Mind Candy by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Author:Lawrence Watt-Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: essays, pop culture, star trek, buffy the vampire slayer, comics
ISBN: 9781434443199
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

I’m in Love with My Car: Automotive Symbolism on “Veronica Mars”

Originally published in Neptune Noir

Neptune, California—a coastal town somewhere not too far from San Diego. It’s fairly typical of southern California in many ways, deliberately so. It’s got its share of the very wealthy—movie stars, software millionaires—but most of the town isn’t so fortunate. If you work your way down to the bottom of the social ladder you’ll find the Hispanic families who supply the wealthy with maids and gardeners.

In Veronica’s voice-over introduction in the pilot episode of “Veronica Mars,” she tells us Neptune has no middle class—just the wealthy and the people who clean their homes and tend their gardens. This isn’t literally true, by any means, as we see plenty of schoolteachers, mechanics, and the like, but it’s uncomfortably close.

Perhaps as a result, the people of Neptune, including the students at Neptune High, take social status very seriously. They’re always alert to the markers that indicate who’s better than who—the clothes they wear, the accents in their speech, their manners, the cars they drive…

Oh, yeah. Definitely the cars they drive. In Neptune, what you drive tells the world who you are. And someone at the show clearly put a lot of thought into who drives what.

Once upon a time, if they showed cars at all, TV shows would typically give every character a fairly generic vehicle; often, every car on a given show would come from a single manufacturer, who provided them free as part of an advertising deal. The closing credits would include a line like, “Vehicles courtesy of Ford Motor Company,” and every character would drive a different model of new Ford.

This is far less common than it used to be; I’m not sure any scripted shows still do it, though reality shows do. I’m very glad that the producers of “Veronica Mars” didn’t try it, though, because the vehicles here add significant flavor to the show, and tell the viewer something about the characters.

Everyone on “Veronica Mars” drives—which is hardly surprising in modern America, but if you think about it, it’s far from universal on TV shows. Does anyone on, say, “How I Met Your Mother” own a car? Can you identify the make of a single character’s vehicle (excluding Dr. House’s motorcycle) on “House,” even though it’s set well out in the New Jersey suburbs? Buffy Summers didn’t have a car, the sisters on “Charmed” teleported everywhere, the doctors on “Grey’s Anatomy” apparently drive but we almost never see the vehicles. Cars are far less visible in TV Land than in the real world.

When cars do appear, especially if they’re important story elements, they tend to be so eccentric as to almost be characters in their own right—Batman’s Batmobile, the General Lee on “The Dukes of Hazzard,” or even Giles’ battered 1963 Citroën on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” You can find fan websites devoted to these vehicles, just as if they were characters.

In the most extreme cases, the cars are characters, like KITT on “Knight Rider” or the 1928 Porter on “My Mother the Car.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.