Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: archie, archie comics, cw, riverdale, television

Look! It Moves! – The Bonkers High Camp of Riverdale

The first season of Riverdale is almost over. We're 12 episodes in, and by now the intentions of the story are pretty clear. It's a dark inversion of everything we've come to take for granted in Archie comics: That the American small town is safe and everyone is good at heart.

The TV show is a totally bonkers dark and gritty melodrama where no one is safe, secrets are bubbling away on the surface, innocence is destroyed, and murders occur. Archie is having sex with Ms. Grundy! Jughead is homeless and his dad is a gang member and drug addict! Cheryl has incestuous feelings for her brother! Veronica's father Mr. Lodge has been arrested for financial impropriety! The town has a pipeline to the drug trade! Jason Blossom's been murdered! Purists have been up in arms at the dark, gritty versions of the wholesome characters from the comics.

Sure, the show is cheesy, the dialogue is on the nose, but it's all incredibly knowing. It's all gothic melodramatic soap opera with a veneer of hyperreal, high-camp dialogue — though most of the actors play it straight and deadly earnest.

The one actor who camps it up the most is Madelaine Petsch, who plays Cherry Blossom. She plays it as if she was in an Almodovar movie, vamping and camping it up for all it's worth. She seems to be the one actor allowed to act as if she were in on the joke. The show is as if Almodovar took the Archie comics and crossed them with Twin Peaks, and Petsch's Cheryl is the poster girl.

People who hate the show think it's trash. If it is, I think it's doing it all on purpose. The show's campiness and cheesy dialogue feel deliberate, especially when it throws in wisecracks referencing the likes of Nicholas Sparks novels, Alfred Hitchcock, even H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Every episode was named after a classic movie, more than half of them noir movies: The River's Edge, A Touch of Evil, Body Double, The Last Picture Show, In a Lonely Place, and Anatomy of a Murder. These were not chosen gratuitously, but as a nod to the genres the show takes its cue from. It's all very postmodern.The show is awash in references to movies. Jughead refers to Betty as the town's "resident Hitchcock Blonde," and she's often dressed in a cool blue sweater and brightly lit like Grace Kelly in Rear Window.

The 7th episode took its title from a 1930s French movie by Jean Renoir, calling itself La Grande Illusion, referencing Renoir's movie of the same name, in which he dissects class politics amongst war prisoners from World War I. Here, the class dissection is in the big Blossom family dinner scene, which is more reminiscent ofThe Rules of the Game, Renoir's later movie about the upper class. I can pretty confidently say that this is probably the first time a CW teen show has ever referenced Renoir's work.

Meanwhile, the oversaturated technicolor art direction and a mansion in the snow is reminiscent of Douglas Sirk movies like All that Heaven Allows, which is itself a melodrama about a forbidden romance between a rich woman and a poor gardener, played by Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson. The campy melodrama and oversaturated hot colours in the art direction is very much Sirk, who's a huge influence on Almodovar and Ryan Murphy in the way they use camp and melodrama to tackle genre and social ideas.

Sirk is the master amongst classic Hollywood directors who employed a tongue-in-cheek, campy approach to genres considered trashy and melodramatic as a kind of Brechtian commentary on social themes and politics. Ryan Murphy has been consciously continuing that tradition in his shows, like in Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror Story, and most recently Feud. The makers of Riverdale have already referenced David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock, and now Jean Renoir? They definitely know their Douglas Sirk.

It's an incredibly rich show to watch and examine for a film student. It's kind of ironic that some TV critics have been praising Ryan Murphy for being taking the Sirk approach to TV drama while dismissing Riverdale for doing the same thing. I think Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who has already been gleefully subverting and tearing apart the Archie world in the horror comic Afterlife with Archie, and his writer's room, know exactly what they're doing.

You can also amuse yourself even more by looking at Riverdale as a commentary on how the nice, clean-cut world of Archie comics, like the illusion of the American Dream, has been warped into a darker, more violent, downbeat world in the TV show as a reflection of the loss of innocence — and what better way to express that than the loss of trust between parents and children? The predominant theme in Riverdale is the way parents protect either or betray their children, with the mystery's big reveal as the ultimate transgression and endpoint of that theme.

Let's end on a fun easter egg: In the 12th episode, Kevin Keller's boyfriend Joaquim leaves town on a bus heading for "San Junipero". That's the title and fictional location of one of the most popular episodes of the last season of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror. San Junipero is a virtual online world where the old, the infirm, and the deceased go to spend their afterlives in a humane version of The Matrix. I'm sure the writers threw in the reference just for fun, but think about it — what if Riverdale is another virtual world? What if it's just another server, and everyone in Riverdale is really an old, dying, or dead person who's had their consciousness transferred to this campy, color-saturated fantasy small town to live out a new life of adventure and drama?

Like I said. Fun.

Bitter sugar sugar at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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