In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural Page 11
FAKE MARY: It doesn’t matter. It’s still better than anything you had… . It’s everything you want. We’re a family again. Let’s go home.
Dean Winchester’s hopes and dreams in a nutshell: love, comfort, and safety. The fake Sam pointed out that Dean wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore; the make-believe girlfriend held out the possibility of a future, Dean building his own family. After Dean escaped from the alternate reality, with some help from Sam on the outside, he admitted to his brother that, even knowing it wasn’t real, “I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay so bad” (“What Is and What Should Never Be”).
Of course, letting himself give up was never truly a possibility, not when Dean is drawn so strongly to the real world and his obligation to “raise” Sam.
It was Dean who, years ago, had the Talk with his younger brother-even if it was about the existence of demons and not sex … although they probably had that chat along the way, too (“A Very Supernatural Christmas”). It was Dean who made sure his brother ate, admonishing Sam to “eat your vegetables,” even if the veggies in question were Funyons (“A Very Supernatural Christmas”), and who gave up his own dinner of the last of the Lucky Charms when Sam balked at the SpaghettiOs he’d requested earlier (“Something Wicked”). It was Dean who tried to mediate family differences by making sure Sam knew John was not disappointed in his youngest son and even used to sneak by Stanford to check up on Sam, an assurance Dean followed up with the reprimand, “It’s a two-way street, dude. You could have picked up the phone” (“Bugs”). It was Dean who sought to protect his fully grown and not-so-little brother in “Heart” (2-17), by offering to kill Madison so that Sam wouldn’t have to do it.
Ultimately, it was Dean who raised Sam from the dead by exchanging his own soul (“All Hell Breaks Loose [Part 2]”). When Sam later tried to discuss this sacrifice and possible ways to free Dean from the deal, Dean shut him down in the most maternal way possible:
DEAN: Sam, enough! I am not gonna have this conversation. SAM: Why? Because you said so? DEAN: Yes, because I said so! (“Bedtime Stories,” 3-5)
Many mothers believe they’d be willing to die for their children, but few of us-thank God-are tested in as literal a way as Dean Winchester has been nearly all his life and in nearly every episode. He takes his responsibility solemnly and in repeated episodes has referred to protecting Sam as his “job.” He’s definitely felt the heartbreak parenting can bring, when you don’t know what to do, when your kids push you away, when they reject your attempts to help, or when you witness them hurting. The upside, though, is that Sam turned out smart, strong, and under the circumstances, incredibly well-adjusted, which means Dean was almost as successful at mothering as he is at kicking demon butt every week.
Oh, and Dean? Just for the record, being a mom and being a bad-ass aren’t mutually exclusive.
Award-winning author TANYA MICHAELS (who also writes as Tanya Michna) is in fact a minivan-driving soccer mom. Though she feels heroic whenever she makes someone laugh or meets a deadline, the closest Tanya gets to being a literal bad-ass is defeating Nintendo bad guys with her kids.
Sacrifice and heroism: can one exist without the other? Does sacrifice make the hero or does heroism demand sacrifice? Do the sacrifices each of the Winchesters has made inform the kind of hero he has become? Is Sam any less of a hero than Dean for having sacrificed his family? Is Dean more of a hero than Sam for having sacrificed his sense of self in order to support his father?
Amy Garvey examines the choices and the sacrifices made by the Winchesters and how those choices and sacrifices have affected the type of men-and the type of heroes-they have become.
AMY GARVEY
“WE’VE GOT WORK TO DO”
Sacrifice, Heroism, and Sam and Dean Winchester
Sacrifice isn’t part of my everyday vocabulary. I’m not usually asked to give up much that really means something to me. In my life, offering one of the kids the last chocolate chip cookie or missing an episode of Supernatural because somebody’s got a recital or a baseball game that ran long qualifies as a major hardship. (Stop looking at me like that.)
The Winchesters, on the other hand, have “sacrifice” stamped all over their well-fitting torn jeans. It’s not surprising-the Winchesters, as envisioned by Eric Kripke, are heroes, a family of men who fight the nastier elements of the supernatural and save lives in the process. And being a hero generally goes hand in hand with a boatload of sacrifice.
Look at some of the biggies, at least by popular culture’s standards: Superman, Batman, Buffy. Each of them heroes in their own particular way, and each of them missing a fair-sized chunk of what most folks want out of life.
The Winchesters aren’t superheroes, though. They lack the super-strength, X-ray vision, or a whole bat cave full of techno-toys that have to go at least a little way toward easing the pain of missing out on a normal life. Dean and Sam Winchester are simple, sturdy Kansas stock, at least when we meet them, and no more superpowered than a couple of sawed-off shotguns, a working knowledge of Latin, and a fine example of American heavy metal can make them. And their choice of family business-“saving people, hunting things”-requires a whole lot of sacrifice for both of them, even if what they sacrifice and how they look at the choice is very different for each of them.
Who are these guys? On the surface, they don’t look like much. One half of the pair is an enormous, lanky guy in too many layers, with shaggy dog hair and a displeased bitchface that could fell an even bigger man at thirty paces. His other half is a startlingly pretty bad boy with a fondness for leather, classic rock, and waitresses, and about as much tact as most demons have, which is to say, um, none.
That’s Sam and Dean for you. A college-educated research geek who can throw an awesome left hook, and a cocky self-taught mechanic who doesn’t go anywhere without a knife in his boot and a scammed credit card in his wallet. No capes, no Batmobile (although the Impala is a pretty sweet ride herself), and no supernaturally enhanced powers (at least at first). They may not be superheroes, but they’re heroes nevertheless. They tangle with werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and demons for absolutely no pay and very little recognition, all to save the general population from facing the often deadly truth about the monster in the closet. And they do it-well, most of the time-simply because it’s the right thing to do.
Dictionary.com calls a hero “a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities.” Sam and Dean certainly fit that bill, although Dean’s nobler impulses are sometimes hard to find under the glare of his enthusiastic hedonism. This definition doesn’t particularly point out anything about sacrifice. Neither does Joseph Campbell’s description of the hero’s journey, unless you read between the lines-giving up safety, home, and family to set out on a quest sounds like quite the sacrifice to me. In practice, there are no heroes who give up nothing-sacrifice is integral to the notion of a person who cares more for the fate of others, or the world, than him-or herself.
Even so, I think Sam and Dean are a special case when it comes to heroes. Unlike Campbell’s mythic figure, they don’t accept a “call to adventure,” they’re thrust into it as children.
There is no Sam and Dean Winchester, not as we know them, without John Winchester, father, soldier, and vigilante. Before the demon came for Mary, the boys were average kids, a preschooler and an infant, safe in a suburban home with loving parents and all the expected trappings of childhood. It’s easy to say Mary’s death was the event that changed that, but it didn’t have to; plenty of widowed fathers raise their children just fine after a spouse’s death. No, John changed the circumstances of the boys’ lives when he took Sam and Dean on the road in his quest to find the creature that killed his wife.
Did John make a sacrifice? A sacrifice isn’t a sacrifice if it’s something you don’t care about giving up. Imagine asking a teenager to give up algebra homework or to please stop cleaning his room. Not a problem, right? For all intents and purposes, giv
en John’s choices, the only thing that mattered to John was Mary, and she was taken from him, not offered up willingly. When he dedicated his life to uncovering the more vicious supernatural creatures that prey on the innocent, he wasn’t giving up anything that he valued. Or at least not anything he valued enough to think twice about, including his sons’ welfare.
Vengeance was John’s raison d’etre from there on out, and it became, by default, his sons’ mission, as well. The boys’ childhood was offered up to it, everything from decent schools and the safety net of a caring community and a stable, familiar home to a child’s right to fantasy and innocence. As Sam told Dean in the series pilot, “When I told Dad when I was scared of the thing in my closet, he gave me a .45.” Not your typical reaction to a boy’s fears, is it?
Sam and Dean’s childhood was sacrificed for them. And yet despite growing up with the same father, in the same circumstances, each handled their nomadic existence very differently. Much of that might be put down to the age difference between them-Sam doesn’t remember his mother, or his home, since he was a mere six months old when Mary was killed-but I think a lot of it shakes down to a difference in temperament. It’s the old nature versus nurture argument, of course, and there’s never any way to prove concretely that one outweighs the other, but it’s clear from the outset that Dean is a completely different animal than Sam.
In the third season episode “Bad Day at Black Rock” (3-3), Dean and Sam found a storage container of their father’s that housed a trove of demon-hunting paraphernalia, but also a few mementoes of the boys’ childhood. Sam found his Division Championship soccer trophy; Dean found the first sawed-off shotgun he ever made. It’s more than a glimpse into how John viewed his boys; it’s a telling indication of who the boys were as kids. It’s telling that Dean’s subconscious seems to agree; in “What Is and What Should Never Be” (2-20), Dean’s version of Sam was entirely removed from the blue-collar life Dean had adopted in this dream world. Sam was the successful product of a suburban childhood, educated and relentlessly civilized, while Dean was, well, not.
Sam was protected from the truth of their father’s quest far longer than Dean ever was, as “A Very Supernatural Christmas” (3-8) proved. Sam excelled at academics, eventually earning himself a scholarship to Stanford, and even managed to play soccer and participate in a school play (“Shadow,” 1-16). Those last two examples show that John was willing to settle at least occasionally for more than a month or two at a time, but even so it couldn’t have been easy for Sam to be the new boy on a regular basis and to make such a success of his scattershot schooling.
Even as late as the end of the third season, the viewer still isn’t sure that Dean ever graduated high school, and the only evidence of an extracurricular activity is that sawed-off shotgun John saved. But Dean’s first job in their grieving family was defined from nearly the moment of Mary’s death: to take care of Sammy, as the pilot’s flashback illustrated when John handed four-year-old Dean a squirming infant and told him to “take your brother outside as fast as you can, and don’t look back. Now, Dean, go.”
And there’s Dean’s purpose in a nutshell: take care of Sam. We saw it in “Something Wicked” (1-18) especially, as well as in “A Very Supernatural Christmas,” a boy far too young to be a surrogate parent, but acting as one anyway. Dean’s not a saint, or a martyr, especially as a child, but he takes his responsibilities seriously. The guilt and terror on his face when the shtriga in “Something Wicked” nearly devoured Sam was heartbreaking. No nine-year-old child should feel obligated to provide for the safety of his own sibling, and Dean’s guilt was likely twofold: not only was he not off getting Sam dinner when the monster attacked, he was playing video games, the way any bored nine-year-old would be tempted to do.
The next time we saw childhood Dean and Sam, they were three years older, and Dean had learned his lesson well. The boys were holed up in a motel room so crappy it barely looked legal, and it was Christmas Eve, with no sign of John’s return. With Sam asleep (and newly clued in, and freaked out, to the truth of their father’s crusade), Dean sneaked out and returned with “Christmas,” in the form of a straggly Charlie Brown tree and two stolen presents-both for Sam. There was nothing for himself; Dean clearly wasn’t surprised that John didn’t make it back to the motel, and he apparently didn’t even think to make his ruse a little more believable by stealing gifts for himself as well.
Dean gave Sam the most “normal” childhood one could hope for under the circumstances. Because of that, Dean taught Sam to want a life outside of motel rooms and highway rest stops and dangerous confrontations with things that go bump in the night-even though Dean doesn’t seem to want those things for himself.
We have to assume that as Sam got older, and more self-reliant, Dean’s focus shifted from being Sam’s surrogate parent to being the warrior his father wanted him to be. Honestly, nothing makes that point better than the fact that when we first saw the boys, Dean was fresh off a solo hunt in New Orleans while Sam had left the family and the family business.
The pilot episode was explicit in pointing out the differences between the young adults the boys had become. We met Sam, a college student who had aced his LSATs and had a law school interviewed planned, and lived in an apartment with a loving girlfriend. Then there was Dean, who showed up in the middle of the night breaking into Sam’s apartment, and was still entirely focused on the hunt. Despite their common upbringing, it seemed Sam hadn’t sacrificed anything he’d wanted for his life, while Dean had sacrificed everything in the name of the crusade. Sam said to Dean later in the episode, when they were looking for John, “I’m not you. This is not going to be my life.” Dean’s response? “You have a responsibility.”
Is it really as simple as that? It’s a given that anyone with the power to save others from harm, if not Big Bad Evil, should use it (hence, the reason Superman is Superman, and not just a defensive end on some NFL team), and certainly the Winchester boys have knowledge and skills very few other people do. As an adult, Dean has made a choice to continue his vagabond life, hunting down the things that go bump in the night, but is he ever free to choose differently? Is he really a hero if he believes the only thing he’s good for is aiming a shotgun full of rock salt and burning bones?
Sam clearly never believed hunting was his fate. He made sure of it, in fact, and if Jessica hadn’t died, there’s no doubt he would have let Dean go back to the road, aced his law school interview, and married Jess shortly after he passed the bar. But Jessica did die, at the hands of the same demon that killed the boys’ mother, and even if joining Dean on the road was an active choice, it was motivated by the same prime mover that motivated his father: vengeance. In fact, Sam made it clear to Dean that once they found and destroyed the demon, he’d head back to college and the “normal” life he’d always wanted.
That changed as the series progressed. Sam never defined himself strictly by his abilities as a ghostbuster, to borrow a term. At the end of the first season, and even the second, it wasn’t a given that Sam would continue hunting forever, but the plot of the show always provided one more hurdle for him to clear before returning to the life he had begun to carve out for himself.
But the show’s events have been more than simply additional hurdles. Sam has come full circle, from a boy who was willing to sacrifice the one thing his brother couldn’t imagine giving up, his family, to a man who is now, in his words, becoming “more like Dean” (“Malleus Maleficarum,” 3-9). To go to school at all, to turn his back on hunting, Sam gave up the only people who provided a constant in his life, the people who loved him and always protected him, Dean and John. It’s still not clear that Sam will hunt forever, but it does seem clear that he’s now willing to sacrifice everything else to stay with his brother.
Dean, on the other hand, seems never to have imagined any other life for himself. One throwaway remark in “Salvation” (1-21) about wanting to be a fireman when he grew up is as close as we get to a “what i
f” for Dean, until “What Is and What Should Never Be.”
It’s a painful episode. Dean found himself living an alternate version of his life, thanks to a djinn who seemed to grant wishes, but with a twist: the djinn’s victims experienced their deep-seated subconscious wishes as the djinn slowly killed them. The most disturbing element of the episode was that his “wish” catered to every member of his family but himself. He was back in his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. His mother was alive and healthy, his father had died a natural death after a long and fulfilling life (complete with several seasons of recreational softball), and Sam was a virtual star, engaged to Jessica, excelling in law school, and happily living far, far away from his shifty, disappointing brother.
And Dean? Dean was a mechanic, although this was apparently so unremarkable that he never actually went to work while he was in the “wishverse.” He lived with a young, pretty nurse named Carmen, but his interest in her was nothing compared to his pride in Sam and his relief about his mother. Every wish in Dean’s subconscious was focused on his family’s happiness, not his own. Dean was still himself, but maybe more so; when they were younger, Sam said, Dean had “snaked my ATM card … bailed on my graduation … [and] hooked up with Rachel Nave,” Sam’s prom date. Even sadder, everyone assumed Dean’s odd behavior in this reality was because he’d been drinking too much.
Is this the way Dean really sees himself? Working a blue-collar job he doesn’t much care about, drinking too much, tolerated by his family, especially Sam, who accuses him of stealing from their mother? Carmen wasn’t even a girl Dean once knew, but a model from a beer ad. Way to value yourself, Dean.
Most telling was the fact that even here, Dean couldn’t quit hunting. Sitting at his dad’s grave, he asked, “Why is it my job to save these people? Why do I have to be some kind of hero? What about us? Mom’s not supposed to live? Sammy’s not supposed to get married? Why do we have to sacrifice everything, Dad?” And yet, Dean’s idea of his own sacrifice was leaving the wishverse, shrugging off the comfortable fantasy of his family’s happiness. He longed to stay there, the gray sheep if not exactly the black one, to set the world right for the rest of the Winchesters. Even his choice of words was telling; he didn’t say, “Why can’t I have my mom back?” He said, “Mom’s not supposed to live?” That impulse is selfless, based entirely on Mary, not on himself.