In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural Page 13

  The Winchester family history essentially rebooted itself during Dean’s contract negotiation and started to retrace a familiar path. Apparently, erratic and scary tail-spinning is every bit as much a part of the family business as saving people and hunting things. Of course, after John sacrificed himself to save his eldest son, Dean was the one being asked if he was all right, whereas the second time around it was Dean who was doing the asking. Big brother thought Sam should be “go[ing] on about the sanctity of life,” (“Malleus Maleficarum”) but Sam was just too busy trying to kill “as many evil sons of bitches” as he possibly could (“Wendigo,” 1-2). In fact, by the time the brothers found themselves struggling to escape Supernatural’s life and death version of Groundhog Day, their old nemesis, the Trickster, had some insight to impart to Sam and to the rest of us: “Whoever said Dean was the dysfunctional one has never seen you with a sharp object in your hands” (“Mystery Spot”).

  Looking at Sam in the aftermath of his brother’s “Wednesday death,” we see that there’s more to heroism than the deeds you do. The sole survivor of the Winchester clan still had all the right moves. He was still hunting things after his brother was gone and presumably still saving people, if only by default. But he was clearly just going through the motions. His heart was no longer in it, or perhaps it was just frozen into a heavy, protective numbness. When the pain and the fear get to be too much, the Winchester men hide in plain sight, but each brother goes about it in a different way. Dean puts his game face on-any changes only go skin deep. Sam, on the other hand, tries to adapt from the inside out.

  “You’ve got one advantage that Max didn’t have. […] Me.”

  -DEAN WINCHESTER, “Nightmare” (1-14)

  The youngest Winchester’s malleability in response to his environment is, at times, a valuable asset but it can also be a dangerous liability. In “Dead Man’s Blood,” Sam experienced a rare moment of quality time with his father and observed how alike they were. Mary Winchester’s death fed into the obsessive side of her husband’s nature so that all he could see was the evil around him. If John managed to avoid transforming into an emotionally dead exterminator á la Sam in “Mystery Spot,” if he managed to stop short of becoming Gordon Walker, it was the family he had left that saved him from that. He needed his boys to be a light in the darkness, perhaps his eldest son in particular. In his final moments, John recalled with loving gratitude how when he’d come home, wrecked from a hunt, Dean would lay a hand on his father’s shoulder and tell him everything was okay.

  John needed Dean to keep the home fires burning, or the campfire, really, that kept the wolves at bay. And Sam is his father’s son-he needs Dean every bit as much. Well, that’s not entirely true. Sam can be a regular guy living a normal life without his brother, a feat Dean himself may be less able to accomplish. But what the youngest Winchester cannot do on his own is be a hero. Oh, he can try, and the Trickster has shown us what will happen if he does. Of course, if there was a villain in “Mystery Spot,” we have no one but the demigod to cast in that role, so perhaps we shouldn’t trust the vision he presented to us. I can’t say that I doubt it though. What I saw rang true to me.

  Certainly, when Sam is listening to his better angels he can spot the innocent human inhabited by the werewolf, argue that not all vampires are evil, offer the mercy of imprisonment to a misguided hunter who had unmercifully marked him for death… And yet this same young man who tried so hard to save fellow Psychic Kid Max Miller also jumped all too easily to the conclusion that innocent Andy was using his psychic abilities to kill people. Yes, when his fearful and dark obsessions get the better of him, Sam’s lesser angels have been known to shout down his better ones. Immediately after burying the woman he loved and leaving his hoped-for normal life in smoldering ruins, Sam had his worried brother characterizing his behavior as “all … shoot first, ask questions later” (“Wendigo”). Several months down the road, Dean had to physically restrain Sam from acting on a self-destructive impulse to rush into a burning building in the hope of exacting revenge on the thing that killed Jess … and Mom.

  When discussions of Supernatural venture into moral compass territory, I always peg Dean as magnetic north, a constant to be relied upon. I’ve yet to participate in a similar conversation about celestial navigation, but I think such a metaphor may be even more apropos. Dean is Polaris for the hunting Winchesters, a bright light in the expansive darkness that is essential for finding and keeping your bearings. North may not always be the way to go, but if you’re “in tune” with your environment and the North Star is in sight, you’ll be able to find your way.

  “… for the same reasons you do what you do… . Loyalty… . Love.”

  -MEG, “Shadow” (1-16)

  Forget about Roy Le Grange. If anyone qualifies as a faith healer in the Supernaturalverse, it’s Dean Winchester, who also happens to be a guy who looks in the mirror and hates what he sees. “Desperate, sloppy, needy Dean” (“Bedtime Stories”) offers comfort and security to John and Sam who, in turn, provide Dean with his purpose and sense of self-worth. And as it turns out, the Winchester family’s need for one another is the stuff heroes are made of, which means I’m simply not prepared to call it a bad thing. Dean himself did “a one-eighty” on the function (or dysfunction) of family in the space of a handful of episodes in season one. In “Shadow” he told his brother, “Dad’s vulnerable when he’s with us. He’s stronger when we’re not around.” But in “Dead Man’s Blood” Dean changed his tune: “We’re stronger as a family, Dad. We just are.” This may have seemed a maddening inconsistency to some but it was merely a reevaluation of the power of familial need in the face of changing circumstances and dissimilar threats. After the near success of Meg’s trap, Dean realized that he and his brother could be used by Evil to manipulate John into suppressing his survival instinct for the sake of his children. But later, when John planned to go after the Yellow-Eyed Demon on his own, Dean recognized that the boys could also serve an equal and opposite purpose: to protect their father from his own obsession-driven recklessness.

  From the moment in the pilot when Dean let it slip that he could not go looking for Dad alone, need and weakness have been recurring, overt themes in Supernatural. While it is rarely if ever Sam who directly puts these matters front and center, a dark preoccupation informs the series’ presentation of these themes, which is suggestive of Sam’s point of view. This perspective is a slave to the environment which, in season three, was dominated by a slow, dispiriting dying of the light-Dean Winchester’s light. “Dean’s your weakness. The bad guys know it too,” the Trickster warned (“Mystery Spot”). In this context, if Sam needs his brother, if Dean can be used to cause Sam harm; he’s a liability, a weakness. While such thinking isn’t really wrong, it is nearsighted (if understandably so). Fixating on the connection between need and weakness promotes a kind of tunnel vision that can obscure another equally important truth about what it means to need. Winchester need is a powerful need, but power in and of itself is a value-free commodity. It’s how power gets used that determines whether it is a force of Evil or a force of Good, whether it is destructive or generative, whether it is a weakness or a strength.

  If heroism is to be valued, that which makes a person capable of leading a heroic life should be looked upon as a strength, should it not? For the Winchesters, needing family and having the ability to acknowledge and sustain that need is the wellspring for their mission of “saving people, hunting things” (“Wendigo”). It is both the weakness and the strength implicit in the clan’s loving interdependence that lies at the heart of their heroism. And it is why, for the Winchester men, hunting is and must always remain … a family business.

  SHERYL A. RAKOWSKI is something of a born-again Supernaturalphile. Initially, she practically went out of her way to avoid this supposedly youth-targeted “horror” series. In fact, Sheryl didn’t become a true believer until the summer of 2007 when she came home from the video store with season one, disk
one of Supernatural. By the start of season three that fall, she had made a pilgrimage through all forty-four of the preceding episodes. Sheryl has a master’s in genetics, a passion for amateur motorsports, an appreciation for television that transcends mindless entertainment … and a yen for written expression.

  Doomed mothers and girlfriends, demons, witches, and damsels in distress-are these the only roles available to women in Supernatural? Is the show merely a male reaction to a perceived emasculation of the horror genre perpetrated by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an attempt to reclaim TV horror/fantasy for the guys?

  Mary Borsellino examines the role of women, and specifically Jo Harvelle, in Supernatural, and whether the show perpetuates misogyny as an integral part of the Winchesters’ journey.

  MARY BORSELLINO

  BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, JO THE MONSTER KILLER

  Supernatural’s Excluded Heroines

  Whether it wants to or not, Supernatural exists in a world and genre which is unarguably post-Buffy. You can’t be a popular, fashionable show beginning life on the WB Network and featuring attractive young people killing monsters without summoning the ghost of Slayers past in the process. But this legacy has always sat uneasily on Supernatural’s shoulders, and the tension has rarely been as obvious as it was when it came to Jo Harvelle, the supporting character who first appeared in episode 2-2, “Everyone Loves A Clown.”

  To understand why the saga of Jo shook down as it did, we first have to look at Supernatural’s relationship with gender and genre, and especially at its views on another small, blonde, female demon hunter.

  THE GUY WITH A CAR, THE GIRL IN A GRAVE

  Eric Kripke, creator of Supernatural, is a self-confessed acolyte of the “Hero With a Thousand Faces” school of character arcs. One of the pivotal moments in this story-form is the “return from the dead”; sometimes this journey is metaphoric, sometimes literal.

  In the opening episode of season six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the heroine of that show is brought back to life and, struggling to live, thrusts her hand up through the earth of her grave. This image is repeated in the second episode of Supernatural, but here the possibility of a young woman’s return has become monstrous, the stuff of nightmares-Sam awakes from the dream of his girlfriend Jessica’s resurrection in horror.

  There is a female character in the first season of Supernatural whose character arc can be mapped onto the Hero’s Journey, mirroring as it does the Sam’s progression from the ordinary world into the realm of a supernatural quest. Meg, the woman in question, is shown moving through a “death” and then returning. Like Buffy, she is a young, fair-haired woman with demonically imbued strength.

  Meg is one of the central adversaries of Supernatural’s first season, and a serial murderer. She is also one of only three prominent female characters in the season; the other two are “good” women, and are both killed off incredibly violently after only a couple of scenes apiece (just enough time for the show to establish that they are “nice” girls). They return in later episodes to swan around the afterlife in floaty nightgowns. Meg, the only one with agency or initiative, is thrown out a window, shot in the chest, and put through an extended and apparently torturous exorcism before dying with what sounds like every bone in her body broken.

  I’m not suggesting here that Meg is a hero done wrong by the text. She’s a villain. But there are no female heroes in the first season of Supernatural. There are strong female characters in a number of the episodes (though the ratio of them to the generic, simpering damsels leaves a lot to be desired), but they are never the ones to solve the mystery, kill the monster, or help the helpless.

  This can be explained by the fact that it is, after all, the hero’s prerogative to save the day, and Sam and Dean-the heroes of Supernatural-are both male. But the masculinity the characters attempt to embody is one which reinterprets tropes introduced into the postmodern horror genre by Buffy, and the ways in which Supernatural seeks to recontextualize these images is distressingly easy to read as an attempted regression away from the new frontiers Buffy opened up.

  Jared Padalecki, the actor who portrays Sam on Supernatural, was asked in the August 2006 edition of AXM magazine what he thought of his show in comparison to Buffy. He responded with “That was a great show and obviously went for several seasons and had a huge fan base, but I like to think that our show is different. I think it is less campy… . Our show is more of a blue collar, in-your-face scary horror.”

  Padalecki’s remarks are particularly interesting in light of the fact that Sam’s own Hero’s Journey is centered around his wish to leave behind his “family business” (hunting monsters) in order to attend college and become a lawyer. Kripke’s frequent invocation of Star Wars as a classic example of a pop bildungsroman underscores the role that discontent with the family legacy plays in a story such as Sam’s: Luke Skywalker doesn’t want to be a farm boy; Sam rejects the “blue collar” class-coding which Padalecki marks the show as embodying.

  If Supernatural is “in your face,” then the implication is that Buffy is something else: tricksy, complicated, smug, compared to Supernatural’s honest straightforwardness? A more concrete contrast between the two programs can be found in two of Supernatural’s season two characters, Gordon and Madison.

  Gordon shares many similarities with the Buffy-universe character Charles Gunn. Gordon and Gunn are both Black men who kill vampires, and each of them is forced to kill his sister after she is turned into one

  In Gunn’s case, this killing was framed as an act of mercy, a final display of love. In Gordon’s case, this same act was depicted as a blood betrayal-something more unnatural and monstrous than any creature could be. To kill someone you love, even if they have become something evil, is a heinous act. This theme was the driving force behind season two, in which Dean faced the prospect that he might have to kill Sam.

  When writer Sera Gamble stated in a Sequential Tart interview that Madison, who became Sam’s lover in the then-unaired episode “Heart,” would not become a “brunette Buffy” or the third inhabitant of the brothers’ Chevy, the same backlash against the seminal horror-genre heroine reared its head once again.27 Fans had no reason to worry at such an outcome, though: Supernatural put this female werewolf down like a dog, and left the firing of the shot to Sam.

  To kill those you love is terrible, says Supernatural … except when the alternative to death is for her to become (horror of horrors) a Buffy-type character.

  Another, more detailed example: Buffy’s male offsider, Xander Harris, is a screwball sidekick often played for laughs. Of the three core characters, and the wider ensemble as well, he is the one without easily definable skills: he’s not a Slayer, like Buffy, nor a witch like Willow. In a season three episode, “The Zeppo,” Xander’s seemingly tenuous place within the group became the central narrative element.

  In “The Zeppo,” Xander attempted to prove his usefulness by becoming “Car Guy. Guy with the car.” The car in question was a classic Chevy, which Brett Rogers and Walter Scheidel point out “brilliantly evokes American car culture and cinema in the late 1950’s [sic] and early 1960’s, an era when cult heroes like James Dean were making movies about tough teenage rebels and dangerous chicken fights of masculine bravado.” 28 The Chevrolet is a symbol of a particular kind of mythic branding in American pop culture. In Buffy, it was played for irony, for hypereality-“imagery of the 1950’s [sic] appears repeatedly in ‘the Zeppo,’ reinforcing the connection between the Chevy and a specific brand of rebellious American machismo”29-while in Supernatural it was straight-faced.

  In another car-related plotline in Buffy, Xander spent the last months of his time at high school reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and planning a road trip across America. Buffy mocked him for this dream and, by extension, could be seen as mocking the particular brand of mid-twentieth-century, male-centric romanticism which such narratives invoke. Xander’s travel plans were thwarted when the engine fell out of his car in Oxn
ard, California.

  Sam and Dean of Supernatural are named for the two central characters of On the Road, and their endless road trip is a direct counterpoint to-and, I would argue, a refutation/backlash against-Xander’s inability to tap into a traditional form of American masculinity.

  Xander and Dean are very similar characters in many ways-they both pepper their conversations with references to popular entertainment, their libidos are extremely active, and they both tend to avoid emotional vulnerability with quipping and wisecracking. Neither is as formally educated as those he fights alongside. Dean is, it can be argued, what you get if you strip the irony away from Xander’s make-up. But where Buffy thwarts opportunities for Xander to be a hero through traditional masculinity, it is exactly that traditional masculinity that Dean typically uses to save the day.

  The real irony of this is that Xander’s eventual ease with himself, and confidence in his abilities, affords the character a far less generic and more honest concept of himself as a man than he would have found by simply adhering to the motifs later taken up by Supernatural.

  Another way in which Supernatural directly addresses ground previously covered by Buffy is in each show’s relationship to firearms. While Buffy will use them when she needs to (season two sees her wield a rocket launcher), she doesn’t put any faith in them at all: “These things? Never helpful” (“Flooded,” 6-4). In contrast, guns are Sam and Dean’s primary weapons, and make up the bulk of their arsenal. Firearms, like the Xander/Dean figure, are given back their traditional signification and narrative place by Supernatural, a role from which Buffy had removed them.

  Finally, and perhaps most obviously, a parallel between the worlds of Buffy and Supernatural can be found in season six and the episode “Hell House” (1-17) respectively.