After my ecstacy over saving the world faded, things got better and worse. Part of the reason I got into the trial was because I was considered high risk, not just because of my demographics, but because I was living with five people, most of whom could not work from home. So I took on more of the short trips that would normally just be tacked on to whoever was leaving next, to even just psychologically pretend that I was helping them. But then I was worried — was I skewing the data? What was even considered high risk when you were already starting from an ‘unnaturally high risk’? I started obsessing over analyzing my behavior to see if I was over correcting my behavior, or overover correcting, or mistaking or under correcting. The window of behavior kept shifting as more people got vaccinated, and then as variants came back and started killing people at clip. But I remained still.
There aren’t a lot of good descriptions of the joys of schizophrenia, mainly because the stigma around schizophrenia is so intense so no one talks about it. There are fucking terrible concerns, and even now, writing this, I realize that I used a whole bunch of euphemistic language to describe what was happening to me leading up to that fateful September night. What I really mean to say was that the part of my brain where I envision my schizophrenia residing was festering with so much COVID thinking, I was losing the ability to function. I would hear a woman on the phone at the store, explaining how relieved she is to finally get a covid jab for her child and I had to leave, grocery cart abandoned, because I didn’t know how to tell her that I was a part of her life, her body, her child’s body, forever, and I was hysterical. Every interaction with a stranger now was fraught and tense because now I felt intimately connected to the 150 million people with the medicine made in my body, and their changing views of what that medicine was. I hadn’t written in months. Sleep was impossible and when it would come it was full of numbers and death and death and death. The weight that I had worked so hard to gain for Mishima was falling off. I knew that something had to change for me or I was absolutely going to end up dead or worse.
I have to speak very slowly and carefully as I write this because sometimes I let emotions take over me and then I am incapable of functioning. On this day, June 29, two days after the official wrap, I offer this, first of many schemas, the first of many odes, the first of a whole bunch of sonnets about Riverdale.
Originally, I was going to break it up. I thought of titles like;
SERPENTS VS. GHOULIES: THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE OF MISHIMA’S MYTHOLOGICAL WARFARE
And
HBIC: THE CHEERFUL CHAOTIC DEATH DRIVE OF CHERYL BLOSSOM
And
SCULLY’S OUROBOROS: RIVERDALE, THE X-FILES AND THE ORDER & POWER OF MYTHS
I wrote things like;
Veronica responds by accusing Cheryl of incest, using her extreme presentation of grief as a slit to insert something nasty into Cheryl’s body. Cheryl cannot respond, because there is no appropriate response to the accusation of incest. Veronica used a common trope about heterosexual aristocratic siblings to explain the unnaturalness everyone senses around Cheryl and her family. She points everyone towards a different more common perversion, ignoring the more dangerous one, the one we know for sure is true, that Cheryl is a lesbian. In the rarefied air that Cheryl and Veronica breathe, Cheryl isn’t the first victim of incest Veronica has run into and knows that incest as a rumor is easier to grapple with than with the only remaining heir being a sapphist. Veronica matches Cheryl’s nastiness with an appropriate level of nastiness, but declines to really hurt Cheryl. Until Toni, Veronica is the only ally Cheryl has and perhaps the truest one.
And
Cheryl and Veronica were now connected thru a physical, intimate sexual crime against their body property versus Veronica’s very public shaming in reaction to a crime against her intangible property - her name and reputation. She is effective with her intangible property rights but not the crimes against the tangible property body.
And
As Riverdale’s animus, Cheryl’s function is chaos, in the generating, world building sense. She is the only character that explicitly expresses suicidal ideation. When she acts on those thoughts, she burns down her ancestral home, her palatial prison of abuse, incest, homophobia and despair. This act is Riverdale’s original hellmouth and explains everything that happens later. She has complete control over everything that happens in her life after this act, the burning of the Golden Pavilion.
This is not where I wanted to begin.
July 4th.
Our story is about a town, a small town. And the people who live in that town. The name of our town is Riverdale. Our story begins, I guess, with what the Blossom twins did this summer.
The Netflix info card told me what I needed to know. It originally airs on the CW, or what used to be the WB, the real off brand, low cal, low fat network television network. It was a “modern take on the Archie comics universe.”
I was looking for what we call companion television, something meaningless and comforting for moments of loneliness or the dregs of insomnia, now that I was becoming friendly with 3 and 4 and 5 am. The cast looked hot, it was from a trash network, teen drama, IP I was vaguely familiar with, let’s go for it. It was 2:57am.
By 4:04 minutes into the pilot episode I was absolutely losing my shit. The first interaction between Archie and Betty, the lynchpin relationship for this piece of American propaganda, and Betty is talking about Toni Morrison?!?!?! I quickly realized I would have to fucking watch this show. Like watch watch, and not just have on in the background while I read fanfic on my phone. At 6:00 minutes in, Veronica arrives to complete the threesome hat trick, and this bitch is really introducing herself with a compare and contrast of Truman Capote?!?! The book about the high society escort? And the murder town?
If you are not a regular teen media enjoyer, you have no idea why this was so striking. In 6 minutes, main characters not only referenced multiple authors and books, but a character has oriented part of her life around books. Betty’s an overachiever (internship? aren’t you 14?) sure, but then Archie responds with poems, and then Veronica literally defines herself using two books as parameters Absolutely absurd, absurd, especially a show that has no supernatural elements (we need a teacher/guide to explain all the creatures to Buffy, Teen Wolf Scott, etc.), a show that has no need of a librarian or more than one nerd. It was already trying to be something different. Was this show r e a l l y going to reward me for, well, ya know, being me?
By 10:07 minutes in, before the end of Veronica’s first day at school, and they’ve referenced or cited Lolita, Our Town, Twin Peaks, Blue Jasmine, Mad Men, Indecent Proposal, The River’s Edge, “Fire and Ice”, Outlander, and I was no longer tired. The dialogue was hypnotic even when it was embarrassing. I read in a review somewhere that why Taylor Swift’s Barbara Stynwyckesque All Too Well worked so well was because the fight between Her and Him sounded like what a fight sounds like when you tell your friends about it. Which then becomes the truth of the fight. The first ten minutes of dialogue sounded like what millennials think we sound like talking to other millennials about other millennials. And so now it’s become the truth.
I hadn’t even met the fourth character of the ‘Core Four’, Jughead, yet and I committed to watching the whole first season. With schizophrenia, it is always sure and it’s always fast. Even Taylor Swift, which took me thirteen whole years
was sure, and when I finally worked out my problem with her, it only took six hours for me to fix it, reorient myself, write about her, and love her music. I was signed on to Riverdale in those ten minutes, not sure entirely for what, but I was there.
[camera pans to Jughead Jones, sitting alone]
JUGHEAD JONES [VOICEOVER]: It was nearing midnight when my old friend, Archie Andrews, showed up to the last place in town still open. He was looking for the girl next door. Instead, he found me.
ARCHIE, TO POP: Hey Pop. Betty been in tonight?
POP, TO ARCHIE: No, just the nighthawks in tonight.
My vexation was returning, in full force. The references are a smorgasbord of millennial interests and anxieties. It takes place out of time - social media is important but also an after thought, there are anachronistic gestures to technology millennials grew up with and ‘killed’, and other relics of millennial consumption. There is the millennial anxiety around advancing social technology, with some cautioning that cruising can be safer than online, depending on what you were the most afraid of. It rewards all forms of millennial cultural play. It never focused on streaming, it wasn’t built for streaming, the last show not made for streaming we’ll ever get and embraces its heritage as the legacy media (propaganda) that helped invent teenagers anyway. The show was not only rewarding me for being a curious eleven year old writing in my notebook in cursive gel pen watching people jump off burning buildings on live television, but it was reminding me of what a JOY it is to live a bookish, wordish life, a critics life.
That art –objects human beings make and that critics devour to make culture– is what we have to connect with each other, explain each other, understand each other. That art is fun. That it’s fucking fun as shit when you catch a reference to a piece of media you love in another piece of media you love. It’s fucking fun to see what writers who love their job do. It’s fucking fun to see a picture of you made with such care and charm and sweetness and tenderness and flesh. It’s fucking fun to play with language. It’s fucking fun when people fucking mean it.
I watched six episodes in a row. I slept for 18 hours. I was possessed with the cunning of the insane. When I woke up ––––
When I woke up, I understood everything, and I began to write.