In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural

by Supernatural. tv,

  And Sammy is that hero, even when he’s also being a selfish, emo bitch. Whether he’s shooting Dean in the chest with rock salt (bitch) or using his own body as a flesh-and-bone shield between relative strangers and a Wendigo (hero); whether he’s in a nose-to-nose shouting match with John (bitch) or shooting John in the leg instead of the head, thus sacrificing his shot at revenge (literally) in lieu of saving his father’s life (hero, not that John will appreciate it, because family never appreciates your sacrifices the way they should, do they?). Sammy is human. Sammy is not an aspirational state of being. Sammy is you.

  So to the point of it all: real heroes (again, storytelling or otherwise) are just selfish, emo bitches like the rest of us. They’re people on a journey, doing the best they can to overcome their own flaws and failings, trying to survive their losses and mitigate the damage done by events beyond their control to the end of maybe finding a Jess (or a Mary) along the way to keep them warm on cold nights and take their turn doing the dishes.

  Sammy is one of those guys. That’s the burden of being Sammy: being real.

  And not being Dean.

  Dean is who we want to be; Sammy is who we are. Dean is our self-perception; Sammy is our self-reality. Dean is a storyteller’s hero myth; Sammy is the reality about which every story is told, even if other people star in them on occasion to the perception that it’s all about Dean, when it’s really all about the burden of being Sammy.

  DODGER WINSLOW is an enigma wrapped in a riddle dressed in a conundrum. When she’s not being evasive or mysterious, she’s usually writing or rattling on about the much maligned and dramatically misunderstood John Winchester.

  Few of us out in the “real world” are likely to begin a conversation, “So this killer truck …” as Dean does in the season one episode “Route 666.” Even Sam comments, “Our lives are weird, man,” in season two’s “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things.” But while killer trucks, demons, werewolves, reapers, and death omens are just another day at the office for our heroes, Sam and Dean’s lives are full of things we ordinary folk would term “supernatural.”

  Randall M. Jensen takes a look at horror and the supernatural in Supernatural and how the Winchesters’ perceptions differ from those of us who remain blissfully unaware of what’s really out there in the dark.

  RANDALL M. JENSEN

  WHAT’S SUPERNATURAL ABOUT SUPERNATURAL?

  Supernatural begins like any number of horror stories. Once upon a time, not too long ago, an ordinary family lived in an ordinary house on an ordinary street somewhere in Kansas. John and Mary and their two boys, Dean and Sam. Very ordinary names. But then, one night, something extraordinary happens. In the dark, with the lights flickering, and with building tension and slightly spooky music playing in the background, we glimpse a shadowy figure, we hear a bloodcurdling scream, and then, as we watch with John, we see something impossible: Mary sprawls on the ceiling, bleeding, and she spontaneously bursts into flames. The ordinary is gone forever and life for the Winchesters will never be the same.

  Although it would be difficult (and pointless) to try to give a precise and universal definition of horror, it’s worth recalling Freud’s observation in his essay “The Uncanny” that “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” If we make the plausible assumption that Freud’s notion of the uncanny lies somewhere near the heart of horror fiction, we may think of horror as what happens when the familiar meets or becomes the unfamiliar. Horror stories involve something strange, out of place, unseen or unknown, something that makes our skin crawl and our spines tingle. We all know the delicious dread good horror can provoke in us. But it’s also significant that this thing, this disturbing anomaly, is an unexpected intrusion into our everyday world. Horror needs the familiar as well as the unfamiliar. Now, the horrific element doesn’t have to be something supernatural, since even something perfectly natural can be uncanny. Think of what a good storyteller or filmmaker can do with something as simple as the dark. However, perhaps unfairly, the books and movies most of us call to mind if we’re asked to list well-known horror stories probably do involve the supernatural. And since our show’s very title is Supernatural, we’re especially interested in horror that contains a healthy dose of the supernatural. So let’s spend some time thinking about the way the supernatural functions in our favorite show and perhaps we’ll learn something about the distinctive nature of the show’s stories as horror.

  SUPERNATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL

  Supernatural depicts a world that’s very different from the real one. The most glaring difference is the world’s population: demons, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, reapers, and other strange creatures roam the planet with us. But there’s an even deeper difference, because the Winchesters’ world runs by a different set of rules, too. Dead isn’t dead, not really: you can bring the dead back to life, if you know how. And corpses can move around by themselves, even when they’re so decrepit they’ve got no earthly right to do so. Magic works. Lines of chalk on the floor have incredible causal influence over unimaginably powerful beings. Salt isn’t just something you put in your soup. And so on. The world of Supernatural is, well, supernatural. But what exactly do Sam and Dean mean when they call something supernatural? How do they know whether or not they’re dealing with something supernatural? Let’s hunt down the answers to these questions.

  Nearly every episode of Supernatural is jam-packed full of supernatural entities and events, whether they’re puzzling, frightening, gruesome, thrilling, humorous, friendly, or just downright weird. The one exception seems to be the first season’s “The Benders” (1-15), in which Sam and Dean come up against a sadistic backwoods family who are, in Sam’s words, “just people.” There’s nothing supernatural-in a certain sense-about them, but no doubt we’d agree with Sam that there’s something decidedly unnatural about human beings that live as they do. Other than this standout episode, it’s wall-to-wall demons, monsters, and spirits. Of course, this is because Sam and Dean are constantly on the lookout for their kind of prey, whether by scanning the papers for bizarre stories, talking to Bobby or Ellen or Ash or the other hunters at the Roadhouse, or trying to decipher their dad’s journal. What exactly are they looking for? To begin with, something that’s odd, unusual, apparently inexplicable. Someone has seen something that’s literally unbelievable. Or somebody winds up dead and it just isn’t clear how. This might be a job for the Winchesters! But then again, it might not be.

  What counts as supernatural in our show’s world? The answer to this question turns out to be surprisingly interesting. When Sam and Dean are searching for a potential hunt, they often use the label “supernatural” to characterize what they’re after. They don’t want to cross state lines only to find out that a story is based on some really bizarre coincidence and there’s no quarry for them to hunt down. They’re after something that’s genuinely supernatural, not just something strange or freaky. Yet vampire nests and demon possessions are very much a part of the world they inhabit. They’re not unusual at all in their lives, and in that sense, they’re perfectly natural-at least for the Winchester family. But in this sense, what’s natural to you and me and what’s natural to Sam and Dean aren’t the same thing, not by a long shot.

  For example, is a haunting a natural or supernatural phenomenon? To us, the answer’s clear: What could be more supernatural than that? (I’ll assume that, like me, you haven’t had an encounter with Casper.) However, what if we were to experience hauntings on a regular basis as Sam and Dean do? At some point, wouldn’t we come to regard hauntings as natural in some important respect? And maybe we would come to think that formerly we were mistaken to see them as supernatural. If so, we’d be guided by the thought that what’s supernatural is simply what doesn’t or can’t happen in nature. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the philosopher David Hume defines a miracle as “a violation of the laws of nature,” and this seems
to be close to the idea we’re after in defining the supernatural. Now, maybe a miracle is a good supernatural event. Not too many people would cry miracle upon seeing a scary, fugly, god-animated scarecrow, but they would definitely think that something supernatural was going on. In our world, creatures such as pagan gods are the stuff of imagination rather than creatures that are found out there in the biosphere. That’s why, by our account, they’re supernatural beings. But in Supernatural, they are presented as if they’re normal residents of the world, even if such beings tend to keep it on the down-low, sometimes pretending to be just another particularly annoying suburban couple who are just a bit too happy about the holidays. In the world Eric Kripke has created, there just are demons, ghosts, and so on, even if most folks aren’t in the know about this. Such creatures are rather like the bizarre species that live deep in caves, on the ocean floor, or in some forgotten jungle: they’re unknown to most of us, but they’re out there and we can learn about their characteristic traits. What we regard as the supernatural realm is for Sam and Dean a part of nature. The supernatural has thus been “naturalized.”

  After all, Sam and Dean enter many haunted houses and meet and dispose of many spooky “supernatural” creatures. It’s precisely this piling up of experiences of the (formerly) supernatural realm that leads them to alter their picture of the world. Whereas a single monster is a horrifying and seemingly impossible interruption of our reality, thousands of monsters belonging to dozens of species show that we’re dealing with a new reality. Not only do Sam and Dean see the world differently than most everyone around them, but in an important way, they even live in a different world, a world with a different nature. If they were to think and act as they do without having had such ample experience of ghosts, demons, and the like, they’d simply be screwballs, out of touch with the real world, rather like the two guys who eventually become the “Ghostfacers.” At first, those losers believed in ghosts without any experience at all to confirm their beliefs. But since even idiots can get lucky, they just happened to be right! Sam and Dean are different. For them, the appearance of a ghost is not at all something that goes against everything they’ve experienced in their lives. Quite the opposite, really. Again, the supernatural has become the natural.

  Why then do Sam and Dean use the label “supernatural” in the way they do? What’s going on here, I think, is that Sam and Dean are using “supernatural” in our sense, or more precisely, in the sense assumed by most people in the alternate universe that is the world of Supernatural. It means “something the uninitiated think isn’t ‘real,’ i.e., isn’t part of nature.” We (and most of the folks in Sam and Dean’s world) don’t believe in ghosts. And so we regard them as supernatural. Sam and Dean simply agree to talk as most people do because it’s easier to talk that way. As the eighteenth-century British philosopher George Berkeley once said in a different context (in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge), we can “speak with the vulgar, but think with the learned.” We do still talk about the sun rising and setting, after all, even though we realize that isn’t what is actually happening. And even the most reductionistic neuroscientist might ask you what’s on your mind or talk about finding a kindred spirit, even though she doesn’t for a second believe in immaterial minds or spirits. In much that way, Sam and Dean call a lot of what they encounter supernatural even though it plainly isn’t, not in their world. Such ambiguities are fairly common in language; sometimes it avoids confusion to sort them out.

  On a few occasions, however, the Winchester brothers run into something that seems to be supernatural from their own point of view. Here I’m thinking of two episodes in particular, “Faith” (1-12) and “Houses of the Holy” (2-13). In these storylines, Sam and Dean find themselves faced with something that simply doesn’t fit into their view of things, wondering whether to believe in something they haven’t ever seen before. A mere man who has the power to heal? Or, even more dramatically, an angel? As far as Sam and Dean know, in spite of all they’ve seen, things like this just don’t happen, and thus they don’t fit into their view of the world. From all the time they’ve spent hunting, from all the knowledge they’ve gained from their dad’s journal and from other hunters, Sam and Dean have put together a kind of “science” of hunting, a kind of expanded “biology,” I suppose, with demonology and the like in addition to entomology, zoology, botany, etc. It’s sketchy, to be sure, and focused pretty intently on figuring out how to kill the species they study. But this quasi-scientific picture of the world gives them a conception of what is natural-what follows the rules-and what doesn’t. And angels don’t have a place in their expanded science, at least not so far. They aren’t excluded by definition, either, of course. Sam and Dean might “discover” angels-or some other hitherto unknown variety of creature-much as a field biologist might discover a new species. Perhaps someday they will need to add some chapters to the John Winchester journal, or even to expand it into an introductory demonology text. For now, however, the “bright side” of what we think of as the supernatural realm just isn’t part of Sam and Dean’s world. For them, the unknown and the genuinely supernatural are to be found here. Demons, unfortunately, are as natural as can be. Angels? Well, the jury is still out.

  Interestingly, our two heroes react differently when confronted with the possibility of something that’s truly supernatural. Sam seems quite ready to flirt with belief in angels, as he began to do in “Houses of the Holy.” Dean, on the other hand, infamously remarked that he’d just as soon believe in unicorns that ride silver moonbeams and shoot rainbows out of their asses. Dean believes in what he can see-in what he has seen. And he hasn’t seen any angels, or even met anyone else who claims to have seen one. His view is that angels are on his “bull-crap list” and that this so-called angel was just another demon-a vengeful spirit, to be precise. The real explanation of this supposed “supernatural” happening (i.e., an angelic manifestation) was a perfectly natural one within Dean’s ’verse: it’s just another damned demon. Of course, as we know, he was right.

  Since Sam and Dean are different in so many ways-musical tastes, dating habits, vocabulary, life ambitions, and so on-it’s no big surprise that they reacted differently on this score. But why, exactly? Dean resists believing in angels (or in God) because of all the horror he’s seen, and in particular because his mother believed that guardian angels watch over us and yet nothing protected her from the Yellow-Eyed Demon. As a result, Dean is angry and bitter. To believe in some supernatural force of good is to believe in something that let his mother die a horrible death. Dean is the kind of conflicted agnostic who doubts God’s existence and yet at the same time is pissed off at him for not existing. If evidence of angelic activity started to appear, at this point Dean seems like he’d be pretty committed to explaining it away. Or he’d claim to be rejecting it, that is, both to himself and to others. But sometimes loud and angry denials indicate that someone actually believes what he is denying, even though he doesn’t want to. Whatever the case may be, it would take a lot to overcome Dean’s resistance. For him, it isn’t just a matter of following the evidence trail, whatever he might say to the contrary. He’s going to stick like glue to his current picture of the world, and not just because he’s a die-hard rationalist.

  Sam, on the other hand, wants so much to believe at least in part because he hopes he can be saved from his own dark destiny. He needs help, so he hopes there is someone out there who can help him. And sometimes he wants to believe because it means he might be able to save Dean, whether from his heart problems in “Faith” or from his impending doom in season three. Sam seems to believe even when the evidence is pretty flimsy, like he’s desperately searching for a sign. There was no good reason for him to buy the angel story in “Houses of the Holy,” when there was a perfectly ordinary and natural (for Sam and Dean!) explanation of what was going on. Whereas Dean’s mind is closed a bit too tight, perhaps Sam’s view of the world is a bit too open. If Dean’s too cynica
l at times, Sam is a bit too gullible.

  Of course, Sam and Dean’s attitudes on this aren’t static. At times Sam has seemed to lose any faith or hope he might have had, especially when it seemed his fate-or Dean’s-was inevitable. Dean has doubted his skepticism at times, too, although not because he got touched by an angel. On one occasion, it was simply a piece of steel that landed in the right place at the right time, fortuitously impaling a bad guy (in “Houses of the Holy” again). An incredible coincidence, and it could be just that: odd, really serendipitous, but not supernatural. Yet surprisingly it made Dean wonder if there was some providential hand behind it all. Objectively speaking, the impaling wasn’t any more compelling as evidence than the angelic manifestations were. Yet Dean began to believe in something beyond what he’s seen, something that’s actually supernatural. Why? Perhaps because he finally wanted to. We got another look at this more hopeful side of Dean in “Long-Distance Call” (3-14), when he was the one who was too quick to believe something that he probably shouldn’t have believed: that his dead dad was on the phone.

  No matter how weird a world might be, conceptually there will always be room for something that defies its limits, something that’s truly supernatural. We can learn some pretty interesting things about people-about Sam and Dean, for example-by examining their attitudes toward this supernatural realm. It’s also worth pondering how different kinds of horror stories depict the supernatural.

  SUPERNATURAL AS HORROR

  Supernatural seems to be part of what we might think of as a new trend in horror fiction. Classic horror tales describe how something strange and forbidding breaks into our everyday world. As Noel Carroll puts it in “The Nature of Horror,” characters in horror tales “regard the monsters that they encounter as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order.” Notice how this definition seems to tie the horror genre to the supernatural, as defined above. Some particular thing shows up that just doesn’t obey the rules; it defies our categories and so we don’t know how to think about it. In fact, this is one way of thinking about what a monster is: something singular that doesn’t fit our view of the world. A number of more recent horror narratives, including Supernatural, seem importantly different. These stories naturalize their horrific elements, making them familiar and, at least in some sense, normal and natural, so that horror somehow becomes part of the mundane world. Although we should be wary of offering exact classifications here, and there is certainly room for a more detailed analysis, we can divide such stories into two broad categories without exercising too much force.