In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural Read online

  Sincerely,

  Charles L. McWilliams, Esq.

  Lead Counsel

  Dayton Daily Sun Sentinel

  MEMO

  To: Adam Shastenberger

  From: Eileen O’Rourke-Dutton

  CC: Charles L. McWilliams, Esq.

  Date: 6/10/07

  RE: “Ask Adam” Advice Column

  Dear Adam,

  I’m so sorry it’s come to this. Through your patient tutelage I have come to see the merit of Supernatural as a template for modern male interpersonal relationships. (Not to mention my newfound role as a number one J.A.F.-Jensen Ackles Fan, that is. He’s a modern day James Dean and has rekindled my girlish crush on the rebel without a cause archetype.)

  Unfortunately, as far as legal action against you, I’m afraid my hands are tied in this matter. Mr. McWilliams has me in a devil’s trap of sorts. Please do what he says or I’m afraid you will be “exorcised” from our newspaper!

  Most sincerely,

  Eileen O’Rourke-Dutton

  Managing Editor

  Dayton Daily Sun Sentinel

  Dayton Daily Sun Sentinel Newspaper

  “Ask Adam: Advice for Men” weekly column

  October 8, 2007

  Hey Adam,

  Here’s a tough one. Due to a congenital birth defect, my brother needs a new kidney. Turns out I’m the closest match. The thing is, ever since he was a kid, everyone has bent over backwards for my brother because he almost died when he was a baby. I’m finally getting my life together. I met a girl I want to marry, got the job I’ve been after, and I’m ready to buy a house. My parents expect me to put my life on hold and get myself sliced open for my “special” little bro. Do I have to?

  Signed,

  What’s Mine Is Mine

  Dear Mine,

  How far would you go for your brother? Give him the last taco off your plate? Let him crash on your couch if he was broke? Go to the Crossroads and sell your soul to bring him back to life? Vow to find a way to get your brother’s soul back even if that means continuing to tempt your dark side? That’s exactly what Dean and Sam Winchester do for one another, because they are true brothers. They’ve seen each other through thick and thin after they’ve lost everyone important (mother, father, girlfriend, fellow hunters). Sam and Dean are the kind of guys who realize that there is no stronger bond in this world than the bond of two brothers fighting evil.

  But maybe you’re not that kind of guy. Maybe you’re the kind of guy who wants all his kidneys for himself. Well, fine. But you better watch your back when the soldiers from Hell come marching forth, because Sam and Dean won’t be there, man. You and your two kidneys will be all alone.

  Take it easy,

  Adam

  MEMO

  To: Adam Shastenberger

  From: Charles L. McWilliams, Esq.

  CC: Eileen O’Rourke-Dutton

  Date: 10/10/07

  RE: “Ask Adam” Advice Column

  Dear Mr. Shastenberger,

  Well, it’s the beginning of season three on the CW and, despite repeated good faith attempts to dissuade you from using Supernatural as your template for advice, you have once again done just that. Your last column was frankly the last straw.

  The legal department of the Dayton Daily Sun Sentinel has taken immediate action to terminate your contract. Your services are no longer welcome at our fine newspaper establishment.

  Sincerely,

  Charles L. McWilliams, Esq.

  Lead Counsel

  Dayton Daily Sun Sentinel

  10/12/07

  Dear Mr. McWilliams,

  Are you possessed? Has the Yellow-Eyed Demon taken hold of your soul? What else could explain this virulent attitude of yours? This cold-blooded disgust of what is sacred and holy? What is your problem exactly? Sure, you look normal, but do your eyes flash the dark of a moonless night when your inner demons rear their ugly heads at the mere mention of what is good and just in this world?

  You sicken me and if we ever meet in a dank abandoned warehouse, be forewarned that I will rip you to shreds and send you back to the Hell you came from. Please consider our working relationship severed like the head of a black Hell Hound.

  From now on my loyal readers can contact me via my Facebook page and of course find me posting under the name SuperShasty on the TV.com Supernatural chat forum.

  Sincerely,

  Adam Shastenberger

  10/13/07

  Dear Adam,

  I’m terribly distraught! I’m so sorry the legal department at our newspaper can’t recognize genius when they see it. Please know that I did everything in my power to keep you on board. I’m afraid there are no bones to salt in this case.

  Most sincerely,

  Eileen

  10/15/07

  Dearest Eileen,

  Please don’t worry yourself over this matter. I will prevail and Supernatural will be picked up for another season, I’m sure. What more could we ask for?

  As for Chas McWilliams, I’m sure he’ll get what he deserves. Evil always pays in the end.

  Please know that you are always welcome at the Fan Club viewing party held every Thursday. We’d love to have your spirit with us as we root for Sam and Dean.

  Yours truly,

  Adam

  Dayton Daily Sun Sentinel Newspaper

  November 5, 2007

  “Local Lawyer Missing”

  According to Police Chief Steven Botch, Charles “Chas” McWilliams (local lawyer and lead counsel to the Dayton Daily Sun Sentinel) is feared missing. His wife, Liz McWilliams, reported that McWilliams left his residence at 4:25 p.m. October 31st for a business meeting but never returned.

  Police Chief Botch offered no comment on the ongoing investigation of Mr. McWilliams’s alleged involvement with an organized crime ring that has infiltrated area media and refrigeration businesses as well as narcotics trafficking. In September, Mr. McWilliams pleaded not guilty to charges of money laundering and extortion and is awaiting trial.

  The police believe it is entirely coincidental that McWilliams disappeared on Halloween night, yet foul play has not been ruled out. “I don’t think he was snatched off the street by some hobgoblin, if that’s what you’re implying,” said Chief Botch. “Halloween is an ordinary day just like any other.” There are no suspects at this time.

  Dayton Daily Sun Sentinel Newspaper

  November 5, 2007

  Community Announcements Weekly Calendar

  WEDNESDAY

  The weekly midnight meeting of the Green Grove Wicca Coven will be held at the Miamsburg Earth Books behind Kinko’s. Presiding High Priest Adam Shastenberger will discuss “The Occult and the Media: Friends or Foes” with former Dayton Daily Sun Sentinel managing editor Eileen O’Rourke-Dutton. All are welcome no matter what path they follow.

  Dayton Daily Sun Sentinel Newspaper

  January 10, 2008

  Community Announcements Weekly Calendar

  THURSDAY

  The Dayton “Supernatural Fan Club” will host their weekly viewing party at the Delco Park Applebee’s in Kettering. New President-elect Eileen O’Rourke will preside. Drinks and appetizers start at 7:00. Free Tex-Mex Pizza Poppers for new attendees.

  Dayton Daily Sun Sentinel Newspaper

  May 15, 2008

  Shastenberger/O’Rourke Wedding Announcement

  Eileen O’Rourke and Adam Shastenberger were married in Hueston Woods State Park at sundown, on Saturday, May 12, 2008. High Priestess Katura Lloyd of the Green Grove Wicca Coven officiated the wedding. The couple, who are co-presidents of the Dayton area Supernatural fan club, are currently enjoying a cross-country honeymoon trip which begins in Lawrence, Kansas, and will end in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. “We’re going to visit every town that Sam and Dean Winchester have been to,” the groom explained. “Then we’ll go to the set in Vancouver where I’ll present Jensen Ackles with a needlepoint pillow I made bearing the likeness of his face,” said the bride. It’s
a Supernatural love story.

  HEATHER SWAIN is the author of two novels, Eliot’s Banana and Lucious Lemon, and the editor of Before: Short Stories About Pregnancy. Her young adult novel Me, My Elf and I will be released by Puffin/Speak in summer 2009. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary journals, Web sites, and magazines. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, two children, and dog.

  When is a car not just a car? When she’s Dean Winchester’s 1967 Chevrolet Impala, of course. Home to the homeless, mother to the motherless, an essential member of the family: the Impala is all of this and more. She is one of the few constants in the Winchesters’ lives and the only thing they can rely upon besides each other, even when she’s been towed, impounded, or smashed to pieces by a demon-controlled truck.

  Here, Jules Wilkinson looks at the various roles assumed by the Winchesters’ heavy metal steed-protector, mother, home … and a constant reminder and symbol of their father, his place in their lives, and their own place in the “family business.”

  JULES WILKINSON

  BACK IN BLACK

  The Batmobile, the General Lee, Starsky and Hutch’s Torino, Magnum’s Ferrari, Knight Rider’s KITT-cars have become icons in many TV shows. Mean, sleek, macho machines with an ability to burn rubber in the cause of a hot pursuit or getaway. Auto-erotic fixations for the heroes, valued for their grunt and stunts. However, one car is going full throttle beyond these conventions. In her break-out role on Supernatural, a ’67 Impala Chevy is showing that a car can be more than just a bitchin’ ride.

  At first glance, the Impala appears to fulfill the usual TV-car stereotype. She fits the bill in the looks department: a classic, sexy and shiny, with a trunk full of weapons. Like all TV cars she never breaks down or gets covered in bird poop, and she always finds a place to park. Sure, the Impala might get dirty occasionally, but in the next episode she’s certain to be gleaming again. (Unfortunately we have never seen Dean in a pair of cut-offs, sudsing her up. Of course, Dean “doesn’t do shorts” [“Wendigo,” 1-2], but viewers live in hope.)

  Like her well-known brethren, the Impala, for all her distinctive looks, flies under the radar. Despite their eye-catching appearance, it’s as if TV cars can cast a glamour over themselves to remain inconspicuous. The super villains of Gotham City never noticed the Batmobile parked on the corner and criminals never wised up to the fact that the arrival of a loud, red Torino meant Starsky and Hutch were on their tail. Similarly, on Supernatural, when the FBI takes an active interest in the Winchesters, the only disguise the Impala needs is a switch of her license plates: Kansas plates KAZ 2Y5 to CNK 80Q3 from Ohio. It’s a bit like a fugitive from America’s Most Wanted sticking on a fake mustache.

  Along with their owners, who are usually breaking all the rules in their fight for justice, TV cars are mavericks. Like the Winchesters, the Impala is an outsider, marginalized from mainstream society. In today’s world, she’s transgressive-a gas-guzzler harking back to the days when gas was thirty-three cents a gallon and heavy with lead. The ’67 Impala was built for cruising down the highway, not for zipping down to the mall. No airbags here, just a solid chassis of Detroit steel. This is no iMpala; she has a cassette deck that only plays mullet rock-no indie pop mp3 nonsense for her.

  TV cars are known for their guts and their willingness to throw their metal bodies into danger without hesitation and the Impala is no exception. She’s courageous, a hunter chasing down ghosts, demons, and vampires, along with the Winchesters for all the thrills and spills. The junk in her trunk is all high caliber and razor-sharp steel. She gets beat up, once smashed almost beyond repair, but like the rest of the Winchesters, death proves an impermanent condition. When Dean restores her after her late season one encounter with a demon-driven Mack truck, she makes her return to the screen in a long, sensuous scene, gleaming in the sun as she tears along the highway to AC/DC’s “Back in Black.”

  But Supernatural is not just a show about battling evil; it’s a show about family. The Impala is a character with as much depth and emotional resonance as Sam or Dean. She is the link to their past, to what they are fighting for, and present at all the significant moments in their life to lend support and comfort. She takes them on their journey and provides the only home they know. The Impala is not just a hot ride; she is a Winchester.

  The Impala is established as an integral part of the family in the opening scenes of the pilot episode. When Mary Winchester dies on the ceiling of the nursery and their house goes up in flames, John Winchester, young Dean, and baby Sam are seen huddling on the hood of the Impala, supported by her, as life as they know it ends.

  With the loss of mother and home, it is the Impala that takes on the role of nurturer and sanctuary, becomes the metaphoric womb for the Winchesters. This is the heart of her character.

  The Impala carries with her the family history. She takes the Winchesters from suburban idyll to a nomadic life hunting the supernatural. When Peter Johnson, writer of the tie-in Origins comics, made the Impala a car that John acquired as part of becoming a hunter, fans were outraged. Johnson listened, and later altered this in the trade paperback edition, saying he now recognized what the car represented thematically “in the continuity of the family-before and after Mary’s death.”45

  We know little of what happened to her during the intervening years, but twenty-two years after Mary’s death it is the Impala that brings Dean to Stanford, to reunite him with Sam. (I’m pretty sure she had some work done in those intervening years because she looks pretty amazing for a girl approaching forty.)

  The relationships in the Winchester family are intense. For twenty years, as they chased the creatures of myth and urban legend, cut off from normal society, this family had only each other: John, Dean, Sam-and the Impala, too, because as Bobby later reminds Dean, “Family don’t end with blood” (“No Rest for the Wicked,” 3-16).

  The Impala signifies for both Sam and Dean the home they never had. In contrast to the never-ending series of quirkily decorated motel rooms, the odd house-preferably with a steam shower-to squat in, and the occasional weekend at Bobby’s, the Impala is the only space that is truly theirs.

  As a car, though, she can only provide so much in the way of a home. While the Winchesters travel in her, sleep in her, and eat in her, the Impala really offers only the illusion of a private space. As anyone who has been caught singing out loud or picking their nose while in the car knows, the car is a private space open to the public sphere. Put simply-it has windows!

  Having a car as the only recurring space on the show emphasizes the boys’ isolation from normal social interactions. Most TV shows have three types of spaces: private space, such as a bedroom (or prison cell); a semi-public space, such as a living room in a sitcom or a workplace (think squad room or hospital doctors’ lounge); and a contained public space, like the Bronze (Buffy), Central Perk (Friends), and those bars or dining areas that exist on every spaceship from Enterprise to Galactica.

  The purpose of the recurring semi-public spaces is to allow social relationships to develop. It is where relationships may transition from friendship to romance. They are often an alternative space to both the private space of a home and the open public space of a crime scene or workplace, a place where characters of different status at work can interact more equally. They are a more public space than a home and allow antagonistic characters to interact with each other-think (early) Spike and Buffy.

  The Winchesters have access to none of these. They did visit Harvelle’s Roadhouse for a brief period before demons destroyed it, but they rarely interacted with any of the perpetually gun-cleaning hunters who frequented it. All Sam and Dean have is the Impala, primarily a private space, and rarely are other people allowed in. They do not have access to spaces in which to develop relationships with other people. That kind of interaction is limited because this show is all about Dean, Sam-and the Impala.

  It is within the fragile private space of the Impala that the brothers have ma
ny intimate and often difficult conversations-the sort of exchanges either brother would prefer to walk away from, but which are inescapable when the Impala is powering along at 100 miles an hour. Whether it’s Sam challenging Dean about his obedience to John or trying to tell him how much he means to him, or Dean insisting to Sam that he’ll save him or later that he doesn’t want to go to Hell, the Impala is the space that contains and holds them.

  Many other significant events occur with the Impala present. At the end of the pilot episode, the brothers stand over the trunk of the Impala, guns in hand, side by side. Sam, having just lost the woman he loved to another incendiary ceiling, has to choose whether to leave his “normal” life and return to hunting and his family. The camera shows us the brothers from the Impala’s point of view, waiting to support whatever decision is made. “We’ve got work to do,” Sam says as he throws his weapon in, and the episode ends as he closes the trunk.

  This scene is recreated forty-four episodes later, in “All Hell Breaks Loose (Part 2)” (2-22). Supernatural stands out in its use of a visual language more sophisticated than is usually found on TV. In particular, it uses the mirroring of scenes from previous episodes to provide a link to past events, and to indicate how characters have evolved since that earlier point, adding emotional resonance to the character arcs.

  At the end of the season two finale, the Winchesters’ mission is ostensibly complete-they have defeated the demon that killed their mom-and there is another pivotal choice to be made. As the brothers decide to carry on fighting the demons that have escaped from Hell, the scene from the first episode is replayed, again from the Impala’s point of view. This time the brothers’ positions are reversed, for in the second season it has been Dean who has repeatedly suggested that they leave hunting and so now it is Dean who tosses the Colt into the trunk, saying, “We’ve got work to do.” There is no doubt, of course, that the Impala is along for the ride.

  The Impala is also there when Sam and Dean first find out their father is alive, as they sit on her hood and listen to a voicemail message in “Phantom Traveler” (1-4). The Impala supports them as Dean shares his grief with Sam in “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things” (2-4), and as he collapses with the vision he receives from Andy in “All Hell Breaks Loose (Part 1)” (2-21). She looks on as Dean finally shares John’s secret with Sam and later when he sells his soul to the Crossroads Demon, and again when Sam kills the Crossroads Demon. The Impala helps Dean carry Sam from Cold Oak after he is killed by Jake, and watches helplessly as Dean dies in “Mystery Spot” (3-11). She shares too in the most bittersweet moment of the season three finale, when the boys recapture for a moment the memory of happier times as they sing along to Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive.” In each instance, the Impala shares in the brothers’ trials and their grief, and on rare occasions their hope.