Okay, I can’t hold it in any longer, so brace yourselves for a LONG VM tirade. Do NOT read if you have not seen S4!!
((SPOILERS)) I’m on a mobile so I can’t do a cut to put the text under-sorry!
As somebody who has an actual film theory BA that focused on the film noir genre, I can confirm this season was lazy fucking writing and not even in the spirit of a noir twist. Deaths in noir are meant to be ironic on some level, like an inevitable thing. The antihero gets swept up into the madness, but they are the straight man, the audience proxy who internally WTFs at the mayhem.
Yes, they are sucked into doomed romances, but those romances are temporary and fleeting and usually with a character who somehow brought death onto themselves through their actions. The dead love interests are the architects of their own demise. If there is a love interest who is not a femme/homme fatale, they are a gatekeeper character, the Girl Friday who knows them better than they know themself, supports them no matter what, keeps them from making horrible choices, and tethers them to the real world. You don’t kill the gatekeeper.
Logan Echolls was set up as a gatekeeper, not an homme fatale! You don’t kill the ‘good’ love interest, you kill the temptation one. By the rules of classic noir, Leo is the one who should’ve died, and he should’ve been connected to the central mystery in a personal way, somehow. Killing Logan isn’t noir, it’s torture porn.
It just bothers me that the cast and crew keep crying ‘noir!’ as an excuse to make the plot grimdark when they violate the rules of noir so blatantly! A movie like Fargo works because it uses a very classic noir structure. The sheriff is the straight man, and it doesn’t matter than she’s happily married with a kid on the way, because she’s not supposed to be the unstable character, she is meant to react to the instability around her. Yes, PIs are supposed to be cynical and grizzled, but they are not meant to be past the point of being shocked by the depths to which people would go for greed. In the original run of the series, Veronica had been through a lot, but she was 17 and still capable of being disappointed by humanity, How can anything possibly shock Veronica now after all she’s seen and endured?
And yes, you can update the genre, but if you want to do a post-modern noir, you do something like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or The Big Lebowski. They’ve changed the central protagonist into something we haven’t seen before, but left the structure of the noir intact. The Dude is not a cynical, hardened PI, he’s a victim of circumstance, but he is still the straight man, the audience proxy. He still has his gatekeepers to ground him. He has a romance, but the woman is a femme fatale. Noir rules apply, but in a fresh new way. And, like, honestly, noir rules have to apply, or it’s NOT noir, it’s just a detective show, no different than Law and Order SVU. On a superficial level, they’ve completely abandoned most of the stylistic choices that made VM noir, so without the structure or the style, how can they cite noir as an excuse for killing off a main character in a way that doesn’t even impact the plot?!?
Logan’s death does not do anything for the central mystery plot—it happens after everything is wrapped up—it simply and transparently serves to free up Veronica up for more romance, because Rob Thomas was too lazy to figure out a way to write the relationship into her story in an interesting and relevant way. Rob likes the thrill of the chase, and wants the opportunity to build tension with a new character. Killing Logan and sending Veronica on the road is essentially a soft reboot—something marshmallows did not sign up for.
Most of us thought Keith was going to die, and we were devastated by the thought, but understood how that might work within the context of the show to propel Veronica into adulthood. We didn’t want it, but were willing to accept it. Killing Logan just heaps more pain on top of already existing pain, and does not change her character in any significant way. She has already experienced loss. This was not a narrative choice to enhance a character, this was not a death in the tradition of a noir show, this was a way of trimming the fat from a show so they could refocus the story on the lead at the expense of the supporting cast. There was nothing foreshadowing it, and it played no part in the story. It was a transparent way to ditch a beloved character the writer and star felt was holding the show back. And they didn’t even have the decency to do it in an interesting or heroic way 🙄
Uncool, and also a betrayal of audience trust.
