In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural

by Supernatural. tv,

  Dean has no faith in angels because he says he has never seen one. If he wants to see an angel with his “own two eyes” all he needs to do is look at his brother. Or look in a mirror.

  CONCLUSION

  DEAN: I think the world’s going to end bloody. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight. We do have choices. I choose to go down swinging. (“Jus in Bello”)

  Humanity’s ability to make the wrong choices is balanced by our ability to make the right choices. Humans can choose to do good, to act courageously, to fight when fighting is necessary. Faced with the choice of becoming an angry spirit or moving on, humans can choose to let go and face the unknown (“Roadkill”). Ava Wilson believed that she had no choice but to embrace evil: “It’s me or them” (“All Hell Breaks Loose [Part 1]”). But Madison’s willingness to die rather than hurt others shows that there is always a choice: “This is the way you can save me. Please. I’m asking you to save me” (“Heart,” 2-17). The choice may be self-sacrifice, but Supernatural argues that humans always have a choice.

  Supernatural, like other forms of pop culture that deal with themes of good and evil, offers its viewers the hope that evil can be defeated by humans taking responsibility for their own actions and working together for good. In their choice to hunt things and save people, Dean and Sam Winchester are God’s warriors. Angels and occasional Christ-figures, Sam and Dean are also profoundly human. They make mistakes, and the occasional incredibly stupid decision, but in their determination not to allow evil to win they act as role models for all those who watch them.

  I would like to thank Wendy Crawford, Carol Davis, and especially Jennifer Dowling for commenting on earlier drafts of this essay. They also did their best to turn my Australian English into good American-any remaining mistakes are mine.

  REV. DR. AVRIL HANNAH-JONES was recently ordained by the Uniting Church in Australia and is Minister to four small congregations in rural Victoria. Her worldview is the mirror image of Dean Winchester’s: she believes absolutely in God and the powers of good; disbelieves completely in demons and personified evil; and is agnostic on the subject of angels. After hard days at work Avril has been known to console herself with the thought that at least she hasn’t had her throat cut in her own church by a demon she was trying to counsel.

  Supernatural is rife with demons, vampires, evil entities of all kinds: monsters . But who, exactly, are the monsters in this story? What gives the Winchester boys the right to kill, banish, exorcise, and indiscriminately slaughter the world’s supernatural minority? Are they themselves so much different from the things they hunt to near extinction?

  Robert T. Jeschonek examines Sam and Dean Winchester from the point of view of society’s victimized supernatural community and asks the question: Are the Winchesters slowly becoming more like the things they hunt … ?

  ROBERT T. JESCHONEK

  SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVILS

  What makes Supernatural so special? Here’s a clue: it’s the same thing that pumped up Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The X-Files.

  It’s the monsters, of course. The colorful villains who kick-start the action, chew the scenery to pieces, and threaten our way of life. They’re so scary and cool, their names are burned forever into our memories … the names of some of the wildest monsters in TV history:

  Carl Kolchak.

  Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

  Sam and Dean Winchester.

  These are the monsters who haunt the TV screens and nightmares of viewers like us-viewers who just happen to be vampires, demons, and other creatures. Monsters like Sam and Dean would be our natural enemies if we ever met them in real life, yet we’re drawn to watch them on TV. They make for great drama, serve up metaphors for our common struggles, and reenact blasts from the past. We might even identify with them a little … and as the show goes on, they begin to identify with us.

  ALL ABOUT THE DRAMA

  Real life wouldn’t make much of a TV show, would it? Who wants to watch people like us-vampires, demons, changelings, ghosts, and ghouls-going about our daily business-sucking blood, possessing housewives, shifting shapes, haunting houses, and slaughtering innocents? In other words, the same old same old? Let’s face it: even the wickedest ways can become kind of humdrum if they’re repeated day in and day out.

  When we watch Supernatural, we want the opposite. We want thrills and chills and drama as our TV creature counterparts fight for their lives against seemingly insurmountable odds.

  Which is where the monsters come in-monsters by the name of Sam and Dean Winchester. Starting with the first episode of the series, they cut a murderous swath across America. When it comes to paranormal creatures, they kill whatever they cross paths with, from Bloody Mary to the Hook Man to the Shtriga to the Rakshasa and the Crocatta. They execute a werewolf, a djinn, pagan gods, and of course any number of demons, vampires, and ghosts.

  The crimes of Sam and Dean flood Supernatural with crackling intensity. They raise the stakes in every story, as we watch their victims-our bloodsucking, hellraising kin-struggle to survive. It makes for truly operatic escapism.

  And yet, Supernatural lacks the one key element we hunger for in any good story: it almost never has a happy ending for our heroes. Each episode ends with Sam and Dean riding off down the road in their Chevy Impala, alive and well, leaving a trail of vampire dust-heaps, dead demons, or sliced and diced creatures behind them. Over and over, our own dark-side heroes lose, and the deluded “do-gooder” monsters win, charting a vicious circle of misery and injustice.

  It’s a bold choice by the show’s writers and producers, and it works. We keep coming back for more. But how can this TV series still be popular with viewers like us? How can we bear to tune in, week after week, to see our kind of people annihilated by despicable human scum? By the very prey we were born or summoned or conjured to feed on, torture, haunt, and possess?

  Maybe it’s because there’s more going on in these stories than meets the eye.

  METAPHORICALLY SPOOKING

  Supernatural episodes are more than pointless, lurid crime fiction. Creatures we care about perish-staked through the heart or exorcised or gunned down with a mystic Colt firearm-but always in service to metaphors that address thought-provoking themes.

  In Supernatural, we see demons, vampires, ghosts, gods, and ghouls face attacks by the agents of a world that doesn’t understand or appreciate them. The monsters, Sam and Dean, are enforcers representing the power elite … spreading fear, crushing dissent, and culling oppressed minorities wherever they go. Again and again, our heroes are punished by an empowered, conformist majority that infringes on their basic rights and denies them a productive role in society. Thus, Supernatural stands as a metaphor for racism, sexism, and creaturism-for oppression in all its forms. It makes us think about the discrimination we all face as minorities in a world that hates and fears us … a world that fails to recognize our cultural contributions, socioeconomic value, and importance as predators in the food chain.

  Like the most enlightening literature and entertainment, Supernatural uses metaphor to shine a light on the injustices and inequalities of our world. This adds another layer to the show’s storytelling, amplifying its power as a modern-day fable to move and inspire us.

  Supernatural also spotlights a broad canvas of universal themes. The Supernatural episode “Houses of the Holy” (2-13), in which angelic beings triggered a series of murders (talk about true-to-life monsters), spotlighted the destructive effects of misplaced faith. “Sin City” (3-4) explored the nature of sin, as Sam and Dean visited a town where demonic influence had dramatically loosened inhibitions (and made the town a better place, if you ask me). “What Is and What Should Never Be” (2-20) looked at the nature of reality itself, as Dean was tempted to live happily ever after in a wish-fulfilling alternate world conjured by a djinn (who ended up slaughtered for his trouble, of course).

  When it comes to themes and metaphors, Supernatural shares the spirit of many other series …
but one other layer of the show is absolutely unique. How many other television series can say they reenact the greatest story ever told on a regular basis? How many do it in every single episode?

  LUCIFER’S FALLEN, AND HE CAN’T GET UP

  Every episode of Supernatural reenacts what we of the vampire/demon/creature community consider the greatest story ever told: the Fall of Lucifer Morningstar, the angel who rebelled against God Himself and ended up banished to Hell, which he promptly turned into his own personal kingdom: “Once he was the most beautiful of all God’s angels, but God demanded that he bow down before man, and when he refused, God banished him” (“Sin City”).

  Like the rebellious Fallen Angel Lucifer, Supernatural’s sympathetic demons, vampires, ghosts, ghouls, and creatures strive to thrive and evolve. They repeatedly challenge the authority of society, only to be put down again and again by the ruthless Winchesters, just as God cast Lucifer out of Heaven.

  By retelling the story of the Fall of Lucifer so many times in so many ways, Supernatural reminds us of the story’s relevance to our lives today. It also reinforces the importance of hope in a hostile universe. Each week, God’s strong-arm agents, the brothers Winchester, cast out another “devil” with violent finality … but, like Lucifer, the “devils” always embrace their fate defiantly, going down fighting every time. As in Paradise Lost, they never waver in their conviction that it is “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”26

  And there’s always another “devil” next week. Comrades of the same courageous stripe rise to pick up the gauntlet and continue the struggle. This is the bright heart of the series, which keeps us coming back for more: Supernatural gives us hope that no matter how outnumbered and outgunned we might be by the human vermin infesting the world, we will never stop rising up with dignity and defiance against the forces that seek to oppose us.

  If that alone isn’t enough to inspire us, we can find even more hope in another aspect of Supernatural. We can find it in-of all places-the monsters themselves.

  REHAB FOR MONSTERS

  In the course of Supernatural, the monsters-Sam and Dean-undergo a dramatic rehabilitation. Over time, they adopt a new outlook that brings them closer to our way of thinking.

  In the beginning, the Winchesters didn’t pull any punches when it came to the supernatural. Their policy toward vampires, demons, and all such like-minded heroes of darkness was zero tolerance. Make that sub-zero tolerance.

  Then, a change came upon them. In “Bloodlust” (2-3), Sam and Dean encountered a colony of pacifist vampires. These vampires, led by a woman named Lenore, were committed to drinking the blood of animals instead of the blood of humans. A gung-ho hunter, Gordon Walker, wanted to kill the vampires anyway … but Sam and Dean wouldn’t let him. Instead of murdering the peace-loving vampire clan, the Winchesters protected them and helped them escape.

  It was a mind-blowing turning point in the series. Instead of blindly attacking and killing vampires, Sam and Dean actually sympathized with them. They rescued our bloodsucking heroes from the same breed of hunter scum that they themselves have been from the start. They even questioned past killings they’d committed:

  DEAN: Think about all the hunts we went on, Sammy, our whole lives.

  SAM: Okay.

  DEAN: What if we killed things that didn’t deserve killing? You know?

  These two seemingly heartless monsters actually felt remorse and uncertainty about their crimes … and that was only the beginning. From that moment on, the monsters-and Supernatural-were never the same.

  Though the Winchesters went on killing our kind, they experienced flashes of sympathy … even love. In “Heart” (2-17) Sam actually fell in love with a werewolf. That’s right: a werewolf. Of course, Sam did end up killing her … but only after she begged him to do it. When the deed was done, he felt misery and remorse, which aren’t his usual reactions to killing paranormal prey.

  Another supernatural character also offers the Winchester monsters a new point of view. Ruby, a demon, helped Sam and Dean on several occasions, giving them advice and fighting alongside them with an enchanted knife that killed her demonic brethren. She helped Sam and Dean’s ally, Bobby, rebuild the mystic Colt (“Sin City”) and tried to help Sam use his dormant psychic powers to save Dean from going to Hell (“No Rest for the Wicked,” 3-16). She also changed Sam and Dean’s understanding of demons when she told them she was once human … and explained that the same applies to all demons (“Malleus Maleficarum,” 3-9). Sam and Dean still couldn’t bring themselves to trust her, but they did at least realize that demons were complex creatures with souls that were once as human as their own.

  What a change! In the early days, Sam and Dean looked at the world in black and white; they saw everything in terms of absolutes, of “good” and “evil.” It’s to be expected, perhaps, given their lifelong training as hunters and the loss of their mother to a supernatural threat; they had to boil the world down to clearly defined opposites just to survive. Over time, though, Sam and Dean have developed a more nuanced perspective. They have come to see that paranormal beings and creatures can have many facets, not all of them destructive. They have realized, as we of the alternate morality set have always known, that the world is painted in shades of gray rather than stark black and white.

  It’s a mature worldview, and it’s more than just a new way of looking at the enemy. It’s a new way for Sam and Dean to look at themselves … because ultimately, the two of them are becoming as supernatural as the creatures they hunt.

  SUPERNATURAL EVOLUTION

  Supernatural doesn’t stop with Sam and Dean feeling sympathetic toward vampires, werewolves, demons, and creatures. The show actually makes Sam and Dean more like them.

  Sam was the first to take this step up the evolutionary ladder. Beginning in season one of the show, he manifested psychic powers-precognition and telekinesis. In effect, he became a supernatural being, no longer purely human … and his link to the supernatural continues to intensify.

  In season two, the pace of Sam’s evolution accelerated. His powers grew stronger and more active, and he discovered he was part of a group of paranormally endowed humans. Sam was drawn to these kindred spirits and eventually pitted against them-his nemesis, the Yellow-Eyed Demon Azazel, wanted the last man or woman standing to lead his doomsday army. Azazel, it turned out, was behind Sam’s change all along.

  And this is the greatest irony. Not only is Sam touched by the supernatural. Not only has he gradually become more like the paranormally empowered creatures he and his brother routinely murder. It turns out he was supernatural all along.

  Azazel dosed Sam with his hellish blood when he was a baby. That means the blood of a demon runs in Sam’s veins and has been there since Supernatural’s start. From Sam’s first scene in episode one of the series, he has been part-demon.

  So one of the Winchesters, at least, is more closely connected to the supernatural than he, or we, ever imagined. Sam’s psychic powers fell dormant until the very end of season three, but he still can’t reverse his fundamental link to demonkind. He is a product of supernatural evolution.

  And soon enough, his brother, Dean, changed too.

  Dean’s evolution happened more slowly but was no less profound. It started in season two’s “All Hell Breaks Loose (Part 2)” (2-22) when Sam was killed by one of his paranormal brethren and Dean sold his own soul-and all but one year of his life-to the Crossroads Demon in exchange for Sam’s resurrection.

  In the year of life that Dean had left, he faced growing dread at the prospect of going to Hell. Various demons told him what to expect, and he didn’t like what he heard … especially from Ruby. Anyone who spends enough time in Hell will become a demon, she said … and Dean could be no exception.

  RUBY: It might take centuries, but sooner or later Hell will burn away your humanity. Every hellbound soul, every one, turns into something else. Turns you into us. So yeah, yeah, you can count on it.

  When th
e deal came due, a Hell Hound dragged Dean into Hell itself (“No Rest for the Wicked”), where, according to Ruby, he would eventually be transformed into a demon. Once again, a Winchester has taken a personal evolutionary leap into the supernatural. Dean, like his brother, will be infused with demonic influence. A monster will be reborn as one of us.

  It’s a beautiful twist. It’s the full flower of Supernatural’s promise, the ultimate expression of hope in what at first appears to be a grim and hopeless show. If monstrous, murderous humans like Sam and Dean can become demons, maybe there is hope that everyone can find enlightenment and redemption on the dark side.

  FRIENDS OF THE DEVILS

  Clearly, when it comes to Supernatural, the monsters-Sam and Dean Winchester-make the show. They give Supernatural the high-octane drama that thrills us, fuel metaphors that enlighten us, and reenact historic touchstones that inspire us. In spite of the evil they do, they develop a more nuanced, balanced outlook toward our kind and come to see the world in shades of gray instead of unrealistic black and white. They become more like us all the time, more like the supernatural creatures they’ve been hunting, making us-against our better judgment-care about what happens to them. Sam and Dean go from being two-dimensional, unsympathetic menaces to fully realized, multidimensional characters who intrigue us on multiple levels. They are characters we might not mind sharing a full-moon rampage or a goblet of blood or a damned soul or a haunch of human flesh with.

  Does this mean we care too much about these characters? Does their appeal foster an unhealthy interest in villains … characters who still, for all their sympathetic qualities, wallow in violence and antisocial behavior toward the demons, vampires, witches, werewolves, shapeshifters, tricksters, and other creatures who make up our community?