Zoya Akhtar’s The Archies will fail to connect with those who have grown up with Archies comics and really everyone in general.
Growing up, for privileged kids of certain vintages (from the 80s and 90s), Archie Comics was our window into semi-urban Americana. The idyllic town of Riverdale was a raceless utopia where the biggest issues were Reggie’s pranks, Archie’s Hobbesian choice between Betty or Veronica (in days when polyamory was frowned upon more), or the fiscal size of Jughead’s pocket money that could never keep up with the size of his stomach. It was a coming-of-age tale where no one ever came of age.
For me, Archie Comics was synonymous with end-of-term celebrations. Whenever I returned home from boarding school, the first thing he’d do was go to have lunch at Kwality in Park Street in Kolkata. But, before the lunch trip, Baba would buy the author a couple of Archie comics from the book stalls outside, which I’d read while eating a lunch that would usually end with a chocolate sundae, which while not up to my imaginary standards set by Pop Tates, was quite up to the mark.
In fact, Archie Comics would also be a bribery ticket whenever I went back to school as well, perhaps a symbol of the guilt of having shipped off one’s progeny to boarding school.
Maybe, that’s why The Archies on Netflix feels like such a disappointment because it could never live up to the memories many of us had created in our heads.
I was still optimistic because it was a Zoya Akhtar film, and she seldom goes wrong. And before I begin my critique, let me be clear, I’ve no issues with nepotism in any industry that’s run by private finances. Audiences are perfectly entitled to make their own choices. RRR, the most successful Indian cinema globally, is a product of the so-called nepotistic Telugu film industry, where almost everyone is related to someone famous.
As I’ve argued before, in a piece on HT: “…folks who tend to whine about nepotism would like to believe that they were found floating in a river like Karna or Moses. That they grew up in ancient Sparta, where they had to survive in the wild like Leonidas. That they are creatures who have “merit” running through their veins and everything they have achieved in life is by dint of their “hard work”.”