Destroying Veronica Mars: Gentrification, Gendered Intersectionality, and the Coming of Age of Los Angeles

Abstract

Destroying Veronica Mars: Gentrification, Gendered Intersectionality, and the Coming of Age of Los Angeles Susan Ingram In the summer of 2019, fans of Veronica Mars were treated to a fourth season of the critically acclaimed television series, which had played for three seasons (2004–06) before being cancelled due to low ratings despite the protests of its large, fiercely loyal fan base, who call themselves “marshmallows” as a tribute to the opening bumper of the show, which ends with Veronica noting that “people say I’m a marshmallow” (Cochran). When it became clear that Warner Bros. would not back the feature-film script that creator Rob Thomas had written as an alternate way of continuing the series, Thomas and his team turned to Kickstarter, crowdsourcing the 2014 Veronica Mars film to the tune of $5,702,153, which far surpassed the $2 million they had set out to raise, and broke several Kickstarter records in the process (Hicken; Thomas, “The Veronica Mars Movie Project”; Thomas, “Update 2”). Like the three TV seasons before it, the film garnered critical but not commercial success, grossing only $3.5 million worldwide with a budget of $6 million (Acuna), and it was only on the strength of continued fan demand that an abridged fourth season (of eight episodes vs. 64 in the first three) was made. The Veronica Mars franchise, which also includes two novels co-authored by Thomas and Jennifer Graham, Veronica Mars: The Thousand Dollar Tan Line (2014) and Veronica Mars: Mr. Kiss and Tell (2015); and a short-lived web spinoff, Play It Again, Dick, follows the eponymous young blonde hard-boiled PI as she solves crimes in Neptune, a seaside town in Southern California in the fictional spirit of Chandler’s Bay City.1 The changes that Neptune undergoes from the first season in 2004 to the fourth in 2019 are substantial, and parallel Veronica’s own coming of age as she goes from being a date-raped teenager who helps out in her father’s office after school to being a full partner in the firm, and the one who keeps it afloat when her father faces a potentially debilitating health crisis. Season Four ends with a shockingly unexpected [End Page 11] bombing, the results of which see the season end with Veronica driving out of Neptune determined never to return. Thomas admits that this plot twist was a huge gamble that could well end the series (Gennis), and it received considerable criticism (Connolly). What I am interested in in this article is how the changes that Veronica and Neptune undergo over the course of a pivotal decade and a half reflect the development of both feminism and urbanization. Comparing Veronica’s coming of age with the city’s along the parallel vectors of gentrification and generation allows me to explore what it means for Los Angeles that it has gentrified to the point that the makers of Veronica Mars no longer felt it was the right place for her. After detailing the points in the series along which Neptune and Veronica are shown to mature, I explore what these parallel transformations mean for the figure of the female private detective as well as for the city in which she lives and works. Neptune: From Noirish Suburb to Spring Break Destination At the end of the 2014 Veronica Mars film, Veronica opts to stay in Neptune, “preferring self-employed work on her home turf to a stressful, high-powered career in corporate, East Coast law” (Ingram and Reisenleitner 32). She also does so in order to be able to look after her father, Keith, who is seriously injured in the film in a car accident when someone tries to take him out for pursuing a case against the Sheriff’s Office over the planting of evidence at crime scenes involving the poorer members of Neptune’s population. When we next meet up with them in Veronica Mars: The Thousand Dollar Tan Line, we learn that [f]or the past two months he’d been able to pretend she was there to help him in his convalescence, but more and more she sensed...