In the end, we love our desires and not the thing desired.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
                       
It would no longer be known as the town with pep.
It would be known as the town that dreaded sundown.
- Jughead Jones, Riverdale opening monologue S2, EP 4

Introduction

Upon entering the fictional universe of the television series Riverdale, created by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and originally broadcast on The CW from 2017 to 2023, visitors are greeted with a road sign reading "Welcome to Riverdale: The Town with Pep!," the large, jaunty letters backgrounded by a fading scene of mountains and a snaking river. The sign is emblematic of the bucolic little town, nestled in a rural region somewhere in middle America, its imaginary promise of wholesome Americana fading at the center and flaking around the edges. The initial impression of the town of Riverdale¹ is of a quaint, small-town community going through the usual joys and dramas of life: new romances, breakups, small fortunes gained or lost, poor life choices and opportunities for renewal, and the occasional murder. Like the long-running Archie's Comics series upon which Riverdale is loosely based, signs of nostalgia for simpler times are rampant. Tree-lined streets adorn the town and its well-manicured suburbs. At the center of town sits Pop’s, a charming fifties era diner that is the axis mundi of Riverdale's social life. School spirit runs strong at Riverdale High. But the quaint exterior belies an interior darkness that no symbol of nostalgia can cover up.

Riverdale is the dark mirror universe to that of Archie's Comics where the politics of life are constituted of silly misunderstandings, gaffs, hijinks, and pure, if at times misguided, intentions. Alternately, political life in Riverdale is constituted of treachery, deceit, avarice, terror, and an astonishing amount of killing. No good deed goes unpunished in Riverdale. Any sign of purity, innocence, nostalgia, or simplicity is merely a cover for a darker, more sinister reality. Just as Adorno once claimed that a tree in bloom lies because it hides life's true terror, so Riverdale suggests that beneath every signifier of nostalgic innocence lies a mirror reality of emptiness and struggle (7).

The cast of characters responsible for keeping the town of Riverdale together is drawn from the Archie's Comics series. The four main characters – Archie Andrews (K.J. Apa), Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart), Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse), and Veronica Lodge (Camila Mendes) – manage to wield tremendous influence in Riverdale, though only teenagers for the first four seasons of the show. Riverdale centers around the gang of four as they solve murders, uncover nefarious plots, fight against mob bosses, dismantle dangerous cults, and fall in and out of love. The usual dramas of high school – unrequited love, breakups, lost football games – are almost welcome events in the face of dads who turn out to be serial killers or influential crime lords, moms who are cult fanatics or who run brothels and are also serial killers, and gruesomely murdered classmates. Riverdale is a place of perpetual misery, of ever-encroaching darkness, and of sinister plots to control and destroy others. Happiness has no permanent place in Riverdale. Corruption is the town's de facto setting. Adults can rarely be trusted.

If Riverdale has a central theme, it is of the deceit of nostalgia and the impossibility of innocence, made so by adults whose dramas, psycho-social politics, and need for control make life difficult, and even dangerous, for the kids. The adults of Riverdale, one quickly learns, are often so deeply absorbed in their own vanities and twisted politics they make their children's lives exceedingly complicated, and, more often than not, terrifying. For example, when Betty learns that her father has been murdering Riverdale's citizens in order to cleanse the town of sin, she must confront him in their own home about it. Cheryl Blossom (Madelaine Petsch), heiress of the Blossom maple syrup fortune, learns that her father, Clifford (Barclay Hope), is the killer of her brother, Jason (Trevor Stines), whom he shot at point blank range in the head in order to protect his heroin smuggling empire. Cheryl confronts her father in the dining room, standing beside her mother Penelope (Nathalie Boltt), who also has a penchant for murder, having racked up the most kills in Riverdale up to season four. The ominous feeling that hangs over Riverdale's citizens, and especially its young people, is that no one is safe. Much like Roald Dahl's worlds, adults are often not merely unreliable caregivers, they are rarely to be trusted. The kids move from one fiasco to the next, trying to enjoy the typical experiences of youth while also sorting out the twisted relationship between a role-playing game, the rise of suicide by a poisonous blue drink called Fresh Aide, and a fast-spreading cult. Thus, I suggest here that the rapid succession of disastrous events, tragedies, and horrors is structurally symbolic, revealing a disturbing existential and ontological reality that no moment of plenitude can remedy.

In this article, the overlapping theme of the fallacy of nostalgia and the impossibility of innocence in Riverdale is explored through four main avenues: the deceit of nostalgia and the paradox of innocence, the monstrous other-self, the excess of polis, and the emptiness of religion. Through these four frames of analysis, I argue that Riverdale's unique appeal lies in its extremely Nietzschean theme of emptiness and the impossibility of solace, transcendence, or plenitude. I introduce the term nostalgia noir to capture Riverdale's insistence that signifiers of nostalgia and innocence are ideological covers for the true horror humans heap upon each other and themselves. As its own particular genre of nostalgia noir, the show underscores how tragedy, hardship, and pain are never fully compensated for through the usual Hollywood tropes of love and tenderness, which, in this reading, suggests a Nietszchean/Derridean interpretation of life centering absence and emptiness over fantasies of plenitude, wholeness, and permanence. Examining the first four seasons of the show, I use critical, psychoanalytic theory and some symbolic anthropology to foreground Riverdale's haunting themes of emptiness, deferral, the monstrous other-self, the impossibility of innocence, and the longing for a transcendent signified.

The Deceit of Nostalgia and the Paradox of Innocence

Kids that go into woods in those fairy tales, they always
come back changed. Fairy tales rarely have a happy ending.
-Jughead Jones, Season 2, Episode 3, "The Watcher In The Woods "

While Riverdale's symbolic landscape is crowded with critiques of nostalgic innocence, perhaps none captures the darkness of nostalgia noir quite like the Blossom maple syrup empire. On the sides of the old shipping trucks that trundle through town and on billboards advertising the family-run maple syrup company, we see a wholesome Northeastern forest scene with a cabin in the woods on the left, covered in snow, and a large bottle of pure maple syrup on the right. At the top of the image, viewers learn that Blossom Farms is "America's Favorite Maple Syrup." The bottom reads, "Have Some Syrup with that, Ma'am!" The rural expression, written in inconsistent English (some words capitalized, others not) underscores the Blossom effort to appear comforting, simple, and without pretensions or guile, capturing down-home, idiomatic Americana. But within the trucks, there is no syrup. The barrels inside carry heroin, and the occasional dead body. Both Clifford and Penelope Blossom, the patriarch and matriarch of the fabulously wealthy family, are ruthless people, willing to kill their own family members, including their children, who threaten their power and wealth, both won through an elaborate heroin smuggling ring. The show opens with the discovery that Jason Blossom, a handsome and promising high school student and presumed heir to Blossom Farms, has been brutally murdered and tossed into a river, his limp body washed up on the banks. Throughout the first season, the whodunit mystery hangs over the town as the kind but inept sheriff struggles to solve the mystery. The Archie gang is forced to take matters into their own hands as the adults prove themselves either incompetent or compromised. They ultimately learn that Jason’s father was not selling maple syrup but heroin and had grown concerned that his son had not only found out but was threatening to reveal the operation. That maple syrup, a product whose iconicity lies in its signification of wholesome goodness, masks a gruesome filicide, reveals the show's dim view of nostalgic signifiers. Viewers learn quickly that the more down-home and wholesome a signifier of nostalgia is, the darker the avarice and criminality behind it. The signifiers add up quickly.

Riverdale is a place of perpetual catastrophe, where the highs of joyous occasions are quickly followed by the lows of tragedy, cruelty, deceit, and death. And all of it coming at characters and viewers at breakneck speeds. Riverdale time is condensed chaos where space to heal and recover from a trauma is forfeited by yet another trauma. The march of misery is relentless. This, I argue, is also symbolic, indicating the treachery we often feel at life's uncanny ability to invite drama and trauma at every turn.

A recurring pattern throughout the show is that innocence is not only lost with age, but that it is savagely torn away from the young by conniving adults, never to be returned. In Riverdale, we are not consoled with fantasies of replacement, which pretend that the loss of one comfort can be compensated for by gaining another. What I call the replacement fantasy, a staple of virtually all popular texts, finds little traction in Riverdale where losses are compounded and multiplied or stand as significant events in and for themselves. The absence of replacement, or here we might say the subtraction of it, is the ontological center point of Being in Riverdale, the truer event than presence or the fabled replacement. To live in Riverdale is to experience a rapid succession of life-altering dramas, traumas, and tragedies that find no lasting consolation. Where most texts position the replacement (consolation) as the thing that all along was the better, more true, and thus properly lasting signified, in Riverdale, what one is left with after all the subtraction is absence (Derrida), emptiness (Nietzsche), and total structural breakdown (what Derrida would call play). There is no transcendent signified upon which any of the characters can rely for comfort after the loss of an illusory one. There is no master consolation they can turn to that will sustain illusions of permanence. In Riverdale, love does not conquer all.

Of the countless examples that there is no consoling event, perhaps the most jarring are the pools of blood each of the four central characters confront after their first sexual encounters. After Betty and Jughead enjoy their first sexual embrace following a long courtship (in Riverdale time), Betty returns from Jughead's trailer to her large suburban home to find a dead man lying in a pool of his own blood on their living room floor. Her mother, Alice Cooper (Mädchen Amick), is frantically scrubbing the mess in bright yellow kitchen gloves while Betty stares in horror. Alice, Betty learns, had just brained a friend of Betty's strange, drug addled, half-brother Chic (Hart Denton), with a marble lampstand. "This was self-defense, right?" Betty asks her mom. Haltingly, Alice replies, "Of course." Betty presses further, "What if he had a family?" To which Alice curtly replies, breathing heavily from the frantic mopping, "He doesn't strike me as the type."

As is common in Riverdale, the police are not alerted and the matter is handled by Betty, Alice, Jughead, and FP (Jughead's father, Skeet Ulrich), who unceremoniously dump the body in a hastily dug grave near the swamp outside of town after Alice and Betty had temporarily stashed the body in a rolled-up carpet and left it in a tunnel on the outskirts of town. A psychoanalytic reading of the scene suggests that the instability of tenderness is made so by the countervailing force of uncertainty and brutality. Viewers would also note the absence of a police presence, even when one is the ostensible target and victim of crime. This is because in the Riverdale universe, every bad deed is either an extension of or reaction to another bad deed. Nobody is innocent in Riverdale, a fact known to victim and perpetrator alike. Best to leave the authorities out of it and settle matters without them. Predictably, this leads to tangled power politics that recall the all too real politics of daily life for most people.

The morning after Archie and Veronica have sex for the first time, Archie meets his dad, Fred (Luke Perry), in Pop's Diner for breakfast. Fred, an idealized image of morality and middle-class sensitive masculinity, is already seated at a booth when Archie enters and tells him he's going to wash up before joining him. While washing his hands, Archie looks at himself in the mirror, transfixed by his own glow after sharing a night with the love of his life. He then hears a commotion in the diner and emerges from the restroom to see a man in a black hood wielding a gun and threatening the diner's owner, Pop Tate (Alvin Sanders). Fred Andrews is standing now, looking as though he may try to reason with the hooded assailant. His efforts fail; the hooded figure points his gun at Fred, fires, and runs out the door. We look down to see Archie clutching his father as blood pools on the checkerboard floor around them.

For both Archie and Betty, the joy of intimacy lasted mere hours before its replacement by terror, chaos, brutality, and dread. Betty's quaint, "mid-century modern" home is stained with the blood of a person they came to call "the creepy man," and Archie's breakfast with his father in the quaintly nostalgic, fifties-era diner is turned in an instant to meaningless horror and anguish. Betty must confront the jarring realization that her mother has just killed a man and could face imprisonment for doing so. Archie must face the prospect of his father dying.

Ever the helpful daughter, Betty assists her mom in mopping up the blood, rolling the dead man in an old rug, stuffing him in the back of their station wagon, and dumping his body in a creek tunnel until FP arrives to help bury the body. The contrast of the two nights – the intimacy and the horror – reveals not only the impossibility of plenitude and transcendence but also that the excess of jouissance is always linked with the excess of its counterpart, the emptiness that disrupts the possibility of eternal joy (see Žižek, Plague of Fantasies; Ticklish Subject). Archie’s experience reveals the same torturous reality but in a more direct confrontation between the self and empty Other.

Archie's mirror moment of innocent teen bliss is disrupted by the primordial image of unidentifiable dread, a faceless specter of pure malice and unstoppable power. He is frozen in place, much as nightmares of impotence and immobility grip terrified dreamers. Archie is unable to share his reverie with his father over breakfast, but instead must clutch his dying body while screaming for help. The faceless figure of annihilation appears at the peak of Archie's transcendent moment, transporting him from an ecstatic, above-worldly-concerns realm, to a dark underworld of pure emptiness. That this scene takes place in Pop's Diner magnifies the moment and drives deeper the theme: impossibility of innocence.

In the figurative and literal geography of Riverdale, Pop's Diner sits at the center of it all, an ostensible beacon of innocence in a shadowy landscape of cruelty, corruption, and power games. Pop's is a paradoxical axis mundus of all the show's tensions – while lovers share a malt, other patrons plot a murder, or deal drugs to kids; all of Riverdale's many serial killers pass through Pop's, at times attempting to claim victims there. When Veronica Lodge buys Pop's, she leaves the diner as is, but transforms the basement into a speakeasy that becomes (against her will) a staging area for shadow economies of drugs and alcohol. That a place of innocence also harbors its alleged opposite (moral corruption) underscores three features recurrent in Riverdale: the fallacy of nostalgia, the impossibility of innocence, and that each ontological category contains within it both the possibility of its opposite and the reality that there really is no such thing as an opposite (see Derrida). The structural position of the quaint, 1950s era diner above and the darkened speakeasy below, appears to situate a binary opposition between righteousness (above, lighted, open) and sin (below, darkened, closed) (see Lévi-Strauss). However, just as Derrida suggests that there is no true opposite, we see moral corruption unfold in and just outside of Pop's while at times love and righteousness flourish in the speakeasy. This arrangement cleverly reveals the paradox of absolute ontological categories, underscoring the fallacy of good and evil as fixed oppositions. The fact that purity always contains within itself the inevitability of pollution is evident not only in Pop's, where the playful exterior contains within it signs of both innocence and corruption, but within Riverdale's protagonist, Archie Andrews (see Douglas).

The Monstrous Other-Self in Archie Andrews

Here's the thing about fear: it's always there.
When you slay one fear, there's always another monster.
-Jughead Jones, Season 1, Episode 7, "In a Lonely Place"

Archie's interpellation by Riverdale's citizens as a model of goodness, innocence, and virtue belies his tendencies toward violence, deceit, lust, and vengeance (Althusser). While the Archie of Riverdale shares the iconic red hair and boyish charm of the Archie from the comics, in Riverdale he is an existentially tortured soul, caught between his desire to do and be good and his desire to be powerful and perhaps even feared. When the Archie of the comics makes a gaff (the premise of virtually every issue) hijinks ensue. When the Archie of Riverdale makes a gaff, blood flows. Rarely an episode goes by that Archie is not involved in some kind of fight. As Jughead says to him, "You can't go five minutes without getting the crap kicked out of you" (Season 3, Episode 7, "The Man in Black"). When Archie is thrown into juvenile hall on false charges, the warden involves Archie in a fighting scheme that allows him and his influential friends to bet on outcomes. The violence that surrounds Archie we learn is an extension of the inner violence he contends with daily.

While alone in a remote cabin, dying from a bear attack, Archie begins having intense hallucinations and vivid dreams concerning his relationships with others, with himself, and with the Other within the Self. In his last dream, after a series of dreams in which he confronts both the good and bad people in his life, he comes face to face with his unwanted Other Self (Season 3, Episode 9, "No Exit"). In characteristic fashion, he's wielding a baseball bat and ready to strike. He stands over himself, the Other Archie asleep peacefully in his bed in the home he shares with his father. He is about to destroy his Other Self when his father enters and suggests that there's another way to get past the pain of the undesired Other. Archie looks determined to destroy the Archie that causes him so much pain, but he listens as Fred tells him he can learn to forgive himself. Unconvinced, Archie brings the bat down on the sleeping Archie with the ferocity of a man possessed. He destroys the empty Archie, the Archie that cannot find lasting happiness in life's many pleasures, the Archie that can never seem to make the right decision. The Other Archie is destroyed.

Later, the surviving Archie recovers from a bear-inflicted wound and returns home a changed man. But for the worse. His tendency for violence has increased. He takes up drinking. He becomes easily agitated and combative over trivial matters. A man of few words in normal circumstances, now he says even less. He broods, sulks, and withdraws from friends. Archie is confused, angry, and lost.

The moral here, rightly expressed, is that there is no slaying of the monstrous self to become the good, upstanding, loving, and perfect subject. The monstrous other of the self is the Self. No moment of plenitude is had through some fantastical vision of the eradication of an uncontrolled and uncontrollable aspect of our Being. The great paradox of the scene is that Archie uses a baseball bat, the prototypical emblem of Americana innocence and childhood play, to brutally slay his problematic self-as-other. In the process, of course, he did not slay a demon, but rather authorized its full reign. There is no escape from the self that desires beyond adequacy, that fights savagely to protect itself, and that will ultimately self-destruct. The self is, in the last analysis, a war between the culturally constructed, moral conscience ego and the dread will to power the desiring id. As such, the inescapable message is that Archie, "the one good person" in Riverdale, is a fantasy of innocence, a copy of morality for which there is no original, a mere simulacra of goodness (see Baudrillard).

The text also reminds us that goodness is not sufficient for defeating or circumventing emptiness and terror. As innocent and good as Archie is alleged to be, he can no more escape the emptiness of Being than anyone else. That is, his goodness is not absolute, it is not a given. Archie's goodness is circumstantial, it is relative to the id-dominant world of Riverdale, and as such, is a function of the ego-cultural complex that fashions the very contours of ideal moral Being. There is no Other to destroy in order to realize a grand über self who feels complete and powerful. The fundamental constituent of Being, Riverdale suggests, is emptiness, and as such, it cannot be displaced or replaced, however much we fantasize to the contrary. The Self is always multiple, containing a multitude of social-political forces and voices that compel us to act and feel in ways that are often paradoxical, contradictory, ambiguous, and contrary to popular moral regulatory patterns. Leto Atreides II from Frank Herbert's Children of Dune (1976) states it best when he rightly says that the hardest task in all the universe is enduring the self.

The Excess of Polis

Archie: War is hell.
Jughead: No Archie, hell is other people.
-Season 1, Episode 8, "The Outsiders"

Archie's conflict with the self, however, is of course a singular locus of the conflict of people in community, that is, in polis. The old saying that the world will be without conflict only when its population is reduced to one, or less, is aptly demonstrated in Archie's unresolvable self-conflict, which is driven by the need to get along in a social context (a polis) that is always already arbitrary, contradictory, abstract, and paradoxical. Like the citizens of every other polis, Archie must interpret Riverdale's abstract signs and symbols that would regulate, constrain, and authorize social practice while bringing his own desires into some kind of alignment with them. Viewed from this angle, we might see the notion of innocence as a regulatory ideal constituted by a set of desires that align with a society's normative-regulatory forces, or what Agamben would term nomos. In other words, to be innocent is to act in concert with society's moral prescriptions and never in conflict with them. The excess of polis then can be understood as the perpetual conflict between the desiring subject and the abstracted nomos that would attempt to constrain, frame, and stage desire (see Žižek). Thus, given the violent excess of polis, it is clear that there is no return to innocence. The other that is language, that is nomos/polis, ensures that such a notion remains in the realm of fantasy. While Archie is described as an inocente by family members of Veronica Lodge, this only refers to his lack of participation in the criminal underworld that has shaped their lives. The elder women of the Lodge family, all deeply immersed and well-versed in the world of organized crime, are charmed that Archie is an inocente, that is, pure of the moral compromises that come from doing shady business. Archie, however, wants to prove to Veronica's mafia boss father, Hiram Lodge (Mark Consuelos), that he's willing to do what it takes to "make his bones" with Hiram, even if that means moral compromises.

As Žižek explains, "So Heidegger is well aware that every dwelling in the familiar everyday universe is grounded in a violent/monstrous act of resolutely deciding/assuming one's fate: that since man is primordially 'out of joint,' the very imposition of a 'home' (heim), of a communal site of dwelling, polis, is unheimlich, reposes on an excessive/violent deed" (Ticklish Subject 55). Thus, living in communion, in polis, is in itself an excessive act for which there is no remedy. Using Giorgio Agamben's conceptual categories, we might say that living with others in bios (in political life) as compared to zoe (bare life) is thus a violent imposition of the political on the natural (Agamben). Foucault's claim that politics is simply war by another means captures the violent excess that life in polis imposes (see "Society Must Be Defended"). The incessant warfare in Riverdale is emblematic of the excess of polis. In contrast to myths that neatly resolve the contradictions of life in bios, the show expresses the lived experience of having no ultimate replacement or compensation, of the impossibility of a final resolution, of the fallacy of soul being aligned perfectly with the body , or of desire finding its transcendent object (Derrida, Of Grammatology 34). The painful contradiction between the promise of a fulfilled and fulfilling life and the objet a, the other thing that both constitutes and eludes the subject, is never neatly resolved. Evildoers do not always get their just desserts, justice is rarely served, and the objects of people's desire are either forever out of reach or always disappoint. Power and control, the will to power, the longing for a stable/transcendent signified, are forever at the forefront of people's motivations. In the special nomos of Riverdale, virtually everyone is interpellated as a controlling and manipulative subject.

The ultimate fantasy of innocence is seen most clearly in religion, particularly Christianity, where an innocent man is brought to Earth by the Eternal Signified to set humanity free from the prison house of carnal desire. Riverdale interrogates not merely the hypocrisy of such cosmologies, but the true impossibility of an innocent and absolute Other.

Religious Emptiness in Riverdale

There's a bunch of nuns coming. We have to go!
-Betty Cooper, Season 2, Episode 17, "The Noose Tightens"

In Riverdale, the surest path to a haunting childhood is by participating in religion. The religious communities of Riverdale are populated by a host of unsavory characters who manipulate, threaten, abuse, exploit, and psychologically torture their members. The two primary religious groups we confront in Riverdale are the Catholic Sisters of Quiet Mercy and a cult simply called The Farm. In both institutions, coercion, control, and fear constitute the microphysics of power they use to regulate their subjects and achieve their goals, both of which involve capital punishment and capital accumulation. It is telling that both organizations are caught up in dark webs of shadow economies that involve the exploitation of their members for wealth. The Sisters are offered large sums of money by Hiram Lodge in order to test his hallucinogenic drug, Fizzle Rocks, on the kids in the convent. The Farm, it turns out, is not merely a Scientology-like, self-improvement cult, but a front for a kidney-harvesting scheme. In both cases, the critique of organized religion as a front for a powerful organization operated by a charismatic, but bad-minded leader, is clear. Both The Farm and the convent are institutions that hold people (often young people) against their will and must be escaped from. Both even have their own security goons.

The problem, cleverly articulated in the show, is that a supernatural belief structure undermines itself by establishing a transcendent signifier through logos, through a doctrine that is always already self-contradictory, paradoxical, and arbitrary. There is no way to arrive at a transcendent-eternal signified through a paradoxical doctrine, which Riverdale underscores by showing both the constructed and ultimately unfulfilling nature of Catholicism and cults. Following Žižek, there is no possibility of total transcendence (The Ticklish Subject). Plenitude is a flashing ephemerality, not a fixed state. The notion that the center (in this case God) holds while all else fails in the last accounting reveals a theological absurdity – play at the periphery indicates play in the system. Thus, religion will always host corruption.

While religion seeks to establish a transcendent and present signified in the face of evident chaos, loss, and indeterminacy, Riverdale argues that religion does not compensate for, or is not separate from, these aspects of Being, but rather contributes to them. Religion as a fantasy of eternal presence is perhaps best expressed in the very immediate, Earthly concerns of religious leaders and adherents in the series, thus leading inexorably to the very corruption religion promises to escape. At The Farm, for example, all the piety and promises of ego-transcendence were merely a cover for an organ-harvesting scheme. The symbolism here is rich with metaphor as charismatic religious leadership is cast as a means of literally reaching inside believers and extracting vital aspects of their Being. The promise of transcendence (the unreachable desire of humanity) was merely a smokescreen for the accumulation of wealth at the expense of people's belief in a lasting moment of plenitude. That mistaken belief, Riverdale warns, could cost residents dearly.

The theme of corruption at the center of piety is also evident with the Sisters of Quiet Mercy. The sisters of the convent inhabit a dark world of terror, rigid control, and manipulation. The setting of the convent is literally dark – a shadowy and labyrinthine fortress of discipline and authoritarianism. The convent evokes the dark corridors of the Catholic theological mind that is inhabited by monsters, demons, and the master of evil himself, Satan. The presence of such theology is shown to twist the sisters into terrified and terrifying people who see evil at work in the play of children, thus compelling them to control kids at all costs, including physical restraints and the use of psychotropic drugs. The drugs are a clear metaphor symbolizing the fantasy structure of religious belief that is perpetuated as a mechanism of control and punishment. The emptiness of Catholic theology is cast in stark relief as we see "troubled teens" brought to the convent for moral education, including queer conversion therapy. The sisters use guilt, shame, fear, and powerful hallucinogenic drugs to guide the children to the right path.

After Betty is admitted to the convent against her will, she learns that one of the primary mechanisms of control deployed by the sisters is the powerful psychoactive drug Fizzle Rocks (Season 3, Ep. 7, "The Man in Black"). The sisters administer a dose of the drug to the kids every day to keep them frightened and docile. Betty's independence and rationality are evident to Sister Woodhouse (Beverly Breuer), who tells her, "You've been a bad girl Elizabeth, you haven't been taking your candy." When Betty continues to resist, Sister Woodhouse becomes menacing and threatens Betty by saying, "I'll strap you to your bed and electroshock the sin out of you" (Season 3, Episode 8, "Outbreak"). Children who misbehave are taken to a dungeon-like room filled with menacing gargoyles who stare down from their perches – the ostensible lair of a creature known in Riverdale as the Gargoyle King – where the kids are given a high dose of the drug and locked in the room overnight. Here, the series articulates well the true complexity and power of culture – a subject's interpretation of both the natural and supernatural worlds can be guided merely by suggestion and the reported experiences of others, even during a psychotropic experience. Anthropologists have long noted that members of a society will see the same things – spirits, deities, powers – while under the influence of psychoactives (see Taussig). The kids see the delusion and thus make real the phantasm created by the cultural order they are subjects to and subjects of.

Betty manages to uncover the scheme between the convent and Hiram Lodge, the Man in Black, unraveling the elaborate fabrication the sisters created with the help of Hiram's drugs. The last scene of the convent is of the sisters all lying dead around the pillar of the Gargoyle King, their lips blue from having drunk poisoned Fresh Aide. The circle of dead nuns thus suggests the dead(ly) theology that animates Catholic belief and practice, which is also interrogated in the haunting saga of a serial killer dubbed "the Black Hood," who turns out to be Betty Cooper's father, Hal (Lochlyn Munro). For Hal Cooper, sin, and, importantly, the sinners that commit them, must be destroyed in order for innocence to flourish. Hal, the Black Hood, who wishes to cleanse the world of sin through murder, does so because his intensely Christian upbringing shaped a worldview that saw sin as a spiritual stain to be violently removed. Likewise, Chic, the imposter brother of Betty, was raised by the Sisters of Quiet Mercy who terrorized him (as they do all children at the convent) with gory fantasies and, presumably, homophobic doctrines. When Chic sits upright in a chair in the Cooper house, Polly's (Betty's older sister, Tiera Skovbye) baby on his lap, we are reminded of the Madonna with the Christ child. However, in this case, rather than the mother of God holding the Messiah, the series creators present us with a gay male gigolo and heroin junky with severe mental health problems who wishes harm on the Coopers. Here, the message is that culture creates subjects, and Chic is every bit a part of the social fabric as anyone else. Religion, in Riverdale, is thus not to be trusted with the psycho-emotional-moral guidance of children. Neither Catholics nor Protestants are spared in Riverdale as both contribute mightily to the undoing of many of the town's citizens.

Hal's rampage of purity through destruction compels him to kill everyone he regards as unrighteous. He goes after adulterers, fornicators, and liars, including his neighbor Fred Andrews, widely considered the most upright and respectable man in Riverdale. While Hal is carrying out his campaign of terror, he himself is involved in an adulterous affair with Penelope Blossom, the town courtesan and prolific serial killer as well. This plot sequence can be read not merely as commentary on the hypocrisy or destructive theology of the church, but, even more so, as Hal's attempt to destroy any reminders of the instability and thus impossibility of a pure and permanent signified.

Hal's sanctimonious campaign of terror underscores both the excess of polis (often to the point of brutality) and the important point made by Deleuze and Guattari that polis (what they call the social machine) "is not first of all a milieu for exchange where the essential would be to circulate or cause to circulate, but rather a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark and be marked" (142). In other words, the creation of subjectivity is a culture's first order of business. Nomos acts through a polis, through its populace, to fashion subject beings who themselves are as unstable – in form and identity – as everything else in the universe. This awareness, I argue, is what compels people toward the fallacy of permanent signifiers and is the underlying motivation for Hal's campaign of violence. He knows, as all people instinctively do, that impermanence is the mark of all existence, and, as such, he must destroy any and all indicators of that which threatens to erode the center. In this sense, Hal Cooper may be seen as a metaphor for religious campaigns throughout history (mostly European) that resulted in the killing of innocent people, including children, in order to preserve the illusion of a transcendent signified. In a fitting touch of nostalgia noir, Hal, as the Black Hood, routinely calls his daughter, Betty, to explain his campaign of purification, though Betty is not yet aware that the Black Hood is her father. However, she always knows who the caller is by the ringtone he's chosen – the 1950s doowop song "Lollipop." Whenever Betty hears the bouncy and innocent tune she tenses, fear struck into her eyes. The song is followed by the faceless sound of annihilation, a dark, brooding, guttural and almost inhuman voice describing the destruction he's about to visit on the town. There is always a sense of foreboding when "Lollipop" plays.

Thus, while the world of Riverdale underscores the impossibility of compensation in any domain – romance, family bonds, friendships – religion is presented as only and always a net negative. In this series, romance and healthy family relationships can at least buy one brief respite from life's perpetual march of humiliation, cruelty, and terror. But religion not only fails to offer any meaningful or lasting comfort, but rather only adds to the misery and loss one can expect from others in polis. In the logic of the show, religion is not a warm palliative in a cold and harsh world, but rather a source of humanity's degradation and immiseration.

Conclusion

Rejecting the fantasy of replacement, Riverdale captures the constant cycle of symbolic and physical violence humans heap on each other as we wrestle within and against the limited and limiting borders of polis. The show may thus be read as a narrative of subject creation within a stratified and hierarchical polis. The underlying ontological problem is that the subject is determined by arbitrary forces constituted of deferred symbols. In this series, viewers get a clear and startling view of the self's struggle to align and realize itself through conflicting forces of nomos and desire. The show seems to recognize, even argue, that our capacity for true object awareness is limited by the narrow horizons of our subject position, situated between the emptiness of Being and the fragmented and fragmenting realm of arbitrary symbolism. Even as characters express love for one another, their struggle to express or articulate what that really is, and even to maintain that feeling, is evident. Terror, emptiness, solitude, and the eternally mysterious and fraught business of making one's way through life in polis are, in the logic of the show, every bit as much an aspect of being human as joy, love, completeness, and stability. The latter experiences are not any truer, any more real, any more lasting and permanent than the former.

For the citizens, they do not experience pain or terror then find lasting consolation in a loving embrace, which is often staged as the Real aspect of Being in most popular texts. Rather, in the show, as in life, conflict, with the other of the self and with others, is every bit as real and true and lasting as peace and harmony. The abnormal is normal. In this reading, the show becomes a jarring textual refusal of nostalgia and facile tropes of innocence that attempt to cover life's challenges and which, in so doing, often make matters worse. Whether through religions that control and coerce followers through fantastical promises or the many parents pretending "that everything is normal," the show's creators reject symbols of nostalgia and fantasies of innocence and purity, recognizing that emptiness, corruption, and misery are as much a part of the human experience as love, joy, and fulfillment. As Jughead so reflexively states it in "The Lost Weekend," "Everything in our lives is controlled, but then, something like the murder of Jason Blossom happens, and you realize there is no such thing as control. There is only chaos. Nevertheless, some of us strive to impose and maintain order in what is, fundamentally, an orderless world" (Season 1, Episode 10).

Note

1. Throughout this article, Riverdale (italics) will be used to indicate the name of the show while Riverdale (no italics) will indicate the town itself.

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