Early in season three, we encounter another a client whose uncontrolled subconscious, as with the girl from “Hook Man,” threatens to overwhelm everyone around her: a little girl playing out the grimmest of fairy tales. This is an important thematic element for Sam, whose representation as the spiritual half of Everyman brings with it the responsibility not only to confront the darkness, but to master or assimilate it. Unlike Dean, who spends the series fighting demons, Sam is set upon a harder path: to find a way to coexist with darkness itself. The show’s curious and sometimes virulent homophobia rears its head momentarily and memorably in this context, as Dean taunts Sam for his knowledge of these tales. Any cultural or folklore expert can tell you that being conversant with fairy tales is not a sign of the mental illness the show makes of homosexuality, but it is a substantial advantage in hunting. The connections Dean seems to draw between femininity, weakness, and homosexuality are essential in his ongoing project to train Sam in masculinity, whether or not those connections are even rational. The manhood game is as much about exclusion of non-masculine qualities as it is about absorbing or performing masculine qualities and acts.
This struggle-Dean versus Sam’s alignment with darkness and the feminine-plays out as Dean threatens again and again to kill Ruby, against Sam’s protests, and through Sam’s near-obsessive need not only to save Dean from his fate but to ease his pain on their travels. Sam’s nurturing qualities are both helpful for the boys’ survival, and a hindrance in Dean’s intention of making sure Sam is strong enough to survive without him. Watching Dean combat his own association with the demonic world for the first time, Sam is pushed into accepting his own implication in the world and systems of the supernatural. As Dean is dreaming of his double, and retrieving his own will to live and escape the demonic deal, Sam dreams only of rescuing Dean. But this struggle is not without consequence: on several season three occasions, even Dean is surprised by Sam’s newfound willingness to kill when necessary, even when the perpetrators are all too human. There’s a beauty in the irony: Dean is just as offended when Sam becomes “harder”-more masculine, in Dean’s construction-as when Sam shows signs of femininity or passivity.
There is also a motif throughout in which Sam requires Dean’s grounded presence to keep from being carried off by darkness altogether. Whenever the boys split up, Sam loses his anchor to the real world: he meets Meg, or becomes entangled in the machinations of Azazel. There are also positive benefits to these frequent abductions: it’s Sam’s kidnapping by the leader of a nonviolent vampire collective that readjusts the boys’ attitudes toward the human qualities of some monsters and demons, and also radically affects their view of the fanatical nature of some hunters, including their own father.
Rogue hunter Gordon, a recurring and frightening character, is the villain in the latter episode, and becomes a serious threat in season three, not only tracking the innocent vampire Lucy but working with the mercenary Bela to find Sam, whom he believes is the Antichrist. While the possibility that Gordon is technically right is unquestioned, the experience makes clear the degree to which the boys’ approach, methods, and philosophy have diverged from that of the average hunter. While in season one this move might have been unthinkable, the hunters become a neutral element in the story: the boys have been exposed to the human darkness, and the revenge element, implicit in their father’s loose army of vigilantes, and eventually find it as questionable and mixed in value as any darkness they’ve come across. It may be, in fact, that the loss of the hunter as a possible ideal is a contributing factor to the breakdown of Dean’s own identity in season three.
(A man and woman, moon overhead, locked in a kiss, each with fingers crossed.)
Which brings us back to the problem of the viewer. As the story of the Winchester boys’ compromises with and accommodations of darkness continues, the only element that seems to have taken fans by surprise is the introduction of Bela and Ruby to a cast that has, over the years, contained many female allies and villains. The outcry started before the third season had even begun, with worries that the show was trying to expand its demographic or, worse, introduce permanent love interests for the boys. Bela’s initial prowess as a hunter, matching or overwhelming Dean’s own, seemed like betrayal. Sam’s acceptance of Ruby’s ability to come and go as she pleases, and her production of a tool more powerful than the Colt, seemed likewise to dilute his character.
I maintain that this is as a natural outgrowth of the central tension provoked by the series itself, from the first episode: the story takes place in a universe of Otherized and fetishized femininity that surrounds the narrative’s all-male viewpoint. If Dean is teaching Sam to be a man, who’s teaching Dean? By watching these boys learn and test their own limits, and explain to themselves and each other their own masculinity and traditions, we see a modern portrait of manhood that’s been recapitulated a thousand times. Behind Dean’s swagger and sexual bravado there lies the implicit accusation that his own learned masculinity comes less from real life experience than from television and movies-and perhaps that’s the only answer the modern man could give. But introduce female doubles (who swagger twice as much!) and you’ve unlocked something that’s been brewing in the show since Sam’s first premonition: the inter-penetration of the male world of the protagonists and the female world in which they live.
As a compromise of the characters themselves and their code of honor, the darker developments of the latter parts of the series are troubling enough-perhaps only acceptable because when one brother is threatened, the other is there to save and comfort him. But once the brothers start taking on and accepting their own magical implications and become more willing to compromise, as a united front, the show itself takes a dramatic turn toward complexity.
The story ceases to be an explication of the boy’s journey toward manhood, and starts being a reflection of the human journey toward whole-ness. Part of this latter journey expresses itself through the breakdown of male control and power: giving up reliance on absolutes and rigid rules, and on establishing control of the world around us. To stop hunting demons, and start talking to them. In season three, the boys’ journey stops being a spectator sport, and the boys themselves stop being so easily objectified. It’s hard to stand separate from the story when the story seems so intent on implicating the viewer in its ethical conundrums, and a lot harder to sexualize or fetishize the boys when their hurt/comfort tropes become more thematic than based in a given episode’s particulars. The story element that best expresses this relaxed view of the world as black and white is the introduction of characters-not faceless demons or goddesses or dead parents, but identifiable people, in the same age bracket and of the same idealized physical attributes-who know more than the protagonists, or are more powerful than they are. By giving Bela and Ruby existence, and backstory, independent from the Winchester-eye view of the world, the viewer is put into the position of seeing them as more than just symptoms of the landscape: they become true doubles.
And if these new doubles for the Winchesters were male-stronger, better, faster, more ethically variable men or demons-the show would be over. The rules of the Hero’s Quest dictate that this is an impossibility. In a show so relentlessly dominated by the feminine yet negotiated entirely by the masculine, the idealized and contradictory mirrors represented by Ruby and Bela must be played by women. And because it’s television, they have to be at least as hot, as appealing and intriguing and multifaceted and funny, as the leads themselves. Our hypothetical female or queer fan, already feeling pushed out by the conflicted masculinity and morality of the show’s deepening complexity, finds herself pushed even further out by these new arrivals; as companions on the journey, our place has been taken up by these new, powerful characters. Accusations of the “Mary Sue” were flying thick and heavy at both characters before they even debuted on the show proper: a sure sign that the characters were meant to be simultaneously real characters unto themselves, and meant to work as plot elements as well.
Identification with the boys, and simultaneous identification with the new girls, results in a viewer paradox: as rivals to the central characters, the girls are to be hated, while as characters in their own right, they are to be respected. What’s a viewer to do?
Which is as it should be. Trained as we are, by the nature of the show, to the portrayal of the feminine through the show’s monsters-or occasional allies, and often dead ones-we are invited through the girls’ relationships with Sam and Dean to confront those aspects of the feminine, the unconscious, and the questionable within ourselves. Queer or straight, male or female, we’ve spent years learning to read the show, but in order to follow the boys on their season three journey, we are asked to lay down the rigid categories and assumptions that we spent the first two seasons building, in contract with the show itself.
The introduction of these new characters puts the viewer, perhaps for the first time, in the exact same position as the protagonists: mystified by or jealous of the new characters’ abilities and knowledge, suspicious of their motives and shifting allegiances, worried by their unseen connections to the larger picture, and tempted by hints at their own rich histories and futures within the universe of the show.
Questioning Ruby and Bela, then, might be the best thing a participating fan could do at this stage of the game: it finally takes us out of the realm of passively watching the Winchesters’ journey, and sets us on the road right beside them. Confused, perhaps; definitely looking forward and wondering what happens next; lost in a world where black has begun to bleed into white, and where the knight errant, Dean, is in need of a little rescue himself. And so I think for the first time, maybe, the problematic viewer is able to stand alongside the Winchesters, and see exactly what they see.
JACOB CLIFTON is an Austin novelist and staff writer for the Web site Television Without Pity (www.televisionwithoutpity.com).
Mary Winchester’s fiery demise in the opening teaser of Supernatural’s pilot episode is surely one of the most shocking and most memorable images not only of the series, but of recent television in general. This one event informs the entire show, as well as the actions of the main protagonists-Sam and Dean would not be the men they are without Mary’s death and John’s obsession to “find the thing that killed her.”
So in a show based ostensibly on myth and folklore, does the image of “Mom on fire on the ceiling” demonstrate Supernatural’s attempt to create its own unique American mythology out of the old and the familiar? Carol Poole investigates.
CAROL POOLE
WHO THREW MOMMA ON THE CEILING?
Analyzing Supernatural’s Primal Scene of Trauma
Here is how the series Supernatural begins, with its own origin myth. It’s a dark night, late autumn. A big, comfortable-looking house doesn’t seem to know it’s being stroked by spooky shadows of bare tree limbs. Inside the house we see a young family just brimming with its own goodness and naïveté. Mom, Dad, and four-year-old Dean are saying good night to baby Sam in his crib.
Already the show has begun to use one of its favorite tricks: studding each scene with pop-culture references. Sam’s bedroom is a stock set of the genre, the scary nursery where the mobile spins for no apparent reason while the music slides off key. Supernatural’s opening scenes are so saturated with familiar tropes that one doesn’t expect to see anything exactly new here. But maybe we don’t care. Such scenes draw audiences again and again, if only because, as Sigmund Freud discovered, people have a way of needing to repeat certain experiences endlessly. Supernatural winks at the viewer with knowing references that say we have all been here before, while at the same time asking us to care as much as ever.
When the foreshadowed bad thing happens it’s as scary as you’d expect, but there is something new about it. In the dark nursery room, just above Sam’s crib, Mom is splayed across the ceiling. Victim of a gravity-defying demon, she grimaces in terror while blood drips from a gash in her abdomen. A few moments later she bursts into flame. The fire burns into the viewer’s retinas this horrific view of her-hair swirling, one leg bent to the side in a grotesque parody of a cheerleader’s kick-then consumes the house, leaving the Winchester males homeless and emotionally scarred.
As far as I know, this is a new image in American pop culture: a wounded mother burning to death on her baby’s nursery ceiling. Eric Kripke, the show’s thirty-four-year-old creator, has said that “Mom on fire on the ceiling” was “the start of it all,”33 the first image he had in mind when he began to develop the series.
But what might it mean? This is the question I want to explore here, using depth psychology to try to understand more than one layer of meaning. I want to look at how “Mom on fire on the ceiling” resonates as an image of soul trauma. Within the plot, their mother’s death is the catalyzing event that sets Sam and Dean off on their scary yet meaningful quest for redemption. But it can also be seen as a key to the show’s artistic ambition, which I think is to make myths that are uniquely American and newly imagined.
Of course, one could argue that “Mom on fire on the ceiling” is just the obligatory gross-out scene every horror show needs. Like Regan’s 360-degree head spin in The Exorcist, the scene aims to shock.
But gore is just one side of Supernatural, which has three-dimensional characters we’re meant to care about and features big moral themes like death and redemption. Emotionally, the show has as wide a range as any serious drama, from rage to humor to love, loss, and forgiveness. It also has a meta-narrative, with its continual pop culture references and in-jokes.
What sets Supernatural apart from a lot of genre fiction on TV is the way it plays with different layers of story and source material. Its sources are an eclectic mix of pop culture, history, folklore, and urban legends-the flotsam you might find in any teenager’s mind, or your own. In a way that seems at once ironic and heartfelt, Supernatural creates a specifically American mythology out of this stuff littering our mental attic. Kripke names such influences as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey34-serious mythologists, both, suggesting that Kripke has ambitions as a myth maker himself.
If so, “Mom on Fire on the Ceiling” appears to be the core, origin scene in the myth Kripke set out to create in Supernatural. It’s a powerful, disturbing image worth taking a closer look at.
A NOTE ABOUT MYTH AND PSYCHOLOGY
The study of myth has been important to psychology ever since Freud pondered Oedipus’s unhappy family life. More recently, Jungian analyst James Hillman is one of the better-known proponents of using myth to illuminate psychology. He defines myth as traditional stories which help us understand our lives, making meaning out of our experiences in a poetic, dreamlike way that feeds the soul:
Myths talk to psyche in its own language; they speak emotionally, dramatically, sensuously, fantastically… . One beauty of mythic metaphors is that they elude literalism. We know at the outset that they are impossible truths. Like metaphor itself, the power of which cannot satisfactorily be explained, a myth also speaks with two tongues at one time, amusing and terrifying, serious and ironic.35
Maybe this is why, while the dramas on television can be irritatingly superficial and sensationalistic, some of the most searching truth-and-beauty meditations on TV can be found in ironic genre shows like Buffy, Battlestar Galactica, and Supernatural. Outlandish, impossible images talk to us in the language of dreams, while literal shows about “reality” such as ER or the endless crime-fighting dramas often seem psychologically implausible.
In this spirit, I don’t aim to explain in rational terms why “Mom on fire on the ceiling” has such impact, but do hope to explore at least some of its resonance, both in terms of its impact as a formative event in Sam and Dean’s story, and as a defining image of Supernatural’s world-and, maybe, the viewers’ world as well.
“MOM ON FIRE ON THE CEILING”-A VIEW FROM THE CRIB
If like me you’re a woman and apt to identify with women you see onscreen, your first
thought about Mary Winchester’s death might be simply, “Ow.” Your second might be, “Why should I watch this kind of sadistic, misogynistic crap?” Within the campy yet scary world of a show that speaks with two tongues, it’s hard to know how to feel when the family’s only female member makes such a horrifying final exit in Scene One. But for the sake of understanding the attraction of this intense imagery, let’s just stipulate that Mom is clearly not a subject of her own experience in this story; her role here is to be the object of other people’s feelings. Mary is Mom, the most important person in a baby’s world, and when she dies her baby’s world comes crashing down in flames.
The view from Sam’s crib is a scene of overwhelming horror. From the ceiling, Mom can no longer hold him or offer him any kind of safety or comfort. In the scenes leading up to her death, Mary appeared as a likeable, down-to-earth woman who would be more at home in Dawson’s Creek than in Rosemary’s Baby. But on the ceiling, she’s no longer down-to-earth; the laws of gravity no longer hold her, and her face is a mask of panic. She seems out of her mind. The wound in her belly suggests that her very ability to carry and nurture life is what the demon is out to destroy.
This imagery is all the more potent in light of developmental psychology, which tells us that at Sam’s age his mother plays a key role in his psychological development. In recent decades, psychological research has confirmed that there is something very powerful and awe-inspiring about the relationships between babies and the people who mother them. Human minds and nervous systems develop through closely attuned, comforting yet stimulating relationships.3637 In order to develop normal emotional and psychological capacities, in fact in order to survive at all, babies need to be held, played with, soothed, and talked to as much as they need to be fed.38 Psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden has described this life-giving early relationship with mother as “the matrix”-mother-“of the mind.”39
In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural Page 17