Enter the Nightmare-Fueled World of "Josie and the Pussycats"

               Once upon a time, in a world of soda fountains and family-safe shenanigans, there was a boy named Archie. Archie is and was the star of “Archie Comics,” a deeply mismanaged funny-book targeting (it seemed) the same demographic as Bazooka Joe. Over the years, Archie has had countless spinoffs, including Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Afterlife with Archie, and the inexplicably amazing Archie Vs. Predator. Today we’re going to talk about the least-known of the spinoffs, the 2001 Universal Studios blunder, Josie and the Pussycats.

               “Hold it, pal,” you say, lowering your croissant, “ain’t this a literary blog? Where the hell’s the literature?”

               Well, yeah it is. But your Loyal Writer is finishing up the second draft of a novel and he’s a bit tired, so a reaction-post about a pre-teen pop parody is about all he can do right now. Okay?

               “Fine, but... Aren’t you worried you might alienate readers who come here for high-quality, intellectual stimulation—”

               Hey, relax. I know what I’m doing here. Besides, this movie has Alan Cumming in it. And the Illuminati. Everyone loves those two things specifically, right?

               “Actually…”

               Ah, shut up and eat your hypothetical croissant.

You can feel the obscurity seeping out of every pixel, can’t you?

               So, Josie and the Pussycats. This movie was based on a comic of the same name published by Archie Comics. Josie and crew were pretty popular back in your parents’ day, and even had their own cartoon. Which is weird, given that her gang… doesn’t really have much personality. Don’t blame Josie, though: they’re not allowed to. They needed to be inoffensive in the way 60’s cartoons had to be: vacant-eyed, eternally cheerful, and ready for family-friendly adventures every Saturday morning.

               Also, they went everywhere dressed in leotards and cat ears. That’s not weird. Why would that be weird at all?

              

               … Okay, I lied. It’s super weird.

               Josie and her pals were mostly forgotten by society, until in 2001 Universal Studios decided to resurrect them for a quick cash-grab. What they expected was a paint-by-the-numbers, predictable teenage adventure with photogenic stars, which might net them some profit. What they got was a huge financial flop with embedded warnings of corporate greed, world-spanning conspiracies, and subliminal messaging. Understandably, there were no sequels.

               Which is kind of a shame, because it’s a good movie in a vapid, early-00’s kind of way. Josie came out in April 2001, so I’m not surprised it’s been forgotten—a year later we were pushing Freedom Fries and watching George W. waddle into a quagmire. But Josie deserves to be remembered for its surprising, inexplicable, and wholesale rejection of consumerism.

               Josie opens with an N-SYNC style group playing to a crowd of cheering teenagers. We see already this is a rough world to live in: without a Nick Carter or a Timberlake to crush on, the teens of this universe must settle for Seth Green, Breckin Mayer and… Donald Faison? What the hell are you doing here?

Run, Turk, run! You have an amazing sitcom career ahead of you! Don’t get affiliated with this movie!

               The movie proceeds to mock its own boy-band relentlessly. This is a tongue-in-cheek nod at stupid fads which Disney has also done, and it’s all fun and games until Alan Cumming figures out the boys are getting wise to subliminal tracks in their music. And he proceeds to kill them. Yep, he parachutes out of the plane and it crashes. We aren’t treated to a gruesome explosion, but presumably it happens off-screen. Damn!

               Having crashed this plane with no survivors, we are then introduced to Josie and her bandmates Melody and Valerie. Josie is heart-sick over the “cutest boy” in Riverdale, a knockoff Cobain type who’s apparently allergic to shoes. Shouldn't Josie’s unrequited love be someone with a job? Who doesn’t sing about truck engines? Whatever, la vie boheime, I guess. We’re also introduced to Josie’s shitty manager and his sister, who are only characters because the movie needed more SUPER ZANY and MAD GRODY behavior, because that’s what brings kids to theaters.

Damn you, focus groups!

               After the weird 90’s nostalgia-bomb that is Josie’s house, we snap back to Alan Cumming as Wyatt, who--we feel obliged to remind you--is still a murderer. Our murderer is looking for a band, and wanders into a mall. Things get terrifying real fast.

Wyatt tells the mall DJ (because it’s 2001, and they have those) to play a new track from the band he turned into jerky. The DJ does, and the mindless consumers around them are re-wired to want new stuff. Yeah, seems legit! He also gives some random Biff-looking teen spontaneous alcoholism. Hooray for capitalism! (Not pictured in this clip: An edgy goth girl rejects his subliminal message and is dragged into an unmarked van, faster than a Saudi professor acknowledging the existence of Yoda.) By this time it’s clear: Alan Cumming is an actual supervillain. All hail our snarky new overlord?

But wait: the conspiracy goes deeper. Wyatt picks up Josie and co., since he needs new musicians to replace the ones he burned alive, and Josie is skeptical. But her band-mates are totally down! so they fly to the big city! With Josie’s beau! What could go wrong?

Sweet Jesus.

So… THAT’S a thing, I guess. The movie has neglected to mention until now that NYC, Riverdale, and possibly all of America are slowly becoming Mega-City One. Corporations own the city skyline, the local decor, and quite possibly the air. How edgy! It’s almost like the movie is trying to tell us something, about reckless consumerism.

I wonder what they’re getting at?

Our heroine and her crew are deluged with luxury, but all is not well. A stalker keeps leaving them warnings not to trust the record label, Wyatt’s auto-tune machine turns their vegetarian into a Big Mac lover, and we’re given a back-stage pass to the inner workings of a pop-music conspiracy. It’s led by Wyatt’s boss, villainess-slash-fashion-abomination Fiona (Parker Posey.)

“Could you at least TRY to look menacing for this scene?”

In true teen-movie fashion, the antagonists are more bumbling than terrifying, but they’re also selling mind-control headphones to the U.S. government. And they’re doing all this in the name of “stimulating the economy.” Don’t worry, they’re job creators, it’s fine.

By now we’re in maximum anti-Wall Street territory, smuggling as many Marxist undertones as our humble Universal kids’ movie can abscond with. The characters are constantly surrounded by branding, which has double-duty both advertising to the audience and reminding us how annoying it is to be advertised to—and this was back in 2001. I can only imagine the horrors a modern Josie reboot might bring us. Mind-reading Pandora ads? McDonalds-sponsored extra stomachs? Man, I’m glad I don’t live in their universe. Or do I? Maybe I’m being mind-controlled right now! Maybe we all are! My third eye is opening, I can see Hypercubes! Must… build… tinfoil hats! 

Speaking of mind control, the use of the band’s cat ears (as a subliminal messaging vector) is a clever little commentary. “The Man” has taken Josie’s endearing gimmick, and turned it into a soulless money-making machine. Her music itself is then remixed and used to turn her into… well, kind of an asshole. She drives her friends away by acting like a diva, because the psychologicalfallout of wealth and fame is hard to unpack inside one hour and thirty-eight minutes. It’s easier to just say “Josie’s an asshole now, because of magic headphones.”

Schizophrenic personality swaps and BFF-breakups ensue. All standard Disney Channel fare, but it leads us to the best moment in all cinema. Because there is a scene, in this movie, where Carson Daly turns out to be an assassin working for the New World Order.

Did we mention this movie is for kids? The Pussycats provide valuable role model material here, by beating the shit out of their aggressors. Then they run to tell Josie and not the police, for… some reason. Josie, of course, isn’t having it, because she’s a Lizard Person now, and is helping the Masons erect a giant Xenu-pyramid beneath the World Trade Center. (No, none of that actually happens, but it wouldn’t be much of a stretch at this point.) 

Everything gets wrapped up in the climax with PG-rated convenience: the villainess turns out to just be looking for love, the mind-control scheme is derailed, and the U.S. government confiscates the cat-ear headsets, probably for use at Guantanamo. The dead band turns out to be alive—horribly maimed, but alive! They even get triumphant background music.

"After getting their skin cooked off, Du Jour's music improved considerably, and they put out a rustic folk album."

Everything is neatly resolved, with no loose ends at all except for… wait. The "Archie" universe is still run by corporations treating people like puppets. That hasn’t changed one bit by the end! This isn’t a resolution at all! But Josie and the girls get to sing a rebellious rock song about love, so... maybe that’ll fix their dystopia somehow. I don't know.

While soaked in post-90’s wholesomeness, this is the rare kind of kids’ movie which serves as a commentary on itself. And despite bad reviews, it's genuinely funny, with absurdist gags throughout, and Alan Cumming doing his best Atlas, carrying the entire movie like a boss. Parker Posey also deserves an honorable mention, for her creepy junk-food-addicted, gender-role-enforcing CEO. Really, the only REAL villain in this movie… is Capitalism. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. Open your eyes, sheeple!

And that wraps up my (hopefully) only interaction with the ridiculous Archie universe. Thank God I’ll never have to interact with this cornball cast again. Wait... What’s that, on the horizon?

Could it be? It is!

Another weird Archie-themed reboot, that NOBODY asked for!

               Oh, I gotta check this one out. See you guys in a few weeks.

The Traitor

An excerpt from one of the books I'm working on, called "Plague of Steel."

            My name is Jamie Dhukkan, and I am about to become a terrorist.

            When the first refugees arrived, my husband and I campaigned to deport them. It was ironic: we were both second-gen immigrants, his parents from Kolkata and mine from Sri Lanka, and here we were petitioning to try and reject frightened, scared people from our shores. America is beautiful, yes… but as they say, you must pay the toll to get in, and the toll was far too high for these people, escapees of the first infestations in Ukriaine, in Sierra Leone, in Indonesia. My husband overheard the military discussing the plague; they thought might have been “delivered” to developing nations on purpose. “Developing”… Well, they developed under Silver’s influence. Very quickly. They developed into angry hives of furious, faceless half-machine monsters, their last sliver of humanity allowing them to understand the pain and betrayal of border closures, UN firing squads, the last resorts of a terrified Europe. Can anyone be blamed for trying to run from these things?

            If we had permitted a few more to make landfall, if we’d seen the face of the disease instead of sharpening bayonets and building higher fences, we might’ve managed a cure. We might have had enough time, enough human specimens to work on. Applied EMP bursts worked temporarily for pushing back the infected, but it was like using a sledgehammer against a swarm of gnats—by the time the FDA had approved the manufacture of EMP belts and necklaces, Florida was already neck-deep in nanites, and the first cases had surfaced in New York. We waited too long; we saw only in the short term, planning for today instead of thinking of tomorrow. Now we’ll pay for it.

            My husband has been gone for three weeks.

He was working on Project Kessen—a “breakthrough” he claimed would turn the tide of the plague. Two days ago the Army came and confiscated all his work, right down to the last sample. I was furious; I demanded they tell me where he was, what had happened. They served me a death certificate on the spot, like stone-faced magicians producing a rabbit. Reach into the black top hat and poof, Annie, your husband is gone. So sorry. An accident at the lab, casualty of the war, these things happen.

They stripped the lab and left me standing in the kitchen, hyperventilating like an idiot. I sucked life from my inhaler, struggled for air as they piled into an armored truck and pulled away. I wish I’d fought them on it, asked more questions, forced my hand… but would it have helped? We all know what happens when you ask too many questions about the nanites. About where they came from. The president has stopped issuing denials—Silver is a federal experiment gone wrong, and everyone knows it. My Farook wouldn’t say so—but I saw the guilt in him. The shame. The terrible knowledge that his adopted country had unleashed something on the world, something that was eating men and women and children alive. Changing them. That kind of guilt can’t be shaken off—you live with it all your life.

I should know; I’m a cellular biologist, like my mother before me. When I was five, she was working on malaria for the Sri Lankan government, trying to neuter infected mosquitoes. Somehow a single insect escaped from the lab—my mother would never say how, but she suspected that someone simply left a door open. One fault in a specimen cage, one door left ajar, and hundreds of people died from a completely preventable disease. The elderly, the weak, and the poor died in droves. Such are the wages of knowledge.

Sorry, I’m rambling. I’m getting bitter in my old age. Just forty, and I’ve lost my husband, my career, my government grants. No golden years for us, no peaceful retirement—it’s not like there’s a Florida or an Arizona for us to retire to, anyway. But I refuse to believe I lost him in some idiotic accident. Farook wasn’t like the other Army hire-outs, the ones who sucked the CDC’s teats and outsourced their work to agencies that didn’t even wash their petri dishes. Farook was smart. He could sense a change in the wind before anyone else—it’s how he survived the budget cuts, the havoc at DARPA when funding for his cellular automata disappeared. He never quit, naturally: he was patient, he was precise, and above all he was committed. He loved the whole concept of nanobots, I took to making fun of him for it. “Don’t make anything that can think,” I would warn him, and pinch his ear. Oh, how he hated that.

Guess the joke’s on me. Because if he didn’t have a hand in making Silver, who did? Some backwoods Iranian engineer? Those madmen in Pyongyang? I don’t think so. These machines are not logical; they do things to human cells that shouldn’t be possible, that defy the laws of physics. They move so quickly and evolve so fast it borders on—I hate to say it—magic. If human hands were behind this thing, I’ll eat my doctorate.

The Army is running out of doctors. Silver cases among the enlisted are through the roof, and of course the nanites can chew through a clean-suit now. They’ll do anything to get at a vulnerable human host. Which makes no sense; the wet, hot environment of human organs should be anathema to machines. We should be inhospitable to them. But the ‘why’ of the disease is no longer important. The plague’s hunger is my ticket into Farook’s Army base.

It’s been a long time since I left med school for epidemiology. I didn’t have the heart for being a medical doctor… Watching people sicken, watching them die. I wasn’t strong enough to watch for that, because I knew for every man or woman I saved, there would always be two more who died of leukemia, or bone marrow cancer. No, that life was not for me. Until now.

               

I found a man who will forge me credentials. He smells strange, like curry gone rotten, and doesn’t speak much. But he’s ex special-forces and he knows what they look for—the personality quirks they check you for. He thinks he can get me into the base, to “treat” their sick. As if anything can stop the machines, once they take root.

                There’s an on-site lab, very secure, hidden below fifty feet of bomb-proof elevator shaft. I have Farook’s codes. I took them, before the army came. I thought he might want them, if… if he ever came back.

                I’m packing now. I’m leaving this tape recorder because, well, once I get in there I can’t guarantee what will happen. If they disappear me, if they wipe me from the records and ship me to Guantanamo or some other blacksite, Chicago maybe, at least someone might find this. At least someone will know why I did what I did, why I turned traitor. It wasn’t for a big agenda, not for fundamentalism or money. It’s just love. I loved that ridiculous, eccentric, occasionally stupid husband of mine, and I am going to get him back or find his body. One way or the other.

                Project Kessel… They think they’re so clever. They think just because I’m a biologist by training, there’s no chance I could have understood his notes. They didn’t even take me in for questioning. But I know what they’re up to.

                They’re trying to tame it. Turn it to their side, or a piece of it, or a colony. And then… what? Weaponize it? This thing has already threatened us as a species. How many more will die when they try to turn it loose, a dog on a very brittle chain? Right now, the machines convert people at random. It’s all arbitrary. Some hosts merely get sick; others warp into monsters with gears for teeth and titanium fingernails. But if we make it angry, threaten it… It’s not stupid. It can respond to stimuli, evolve. If we declare war on this thing, turn nanite on nanite, how long can our species survive?

                I’m going. I don’t know what I’m going to find, but I know this will be the last time I see the house. The photographs in the hall; the shrine near the coat-rack. All of it, I must hold in my memory. When they catch me, and waterboard me, and put battery clamps on my loins, it will be this house I think of. Our peace that we built, here, in spite of the plague. In spite of a lack of children. We made this house our child, and it breathes in and out with the essence of us. The essence of what we were.

                I’m coming, Farook. Wherever you are, please don’t give up.

                It’ll take more than a little plague, to stop me loving you.