#overanalyzing everything

@lessoleilscouchants knows her Faulkner much better than I do, and so encapsulated brilliantly a lot of what I was going to say in her own observations about this aesthetic: “a semi-tragic narrative of class warfare, dead yellow grass, weighty history, bare feet on broken steps, useless resistance against the paths set out for them, and a general sense of doom.” I want to also add a theme from Faulkner's short story "Barn Burning": a son agonizing over whether he should remain loyal to his father in the face of that man's repeated crimes. The choice is complicated by the fact that his father's acts of destruction are clearly a form of protest against the family's place in the profoundly inequitable structure of their society. Hellllooooo FP, Jughead, and South Side Serpent feels! (Although I certainly hope that FP does not suffer Ab Snopes’ fate.)

I got to "Barn Burning" from this really great essay about the material culture of trash and waste in Faulkner's work. Jumping back to the campy elements of Riverdale, it certainly made me think about the ways in which we are all “trash” for this “trash show” - but it also made me move more broadly from the materiality of "trash" to remember that Faulkner's Snopeses are generally considered one of the most famous examples of "white trash" in American literature. (I am scare-quoting this term to be clear that I’m not just throwing it out there, but rather am bringing it up to analyze it.) Despite Jughead calling himself "a damaged loner outsider from the wrong side of the tracks" and Cheryl calling him "a hobo," I'm pretty sure that up to this point, no one on Riverdale has actually used a term that would seem to present itself very naturally: "trailer trash." (Again, not just throwing this term out there!)

This absence is interesting, especially considering the (seemingly increasing) importance of FP's trailer as a physical location where important plot points happen (*ahem*), and as a general shorthand for characterizing conflicts between FP and Jughead, the South Side and the North Side, and the issue of class within Riverdale generally.

And so now we get this beautifully composed image, which is just full of elements of entropy and decay and trash, in all the varied and loaded meanings of that term. I’m going to repost for scrolling convenience - many thanks to @musingmola for the original image of the tweet, and @jandjsalmon‘s close-ups.

There's the trailer itself, with discoloration of the siding - the old and tilting antenna - the bars on one set of windows (but not both) - the blue tarp on the roof at top left. As we know, this is a decaying and neglected home, both literally and metaphorically.

We have the selection of objects outside the trailer, which seem to have just accumulated there over time - there's that breakdown of order, the rejection of social rules about keeping a neat house. The objects SEEM random - an old hand mower, a washtub, the various scrap metal parts behind Jughead, the garden gnome - and there, too, we have that postmodern fascination with evocative fragmentation, with the potential in trash and pieces.

A quick note on "trailer trash," considered now as an identity category rather than as the actual physical objects surrounding the trailer. Although obviously non-white people can and do live in trailers, "trailer trash" is pretty much interchangeable with "white trash." And "white trash" is first and foremost a distancing term that lays down boundaries to try to contain problematic whiteness - whiteness that is poor, disorderly, violent, ungovernable; whiteness that threatens to disrupt and undermine the typical racialized social hierarchies. (This is not my insight - people like Annalee Newitz and John Hartigan, Jr., and most recently Nancy Isenberg have written much more thoroughly about the history, connotations and function of the term.)

Let’s go for the loudest detail first: that white tank top is such a loaded symbol in this context, you guys. It's SO loaded. We all know what the awful colloquial term for a shirt like that is. I don't totally buy the full explanation for the origins of the term here, but the observation that classic films (like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire) cemented its symbolic association with violent, unstable, and I would add a sexualized working-class masculinity, is apt. 

(So: RAS commenting on the "timelessness" of this shot? Check. Possibly Jughead reaching into his own store of classic film symbology? Also check. I can’t find the promo image of Jughead in that weird jacket right now, but I want to point out that this isn’t the first Brando aesthetic nod we've gotten for S2. I STILL need to know who the fuck Stefano is!) 

That bandaged hand is straight-up evidence of previous violence; that wary look and the tense posture implies the promise of more to come, as needed. I am NOT, of course, suggesting the connotations of the shirt as an explanation for that injured hand in this case! Just observing on the general aura of trouble. 

Furthermore. This kid normally lives in layers of clothing, and now we've got him down to that ever-so-symbolic sleeveless top, sitting resignedly outside his family home? Way to underscore the idea that the circumstances of Season 2 are going to strip down all those layers, and make Jughead grapple with who he is, where he comes from, where his loyalties lie, what he's afraid of being underneath it all, etc. 

Jughead's fascination with writing and film, particularly auteur film - I'm now thinking about that as a layer of cultural armor against being called "white trash." Like, I don't think it's feigned or anything - but it certainly has the happy side-effect of being a way to forestall those accusations of a lack of culture. He's not TRASH; he's a WEIRDO. He's on the fringes, but that gives him the power of insight that you lack. (I should also point out here that @foresightfromforsythe has been doing this Jughead-as-trash-king analysis piece by piece for months now. Whoever runs that account is brilliant.)

The idea of concealing or revealing your fears about who you are and what you've inherited from your parents, got me thinking about another one of my beloved TV shows, in which the main character creates a new identity that allows him to escape the childhood wounds inflicted by poverty, a troubled, alcoholic father/son relationship, and repeated maternal rejection. And I realized that nearly any time that Don Draper is getting touch with his inner Dick Whitman, white sleeveless undershirts come into play in EXACTLY the same ways I've been talking about above.

Dick Whitman and his “Uncle” Mack:

Dick Whitman in the moments leading up to the creation of Don Draper:

And then I got lost in considering the fact that Don Draper's father's name is ACTUALLY ARCHIE; the whole Betty connection; and that in one memorable episode, Don Draper hallucinates about sleeping with a character played by Madchen Amick and then strangling her to death. I don't think that any of that is actually all that useful in reading this image or the direction of Season 2 - I'm not arguing that Jughead is Don Draper - but it sure was fun to think about.  

Of course, the connection to Mad Men also gets us to some of the criticism leveled at that show - that it was more in love with its own aesthetic than with exploring the historical issues of the period, and particularly the racial tensions of the 1960s. I'm not going to rehash that debate here, but I *will* observe that Riverdale also loves its aesthetic and has also received some criticism about needing to make its non-white characters more fully realized. There's always the possibility that Season 2 is going to do the "Civil War" storyline in a way that centers mood and aesthetic, which, like, clearly I HOPE IT DOES, but there are ways to do that with more and less heft, you know? I know I'm going to love it one way or the other - for me, it's honestly enough for this show to be Teen Peaks/Maple Syrup Murder Hour, without necessarily saying that it must also be Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But it's going to be interesting to see just how seriously the showrunners decide to engage with this theme.  

Because of course, a predilection for surface-level engagement is another interpretation of the image. For everything that I've just said about trailer trash above, God knows that there is also a certain type of undeniable (and undeniably comfortable) cultural capital in the melancholy aesthetic of rusty metal and decaying trailers and lithe young white men showing off their defined biceps in sleeveless T-shirts. (CS himself also seems to love to play with and remix this aesthetic in his photography and personal aesthetic.) It's the minor-key version of Americana. We might call it, as Everlast does, "White Trash Beautiful."  

(Please note: this is the potential departure point for a whole other Current Events meta on the cultural politics of nostalgia and the romanticization of an idealized version of the white working class, which - in short: please make smart and savvy choices, RAS!)

Anyway, now that I've gone and broken the seal on musical connections here, it's time to say that I probably could have just copy/pasted the lyrics to Modest Mouse's "Trailer Trash" here and been done with it. (Here's a great little essay on this song at Pop Matters.)