#the jughead paradox is going to blow this whole thing wide open btw

[archietransdrews]

literally talking to the walls of my room like. riverdale's internal logic relies on the explanatory power of one's origins to an absurd degree, framing the actions of the protagonists as prescribed by their generational predecessors to such an extreme that the town's founding years not only provide meaning, context, and motive to current events as is typical in an archetypal place-based narrative but futhermore exert a horrifying control over the characters, compelling them to repeat or rebel against the actions of long-dead townspeople to whom they are only distantly related. these scenes from the past, when included in the show, are filmed using the same actors as the present-day scenes, producing the past as not only reminiscent of but in some aspects identical to the present. blood and bloodlines are used by various characters as explanatory schemas for the behavior of different characters throughout; riverdale is a place overdetermined by its own origins to the point that our protagonists spend years trying and usually failing to escape the combined generational curses of an entire town whose entire history consists in the repetition of its own genesis ad nauseum. does this seeming over-reliance on origins exaggerate the process to the point of effective parody, or does it merely & more straight-forwardly reinforce the [genetic] origin as privileged locus of [fictional] meaning?

a potentially conflictual reading of riverdale's historical "origins" is that they are invented or produced through the act of jughead's narration of riverdale as text; this reading posits that there is no "before" the pilot of riverdale, save what jughead invents to give additional meaning to the events which make up his plots. riverdale is his puppet show; everything in the text has been filtered through his point of view, which is to say that everything acquires the exact same level of (un)reality, whether it's a comic book character come to life or the sins of one's ancestors. in this framing, the true origin, and the key to whatever meaning might be made of this text, is the moment jughead's narration begins in the pilot with "our story is about a town.." in foregrounding jughead's ongoing acts of authorship and creation which function to continually produce the narrative & all it contains, riverdale destabilizes epigenetic origin as a locus of meaning by framing it as in some way artificial, invented, unreal; however, it does this by substituting another, no less authoritative, specifically authorial origin in its place.

and there is still a THIRD possible genealogy through which we can read riverdale as understanding itself, namely the genealogy of the cinematic canon. we well know that riverdale is constantly referring back to earlier moments in the history of film, from 70s noirs to 80s coming of age movies to 90s thrillers to etc. etc., not so much situating itself within this history as aiming to encompass all of the various stages of the medium's development. this argument could be broadened to include the histories of other prominent cultural forms, namely the novel and the comic strip; the meaning in riverdale might be said to be primarily derived from comic conventions, the principles of character creation and economy of image that have governed strips for decades and which now cause riverdale characters to wear outfits that have no in-world meaning except to refer back to their original iconic wardrobes, e.g. archie and jughead's S and R t-shirts.

which of these frames has the most explanatory power? which best helps us to understand or analyze why events in riverdale play out the way they do? i think in most cases one needs some combination of the three to be able to even begin getting at what's going on, which suggests that at least part of riverdale's project is the destabilization of the genealogical narrative via the introduction of several distinct, at times competing, narrative origins. riverdale is a story whose meaning is located simultaneously in the past, the act of narration, and the development of cinema and comics as mediums. while this structure does not necessarily step outside of the dominant symbolic framework that looks to origins in order to generate the meaning of a text, it is in typical riverdale fashion that the show wants to do everything at once, meaning in this case that rather than privileging one frame through which we are meant to make sense of the show's content, we are given to several possible readings which are all compelling in their own ways & when taken together succeed in troubling the final authority of any one interpretation.