In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural

by Supernatural. tv,

  Season six of Buffy featured a trio of villains-a group of young men who fit the stereotype of the sci-fi nerd. They collected action figures, hung out in a basement, attempted to dabble in the occult, spoke with exaggerated self-importance and earnestness, and dreamed of the day when they might have sex with a girl. The characters were intended to be, for the majority of their appearances, read as comic figures, but were eventually revealed to be extremely dangerous.

  Supernatural’s season one episode “Hell House” featured a pair of characters who adhered to almost exactly the same template as Buffy’s three. They collected action figures, hung out in a trailer, attempted to dabble in the occult, spoke with exaggerated self-importance and earnestness, and dreamed of the day when they might have sex with a girl.

  In one scene, as the pair attempted to gather their thoughts, one reminded the other of their mantra: “What Would Buffy Do?”

  This, then, strongly suggests what Supernatural really sees Buffy’s legacy as: bumbling, inept, absurd male characters out of their depth in the world-no matter what role these characters were put into within Buffy or what other nuances and strengths various depictions of male characters on the earlier show may have had.

  Buffy gave the world a story in which the traditional roles of masculine hero figures were questioned, and Supernatural responded not only by attempting to restore those pre-Buffy tropes, but also by putting the girl back in her grave and leaving her there.

  JO HARVELLE

  Just as “Winchester” conjures images of guns and mysterious houses, and did so even before it was associated with Supernatural, so too is “Harvelle” a name laden with meaning: it’s Old English for “warrior woman.” Jo Harvelle was a young barmaid at a roadhouse diner frequented by demon hunters, and her life intersected with those of Sam and Dean shortly after their father’s death at the beginning of season two.

  The original name for the character in the first script drafts was Alex, and both “Jo” and “Alex” share the common trait of being androgynous names. Carol Clover, who studied gender in the horror genre in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws, observed that the “final girl”-that is, the only one to survive the slaughter in a fright-fest-usually has a name of this sort, listing off Stevie, Marti, Terry, Laurie, Sam, Stretch, Will, Joey, and Max as examples from the movies of the seventies and eighties. This pattern has continued into the era of self-aware, referential horror to which Supernatural belongs: Scream gave us Sidney, Final Destination has Clear. Armed with a surname ready to fight, and a first name-be it Alex or Jo-ready to survive, this character appeared primed to take on whatever the writers threw at her.

  After the name shift to Jo, no two creators could seem to agree on what “Jo” was short for-her blog, accessed through the season one DVDs, listed her name as Josephine, as did the comic-book series Supernatural: Origins, while the sixth episode of season two, “Hunted,” had her mother refer to her as “Joanna Beth.” Her age, likewise, was never really pinned down: Origins had Ellen remark that Dean and Jo were the same age, giving her a birth date sometime in 1979, while her blog put her birth date as April 7, 1985.

  Such are the pitfalls of multiple-author texts. Rather than undermining the integrity of a character like Jo, however, such discrepancies create a different kind of “truth”: a legend. Supernatural deals primarily with a world shaped by folklore, hearsay, and contradiction-the information that all hunters rely on and live by is information they heard secondhand, which may or may not be true. As part of that world, it’s appropriate for Jo’s past to be a little shady, a little mysterious.

  In the first drafts of “Everyone Loves a Clown,” Ellen referred to Jo as “Annie Oakley.” Annie Oakley is one of the key female figures in the rich American frontier history on which Supernatural draws on so strongly, a markswoman who was nicknamed “Little Sure Shot” for her incredible aim. To invoke such a figure in Jo allowed Supernatural to make room for a strong woman within its own mythology. After the sexism of the first season, it seemed like the show was finally going to start getting it right.

  The Annie Oakley line never made it into the aired episode.

  Jo’s blog showed this same pattern, of a brave beginning giving way to a cop-out. The first blog, which lasted only a few days before it was replaced by a very different version, was the diary of a young woman at ease with herself and her place in the world. The entry for March 18, 2005, read in part,

  I’m not sure why I decided to add my own journal [to the blog site]. I mean, I guess one thing that struck me as I read was the fact that there are almost no other women out there hunting, or at least writing about it on the site… . Maybe these entries will help someone along their path, or at least comfort them a little.

  Other entries, copied into the blog from Jo’s childhood diaries, tell of her friendships with John Winchester and Caleb, a hunter from season one, and season two’s Gordon.

  The writings of previously voiceless and disenfranchised groups are often vitally important historical documents, as they provide researchers the opportunities to put absent pieces back into the puzzle of the past. The first blog of Jo Harvelle was, for the mythology of Supernatural, just such a document. Actively and deliberately so, in fact: Jo set out to become a visible hunter in the community, a public voice with her own connections-heretofore unmentioned by the men involved-in the world … and she set out to do it because she couldn’t find other women who’d done it already. If nobody else was going to stick themselves in the story and say, “Hey, women are fighting demons too! We’re not all stuck down in graves or being tied up and killed!”, then she’d do it herself.

  The March 18 entry of the blog, along with the references to Jo’s friendships with John and Caleb, were deleted within days, and in the four scant episodes in which Jo appeared she ended up both trapped in a coffin underground and tied up at knife-point, and each time she was rescued from certain death by the Winchesters. Begun with the best of intentions, the character had rapidly become everything she’d originally stood against.

  The second version of Jo’s blog contains some of the same backstory-though greatly reduced and edited-but a wholly different story of Jo’s first love.

  The first blog had contained the tentative, ultimately tragic story of Jo’s hunting partnership with a young man named Rick:

  I’d gone out on a hunt with him once before, just a quick day job one city over. But then, over the holidays … the hunt was supposed to be me, Rick, and Jake Reilly, but two days into it Jake was called away-a spirit he thought he’d taken care of was back and he had to go deal with it. So Rick and I had to handle the case… . I can’t say much about it, but it was complicated, it involved a demon and an exorcism. I’m sure Rick has seen much worse, he said as much … but, he also said he needed me there, because it was definitely a two-man job. And I’ve never felt as in sync with another hunter as I did with him… . [W]hen we finished off the spirit, and saw that the victim was gonna be okay, it was such an amazing high. And Rick felt it too. One thing led to another, and, well… .

  Like I said, just the facts. And the fact is, Rick and I are dating now. We told my Mom about it and everything. I think she’s pretty happy about it… . Rick is a damn good hunter and, like I said, the guy you’d want watching your back, and Mom always likes to know that someone’s got my back. I think we’re gonna be going on out on a lot of trips together.

  Nine months after they began, however, Rick went out on a solo hunt and never returned. Jo version 1, while sad, seemed to cope with the loss relatively well-it’s a fact of the hunting life that people die.

  Jo version 2.0, however, had a different experience with Rick in the re-written blog:

  He’s been coming in the bar for a while, and we always got along fine. Over the holidays … well, he started coming into the bar more often and I caught his eye looking at me. It was the kind of look you don’t forget and I don’t know why the possibility that Rick could be after anything besides a hunt had n
ever occurred to me. It was awkward at first, but I sort of liked the attention. I started paying attention to what I said around him, what he was looking at when he was stopping by, and finally, well, one thing led to another, and… .

  Like I said, just the facts. And the fact is, Rick and I are dating now. We didn’t want anyone else in the roadhouse to know, especially my Mom, she’d flip if she knew I was dating a hunter. But she’s got eyes and ears and one time called us out on it … but we both lied. I know she doesn’t believe me and it’s getting hard to hide so many things from her. The last thing she wants is me falling for a hunter, but who knows what’s best for me anyway? Me or my mom?

  There would be nothing wrong, of course, with introducing this revisional, less mature Jo into the show, rather than the original version … if the show had then taken the time and effort to allow her character to grow.

  Fan reaction was volatile on the subject of Jo from day one, with most of the nicknames for the character being unprintable here. Rather than stick with the plan for season two as it was originally envisioned, the creative team bowed and scraped to placate fans as fast as they could, with executive producer Eric Kripke telling TV Guide, “While we’re on the subject of the roadhouse characters … we read the boards, we pay attention, and we take your concerns seriously… . [W]e’re not going to pursue anything on the show that’s not working.”30

  Seven months later, again talking to TV Guide, Kripke said of Jo that “we feel we’ve learned from that mistake… . [W]e conceived the character wrong.”31 One can’t help but wonder which particular conception of the character Kripke considered a mistake.

  Another of the show’s executive producers, Peter Johnson, went so far as to promise that future printings of the old issues of Supernatural: Origins would include no mention of Jo whatsoever, effectively excising her from the mythology completely-writing her back out of the history she’d tried to reclaim her place in. Johnson went on to say of Jo and her unceremonious expulsion from the show that “that issue remains dead and buried.”

  You can take the girl out of the grave, but in the end Supernatural always puts her right back in her place, six feet under.

  Jo’s mother, Ellen, is a strong and fascinating female character in her own right, a tough yet maternal single mother with a mixed opinion of the world of hunting. Fans responded more positively to her than to Jo, leading Eric Kripke to joke that perhaps Dean should “score some hot MILF action!” MILF is, of course, slang for “Mom I’d Like to Fuck.” While it’s a positive step to see an older female character perceived as remaining sexy and attractive to younger potential lovers, Kripke did not choose the most respectful term he might have to describe that. In a world where women seem to be either minxes or mothers, Ellen is described as both minx and mom and nothing more.

  The season two finale saw Ellen’s character arc pulled up sharply, with the bar she owned burned to the ground and her role reduced to nothing but a hostage: in the climactic showdown between good and evil, telekinetic villain Jake Talley forces Ellen to turn her gun on herself, assuring Sam and Dean that if they make a move, “You’ll be mopping up skull before you get a shot off,” and referring to Ellen as “sweetheart.”

  Rather than a character in her own right, Ellen is ultimately a pawn and passive catalyst within the stories of the male characters. This categorization for women on the show would become even more evident in season three, but was rarely more blatantly evident than in this shift from dame to damsel for one of the few stereotype-breaking females the show had managed to leave alive beyond their first appearances.

  In the end it’s Meg, the female demon punished for her agency through multiple gory deaths in season one, who teaches Jo that she’ll never have a place of power in the Winchesters’ story. Back from Hell and possessing Sam, Meg pays a visit to the bar Jo now uses as a home base for hunting (still unable to get the message that women’s stories have no public place on Supernatural, Jo’s hunting journal was then taking the form of postcards she sends home to the roadhouse). Meg ties Jo up and threatens her with a knife, telling her that she’s nothing but “a schoolgirl” and “bait.” To be tied up was the final act of violence a man inflicted on Meg before killing her last time, when the Winchesters bound and beat her before her fatal exorcism, she simply sneered at Dean that it was “kind of a turn-on, you hitting a girl.”

  Now, having crawled back from Hell, Meg’s taken over a male body as her human form; she’s not gonna make the same mistake again. Girls don’t stand a chance, not in Supernatural’s world.

  Dean saves Jo, Meg shoots Dean, Jo saves Dean. As Dean prepares to go after Meg, Jo has her final moments on the show.

  “I’ll call you,” Dean promises.

  “No, you won’t,” she answers, not sounding all that dismayed about it. And that’s the end of that.

  MARY BORSELLINO is a writer living in Australia. She likes comic books and loud music and other things which grown-ups are supposed to be too clever for, such as obnoxiously lurid hair dyes and staying up past bedtime. You can find interviews she’s done with the cast and crew of Supernatural at http://monkeywench.net/supernatural, and her e-mail is mizmary@gmail.com.

  On the surface Supernatural appears to be completely male-dominated: two good-looking guys in a muscle car drive around Smalltown, USA, shooting, stabbing, and blowing things up as they search for their missing father and vengeance against the demon that ruined their lives.

  Why, then, does Supernatural have such a huge female fan base? Are the aforementioned two good-looking guys in the muscle car the only reason women viewers could possibly have for tuning in?

  Jacob Clifton examines gender in Supernatural, and how an ostensibly male-oriented show can ultimately be grounded in the feminine.

  JACOB CLIFTON

  SPREADING DISASTER

  Gender in the Supernatural Universe

  I: KANSAS

  (Three men watch as their house burns, huddling together on the hood of their car. The youngest is six months old.)

  Every dramatic universe, just like ours, has its laws. They define the tone and intent of the story as much as they are affected by it, because they describe what is possible. The rules of a given show are its narrative physics; they also describe what it is that keeps viewers coming back. A show that falls off the beam, so to speak, has let its viewers down by not obeying its own rules. Either by making sense with the stuff that happened before, or by retroactively redefining the laws themselves, each new episode of a show has the duty of integrity. (The revelation, in the show’s final seasons, that the power of the Slayer comes from a not-so-divine source, for example, puts Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s ethics on shout in a way that could hardly have been presumed from the start, but definitely fit with the show’s overall ethos.) Everything prior in the story must agree with new events, or else they must be explained in the stories to come. Otherwise, you’ll have your viewers jumping ship.

  Coming-of-age dramas, like other basic forms of storytelling-fairy tales and classic mythologies, for example-bear a further responsibility to their own integrity. Every Young Adult novel or teen show is also a mystery story, because its entertainment derives from the fact that the characters are learning about the particular societal rules of their universes: they are stories about negotiating the physics of the narrative, and we’re along for the ride. While every Hero’s Journey is, in part, about finding one’s place in the world, that journey is most explicit in teen and coming-of-age stories, because that searching and negotiating are just as central to the teen experience outside the narrative realm. No matter how old we are, every one of us can name books, stories, or television series that helped us to understand the world and our place in it. They take their position in our personal mythology and help to guide us through the mysteries of the real world: life, love, labor, and happiness.

  Supernatural teen drama, by extension, is able to take those queasy subconscious forces and contradictions and represent them ex
plicitly, as outside forces, in the life of the show itself. Myth and classic tropes, which linger in the margins of all fiction, are brought to the fore. Two clear examples, which have perhaps defined supernatural teen drama for modern television, are Smallville and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In both cases, the central characters exist in opposition to an often confusing, antagonistic universe: the characters learn how best to adapt to and, more importantly, understand the rules of these worlds. Teen drama characters conquer inner demons, and learn to negotiate between their inner desires and potential (often signified by actual supernatural power), and outward social acceptance. But in the supernatural genre, those demons aren’t always internal, and those potential powers are a bit more dramatic.

  In these sorts of shows, natural psychological responses are mirrored by unnatural occurrences in the world itself. To explore the psychic and mythic content in these shows-and their instructive value-we must begin by looking at the overall qualities, positive, negative, and neutral, of these worlds, and the ways in which they differ from our own. Every story contains multiple points of entry for the viewer or reader: Are you Buffy? Willow? Xander? Giles? Or none of these? The challenge can also become finding a place to stand in a story that seems to resist you as an individual. Does the nature of a given story, for a most basic example, privilege a masculine or feminine viewpoint? What gendered qualities does it most value in its heroes? Who is it that defines the characteristics of this world? Who is it that defines what a “hero” in a given story must do or say, or avoid? And how can we align these criteria with real masculine or feminine experience?

  Another way to ask these questions can be found within the narrative of the shows themselves: Which of the characters within them are representative of and identified with the ego-the personhood of the show and viewer-and which represent the shadow, the twisted mirrors of the main cast, the Other? In cultural criticism, this defining point of view is often referred to as “gaze.” It’s a way of describing the central unifying perspective of the show (or book, or writer) in and of itself; in the terms we’re describing now you could call it the gender of the show itself.