Betty Cooper, R.I.P. (Rest In Pink): Strawberries and the Sweet Hereafter
So, a couple days ago, I unleashed this off-the-cuff 3a.m. food post, because it was 3a.m. and I'm rewatching Riverdale to take notes on how the show uses food. In that post, I mention two key observations: strawberries are used as a visual cue for love - that a character is motivated by or desires love, that the scene they're in will revolve around love, that love is thematically central for this episode/scene/relationship/set of characters/etc. - and, parenthetically (while discussing the oft-fluctuating visuals of the prop), that Betty Cooper is the vanilla milkshake girlie. In the notes, I saw these tags -
- from @famdomanfshit and immediately had to jump ahead to the last two episodes of s7 so I could mull this over. And it's true! In the final scene of the final episode, Archie tells newly-arrived Betty (in her strawberry milkshake pink and white gingham dress and whipped cream topping white sweater and maraschino cherry garnish pink headband) that they got her a shake - "strawberry, your favorite." The thing is, 50sdale Betty and Sweet Hereafter Betty are both different Bettys than main drag s1-6 Betty, and even alive!s7 Betty, but also, Betty historically being a vanilla milkshake girlie serves a totally different purpose than being a strawberry milkshake girlie in the Sweet Hereafter.
50sdale Betty is just as obsessed as regulardale Betty with The Truth, with uncovering Secrets, but because her mother's mania is the nuclear family rather than bloodthirsty journalism and her father's fixation is protecting his own reputation rather than purging the town of sinners, she turns not towards solving crimes but towards romantic and sexual relationships. Sex is the great secret whose truth she is denied, and so sex and dating become her fixation, the focus of her writing, the thing that consumes so much of her thinking that she's unwilling and unable to perform Squeaky-Clean Perfectly Normal Girl Next Door to the satisfaction of the people who project that identity onto her - that she sheds it altogether except as a convenient disguise. Because strawberry milkshakes, and strawberries in general, are a convenient and established shorthand, making Betty a strawberry girlie is an efficient and easy way to indicate that shift.
Although, that's not the whole story. 50sdale Betty is not the Betty who chooses strawberry milkshakes; 50sdale Betty is having vanilla milkshakes up to the very last episode, the very last day of her own life - even if that day is also the last day of senior year. Sweet Hereafter Betty is the Betty who chooses strawberry milkshakes. A Betty who's spent her whole life embracing non-romantic love - building a family outside the boundaries of what her parents told her was acceptable, raising a daughter, nurturing a granddaughter, bonding with and understanding her mother despite the misogyny that separated them - and chose, on her last day, to return to her great romance(s) and all the old friends she lost touch with and outlived before entering an afterlife where all that love is the trade-off for the end of her ability to grow and change and become something new. Of course she's drinking a strawberry milkshake - the Sweet Hereafter, at least as she gets to explore it, is either an insular bubble of love burning bright in the infinite darkness or a confounding trap baited by the promise of that love. Either way, the love is the point.
And then we get to the question of vanilla. What does the vanilla milkshake mean? Well, going back to the comics, Betty's vanilla milkshake is visual shorthand not for anything about her but for her opposition and contrast with Veronica. (This is something I cheekily refer to as The Dichotomy - blonde vs. brunette, vanilla vs. chocolate, girl next door vs. socialite sophisticate, good girl vs. bad girl.) In s1, Pop's concretizes The Dichotomy - "double chocolate and old-fashioned vanilla," Veronica in her excess, Betty in her rigidity and conservatism. It's more than that, though.
Vanilla is one of the single most complex flavor compounds in the natural world and its heaviest hitter, vanillin, can be found in everything from the vanilla orchid to raspberries and lychees to olive oil to coffee to maple syrup to tree parasites. It's also almost always used, albeit in tiny amounts, in chocolate recipes, dating back to the Mayan empire where tlilxochitl was used to flavor xocohotl. Betty looks sweet and simple; vanilla is the basic flavor, what you give to picky eaters and little kids overwhelmed by options at an ice cream shop, taken to mean "plain" or "boring" colloquially; both have hidden complexities, show up in unexpected places. Hell, vanilla is practically Lady Macbeth - coming from an orchid, capable of triggering migraines in up to 2% of sufferers, it's practically a gimme to sum it up with "Look like th'innocent flower, but be the serpent under't" - and so, too, is Betty. I doubt that was the point in assigning her her role in The Dichotomy back in the days of yore, but it is the point now, and I do think it was the point in Riverdale. That's why the vanilla milkshake changes visually so often - because Betty contains multitudes, and that milkshake is supposed to express them with her.
She's also the character who has the straightest shot to escaping her family's cyclical traumas. She finds out about her parents' flaws - her mother's unfulfilled love and cut-off son and everything else she sacrificed to move up a socioeconomic class, her father's hypocrisy and violence - and resists becoming them at every turn. She does not become a murderer (no matter how fun I would've found it), and she becomes the first Cooper woman in at least two generations to not get teen pregnant, and she finds a way to channel her desire for the truth and the advantages of her serial killer genes into a life she finds value in, feels is worth living. She doesn't cut off her community to become the person she wants to be, and of the people with whom she does cut contact - Jughead, Polly, kind of Alice - it's not permanent, and she regrets the loss even when it's not her choice, and she puts in the effort to repair those relationships when given the chance. Betty, more than any other member of the core four, is allowed to change and grow and heal. Is she perfect by the end of s6? No! Fuck, no! But she is, for the most part, happy with herself, because she's been permitted to choose to become herself - to choose to change. Hidden depths, adaptability, the capacity for change - that's the truth behind the curtain of Betty and her milkshake of choice.
And that's the difference between the Betty in the finale who, per Archie, calls strawberry her favorite flavor and the vanilla milkshake Bettys who came before and after. Whether clear-eyed or tricked, granted eternal peace of eternal torment, she has made her last choice, and so has everyone else at Pop's in the Sweet Hereafter. Nobody has a vanilla milkshake. Their choices are gone; their potential to change has been burnt through. Veronica and Jughead have chocolate shakes, Archie cherry, Toni and Cheryl a banana split, Dilton cherry or strawberry, and the counter and the other booths are populated by yet more cherry pink milkshakes. The waitress who walks across the frame when Betty first looks inside is carrying two shakes on a tray - one chocolate, one something like butterscotch or banana based on the yellow hue - and there is not a single cup of vanilla in sight.
