Who’s the femme fatale in Veronica Mars?
I’m talking in class tomorrow about Veronica Mars (hooray!), and because it’s a class about narrative theory and we’ve covered a few different noir texts, I’ve been focusing on the explicitly noir aspects of the show and some of the basic narrative devices. In hunting around and browsing Rob Thomas’ fairly extensive offerings on his personal website, I landed on a pdf he’d uploaded of his original notes for the show, which begins as follows:
It’s pretty easy to see how all of this fits into the aesthetic and structure of the show, and I particularly like the foregrounding of the rape mystery over the Lilly Kane mystery. One of the points tomorrow will be that while Lilly’s murder represents a straight-up, classic noir device, Veronica’s rape is one of the re-writings Thomas plays with in casting his detective as female, and her trauma takes the place of a lot of post-war trauma that frequently haunts American detectives in the inter- and post-war periods.
My big question about this part of the document – Duncan Kane (Cain) is the femme fatale? Woah.
It’s not a question that can be taken too seriously beyond a hypothetical level, because these are just notes. By all accounts, the rise of Logan Echolls was not in the series’ original plan, and who knows how that and innumerable other factors may have played into what happened between this document and the production of the series. The notes replace Abel Koontz with someone named Strom Jenkins, so obviously there’s some reworking yet to do. Still, I wonder whether we should still be reading Duncan as a femme fatale, and if so, whether it’s a representation that failed to come through in the show, or whether he was actually re-conceptualized. (Or, third possibility, everyone else already thinks Duncan is the Bacall to Veronica’s Bogart and I’m just way behind the curve here.)
To be fair, I can sort of see the logic. Duncan’s attractive, he’s mysteriously connected to all of the major crime plots, he has a hidden flaw, he’s a love interest for Veronica, he’s dangerous, and he seems tragically unable to control the events surrounding him. Setting aside Teddy Dunn’s milquetoast Duncan, I could imagine a scenario where the season plays out with much more tension between Duncan and Veronica, which would significantly downplay the role Logan eventually takes in her life, and would make the question of Veronica’s paternity a more pressing issue.
From a purely structural standpoint, though, I have a hard time with Duncan in a traditional femme fatale role because something about the position seems to require a lot more enigma than Duncan ever carries, if for no other reason than that Duncan and Veronica dated long before the show begins. How mysterious and dangerously seductive can he possibly be – they went to Winter Formal together! I recognize that the epilepsy plotline and the resulting Duncan Hulk (DUNCAN SMASH!) are attempts to imbue Duncan’s familiar persona with new mystery, but it’s hard to imagine any circumstance by which he becomes more seductive as a result.
So that’s my query for the evening – should we be reading Duncan as a femme fatale, and if so, what does that make Logan Echolls?
First, thanks for posting the notes — I’m nearing the end of a noir course in which we considered screening VM, but decided against it in favor of Twin Peaks. Seeing these, though, I’d probably try VM next time.
As for Duncan as ff, a couple of thoughts. First, he is not driven by a need/desire for power, either as a means to escape his circumstances or out of some mysterious personal drive. His machinations are not motivated by this drive, but instead by fear of discovery of his inability to control himself.
Also, he doesn’t use his sexuality to achieve his goals, even though it serves as a means of keeping him and Veronica together (or oriented toward one another, which causes conflict for both of them).
So on the one hand I love the idea of Duncan as ff, but on the other I find the comparison lacking in some key respects.
Logan acts much more like an ff than Duncan, especially later in the series (after season 1), but there are also key differences. There is something about his ongoing presence in Veronica’s life that means he can’t ever really be that destructive for her (he never brings about his or her literal demise, for example). But, we can certainly say that a big part of her ongoing emotional wreckage is due to his ability to hurt her on an ongoing basis. So maybe Logan is at once both less than a traditional ff and much more, as if the ff’s destructive powers vis a vis the protagonist had metastasized in her/his shift from female to male and from film to serial TV.
I love this question — I’ll be interested to hear what your class says about it.
One of the things that came up in class was the possibility that just as Veronica re-makes the detective roll and doesn’t take on all the characteristics a male detective would assume, a male fatale wouldn’t necessarily do all of the same things a femme would. It’s clear that as it turned out (due, as Jason notes below, to casting if nothing else), Logan is much closer to an homme fatale – a term one of the students came up with
But it’s interesting to consider the ways that the archetype gets reconstructed with a gender switch.
For instance – would a male fatale have to use sexuality? Or would that mean they were no longer the same character type?
Absolutely: how much of what we understand about the femme fatale as a character type is rooted in her gender, and how much is about her role within the narratives noirs weave?
This kind of thing comes up for me all over VM: how much of the use of an urban setting, of casting the leads as adults, of the use of a low-key visual milieu is a core element of what we identify as noir, and how much of these things are driven by the kinds of stories those filmmakers were seeking to tell? That is, are they *required*, or are they byproducts of being part of very similarly themed stories?
VM sortof asks you to think about these questions in the way it gives you enough “noir-ish” elements to keep them always bubbling up in your mind.
As I said on twitter: HECK NO. Mostly, I think Duncan is never portrayed as devious enough to really justify a femme fatale label. You may get the sense that he has secrets, but you never get the sense that he’s manipulating Veronica or others to accomplish his goals, or conceal his secrets. Logan, on the other hand, fits the mold really nicely.
I think this points to a major difference between serial TV and other storytelling forms: the actors’ contributions can reshape the plan quite drastically. We can’t set aside the performance, as it’s so crucial to making the character develop and create chemistry (or lack thereof) with others. If VM were a film, they would have recast Duncan once Dunn’s lack of fatale-ity became clear. But as an emerging narrative, they were forced to adapt the plan and make Logan serve those roles as the series developed. We can only imagine how the show might have played out had Logan & Duncan’s casting had been reversed!
Oh – I forgot to add: I’d love to see a syllabus for this course! I’m teaching Storytelling in Film & Media this semester and had a hard time finding other examples of courses bringing together narrative theory and media studies.
Yes, casting and the way Logan’s character changes was something many students really wanted to talk about, but we only watched the pilot in class, so I couldn’t get into it as much as I would have liked – alas. Happily, many of them are now motivated to watch it on their own time, so hopefully we’ll be able to talk about it later.
As for the syllabus, it’s a straight-up Narrative and Narrative Theory course I’m TAing this quarter, and the professor has very kindly allowed me to sneak in some televisual narrative. I picked Veronica Mars because the other works on the syllabus had a heavy California/noir vibe, and because I thought the voiceover aspect would be a good way to introduce some very basic cinematic narrator questions. (I pointed the students to your work on the VM pilot, so thanks for that!) Let me know if you’d like any other info about the course.