The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

Veronica Mars, How Do I Love Thee?

Let me count the ways.

1. Veronica is tiny, but you don’t want to mess with her. Especially when she has a Taser.

2. She has a pit bull named Backup. (As in, “Always take Backup.”)

3. Her dad, ex-sheriff Keith Mars, is the spittin’ image of my Granddaddy.

4. Veronica has more witty one-liners per episode than the number of times Nancy Drew is described as “strawberry blonde” per Carolyn Keene book.

5. Rich people are always bad. In this, the show agrees precisely with my worldview.

I could go on from there, but instead I’ll explain what has inspired my ode to Veronica Mars. By the way, this blog post is dedicated to Dormouse, without whose DVDs we could not have caught up on seasons 1 and 2 of VM. In Dormouse’s honor, I’ll even keep the first part of the post spoiler-free, since we snitched her DVDs from her before she even had a chance to watch them (in our justification, she was (1) out of town; and (2) busy).

So in the past month, we’ve seen 42 episodes of Veronica Mars. Actually, technically that should be 43, counting the episode of the 3^rd season that aired on May 1. But as that episode was clearly mandated by the network to include valuable life lessons like “Arab Americans are Americans, too” and “don’t make fake IDs for your friends” (okay, the actual message was probably supposed to be “underage drinking is bad”), I’m not going to count it—also because it throws off the ideal Douglas Adams balance of Veronica Mars episodes.

Porpoise has had this theory for a while that the advent of TV on DVD has made it more possible for shows that have a season-long story arc to get made. I have to agree that watching seasons 1 and 2 of Veronica Mars on DVD (as opposed to season 3, which we’ve been watching live on the CW) has made it easier for me to follow, especially since I seem to have a hard time telling high-school and college-age males apart if there’s a week or more separating their appearance on my TV screen. The benefit of having VM on DVD is that you can watch episodes in close succession; the drawback is that you do. Repeatedly. You can’t stop, because each episode ends with a cliffhanger that leads you on to the next one. You quickly become an addict, and you start to worry about all the things adults told you would happen to kids who watched too much TV (Eyeballs fried to the back of your head? I can’t remember the details, but that was my general impression.)

So you descend guiltily into the seedy noir underworld of . . . high school. In the rich California suburb of Neptune. But remember how I said the rich people are bad? Veronica helps to give them their comeuppance. Sometimes she also gets them off the hook, because even more than getting back at snobs, Veronica cares about finding out the truth. She often wrestles with the discovery that sometimes you’re actually better off not knowing all the facts. Veronica is a fallible character, which is one of the things that makes her so interesting.

Veronica is more prickly than cuddly, which is why I like her, but that prickliness, when it translates into go-it-on-your-own independence, can get her into trouble. Porpoise made the interesting observation that he thinks Veronica too often gets rescued by men, especially in the show’s most dramatic moments. I do like her end-of-season-1 rescue, but overall, I agree. The thing is, Veronica needs rescuing in these situations because she’s made stupid decisions (like not telling people where she’s going or jumping to conclusions), so in some ways it shows that her character flaws do have consequences. Still, I’d like it if she got rescued by Mac (her computer-whiz friend) or even the Greek Chorus of Feminist Shame at some point.

Veronica can also get carried away with justice to the point that it becomes retribution. This is quite understandable, in an unjust world, and a particularly unjust town, where it’s fairly easy to be acquitted of a crime if you happen to live in the ritzy “09” zip code. But when, in a season 2 episode, Veronica bugs a church confessional (there is actually a reason for that), she starts her fake confession to the priest by saying something along the lines of, “I like to find out when people do bad things and then make them suffer for it.” The priest replies that he used to feel the same way. Then he quotes scripture: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” At this point, Veronica, having already gotten more than she bargained for, jumps up and says, “Okay, I guess I’ll just try to be a better person, then!” But the priest continues with the rest of Romans 12:20-21 (the first part being drawn from Proverbs): “But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Less skilled writers would make Veronica try to follow up on that principle within the episode, but that doesn’t happen here. Veronica isn’t religious, and she certainly doesn’t make decisions according to Christian ethics, nor should she start doing so just because a priest quoted Romans to her. But it’s fascinating to watch how Veronica reacts when she oversteps her own ethical code.

Veronica’s biggest flaw is, of course, her romantic taste. Come on, Veronica, stop dating troubled rich boys with names like Duncan or Logan! After seeing seasons 1 and 2, I can at least better understand her attraction to Logan, especially since she is a high school girl and still susceptible to the lure of “he understands my pain.” It’s believable that Logan and Veronica would get together in moments of crisis, and that they wouldn’t be able to hold it together for the long term, because Logan is an immature jerk (if an occasionally likable and witty one).

Okay, I really need to draw this to a close. Final question: did I like season 1 or season 2 better? Well, season 1 probably held together better and had fewer moments that stretched credibility (i.e. the resolution of the bus crash in season 2). However, there were also things I loved about season 2, namely a better look at town politics. Neptune’s new mayor wants to incorporate it as a city, which would drive up the tax base and drive Neptune’s poorer residents out. In real life, our local school board seems to be making decisions with the same kind of motivation, so that theme especially resonates with me right now.

The network mandated that the last few episodes of season 3 would be stand-alone episodes with no connection to an overall story arc. Last week was the first of those. It was still an enjoyable hour of TV, but not up to the standards we expect from Veronica Mars. So, CW, please renew Veronica Mars and please give the writers their creative control again!

My hopes aren’t too high, though, because rich people are evil. And so are Pussycat Dolls. (In case you don’t know, season 3 of Veronica Mars was put on hiatus for eight weeks, so that “The Search for the Next Pussycat Doll” could air. Uf. I can’t think of a worse way to trample everything Veronica stands for.)

3 comments May 7th, 2007

The Namesake

I like India-born director Mira Nair’s work because she appreciates the romance of arranged marriages—something for which Hollywood, with its false notions of emotion-driven romance, has little use. Her latest movie, The Namesake (based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel of the same name), follows in the footsteps of 2001’s Monsoon Wedding, helping me to forget her dull and rambling version of Vanity Fair (2004).

One of the most interesting things about The Namesake is that, though it covers about 30 years in time and takes place in both the U.S. and India, it isn’t rambling. I’ve rarely seen a movie cover so much territory without unraveling at some point.

The movie begins with a train ride in India that shapes the life of Ashoke Ganguli, a young Bengali man. He happens to be reading a book of Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s short stories on the train, a book his grandfather gave him. As the events of that evening unfold, it becomes clear why Gogol becomes a touchstone for his life.

Years later, as an American doctor informs Ashoke and his wife Ashima that their newborn son can’t leave the hospital until he has a name (they want to wait until Ashima’s grandmother can name him in an official ceremony), they inscribe “Gogol Ganguli” on the birth certificate.

The film covers many stages in Gogol’s life, and his complicated relationship to his heritage is embodied in his many changes of opinion about his birth-certificate name and his “good name,” Nikhil (shortened by his rich, white girlfriend to “Nick”). Gogol/Nick can be maddening at times, but the film refuses any easy solutions to his identity crisis. He goes through a stage of thinking re-embracing his Bengali roots will solve everything, and in a simpler movie, it would—but not here.

Gogol’s second-generation immigrant quandary is balanced with the love story of his parents, played by Irffan Khan and Tabu, both Bollywood superstars who act with powerful subtlety in The Namesake. And this is where the arranged marriage comes in. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Nair reveals how she saw these two main stories as the center of the movie:

“You know, any adaptation is about sifting, and right from the word go I wanted the film to rest on two pillars. I wanted to make an exquisite adult love story of [Ashoke and Ashima], coming from a generation where it’s about, like, literally having a cup of tea in the stillness of a morning and the way you look at each other, rather than what we are so used to in our tangle of the younger culture, you know, roses and diamonds. But this is not Ashoke and Ashima, this is not their generation, and for me it was clear to make that love story and then counterpoint it with Gogol’s coming of age. It was clear from moment one that we wouldn’t deal with Gogol’s high school or Yale years. And once I sorted out this idea of the two cities [New York and Calcutta] as one, that was the glue [by] which I kind of meshed the passage of time. That’s how it really began.”

A few reviewers have complained that the movie felt incomplete, but I think that’s part of the point—again, it refuses easy solutions. And, yes, the movie does have an episodic, almost sketch-like feel, with the large jumps in chronology, but if it had tried to fill in more, I think it would have actually lost focus rather than gained it. The only major flaw I see in the movie is the white girlfriend, Maxine, whose character seems so stereotypical that it’s hard to see why Gogol ever fell for her.

Nair’s films are all praised for their rich visual tapestry, and, though I’m no good judge of such things, I think The Namesake is no disappointment in that area. Though I do wish there was a man randomly eating marigolds, like in Monsoon Wedding.

Add comment May 4th, 2007

Why Otters Should Not Be Pets

First, this video of otters wreaking havoc in a house is a must-watch. In addition to convincing me that, in spite of how much I love otters, I do not actually want one for a pet, it also confirms that my cat is indeed part otter. The only difference is that she doesn’t like to swim. And I haven’t yet heard her make the evil little chuckle that these otters do . . . but no doubt she can. May I just mention that we have to have child-proof locks on our cabinets so that she won’t get into them?

The video also brings back memories of a book I checked out from the library over and over again as an otter-obsessed kid. Actually, there were two books: one for children and one for adults, but both were about Okee, an orphaned baby river otter cub who was adopted by a human couple and who lived as a pet in their house. Now, this happened back in the 1960s (the book’s events, not my childhood), when we were apparently much more stupid about making wild animals into housepets. Still, I loved reading about Okee’s shenanigans. I particularly remember one episode involving the author’s attempts to put up a Christmas tree that Okee wouldn’t knock over or otherwise destroy.

Unfortunately, both versions of Okee’s story now seem to be out-of-print.

3 comments May 1st, 2007