It seems that something very important is being attacked in this nursery. By destroying his mother and his home, the demon takes away from Sam the sustaining matrix of emotional safety he needs in order to develop a mind and a sane, ordinary sense of self. Of course, Sam has a father, too, but in the Winchester family Mom is obviously the one who provides primary emotional safety. While Dad snoozes in front of the TV, Mom is alert to Sam’s cry in the night. As the story goes on it soon becomes clear that John Winchester is a difficult dad, at least after Mary’s death. He’s deeply attached to his sons, but his obsession with demons makes him more scary than nurturing. Sam’s mother and his home both seem to represent the life-giving qualities of safety and nurturance. Without them, he grows up in a world of demons and ghosts.
One of Supernatural’s ongoing themes hints at a dark connection between the demon and Sam. The Yellow-Eyed Demon, we eventually learn, kills Sam’s mother in an effort to redirect Sam’s development, to make him special and superhumanly powerful, and also to warp his morality, to turn him toward the demonic side.
The imagery in this scene provides some hints toward the demon’s motivation. The fire that consumes her suggests fiery feelings. The demon seems offended, enraged even, by the thought that Sam might be an ordinary baby who will grow up to be an ordinary person. Ordinary babies need mothering, and will die without it. Some psychoanalytic thinkers believe that we are all apt to feel rage about this dependence, so that our love for our mothers naturally has to contend with unconscious feelings of rage and hate about our human limitations and needs. According to this line of thought, there’s a part of each of us that wishes to be a superhero instead of an ordinary, vulnerable person who can suffer and cause suffering to those we need and love.
Whether or not this is true about people in general, I think it is true of the Winchesters, who can never seem to need a woman without setting off terrible consequences. A world where Mom burns on the ceiling is a world where we can expect to find mother issues.
BRAVE LITTLE SOLDIERS: SAM AND DEAN AS MOTHERLESS HEROES
Sam and Dean’s story resumes twenty-two years after the fire. We learn that their mother was never replaced, nor was their home. Instead John raised the boys on the run as demon hunters, seeking revenge on the demon that killed their mother. Sam has rebelled by opting for a conventional life-he has a girlfriend, he’s applied to law school. But nothing about the fire has been resolved, and Sam soon learns that he can’t escape its ramifications.
Like Luke Skywalker-another hero inspired by Joseph Campell’s understanding of hero myths-Sam and Dean are propelled into heroism by losing their mother and home in a traumatic way. Maybe part of what makes them heroes is that they survive losses which ordinary humans can’t endure. And as Americans, they’re heirs to a tradition of John Wayne-style heroes for whom “masculine” is just another word for “independent.” After all, this nation began in war with its mother country, and in Sam and Dean’s world, someone is making war on Mom.
In the pilot episode, it soon becomes uncomfortably clear that Mom on fire on the ceiling is not only felt to be a trauma, it also represents freedom from the tyranny of needing Mom. Sam’s not a baby anymore, he’s a young man, but questions about needing Mom can bubble up out of nowhere when a boy is in mid-transition to manhood. Does Mom make a young man strong, or weak? Does he need her, or is he supposed to be the strong one who protects her? Is she an angel offering solace and love, or a demon threatening to weaken and emasculate him by making him endlessly dependent on her instead of allowing him to become strong in his own right? What place does femininity have in a man’s psyche, anyway?
It’s all very confusing, and so is the scariest, darkest question of all: can he survive without her? The pilot episode of Supernatural poses this question sharply when Sam asks his girlfriend, Jessica-who strongly resembles Mary Winchester-“What would I do without you?” She smiles and says, “Crash and burn.”
But Sam’s big brother Dean shows up in his black ’67 Chevy Impala, like a ghost from Sam’s demon-ridden past, and soon they’re riding off to find their father, who has gone missing. An AC/DC song blasts on the car’s antiquated stereo system:
Let loose
From the noose
Before the pilot is over, it is Jessica who has crashed and burned, on the ceiling-killed in exactly the same way as Mary. But this time it’s not a baby’s mother who is killed, it’s a young man’s future wife, a woman who represents stability and responsibility and belonging in a world of law and order, a world where things make sense.
Jessica’s death throws Sam back into the arms of the person who really became his mother after the fire: big brother Dean. Like their father, Dean is a misfit in the mainstream world, a “hunter” who fights dangers most people don’t know exist. He likes beer, girls, and his Impala, and the vintage cheese rock he plays on the car stereo like the soundtrack to his soul-equal parts tough-guy stoicism and soppy sincerity, with a saving edge of humor. Dean is the kind of guy who can bully and charm you into admitting that you secretly love Journey, too.
Honestly, it’s Dean who charmed me into liking Supernatural. I didn’t want to; feminism is close to my heart, and there is no way to construe this as a feminist show (though you could argue that some of its female characters have a post-feminist flair). It’s a story where the heroes belong to one demographic-pale, young, and male-and the rest of us have to be content with identifying with characters who generally die or turn evil.
But then there’s Dean, a wisecracking, soulful dude who just wants to save the American soul from all the demons and ghosts that populate its nightmares and haunt its folklore. He’s funny, and genuinely touching. Who wouldn’t rather ride off with him than go to law school?
In fact, while Sam and Dean are on the run from their losses, and don’t seem ready for relationships with women, they do make a family with each other. Traveling the country in Dean’s Impala, working together to protect people from demons, the brothers develop a relationship that survives every test. They save each other’s lives again and again. They even survive their constant bickering and the strain of their endless road trip’s logistics, the shared motel rooms and hours in the car.
What’s great about these two is the way they’re searching to heal themselves and each other by developing what every girl or woman watching this show knows they need: to reintegrate the sanity represented by Mom and home back into their damaged lives, without losing their independence in the process. I might go out on a limb and say they need to resurrect the nurturing feminine wisdom in their own souls. They live in a world of monsters, haunted by old traumas, but in their relationship with each other they keep trying to learn how to live with their own demons with tolerance, and even humor. I would say “love,” but I think it’s important for Sam and Dean to have their own way of saying that dangerously comforting word:
SAM: Jerk.
DEAN: Bitch. (“Pilot”)
HUNTING: SUPERNATURAL’S QUEST FOR A NEW AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY
“Mom on fire on the ceiling” is the disaster that propels the Winchester brothers out of a conventional life. This event sets their story in a post-traumatic world, haunted by stories that need resolution. But their world is also a postmodern one, because their story is set in an America of immigrants and survivors, people whose Old Country traditions have been lost or fragmented by displacement to the New World where the old hierarchies and value systems have been thrown drastically into question. Instead of a unified religious or folkloric tradition, the Winchesters’ America is a place where feelings and meanings, deep and shallow, wander around all lost and overlooked, waiting for someone to notice them and put them either to rest or together. Here, Sam and Dean’s trauma seems like everyone’s. A nation that began in war with its mother country is haunted by the same intensities of rage and need, and the same ambivalence about need versus independence.
In this postmodern landscape, Sam and Dean fit right in. As chara
cters, each of them is a collage of pop-culture references. Eric Kripke has said that Supernatural was conceived as Star Wars meets Route 66, and has also cited the 1950s TV Western series Have Gun, Will Travel as an influence.40 I’ve described it myself as “Kind of like X-Files meets The Hardy Boys, except darker.” It’s impossible to watch a single episode of this show without being reminded of all of the above, plus Ghostbusters and Men in Black. It’s quite a canon.
Then there are the show’s historical references. The name “Winchester” is a blatant nod to the Wild West era.41 If Sam and Dean are postmodern knights on a quest for justice and redemption-or at least a so-called life-their Excalibur is a magical Colt revolver. They have a special relationship with guns and gun symbolism which sometimes seems glossed-over and troubling. Let’s not forget that the “demons” killed by actual Colts and Winchesters in the nineteenth century included Native Americans demonized by the settlers who shot them. The show hasn’t yet addressed this kind of historical complication in its gun imagery, but it does have a way of lurching unevenly sometimes between light camp and heavy heart-of-darkness violence. (How were viewers supposed to feel when, in “Heart”(2-17), Sam shot his new girlfriend to death?)
The heaviest episodes show Sam and Dean longing to know that they’re good, but wrestling with their power to do harm. Even in the tongue-in-cheek mode of Supernatural, it’s painfully confusing to try to be good men in a world of violence, in a country that was “won” at the end of a rifle. As demon hunters, Sam and Dean struggle to figure out where the line is between being warriors-protectors-and thugs, an anxiety highlighted when Bela accused Dean in “Red Sky at Morning” (3-6), “You’re a stone’s throw from being a serial killer.” The difference is not always clear. As Dean put it in “Wendigo” (1-2),
I mean, our family’s so screwed to hell, maybe we can help some others. Makes things a little bit more bearable. (long pause) And I tell you what else helps. Killing as many evil sons-of-bitches as I possibly can.
I think this question-“Are we good guys or bad guys?”-is at the heart of the show. Supernatural is a story about two American men in search of redemption from pain and destruction, trying to learn how to be strong, how to survive, but also how to use their power for good. But what is good? Is it just the opposite of evil? Supernatural explodes that simple notion through the character of Gordon, the demon-hunter whose worldview is dangerously two-dimensional. Gordon’s self-righteous loathing of demons makes him the moral equivalent of a demon himself-sadistic and murderous, unwilling to think about what he’s doing. He lacks empathy.
Supernatural seems to understand the appeal of this kind of thinking. It’s not so different from the fantasy that a magical revolver can kill any enemy. In this fantasy, men don’t need the feminine trait of receptivity; they can just point a projectile and make the Other disappear. But this isn’t the only fantasy being acted out in Supernatural. There are also fantasies about containing demons in magic circles, and putting ghosts to rest by learning about them. The way Sam and Dean put ghosts to rest is to bring new understanding to the traumas of the past, find out where the bones are buried, and cleanse them with salt and fire. There’s also a kind of cleansing that happens when the brothers restore meaning to a ghost’s disrupted story. Unlike Gordon, the Winchester brothers are on a quest to repair and resurrect life, love, and meaning-which seems to parallel the show’s quest to resurrect and restore meaning to cherished but neglected bits of America’s mythology. When Supernatural resurrects historical figures such as H. H. Holmes, the serial killer who plagued the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 (“No Exit,” 2-6), or puts a sinister twist on Scandinavian tree folklore (“Scarecrow,” 1-10), it piques the viewer’s desire to know more about our history and the beliefs that have shaped it. In other words, the show appeals not only to our desire to kill what we fear; it also invites us to try to understand.
CONCLUSION: YES, CHICK-FLICK MOMENTS
Why don’t I just come out and say it: Beneath Sam and Dean’s macho exteriors are two young men trying to heal from the traumatic loss of their mother, which also seems to mirror America’s traumatic loss of the coherent, stable mythologies of our mother countries. Dean in particular seems to take on some of the functions of mothering even while he struggles to find himself as a man. If Sam is in some ways the eternal baby of the pair-endangered, but also endowed with scary potential and unknown powers-Dean is how the baby gets by without a mother, the baby’s ersatz protector. Eric Kripke has called Dean the Han Solo to Sam’s Luke Skywalker.42 He’s the one who provides the closest thing the brothers have to a home-his car-and an ambience-his music. The box of cassettes in his car is garage-sale junk from the ’70s and ’80s-AC /DC, BTO, Creedence Clearwater Revival-but Dean loves the stuff, without irony or apology.
Which is basically what Supernatural does with neglected scraps of American folklore: “Bloody Mary” in the mirror, the “Woman in White” legend, the mysterious disappearance of the Roanoke colony. Supernatural isn’t interested in historical authenticity; anyone who wants to know what “Croatoan” means to historians had better look elsewhere. Instead, it weaves new stories out of bits of old, semi-forgotten ones, raising a puzzling question: Is Supernatural’s postmodern pop sensibility a demonic force dismembering traditional stories into mixed-up fragments? Sometimes, yes. In “Wendigo” (1-2), for example, we are asked to accept what is obviously Pacific Northwest coastal rainforest as a scene in the Rocky Mountains, a demonic abuse of America’s regional integrity. If our history is worth learning, so is our geography. Still, for the most part Supernatural’s way of mixing and matching recycled cultural references seems creative, a way of bringing new life and meaning to older traditions.
Stories can do for a culture what a mother can do for a baby: They hold us, and help us develop our minds and souls. They help us link our own experiences with larger meanings, and work through personal and collective traumas. So I enjoy Supernatural’s attempts to find storylines in the back roads of American myth and legend and pop culture. It’s as though the show were speaking to the viewer in Dean’s voice, saying, “Okay, we Americans are kind of shell shocked and lost, we have no sense of history, and we don’t understand where anything or anyone comes from or belongs. All we know is that some things out there can hurt us-and have hurt us-and we can hurt them, and what does that make us? But what the hell. We can try to put something together; we have to start somewhere.”
CAROL POOLE, MA, is a psychotherapist practicing in Seattle. She is a graduate of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California, with a strong interest in the conjunction of psychology, mythology, and pop culture. She is a member of the Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study and a frequent contributor to its literary publication, The Forum.
As Supernatural blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, creating a realistic world inhabited by fantastic creatures, its characters themselves must by necessity also live outside of the “normal.” Sam and Dean Winchester are antiheroes who get by on hustling pool and credit card fraud, who are wanted by the police, and who don’t “live regular.” In response to this transgression of society’s norms, Supernatural’s fans have embraced the concept of transgression, and the freedoms offered by the show’s lack of boundaries, as well-specifically, in fanworks. Emily Turner examines the phenomena of Wincest, crackfic, and genderswap fanfiction, and how these stories themselves transgress the boundaries of the Supernatural universe, and our own.
EMILY TURNER
SCARY JUST GOT SEXY
Transgression in Supernatural and Its Fanfiction
Supernatural is a text packed full of themes of transgression. That is to say, to “transgress” is to go beyond a boundary or limit, those boundaries and limits often pre-set or prescribed. In the case of Supernatural, two core examples of transgression occur both within the plots and premise of the show-the boundaries of reality as we (the viewer) know it are transgressed by the existence and behavior of supernatural el
ements (ghosts, cryptids, demons)-and at a meta-textual level-both the creators and characters refer to outside films, shows, comics, and other texts, transgressing the boundaries of Supernatural as a discrete text itself. The themes of transgression trickle down into countless aspects of the show, both trivial and key to narrative. Sam and Dean transgress the boundaries of their own society to live as nomads and work the system with their fake IDs and lack of permanent address. They transgress the boundaries of life and death by repeatedly dying and bringing each other back to life, even as demons and spirits transgress boundaries of human bodies to possess victims.
Each week Sam and Dean drive in their big black muscle car from text to text, transgressing boundaries of state lines and city limits to enter into existing worlds drawn from everything from folktales to popular culture: The Ring (“Bloody Mary,” 1-5), an X-Files episode (“Tall Tales,” 2-15), The Blair Witch Project (“Ghostfacers,” 3-13). In solving the mysteries and vanquishing the villains, often in ways different than in the text that is being appropriated or referenced, Sam and Dean reread and rewrite existing stories and characters. At the same time, Eric Kripke and the rest of the production team are doing the same as they write these scripts and set up these shots. This blatant celebration and transformation of the countless other horror texts being appropriated is not that different from fans’ transgression of Supernatural’s boundaries as a TV show-a legitimate cultural text (aired on network television, made by professional and paid staff)-as they appropriate the Supernatural world and rewrite and recreate its existing stories and characters.
This is particularly true of the group of fans who engage with the show by producing fanworks such as fanfiction, fanart, and songvids. Just as not only the construction but the content of Supernatural reflect themes of transgression, so too do these fanworks explore transgression not only in their creation but in their plots and premises, as the themes and practices of the show sift down into the fan communities. But unlike the show itself, which exists within the restrictive ideological requirements that come along with being produced by an industry for the commercialized mainstream, Supernatural fans are free to explore and express creative responses to Supernatural any way they wish, able to publish them freely with no editorial requirement beyond access to the Internet and skill to use it. Writers of fanfiction may construct any scenario they wish for the characters to exist within, the only guidelines the community standards of characterization and effective suspension of disbelief-guidelines that are not enforced, and remain up to each individual reader.
In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural Page 18