A Painfully Difficult Confession

I have a confession to make: I am addicted to child pornography! It doesn't come to my house in anonymous brown wrappers, or on the internet (I don't even have the internet at my house), but from the public library on DVD in the form of the first season of the television show "Veronica Mars." Okay, I know this is not a laughing matter, and I don't mean to joke about what can be a very serious problem, but I didn't know how else to get into this difficult, for me, to talk about, subject.

This is a TV show that has been apparently aired on "the WB" whatever that is, and now "the CW" whatever that is. That is another world we won't get into. It's a mystery show about some high school kids in a 90210-like California coast town. Veronica is a detective, and like Nancy Drew she is an only child and lives with her father. Nancy's mother was dead and her father a lawyer. Veronica's father is a private investigator, and her mother has disappeared. This is one of the mysteries she's trying to solve, though the big one is who murdered her best friend. Several new mysteries present themselves in each episode, and she's often doing about four things at once. And, of course, all the mysteries are related.

Not meaning to downplay the very real pain very real child pornography has caused many, I still want to pursue that analogy, just because when I think of pornography I don't only think of nudity and sex, but violence and exploitation. It could be that kids aren't allowed to see a naked body in a movie, but can see a body being torn apart by a weapon. It makes no sense, but I don’t want to get into that. I don’t really think Veronica Mars is pornography, but on paper it's pretty hard core. Here are high school kids that drink, smoke, do drugs, and have sex (just like real high school kids do-- I don't know how they show this on TV, but I'm not worrying about that)-- and even worse, these kids have very adult senses of humor (intelligent, quick, and vicious-- and the degree of reality there is just a matter of degree).

If you look at it simply on the level of victimization, Veronica has got to be one of the all-time record holders: as an underage girl in high school, and this is just in season one, she has been dumped by her peers, had her best friend murdered, she was drugged and raped at a party, her father was run out of his job as sheriff, her mother left town, her father is then seeing her new best friend's mother, and there are very real questions to who her real father might be-- there is the possibility that she might be the illegitimate daughter of her former boyfriend's dad. That's right-- that would mean she had been sleeping with her brother!

How does she deal with all this? She is clever and ruthless, hard-edged and funny. The best senses of humor come from the worst pain. You can't help but like her. Yes-- at first I was annoyed, but I got hooked. Okay, maybe it was the mystery element that hooked me. I read movie scripts from time to time, as a vocation and a profession, and I have found that a good mystery will help get me past the most shallow characters, bad dialogue, and terrible topical humor you can imagine. I mean, you have to look no further than the criminals (currently holding the government of our country hostage) who are using a fictional mystery-- weapons of mass destruction-- to attempt to make palpable the hijacking and destruction of an entire country for corporate financial gains. But back to Veronica Mars-- the mystery gets you hooked, but then the characters, just like the people you know, start to endear themselves to you in spite of their annoying traits.

But finally, the thing that really got to me with this show (okay, I'm still dying to find out what happened) is that it became emotionally complex, and in many different ways. There are the questions of family-- who is family, where does loyalty lie-- how important is blood, and how important is devotion? Then there are questions of "the truth"-- can it ever be known, really, and the relation of politics, public relations, and money to the truth. And then most of all, the questions of responsibility. Veronica discovers, as a survival technique, her talent for ruthlessness and revenge. That is her way of coping, and she's good at it. But at some point she realizes that her actions affect people in ways she hadn't intended-- that there is always a ripple effect, especially with extreme measures and extreme results. Sometimes in helping someone she is hurting someone else more, someone she had not intended to hurt.

I can't imagine what is going to happen in the second season, because Veronica, as a precocious high school kid, is already becoming more adult than most adults do in an entire lifetime. I am half expecting to see her end up in a monastery, or high up on a mountain, in self-imposed isolation, waiting for a student, perhaps, who can take on the entire world.