RIVERDALE: Our American Bubblez
The latest episode of Riverdale, The CW’s ‘Archie Comics’ adaptation, opened with its iconic characters in their 1940’s designs and, well, before we get into the business of tropes and trashique goodness… BEHOLD —
That is serious 75th anniversary swag.
For readers who haven’t tuned in yet: Yes, every character has killer eyebrows and yes, the comic strip’s original aesthetic feels faithfully updated in the show’s usual contemporary setting. The teaser to last week’s ‘In a Lonely Place’ was a Jughead dream sequence, but for the most part that retro-America vibe persists throughout Riverdale. There’s Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe, a drive-in theater (on its way out), and a recent exposition dump from Papa Cooper clued us in on his feud with Cliff Blossom over that oh-so-precious sauce, the town’s founding export, maple syrup. That is to say that Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s (Berlanti-Verse?) version of Riverdale is just like Twin Peaks, sans logging industry. They share a brooding, hazy atmosphere amidst dangerous woods, serial crime-mystery cum coming-of-age plotting, and in one instance (so far!) a cast member. Expect Madchen Amick to be more Leland, less Shelly…
The allusions are deliberate, the teen cadavers are practically color-graded alike — crisp, cold grey — and the crime-time soap framing for this first season ups intrigue in spades. By riffing on formulaic crime themes instead of only teen antics, the archetypes of Loner Boy, City Girl, Boy Toy from a franchise that was already a tentpole teen soap are afforded an opportunity to examine American ideals and hypocrisies in a narrative sense that’s less heady, tailored to the Berlanti demographic. Riverdale’s new sense is self-aware, and it quips about its own cliches. The thematic layering that results from this overlap, references that are near intertextuality, recontextualizes tropes for a younger audience’s understanding of the same demons and dramas. Suburban taboos and resentments that boiled up around David Lynch in his childhood, and Archie’s got five years on Lynch!
At its essence, integral to its systems, a small town requires a divide to earn its distinction. If it gets any bigger, the context changes. Riverdale is separated from its neighboring town, Greendale, by Sweetwater, a river named after the booming, bustling, trouser-brownin’, Boardwalk-Empire-channelin’ enterprise that is the maple syrup trade. This American ideal is dependent on the bubble. “The Lone Star State,” “Locals Only Beaches,” an interpretation of the American Dream as illusory state of being on the rise and being wholly closed off. Being a bubble, that is.
(an aside — Lovecraft, The Stepford Wives, Stephen King’s Derry and Jerusalem’s Lot, Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, are good jumping off points for following the Town with a Dark Secret trope further down the rabbit hole)
The bubble can be seen-through, it’s easy to game, and fragile as it floats, founded on drives and ambitions that sprout envy. Each Archie lustful and every Laura Palmer doomed. Herein the small town presents an idyllic image associated with quaint values while thriving off the tension of exclusion. Local gang activity, the stigma of mental illness, spirals of addiction, the perversion of adult predators, affairs and abuse, outsiders…all that threatens the image. Eventually everything buried starts to accumulate. A body washes ashore, someone’s gotta be held responsible.
While traveling on Sweetwater river on the 4th of July, Jason Blossom and his sister Cheryl fell off their boat and into the current. Jason drowned, supposedly. The dynamics in Riverdale’s first act hinge on the opportunity to exploit divides in a Post-Jason-Blossom town, secrets revealed and confessed, maneuvered as leverage between relationships so as to bind the town as a whole in liability for this young man’s death. Twin Peaks and Riverdale explore this environment of small-town-in-crisis through different psychologies, but their archetypes are familiar, functioning as flipside-mirrors. At their meeting point is the death of someone young. Loss of innocence defines the town whether they want it to or not.
And this show knows you know this, because it knows Jughead and Betty and Veronica and Archie would know it. Gaudy neon lens flare in the diner gets at that heightened sense of awareness of being a teen, and they talk slick about Mad Men and Truman Capote with more zeal than Dawson Leery. Different era, same network. In another timeline, Jughead is already investigating why these strands of evidence are so similar to the David Lynch & Mark Frost series.
Imagine your friends are not who they are. Adults don’t know better, they know less and less each passing second. With its second season, Twin Peaks added more quirks and otherworldly swirls to its brew. Now that Riverdale’s been picked up for a second season, a few choice clues make sense past the gag and continue the thematic journey Lynch began. Say there’s something nobody, nobody is talking about, and that something goes past life and death or anything petty between neighbors. Through a hidden lodge, perhaps. Or, across Sweetwater river, where Sabrina the Teenage Witch awaits to reveal even more horrors and gifts.
