detective. He wants to protect her, but also teach her, and he often needs her help. He wants to trust her, but there are times when she breaks that trust, and he has to decide how to deal with that as a father and as a boss.

Familial relationships aren’t rare in television or movies (though complex portrayals of them are still rarer than in-depth looks at romance), but they’re rarely dived into as deeply as with Veronica and her father. They joke together, work together, go through extremely difficult circumstances together, and work together to come back from the problems created when they both inevitably screw up.

Veronica Mars portrays all these relationships, and their various issues, without touching romance. That’s not even getting into the relationships Veronica forms with whatever classmate she’s trying to help that week, or with other characters like Meg (her romantic rival, but also far more than that) and her dead best friend, Lily. In a subversion of a heroine who’s closed off and can’t get close to people, Veronica Mars is essentially a show about relationships of all types, and it’s at its best when it’s focusing on those.

The show deteriorated for many reasons in season three, but in my opinion, the major reason was the increased focus on romantic drama, at the expense of the many platonic relationships it built up previously. Weevil and Wallace have significantly smaller roles. Keith and Mac are still important, but mostly because of their own storylines, and they do a lot less interacting with Veronica. When Mac does talk to Veronica, it’s mostly so they can discuss their romantic lives, rather than develop their relationship with each other.

Season three's Weevil, aka "Who the Hell Is This Guy, Again?" — Season three’s Weevil, aka “Who the Hell Is This Guy, Again?”

Romance certainly existed in the show before season three. Veronica had three boyfriends in two seasons, and those relationships were in no way simple or small parts of the story. But they were portrayed quite similarly to the platonic relationships: the focus was on human interactions, and two people figuring out how to fit their personalities together. They even shared the issues about genuine caring versus using each other; Veronica’s first boyfriend was a cop who she met because she was trying to sneak past him to steal evidence, and she spent the better part of the second season trying to get her next boyfriend off for murder.

However, in the third season, most of Veronica’s romantic issues were more superficial. Her and her on-and-off boyfriend Logan spent more moping about each other than actually figuring out how to be together (or not be together). There’s drama about who’s sleeping with who that leads to more fights than resolutions. The show seems to lose its focus, particularly since so many of Veronica’s platonic relationships are neglected.

There were things I liked about the third season of Veronica Mars, and I await the upcoming movie with as much bated breath as the next fan. But I hope the movie put the focus back where I think it belongs: on complex relationships of all kinds, rather than romantic drama.

See also at Bitch Flicks: “Why Veronica Mars is Still Awesome,” by Amanda Rodriguez

Sarah Stringer is a psychology student in Ontario, with an interest in the political aspects of pop culture.

Women in Sports Week: The Political Gets Personal for ‘Friday Night Lights’ Jess Merriweather

This is a guest post by Sarah Stringer.

(Spoilers ahead for the last couple of seasons of the Friday Night Lights TV show – if you haven’t seen it already, I’ll wait while you watch all five seasons of the show, then watch the movie and read the book. Trust me; it’s worth your time. Also, warning: links to TV Tropes. Do not click if you have anything else to do for the next 24 hours.)

Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Jess Merriweather in Friday Night Lights

A long time ago, movies, books and TV shows figured out how much emotion there is to harness in stories about sports. Sports are driven by dreams, hope, love, hate, anger, exhilaration and devastation. There’s power in that kind of passion – power that leads Rocky Balboa to knock out the mighty Ivan Drago, and Friday Night Lights’ Vince Howard to throw 60-yard bombs. Portraying them this way is truth in television; heart and love of the game really are major factors in athletic achievements, and it makes for some incredible narratives.

This says something about the fact that so many sports stories (fictional ones, and coverage of real-life ones) are male-dominated. It tells us what depths of emotions society ascribes exclusively to androgens. There are some exceptions to this rule – movies like Bend It Like Beckham, Million Dollar Baby, and A League of Their Own come immediately to mind.

Jess, equipment manager, stands on the field with the football team

For all its well-written female characters and feminist storylines, Friday Night Lights is, overall, not one of those exceptions. It would be unrealistic if it were; it’s about a small Texas town that idolizes its football team, and small Texas towns do not idolize (or, often, have) female football teams. The show offers us complex, three-dimensional female characters like Tyra Collette, Lyla Garrity, Tami Taylor and Becky Sproles, but Jess Merriweather is the only character who demonstrates that love of sport (in a story in which “sport” = “football,” the be all and end all of sport in that town) isn’t reserved for men.

In season four, Jess strode into that hyper-masculine domain with every bit as much passion as the male characters, and the extra savvy, self-awareness, and anger that comes from being a woman in a man’s world. She became a cheerleader because it was the only way for a girl like her to get close to the sport she grew up teaching to her much younger brothers, but as she gets older, that’s not enough for her. Helping her little brothers and running drills with her football star boyfriend isn’t enough; she wants to be involved for herself. She convinces Coach Taylor to let her be an equipment manager, with the intention of someday becoming a high school football coach.

Jess argues with her boyfriend Vince (Michael B. Jordan) in the locker room

Jess’ storyline is consistent with FNL’s aversion to creating caricatures; the people around her are not divided into evil, misogynistic villains and helpful, sympathetic allies. Coach Taylor, the compassionate hero of the show, dismisses her completely at first and has to be talked into giving her a chance. Her boyfriend, Vince, is portrayed as an essentially good guy, but he gets angry and protective when his teammates start messing with her. He was raised in a culture that makes him feel emasculated and threatened by having a girlfriend who handles herself among the boys, and the show realistically portrays Jess’ frustration at having to reconcile her feelings for Vince with the way his issues hold her back.

Also realistic is how personal Jess’ storyline is. She isn’t a feminist crusader; she’s a reminder to feminist crusaders of who they’re fighting for: high school girls who find their dreams limited by rules they didn’t ask for or create. She’s a girl with her own ambitions and goals, and she’s interested in systemic issues only to the extent that they get in the way of those goals. When Coach Taylor tells her there are no female football coaches, she goes home and prints off a story about the first female high school football coach in America (even though, as Coach Taylor points out, it’s only a story because there isn’t a second one). The point of Jess’ storyline is that she shouldn’t have to do this kind of feminist campaigning; the path to her dreams should be no less clear than it would be if she were male.

Jess as a cheerleader

FNL offers us some feminist crusaders; Tami Taylor takes on higher-up perpetrators of systemic injustices on issues of education and abortion and lobbies her husband in defense of Jess’ right to work in football-related jobs. Citing Tami as an inspiration, Tyra Collette ends the series by expressing a desire to go into politics, so she can make a difference on a larger scale. Jess, however, is not in it for the politics. She’s in it for her own rights, and systemic political issues just happen to be in her way.

Jess starts the show defined by her relationships to the male characters; she’s a love interest for Landry Clark and Vince Howard (and a catalyst for issues between the two of them), and her status as a cheerleader makes playing a supporting role to boys a central aspect of her life. However, even when her only important storylines were romantic, she was known mostly for not taking shit from the male characters. In a culture in which most students, especially female ones, let the football players get away with anything, she stands up to Landry for destroying her bike, and calls Vince out on going back to his life of crime.

Jess talks to Landry (Jesse Plemons) at her locker

Jess’ autonomy develops far beyond simply filling a “sassy” love interest role, as her own, independent storyline really starts in season five. She talks to Tami Taylor about her frustrations with going back to being a cheerleader after spending all summer working with her boyfriend, Vince, on his football skills. She refuses to be a “rally girl,” whose job it is to take care of her football player by wearing his jersey and presenting him with baked goods every week.

This is when Jess, with some help from Tami, begs Coach Taylor for a job as an equipment manager. Coach Taylor doesn’t understand why this is important, but he lets it happen. She faces expected sexist jabs that come from being a girl in the boys’ locker room, but what makes her angrier is the way Vince tries to control her and keep her out of there. By the end of the series, her romantic storylines are subplots to her dream of becoming a football coach, just as most of the male characters’ stories are focused on their own dreams.

Jess and Vince

Jess’ other relationships show us how she got the way she is. She grew up poor, and she takes on a lot of responsibility, working long hours at her dad’s restaurant and taking on a parental role to her younger brothers. She gains maturity beyond her years, which shows in all aspects of her life. It’s incredibly refreshing to see a teenage female character who’s emotionally aware and straightforward about her feelings. She breaks stereotypes about game-playing girls by being upfront and honest with Vince and Landry in her romantic relationships and shows similar assertiveness with her father.

All this backstory should leave us unsurprised that Jess is willing to take on the odds and fight for what she wants, as she’s spent her whole life doing that. She fights her father when his hatred for the game of football emotionally harms his son. She fights Vince when he displays juvenile, sexist behaviour, and her refusal to take this from him leads to the end of their relationship. It’s implied that growing up female in a man’s world (and with dreams of existing in a very male-dominated part of that world), and poor and black in a world dominated by the more affluent, mostly white side of town, is what’s made her as strong as she is.

Jess stands with members of the football team

However, one of my favourite aspects of Jess’ character is that she manages to be mature and savvy without being unrealistically stoic, the “strong female character” who shows no real weakness or emotions. Her feelings for the boys she dates are genuine, her love for her brothers and parents is obvious, and most of all, her passion for the game of football is overwhelming. She doesn’t always know the perfect way to fight, and she gets as angry, frustrated, depressed, and excited as anyone else. We see her cry sometimes, and not in the media’s common “it turns out the ice queen is really just an emotional woman all along” way, but in a “she has emotions – strong, weak, positive, negative, often nuanced and mixed, just like all the other male and female characters” way. Her emotions don’t make her weak or unlikable, but realistic and relatable, so you (or, at least, I) can’t help but root for her.

It’s Jess’ ability to be strong while still being emotionally realistic and flawed, and having nuanced relationships while still having her own goals/agenda and an independent storyline, that put her in the rare, coveted category of a truly three-dimensional female character. The fact that her storyline involves struggles against systemic sexism, perpetrated in a realistic way by well-meaning people around her, is icing on the cake to make her a feminist’s dream. We never see Jess score a touchdown, but she’s one of my favourite fictional feminist sports figures.

Sarah Stringer is a psychology student in Ontario, with an interest in the political aspects of pop culture.