Dear 14 Year Olds Just Discovering Veronica Mars:

I am eleven years late for this conversation, but that’s about where I lag behind pop-culture.  And if you are 14 now then you were three when Veronica made her debut in 2004 and just now old enough to have her on your radar.

So here we both are, ready to talk.

Andrew and I watched the first three episodes last night and after sober meditation, Veronica joined the other cutting edge series that we cut off in its prime – Breaking Bad.

The fact is it was hard to stop watching.  Both Breaking Bad and Veronica were engaging stories, good acting, effective musical score, pretty people, interesting video work.  Both had characters with some complexity to them.  They hooked us and drew us in quickly.

So to stop watching required an actual decision, a push-back against inertia and the suction of the couch.  Once done, the real work began of articulating why Veronica Mars was so disturbing to us.

I watch anything as a parent.  I can’t help it.  What world are my children getting from me to work with and give to their children?  Veronica’s world was breathtakingly immoral. There was loyalty, I guess.  And sacrifice of a sort.  But her high school world was more like the seedy and pornographic world of adults who die of violence and disease.  The dialogue was vulgar and aberrant. It hurt me for your sakes that this was depicted for you as normal life.

Perhaps you would protest that this is the real world of a typical high school campus and I am in a bubble.  No doubt.  But if it is the real world and the show’s noble goal is to expose and condemn dark topics like rape and abuse of authority, it certainly takes its glamorous, lucrative time doing it.  By the end of the series are the fans indignant about injustice?  I doubt it.

Or you might tell me it is noir on purpose, some people like it, and to just turn it off and don’t watch.  I did and I don’t.  But it is still out there for you to have to deal with and I am pointing out some flaws in its message.

Andrew asked me who I thought the target audience was for this series.  I decided that it was aimed at 14 year olds who had suffered abuse or neglect at the hands of people who should have cared for them, vulnerable 14 year olds who would be tempted to follow a hero like Veronica into the moral void.

In episode three, the “moral” that came out of the void was “Be true to yourself!”  In that episode a man disappeared early from his son’s life.  When the son found his father, the man was being true to himself and was now doe-eyed, long haired, and wearing a dress.  A creepy moment indeed when the boy said, “Dad?” to a woman.

And that was the moment I realized my soul couldn’t take Veronica Mars.  My soul cannot embrace a story, compelling as it is, that is empty in the middle.  “Be true to yourself” is an empty message.  It is a false one.  Children cannot call a woman “Dad.” Dad cannot call himself “woman.”  You cannot look east and call it west and still live in reality.  Veronica wants you to believe you can, that your west is whatever you want it to be.  And that’s fine until you are looking for sunsets. Then you better find real west.

Our life story doesn’t have to be empty in the middle.  Emptiness is a choice.  It may be the popular one, but it’s not the only one.  Fullness is available even in the midst of this real life.  It is possible to be fully known and still fully loved.  That is what is missing from Veronica’s world that pierces when I watch. No one there knows the filling love I know and they careen from emptiness to emptiness.  It’s hard to watch people die of thirst.  It is certainly their right to do it, and to make TV about it.  But it is my privilege to say, “Hey!  There’s water over here.”

Because I am human, there are times that I experience the emptiness of the void.  I feel it behind me, gaping.  And as I teeter there, held only by the steadfast love of God, I wonder how it feels to be standing on that edge without the saving love of Jesus.  How does anyone even stay sane?

I am sorry that you’ve been fed the ‘be true to yourself’ lie.  You can’t be your own answer.  It doesn’t work that way.

I can’t be both myself and the one who saves me.

“When I thought, ‘My foot slips,’
your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up.”
Psalm 94:18

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