The Green Eyed Monster

I was reading the latest Veronica Mars recap over at TWOP, and there was an interesting aside. A while ago, they published a fascinating and insightful interview with series creator Rob Thomas. Great stuff, if you're a fan of the show. In this week's recap, they reference a tidbit that was withheld from the interview (it was published before last week's revelation about Logan and Madison). The full portion is in the recap, but here's a part of it:

The interesting thing in my mind is that Veronica and Logan have been broken up for six weeks when [Logan and Madison's hookup] happens. It's a fleeting thing one night when they're drunk in Aspen together. Veronica can't get past that. This gets into a whole debate we have in the writers' room. There is a contingent, of which [producer] Diane [Ruggiero] and I are a part who experience this overpowering sexual jealousy, the kind so nicely illustrated in Chasing Amy: "I can't get past what you did when we weren't together." It's something that I've struggled with in my life -- I'm interested in that phenomenon. There are others, like John Enbom, who don't really get it: "Why are you jealous of something that happened when you weren't in a committed relationship with someone?" Fair enough, that's a logical response, but emotions, for those of us who aren't Vulcan, aren't dictated by logic. I'm certainly not proud of my own jealousy, nor is Veronica proud of hers, though I find hers much more excusable. She's seen so much unfaithfulness. She does everything she can to protect her own heart. She hates being vulnerable. On a side note, I eventually got over mine. Not sure whether to ascribe it to years of therapy or finding the right person.

One of the wonderful things that "art" does (whether it's a song, a show, a movie, a book, poetry, etc.) is make us think about things in our own life in a different way, or examine our own situation, beliefs or experiences through the prism of fictional characters. TV "shippers" tend to blow right past the analysis and get to the result. "LoVe 4-ever!" "Dump his ass!" "They were on a break!" But, if you write (and act) truly rounded and embodied characters (like Veronica, BSG, The Sopranos, Dexter and a few others), the dramatic identification process is a lot more complex than that.

The reference to Chasing Amy is not lost on me. Besides being one of my absolute favorite movies, it's also an emotional, witty and oh-so true to life examination of the things that slowly but surely creep into a relationship. And different people handle those different ways. How much do you examine, obsess over, consider, judge and react to things that happened to your significant other in the "past?" And what exactly is the "past?" A few months, as in Veronica's case? Many years, as in Holden's case? On some level, most adults rationally know that what's happened in the past or while "we were on a break" shouldn't necessarily impact the present and the future. But relationships are rarely rational; the situations we all face are usually less cut and dried. Neither school of thought should be considered empirically "right" or "wrong," should they? On one hand, in the fictional worlds of the ViewAskewniverse or Neptune, I empathize with Logan and Alyssa. Logically (like a Vulcan, as Thomas suggests above), what happens outside the "boundaries" of the relationship shouldn't matter. But on a primal, emotional and all too real level for me, I'm right there with Holden and Veronica. (In fact, I think I even referenced the experience I had with nightmares and visions, when I posted my "morning after" reaction to last week's show). I've got friends who could easily fall into the latter category and yet don't, and manage to handle things with grace and maturity I can't even understand, much less emulate. But my psyche doesn't exactly work that way, despite repeated psychological and chemical attempts to rewire it. Of course, my fairly recent experience in this arena wasn't exactly analogous to Amy or Veronica. There were the incidents in the past, and behavior of a "vaginally sociable and commercial" nature. But there were also a lot of hypocritical, deceitful, manipulative and morally questionable incidents in the present, too, that I was just too stupid to see (which became particularly apparent in the post-mortem).

Perhaps a lot of it can be attributed to that old joke about "don't think about a pink elephant." Maybe there are just people, like Dawgs and Gators, that shouldn't be together (though I have a set of friends who disprove that theorem). Maybe it's in the way that the person with the past chooses to approach the present. Maybe honesty isn't always the best policy. Maybe it's in the way that people "judge" and embody that judgment, or are able to compartmentalize. Or maybe it's just simply better to be a Vulcan. Live Long and Prosper, y'all!

Whether or not there are any magic solutions, or "right" answers, it does make for compelling drama.