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The Black Keys will rock your teeth out, son.



Veronica Mars is not only tied for my all-time favorite show on TV right now (with Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and Deadwood - don't make me pick!), it's also the best show about a rational world like ever. If you're at all familiar with the show, you have the basic premise girl: sassy, cute blonde in high school solves mysteries. Veronica is, ostensibly, a super hero in a Le Baron. The first two seasons are structured around one *big* mystery that structures the whole arc, and in between, are lots of little weekly mysteries. Like a lot of ongoing shows, it's possible to distinguish between "mythology" episodes and "monster of the week" episodes.

But, just below that, is a wonderful argument about the rationality of the world around us. Like Hegel's obsession with "threes" (Hegel works in a fractal way a lot, with a group of three breaking down into three groups of three etc), all of the mysteries in Veronica's world happen to converge. Thus, while working on a simple "who stole my bike?" case, Veronica ends up running into evidence that just happens to relate to the big season-long mystery. I suppose we could call this lazy writing, and just an annoying deus ex machina - the kind of thing you need to make fiction work. But that's no fun really. I prefer to think of it as a *statement about the world.* What Veronica Mars - the show not the girl - is positing is that the world is a kind of rational, harmonious place, where all the pieces of everything fit together. There *should* be order.

But there isn't order - because people fuck it up. It's perfectly clear from the arcs in the show that human intervention almost never works. Juries can be misled, inept people can be elected, and the rich really pay for nothing. Thus, the confluence of events - seemingly unrelated clues forming togehter into a cohesive event - shows us how the world *should be.* The problem is that people are agents, with some degree of freedom, who simply are not always rational, thus goofing up the cosmic order.

But, like some perky Hobbesian Leviathan in cute jeans, Veronica Mars swoops into set things right. Sure, she doesn't use the force of the club to make the world rational (she has a big dog and a tazer instead) - but she does break laws. A lot. In fact, privacy doesn't *exist* in Veronica Mars, as Veronica breaks into classrooms, steals files, plants bugs, eavesdrops, and stalks people. Like a lot of superhero fiction, there is an uncomfortable layer of authoritarianism underneath the bright colors and do-gooding. Veronica *is* rational (the show in fact goes to great lenghts to establish that she is one of the worldiest, wisest, and intellectual most gifted students at her school). Thus, in the name of the common good, Veronica uses whatever tools are at her disposal - information, coercion, and maniupalation included - to do what is "right." It's not process, it's *outcomes.* Essentially, since Veronica is the one with reason - the one who sees the pattern of how the world should be - she goes out and does whatever has to be done in order to correct irrational people who have goofed up this natural order. Veronica Mars is a really hot, super competent version of George W. Bush.

This doesn't make me not like the show. I just think it's bitching. The show can easily be seen as "just" another feminist empowerment show, a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But there is a whole other layer going on in it, relating directly to human nature and the problem of governance. Plus, the show has a bitching soundtrack.