Teen is the new Noir
Last month The Observer had a wonderful article on the new “Teen Noir”—specifically, Veronica Mars, one of my favourite new TV shows, and forthcoming movie Brick.
With its highly stylised dialogue, hardboiled talk of gats and hop, shamuses and reefer worms, Brick breathes new life into the teen movie. As depicted by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brendan is an adolescent Marlowe, all world-weary attitude and well-placed punches—when asked by one character what he intends to do now his plan has been rumbled, his response is the deadpan: “Stand here and bleed at you.”
Similarly, a recent episode of Veronica Mars saw Veronica, who was manning a drinks stall, ask the show’s anti-hero: “What’s your poison?” The response, “emotionally unavailable women”, echoed Bogart/Bacall dialogue from Hollywood’s Golden Age.
It’s hard to describe Veronica Mars, and in previous posts I’d opted not to; I feared any description I gave would make it sound like Nancy Drew, when in reality it’s closer to something by Chandler or Hammett, just layered on to the world of American high school with its gangs and cliques, the stylised hard-boiled dialogue transcribed into teen slang. It’s genre-bending on a Buffy scale, and it’s surprising how well it works. (I admit I was very sceptical when I first heard about Veronica Mars last year, and it took me a couple of episodes to settle in to it, unlike Buffy and Firefly—another genre-bender, cowboys in space—which hooked me immediately.) The important thing is that the noir protagonist has to be an outsider who effortlessly outsmarts the socially and economically advantaged, mired in moral turpitude as they are, and who is constantly exposed and vulnerable to the violence of the bottom feeders vieing for a way out of their social ghetto, and those themes translate surprisingly easily into the world of high school. Perhaps the most brilliant twist of the genre-bending in Veronica Mars is its gender-bending—with the private dick now being dickless in the shape of Veronica (and what a nice shape), the femme fatale is converted into an homme fatale: Logan Echolls, one of the best characters to ever grace the small screen.
Last year Veronica Mars was named the best new show of the year by the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly and Brick won the Sundance Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision. You can read more about Veronica Mars at fan site Mars Investigations. IGN also has an interview with Enrico Colantoni who plays Keith Mars—Veronica’s dad, erstwhile sheriff of Neptune, and now private investigator.
