Veronica Mars, Hollywood’s Latest Noir Film

A long time ago, noir films were a staple of Hollywood. Hardened Private Dectectives looked for cues, seduced the wrong women and solved a case with flare, more than enough smoke and some shadows from Venetian blinds than was strictly necessary. The genre faded, coming back in moments of interest, but for a long time, noir films were a faded mark of film history.

Over the weekend, another noir film was added to the list of revivals: Veronica Mars. As a show, Veronica Mars was all about the seedy underbelly of lives in a town without a middle class, and as our heroine took on life as a girl detective, she became grey surrounded by the hard life, by the betrayal and the scorn. But, as can happen, Veronica wanted to escape the grey and find something else.

That was where we found Veronica at the start of the film – doing her best to lead a “normal” life with a steady job, a sweet boyfriend and no messy life in the seedy underbelly. But, as all good leads in noir films, tragedy intervened on Veronica’s behalf and shuffled her back to Neptune to help her homme fatal Logan escape another murder charge.

Returning to the one place where Veronica was always grey, the film unfolds and we watch the world between right and wrong become Veronica’s normal: she’ll ask for favors of dubious ethics after trespassing and impersonation all in the name of truth and saving Logan from another murder case. What started as a simple murder plot morphed into two murders, years apart, and the murderer expertly turned out to be a character that appeared far too nice for the unassuming eye.

By the films end, Veronica had found herself thinking that the “normal” life she had longed for wasn’t what she wanted and as the camera faded, Veronica Mars was back where she started: chasing truth however she saw fit, with whatever means were at her disposal.

At the end, as all noir stories go, Veronica Mars hit many of the tropes that film student study, but also brings the genre into the twenty-first century. No longer are dogged Private Dicks just hunting down leads and relying on eavesdropping but instead are using technology to aid the investigation. At the heart of the mystery was a tablet that exposed a group of friends looking to protect their own interests above their other friend, and if that didn’t spell the difference between Veronica Mars and Sam Spade, nothing else will.

That’s not to say that the film is perfect: many characters felt underused, and given that the show thrived on long-form mysteries, such a small case felt like a longer episode of the series. But, in the bones of this story are the seeds of something larger, something deeper and something more dangerous for Veronica Mars.

It is that possibility that makes Veronica Mars a success transition from television to movies and beyond: endless possibilities that could be explored again in new mediums.