I’ve talked a lot about the show as a whole, and some characters individually, but I haven’t really addressed our Sad Breakfast Club (also known as the ‘Core Four’) and who they are as millennial figureheads. There are a lot of television shows about being a millennial, with millennial characters, but I think due to the fact those shows are about millennials in society (looking for jobs, looking for love, looking for meaning) their millennial characters don’t function as well as archetypes as the gang does in Riverdale — where society intrudes on millennial life. They are millennials regardless of where they are put, which feels less likely with other millennial shows.
I’m also in a weird place waiting for Riverdale to end so I can buy the whole thing on DVD since I am not streaming or anything else related to media due to the strike and watching the new episodes live and I only own S1 and S2 currently. So this whole thing is going to be written with my memory, so apologies ahead of time for what I’m forgetting and I’ll fix it later. I’ll go in order of how much time I actually spend thinking about them;
Archie Andrews: Unaffiliated Voter
When I got back from my trip to Russia in 2019, there was a lot of writing about Russia’s attempted courting of Africa, and various ways that was going. Positioned as America-ish without the awful American-ish racism, and that the defining Russian character is….character. That the propaganda about being Russian had so flattened the Russian identity that when asked, the average Russian man on the street said the most defining characteristic of being Russian is the character of being Russian. Archie’s definition is his Archie-ness, which is another way of saying he is who you want him to be. He’s the good kid who can’t choose between music and football, and he’s also being radicalized against the ‘wrong side of town’ that escalates into gun violence and Taliban videos. He drops out of high school to join the army and comes home to a town straight out of a Bruce Springsteen novel and starts a union and builds homes for the homeless. He’s a miner and a firefighter and a political prisoner. He’ll kill for a woman he can’t even figure out if he loves her or not. He’s had same-sex relations both inside all male worlds (prison, army, etc) and when he’s at home (Reggie). He asks a girl to marry him and she says no and then she asks him later. He’s an Obama Trump Voter, He’s a Sanders Trump voter, he’s a Romney Obama voter, he’s a non voter. The only thing that hasn’t happened to Archie ever is crypto and podcasting. It takes him awhile to learn and understand complicated issues like racism, and homophobia, and class war, and it’s usually painful and awkward to watch. And then when he does figure out how bad said issue actually is, there is literally no one on earth who will stop him from destroying the racist basketball team, or standing up for his gay friends even if he doesn’t exactly know how being gay works, or attempting prison breaks, or blowing up a bad guys house with a pipe bomb. His best friend/boyfriend is Jughead Jones, because every golden boy needs a Donnie Darko. Archie is down to clown, whatever that means. Can hold 6 different jobs at once but not a girl. Is probably going to end up living with Jughead in a platonic gay relationship because Jughead is honestly the only person that can put up with that mans shit. Archie is what every millennial straight guy could be if they stop living in a world of no and start saying yes!
Books
- A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
- Dune - Frank Herbert
- Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption - Stephen King
- “Fire & Ice” - Robert Frost
- The Crucible - Arthur Miller
- Band of Brothers - Stephen Ambrose
- “The Boys in the Bank” (Dog Day Afternoon) - P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore
- On the Road - Jack Kerouac
- Howl & Other Poems - Allen Ginsberg
- The Stand - Stephen King
- Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
- The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
As of S7 I’m prepared to have sex with this character in a dumpster with how much he’s grown on me.
Betty Cooper: Femme & Fucked to the Core
I’ve met so many Bettys I don’t even know where to start. The first red flag is in the pilot, where she tells Archie she has spent all summer working with Toni Morrison. The improbability of this 14 year old sophomore working with the 80 year old Nobel Laureate isn’t the fucking crazy part, but that Betty is so headlong into a plan that said 80something Nobel Laureate tells her to slow the fuck down before she wakes up and has no idea what her whole life has been for. Betty is terrifying because I’ve met so many of them and despite all of us being adults they don't seem any better because they haven’t figured out how to exorcise this desire of self annihilation that drives millennial existence. Girls with 5.0s who are self harming, having group sex with the football team, shooting heroin, making porn videos. The fucked up part about Betty is that, just with every other girl you know who is absolutely fucked to the core is how reliable they are. You wanna get back at some asshole spreading rumors about you? Betty Cooper will literally torture him for you. Have a question about your vagina? Suddenly you are at the Planned Parenthood where everyone knows Betty by name. Betty definitely knows how to shoot a gun and perform oral sex on both genders and can fix a car but also might touch a Black persons hair in public. A total sleeper agent. Ultimate high risk high reward. She could be Hillary Clinton or the D.C. Madam or that lady who killed all her kids in Idaho or Taylor Swift. As Archie’s female counterpart, when confronted with issues she maybe doesn’t understand, she does the white lady thing and cries. It takes her longer than Archie to ever admit to being wrong, or to try and fix her mistakes, when she bothers to. She’s smarter than Archie but also does not have any concept of long term consequences of actions she takes to accomplish her goals. When she breaks into Ms. Grundy’s car, Veronica (the non white of the core four in this situation) clearly reminds Betty that what she is doing is a felony, and she does not want to go there without some fucking clarity. When Betty expresses concern it’s all fucked up and wrong — sure she’s worried about Kevin’s safety cruising Fox Forest, but Kevin is absolutely right to drag her for filth for policing his body when Betty likes to dress up and play the domme on cam for men. Pretty sure Betty is gonna end up alone and that’s fine and honestly probably the best outcome for everyone in the orbit of a Betty. Betty is insanely productive, smart, work oriented, ambitious and driven. She’s also absolutely fucked to the core, incapable of regulating her rage and obsessed with controlling her body - be that sexually or thru self punishment. Which Mitford Sister will she be? Who knows! Give her some tequila and we’ll all find out.
Lets go girls.
Books
- Nancy Drew and The Hidden Staircase - Carolyne Keene
- Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
- Dracula - Bram Stoker
- Beloved - Toni Morrison
- Basics of Small Engine Repair
- The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
- The Silence of the Lambs & Red Dragon - Thomas Harris
- Romeo & Juliet - William Shakespeare
- The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan
- Caliban and the Witch - Silvia Federici
As of S7 she’s still too insane for me but she seems to be getting better. I hope that’s what is happening for all the Bettys I know too.
Jughead Jones: School Shooter
Cole Sprouse is the actor who understands his character the best and probably the show the best. His initial approach to the role was Rod Serling’s narration for The Twilight Zone which makes sense until you remember Cole Sprouse was the most famous of the core four so they had to move out of just using Jughead as a narrator and into a main character. Jughead is thin and pale (remember when Nicole Richie on The Simple Life said she liked her boys to look near death?) and despite Archie being the show runner’s obvious favorite, Jughead is the beating heart of Riverdale and he teaches us about how to love Riverdale and the people in it. He is the writers representative. In the first two seasons he’s shown wearing headphones and we can’t hear anything but I just know it’s War All the Time by Thursday, the entire My Chemical Romance oeuvre, Atreyu, and when he’s feeling real hardass about it all, Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails. He is obviously homeless, living apart from his (hot) drunk mess of a father, mother nowhere to be found, but is one of those children who ‘fall thru the cracks’. It’s an incredible amount of work that the Andrews put in to taking care of Jughead and they are the only reason Mr I’m Weird, I’m a Weirdo makes it college. As a child he is arrested for setting a school on fire, or ‘playing with matches’. He’s the only character on Riverdale that has a confirmed birthday, and he’s a Libra, like another important shooter. Much like how Cheryl is the only character that acts on her suicidal ideation, Jughead is the only boy who cries. Just as Veronica exists so that Betty can use violations of V’s body to further her own bodily interests, Archie needs Jughead to help him deal with things he cannot understand or fully grasp. Jughead has never been to prison, but Jughead is the one who helps Archie prepare to get sent to pretty boy jail. Jughead and Veronica don’t shame Archie for his super illegal relationship with Ms Grundy Kay LeTournaeau, but their bigger problem is that Archie is concealing information about a literal murder of a teenager. Jughead is also exceptionally vain and haughty, the type of boyish vanity that used to convince me to take off my shorts in the backs of cars, the type of boyish vanity Tennessee Williams describes Yukio Mishima being while Mishima describes the sword fight he had earlier that day. The type of boyish vanity and haughtiness that keeps me forever a bisexual. Despite the deep emotional investment fandom has in Betty x Jughead (the good girl always wants the bad boy), Jughead’s best straight relationships are with non white women. Because what he’s looking for is freedom, for freedom from being alive, and the only people who know what that is like are non white people. He comes on Toni’s thighs in his gang banging dad’s trailer and dresses Toni in his clothes before he gets anywhere with Betty, and this all tracks. He’s going to either up with Tabitha (another Kinsey 5 and a literal angel) or Veronica and this is all fine.
Books
He honestly has so many so here’s just some authors.
- Everything Raymond Carver has ever written
- Raymond Chandler
- Philip K. Dick
- The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton
- The Road to Los Angeles - John Fante
- Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
- John Updike
- Fathers & Sons - Turgenev
- Underworld - Don DeLillo
- Devil’s Knot - The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt
He’s gonna make it out of S7 alive and that’s an interesting fact in of itself.
Okay wow. I was really going to write about Veronica here but this post has been going on for four hours so I will just post this now and add her later or really give her the post of her own she deserves.