TELEVISION / Information is Insurance / Katie Darby Mullins
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Veronica Mars
2004
I am disturbed
(Gimme shelter)
“Veronica Mars,” Blondshell
No one starts out with a code as a rogue investigator—you have to make some pretty serious mistakes before you have rules. I know. If curiosity were a disease, I wouldn’t have made it to adolescence. There isn’t any information in the world that I think I shouldn’t have access to. Earlier this week, I was watching a documentary that noted interrogation footage had been redacted and not released to the public. I should be embarrassed to tell you the truth, but I’m not: I spent almost 45 minutes trying to find, if not a video or transcript, a reason that the footage was private.
When I say it like that, I can hear how it sounds. But it doesn’t break any of my personal rules to look up things about strangers. It’s different when you’re investigating people you know or, worse, love.
In 2004, I Tex-patriated from Dallas to southern Indiana for college, and I immediately wanted to go home. My parents remarried each other the summer before I left after having been divorced through my high school years. Even though my high school boyfriend of nearly three years had made the twelve hour move with me, it felt like he was still hours away and maybe he had always been. We’d stay together a few more years, sure, but I remember he once told someone who wanted to make plans with him to “check with his secretary” and he was more right than wrong. That meant the TV—which had always been a friend of mine—became a lifeline. And one night, every star in the universe aligned and there she was: Veronica Mars. Angry. Curious. Funny. Underestimated. I wanted to be her.
Maybe, I convinced myself, I already was. Or I could be.
I probably wouldn’t have even noticed the show as I channel-surfed past UPN, but the recap of ‘previous episodes’ was impressive, and one of my favorite bands, The Dandy Warhols, lent their song “We Used to be Friends” as the theme song. (Wildly, if I’d caught the previous episode, “You Think You Know Someone,” I would have known it ended with the Old 97’s “The New Kid”: they are, in my opinion, the undisputed Kings of Dallas Music, and I’d have felt even more bonded to the show.) Though the show is sequential, I assured myself that coming in a few episodes late wouldn’t hurt me too much. I could jump in.
It didn’t hurt that her murdered-before-the-action best friend taunts her in constant flashbacks: I have a secret, Veronica Mars . . . a good one.
I always want to know the secret. Always.
***
The first time I pretended to be Tina—and she has a pretty decent backstory, though her last name changes based on what I need her to be—I wanted to know the difference in the way Planned Parenthood talked to women and the way Christian Pregnancy Centers did. That day, Tina cried and told the same story of her first time with her boyfriend, who had just shipped off to basic. I wore a clunky cubic zirconia on my right ring finger, uncomfortable and gaudy. No one seemed to think anything was off.
I was 18. For the purposes of this story, I didn’t need to change my age, though I was always flexible. I look young for my age—still—and it can get me into or out of exactly the kinds of safe trouble I’m looking for.
I didn’t find anything you couldn’t by doing a Google search. Both women were in softly lit rooms with generic floral wallpaper, both had boxes of Kleenex nearby. (I prided myself in being able to cry in both rooms.) Neither wanted to tell Tina what she should do with hers and Reed’s child, if, of course, it wound up she was pregnant, but they had suggestions. (I knew I wasn’t when I walked in: I also felt vaguely guilty about wasting resources, but I wanted to see what happened when I tried to get information or become someone else.)
I’m 38 now, and I’ve been Tina so many times, I don’t know that I could even remember them all. She’s been to DNA clinics to find out how a paternity test works; she’s been a journalist who needed to speak to someone who had committed arson; she’s been someone who needed to know exactly who walked into the restaurant ‘her’ boyfriend. She’s someone I got very comfortable being. (She has a male counterpart, but I can really only pull that off when the information I need is online.) Very, very rarely is Katie, the person I actually am, caught up in my shenanigans. I learned “I’m a writer” or “It’s a school project” would basically get me into any room: people love to talk about themselves and to teach you what they know and how they learned it. They rarely need to know the details of your project.
Probably some of the reason I created Tina, an alter-ego, is because after my parents divorced, Katie broke into her father’s email and explored. It’s hard for me to remember that was Katie, not Tina, because, as every part of me seems to scream, I’m Katie. How could Katie do that?
***
One of the things that hurts most in Veronica’s backstory is not that her parents’ divorced, but why. Her father, a disgraced sheriff-turned-PI, keeps fighting for their life in Neptune, California, as her mother slides into a life of alcoholism and eventually abandons the family. Veronica, of course, is not about to take that lying down. Sure, she’s angry at her mother, but she’s also desperate for her. Her best friend Lilly’s murder is the trigger for her family falling apart: her father had the audacity to accuse Lilly’s family, the richest, most philanthropic family in town, of covering up elements of the crime before someone else (however unbelievably) confesses, and Veronica’s mom Lianne can’t live with the shame and disgrace of falling out with the rich, society people her husband’s job had gotten them ‘in’ with before. Veronica is always angry, but it is just a go-to emotion to cover up what she’s really feeling. In one episode, she tells her counselor that she doesn’t want to talk about her grief and let it go, she wants to turn it into fuel. In that way, no matter she never quits wanting her mom. So she decides to find her. She does enough PI work for other people.
My parents, despite my proclivities, protected me well enough that my guess is they are both reading this essay, both a little sad they got divorced at all, now that they’re happily remarried to each other. I never had to lose a parent, and I never had to track one down. I was always someone who could hold a grudge, and there were long periods of time where I’d posit having me as the “child” in a relationship was a challenge because of it: worse, I was willing to dig for information. They never even blamed me for my constant vigilance and hunt for information. They actually supported me. They apologized when I found things that hurt my feelings, even if I found those things in places I absolutely should not have been looking.
So my backstory wouldn’t make for a good, drama-filled series on UPN. That didn’t mean I didn’t understand Veronica in my bones. In fact, in one episode, she sends unmarked, pre-paid cell phones to any address that has any connection to her mother, hoping that her mom will see the burner and feel comfortable calling her and getting in touch. I don’t even think I realized I did the same thing when, looking for any man with the correct first three initials in DFW (I was looking for a ‘JGR’), I sent ten identical letters out to any house I thought he might own. I didn’t find out until after he’d died that one of my letters had found him.
Did I come up with that on my own? Or was part of Veronica buried so deep in me that I stole from the plot without realizing it, years later, long before streaming TV would bring her back into my life?
***
Hi, I’m Katie, and I’m addicted to secrets.
Not my own. I have no interest in being a mystery. In fact, if anything, I’m the opposite. I tell the stories where I look bad just so that skeletons don’t tumble out of my closet and surprise me, someday, long after I’ve decided to justify whatever the awful deed was.
I’m definitely still addicted, though, because all the check marks are there: I have unhealthy behavior patterns. I’ll stay in contact with people who are awful to me if they’re in the middle of a compellingly difficult time in their life, and usually it won’t be until we’ve been out of contact for years that they’ll realize they don’t really know much—if even—information that a public records search wouldn’t turn up about me. I’ve watched people I’ve loved, friends, family, and even celebrities, who have detoxed from one type of ill or another just to turn to another (usually more productive) addiction, so I can identify the same traits in myself. I’m obsessive-compulsive: that means I act on the little things I think. And I think a lot of things. Most of my friends who have suffered through addiction have had to fight through something much worse than “information,” but I’ve always wondered, when listening to people whose drunk or drugged thoughts made sense to me more clearly than other people’s sober ones, whether it’s just because I never tried drugs and alcohol.
One musician I love has a song about his parents’ divorce happening in his early teens. I can barely get through the song. He says a lot of things that I know because I lived them, and even though, like I said, my parents are happily remarried, there’s a way his voice breaks when he says the word “swore” that makes me thirteen all the sudden, breaking out in a cold sweat. That’s when I started loving other people’s stories. I actually re-read David Copperfield over and over, because it was the only truly satisfying story: it goes from literal birth to death.
For the singer? I think that’s around the age he started drinking. We both found new ways to mark time. Both probably seemed safe enough at the outset.
***
MY RULES:
1. Do not ever open an email that you would be happier if you never read. (You know which emails those are before you even hack into the inbox.)
2. Don’t look up people’s criminal history if you aren’t prepared to find something.
3. Catfishing is easy. Teaching someone to catfish is easy. Teaching them how to catfish their partner may be a moral gray area and not one to mess around with unless you’re really ready to see someone’s dark side.
4. You don’t divorce the same person you married. When helping friends collect evidence, remind them that their history is still real. That said, if the soon-to-be-ex is messing around with a college student, I’m happy to print out whatever pictures or correspondence you need, so long as if/when it hurts you, you can own it.
5. There are some things I don’t need to know. There are some things I don’t want to know. The Venn diagram is nearly a circle.
6. Sometimes you have to quit. Even if you’re onto something. Especially if you’re onto something. Do you really want to live your life proving that people aren’t trustworthy before they’ve had a chance to prove themselves?
7. Remember Veronica’s question when information she finds leads to someone getting shot early in the first season: “Can I let myself slide? Sure, the real tragedy happened long before I came along, I just brought it to the surface. But are some things better left buried?” If that ever applies, pull out.
***
The first time I ever taught someone how to catfish, I did it to get them off my back. They were concerned their partner was cheating on them, which I knew to be sort of true, if you mess around with the preposition—their partner was cheating with them. But no, this person insisted, there had to be someone else. Another someone else.
I have very little patience with infidelity and I was so tired of the conversation, I decided to do something—honestly?—not particularly justifiable, but that I thought would be funny. I told the person I would “run an algorithm” on a picture of the partner (reader: I know that means literally nothing), but that they should set up a dating profile to try and reel in said partner on a website I knew would likely not be a place the partner frequented. I was pretty sure that the person who set up the phony profile would get a lot of unsolicited naked pictures, though, and that it would keep them from bothering me.
So I taught them my rules. Use a name that is almost yours: it’s ridiculous to use your own name, so no one would do it. Play to what the partner likes: he was a “take-charge” MAGA-alpha type, so be the easily-taught ingenue. It wasn’t rocket science. Take an attractive picture from a model’s instagram, hack it to just one body part, blow the picture up and make sure you can’t run it through Google Images reverse (knowing that Instagram already waters down the resolution), use that as the profile picture.
Now, class, you all know how to catfish someone.
Unfortunately for the person I taught? I was wrong. Their partner was on that website, and within ten minutes, had reached out to them.
Womp-womp. Am I bragging by telling you this story, how good I am at tricking people? Or am I showing you how far I will go to get a good story while staying as far out of the narrative as possible?
Even I’m not sure.
Veronica didn’t always do the right thing. In fact, a lot of times, she did the wrong thing for the right reasons. Sometimes she did the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. I know that this was ‘wrong’ in at least one way, but I try not to interrogate Past Katie too much. Besides: she wasn’t really in the story. Right? She just taught someone else how to use the system.
Ugh. Even I can hear the justification. Gross.
***
The first episode of Veronica Mars I ever watched was “Return of the Kane.” The A-plot is the student council election—an unpopular rocker chick runs for school president. Despite having a clear majority, Wanda doesn’t win, so Veronica decides to uncover ‘why.’ The only real reason that mattered to me was it took a strange turn: Wanda was, in her own way, a liar posturing for a demographic. It was one of the first episodes of anything that was mystery-based that I didn’t guess from the starting gun. More importantly, though, it sets Veronica up as a compelling spy: she makes headway in the search for her best friend Lilly’s killer, even though everyone else seems satisfied with the killer behind bars. She’s haunted by Lilly, figuratively and literally: Lilly shows up in the present tense, sometimes as she was, sometimes with the gaping head wound that she died from. (The show does not forget that Veronica is a junior in high school; she successfully breaks into her father’s safe, but only once. The second time, he’s changed the combination.)
The B-plot is darker and probably why I couldn’t turn away. I wanted to be Veronica, but they created a wildly coherent and layered antagonist in Logan Echolls. In the recap, Logan is introduced as their school’s “obligatory psychotic jackass.” I wasn’t exactly primed to care about or for him, and it immediately gets worse, with him propositioning unhoused people to fight for the rich kids’ amusement.
When Logan is emceeing the ‘bum fight’ toward the beginning of the episode, he doesn’t even know the names of the homeless men he’s paid to fight each other. They do not, in any way, flinch about how ugly and cruel his behavior is. The only glimpse of humanity you’re given is him finding videos of the bum fights on TMZ, attached to his father’s name. He looks sick. It’s not quite enough to redeem him, and within a few minutes, you’re shown it’s not that he has a sudden case of empathy. Much of the episode’s success relies on Jason Dohring’s acting: his physicality in the first altercation with his father (which… doesn’t seem so bad, because again: he has been paying unhoused people to fight each other) is so demure and so opposite of the cocky, self-assured character as seen in the rest of the episode, it was enough for me to immediately be on my guard. (Part of that is Harry Hamlin as his father, Aaron: he doesn’t emphasize the inhumanity of Logan’s choice, but rails against what Logan’s choice has ‘cost this family,’ showing a pretty clear line of how and why Logan thinks the way he does.) At the end of the scene, Logan’s dad says, “Don’t you ever embarrass me again.”
I was never that kid. Ever. My parents never said anything like that to me, nor did I give them reasons to. But something in it made my blood run cold, and between the interlocking braid of a normal high school mystery, the murder of Veronica’s best friend, and her antagonist’s backstory, I was hooked.
To solve the “PR crisis” of the bumfighting ring, Aaron brings Logan to a soup kitchen for a photo op. When talking to his agent, he asks, “Was this the closest homeless shelter you could find?”; “Are the cameras ready?” And then after booking a movie he calls ‘unwatchable,’ he turns to Logan: “Son, how do you argue with eight figures? It can’t be done!” And now, in five minutes, I’m not sure who I hate more, Logan or his father, though I can draw a pretty clear line from Aaron’s behavior to why Logan is so outrageous.
The scene is set to America’s “Ventura Highway,” which was another draw for me: I always had a soft spot for 70s radio bait, but especially that song, and something about having this hyper-contemporary show (it was 2004 and the Echolls’s car started with a push button) scored with something that struck me as emotionally correct took me off guard. I actually remembered I had goosebumps. Of course, Aaron knows how to work a room and pretend he and Logan have a loving father-and-son relationship, and that’s when Logan won me over, jackass or not. Because his apology seems sincere—at least part of it. “I know now that, uh—what I did was wrong. I’m really sorry. I only hope that one day, I can live up to my dad’s good example.” Aaron takes the bait and goes in for a hug before Logan ebulliently says, “I love you,” which seems a lot less genuinely. This is where Dohring shines. His physicality goes from demur to confident in moments, and then he says, “Okay, look. I know that he didn’t want to make a big deal out of this, but I’m just so proud of him . . . Dad told me on the way over that he’s donating half a million dollars to the Neptune Food Bank.” Aaron’s clearly furious, and Logan is playing a role: the next scene is one in which, over “Ventura Highway,” Logan selects a belt from his father’s closet and, though they close the door, you can hear Aaron whipping him, and it becomes immediately clear that he knew, from the first moment he saw TMZ, that this was the logical conclusion.
I’ve heard that the reception to that episode is part of what turned Logan from an entertaining side character to the second lead, but who can say. Maybe it was always planned: Veronica, masking her pain with anger and information, and Logan, her foil, masking his with jokes and jackassery. Whatever lightening was forked there struck, though.
It wasn’t until I was watching the re-runs that I heard her say, “Love is an investment. Information is insurance. With someone who’s heart has already been crushed, I say, you can’t be too careful.” (Season 1 Episode 5). With that, she types her father’s girlfriend’s name in the search engine, and he is furious. Rightfully so. When her dad asks, “What makes you think you have the right?” She responds, “This is what we do. This is how we survive. I was trying to protect you.” For all of her arguments that she’s fine, she’s furious when her father does try to move on after her mother has been gone a solid year, and in one of the few actual fights they have, she screams at him that if her mother was a criminal, he’d find her because he can find anyone. She’s confused. She doesn’t know what she wants.
I wanted to grow up and move on. I wanted to be an adult. I didn’t care if my parents divorced, because I was emotionally mature enough to handle it, and it was their relationship. All of that was true.
That inner dialogue voice? It was scared all the time.
That’s my biggest secret. For almost two decades, I’ve scrawled my favorite Veronica-ism on everything: “After all these years, do you not instinctively fear me?” I am 5 foot even, and sure, I am brave enough to move twelve hours away, then to another city, then to lie and get myself into the weirdest places to ask questions—but I am not brave enough to go out to bars with friends, or drink without a sober friend or partner. I never have been. Not in high school, not in college—not in grad school. It was more likely you’d find me on a 6AM walk around my neighborhood, with, again, a male friend, where we’d get coffee from the gas station and talk about our respective partners.
I need people to be either afraid of me or at least of the aloof, generic-friendly personality I can project, because if they aren’t, they might learn something you can’t find about me in a database.
I’m always afraid.
OK, now you know my secret. I’m afraid, OK?
***
Veronica Mars
2000-oughts
Logan’s a dick
I’m learning that’s hot
“Veronica Mars,” Blondshell
For all of the things I learn, and I learn a lot, I seem to always miss the obvious things. The first time I heard Blondshell’s “Veronica Mars,” this line slapped me in the face. It had never crossed my mind that Logan was attractive because of the ways he acted out. How did I learn the wrong thing? Blondshell is right. Of course she’s right! I told you about the bum fights. Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas didn’t pull any punches where Logan was concerned. Think of all the awful things I already told you about him. The way he treats Weevil. The casual violence and racism. The explosive temper. If I had found any of that information about a real person, I would have run the other way.
I think.
(I’m lying. Remember me, who stayed a few years past being a “secretary?” Who broke into her father’s email because she wanted a ‘real’ answer about the divorce?)
But then, there he was, objectively awful, but vulnerable and mistreated. I didn’t learn that being a dick was hot. I learned that no matter how hard Veronica tried, she couldn’t save Logan—it literally takes until the books when he joins the navy for him to actualize.
He’s worth the wait. Worse? As he gets better, she stays the same. She can’t help herself. She had so many huge tragedies at formative ages, all of which taught her that if she couldn’t feel better, she could at least know more than her ‘enemies.’ Logan eventually grows into a worldview that isn’t black and white.
What I learned from Veronica Mars had nothing to do with love or Logan or even what was hot. I learned to find, hoard, bubble wrap myself in information, and that sometimes joking or anger were smokescreens for a much truer emotion, fear and hurt. Because I was a long way from home, from a life that felt like a grenade went off in the middle and then slowly reassembled as I was leaving.
It wasn’t until recently that I realized I’ve cut and dyed my hair to look like season three Veronica. It’s not her at her best. Her neuroses rule her that season. She takes dumb risks. It was my senior year of college—I got through in three years—and it was perfect timing. I’ve read criticism that she acts too ‘immature,’ but she is immature. She’s smart, but that’s very different than making emotionally wise choices. At every turn, she chooses knowledge over happiness. In fact, it’s Logan who makes the mature and smart decision that season, watching her become obsessed and, after trying to protect her from herself and having her fight him with all her might, breaks up with her because she won’t allow him to help her, and she won’t grow up.
I have made that wrong choice. I have committed. I have worn my defiance on my sleeve. Logan goes from defiance to anger to growth: Veronica can always be reeled back in with the promise of a good secret.
Blondshell’s song keeps droning, perfectly 2004, perfectly Katie, perfectly Tina, perfectly Veronica lines:
Veronica Mars . . .
Become a loner . . .
Gimme shelter . . .
I never outgrew her. Sometimes I’m afraid, in my darker moments, that I’ve grown into her. There is a shadow version of me who is sitting in some LeBaron outside a crappy hotel with a long-lens camera.
I was never brave like Veronica. Any real risk I’ve taken has been online. Somewhat ironically, my high school ex was a tech wizard and taught me everything he knew, likely sometimes when he didn’t realize I was watching. I’ve been a party to things even I can’t believe. Every awful thing I’ve ever been afraid to do—and every fun one?—I know who has done them. I’ve watched stranger’s marriages implode over the course of years from a distance. I’ve never even participated in online dating: not with my name, profile, or information, at least.
Gimme shelter . . .
Gimme shelter . . .
Gimme shelter . . .
That’s all it was, really. It’s Wednesday night, 2004. 8 PM on UPN. My roommate knew not to bug me. I turned off my cell phone and unplugged the landline. One hour a week, I learned other people’s secrets, and that power helped me feel less alone—and less itchy to break my own rules. For letting me borrow your pain and fear, turning it into something that could turn a small, persnickety teenage girl into something—someone—formidable and powerful.
Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. In addition to being nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times, she's been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Iron Horse, Harpur Palate, and Prime Number. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC, and her poetry book “Me & Phil” is forthcoming at Kelsay Books.