Archie's Weird Multi-Media Fantasy
comics, plays, films, television - they all play parts in Aguirre-Sacasa's queer vision.
The line between television and film has been blurry since the ‘60s and ‘70s, after Walt Disney smudged it beyond recognition it in the ‘50s with the Wonderful World of Disney program. While Papa Rat can hardly be credited with pioneering the television movie - let alone putting movies on television - it is fair to say that he popularized the practice.
Example — Alice In Wonderland was something of a failure at release. Hard to believe now with the decades of historical astroturfing, I realize, but audiences were unimpressed and annoyed by the film at release. Brits hated the truncated version of Carroll’s witty source text; Americans found it childish and unwieldy. For three years after the fact, Alice’s reputation was as a failure — one in a long line of disappointments from a company in the midst of transformation.
Until, that is, the Wonderful World of Disney. King Rodent pared down his lush technicolor spectacle into truncated, monochrome tripe pitched towards the lowest common denominator. And - proving Mencken (?) right yet again - Americans ate it up. Alice was an overnight success, and a whole generation of children grew up with it as a favorite. By the early ‘70s screenings on college campuses began to sell out, with nostalgic students likely revisiting with the aid of psychedelics. This led to an eventual theatrical re-release, which cemented the film’s status as an American Classic (TM).
But what does this have to do with Riverdale?
You probably know this, but Riverdale is a seven season television series based on the Archie Comics. It’s a decidedly post-modern work, actively engaging with and busting tropes established in the source text. The politics are decidedly leftist - beyond liberal, which is surprising - and a good chunk of the main characters are openly queer or questioning. It is the type of entertainment that no studio of any caliber would let into the multiplex without significant changes.
Which is a shame, as Riverdale is a more interesting work in terms of visual composition, story structure, and diegetic sound use than most wide release movies made in the past few years. Riverdale has experimented with established cinematic techniques from its first couple of seasons onward, and only built upon that solid foundation more since. As modern studio film continues to leave me high and dry - or at least in a place of begrudging acceptance - I often wish more people would take notes from what’s being accomplished in this series.
Unfortunately, people online have hummingbird brains and have largely poisoned the reputation of the show. No doubt, you’ve heard the infamous “highs and lows of high school football” speech taken out of context and rolled your eyes. Because most terminally online people are fascile and irony is therefore lost on them, that clip (and many others like it) has been taken in complete sincerity and seriousness by people eager to make fun of a thing they don’t like.
(In other words — maybe the point of that scene is that Archie sounds sheltered and naive. Mind-blowing stuff if your critical theory comes from YouTube, I know.)
Aguirre-Sacasa himself has been in the writing game for a while, with a start as a playwright. His early scripts earned him a reputation in among the theatre community. His fourth major play, however, might as well have been a brush and a bucket of red paint on account of the target it drew on his back. That play was a work of fan fiction about ol’ Archibald Andrews himself, and centered on the redhead’s return to Riverdale as an out gay man. Much of Aguirre-Sacasa - openly gay as far back as I can find - can be seen in this depiction of the character. It’s a sweet and tender post-modern love letter to the schmaltziest comic ever by a clear lover of camp.
It was also flagrantly against Archie corporate policy in the early 2000s. The play, which was set to be performed at Atlanta gem Dad’s Garage, was slapped with a cease and desist days before opening. Aguirre-Sacasa hastily reworked the script, changing the character names and the title — from Archie’s Weird Fantasy to Weird Comic Book Fantasy. The writer continued to work on independent plays while also branching out into comics, where he fleshed out beloved characters like Nightcrawler, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four at Marvel. In 2013, his zombie AU Archie story - the entracing Afterlife With Archie — did gangbusters for the aging and ailing company. That success led to Aguirre-Sacasa being onboarded as the chief creative officer, where he’s remained since.
Aguirre-Sacasa has spent the last decade reshaping the modern Archie enterprise into something decidedly more diverse and reflective of the real world. Writers are given freer reign to take the characters in unexpected directions, and the core Archie book itself has received two facelifts over the past five or six years. Practically every race and sexuality has been represented, and the institution of Archie has become recalcified for a more socially aware world. Instead of comfort food for WASPs and Klan members (what’s the different, really?), it’s comfort food for many at-risk people. A more noble enterprise, to be sure.
Wait though — what’s this have to do with Alice In Wonderland, again?
Alice’s breakthrough success — along with Wizard of Oz’s landmark airing in ‘53 — paved the way for Hollywood to endeavor into television more. Network shows became less focused on selling soap, and more interested in serving up aging silver screen stars on a platter. Cinematic maestros like Hitchcock became kitschy television presences, losing all sense of mystique and intrigue. Older stars began to pop up on anthology television series like The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and The Outer Limits. And the made-for-TV movie helped ring one of the latest death knells for the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Further, as studios like Universal doubled down on television production, young hotshot directors willing to work for less than film rates got legs up. Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet, Mel Brooks, Ridley Scott… these were among the first major crop of directorial TV-to-theater luminaries in that two-decade period.
(Oh, did I mention Spielberg? Because, yeah, that’s where he came from too. His Columbo episode? Aces.)
I mention this because a lot of to-do has been made about the death of cinema at the hands of modern television. Which is funny to me, because much of our modern canon came from yesterday’s boob tube successes. Going even further into the ‘70s and ‘80s, you’ll even find some of the next crop’s work too — Michael Bay, Wes Craven, Edgar Wright.
I’m not totally minimizing this concern. So much of what gets made today is chaff for streaming services, similar to the “sausage factory” Silver Age era of Hollywood. Remember that Netflix romantic comedy about the CIA and FBI with Gal Gadot, Dave Bautista, and Ryan Reynolds? Or wait - was it Chris Evans and Dwayne Johnson being cops? Maybe some waify blonde Brit as MI6?
Admit it: as soon as I typed that, your mind probably generated at least a dozen titles you’ve half-noticed while you scroll Netflix. Of course, I’m not talking about a real movie - just a simulcrum of everything getting pumped out to Netflix. In the 30s and 40s, it was cowboys and gangsters. Nothing new under the sun, right?
The key difference here is that this stuff is coming straight to our tubes via internet now. Served to us by algorithms, everywhere, every day, all at once. This is not pulp that we can choose to not engage with — it is the lay of the fucking land, and the pandemic has worsened that. It’s almost impossible to distinguish between what’s in theaters, what’s streaming, and what came out a year ago that you missed. We are being inundated with similar stories with same-y posters and the same stock pool of stars on the same streaming services, and it’s having a net negative on the medium.
So where does Riverdale factor into this, exactly?
Aguirre-Sacasa is a fascinating creative because he - along with the rest of the Riverdale team - looks to film first and television second. TV has trended toward short bursts of easily streamed, ‘binge-worthy’ (gag me) stories ever since Orange Is The New Black congealed in Jenji Kohan’s shower drain one summer. Make every episode look and feel the same, then part and parcel that shit out thirteen episodes at a time. Even the best examples of this model — Jessica Jones and Russian Doll come to mind — aren’t immune to this.
This cannot be said for Riverdale, especially in the early seasons. The series is comprised of episodes that tend to be named for cinematic influences on the show. While there is a core creative crew of a few rotating directors, certain episodes are handed off to certain acclaimed film directors depending on their background. Gregg Araki, Rachel Talalay, Allison Anders and Dawn Wilkinson have all had cracks at the director’s chair — along with stars Nathalie Boltt, Robin Givens, and Madchen Amick, among others.
The effect this has on Riverdale is tremendous. Even during continguous multi-part story arcs, each episode manages to feel distinct from one another at the show’s best. Season Two and Rivervale are particular highlights, with numerous standalone stories that draw from rich cinematic tradition at a fraction of the budget. Further, queer stories told by queer writers and queer directors hit much difference than the faux-inclusive and cowardly tripe being served up by major studios.
Riverdale’s final season finds the cast thrown back in the ‘50s after a dimension-altering event that’s… best left unexplained! Characters whose queerness has been a given since the first episode are forced back into the closet. POC characters who came to define the latter half of the show are segregated during dances. Interest in comics and movies are red flags to authoritarian parents and teachers. It’s stifling commentary on the double-edged sword of nostalgia — a queer POC nightmare headed up by a team adept at making those.
(It also draws from Don’t Worry Darling, which kickstarts that film’s eventual queer resurgence and renaissance due in the next decade or so. However, it must be said that the narrative McGuffin of ‘I can’t escape from the fucking ‘50s, help!’ feels much more vital here.)
This season also puts Riverdale in an interesting position. It’s set around the time that Alice, Oz, and so many other television film debuts took. It’s also set around the period that Archie Comics enshrined and memorialized for decades until Aguirre-Sacasa took his position. In some ways, it’s the perfect setting to conclude the series, because it represents an interesection of… well, all of it.
Aguirre-Sacasa’s career has been defined by loving film, writing theatre, working on television, and reinventing modern comics. In Riverdale’s last season, he pulls down the dividers and lets each influence the other in the biggest, most ambitious stroke of medium-fuckery he’s engaged in yet. By doing so, he lays bare the raw and dirty truth that we’re all uncomfortable to admit: there are common threads between all of them. Connective tissue and yarn a la Interstellar.
TV, comics, films, theatre — these are often not as different as we’re led to believe. In fact, the 20th century is largely defined by that inter-medium interplay. Serials based on comic strips helped give us Star Wars. Classical rigors of Japanese theatre brought up Kurosawa. Procedurals gave us Scott and Spielberg. And Osamu Tezuka - perhaps my favorite manga artist of all time - was influenced by German expressionism and Walt Disney films.
Because these things have been enmeshed for so long, works like Riverdale impress me to no end. Respecting cinematic traditions with compelling serialized entertainment based on romance comics is an unenviable task. But when it’s firing at all cylinders, it takes down those dividers with style and substance. It reminds me that what we’re in this for — whether “this” be comic, television, play, or film — are sound, sights, and stories that stir our tanden. (Preferably all at once.)
With any luck, Aguirre-Sacasa will make the jump to film again over the next decade. I’d be interested in what he and his team would make if given creative control over a project of any scale.
Hopefully, he’ll have a good deal more to say than the Russo Brothers.