In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural

by Supernatural. tv,

  As guardians of lore both ancient and modern, Sam and Dean protect people from things they’ve forgotten or don’t want to believe in-the stuff of folklore. There are countless tales buried in our cultural memory capable of rising again to cause trouble among those who’ve forgotten the danger, and even more tales in the present that we’ve become too jaded to believe. Could there still be fairy changelings or people missing for hundreds of years because they got trapped in the world of the fey? And what about those people waking up in bathtubs of ice without their kidneys? There’s bound to be an even gorier explanation than black market organ harvesting, and Sam and Dean are just the men to track down the culprits.

  Meanwhile, along the way they’re weaving their own lore as they battle ghosts, demons, and bratty thieves of arcane objects. Will people someday tell stories about the Winchester brothers around a campfire deep in the woods, late at night, where a hook man could lurk just out of sight?

  SHANNA SWENDSON puts her own twist on folklore and fairy tales in her contemporary fantasy novels, which include Enchanted, Inc., Once Upon Stilettos, Damsel Under Stress, and Don’t Hex with Texas. She’s also contributed to Flirting with Pride & Prejudice, Welcome to Wisteria Lane, So Say We All, Perfectly Plum, Serenity Found, and House Unauthorized. Visit her Web site at www.shannaswendson.com.

  When Eric Kripke set out to produce a “horror movie every week” based on myths, folktales and urban legends, he knew a gold mine of source material already existed just waiting to be tapped. But for every Hook Man, every Bloody Mary, every Wendigo or rakshasa, there has to be an origin, a first story, a place where the myth began.

  Here, London Brickley examines the origins of Supernatural’s tall tales and how today’s modern sources of information-the Internet, blogs, tabloid newspapers -have altered not only our perceptions of these stories but also, perhaps, the stories themselves.

  LONDON E. BRICKLEY

  GHOULS IN CYBERSPACE

  Supernatural Sources in the Modern, Demon-Blogging World

  Open on Supernatural season three: Dean’s made a deal with the Devil, he has a year to live, and his time is decaying fast. Sam sits in the Impala, finger-scanning over the text that he hopes might hold the answer to saving his elder brother’s Hellbound soul. His eyes squint, the camera pans up, and we see that “The Book” that might just hold the answers to reclaiming Dean’s life from the demon he contracted it out to is … a copy of Dr. Faustus? (Wait-didn’t we have to read that in high school?) Sure, the book wrapped in worn leather and ink-block prints of the devil looks like it could resurrect the dead, but then again, while the text may not be the week’s bestseller, it’s still rather accessible for a book that could hold the key to finding Dean a get-out-of-Hell-free card. And really, when faced with such a dire predicament, seeking a soul-saving loophole from something available in SparkNotes seems up there with Your Pathway to Hell Gone Wrong and The Idiot’s Guide To Selling Your Soul as a rather dubious choice. It’s a fairly recent text as far as demonic manuscripts go, and aside from suspiciously resembling a filched library book, there is nothing to suggest that the particular copy Sam has clutched in his fist is any different from the rest.

  Yet Sam is a Winchester, and by this point we have learned to believe that if Sam and Dean need information then they (or at least Bobby) know where to get it. And as we learned the very first time we saw the boys in a motel room lined with news clippings, old torn-out encyclopedia pages, and Scotch tape, the aid and answers they seek usually reside, rather surprisingly, in newspapers, Web sites, and folktale anthologies. In other words, the lowest rungs on the un-credible source list. Sources which, despite their reputations in an academic or mainstream setting, again and again prove to contain secrets not only vital to the success of the hunt, but also the Winchester boys’ personal ongoing battles to survive.

  Over the last fifty-six episodes that have become the crazy and heartbreaking adventures of the father and sons Winchester, we have seen the boys fight a lot of various forms of manifested lore. Seeing these ghosts and demons believably projected in the “real world” could come as a bit of a shock to the viewer, and yet none of them is as surprising as the sources that help the Winchesters deal with them. Particularly apparent in the show’s first season, whenever the Winchesters needed a new hunt or answers for the one currently underway, there Sam would be, half-caf vanilla latte in hand, browsing the dingoes ate my baby tabloid articles, blood-drinkers anonymous classified ads, news clippings from the local paper (page 12), and demonology.com Web sites-each and every one zones of information that we as a society and culture tend to ignore (and often scoff at).

  Now I know that what the boys consult in order to do a little demon research may initially strike some as an issue that is as marginal as the sources themselves. (What does it matter where the Winchesters turn? They have to get their information from somewhere, right?) But sources are important. And if closer consideration/study of mythology tells us anything it is that everything has a source. Every mythology begins with the “origin.” Where they say the world is going is a bit more ambiguous and cross-culturally varied, but they all agree that life and death (and all the supernatural shades in between) had a moment of conception-they came from somewhere.

  However, myths aren’t static. After their births, they have lives-still have lives now. As time has gone on, the early legends have been spun into more intricate tales, or been deconstructed into simple parables. New tales have crept in around the edges-stories of bloodshed over campfires, flesh feasts in the forests, and haunted pretty things that press out from behind the mirror’s glass-each and every one coiled around the culture that conceived it, waiting to strike out at the next audience to come along before it is captured and reshaped into something ever more potent or domesticated. Some of these tales have undoubtedly been lost along the way, but those that survive for our current consideration have done so thanks to the various forms of documentation that have carried them through the time and cultures.

  We call these remnants “stories,” but they have always been, and still remain, just outside classification as “fiction.” Sure, there will always be your skeptics, but start spouting off about ghosts, out-of-body experiences, haunted places, or cursed objects, and you are bound to find a few people who believe you. This is a major theme explored on (and by the very existence of) the show.

  On occasion it becomes inevitable that Sam and Dean reveal who they truly are-not FBI agents, or priests, or undercover reporters for the Chicago Tribune, but hunters of supernatural forces (one or several of which are after that particular person now). However, getting the victim of the week to accept the paranormal threat is met, realistically, with varying levels of success. It may take a bit of convincing, otherwise known as getting hit by the proverbial demon-driven truck (Agent Henriksen, “Jus in Bello,” [3-12]), or they might be a little more open to the supernatural realm and go along with it (Sarah, “Provenance” [1-19]). Some have even already reached that level of belief all on their own (the “Ghostbuster” hunters, “Hell House” [1-17]).

  Pulling back to the external world, the fact that there is an audience base for Supernatural in the first place demonstrates a certain prevalence of interest in paranormal activity. It is simply human nature. We are drawn to the unknown, and what the darkness tries to cover as we sleep. And yet, even the paranormalphiles often draw a line somewhere. Telling people ghosts are real is one thing; telling people paperback books and Internet Web sites hold the truth or key to these mysteries is another. (And in googling “batboy lives” it maybe isn’t hard to see why.)

  One of the primary reasons Internet sites have earned their “unreliable” reputation is on account of the mass accessibility of the Web. Anyone can set up and operate a Web site, keep a blog, or post tales and images for their fellow ’net surfers to come across. This information cannot be regulated. On occasion it can be taken down, but it really becomes too late the second the information is released.
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br />   I had a friend during my freshman year of college who added to the trivia section of a particular musician on Wikipedia that he had an affection for plastic model horses and small gaming fowl. Though her addition was eventually reviewed and removed, any surfer that accessed the site during the several weeks the information was posted would have seen the “fact” and absorbed it. They might have thought it was weird but plausible all the same, and continued through life assuming it to be true. Or perhaps they might simply hear the opening chords to a song filtering through the radio and get hit with a wave of nostalgia for My Little Pony and an inexplicable craving for braised pheasant. Either way, that information has infiltrated the culture as a special form of truth that exists solely because people believe it. On the off chance that someone who read the Wikipedia trivia section is now reading this essay, suddenly what they knew as truth seems completely disproven and becomes an outright fallacy. But then again, I am no authority on the matter. The man might very well indeed have a collection of toy horses that I and the Wikipediaists do not know about. What “truth” comes down to is how many people latch on to an idea and believe in it. If no one believes it, then it fails to have any true impact on the culture. If the majority of the culture believes it, regardless of whether it’s been officially proven, it becomes impossible to expunge.

  The Supernatural episode “Hell House” examined this phenomenon beautifully. The mold-infested, rotting wood house appeared classic enough grounds for a haunting, and yet the spirit was anything but. We were reminded that usually hauntings have patterns; ghosts are annoying but consistent. Yet old Hell House kept changing. As it turned out, the female-lynching, no, child-killing, no, non-discriminate gun-fearing homicidal spirit was not the ghost of a man after all, but the manifested shadow of a mass-supported idea that began in a local boy’s imagination and ended up as a blog-based Web site frequented by thousands. Add to that house’s decayed wall a harmless little symbol that allows things that are believed in strongly enough to come to fruition alongside some Blue Oyster Cult paraphernalia and symbols declared satanic by twentieth-century Hollywood, and the ability for you to participate in the conjuring up of some demons and the slaughter of a few townies is just a Google step away. The crux: ideas and beliefs can be powerful things. All right, but when Sam turned to Dean and asks, “How do you kill an idea?”, the answer, it seemed, is that you can’t; but you can change it.

  The boys, however, could not change it all on their own. Dean just deciding that a gun can kill the spirit wasn’t going to cut it. As the server crashed, the site was no longer accessible, so the potential viewers couldn’t access and believe the change in the tale. The myth couldn’t change until people changed it, and Sam was left questioning, “Out of all the things we’ve hunted, how many existed just because people believed in them?” (“Hell House”).

  The question rings with a resounding truth, and yet still, for some reason, the fact that tales like Hell House and others told on the Web set “much older” myths within a modern context opens them up to public scrutiny. To the modern mindset, necromancy and alchemy may sound romantic and even potentially plausible to attempt, so long as that attempt is set in the fourteenth century. Respectable practical application of such ideas in today’s world, however, better have a whole lot more scientific jargon attached-say, “cell rejuvenation” and “particle reassignment/stabilization.” In other words, ideas and concepts from the past often carry over into the present, concealed in language that is more acceptable to the current culture. But when those ideas and concepts appear in the present in their original manifestation, they seem like alien or distant myths.

  Most modern upgraded sources that maintain mythical language (spirits, shapeshifters, ritual magic, augury, etc.) stick-out as mythical subjects and are not taken too seriously. Although the ideas are interesting to the modern audience, that fascination is accompanied by a general underlying cultural superiority: “but we know now that isn’t how it really works.” As a result, a common, tempting solution to such potential source skepticism (for, let’s say, a television show wishing to create an environment where the audience will accept the plausibility of fantastic tales in their original, fantastic terms) is to remove or displace the source material from the modern world. Current tabloids and Web sites are overlooked and left as the space for crazies and the paranoid. Instead, as if somehow the age of the text automatically allots it a certain level of credibility (a credibility that it most likely did not have back in its own time), rituals, incantations, symbols, and prophecies become lost elements of the distant past that are then “rediscovered” in the present through ancient buried scrolls, scribbled out in long-forgotten tongues. The problem lies not in the decision to use ancient sources, but in scenarios where the sources are exclusively ancient, as it suggests the potential relevance of a certain point in the past on contemporary culture, but fails to address the importance of the time stretching between that point and the present as well as the time that will come after.

  Thus, what makes Supernatural particularly unique in comparison with many of its sci-fi/fantasy-labeled counterparts is the way in which the show acknowledges the importance of contemporary culture’s contributions in the shaping of folklore. Mythology, legend, and lore are not a neatly contained package from the past with no other use than to be opened and explored today for entertainment purposes. Myth is a continuum and it is shifting and evolving right now. Today’s Internet Web sites are yesterday’s peasant folksongs, tomorrow’s paranormal journal articles the modern version of villagers whispering what they saw in the woods. The difference is that in today’s media-accelerated world information moves more quickly and on a more massive scale, reaching a larger audience. Where such mass exposure and easy accessibility might de-romanticize these sources, making them seemingly less desirable to draw from in researching rusalkas and banshees, it actually allows them to hold more power. As they reflect sources created by the current population, they are the ideas, interests, values, and beliefs of the modern audience-in other words, mythology at its most up-to-date. Undeniably, the things these sources contain are enticing to people today, as their audience is the same people who are documenting and discussing them.

  The best way to truly make the audience feel a part of the Supernatural world is to make that world as relatable for the audience as possible. And there is hardly a better way to do that than by utilizing the blueprint cosmology from the audience’s actual world. And so usually when the Winchesters need to research, the materials are not ancient texts that have been lost for centuries, or one of three copies that still survives, useful only if you can read the second-century B.C. tribal dialect. They are accessible sources to anyone with an Ethernet cord or library card. The message here is that the Supernatural world is our world. We all have access to the same sources, we just do not see or realize the truth of the information that these sources hold.

  That is not to say that ancient things don’t come out to play. Things like old Latin incantations often fulfill their own vital roles in the battle. However, these too, can be-and often are-interfaced with the modern age. In “Jus in Bello,” we were graced with an exorcism (preformed with a rather good pronunciation of the language, might I add) that, though often effective the good, old-fashioned, tie-the-demon-to-the-chair-and-read way, here worked on a much larger and more efficient scale when recorded and then broadcast over the speakers. In “Hollywood Babylon” (2-18), the true danger behind the theater and production ghosts was simply a well-researched script, showing that if we collect the tools and know how to use them, the old, when translated into a new-age media form such as film, the Web, or MP3 files, can still retain its power. The mystery, significance, and potency of the old legends and lore need not be lost in the digital age. Instead, they can be accessed more quickly. Supernatural’s acknowledgement and exploration of the potential strength of today’s available resources inevitably binds the show to the present time and culture, and once there,
Supernatural refreshingly does not shy away from the world it is in-a world that holds both thousand-year-old demons and a good WiFi connection.

  Looking back, we find that Supernatural has always been deeply rooted in “the source.” Kripke’s original idea-a tabloid writer and the journal articles that he jots down during his paranormal-laced trip across America-shows a certain interest in or emphasis on sources of information and communication from the very beginning-particularly marginalized forms of information and communication.

  The tabloid article, as it stands in the modern context, bears a strong resemblance to its “Hell House” ghost cousin. What starts out a fictitious rumor or truck-stop story, with enough circulation and enough people to believe, eventually crosses the line into believability, becoming potentially true, then accepted, and then absolute truth within certain communities. The result is mainstream backlash. Whereas most fiction novels or films are viewed as sources of entertainment, uncensored sources, from rune singing and spell-etched coins of the past to tabloid articles and Internet Web sites, when marketed as holding even a spot of potential truth are easily scorned. They become not just fiction, but negative forms of fiction.

  Thus anyone who even begins to believe in “such things” becomes vulnerable to being seen as crazy. If you happen to be a big fan of a recent bestseller, or a more classic work of literature, there are book circles or clubs available where you can get together and talk about them and their relevance to your own life. We have college courses that look at everything from Jane Austen to (more recently) science fiction and fantasy novels, which deconstruct the stories in terms of what they mean to us and our society. But you certainly would never find groups that discuss tabloid articles in an academic setting (yet) or that talk about paranormal activity without suffering certain social stigmas. “Those kinds of people” are usually pushed off into separate, marginalized societies and must resort to communication through the Internet or other, equally marginalized channels.