I have now given four or five lectures about Riverdale and my thinking around it -- for art students, composers, filmmakers, drug users, writers, and labor organizers. I have roped my friends in for practice a million times (thank you again to Grace V., Sydney S., Alma L., David L., Bill D., Brittni C., Shady K., Cooper, Will, NTS Books Channel, the Safely Solopized Salon, among others) and while it has changed for it’s audience and my mood, the core of it remains the same. I believe Riverdale can be a guide, therapy, the answer and the question, a blueprint, a fortune telling device, all kinds of things for those trying to live under terrible times and those trying to find meaning in the senseless cruetly of it all. 


I’m writing this on the 30th anniversary of Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, in the world that he created -- in many ways Timothy McVeigh’s worldview is what we are experiencing, from January 6th to whatever the current administration has done this morning. This summer I am taking a road trip to see My Chemical Romance in Chicago and will be taking a detour to Terre Haute, Indiana, where the Federal Government executed Timothy McVeigh and where they plan on executing Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Robert Bowers and Luigi Mangione. My road trip ally K is an essayist, and as an essayist, she reiterated that I cannot write until I see it, until I feel the weather change over the execution chamber (or as close as I can actually get, which is a Dunkin Doughnuts across the street), my writing will be empty. She regularly talks about writing as a tangible artifact, something with rituals and protection and destruction. Usually I say this is horseshit, writers can write about anything anytime they want, but in this case I am agreeing with her. I have been to Terre Haute before, and in my personal mythmaking, Terre Haute (or, a Greyhound station outside of it, anyway) is the place where a person got on the bus with me and saved my life. So I said I would wait, I would wait until I stood in that Dunkin Doughnuts Parking Lot before I wrote anything down.

I am also facing a sort of crisis of faith -- I live in a world where words have failed so many people, in so many ways, and continues to fail. I have wanted to be a writer since I learned how to read, that I have loved men and women deeply, but nothing compares to my love of the written word -- and I keep writing, and fighting to get paid for it, writing to encourage other people to write, that there is meaning, and importance in the action of sitting down, putting words down, and giving them to someone else to read. I regularly complain that ‘No one is talking about xyz’, but what I mean is no one is writing about it. It isn’t real until I read about it (something that AI continues to confuse) but that if no one sat down, thought, and then wrote it down, they don’t consider it important. And lately, I feel lonely in that thought, that I feel more and more isolated.

The job of a writer -- my job, I won’t speak for everyone -- is to look at, interpret, contextualize, and record thoughts, feelings, ideas, and reasonings around art, violence, the weather, a bad trip on a train, whatever part of the human experience they feel drawn to, to draw others to, in seeking solace for our mutual disease.* It doesn’t have to be new writing, or a new feeling -- you don’t have to rewrite The Song of Songs for a wedding vow if you don’t want to -- but there also has to be new words for new feelings, new thinking. I am disappointed in Writing (the act, the people who do it, the reading of it, everything that can live under that umbrella) for their failure to use any of the tools at our disposal to look at, interpret, contextualize and record what we are living through. The execuses are weak -- it’s too much, it’s too fast, fascist censorship isn’t unique to the US, the race murder**, what am I supposed to focus on?, no one will read it, I’m not the person to, people are dying -- and the people I respect acknowledge it as soon as the words leave their mouth. And I tell them, these writers I respect, if not outright love, that they should watch Riverdale. None of them have taken this suggestion seriously. I’ll keep saying it.


The most recent lecture I gave about Riverdale was to Will’s art theory class at George Washington. He didn’t have a speaker and I had about 36 hours to come up with something, which of course I was happy to do, like all evangelists, I will never pass up a chance to speak about the thing I am devoted to. But that was tight, even for me. I also had very little time for the actual lecture, so the videos and other things I used in previous talks wouldn’t be available. I was also talking (meaning, sitting down and writing words for another to read) with Bill a lot about Luigi, American archetypes (I previously discussed the core four as archetypes here & here) Timothy McVeigh, Magneto, Nebraska, the reordering of myths, all the difficult things I was trying to address in preparation for the roadtrip to the execution chamber on the way to the opera about dying of cancer. What I was grasping for, and what I am still grasping for in my writing with Bill, is that there is a great reordering of the American Myth, happening right now in front of us. Everything that is held and rejected in that myth is now up for grabs. What I told Will’s students was that there are two halves to the American Experience -- Terrorism & Utopia -- and using the core four as vectors -- each person’s archetype has a role to play in shaping this new American Experience. 

From my lecture notes:

ARCHIE - UTOPIA

  Thru Archie, we can mourn the myths about goodness and hard work that will never serve us, and write myths that WILL serve us. And we need to mourn, collectively. Everyone comes to it a different time, from a different experience, until COVID-19, when we all had to do it all at once. We all were taught to be like Archie, and that Archie would win. But Archie doesn’t win, and we won’t either. From afar, Archie is what politicians say they want us to be, and up close he is what we really are. Every politician who plays Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA at a rally without listening to the lyrics about a man home from war with trauma, no job prospects, and a wasted youth is invoking the Archie myth.
Thru Archie, we can actually start building a utopia that is within reach, a utopia where everyone has paid leave and health insurance. After Archie, never again will someone have to suffer thru the old gods of American myth like Ronald Reagan playing Bruce Springsteen or Justice Warren or anything like that. Because if you follow those gods, you end up with Timothy McVeigh. But if you follow Archie Andrews, maybe you can end up with Luigi Mangione.

Archie’s myth is how we build.

JUGHEAD - TERRORISM

  Utopia and terrorism need each other to present a copacetic picture — we cannot do one without the other. Utopia cannot be actualized if it is not realized through the lens of terrorism in it’s most basic definition — a violent act to create fear. The never ending violence heaped upon Jughead — real or imagined, is there to create a fear response in Archie — don’t do that, you might end up like Jughead Jones. But, like all true terrorism stories, the violence begins somewhere else. Are the Southside Serpents an evil biker gang running drugs because they are bad people, or are they an organized effort of mutual aid keeping each other from starving, sending their kids to college, paying off medical debts by selling poison to the rich people who put them in this situation in the first place?

Jughead’s old gods are people like Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Camus, but if you follow those you end up with Ted Kaczynski. But if you follow Jughead, you end up with Aaron Swartz. Jughead’s myth is how we write our story.

BETTY - TERRORISM

  Like Taylor, it takes some pretty intense amounts of destruction for Betty to get right. The Kanye disasters led to a world where the love interests in Taylor Swift videos to become Black and trans, where Taylor Swift has so much power she can demand that if her label ever sells its stake in Spotify, every single one of her label mates gets a payout from that sale, effectively controlling an entire global industry. At some points, Betty has more control over Riverdale than even the federal government. And I hope, for all my music/sound friends, Taylor makes like Betty and destroys it all. Betty is the midwife for Gramsci’s new world, struggling to be born.

Betty’s old gods are Nancy Drew and Sandra Day O’ Connor and Clarice Starling, but when you follow those you get Marjorie Taylor Greene. But if you follow Betty, maybe you can get a Chappell Roan. Betty’s myth is how we destroy.

VERONICA - UTOPIA 

  Veronica is obviously my favourite. I don’t want to be her, I definitely don’t see myself in her (I am a Jughead for many reasons) but she’s finally provided a solid way of looking at form of bi-ness, the most opaque identity out there, and an identity that has grown inside the millennial population — Zoe Kravitz isn’t the only one, according to the census. Veronica reminds me that while our identity relies on transactional harm, it isn’t defined by it. She’s unashamed and proud of who she is, and proud of her friends. 

And thru her body and its unusual status, she saves the world. Veronica is how we put it all into action, how we win — which is to say, Veronica is how we die, and make way for the new, for you.


The class ended with silence and I awkwardly tried to explain why the core four continue to exist when it becomes harder and harder for figures like Magneto to exist (there is a reason every time Magneto appears it is a prequel, existing somewhere in the 1960s or 1980s) and what I hope to write in our eschatology -- what world we will end and what stage we leave for them. I felt strange after I hung up, sort of lost, that perhaps I was speaking too conspiratorially, speaking too darkly. Will texted me half an hour later, exultant -- “They said you were the best speaker they have had all year.” 

I will continue to lecture about Riverdale whenever I can, and until the end of my life (or the end of my time, which ever comes first) I will continue to advocate for it, look to it for answers, and consider it the most important piece of millennial art ever made, but this project -- Serpent Queen’s Gambit -- is coming to a close. It is time for all of us to take action, to make choices. This summer’s roadtrip with K will be the end of this, and the time when I will really have to decide if I’m a Jughead or if I’m a Veronica and what my job is in this Order of Myths. 


Join me?



* from Libra by Don Delillo

** Before we had the term genocide, we used the term race murder, which I believe is maybe what we should return to using in light of the decimation of language in our current time.