#reaffirming and perpetuating a racist trope that manages to dehumanize the white women it pretends to care about

[riverdale-retread]

Riverdale S5 E17 (Dance Of Death) - 5 Things I Loved/ 3 Things To Consider

5 Things I Loved:

The insane-o blend of influences, half-relevant references and commentary that went into the Veronica-Hiram-Chad storyline kept playing in my mind and providing me with unexpected jolts of glee.  Even though this episode was all about finding Polly’s presumably mangled corpse, what I ended up thinking more about was Veronica.

1. I loved that Riverdale makes it clear Freud was wrong, loud and harmful. Ms Burble the High School Therapist was like many of the adults in Riverdale an ineffectual person unable to provide our protagonists’ generation with any truth or help.  (Literally all of them lied to the kids, and harm them in big and small ways).   She poisoned Veronica with Freudian concepts, which are as far as I am aware completely discounted as, among other things, so absolutely misogynist and therefore exceptionally unhelpful for women in particular, such that nobody credible uses them in actual mental healthcare anymore.  (Very Briefly:  See, e.g., The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk).  She could’ve said, Your dad seems really damaged, but you can take after your mother’s example, and LEAVE HIM BE.  Ms Burble could’ve also said, Let’s focus on healing from the wounds your father caused you so you can, later in life, see the wrongs he did and acknowledge the brave resilient child you were in surviving such a parent. But nope, Ms Burble reached for Freudianism and it led to Veronica Lodge being a spouse-killer and calm contemplator of literal patricide.

2. I loved that Veronica killing Chad made me suddenly recall with crystal clarity the last two stanzas of Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy and how comically well it fits with what’s shown on screen all season.  I’m not  saying there’s a 1:1 analogy here (obviously not) but the lines in that poem ping back on what’s going on in this episode in a way that tickled me personally, subjectively, in the hyperfixated way I’ve been tying literally everything I encounter somehow back to Riverdale.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two

The vampire who said he was you   

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

We had a seven year time skip, and she was going to kill a second man after she killed the first one, plus Chad Gekko looks exactly precisely like Hiram Lodge. 

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.   

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through. 

I mean, this is what Hiram has been to Riverdale the whole time.   These things made me laugh in the days after I first watched the episode.  Veronica getting over her Daddy issues by killing her husband whom she picked because of his resemblance to her father is very amusing to me. RIP Chad.

3. I loved Veronica using Ride of the Valkyries as the soundtrack to her self defense killing of that worthless asshole Chad.  Partially, vanity, because I somehow had this weird intuition about Gotterdammerung last episode, and now we’re getting a direct musical quote from Die Walkure. 

To nerd out for a bit, Gotterdammerung is part of the Wagner Ring Cycle, which has as a second installment Die Walküre from which  the Ride of the Valkyres comes.     The Valkyries in Wagner’s opera are goddesses who go riding out collecting the bodies of the fallen heroes to take them to Valhalla, but maybe because of movies like Platoon, this song (about goddesses collecting men’s corpses) is now associated with active combat and aggression (often gendered male).  I’ve read that it’s actually used to hype up actual airforce men in real wars.

Veronica (just like Jughead) gets cultural references wrong all the time, so I’m going to assume that Veronica doesn’t know about Brunhilde the Valkyrie who disobeys her father, the chief god Wotan, who then curses her to mortality, puts her to sleep sleeping beauty style and says any man who finds her that way can ‘marry’ her, and then at her request puts a ring of fire around her sleeping form so that she can at least guaranteed he’s an exceptional man.  One of the many many hats Archie tries to wear in Riverdale, remember, is fireman. 

4.  I loved that I ended up feeling strangely sorry for  Chad Gekko, who must’ve thought he was going to be the dominant evil crazy person in the room when he married Veronica Lodge.  This is a guy who crashed an entire helicopter on purpose (or pretended to - this is left open by the show) in order to persuade his wife to not be better than him on Wall Street.  Whoopsie!  Consider the absolute insanity of this statement from Hiram:  “Veronica stole my palladium, Archie stole your wife.”  So, somehow, to Hiram, making Chad kill Archie makes up for Veronica stealing his palladium. (??)  

Veronica using Archie’s name in order to get a rise out of both her ex-husband and her father is also extremely amusing.  This is really the only thing she can say though because otherwise, she shares all of the values of Chad and of Hiram.  She is pro capitalism, pro ruthless tactics,  pro business success, living high on the high roller life, and pro murder, it turns out.  WINNING!  The only thing that differentiates her from Chad and Hiram is being able to feel affection for Small Town Hero / Symbol of Americana   Archie Andrews.  

5. I loved Betty Cooper’s intensely unhinged irritation that “truckers are not stopping for us” after the 10th night of patrolling the lonely highway trying to pick up truckers with Tabitha.  Don’t trucker’s use radios to talk to each other?  She’s beaten up and violently accosted several truckers specifically for being Johns, almost killed one, and brandished her FBI student ID at lots and lots of people.  She and Tabitha also held that strange bait-and-switch party at the Diner.  The sum total of these things would make her something of a minor celebrity among the limited number of men who drive through this Canada-to- FL route that Riverdale probably sits on. I also just think she might be talking about herself when she babbles that stuff about the inner workings of serial killers - the desire to hunt and kill building up in killers vs the desire to interrogate and do violence building up in Betty Cooper.

And one more for the road:  I ADORED Penelope Blossom chowing down on the most overladen breakfast table in the history of breakfast right in front of her fasting daughter.  Riverdale has always been sharply bitchy about things like crystal healing , rebirth and other New Age mumbo jumbo, and they pull no punches with the ‘fasting’ that Cheryl does here with the maple syrup and cayenne pepper and whatever.  Penelope is so amused with herself that she forgets to call Cheryl “Nightmare Child.”  

Three Things To Consider.

a. Betty Cooper has always been bad at being a solver of mysteries - it was always Jughead on his own, and then Betty often simply took and used what he had found or deduced.  The same happens with the Mothmen/ Dreyfuss/ Nana Rose & Leo Lerman, so no big surprise. What did upset me though, is that  Betty Cooper is hideously incompetent at organizing a raid too.  Even I would do better than they did it - these people invade someone else’s territory but do no reconnaissance, have no plan of attack, create no way of communication between members, and everyone barely makes it out by the skin of their teeth.

b. Fangs and Toni really need a third parent.  They have an infant no more than 3 months old at the most, and both of them decide to go enact violent vigilante justice upon an unknown number of confirmed serial killers operating out of a junkyard, and rush into it in the most disorganized amateur fashion. Something about this irked me, because I didn’t see it as heroic. I saw it as abandonment of the boring, taxing task of constant babycare in pursuit of something showy and exciting, where BOTH of them agree to rope in - of course! - a woman from an older generation to take on the drudgery for them. I don’t like Toni or Fangs being Fail Parents.   When Toni, Fang and Kevin set out to have a family, I’d liked it because they seem the most emotionally balanced among the grown Riverdale kids.   But now? I am very worried about baby Anthony.  Was it the ‘family’ agreement that Kevin would be the stay at home dad?   Is that why Fangs has doubts about whether just the two of them can ‘do’ this?   

c.  Cheryl’s religion keeps getting more interesting. Is Kevin rejecting a female-deity/ nature worship religion (when he was perfectly at home in a self-worshipping religion led by a ripped-abs white man) supposed to be a commentary about him? Gay men? White men? Gay white men?  Furthermore, the Blossoms have always been creepily interested in Archie Andrews in a body-snatchers, “Ginger Penis Supremacy” worshipping way, so I’ve assumed that this is why the elements respond so strongly to Chery’s red-clad prayer on behalf of Archie.  Penelope Blossom created a religion where she externalized her literal worship of her own son born of her body, which you know, this exists a lot in the world.  Cheryl, being both gay and childless, seems distinctly less interested in all of that and wants to go somewhere totally new, and she doesn’t really care if her erstwhile minion comes along or not.