Directed by Robert Singer
Written by Ben Edlund
Before we get down to brass tacks, let’s take a moment to list just how much this episode accomplishes in 41 minutes.
1. A continuation of the two season-wide Arcs – Dean’s crossroad’s deal and Sam’s dangerous alliance with Ruby. They are not central but they are present, already in motion.
2. Gordon returns.
3. Introduction of a major new character. (One of my favorite character introductions in the history of the series. It can’t top the introduction of Death – the best sequence the show has ever done – or of Castiel – another stunner – but it’s up there.) It’s even more of a surprise than Death, because we have been prepared for “Death.” Nobody prepared us for Bela.
4. Entertaining one-off episode.
That’s a lot, but it doesn’t feel like a checklist of events needed to push the plot forward (I’m looking at you Season 12). I will try not to keep referencing Season 12, but sometimes comparisons are an important object lesson. It’s HARD to be as good as “Bad Day at Black Rock”, it’s hard to be as good as Season 3 (especially since it’s truncated) and the fact that it looks so effortless is fuel for that same fire. It’s HARD to do this much this well.
“Bad Day at Black Rock” breaks a lot of rules: the narrative is pulled in many different directions. In some spots in the episode, we know more than the brothers do (what Gordon is planning). In other spots, we are as in the dark as they are (who on earth is that hot waitress?). I love that the episode withholds information from us, knowing that the anxiety – who the hell is that British woman? where did SHE come from? – is an essential part of the pleasure of being a viewer.
Women in Supernatural
There are probably those who do not care for Bela. Who resent (or are suspicious of) any woman’s intrusion into the manly-manliness of the manly-brothers’ world. While a cliched woman, or a shallowly-written woman would be a huge disappointment, at this point the writers had earned my trust in the “writing female characters” department. The show does not show hostility to women, the show does not have that toxic reductive atmosphere that would be a huge turnoff. Look at the women who have entered thus far. Ellen. Jo. Cassie. Bela. Lisa. These are not cookie-cutter women. That will continue to be the case. Amelia was not some generic domestic girlfriend-type. She was prickly and rude, she clogged the sink with limes because she was getting wasted alone. I mean … wow. And Sam LIKED her. He chose her! Instead of being annoyed that she was prickly and rude (I saw a lot of fan chatter along those lines), I was more fascinated that THIS was who he would choose to be with, that Sam was drawn to this woman! His only relationship had been with the perfect girl really: smart, sexy, supportive, who made cookies for him with cute little notes. Now that he’s got all these miles on him, he’s drawn to this MESS of a woman. I LOVED Amelia, because she represented an opportunity to get to know Sam better. We can never know these guys too well. At this point in the series, I had grown to trust the writers, and knew that they knew what they were doing. Even though this is a show about men without women, when women DO arrive, they are three-dimensional. Besides all of that though:
When a woman enters their Belljar(TM), sexual, non-sexual, it doesn’t matter: she brings with her all kinds of disturbances in the atmosphere. They are Motherless Sons. Women are “Other,” “other” enough at this point that it’s WEIRD when Jo wants to be a hunter (very glad Supernatural gave up THAT cliched trope), and the “other” is desired, feared. The “other” can derail these guys because of their natural protector personalities. It’s a kind of sexism, I guess, but it’s sexism that means well. It’s also an Achilles heel.
If Bela were a man, she would not bring the disturbances that she does. If Bela were an elderly woman, she would not bring the disturbances that she does. She is the Potential of Sex. She is a Femme Fatale, and the series hadn’t introduced one of those yet. I’ll be getting into the Femme Fatale later. At length.
I’ve thought about the title and what it might mean. I haven’t really come up with much. I’ll just spitball then. Maybe somebody else will have something better to offer!
Bad Day at Black Rock is an Oscar-nominated 1955 film directed by John Sturges with a mainly male cast. That could be one of the connections since the episode is extremely male-heavy: the two robbers, Gordon’s two minions … Into that Macho Arena strolls Bela, who outsmarts them all. The 1955 film stars a roster of “heavies”: Spencer Tracy as the one-armed investigator who travels to Black Rock, Robert Ryan, Dean Jagger, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, Walter Brennan (and a couple others) play the sketchy guys who live in the town, all of whom have something to hide. My friend Keith Uhlich, in his Time Out review of the DVD, wrote: “John Sturges’s macho B-picture is more brawn than brains…but what brawn!” Sturges films them in epic fashion, they all tower above the horizon. It’s one of those movies that is (unconsciously, probably) both a critique of masculinity and its codes – as well as a celebration of unvarnished masculinity. What it’s REALLY about is coming to terms with the treatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, the first movie of its kind to address that extremely unpopular topic.
Here’s the trailer:
Robert Singer is one of my favorite directors in the roster. I kept hoping he would somehow single-handedly save Season 12. His focus is on relationship. He likes the spaces between people, the spaces where listening and communication – or misunderstanding – take place. He’s all about people.
Teaser
If Gordon was frightening in “Bloodlust” (recap here), he’s even more so here.
Sterling K. Brown’s career has exploded in the last couple of years. I want to say to the world just discovering him now “WE SUPERNATURAL FANS SAW HIM FIRST. WE RECOGNIZED HIS BRILLIANCE FIRST.” Watching him as Chris Durden, I struggled to even REMEMBER his performance as Gordon, that’s how convincing he was.
“Bad Day at Black Rock” is filled with pun names and inside joke names. Supernatural had already declared its love of Kubrick’s The Shining in the glorious episode “Playthings” (re-cap here) and now we see him checking into prison to visit Gordon. Kubrick (Michael Massee) goes through a transformation over the course of the episode: He starts out the episode as a gentle skeptic. By the end, he is Bible-Thumping-Nuts wearing a blissful smile. There has always been a Biblical component to the show, implicit in things like demons and Hell. Then there was the introduction of the possibility of angels in “Houses of the Holy” (re-cap here) but God isn’t mentioned all that much, if at all. And Jesus is certainly not mentioned. Kubrick brings Jesus into the picture. Seeing Jesus show up so prominently is strange, since He will be entirely absent in general throughout (for the most part: Castiel’s belief that he is the Messiah brings Christ to the forefront). In my opinion, Supernatural was smart to stay out of those potentially explosive waters.
Michael Massee died this past October. Although he appeared in a couple of hugely acclaimed (even classic) films (Se7en, Lost Highway, History of Violence), as well as television series (The X-Files, Millennium) he is probably best known for shooting the gun that killed Brandon Lee while filming The Crow. I cannot even imagine how devastated Massee was by that incident. He had been told the gun was okay. Because of this completely avoidable tragedy, virtually all of the obituaries included “actor who shot Brandon Lee” or something-like in its headlines.
I really like the vibe in the early seasons where lines between human and non-human were more clearly drawn. There were lines that you just did not cross. There were enormous taboos. To Gordon, Sam has crossed those lines. He’s not even human (and therefore kill-able). Being a “psychic” is being a monster. Even Ellen, Dean, Bobby … treat Sam’s psychic-ness as sketchy as hell, suspicious of it, they all hate it. (Now the show features Witch Twins screaming “Abracadabra-KA-POW” and I guess everyone’s fine with it. How much has been lost.)
Gordon’s chilling refrain to Kubrick said in a flat-affect tone – “Sam Winchester must die” – is such a brilliant choice. He’s not ravingly intense. The way Brown says it you can picture Gordon lying in his cell for a year and a half, saying those words to himself over and over and over. A mantra. A reason to keep on living.
1st scene
We join up with Sam and Dean mid-argument. (These cherished Impala scenes were completely absent in Season 12.) Edlund does a great job of stacking up the conflicts in 4 or 5 lines. Dean flips out when Sam comes clean about his consorting with the enemy, i.e. Blonde Chick with Knife who now has a name: Ruby.
There are multiple levels to what Padalecki is playing here (there always are).
He starts off trying NOT to mention Ruby’s dangled “carrot” of helping Dean, key to understanding the Sam-Dean-Winchester-Belljar(TM) dynamic. In a normally functioning family, a brother with Intel on how to get his sibling out of trouble would race directly to the sibling and shout, “HEY. WE MAY HAVE A WAY OUT OF THIS FOR YOU AND LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT IT.” Not Sam and Dean.
Dean has been sashaying around with his dick out ever since he made the Demon Deal, and as far as his public persona is concerned, he’s oblivious, careless, in high Burlesque Mode. (If you’re new to me, I have written about his Burlesque almost as much as I have written about Beauty.) Showing that he gives a damn about his own life, that he wants to fight to live, is totally foreign to Dean. He despises being worried over. He’s used to SAM being “the problem,” not HIM. None of this needs to even be SAID between Sam and Dean. Sam knows all of this and it is driving him crazy because it has put him in the position of having to research the Demon Deal all on his own with no input from his doomed brother. Only Lisa got to see the glimpse of fear and yearning that exists in Dean. I’ve written about this before: this is the value of having women come into the picture. Both brothers reveal stuff to trusted women that they hesitate to reveal to anyone else, let alone one another.
Dean’s reaction to Sam’s news about Ruby being able to help is exactly what Sam had been avoiding. “She’s LYING!” cries Dean. Dean is so shocked at Sam’s gullibility he almost laughs at it (but there’s more in that laugh, there’s a layer there that I can’t – and won’t – try to describe. It has to do with self-loathing, but more than that I won’t say. I like to keep things somewhat undefined, so that there’s still room to play around in different interpretations. This is the gift of Ackles’ approach to this role.)
Dean has a way of asserting I’m-the-big-brother-I’m-the-leader, and Sam bristles against it. It’s too much like the control placed on him by his father. He is a grown man, he can be trusted to make choices about the family business. (I always think of Sam’s line a couple seasons later: “Stop bossing me around, Dean.” I shiver when I hear the LIFETIME of resentment that Padalecki put into that line. We’re seeing that here in embryo.)
In terms of the really long Arc: Dean is right. Ruby is not to be trusted. At all.
Complexity is a wonderful thing.
A word or two on the filming of this scene:
It has the typical nighttime-Impala-glamour, with lights swooping up and over the windshield. But I just want to point out the VARIETY of angles and perspectives that Singer (and Ledouceur) get in this very static scene (and in all such scenes). The scene starts out inside the car, with medium shots of both of them. But even within that, there are different angles. Sometimes their heads are alone in the shot, but sometimes the camera is placed next to the brother in the foreground, looking at the brother across the seat, giving that “blurry head on the sideline” look I mention all the time because it is so classic Supernatural. That “style” is one of the ways the characters are connected. They are in this TOGETHER.
Like here:
This style pleases me so much, aesthetically. We are in the space between them. We are in the space of their conversation. There’s air in it, there’s room to breathe. Singer, as always, finds places for pauses, another essential element to the Supernatural “formula”: dialogue does not just push the plot along. The characters are in the present moment trying to figure OUT the “plot,” (this is basically how we all go through our normal lives anyway). These pauses, this AIR between them, gives these conversations a spark, a sense of the real listening going on.
When the call comes to one of Dad’s old phones, there’s some good behavior between the brothers (I love Sam gesturing for a pen. It’s so real). The alias John Winchester used for his secret storage unit is “Edgar Cayce.” Cayce was a mystic born in 1877 who is still so well-known that he has a Twitter feed and an Association named after him.
Cayce’s nickname was “The Sleeping Prophet” because many of his revelations – on reincarnation, transmigration of souls, near-death experiences, the earliest days of man, aliens – came to him when he was in a trance. Those Winchesters with their inside-joke-aliases.
On Beauty, part 624
Perhaps it is because I felt so STARVED for Impala scenes in Season 12, such scenes’ intimacy, claustrophobia, high level of skill, that in this last re-watch I felt like I drowned in Beauty.
Here’s the thing about Beauty, which I go on and on about in these re-caps, and I realize that on some level through all this writing I am trying to work out what exactly I mean.
The series is about many things. Concepts and ideals and conflicts. It’s about Sam and Dean, their quest, and it’s about the acting.
But coursing beneath all that, flooding around them, is Beauty – not so much a theme, but a mood, an atmosphere, a context. It is a tragic epic Beauty, dark and deep, the shadows like velvet, the shadows caressing – yes, CARESSING – the contours of their faces, illuminating their features, their eyes, their emotions. The shadows are seductive, loving, dangerous. These men are often filmed half in light, half in shadow: they are split, different aspects cut off from each other, the conscious world cut off from the unconscious world, the things they SAY cut off from the things they feel, the emotions working on them that they do not even know are THERE. The only way to communicate these things is to suggest them, and to suggest them in as aggressive manner as possible (without becoming arch or surface-oriented only).
The “surfaces” in Supernatural – at least in these early- to mid-seasons – ALWAYS suggest the depths underneath.
This is one of the series’ many powerful and potent uses of Beauty.
Beauty is not “pretty.” Prettiness is domestic, unthreatening. It has the stamp of approval from society. Prettiness is safe. We know how to deal with it. Beauty? We shy away. We are drawn to it but we shy away. Beauty makes demands on us.
Beauty is danger, sex, loss, the rich darkness of memory.
2nd scene
Kubrick is born to be a follower. Jesus writhes in agony on a wall behind his head.
Kubrick’s burly partner Creedy (Jon Van Ness) seems sane by comparison.
Watching these goons go after Sam, it’s clear the makeshift and desperate quality of Gordon’s situation. Gordon has burned his bridges in the hunter world. Nobody else but someone like Kubrick is going to visit him in prison, keep him up to date, do what he asks. Kubrick was probably the last hunter on Gordon’s list of phone calls, and also the only one to call him back. In his favor, Kubrick has the “follower” mentality, and Gordon – a natural predator – picks up on it.
This little scene has a very weird atmosphere. Static, tense, with strange silences: we are in the presence of a lunatic. Kubrick makes such a distinct impression that it feels like he is being set up as a recurring character.
The only way that Kubrick – who is not that bright – could EVER track down the wascally Winchesters to the degree that he does – is because Sam touched the rabbit’s foot. Kubrick got lucky. No other possible reason, not with this guy.
3rd scene
John Winchester is the gift that keeps on giving. There is probably stuff we still don’t know. Bobby knows more than he tells.
It’s intriguing, the image of the peripatetic John, whose home went up in flames, who lost everything – baby pictures, mementoes of his relationship, love letters in a shoebox – created a sanctuary – an “attic” or a “basement” – where he could store personal stuff like soccer trophies. It’s eloquent that John didn’t throw these relics away. It’s also eloquent that John would store the family “heirlooms” alongside the dangerous supernatural objects. Sam’s trophy surrounded by an arsenal. Everything may be dangerous in that storage space, but the mementoes of Sam and Dean’s nonexistent childhoods are potentially the most dangerous. John Winchester would not be able to bear having those things around. But he didn’t throw them away. They were not worthless to him. Who knew?? Certainly not Sam or Dean. Re-encountering these relics, the two of them show childlike delight, they revel in the object they thought was lost, they revel in the continuum, these two men whose lives lack a continuum in any way. The one thing they DON’T do is talk about John and the fact that he kept this stuff in the first place. That territory is still scorched-earth.
Sam refers to the space as a “toxic waste dump.” For supernatural objects, sure, but there’s his soccer trophy too. The implications are unavoidable.
John Marcynuk stepped up to Wanek’s plate in his role as production designer of the episode. There are so many WONDERFUL spaces in “Bad Day at Black Rock”: Bela’s apartment, the thieves’ apartment, the motel where Sam is sequestered and this storage space.
A small primer on “Depth of Frame”
I’ve talked before about depth of frame, a cinematic device that helps establish a three-dimensional world in a two-dimensional format. Here’s a little post about depth of frame. Everything in the frame matters, even stuff far in the background. (Think of the episode prior to this one and the first scene where you can clearly see across the street out the window, and the PAWN SHOP sign is clearly visible. That’s depth of frame.) The human eye does not see with “depth of frame.” The human eye focuses in on whatever it is looking at, and the rest blurs out. Depth of frame does not exist in nature. That’s why it’s such a great device for the movies, and creates such a destabilizing almost cluttered sense where everything rivals each other in importance.
The storage unit is a very deep space with misty dark backgrounds, objects stacked up in the foreground, in the background, piled against each other, bluish shadows and light streaming through from beyond. Sam and Dean’s roving flashlight beams pick up fragments, glimpses, of strange objects covered in dust, stacked on shelves, vibrating with power and mystery.
Supernatural is not a realistic show. This is not a realistic storage unit. It’s an archive, it’s a dusty holding-spot, a detritus dump of objects once precious, a smaller version of the famous final scene of Citizen Kane, where the camera flies above an endless warehouse stacked high with all of the art objects that Charles Foster Kane amassed over the course of his life. This famous shot was replicated almost exactly in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, an homage. Citizen Kane was the film that put “depth of frame” on the map for all time. It’s the gold standard for this style.
Here’s the final sequence of Citizen Kane. WARNING!!! IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT – AND YOU PLAN TO – AND YOU SHOULD – THERE IS A SPOILER TO END ALL SPOILERS IN THE FINAL SHOT OF CITIZEN KANE. I BEG YOU: DON’T WATCH IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM.
And here’s the Raiders homage:
John Winchester’s storage unit is not on that scale, but you say “storage unit in film,” and I think Citizen Kane. Those associations are automatic. What is the “Rosebud” in John Winchester’s life? (Citizen Kane reference, for those of you who haven’t seen it. In his final moments before death, Charles Foster Kane whispers, “Rosebud.” The whole film, essentially, involves an investigative journalist working on an obituary for Kane, trying to figure out what “Rosebud” means.) Was there ever a Rosebud for John Winchester? Is it the soccer trophy? Or is it the land-mine? Is it something only in his memory bank, the significance of which he took to his grave? Charles Foster Kane’s “Rosebud” is eventually explained but – famously – the “explanation” is even MORE mysterious, only brings up more questions. How can John be explained? Our answers will be different than Sam and Dean’s, part of the beautiful frustration of the show. He was their father. Their memories are complex, ambivalent.
As they take the elevator down, Dean has a private moment, laughing to himself, shaking his head. “Dad …” he says. There’s a moment where he looks down, away from Sam, scratching his eyebrow, and it’s one of those unconscious moments of behavior that Ackles is so good at, and that Singer is so good at capturing. You know Truth when you see it. Or you should, if you’re a director. There’s an adolescent shyness in that gesture, the quick glance away from Sam, wanting to shield himself. Dad is hard to talk about.
Being let into John’s private world is an exposing experience. Mostly for Dean, who is already so emotionally exposed – always – that he’s practically naked. Sam is more competent with his emotions (which is why what ends up happening to him with the rabbit’s foot is so hilarious.)
These beautiful shots here are exactly what I’m talking about when I talk about the use of depth of frame, when the film-maker’s awareness – and the awareness of his team (props, production design, set decorating, lighting) – goes as far back as the eye goes. Look at how much these shots tell and show, how beautiful the two leads are framed, how evocative that space, as seen through Singer’s eyes. This type of thing no longer exists on the series, at least not in a consistent way. It’s a bummer because moods like this – the look of these moments – were one of my main “ways in” to the show. Its devotion to a strange and uneasy and lonely kind of Beauty.
Details matter. In the scene before this one, the back wall of Kubrick’s RV was covered in a gun rack, packed to the gills with weapons. In this scene, there’s a grate in one of the interior rooms, also covered in gigantic guns. The wacko religious nut Kubrick and the ferocious warrior John, placed side by side. Moral ambiguities abound. What’s the difference between crazy Kubrick and John? Are those the choices? We saw this in the first episode with Gordon. What exactly are the options for Sam and Dean? Who are the role models? Dean goes with the John role model. Sam is the pioneer, the outlaw, trying to craft a more integrated and thoughtful persona. Sam refuses the role models offered to him. (And he does all this AS he consorts with Ruby, the enemy. You see the problem. There’s literally no way out for either of them.)
When Sam and Dean yank open the door to the storage unit, an eerie keyboard theme plays, a warped version of a child’s lullaby. There’s such sadness in that music. (There are also a lot of stylistic choices made by Singer in this scene that mimic the choices Jonathan Demme made when Clarice broke into Hannibal Lecter’s storage facility in Silence of the Lambs. Notice that there’s a flag draped over a large piece of furniture in both sequences.)
It may be laying it on a bit thick to have Sam find his soccer trophy and Dean find his “first sawed-off” but the point is driven home about how these two did NOT share a childhood. It was two completely different experiences, lived side by side (something adult siblings often experience. Same family, different childhoods)
4th scene
Grossman (Hrothgar Mathews) and Wayne (Christian Tessier) – the two small-time crooks hired by Bela – are a fun-house-mirror image of Kubrick and Creedy, Sam and Dean. Men travel in twos in this episode, and there’s always going to be an alpha and a beta in that scenario. “Bad Day at Black Rock” – like the film from which it got its name – is about the power struggles between men, the secrets men keep between them (and from each other), the way everyone’s trying to maintain their shapes, their ideas of themselves, their dignity.
Grossman and Wayne (the names!!) had very little dignity to begin with.
Just as we met up with Sam and Dean mid-argument, so too we meet up with Grossman and Wayne already up and running, already shouting at each other, in the middle of a crisis.
Wayne, the wiry aggressive one, has been shot in the shoulder with a shotgun by … a minimum wage security guard? Grossman is the dumb one, his face a blank of slow cerebral movements, thoughts rising up through the sludge of ignorance. It’s a very funny performance. There’s a gender-twist here. Grossman is Pandora, the woman who unleashed chaos into the world. Wayne is the “brains” of the outfit, which isn’t saying much. Just as Gordon scraped the bottom of the barrel when he hired Kubrick, so too does Bela scrape the bottom when she hired these guys. Bela herself is, as she says, a “great thief.” She would have been in and out of that storage unit in no time.
Grossman plans to double-cross Bela, which should tell you everything you need to know about his brain power. Dumb small-time crooks? Double-crosses? These are elements from the Noir Playbook, the world in which Bela operates. Bela brings Noir with her.
There have always been elements of film noir in Supernatural, not just stylistically although stylistically it has far more in common with noir than horror. Bela’s whole worldview is Noir, i.e. extremely cynical, so cynical it’s amazing that film noir more or less originated in America (and not, say, France). Optimism is so much a part of America’s cultural fabric as to be practically psychotic. Noir flourished for almost 10 years, 1946 to around 1953/54. In that period it went from stark to baroque, decadent, mannered, self-conscious. The Eisenhower Era kicked in, normalcy started to try to assert itself against all that post-war darkness.
Film noir is CROWDED with people like Grossman and Wayne, dumb lugs set up to be Fall Guys, sidekicks with nary two brain cells between them, ruthless, amoral, violent, but also somehow … charming, in their childlike cluelessness. In noir, they usually wear pinstripes, but the character is the same.
The opening of the box unfolds with appropriate portentousness, a swell of music, a whoosh of supernatural air emanating from the contents.
Wayne brandishes the rabbit’s foot around in the empty air (sealing his fate), and Foster (Forbes Angus), the landlord, shows up telling them both to keep it down. An ex-Army medic, Foster sends Grossman for the medical kit under the sink. “I guess this is your lucky day,” he says to Wayne.
The upside-down horseshoe over the door – a subversive detail – tells another story. Pointing the horseshoe down negates the purpose.
Sam and Dean have tracked down Wayne and Grossman’s car, and we see the Impala barreling down an alley that has been used as a location a bazillion times, in Supernatural, and anything else filmed in Vancouver. It’s a fantastic location, ready-made for filming. Here, you only see it for 2 seconds, but it shows just how much planning goes into the location scouting for Supernatural. In these early seasons, even with their low budget, they challenged themselves to make every single shot – EVERY. SINGLE. SHOT. – even something like this that lasts 2 seconds long – interesting to look at.
A film-noir beam of light shines on the doorknob of the sleazy apartment, as Sam and Dean break their way in.
The spatial relationships of this confusing apartment are very important so I’ll talk about it a little bit. The two sequences coming up are very complex: the group fight in the main room, and Wayne’s impale-ment in the kitchen. Blocking! Blocking is very under-rated, especially in television/movies – where you can cut the scene up into little pieces (unlike on the stage where every movement has to be continuous). However, you can TELL when a TV/film director has no idea about staging (one of the films I reviewed last week had this problem), and Singer here (and the stunt choreography) is in top top form. The staging of these sequences requires a very specific environment and this one is a doozy.
The apartment is endless. There’s a kitchen. There’s a main room that is pretty big, only it’s totally cluttered with random stuff, folded-up beds, a random pillow, a computer from 1982, newspaper covering the walls, punctuated by pages torn out of magazines featuring babes in bathing suits. The small-town grubby atmosphere of grubby low-lifes. The upcoming slapstick needs to take place in a space where we know the layout. It’s part of how slapstick works. You set up the joke a couple of beats before the joke and then you do the joke. The plastic 2-pronged kitchen fork is a perfect example. You SEE it before it serves its purpose. Same with the corner bookshelf. The coffee table. Each object will play its role.
I want to point out that an ironing board is set up in the kitchen. For what purpose?? I don’t care, it’s an amazing detail. It’s not there later so clearly these guys used it for something.
Tragedy is like literature. Comedy is like algebra or calculus. To create slapstick, you must be so specific in choreography and, in film anyway, in shot construction, that the event is airtight. Nothing left to chance.
When Sam and Dean come bursting into the room, the camera movement gets kinetic, following their zig-zag into the space, guns drawn. Dean and Sam are both so ferocious, so intimidating, that it’s absurd. All this machismo in pursuit of a rabbit’s foot, a “charm” that Tweens used to clip to their lunch boxes in the 70s and 80s. Who knows, maybe they still do. Dean does a double-take at the innocent-looking thing on the coffee table, and then the fight breaks out.
It’s a two-part fight, brilliantly choreographed, shot, and performed. Just brilliant! Watch how it’s broken down. Nothing is left to chance. You the viewer always know where each character is, where each object (gun, rabbit’s foot) is. You never get lost in the chaos of the moment. The movement is balletic and Looney Tunes-ish in its precision, interspersed with cut-aways to the gun (on the floor, flying through the air). We are completely oriented to this space.
During the first part of the fight, the Luck is on Grossman/Wayne’s side and so Sam and Dean work at a total disadvantage. They get their asses kicked. Dean gets clocked under the chin with a gun and topples over. Sam gets tackles and goes down out of the frame screaming (makes me laugh every time). Sam and Dean could beat these guys with hands tied behind their backs, and so there are moments built into the action when Sam and Dean are confused … “Wait. Why haven’t we laid these guys flat yet? What is happening?” After Sam grabs the rabbit’s foot, the second part of the fight ensues, when Luck swings around the Winchesters’ way, in choreography splendidly ridiculous.
On Padalecki’s Performance of “Good/Bad Luck”
I’ll just separate this out so I can keep referring back to it. Padalecki’s performance of “good luck into bad luck” is masterful in conception, and it’s not really the most obvious choice, if you think about it. A lesser actor would have just done all the clumsy things Sam does, and kept the Sam-ness intact. Like a normal regular Sam, the Sam we all know and love, except now he’s doing pratfalls all over the place. But it takes real imagination to go where Padalecki goes here. It’s in the script, but again, what he DOES with it is all his. Once Sam touches the rabbit foot, he starts to regress into a state of almost dumbfounded and irritable adolescent passivity. This will intensify once the luck changes to bad. It’s almost like he loses brain cells. Instantly. He winces at bad things, he moans at unfairness, he doesn’t fight back with the single-mindedness that he would on a normal day. “Luck” has taken over. Sam vanishes.
For example. He grabs the rabbit’s foot, and stands up to face Wayne’s gun pointed in his face.
An un-enchanted Sam would lunge forward to wrestle that gun away. But THIS Sam goes:
And forget it, I am on the FLOOR.
If you go a little bit deeper than just the comedic aspects of the performance, there are some interesting things being said here about the concept of Luck. When things just come to you easily, it encourages passivity. When things DON’T come to you easily, it ALSO encourages passivity. Sam’s reaction to the various disasters that befall him is a kind of frustrated adolescent “Why does everything bad happen to me?” irritation, a whining helplessness in the face of chaos, a TOTAL lack of agency. This is what Padalecki – a big capable hunk – taps into: Sam minus Agency. Who knew that that could be as funny as it is? He regresses so much that he loses language. He falls on the ground so badly he rips his jeans and tears up his knees, and all he does is stand there, helplessly, looking at the disaster, confused and injured. It’s all just sighs, and whiny moans, and eye-rolls, and pleading fragments of speech. There’s a sulky quality added to it, a huge part of the humor for me. Like he’s a 10-year-old being given a Time Out. Not a toddler but a 10-year-old who thinks he’s too old to be punished like this, and yet hasn’t developed an Angry Teenager Self-Awareness yet. He submits to the punishment, but tries to plead his case, only he’s still too young to really fight back. That’s what Padalecki freakin’ does (it took me a paragraph to describe it), and it’s such a genius (and funny) way to make Bad Luck manifest.
Padalecki is a great clown. (They both are.)
Once the thieves have “taken themselves out,” Sam has already gone off to … somewhere else. He’s quizzical, unconcerned, a little bit confused maybe, but not really engaged with the specifics of that crazy fight that just happened. There’s already something a little “cut off” about him. (That’s the aspect that I find so interesting about Padalecki’s conception of this “enchantment.” It cuts him off from … himself. From thought, from analysis, from any emotion beyond irritation. HE has gone away.)
5th scene
Dean burlesques his way through some Lottery tickets (labeled “Magician’s Hat”, as in Rabbits Out Of Hats, of course.) Dean’s Burlesque is high in this scene. Dean swaggers and sashays towards Good Luck, in the same way he swaggered Sam into taking a detour to see Lisa in the episode prior.
Dean hasn’t got a lot of time left. He wants to enjoy as much as pleasure/success as he can before he goes down. This isn’t mentioned specifically in “Bad Day at Black Rock” – or, it is, but it’s said by Bela, not Dean. There is a frenzied and HUNGRY appreciation of Good Luck unexpectedly raining down over their Bad-Luck-Ridden asses. Don’t look a gift horse, and etc. Their lives SUCK, right? Dean thinks they’re owed some Freebies. Sam is reluctant to trust the luck. “It’s gotta be cursed somehow,” he says to Dean, but already, if you notice, Sam lacks the URGENCY he usually has when engaged in a disagreement with his brother (consider the first scene of this very episode!). Now instead there’s just a sulky reticence. This is his reaction to winning $1,200.
6th scene
Here’s another scene where comedy as an algebraic pursuit is relevant. The insert shot of the rolling beer bottle is a literary device of foreshadowing. We need to understand spatial relationships in order for the final moment to unfold properly. 2 + 3 = 5. It has to be perfect. The rolling beer bottle is basically the “banana peel on the sidewalk” that dates back to vaudeville and early silent films. The audience knows it’s there and knows people will slip. You wait, wait for someone to step on it. You keep your eye on it at all times. When Wayne steps over the bottle the first time, you breathe a sigh of relief, but you still worry. That bottle is still down there. Alongside the tracking of the beer bottle, there’s the tracking of the pronged-fork. You see it before it transforms into a deadly weapon. It’s there. In the background. Waiting.
This is one of the most gruesome deaths in Supernatural history and I swear I think of it every time I pick up the two-pronged fork in my own culinary collection. Be careful with that, I think to myself …
7th scene
This is a scene of exposition, where Bobby is hauled in to explain things. Potentially boring (as these scenes always are). Here is where the concept of “blocking” comes into play, and how good Singer is at it, without making a big visible DEAL out of it. In the opening section of the scene, Dean lays out his winning Lotto cards on the hood of the Impala. He is excited, activated, in total ID mode. But the focus of the scene is Sam in the foreground, on the phone with Bobby. Sam’s behavior has gone slightly blank. He remains riveted by the rabbit’s foot, and can’t quite understand how the thing works. How bad could it be? He’s feeling fine. And lookee here, there’s a solid gold watch on the pavement!
Bobby, holed up in his lair at home, is literally filmed as though he’s a magician in a dark cave, Prospero amongst his objects, the camera circling around him restlessly. He’s crowded in, piled-up books and occult objects, in stark contrast to the Modern-Art display Bela has in her apartment of similar objects. Bobby’s whole LIFE is a “storage unit facility.” The camera PEEKS at Bobby through the cracks. It’s in direct contrast to the somewhat static framing of the other side of the phone call.
There’s no real REASON for Bobby to be filmed this way EXCEPT to create a sense of visual interest, to get some movement into a scene of expositional footnotes. But it also creates a sense of restlessness, a sense of Bobby’s urgency: Bobby tries to get it through Sam’s increasingly blank skull just how dangerous that cute little thing is. “Good luck” makes people lazy. Sam promises Bobby he won’t lose it. He truly believes he won’t. All of this is even more urgent since Dean is HARDLY trying to find a way OUT of Sam’s predicament. Good luck compromises brain cells. It is such a cynical outlook, and it’s pure Supernatural at its tormented best. In the background, Dean starts counting up his winnings on his fingers. He’s not even in focus! He’s total background at that point!
These guys are full-body actors. They’re beautiful in closeup, but their bodies are equally as eloquent. It is almost a lost art.
The brothers head into lunch at Big Gerson’s (Biggerson’s), which will play such a huge role in Season 7. I wonder if “Gerson” is a reference to Max Gerson, a doctor who claimed he could cure cancer through a specific dietary plan. A total quack. But his bullshit has gained a lot of traction in our world, in pseudo-medicine anti-science anti-vaxx “New Age” hooey, a hostility towards expertise and modern medicine. Don’t get me started. Biggerson’s was a “front” for the Leviathan’s program of infiltration, alongside their PR push announcing their plan to set up cancer treatment centers, etc. Another “front.” Biggerson’s becomes a metaphor for all that is rotten and lazy in American culture (my least favorite aspect of Season 7, it’s very didactic). The restaurant chain makes its first – unforgettable – appearance here.
When they ask for a table for two at Biggerson’s, all hell breaks loose. Balloons fall. Horns blow, they are handed a gigantic check: Free Food For One Year. Dean normally hates attention, right? He hates being singled out, right? Not here. The Good Luck vibes have softened him up, softened both of them up for the knife that will be Bela. When you think everything goes your way, you don’t see bad things coming. Bad things happen to OTHER people, not you. How quickly you forget, Dean!
The comedic punchline, though, to this ridiculous moment is Sam’s fussy almost girlie irritation, like he’s smelling something gross, wincing slightly because someone smelly is standing too close to him
Jared Padalecki is a gorgeous hunk. How does he make himself look so … puny? And prissy? And borderline unattractive? It’s sooooooo funny.
Padalecki is a superb clown.
I thank whoever on whatever Wiki page I found myself on who pointed out that when the flash bulb goes off, the word “FOOD” is whited out, so that the message reads “FREE FOR ONE YEAR,” an underlying message of the Arc of the whole season. Dean’s got a year. Dean’s top-side and “free” for one year. I love that insight, and it makes Dean’s happy “this is the best day of my life” smile that much more ominous. The man is in total denial.
8th scene
In any other episode, this sequence would feel like a cop-out: “Rrrrriiiight. A restaurant like Biggerson’s is going to update its website in real time. Uh-huh. In what universe would that happen?” Well, of course it would happen in a universe dominated by the Rabbit’s Foot. When Sam has it in his pocket, he’s protected from all harm. Once Bela swipes it, their picture goes up on Biggerson’s website, revealing their location to Kubrick. And the restaurant happens to be just down the road. Add to that the fact that Kubrick already has a sense of that he is on a mission from God. Uhm …
The divine messages Kubrick feels he receives are distinct from “messages” from the supernatural world: how those two things are distinct becomes increasingly important once the angels arrive. But now? It just makes Kubrick seem delusional. In a normal world, he would be too kooky to be dangerous. But in a world where Sam lost the rabbit’s foot, Kubrick becomes a mighty foe.
Back in Biggerson’s, a somewhat sedate Sam reels off what he has learned about the rabbit’s foot, all as Dean eats ice cream at such a feverish pace that he gets brain freeze, because he is a CHILD.
Just out of curiosity, I Googled “brain freeze in film” and “ice cream headache in film,” just to see when else this particular phenomenon has been portrayed. I couldn’t remember any, except for Dennis Farina in Another Stakeout.
But then I came across THIS treasure trove! Supernatural is not listed there, by the way!
It’s one of those small moments that I treasure in this series, moments that don’t “add up” to anything, do not do ANYthing other than help tell a story in a more interesting and lived in way. Character-based action. This kind of invented “business” is something Singer excels at. (I always think of his direction to the “witness” in “Monster Movie” to just keep sucking on that straw. Suck on it throughout your interview. That one bit of business completely changed what would have been a boring scene into a little schtick-y memorable moment.)
Into this vulnerable brain-freeze strolls Bela, complete with fake name-tag and fetching Louise Brooks wig. (Louise Brooks comes up below in my big “Femme Fatale” digression. Brooks is one of the original “bad women” in silent cinema: she became famous after starring in a film called Pandora’s Box. So you see the connection. More below.)
What follows is another masterpiece of editing, similar to the 2-pronged-fork death scene and the earlier fight scene. Luck – good and bad – FLIES around the room, and we have to understand who’s got the luck, who doesn’t, how it manifests. Same thing here.
Bela shows up at the table. There’s a closeup of Sam’s coffee cup. The shot feels meaningful. Just like the closeup of the rolling beer bottle. Something is about to happen. When she spills the coffee, she takes her time dealing with it, and the way it’s filmed screams “PAY ATTENTION.” (This is why I say this is one of my favorite character entrances in the series history. They were clearly VERY aware that Bela was going to play an important – albeit peripheral – role, and they went all out in their attempts – 100% successful, in my view – to introduce her into this world properly.) Another thing that’s a standout is how nobody talks during this awkward sequence. Singer allows the action to unfold in a mostly silent pantomime: pheromones pouring out of Bela’s personality all over Sam, Sam feeling the onslaught, feeling her intent towards him, being awkward/polite/flattered. No dialogue. It’s great!
She’s overwhelming. Her female-ness – for lack of a better term – is overwhelming, as is her sexually-alert mischievous energy, a little sexy wink at Sam practically. She disarms him. Her body looms across the screen.
Dean – antennae always alert for any possibility of sexual activity whatsoever – notices that a major come-on is in process. Bela retreats with a beguiling glance at them over her shoulder, leaving Sam and Dean stunned. Padalecki is never sexier when he’s being shy, befuddled. There’s a humility in it, a disbelief that a woman would throw herself at him – when you want to say, “Dude. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror? You’re a centaur.” His “Shut up” to Dean’s teasing is so charming I want to faint.
I have a soft spot for gorgeous hunks who excel at clumsy pratfalls. I can count such men on one hand. They are a rare breed. You have to have a certain amount of grace to be able to pull off a clumsy pratfall, and grace is hard to come by in tall men. (I wrote about two such men – and two of their best pratfalls – here.) Jared Padalecki has everything going for him. He’s tall, he’s handsome, he’s a good actor. AND he can also do pratfalls. When a short man tumbles to the ground, sure, it can be funny. In general, people falling is funny. But a 6’3″ man falling? A man with legs for days going down? I treasure it.
On my first watch of this episode, it was Padalecki’s physicality – the pratfalls – as well as that regressed sulky thing that goes deeper with each passing second – that made the deepest impression.
When Sam falls in “Bad Day at Black Rock,” entire rooms get destroyed.
A small spill of coffee turns into a 3-act ballet of destruction, with a waiter and his entire tray of food the main casualty. When other diners refer back to the lunch they had at Biggerson’s that day, they will not talk about the delicious meal they had. They will say, “God, remember that giant man smashing into the waiter?” That’s how much of an interruption that moment is.
Dean’s brain-freeze-good-luck-high vanishes in an instant. Sam, who was not on a high to begin with, starts his regression into wordlessness right around here. He becomes an OBJECT. Things are done TO him, and he is helpless to do anything back. He caves into despair almost instantly.
After Sam discovers the rabbit’s foot is gone, there’s a cut to that waitress coming out of the restaurant through the back entrance, in slo-mo no less – SLO-MO – just like Death’s entrance! – pulling off her wig and tossing it into the trash, a mischievous and satisfied smile on her face.
All I can do is describe my response to this the first time through.
I was blown away. I was so EXCITED by it, and her. I knew there was SOMEthing about the waitress, but I didn’t think she was some sort of THIEF who was flirting with Sam in order to steal the rabbit’s foot. I didn’t know WHAT I was watching but I didn’t make that leap. So when I saw her taking off her wig, when I saw her smile to herself, I was thrilled! WHO is THAT?? When Ruby entered the house swinging her knife in “The Magnificent Seven,” I was intrigued – but she wasn’t set up like THIS.
In a lot of ways, Bela’s eventual participation in the series isn’t big enough to warrant THIS bold a set-up, but whatever, I’ll take it.
The fact that Bela “GOT” Sam? That she managed to steal the foot during her “oh, let me just wipe the coffee off your hot inner thigh” pantomime, that Bela was able to get around Sam AND Dean was impressive. I was “in” from the start.
Bela’s introduction is Femme Fatale all the way. What follows is not a digression as much as it is the whole damn point of this re-cap. At least, it was the thing I was most excited to write.
Ready to Dig Deep? On the “Femme Fatale”
It is through the lens of “Femme fatale” that Bela can be understood. She is a Textbook case, including her backstory, revealed at the final moment. Bela’s backstory is made explicit while in classic film noir the femme fatale’s backstory is implicit, everywhere implied, never stated outright. Although the femme fatale is sexy, always, dangerously so, it is because she is somehow “cut off” from a normal woman’s normally-expressed sexuality. (Assume quotation marks, please. We’ve got to get Freudian if we want to understand the power and motivations of the Femme Fatale.) The word “frigid” comes up a lot in the femme fatale literature – no longer the language of the realm, thank goodness, although the term has its uses in what it suggests about the femme fatale, an aspect not often perceived (especially and exclusively by men) since she is so “sexy,” so performatively sexy, such a man-eater, etc. None of this is meant to be trigger-y or an endorsement of these views. It’s a discussion of an artistic trope, helpful in “placing” Bela properly. The femme fatale woman is not a “normal” woman with a “normal” woman’s nature: she is twisted, perverse, power-hungry, cruel, she wants to be on top, etc. (You’ll notice that Bela changes her name to the guy who was famous for playing a vampire. Also, she changes her name to a man’s name.) The femme fatale is powerful, but to see her as a symbol of empowerment is … sketchy, to say the least. To see her as a symbol of empowerment is to embrace the femme fatale’s death wish. To see her as a result of a misogynistic culture is ALSO a disservice to the femme fatale. She is complex. With an implicit backstory of probably horrific abuse, then is it any wonder that the femme fatale behaves like a wolf with her paw caught in a trap? She will do whatever it takes to NEVER be under someone’s thumb, ever again. When the femme fatale’s true nature is revealed, the poor schlub of a guy who bought her exterior is horrified. By then it’s too late. The web has got him for good. He’ll be her Fall Guy. That’s why she picked him. She is a predator.
She is also – to co-opt Camille Paglia’s memorable phrase – one of culture’s most important and influential Sexual Personae.
Karen Hollinger, in her fascinating essay “Film Noir, Voice-Over, and the Femme Fatale,” (which I referred to in research for my Criterion essay on Gilda), writes:
As a number of feminist critics have suggested, women in classical Hollywood films have been positioned as objects of spectacle, fixed and held by the male gaze. The femme fatale of film noir is clearly yet another female object of spectacle, defined by her dangerous, yet desirable sexual presence, but she is an object with a difference. Female characters in classical Hollywood films are traditionally portrayed as weak, ineffectual figures safely placed in the fixed female roles of wives, mothers, or daughters and desperately in need of the male hero’s affection and protection. Film noirs release the female image from these fixed roles and grant it overwhelming visual power. The iconography of the femme fatale grants these beautiful, provocative women visual primacy through shot composition as well as camera positioning, movement, and lighting.
The freedom of movement and visual dominance of the femme fatale admittedly is presented as inappropriate to a “proper” female role and as igniting sinister forces that are deadly to the male protagonist. Narratively, this dangerous, evil woman is damned and ultimately punished, but stylistically she exhibits such an extremely powerful visual presence that the conventional narrative is disoriented and the image of the erotic, strong, unrepressed woman dominates the text, even in the face of narrative repression.
The male voice-over in film noir, while it may attempt to control the female image, serves instead to pit the femme fatale’s dominant visual presence against the male voice, thereby foregrounding ideological battles raging in the 1940s in regard to women’s appropriate social role.
Versions of femme fatales have existed since the dawn of recorded story-telling. Eve is a femme fatale, unwilling (unable?) to stay innocent, drawn into sin, and roping in her male companion. Pandora could be seen as a femme fatale: through her action, her “unwomanly” action, she unleashes chaos into the world. (I know Pandora and Eve and all the rest are misogynistic tropes. I get it. It’s unfair that women are “blamed” for all that is bad. But I also feel … flattered? That anyone could think we were so powerful. I almost don’t want that trope to be demolished because of that.) The Sirens on the rocks in The Odyssey are femme fatales, seducing sailors closer and closer through their haunting music. Silent film had femme fatale types, although they were mainly known as seductresses, actresses like Theda Bara who could destroy men through her powerfully expressed sexuality – which was more like a tsunami than a human experience.
Theda Bara
The aforementioned Louise Brooks, in the 1929 silent film Pandora’s Box is captivating as Lulu, a woman whose sexuality is so strong it cannot be domesticated, even though idiotic men try to do so, continuously. And then feel betrayed when she cheats. The girl can’t stop herself. Besides, look at her.
Is this the picture of a happy homemaker? It’s MEN who are the delusional ones, the ones who want to tie her down, limit the personae available to her, give her the culture’s stamp of approval by marrying her. Her lack of inhibitions ruins her life, and ruins the lives of every man who gets involved with her. The film made Louise Brooks a star.
A couple of words on sex and the Femme Fatale:
A femme fatale does not enjoy sex. On the contrary, she has CONTEMPT for sex, contempt for men’s helplessness in the face of sex, contempt for the docile women who “submit” to it in the bonds of marriage. The femme fatale has contempt for all of it. She has contempt for anything that represents a loss of control. When she has sex, she NEVER loses control.
Rita Hayworth, “Lady from Shanghai”
Mary Astor, “The Maltese Falcon”
Lana Turner, “The Postman Always Rings Twice”
Jane Greer, “Out of the Past”
Gene Tierney, “Leave Her to Heaven”
Joan Bennett, “Scarlet Street”
Barbara Stanwyck, “Double Indemnity”
Ava Gardner, “The Killer”
There are many modern versions too (many of which are practically re-makes of the 40s films – like Against All Odds being a remake of Out of the Past). The most powerful, the most direct descendant of Stanwyck and Greer and Turner is Linda Fiorentino’s brilliantly conceived performance in The Last Seduction. I thought she should have been nominated for an Oscar, but there was some controversy at the time because it had originally been shown on TV (if memory serves). Regardless: she is a classic femme fatale, brutal, smart, amoral, sexually voracious (but for ulterior reasons – not just a result of a healthy sex drive), materialistic, ruthless.
One example of a “twist” on the femme fatale in the modern era is the delicious and restless (and sexually abused) Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks, an innocent with a knowing practiced tongue (how did she get that practice? It’s a queasy question that film noir doesn’t answer; nevertheless it screams from the screen supersonically). Audrey is always smiling to herself, a self-contained female narcissist, somewhat “off” – everyone senses it. Men are drawn to her, but that’s just because men are dumb and rotten. (A film noir trope.) Women are really the ones who look at Audrey and know – instinctively – to stay away. There is something not right about her.
It is David Lynch’s genius and empathy (not to mention Sherilynn Fenn’s performance) that allows us to understand just what an innocent Audrey actually is. She’s playing Nancy Drew, using every wile she can think of, all so that she can gain her father’s love and approval. And considering the monstrousness of her father … Audrey’s desire becomes that much more sickening. She’s not a femme fatale pretending to be a damsel in distress, one of the ways these black-widow-women reel in easily-duped men. She is LEGITIMATELY a damsel in distress, and only Agent Cooper has the clear light of perception on that score. He is drawn to her sexually. Hell, a potted plant is drawn to her sexually. But he has the boundaries to know that crossing that line would not be right. Beyond that: he is truly concerned for her, and despite her femme fatale-like qualities … brought on by growing up with that father, that mother, and the pure genetic accident of her beauty … she is a mush-ball underneath, all soft emotions and fluttering heart-beats, all innocent flirtation, her swoon of “love” for Agent Cooper akin to a teenager kissing the picture of a movie star she’s tacked up on her wall. David Lynch has given us some amazing femme fatales – two played by the same woman, Patricia Arquette, in Lost Highway, and he goes deeper into the meaning of the trope than any other filmmaker.
In her wackily entertaining and illuminating and at-times infuriating book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
The femme fatale is one of the most mesmerizing of sexual personae. She is not a fiction but an extrapolation of biologic realities in women that remain constant. The North American Indian myth of the toothed vagina (vagina dentata) is a gruesomely direct transcription of female power and male fear. Metaphorically, every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered … Physical and spiritual castration is the danger every man runs in intercourse with a woman. Love is the spell by which he puts his sexual fear to sleep…
The permanence of the femme fatale as a sexual persona is part of the weary weight of eroticism, beneath which both ethics and religion founder. Eroticism is society’s soft point, through which it is invaded by chthonian nature. The femme fatale can appear as Medusan mother or as frigid nymph, masquing in the brilliant luminosity of Apollonian high glamour. Her cool unreachability beckons, fascinates, and destroys. She is not a neurotic but, if anything, a psychopath. That is, she has an amoral affectlessness, a serene indifference to the suffering of others, which she invites and dispassionately observes as tests of her power. The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms. I will speak at length of the beautiful boy, one of the west’s most stunning sexual personae. However, the danger of the homme fatal, as embodied in today’s boyish male hustler, is that he will leave, disappearing to other loves, other lands. He is a rambler, a cowboy and sailor. But the danger of the femme fatale is that she will stay, placid, and paralyzing. Her remaining is a daemonic burden, the ubiquity of Walter Pater’s Mona Lisa, who smothers history. She is a thorny symbol of the perversity of sex. She will stick.
Film critic Molly Haskell wrote one of the most influential books of film criticism of all time, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Third Edition
In the dark melodramas of the forties, woman came down from her pedestal and she didn’t stop when she reached the ground. She kept going – down, down, like Eurydice, to the depths of the criminal world, the enfer of the film noir – and then compelled her lover to glance back and betray himself. Sometimes she sucked him down with her, like Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai, or Jane Greer in Out of the Past, or Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. Sometimes she used him and laughed in his face, like Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street. Sometimes, like Ava Gardner in The Killers, she let him take the rap for her and then, to show her gratitude, double-crossed him not once but twice. Sometimes she lied and lied and lied, like Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon, or sold him out, like Maureen O’Hara in Fallen Sparrow, or Janis Carter in Framed, and, like Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield and Glenn Ford, he forgot he was a gentleman and sent her up. Sometimes she wasn’t crooked, just a little out of line, like Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, or Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Sometimes she was a murderess and tried to bluff her way through, like Bette Davis in The Letter or Alida Valli in The Paradine Vase. Sometimes she was a femme fatale like Rita Hayworth in Blood and Sand, who lured Tyrone Power away from Linda Darnell; or like Linda Darnell – getting her revenge and a bad-girl part to boot – in Fallen Angel, luring Dana Andrews into a marriage with Alice Faye, to get Faye’s money. Sometimes she was a cool, enigmatic career girl, like Gene Tierney in Laura, who could tease the life out of some poor Dodgers’ fan of a cop, or just psychotic, like Tierney in Whirlpool. Sometimes she was crazy in love enough to kill herself and her lover, like Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun. Sometimes she was possessed by an evil spirit, like Simone Simon in The Cat People, and Edith Barrett in I Walked with a Zombie. Later (under the moralistic force of the fifties) she sometimes crossed over to good, like Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat; or, like Jean Peters in Pickup on South Street, diverted her man from evil. But even then she knew where she had come from and where she belonged.
You got all that? If nothing else, it’s a fantastic list of movie titles to write down and see if you haven’t already. Haskell continues:
[The femme fatale] had sensual lips, or long hair that, passing over her face like Veronica Lake’s, cast a shadow of moral ambiguity. Angel or devil, good-bad or bad-good girl, she was a change from the either/or – heroine or villainess – of the twenties and thirties. But for all her guts and valor, and for all her unredeemable venality (and she is especially refreshing after the goody-goody heroines who persuaded the wrongdoing man to go to jail and “pay his debt to society”), she hadn’t a soul she could call her own. She was, in fact, a male fantasy. She was playing a man’s game in a man’s world of crime and carnal innuendo, where her long hair was the equivalent of a gun, where sex was the equivalent of evil. And where her power to destroy was a projection of man’s feeling of impotence. Only this could never be spelled out; hence the subterfuge and melodrama. She is to her thirties’ counterpart as night – or usk – is to day. And the difference between their worlds, between the drawing room of romantic comedy and the underground of melodrama, is the difference between flirtation and fornication … or rape.
Nobody before or since has ever stated it better.
I quote all of this so extensively because
1. I find it fascinating and
2. It helps “place” Bela. I mean, she places herself – if you’re familiar with the femme-fatale-trope, she’s instantly recognizable.
When Haskell writes:
They are nobody’s fools, these women, but their smarts are devoted to getting what they can out of life – men and money (or more men and more money) – rather than to any high purpose or ideal.
… I think of the argument between Bela and Dean, pointing guns at one another in her New York apartment, surrounded by occult objects dating back to antiquity. Theirs is a moral and ethical and actual standoff. Idealism on one side, total lack of ideals on the other. BUT, as Bela cannily points out, Dean is kidding himself if he thinks it’s that simple.
The femme fatale does not have “idealism” in her makeup in any way whatsoever – and because of that she cannot understand idealism in others. It’s like being color-blind or tone-deaf. Those things are not present for her and so she cannot imagine them being truly present for others. She knows everyone has an angle. Get off your high horse, Dean is Bela’s attitude. And to some degree she’s right. This is the aspect of Supernatural that I so appreciated in these early seasons: the ambiguous landscape of morals and ethics, of lines you don’t cross, of assuming “ends justify the means,” of knowing that yes they killed things but they killed things for the good of mankind … (This is why the sight of Sam and Dean having multiple gunfights with human beings at the end of Season 12 was PAINFUL to watch. Sam and Dean coldly killing other human beings, with nary a second thought. What show was I watching, again? Who are those men? I thought I knew them. Of all of the other sins of Season 12, that one is the most unforgivable.) The standoff between Bela and Dean – and, by extension, Sam – is all about the MEANING of their lives. Bela does not allow Dean to hide behind his rhetoric of moral justification. Dean does not allow Bela to lie to herself either and – in his own way – DOES get under her skin by appealing to her finer instincts.
Unlike a lot of femme fatales – Bela has a spark of humanity in her, a spark that Dean may not sense, but he goes after it anyway in his moral outrage at her crimes. Sometimes his comments get to her. You can see sometimes the flashes of hurt, or surprise, or recognition on Bela’s face. (Cohen is amazing.) Maybe Dean can reach that part of her – and maybe that part of her is available – because of the sexual attraction thing that is clearly between them. Bela is aware of that attraction while Dean is oblivious (so hilarious since he is normally attuned to any sexual possibility occurring in a 20-mile radius). Sam is familiar with the hate-fuck urge, and we see him act on it time and time again, but it’s a foreign concept to pleasure-loving dreamy-Dean. Bela has probably done all kinds of sketchy sexual things in her “line of work,” as well as in her pursuit to get herself out of her crossroads deal. In other words: for a variety of reasons, Bela does not think sex is that big a deal, except as a tool to get what she wants. Consider her background. And so she looks at Dean and knows, “I could have him.” Dean is unaware of how transparently “have-able” he is. We have seen this time and time again. “Having Dean” could be her ace in the hole. Bela is very strategic.
The femme fatale is the ultimate control-freak.
Love her or hate her, she’s got her reasons.
9th scene
Dean/Crowley foreshadowing?
I just realized in the course of writing all this that the opening scene has Sam saying, confidently, angrily: “I’m not an IDIOT”, etc. Well, here we are, just a day later, and Sam has to admit to himself that he is, in fact, an “idiot,” and cannot be trusted to make ANY decisions about ANYthing. Bad Luck Sam’s reaction to this shows up in his body, standing behind Dean as Dean confronts Grossman. Sam is lanky, all awkward arms, hands crossed.
The pratfall when it comes shows how quickly Dean and Sam have adjusted to their new reality. Sam goes down in a clatter of limbs and wires and floor lamps and Dean doesn’t even turn to look. He stands frozen, waiting for the disaster to cease, before saying “You okay?” Sam calls from offscreen “I’m good!” (Singer is on POINT, man, with these choices. If it FEELS easy, then you know the amount of work that went into it to make sure those jokes land was titanic!)
Singer gives us something like this:
Sam has LOST it. In and of itself, even outside the circumstance, that is a funny shot. Sam? Is that you??
On Beauty, part 921
Like Bela in the scene prior, Dean uses charm/seduction deliberately, and does so here in the monologue to Grossman. Ackles is in charge of that. It is an “essence” thing, this particular quality is not “on the page,” and it’s also not something that Singer would even need to suggest. Ackles is already on it. He IS it.
The question any good actor asks when faced with different aspects of script – a line of dialogue, an action, whatever – is: “What do I WANT in this moment. What am I trying to GET here.” (“I” meaning the character the actor is playing.) If those questions CAN’T be answered, then it’s not a very good script and you, the actor, need to make some shit up so that you have your OWN answers to those questions. Asking “What do I WANT from this speech?” – and answering it for yourself – tells you what you have to PLAY, and also HOW to play it. Ackles can do this in his sleep. It was there for him throughout Season 12, when he was barely given one interesting thing to play (and I even clocked him looking bored out of his mind a couple of times, which I consider to be a crime against humanity).
However: the essence part of this monologue, the intense seduction of this moment, is all Ackles, and Singer/Ledouceur has made sure Ackles was lit accordingly.
Dean’s slow walk forward, and Singer’s accompanying slow push-in closer to Ackles’ face, creates a very strange impression. Time stands still. The strangeness comes seemingly from out of nowhere (and I have an issue with this monologue, but I’ll get to that in a second). The moment could have been played in a more up-front casually aggressive way: “Give us what we want OR ELSE.” But Dean goes soft, gentle, his face a blank beautiful mask. The blankness is more intimidating than outward aggression.
But you know what is also intimidating? His beauty. Dean knows it. His decision to “use” his Beauty to seduce Grossman into submission is completely deliberate. Sam does not use himself this way. Dean’s fluidity of personality, his chameleon-like instincts, his aura of sexual potential, his susceptibility – a word I use in connection to Dean all the time, meaning his porous boundaries – all of these things are weapons in Dean’s arsenal. They come up instinctively, and yet he is also in charge of them. All of this is intimately connected to what he looks like.
Beauty is an aristocracy. It’s unfair, but there you have it. Nothing any of us can do about it. Life is different for Dean because he looks like that. It’s a blessing and a curse. Dean experiences both sides constantly. Here, you can see him use his beauty consciously, in what may seem like a very incongruous situation. The incongruity is part of the strangeness (and part of why Dean often comes off as very strange to people who don’t know him. Beauty is not just a seducer. Beauty can also be off-putting.) Grossman is not “put off”. He is completely mesmerized by the spell of Dean’s personality, and that blank soft mask staring right into his eyes.
Continuing in the film noir style, there are bands of light coming into the thief’s room, and Dean – as he steps towards Grossman – moves through these bands of light, and the effect is intensely beautiful, as though Dean is swimming through water, rippling reflections of light and shadow brushing across his face. The placement of the light is such that his eyelashes cast shadows down his cheek. It’s damn near Joan Crawford level of artistry and effect.
The whole point of this moment is to revel in his Beauty. I don’t care what he’s saying. This is another thing that the show has forgotten how to do. You have an actor with a face like that and you don’t capitalize on it and dig into it and find cool ways to highlight his unique coloring and his eyes and his skin tone? You should be thrown in jail.
I’m not crazy about “I read people,” a phrase that comes up again later with Bela. It’s used as such a conscious “bit,” kind of like Samuel Jackson’s monologue in Pulp Fiction before murdering those double-crossing scumbags (a similar situation). You can tell that this “monologue” is something Jackson’s character does before every murder. There’s a ritualistic aspect to his tone. This is what happens here with “I read people” and it doesn’t work because we never hear it again. What is it doing here? In the moment, it’s Dean taking his seduction powers to the next level, a more intimate level: I am inside your head. I am inside you, essentially – and since it repeats it seems to have some kind of meaning. It’s a SPELL Dean casts. “I read people” feels like a fragment from off of a whiteboard in the writer’s room, something they may have wanted to explore more fully – but then tossed it out. My reaction is “Dean, why do you keep saying that?” Is he test-driving a new tactic? It’s a very un-Dean-like thing to say. Dean leads with his gun, and leads with threats. This “I read people” business comes from out of nowhere.
But it sure looks purty.
10th scene
The swan-shaped tin-foil leftovers is so absurd, and it’s even better since it shows up again in Season 7. I like continuity like that. I like it when the show remembers itself, even a small detail like a tinfoil swan. Kubrick leans against his RV, lost in contemplations of the Divine. The bumper sticker saying “Don’t make me come down there” is particularly good, considering the arrival of the angels in Season 4.
11th scene
Another algebraic sequence.
Repeat inserts of Sam’s foot doing battle with the chewing gum. The battle goes on FOREVER. The button of the scene – “I lost my shoe” – is such a quiet moment, really. The humor is in Padalecki’s line-reading, that sulky child-like quality I mentioned earlier. If he was still “Sam,” with an adult’s consciousness, none of this would be as funny as it is.
Dean’s sympathetic to Sam’s plight, knows it’s not Sam’s fault, but the absence of Sam’s partnership – the infantilization of Sam – like: JESUS, man, just take your shoe off what the HELL – results in the eyeroll to end all eyerolls. If Sam reverts to a helpless sulky 7-year-old, then Dean – codependently – reverts to an irritated beleaguered 15-year-old. (Without ever highlighting it, the situation in “Bad Day at Black Rock” is a reversal to what has been happening in the two episodes prior, where Dean has “checked out” of the family business, the partnership, to pursue his own goals, leaving Sam alone in the relationship. Dean is now alone in trying to get Sam out of his predicament, just like Sam has been alone trying to get Dean out of his. Good work, Edlund. Invisible, but present.)
Along with “I read people” this is one of the most beautiful shots in the episode.
I love that “Bela Talbot’s” “origin story” is cloaked in mystery. This is by design. Her name is an alias. She deliberately obfuscates reality, telling stories about “Flagstaff” that don’t match up with Bobby’s version of the interaction. (I love that this is not resolved. We never really get the story straight.) It’s apparent from “Bad Day at Black Rock” that she is not to be trusted, but still: the lengths they go to to investigate her – which leads them to Rufus – is pretty labor-intensive. When they decide to use her, they “feel dirty.” She is the darkness that goes against everything they believe in. But she’s also a beautiful young woman who uses her beauty, tripping them up in their senses of themselves, their stability of personae. Who is she? Her secrets are in a safe locked so tight that even SHE couldn’t break into it. Consider her end-game too. Consider that she is in Dean’s exact position at almost the same exact time. Everything she does is an attempt to extricate herself from her deal. Money could help her procure objects that could possibly neutralize the deal. She is ruthless already. This is a person on the run from her past, this is a person who obliterated her own fingerprints. This woman is hardcore. She turns Sam and Dean into amateurs. Dean can’t see it, because he doesn’t know her backstory (although he senses it: it takes one to know one), but her quest is just as personal as the Winchesters quest is.
Padalecki’s posture when he admits “I lost my shoe” (my second favorite line-reading in the entire series, the first being “Do you have bigger cups?”) is hilarious. It’s not just the line/situation that’s funny. It’s what Padalecki DOES with it that is the slam-dunk of the absurd situation. I am particularly fond of the way his hands face his thighs. It makes his arms look even more long than they already are.
I would not have made the following connection if I hadn’t been in the midst of a re-watch of The Sopranos. Just last week I watched Season3’s “Pine Barrens,” probably the most famous episode in the series. Watch the following disaster unfold.
12th scene
The motel room where Dean stashes Sam while he books it down to Queens (one of the only times a Winchester enters the five boroughs) is a completely silly space. Filled with round shapes and round cut-outs, wall dividers that are big hollow hoops, and super-busy old-lady wallpaper proliferating around the room.
There’s a random circular alcove in the back of the room lit bright red. That red alcove is almost literally a Gateway to Hell. Similar to “Ruby” (her name synonomous with red, filling her plate with ketchup, surrounded by deep red curtains) … the color red – in a show almost totally lacking in primary colors – is usually a signifier.
Sam, at this point, is at peak wordless sulkiness. He protests, but weakly. His sentences trail off. He knows he doesn’t have a leg (LEGS) to stand on. He is under the sway of the enchantment and one of the ways it manifests is that he loses his language, SUCH a funny byproduct. “Oh, come ON!” he complains, while tied up and being threatened by Kubrick and Creedy. Everything is so half-hearted. He can barely “get it up” to defend himself.
Dean sets Sam up, tells him not to even “scratch his nose” and heads out. Padalecki in this next (beautifully framed) moment killlls me. Annoyed, but internally, he mouths something cranky about Dean, a sulky murmur of annoyance at being bossed around, and then of course his nose itches, and he twitches it. When he scratches his nose, he does so in a half-hearted spirit of rebellion. The man is a wreck.
13th scene
Our first glimpse of our femme fatale at home.
Femme fatales are usually hard-scrabble girls determined to climb up the ladder into luxury. You can’t really blame her for not wanting to live in near-poverty, submitting to the clumsy caresses of her dumb-lug husband. The femme fatale will do what it takes to get herself into a fur coat as soon as possible. (Bela’s character adds some elements to that, as I mentioned before. She’s on the run from the crimes she’s committed, so there’s that, but more importantly she is under a time crunch. Her “nice things” have accumulated, and she uses them to communicate with supernatural entities, she uses them to trade for information or another object, if necessary. But wealth is not important to her, in and of itself. Who knows who really owns this apartment and allows her to lease it. There’s probably a pretty queasy story behind that as well.)
Bela’s sleek Siamese cat hisses at the sight of the rabbit’s foot, held by Bela with salad tongs (a great detail). As with all femme fatales – Bela is dressed to the nines, even when by herself. Her “performative personality” is tough, delineated, sharp boundaries. She can handle anything and anyone. Later, she can look a terrifying Gordon in the eye and instead of backing down, is able to manipulate the situation – at gunpoint – in order to get what she wants. She is in the midst of being threatened by someone on the phone. She is unruffled.
We haven’t seen a woman like this yet on Supernatural. While she may be (and is) a nemesis, her presence is welcome. She adds a new dimension to the Winchester Belljar(TM), similar to what Agent Henriksen brings, or Charlie brings. Outsiders. Working their own cons, large and small. Intersection with the Winchesters in ways that complement and conflict.
The fact that Dean brought a Post-It note beggars belief, especially with his “ask questions later” practicality. It goes along with his “I read people” whim. It doesn’t work. For me, anyway. It’s a bit cutesy for my taste.
As far as Dean knows, Bela could be middle-aged, she could be elderly, she could be ANYbody other than what she is, a glamorous English-accented hottie. He has no idea who he is about to meet.
I love that Bela chills her gun with the wine collection.
Any standoff with guns drawn has a phallic undercurrent, whether anyone is aware of it or not. (A friend and I just re-watched Shane, and there are multiple shots of Jack Palance and Alan Ladd walking towards the camera, guns draped down their waists, their crotches highlighted so blatantly that you feel it’s GOT to be deliberate! Even if it isn’t, it adds a depth of experience to what may be a pretty standard and cliched scene, as this one is.)
As a visual counterpoint to the bright-red alcove behind Sam, Bela’s apartment includes a wall that is a recessed shelf unit, brightly back-lit with gold. As Bela and Dean circle one another, the gold proliferates in the background, behind him, behind her, behind then. The pile of gold underneath the dragon. The gold that Bela has devoted her life to accumulating.
Dean and Bela are siblings under the skin. Cut from the same cloth. Hence their crackling explosive chemistry. Danger like this is a turn-on. You can see it on both of their faces.
Their expressions have breath in them, the breath of adrenaline not panic. Both of them are calm in high-stress moments. In moments like this, they know who they are. There’s nothing extraneous on their minds. There’s almost no thought in operation at all. All they are present to is what they want. That’s how the sex drive works too. Both Bela and Dean are creatures of sex, erotic figures who use it even in moments that aren’t sexual. Not too many people operate like this. They do.
14th scene
With the blue toilet standing watch in the background, poor Sam – in a glorious LEGS moment – waits out his Purgatory. Imagine if Sam were still himself, and how much he would fight to get out of his predicament. He’d ignore Dean’s commands. He’d disobey. But the passivity of a Bad Luck Chump has infiltrated his nervous system. He’s a teenager in detention.
From his chair, Sam whines at the malfunctioning air conditioner, but even his whine is impotent: “Oh, come ooon … I didn’t ….” Helpless hand gesture. Padalecki is having such a blast. He’s such a versatile actor. It’s similar to what he pulls off in “What Is and What Should Never Be,” where he has to remove his Sam-ness, it’s similar to the psycho-rapist-wannabe he has to portray in “Born Under a Bad Sign,” where he has to completely remove his moral compass. He is so convincing in these different roles. It’s as though he is born to play them. He could have had a career playing ONLY psychos.
Look at this ridiculous decor.
Like I said, Padalecki is a great clown.
15th scene
Meanwhile, Bela and Dean circle one another, guns drawn. Singer starts off moving the camera back and forth, from him, to her, and back, the guns connecting them in the middle. It’s a style that highlights movement, restlessness, energy, conflict. When they finally each get their own shots, the “other” is an enormous blur on the side, the guns drawn in the middle connecting them visually.
Remember that Dean has no idea whom he is dealing with. He’s never met anyone like Bela. Bobby told him that Bela is “pretty frickin’ far from a hunter,” but if she’s not a hunter, then what is she? Dean has no idea. Bela’s “reveal” that she’s basically an international arms dealer is news to Dean. He didn’t even know such creatures existed. He didn’t even have a concept that such a creature COULD exist. He’s appalled and disgusted.
There are moments throughout their relationship in particular when Dean says something that “gets” to Bela. These are some of my favorite “Bela moments.” They are unexpected. They reveal her end-game. Her awareness that yes, she has made choices that might be morally compromised, that yes, what could she have done with her life if she hadn’t made that deal … There’s a small crack in the persona. (This distinguishes her from the classic femme fatale, whose only real emotion at being “revealed” like this is to shut down forever the man that can see her clearly.) Dean’s words to her are jabs, nudges, they’re meant to hurt. For the most part, she doesn’t experience hurt at all. She finds him amusing, she finds him to be a total hypocrite. But when he DOES say something that ruffles her composure? Watch very very carefully. These are choices made by Lauren Cohen. She understands this character intimately. I don’t know whether or not she knew from her first day of filming what Bela’s end-game was, what the backstory was. Even if she didn’t know the specifics, Lauren Cohen has made some very specific choices about Bela, who she is, what doesn’t get to her, what she finds funny, what DOES get to her. It’s startling, those moments when she hears Dean’s condemnation, when she may admit deep inside, “Well, yes. That was true. Ouch. I didn’t start OUT this way. I had no choice but to become this. Still. Ouch.”
Still, though, like I said: the femme fatale has her reasons.
The music underlying this interaction is pure Western stand-off. Only who’s the black hat, who’s the white hat in this scenario? That’s part of Bela’s point. Hunters are so much better? They’re all revenge-driven sociopaths. You’re no better than I am, Dean.
16th scene
The following sequence moves back and forth from Sam/Kubrick/Creedy to Dean/Bela. Dean must have driven 100 miles an hour to get back to that motel from Queens, considering the timeline.
Sam knocked himself out by falling backwards taking down the curtains with him, because of course that’s a normal thing to have happened. He wakes up being duct-taped to a chair by Kubrick and Creedy. Creedy makes a crack about Sam going spastic like Jerry Lewis stacking chairs, and I wonder if it’s a reference to this:
It’s not a particularly spastic sequence but it sure does involve a hell of a lot of chairs.
Sam’s reaction to being tied up, his moan of annoyance at the name “Gordon,” his passivity in the face of danger, shows just how bad this rabbit’s foot really is, justifies John Winchester wanting to take it off the street altogether.
Bela has the upper hand. Dean scrambles to try to understand how this … creature … works. She lacks warmth, “give,” compassion, humanity. Everything has a price for this dame. Dean does not operate in a world like that at all. When she expresses concern about Sam’s prospects, Dean thinks her conscience has been pricked and she’s come around. When she says “You can have the foot,” there’s a look on his face that expresses, “Huh. That was easier than I thought it would be,” which vanishes when she names her price. Dean is discombobbled. This will continue to be the case. He underestimates her. He is so used to his own moral code that he can’t conceive a person like Bela exists. Also, she LOOKS so elegant and beautiful, girlish almost. You could see her on a beach in a bikini. A fun sexy girl. How could someone who LOOKS like that have such a serpentine soul?? (Welcome to the confusion of the male when he is in the vicinity of the Femme Fatale.)
There’s an interesting moment of foreshadowing, which also opens up fascinating speculation that Bela – who communicates with the supernatural – knows about Dean’s deal. Knows that he’s in the same boat. She doesn’t say as much, but what she does say – with gold gleaming all around her – is intriguing:
“We’re all going to Hell, Dean. Might as well enjoy the ride.”
Bela is one of those characters – like Ruby – where once you know her end-game, it’s fun to go back and watch the whole performance to see if you can see the layers of manipulation and self-knowledge in operation, the things that brothers – and we – can’t see initially. Watch how Cohen says that line. It is HEAVY with personalization. This is not an abstract concept to Bela. Neither is it to Dean. They have limited time left. The two of them may be reacting in different ways, but it’s really just two sides of the same coin.
Reckless Dean has stolen the rabbit’s foot, in as swift a sleight of hand as Bela pulled off in the restaurant. These two would make a magnificent team in an alternate universe (and they DO make a good team in “Red Sky at Morning”).
What is most amazing is that Bela actually shoots at him. She shoots to kill! This is another piece of character information that is super important but may get a little bit lost in the shuffle, as she continues to show up to help them out (always for a price). She points her gun, aims it at Dean, and shoots. Multiple times. But because Dean is now under the Good Luck Umbrella, the bullets ricochet back, piercing her Ouija board.
Meanwhile, back in Gitmo, Kubrick beats the shit out of Sam for not giving him the answers he wants. Kubrick is convinced Sam is in cahoots with the demons. Sam, still passive, not at all the aggressive defense he would put up if he were in a normal state, pleads his innocence. Kubrick’s not having it. In a small conference with Creedy, who starts doubting what they’re doing, Kubrick lays out his world view. He has noticed all of the piled-up coincidences. He has no idea about the rabbit’s foot. He sees this as a “mission from God” because who ELSE could make such coincidences possible? (If you think for any amount of time about the point Edlund is making here, the more radical it seems. In a way, it obliterates the possibility of a God that cares, intervenes, is present. Kubrick is entirely mistaken about everything.)
Dean has entered silently and stops the murder as it is about to occur.
Look at this fantastic shot. The figures stacked in a line.
Algebra dominates again. A closeup of a pen on the coffee table. A closeup of the remote control on the coffee table. Following the trajectory of the pen into Kubrick’s gun. Etc. Sam watches in helpless awe as Dean – without breaking a sweat – takes down two gunslingers with a pen, a remote control, and a slight shift of posture. Throughout, Dean is in his glory, like a magician in awe of his own powers that he has just discovered. “Hey! Nothing bad can happen to me! Let me try THIS. Holy shit, it worked! Now let me try THIS!”
It’s no surprise that Dean’s experience of Good Luck is an entire Burlesque act, performed for his own amusement. The capper is Dean’s “I’m Batman.” Batman, of course, used gadgets in his fight against evil. He didn’t have super powers. There’s a similarity in all of this to Kramer’s insanely detailed experience with Seinfeld’s heckler, which leads to an amputated pinky toe, a runaway city bus, and a mugger. “You’re Batman!” cries George. Casually, Kramer replies, “Yeah. I’m Batman.”
17th scene
Sam, not quite himself yet, handles the neutralizing ritual for the rabbit’s foot in a nearby graveyard. It involves cayenne pepper, because of course it does. Dean scratches off a couple of Lotto tickets for the road. Hell, it’s what I’d do. Sam has that sulky “Oh, come ON” irritation which is how the spell has manifested itself all along. But before Dean can drop the foot into the fire, Bela shows up. As you knew she would. Or you SHOULD know she would. She’s filmed with EXTREME glamour, a nimbus of light around her outline.
The fact that Dean didn’t assume she’d follow him shows just how much he doesn’t understand her yet. Dean busts out the “I happen to be able to read people” thing, and Bela hauls off and shoots Sam in the shoulder. I for one did not see that coming. All assumptions about who she was, how far she would go, is she all-talk-no-action? went out the window. For Dean, too. He cannot BELIEVE what just happened. “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU??” he screams.
“Who here hasn’t shot a few people?” asks Bela, cold as ice and rational (women in art are usually associated with the irrational. Right or wrong. It is the femme fatale’s rationality that may be the most “other” thing about her.) It’s also a pretty good question. During this altercation, she calls him “honey.” “Tiger.” He has a response to her, there’s something in him that hates her and hates everything she stands for, but that is also turned on by the interaction. You see, Dean? Hate can be an aphrodisiac, too. Your brother already knows that!
By this point, I was so mistrusting of Bela that I knew she was swiping his Lotto tickets the second she leaned her arms on the tombstone where Dean draped his jacket. This will be the final double-cross where Dean and Sam finally get who they’re dealing with. They’re distracted by her woman-form. Imagine if “Bela” looked like Rufus or Bobby. Not for once would they underestimate HIM.
Dean’s parting shot – “Don’t go away mad. Just go away” has got to be a Motley Crue reference, right?
Algebra Alert for the last time!
We start with a long take: Sam and Dean exiting the graveyard, holding shovels. It’s done all in one: the camera moving along with them in a straight line, before then swooping around them in a circle as Dean discovers the Lotto tickets are gone, before moving between their heads to see Bela’s car shrieking off down the road, a jolly beep-beep farewell coming from the car.
There are two “buttons” that close it out.
The first is Bela, alone again, triumphant, holding up the swiped Lotto tickets, and laughing.
I know she just double-crossed “our boys” (ick), but I love her nonetheless. I love her as a dramatic device. I love what she brings. I love the unexpected nature of her entire personality and purpose in this story. She serves NO purpose. She is not there as a potential love interest, although both brothers have their “moments” of getting sucked into her attraction-field. Her purpose, though, is almost entirely to throw a wrench into their ideas of themselves as Leaders of the Universe. When they need her help, they hate themselves. When they “win” in an interaction with her, they high-five at how awesome they are, not realizing that they are paying her the ultimate compliment. She is not there as friend. She is not there as lover. She is not there as total villain either. She’s something ELSE. I love what she brings. I love what she brings out of THEM, too. Hell, a moment between her and Dean is what STARTED me on this journey of writing about this damn show. So I will always love Bela. She is not as major a character as Ruby, and she will not survive this season, but boy does she cast a long shadow.
The final button is Dean’s explosive “SONOFABITCH” when he realizes he has been robbed, and Jared Padalecki literally bursting into laughter at Ackles’ acting. I love that they didn’t go for another take, even though Padalecki couldn’t keep a straight face. That’s the risk with putting two actors in the frame at the same time. One person may nail it, the other might blow it. This is a situation where Padalecki “blowing it” doesn’t ruin it. It somehow adds to the full-on absurd quality of the entire episode, closing it out on the perfect note.
18th scene
In an episode filled with mirror-images and repeat-reversals, good-to-bad-to-good luck, the final scene is a repeat of the first. Kubrick returns to report to Gordon that “Sam Winchester is the Antichrist,” so this is going nowhere good very quickly. As Kubrick speaks, you can see Gordon in the reflection on the glass.
Gordon clearly sees that Kubrick is nuts. But he’s glad to have him “on board.”
Sam has risen in importance in “Bad Day at Black Rock,” when he was more of a sidekick in episodes 1 and 2. (Not exactly, but the main Arcs there were Dean’s.) Dean will rise in the next episode, “Sin City,” which features one of my favorite scenes in the whole series. Talk-y as hell, but beautifully acted on both sides. The glimpse that Lisa got in Dean’s face when he talked about maybe not having kids and what will he leave behind finally comes into his language.
This is one of the best things about Season 3. They take their time. It feels like a very spacious season even though there are fewer episodes. They don’t rush. They don’t rush Dean to accept his impending death, they don’t rush Dean into trying to FIGHT his impending death. When I think of how “rushed” the Season 12 acceptance of Mary’s return was – and when I look at Season 3 and see just how much they DUG INTO the REAL issues here – not the PLOT – but the issues – I realize just how much was sacrificed in Season 12. To put it plainly, Season 12 was not interested in what I am interested in.
I don’t watch this show for what happens. I watch this show for how these brothers REACT to what happens.
Dean’s denial about his situation is reaching critical mass, and it’s happening behind the scenes, without much explicit dialogue to support it.
In “The Kids Are Alright” he succumbs to a daydream of domesticity, realizing that this sort of life will never be his life.
In “Bad Day at Black Rock” he has met a woman who is in an identical situation as he is (only he doesn’t know it). Hell approaches. What will you DO about it, Dean? Will you descend into Hell with pockets filled with Lotto tickets? Is THAT what you want to do with the time you have left? The confrontation is imminent. His current attitude cannot last.
His time of denial, his time of putting it all off, is coming to an end.
OMG OMG OMG!!!
I got on to see if there were any new Twin Peaks posts, and instead I find this unexpected treat! I know how I’m spending the rest of my afternoon!
Yay!!
Twin Peaks AND Supernatural?? A very very good day.
That was wonderful! Thanks so much for your continued hard work and insight!
I love your discussions of beauty, there’s always something new and deep. Beauty is disorienting – very different from ‘pretty’. And different from ‘sublime.’ I think I need to re-read C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man and delve into his thoughts on the differences as well. Dante’s line “Beauty awakens the soul to act” acknowledges that strong element of disorientation in beauty – one doesn’t want to simply contemplate it like the sublime or smile at it like ‘pretty.’ And there’s the Frances Bacon line you’ve used “There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion” – and Poe’s modification “There is no exquisite beauty … without some strangeness in the proportion.” Beauty isn’t made from overlapping 600 different faces to get some average, the way one sees in shallow psychology articles that purport to show us what we find attractive. As you say, beauty doesn’t always draw us in, it stands in a hierarchy and sometimes we don’t want to get closer. Sometimes there’s a resistance to submission – Dean gets that reaction a lot – and that’s a big part of his comedy. In math lingo, it’s orthogonal – not on the same axes as those other two. It’s in a different plane.
/Comedy is like algebra or calculus./
I really like that, at least with respect to algebra. Things are set up, there may be a lot of steps to arrive at the result. There needs to be some sense, some logic. Calculus is too much like flying, with swooping curves and beautiful shapes. Or magic, with symbol manipulations to change descriptions into different dimensions. Or archery, getting lines to converge on a target point. But that’s probably just me.
One of my odd investigations involves finding female tricksters. With Bela being not quite a classic femme fatale, I’m examining her through that lens. She does seem to like to cause trouble for it’s own sake, more than is necessary for her ends. That’s a trickster thing. And tricksters often fall prey to other’s tricks. Is she Loki’s spiritual/nonspiritual cousin, becoming what each became due to f’ed up family issues? Gotta give her some more thought along those lines.
Now I need to re-watch the episode. Thank you so much for this midsummer gift!
I liked that Grossman was listening to Vaya Con Dios when he was pouring out the liquor for Wayne, after that terrible death. The lyrics hint at a pretty close relationships between them. I think it was the Les Paul/Mary Ford version he was listening to, but here’s Jeff Beck and Imelda May – ’cause everyone should hear more Imelda.
I definitely think the gold in Bela’s apartment is (in addition to money and dragons and hoards) also a foreshadowing of her going to Hell – and all the occult objects in the foreground are her hope to keep Hell on the other side of the wall.
And, not sure what it might signify, the name on the headstone that Dean puts his jacket on is ‘Lincoln.’ Perhaps the first episode of the season – set in Lincoln.
The whole comedy/math thing is why some people are funny and some people are not. You can’t teach someone to be funny if they are not. and in terms of presenting comedy – through a play, a TV series, a movie – whatever: it’s purely mathematical in terms of timing. If a pause is .6 seconds too long, the joke dies. and this cannot be taught. Both JA and JP have PERFECT timing for jokes – they can HEAR the space needed for the joke, they are totally in sync. None of that would matter if the director – like Singer does here – doesn’t also get how to FILM a comedic sequence. Bad Day at Black Rock isn’t just comedic – it’s slapstick – and that’s REALLY a lost art. You see failed slapstick all the time: you can tell what’s being attempted, you can tell what they’re going for – but it’s not quite right. Slapstick is inherently silly. But silliness requires a perfectly laid out equation to even seem silly to the viewer.
Recently I was involved in a reading series – performing something I wrote. Writing something to be read aloud is different than just writing to be read. I tape recorded myself babbling, transcribed it, edited it – spoke it out loud as I wrote. There were jokes built in. I could hear the jokes before I got up in front of the audience, I could hear them as I was writing it – but I had to pull it off. It’s a risk. Because people might not laugh, and then you hear the silence from the audience and you feel white-hot shame. one of the jokes required a pause mid-sentence – and the pause was a sort of built-in acted moment of searching for the next words (which, of course, I already knew what they were) … but the pause was also there to allow for the Laugh from the audience that I was counting on. If the laugh hadn’t come, I would have looked like an asshole. I would have recovered, but still, those moments onstage are always horrendous. I was so proud because the moment unfolded like the mathematical equation that I had set up in my mind – it went down EXACTLY as planned. I started the sentence and then I paused – as though trying to figure out what I wanted to say next – and the audience erupted into laughter because they knew where the rest of the sentence was going.
SUCCESS. But it required an extremely logical mindset to lay it all out.
Tragedy or drama … it’s easier to “get away with it” – even if it’s not totally on point. It doesn’t require such exact timing. And it can be good even if it’s not perfect. Comedy is rarely good if it’s not perfect.
I was thinking more about comedy as math or science. I’d throw in ballroom dancing as a good analogy. There is algebra to it but there is also movement. It gets back to your piece and the practice you put in on the timing. With a comedic partner you can trust, there is an instant sounding board, a shorthand between the partners to indicate whether it works and more importantly a flow and movement forward – it is taking you to a destination. Lack of good partners like JA and JP is one reason why you probably don’t see as much good slapstick anymore.
And this comes back around to chemistry and longevity — think of all the great slapstick and screwball (and dance?) teams: their chemistry so alive between each other and between them and the camera, and how stable those partnerships were over time. One of the reasons why I feel the buddy comedy/duo legacy so strongly with the show!
// One of the reasons why I feel the buddy comedy/duo legacy so strongly with the show! //
So so true.
Me TRUSTING that element of the show came pretty early – but it was during S3 that my trust was solidified.
So many good and diverse episodes – hilarious and poignant and intelligent – these two guys, man … they can do anything.
Paula – // Lack of good partners like JA and JP is one reason why you probably don’t see as much good slapstick anymore. //
REALLY good point!
We SPN fans are so lucky, really – it’s amazing the rest of the world hasn’t caught on to the slapstick clowning that still exists on SPN at its best!
I don’t see Bela as trickster – because of her Endgame. Her Endgame is life or death. Everything she does is because she’s trying to save her own bacon.
//Noir, i.e. extremely cynical, so cynical it’s amazing that film noir more or less originated in America (and not, say, France). Optimism is so much a part of America’s cultural fabric as to be practically psychotic//
I wonder if the American optimism and noir cynicism actually go hand in hand? Not to keep pulling David Lynch into everything we talk about now, but it’s kind of exactly what he does, pulling away the bright and shiny (but not necessarily false) exterior to expose the dark underbelly. Without American optimism, could we have created the atomic bomb? Couldn’t an argument be made that it was psychotic American optimism (along with racism and misogyny and all manner of other “isms”) that elected Donald Trump? I mean, when you get right down to it, wasn’t American optimism basically built on genocide and slave labor? It honestly seems to me that noir is just the Newtonian equal and opposite reaction to optimism. It’s just the other side of the same cloth, and actually would not have had the same impact in a culture like France, where the cynicism is right there on the surface.
//I know Pandora and Eve and all the rest are misogynistic tropes. I get it. It’s unfair that women are “blamed” for all that is bad. But I also feel … flattered? That anyone could think we were so powerful. I almost don’t want that trope to be demolished because of that.//
I kind of love this observation. I have a (male) friend who I frequently argue with about feminist issues. He does (in general, rightly) consider himself a feminist and an expert (somewhat rightly) on feminism. He and I have both studied feminist theories extensively from different perspectives. His is in the context of literature and sociology. Mine is in the context of individual psychology, counseling, and (it matters) being female. (I once pointed out to him that he had mansplained feminism to me. His response was to explain why he found the term “mansplaining” problematic. I replied that I like the term because it’s an accurate descriptor of an actual lived experience I’ve had many times. He had nothing.) He insists that gender is entirely a socially constructed, ultimately meaningless concept. While I agree that some aspects of gender expression are socially constructed, I insist that it’s not that simple and some gender differences are innate and biological. I have a feeling that he would have read the passage about Eve and Pandora and argued that those tropes absolutely need to go. However, I would argue that, viewed in a certain light, those tropes are actually empowering. Both women are charged with maintaining a male status quo. Both handily take down the patriarchy. They’re only villains in the eyes of said patriarchy. Both uncover truths that would otherwise have remained hidden. (Hmm. There’s that dark underbelly again.) But it’s not all dark. I mean, if the bible were to be taken literally, we have Eve to thank for the existence of sex!
Now I have a sudden desire to rewrite the first book of Genesis with Eve as the protagonist.
Re: Audrey Horne (since you brought it up) ;-)
//But he has the boundaries to know that crossing that line would not be right. Beyond that: he is truly concerned for her//
I have read in interviews with Sherilynn Fenn that the reason Audrey and Cooper never got together in the original series was because of Kyle MacLachlan and Lara Flynn Boyle’s off-screen relationship and jealousy over the on-screen chemistry between Cooper and Audrey. I don’t care if this is really the reason or not, I’m just glad that it played out the way it did. It’s one of my favorite things about the original show that Cooper befriended and protected Audrey without ever once crossing that boundary – all while Audrey was doing everything she could to throw herself at him. It’s beautiful, and it would have reduced Cooper in my eyes if he HAD acted on his attraction to her. He was a grown up. It was refreshing and sweet.
Now I’ve written this huge long comment and not mentioned SPN at all, but I feel like I’ve rambled enough, lol. Maybe I’ll come back later. There’s certainly plenty to unpack in the storage unit scene.
(No pun intended.)
Natalie –
Own it.
It’s a good pun!
I’d love to own it, but it actually was unintentional!
Unintentional puns are the best kind!
/we have Eve to thank for the existence of sex!/
She really does deserve a gift basket, doesn’t she. With muffins and cherries and oysters and sausages.
So true!
Seriously! Everything good is because of Eve. Imagine who we’d be if we’d left Adam in charge? Nothing would ever get done.
Try to build the Lincoln Tunnel, try to put a man on the moon, try to cure polio, without eating from the tree of knowledge.
/Eve and Pandora…are actually empowering. Both women are charged with maintaining a male status quo. Both handily take down the patriarchy. They’re only villains in the eyes of said patriarchy. Both uncover truths that would otherwise have remained hidden./
This may be man-questioning… How are they not powerful figures who upset and create the world? Eve actually has the first human act of Free Will (yay team). And Pandora (the first human female, created by the gods, with unique gifts from each) is curiosity and naivety and experience and Hope. If one ignores that Zeus created Pandora (much like Gargamel created Smurfette) to befuddle humanity after Prometheus gave Men fire. The Tower of Babel in a peplos. Okay, I’m seeing the problem…
// This may be man-questioning //
Yes. It is man-questioning. Not to be rude, but these figures were invented to blame all the ills of the world on women. If women want to “take back” these figures and see them as empowering – then that’s only because these images were foisted on us in the first place and were used as justifications for keeping us barefoot, pregnant, dumb, unempowered politically.
Like I said in the piece – I find it almost flattering that men through millennia have been so AFRAID of us, so TERRIFIED of poor little us, so JEALOUS of our life-bearing capabilities, that they have created vast mythological systems to justify why we need to be reined in.
“Now I have a sudden desire to rewrite the first book of Genesis with Eve as the protagonist.”
I’d read it!
So, that Book of Genesis rewrite? I finally got around to starting it. I have a link to the google doc pinned on my twitter page. @natalie3179
Oooh – Natalie – I’m so excited I will go check it out!
(I am also very impressed that you knew which thread you had mentioned this on!)
//(I am also very impressed that you knew which thread you had mentioned this on!)//
Haha, it’s only because there is an indelible Eve-Pandora-Bela connection in my mind.
But I would love your feedback if you have any!
Natalie – I agree about Audrey and Cooper. I would have hated if that happened.
Me too.
Their relationship was so sweet. And she was bomBARDING him with her availability – and he was not oblivious to it – but he gently warded her off.
Loved him so much.
I wonder if Dale Cooper will ever “bounce back”??
Natalie – thanks so much! Lots to discuss here!!
Interesting in re: Lynch and optimism. He himself is such a “sunny” personality – an “Aw, gee whiz, Neat-o!” kind of guy – and he honors that in himself. You can see it in some of the characters he writes – I guess Dale Cooper is the main one, right? His innocent attitude – his love of simple pleasures – is SINCERE. and he loves Twin Peaks because of its coffee and cherry pie and its Sheriff – but is there a more fucked-up cynical corrupt place on the planet?? So he loves the MYTH of it – this happens in the opening sequence in Blue Velvet too – with its blissful suburban scene – but there’s TRUTH in that myth. That’s what the real cynics don’t get. And won’t ever get.
American optimism put a man on the moon. But noir is still an artistic anomaly. German expressionism is its main influence – and like I wrote in my piece on Gilda (which I linked above) – France, cut off from American movies for the duration of WWII, started getting American films again around 1946 and they were blown away by what had happened in the intervening years. The last films they had seen from America were screwball comedies of the late 1930s, and populist-inspirational Capra stuff like Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Man Who Came to Dinner … and now suddenly there’s Gilda, and Lady From Shanghai? What the hell had happened to America since 1939?
On the flipside: America looked at “noir” (and of course it wasn’t even called that – French critics named it) – but anyway, to Americans these were B-movies. These were trashy erotic pot-boilers. Separate from the “serious” socially conscious fare that won all the Oscars. But France has always loved and celebrated our so-called “trash.” It’s like they hold it for us, they take it seriously, until we come around. They love the American Western, for example. We’re embarrassed by it (well, I’M not, but many silly Americans are) – but the French are enraptured. It’s an interesting cross-cultural phenomenon.
natalie – I love your thoughts on feminism and your male friend!
In re: the tropes of Eve, Pandora, etc. Even if these aren’t empowering tropes (and I do think they are, in a funny way) – they still have their uses in terms of telling stories. Male rebellion against a mother figure, female rebellion against oppression (Eve’s innocence is a kind of oppression), female curiosity, the dangers of knowledge, the beauty of knowledge – all of that stuff is in operation in most great literature.
A lot of sociological feminist types are anti-art. I see it a lot in “Film Twitter”, my little world of cultural criticism. These are critics but I read their stuff and I think, “They actually HATE art. I don’t know why they’re even subjecting themselves to it. They should just get into politics.” These people often mistake SHOWING something with ENDORSING it. I just … can’t with these people. If they had their way, nothing bad would ever happen in a story. Or if something bad DID happen, it would be presented in such a way that nobody could miss the arrow pointing down saying “THIS IS BAD. DON’T DO THIS.”
and so these people get furious about, say, Wolf of Wall Street – a recent example. “It’s so misogynistic!” they seethed – not realizing – or not caring – that this was a story about a misogynistic culture – so of COURSE it was filled with misogynistic characters. I mean … what on earth were they expecting? A “liberal” character to stroll into that hornet’s nest and comment loftily, “Why are you degrading that female character? Nobody should treat a woman like that.” This is why I say these people don’t care about art. They want to CONTROL art so that it broadcasts the message that THEY think is important. It’s condescending towards the audience.
// I insist that it’s not that simple and some gender differences are innate and biological. //
absolutely. I’m re-reading Sexual Personae as we speak and continue to be gob-smacked by Camille Paglia’s (non-existent) balls in bringing biology back onto the table. She goes too far sometimes, but she’s a provocateur. She’s trying to correct the swerve that has gone too far in the other direction.
// Both women are charged with maintaining a male status quo. Both handily take down the patriarchy. They’re only villains in the eyes of said patriarchy. Both uncover truths that would otherwise have remained hidden. (Hmm. There’s that dark underbelly again.) But it’s not all dark. I mean, if the bible were to be taken literally, we have Eve to thank for the existence of sex! //
TOTALLY!
Also: Eve wanted to eat the apple. KNOWLEDGE. If we take the Bible literally, then Eve is responsible for the fact that human beings KNOW shit. If it were up to Adam, we’d all be naked and lolling about all day. There’d be no medicine, architecture, education. So, go Eve.
// It’s beautiful, and it would have reduced Cooper in my eyes if he HAD acted on his attraction to her. He was a grown up. It was refreshing and sweet. //
Absolutely!! It would have been a huge mistake if he had succumbed. Not that he wasn’t tempted but he knew he should not cross that line. I loved that relationship. I am trying not to have any expectations in re: this new Twin Peaks … but I do hope that Audrey and Dougie (ie Dale) are in one another’s presence again. I have no expectations beyond that. I swear. :)
Natalie – would love to hear your thoughts on the storage unit scene!
So, I used most of the time I have right now commenting on the Twin Peaks thread, but I did want to drop in to share that I have impulse-adopted (technically fostering, but who the heck am I kidding?) an adorable teensy black kitten, and on my niece’s suggestion, I’m naming her Pandora, on the basis that black cats are feared and misunderstood and curious. In other news, I’m about 3 cats away from full descent into crazy cat-lady-hood.
omg congrats on your new kitten!!! <3
Pandora the kitty!! Love it!
I should be reading and grading some college essays right now. Instead, I’m indulging myself by enjoying your wonerdful recap — I guess because I’m a CHILD! Instant gratification, right? Or perpetual optimism: “Of COURSE I can get them all graded before the next class.”
I am so glad that the show rarely mentions Jesus because I’d rather Him not be depicted at all than shown in a derogatory manner.
It is sad that “showing that he gives a damn about his own life”is so hard for Dean. But even the things they found in the storeroom highlight why: Sam had the soccer trophy while Dean had the sawed-off. He’s the protector; instead of him being looked after, he was the one responsible for looking out for others (first his brother, later the innocents attacked by monsters). From early childhood he was given a gun and the guardianship of his little brother. Being the one in need of rescue is not a position he’s used to or comfortable with.
I always love your paeans to beauty: this was a lovely way of looking at the filming of SPN’s early seasons – “devotion to a strange and uneasy and lonely kind of Beauty.”
I noticed your line about “their bodies are equally as eloquent” because just this week I was discussing with my fellow castmates how to portray Shakespearean lines, words that often an audience will struggle with understanding. We’re trying to find ways to be more physical with our scenes, less static. As beautiful as the lines can be, as magnificently as they can roll off the tongue, they can be enhanced by some gesture or movement.
You mentioned the femme fatale not wanting a loss of control. Does this connect in any way to Dean’s personality? I have read other discussions of how he doesn’t like to not be in control (some have said that’s why he doesn’t like airplanes). Yet he accepts the control of his father. You also discuss his “porous boundaries.” I was wondering if you see this in Dean or not.
“I read people” – you’re right. That didn’t ring authentic for me either.
I like how you point out Sam’s passivity, how both the bad luck and the good luck stifle and inhibit who he is. That makes an interesting contrast with the angels’ talk of destiny later. They do NOT want to passively submit to what they are constantly being told is their roles to play.
Excellent point about the writers being willing to take their time with the story and not rush things (especially in contrast with how things were developed in season 12).
Aslan’s Own –
// It is sad that “showing that he gives a damn about his own life”is so hard for Dean. But even the things they found in the storeroom highlight why //
I like how you loop those things together. Interesting. In a way – him being gaga about the shotgun totally explains the other (why he can’t show he cares about himself) – “Sin City” he starts to show he cares – but only to the demon he has trapped. (That’s such a killer scene). Even just asking about Hell is almost too much like showing he cares about what happens to him – but it’s a start. This is such a good season! The emotions are so intricate! Dean is hiding stuff even from himself!!
// We’re trying to find ways to be more physical with our scenes, less static. As beautiful as the lines can be, as magnificently as they can roll off the tongue, they can be enhanced by some gesture or movement. //
This is so terrific – so true! Are you rehearsing something? What play? I love to hear about rehearsal processes!
Hmm, interesting about the femme fatale in re: Dean. Dean lacks the femme fatale’s sophistication – he also has too much empathy. He has so much empathy it’s amazing he gets through the day. Thank God for being a hunter! Being a hunter allows him to express his empathy/compassion through action. I guess the same is true of being a father to Ben. Also, Dean loves pleasure too much to be a femme fatale. The femme fatale is really really limited. She doesn’t get joy out of anything, not sex, not food, nothing. I think Dean’s “porous boundaries” make him susceptible to Bela – he has to kind of stave her off even as he is forced to use her – this is one of the reasons why I love Red Sky at Morning, as dumb as that episode can be. It’s a great exploration of the Bela “thing” – and how in a weird way, especially in their brilliance at being thieves – they CAN work together. But she senses how porous his boundaries are – she thinks “angry sex” would be a great way to just let off some steam. He’s like, “uh … what??”
And then of course later in the season, we see that Sam has a sex dream about her!!
She’s a powerful sexual personae! But nothing is ever on the level with her. She’s always got an angle. Quid pro quo.
We are doing an all-female version of Twelfth Night with women playing men’s roles in a reverse of the way in Shakespeare’s day men played female roles; I’m playing Feste the Clown. We’re doing better at lines than movement I think, but the more we get away from the script, the more we are able to experiment with ways to use our bodies to enhance what we’re saying.
I agree Dean is not a femme fatale, although I hadn’t thought it through with the depth you did! You’re right about him not being that sophisticated or that remote; he is empathetic and does enjoy, deeply, simple pleasures. It was just the concept of control that leaped out at me.
// We are doing an all-female version of Twelfth Night with women playing men’s roles in a reverse of the way in Shakespeare’s day men played female roles; I’m playing Feste the Clown. //
Amazing!! That sounds so wonderful! I wish I could see it!
interesting about the femme fatale in re: Dean. Dean lacks the femme fatale’s sophistication – he also has too much empathy
Just to jump in here, please excuse! Yes, Dean’s cynicism is often skin deep. He expects people to let him down, and he prepares for it, but it’s always a near-fatal wound.
It’s Sam I think who often occupies the place of the femme fatale — or activates the potential of the femme fatale’s destabilising presence. I’m thinking (as I often do!) about him standing outside Lisa and Ben’s house. But also about his coldness and his silences and his determination and the rigid control of his sexual impulse. Sheila you say so much great stuff here about why the FF refuses to go back into poverty — refuses to feel sorry for people — refuses to allow herself to lose control. I see a lot of Sam there.
Of course, Sam is a multitude — the empathic listener, the monster, the girl Friday researcher, the screwball husband, the little boy, the Western Stranger, etc etc etc until the cows come home.
Jessie – wow! I hadn’t even considered Sam in this scenario – but now I am so intrigued. Dean’s burlesque act is such a scene-stealer – I try to resist it myself because Sam’s role is equally as important.
// I’m thinking (as I often do!) about him standing outside Lisa and Ben’s house. //
I will never ever forget my reaction to seeing that scene for the first time.
The look on his face is 100% impossible to pin down into any one thing.
I knew we’ve talked about that moment before and I think it’s amazing how completely different our reactions were to it! The power of silence, of suggestion, of gap. It’s a real Rorschach test. For you it was a Stella Dallas moment and for me it was like nothing I’d ever seen before — like if Jack Twist and Marlene Dietrich were one, and were about to walk through Ennis’s white picket fence. The call of Pandora.
I’m so endlessly fascinated by the admixture of masculinities and femininities — archetypal, stereotypical, physical, narrative — these guys express, contain, work within. So Sam is the Luke Skywalker road in to the world and Dean is burlesquing Han Solo — but Dean is the road in to Sam (giggle) and in Dean’s eyes Sam is something inseparably close and unbearably other.
So Sam as FF is just one prism through which to view them, one lens we can flip down over our glasses, but through it, as Dean is our feminine object of fascination so Sam is to Dean — and not a homely feminine either; maybe he tries to recuperate the distance through those feminising remarks (you’re the girl, you’re gay) that were prevalent in early seasons but he’s unable bring Sam within a controllable framework of reference, if that makes sense.
I can’t get enough of these layers, these multiple positionings and spectator POVs. I think this is another reason why Dean never occupies the FF role — because we can get inside him* — we know him, so often he is an open book to us. But even if you can physically get inside a FF you never really get inside her.
*well there are those moments of glamour, mystery, withholding so maybe I’m wrong.
(Kinda funny that as Bela is introduced Sam is about as far from FF as he ever gets!)
and one last thing: you could say (you don’t have to, and in many ways you’d be wrong to, but you could) that Sam is of the city, and Dean is of the country or the road. And noir is of course an urban genre.
// for me it was like nothing I’d ever seen before — like if Jack Twist and Marlene Dietrich were one, and were about to walk through Ennis’s white picket fence. //
GOOSEBUMPS.
This is one of the wonderful byproducts of talking about this show with you fine people. I can go back and re-watch and try to see what you see. And often I DO see what you see – this is because of that “gap” that you mention – the gaps built into the show (once upon a time, that is. Sob.)
I just couldn’t believe after all THAT that Sam was back – ??? – that he WASN’T going inside?? – that … wait, what? Considering the original plans for the series – that would have been a HELL of an ending. I’m glad the series continued, but still….
Jessie –
// and one last thing: you could say (you don’t have to, and in many ways you’d be wrong to, but you could) that Sam is of the city, and Dean is of the country or the road. And noir is of course an urban genre. //
Now this is fascinating and I hadn’t considered this.
A lot to think about.
I love how SPN kind of fluctuates around in genres. Horror, of course, but I’ve always seen it as a Western, with noir elements. I know I’ve said this before somewhere. The next episode, Sin City, is pure Western. (Kind of a dumb Western, to be honest, but still … )
My friend Imogen actually wrote a book about the few times that noir leaves the city and goes out into the country (and also the suburbs). You wouldn’t think there’d be anything new to say about noir, but Imogen found it!
https://www.amazon.com/Lonely-Places-Film-Noir-Beyond/dp/0786463058
Hi!
Butting in to say that while Dean does not fit the classic Femme Fatale’s sophistication and coldness, he does embody a lot of the themes associated with the trope. Especially in how often he is perceived by other characters as a ruiner of men, which I find atypical for a male character. Major examples would be the way the angels talk about him as someone whose very touch corrupts and who caused Castiel’s -and by extension Heaven’s- ruin. Then there’s the way the other demons as well as Rowena accuse him of having made Crowley into his lapdog and taken away his power. There are many examples of Dean leading men down a dangerous path because of the impossible things he asks of them while also playing up his sex appeal. I even see it in how Ruby -another Femme Fatale, less textbook than Bela- sort of ..emulates aspects of Dean while seducing Sam. And the way both she and Bela have been heavily mirrored with Dean.
Sam has an interest in appearing sophisticated but does not really use sex as a weapon like Dean does. He doesn’t seduce, he intimidates. In fact, he’s the one who gets easily duped by Femme Fatales over the years, unlike Dean who is immediately suspicious of them. And I think part of that has to do with the fact that they work similarly.
And I find Sam’s otherness very literal as opposed to Dean’s. Mainly because there is no mytharc relevant reason to consistently film Dean as though he is so threatening and destabilizing yet that’s what the show has done ever since the pilot. For so much of Season 1 Dean is this chaotic presence in Sam’s life who remains a mystery to his own brother. We get to discover things along with Sam and there’s still so much we don’t know over a decade later. And of course, of the two of them he is the cynic.
What I’m trying to say is that Aslan’sOwn was onto something when they said that Dean resembles a male version of a Femme Fatale because at the very least he is often perceived as one within the narrative. He is very much a mix of tropes, to the point where reducing him to one or another is pointless and does a disservice to his complexity, but a certain Femme Fatale quality is part of it.
Anna – I love your thoughts here! This whole conversation about FF has been soooo enriching – and one of the reasons why I love putting all of my thoughts out there. People bring so much to it.
Dean as “ruiner of men” – love it!
The thing about Dean’s persona, as I mentioned here, is its porousness, flexibility – not exactly a chameleon (because that man can never blend in) – and susceptability – he adjusts to circumstances in a way that COULD be seen as almost sociopathic if he wasn’t so lovable.
// We get to discover things along with Sam and there’s still so much we don’t know over a decade later. //
That’s one of my favorite parts of S1! The unfolding of Dean. I always think of S9’s “Bad Boys” … and how perfect it was that there was still stuff to learn, still gaps in the narrative. Sam is like, “Wait, what??” He looks at Dean in a whole new way.
It’s wonderful. One of the reasons I’ve kept watching, that’s for sure.
Anna — excellent points convincingly expressed! Dean as the ruiner of men (while Sam is the ruiner of Man!). Thanks so much for this reading, it makes a lot of sense — makes me think also of Dean’s speculated history with sex work. And great point re: Dean’s reactions to other femme fatales.
I can’t get enough of how, as you say, both of these characters embody so many different and contradictory tropes that ebb and flow in response to narrative or POV, where you want to lay your emphasis, where you come from. These discussions are awesome.
I just came across this comment while doing a google search on Dean using sex as a weapon and I have to tell you that everything you say is absolutely brilliant, especially the differences you point out between Sam and Dean. That’s exactly how I view the show, except that I’ve never been able to express it so well. Thank you!!!
// That makes an interesting contrast with the angels’ talk of destiny later. They do NOT want to passively submit to what they are constantly being told is their roles to play. //
Wow. I had not even considered this.
This is such a deep pool in SPN land. Destiny, free will, luck …
Can you talk more about this?
You wrote that Sam “becomes an OBJECT. Things are done TO him, and he is helpless to do anything back.” This is what the angels want to reduce them to. Earlier indications were that heaven needed Dean, but eventually it’s revealed that they want him to be the Michael Sword — an actual object. Then they’re told that he and Sam are vessels – again, simply objects. “You swore your obedience, so OBEY!” demands Zachariah. But obedience means becoming completely passive, surrendering their will and bodies to a supernatural entity, to be used by a greater power.
That’s what immediately came to my mind when you wrote about how the rabbit’s foot charm seemed to suck life and purpose and determination out of Sam so he became a recipient of first good then bad luck. That lack of autonomy is so similar to what the Trickster calls “playing their roles”, surrendering to their destinies, which they consistently refuse to do, against incredible pressure.
Aslan’s Own – this is so great, thank you for elaborating!
That entire season of potential rape – for both brothers – both brothers faced with the choice of becoming objects – has to be one of the best over-arching season Arcs the show has ever done. It’s amazing that any of it makes sense. “Saying Yes” becomes the entire problem. Giving up one’s autonomy – not just of will, but of physicality! Giving up one’s boundaries, letting themselves be co-opted – as Sam is here.
It’s always great when one or the other of the brothers is compromised in that way. They are some of my favorite episodes.
I think the best episode in S12 was Dean’s slow erasure of memory. These episodes always bring out such interesting elements of personality, they’re a way to explore issues of identity and self that can’t be done in a more straightforward narrative.
Thanks again for another amazing recap, Sheila! So much here. This was one of those classic episodes where I was so busy laughing the first time and then in subsequent rewatches was fascinated by all the side characters and their interactions. And Bela. So complicated in all ways.
//Men travel in two in this episode.// I loved the four pairings, men who are bonded in some way, which makes Bela stand out even more. She has no support and doesn’t need it. That’s clear in this ep but then we’re given a reason why she doesn’t count on anyone later on this season. I loved your discussion of femme fatale and Bela. I would have loved to have her come back as a crossroads demon, all that beauty and serpentine charm, escaping terrible circumstances by doing what needs to be done (too bad TWD is keeping her so busy). It’s such a nice piece of writing, this Gordian knot of the pairs and the parallels and their relationships.
JP and the algebra of comedy. His clumsiness and sulkiness are golden. His trip in the Biggerson’s parking lot is one of my favorites because the Winchesters are launching into action mode, as we’ve seen them do so many times, and then he just drops out of the scene when he goes down. Dean’s patient but so irritated reaction to everything is the perfect note.
John Winchester’s storage locker. Oh, the secrets there. You’ve said before how he looms over everything (even when dead, especially when dead) and it’s so true. I love these dangling threads of love and contradiction in everything he did. Saving their trophy and that first gun? Awww. But the time he spent setting up this storage facility, which bears some resemblance to a workshop in a garage, and obviously visiting it throughout the years, without ever mentioning it to his 26 year old son and hunting partner. I love John and all these complicated hints of who he was, that will never be resolved.
So sorry to hear about Michael Massey. I didn’t realize he was the actor in The Crow. Such an amazing character actor.
// which makes Bela stand out even more. She has no support and doesn’t need it. //
So true! She blazes in and around all of these guys – the only “free agent” in sight. Even though – as we eventually learn – she’s not free at all!
// and then he just drops out of the scene when he goes down. Dean’s patient but so irritated reaction to everything is the perfect note. //
hahahahaha I know! He just disappears! And Dean is so OVER it.
I love how the next time Sam falls, Dean doesn’t show the same annoyance. Now he knows it’s not Sam’s fault. But that first one …
JP is so good physically!! He’s so tall that when he falls you really worry about him.
// But the time he spent setting up this storage facility, which bears some resemblance to a workshop in a garage, and obviously visiting it throughout the years, without ever mentioning it to his 26 year old son and hunting partner. I love John and all these complicated hints of who he was, that will never be resolved. //
I know, that he would never fill them in on all of this! What the HELL. By keeping them under his sway, he put them in danger. Control freak. Wanting to “keep them safe” – but he just puts them in harm’s way by withholding information.
I’m in S4 of a re-watch of The Sopranos right now – not sure if you watched it – but in S4, Carmela starts to try to set up her own financial future, outside of Tony giving her an allowance, etc. She takes real estate courses. She meets with an estate planner. Tony won’t tell her anything about their finances – he basically has millions of dollars stashed in a bin in the backyard. No liquidity. Just a pile of cash. Carmela’s like “what will happen to us if you die?” Tony: “You’ll be taken care of. There are some offshore accounts.” “I don’t have the serial numbers.” “Don’t worry about it.”
A way to keep control – a way to infantilize his partner – keep her submissive.
Dean and Sam seem … sort of? … aware of this. Dean’s little comment in the elevator takes a humorous approach. Man, you think you know someone and …
I really like that it’s not explored. The storage unit is explored – and I guess you could say that the storage unit is like walking around inside the mind of John Winchester.
You hit the nail on the head – control freak John. Nothing inherently good or bad about it, but he doesn’t see that his rigidity and control may have worse consequences than what’s he afraid of. So right about that moment in the elevator. THEY ARE AWARE but reality is always a surprise. Same with the comment in Jump The Shark about John not being a monk, I mean c’mon, John is so masculine, so alpha, and everyone is surprised he has another kid out there? (For all the talk about Dean being a womanizer, I’m more concerned about how many kids Soulless Sam might have out there, but I digress.)
what he’s afraid of (argh autocorrect)
// For all the talk about Dean being a womanizer, I’m more concerned about how many kids Soulless Sam might have out there, but I digress. //
hahahaha I love this thought!!
Oh, and Paula – I know, in re: Michael Massee!
Such a sad story. He did continue to have a career – but I am sure it haunted him. Just terrible.
Ahhh! I can’t believe I have to work before I get to read this! This episode happens to be one that I enjoy a lot but is also the favorite episode of my best friend, and I’m eager to see how your analysis lines up with her sentiment. And this time, I’m going to respond upon reading with actual thoughts and insight, instead of just dorky celebrating. Thanks so much, Sheila!
Audrey – you’re welcome! I love this episode!
// and I’m eager to see how your analysis lines up with her sentiment //
Interesting – would love to hear more! I love the “dorky celebrating” – ha! – but would love to hear more about your best friend’s – and your – take.
Such a great and fun and thoughtful read, Sheila! Thank you!
I don’t really know how to respond to this episode except for as a collection of things I find delightful. There are parts where the angles are awkward and unpretty; there are parts where the tones don’t match; there are parts where the Wurlitzer O’ Fun makes me want to die. The audio is awful and unforgiveably sound-stagey at times.
But the sheer number of wonderful moments overwhelms any of that. The gags. Their faces, their bodies. The dialogue. Like, just the tinest things. The uncontained full-bodied excitement of the Biggerson’s man. Sam’s “Edgar Cacye” voice! “Uh, I don’t have my book in front of me.” Wayne’s filthy sink, stacking dirty dishes in the drainer (nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo). Sam checking to see that Dean is gone before he scratches!!!!
The other thing I love about it is that it is an episode devoted to the ironic cut (“What could go wrong?” CUT TO: EVERYTHING GOING WRONG) and the scene button. Singer and Edlund and the performers milk the HELL out of everything they’ve got. It’s just pure fun. Like JA’s 270-degree turn to get his eyeroll to camera after the Shoe Incident. Or the balloon drop freeze-frame. Or this moment. 100% grass-fed Grade-A filmmaking pleasure.
Love your discussion of luck and agency as a reason why Sam seems to turn into a sack of petulant potatoes, that’s so great. All of his little whines and disbelieving come on!s, just succumbing to how miserable his situation is. I wonder if something in him is happy to lay down the fight for an episode.
I also love your digression on how beauty makes demands. How it’s uncanny, unhomely. How it implicates, how it’s never neutral. And then when you bring the emotion in — pain, anger, grief. It’s overwhelming — back to the sublime again I guess. Thank you for taking the time always to dwell on this, it is an extraordinary aspect of the show!
DAMN I miss hunters like Kubrick. Fanatics, weirdos. People on the fringe. People with complicated relationships to violence and morality. Masse is tremendous: the way he says “Lie lie lie.” The way he’s caught by Gordon’s snake eyes. How casually he deals with Edlund’s absurdities: Creedy: I’m hungry, let’s eat. Kubrick: What do you like? I got canned everything. HA!!! And then he gets so excited about deepfried onions! And he has the best FACE. His pale eyes, his cheekbones, his wide flat mouth. I love it when casting people like him and Jeff Kober was par for the course.
I gotta run but will be back to talk Bela — thanks so much again Sheila, a wonderful read.
//DAMN I miss hunters like Kubrick.// Me too! Much as I love the witch twins (for reasons) and Cesar and Jesse to expand upon that world, the fact is they are all too well adjusted (okay, other than Max bringing his sister back from the dead. //I got canned everything.// Those two were hilarious. I kept asking myself, why is Creedy hanging out with Kubrick? What’s the heck is that backstory? Makes me laugh to think about Creedy holding that ceramic Jesus face, talking about the eyes following him.
you know when I think about it, I got no beef with Caesar and Jesse either! I wonder why. I think I just really enjoyed their performances, their solidity; their groundedness and the fact that they were trying to get out. And maybe because the episode itself was better — I had a HUGELY ambivalent and worried reaction to Asa Fox (I didn’t mind the witch twins on their reappearance, maybe because they showed signs of instability?). But what’s the point of hunters like the Asa Fox fellows, or the pack of nonentities (including WALT and ROY, excuse me, I’m tasting bile already) in 12.22? Oh, I can’t — I can’t with any of those scenes. Awful.
But the Creedy Kubrick Walker chain of side-eyes and growing belief and crazy? So much fun! Don’t touch my Jesus!
// I had a HUGELY ambivalent and worried reaction to Asa Fox //
Me too, Jessie!
I had a problem with that episode in general – and it was around there that I started losing hope in the season.
What worried you about him?
For me, it was his totally generic alpha-alpha-ness.
I mean, who was more alpha than Garth?? But LOOK at Garth. He is not the poster boy for “alpha male” and yet he WAS. So great! The show used to be much better about casting – and … geez, character conception.
Ugh. It’s depressing thinking about it. I also didn’t care for Jody having a fuck-buddy thing with Asa. I have no evidence to back this up, but it felt pandering to me. I’m probably being unfair. Wouldn’t be the first time!
sorry it’s taken me so long to reply! *ducks*
I was using ‘Asa Fox’ as a shorthand for the episode title but as for the character himself, you’re absolutely right: generic, dull, and shoehorned into the world. And his awful pasted-on BEARD! It’s rare that hair and makeup fail so badly on this show. I haven’t rewatched the episode, but in retrospect he was a very bad sign: a boring person’s idea of what a hero is, and an insufficient road into M, D, or S Winchester psychology.
(revisiting your site’s comment thread on that episode is so depressing — we could feel that something was off but I was so sure they were going to course correct)
I’m being very hard on the witch twins! My real critique in re: them is with Rowena and what she has brought to the show – a Harry Potter style of magic and spells – (nothing against Harry Potter. It’s just not how “magic” in SPN was set up) – which somehow … “cleans up” the magic of these earlier seasons, magic that required dirt, grit, bodily fluids, cutting people’s throats open, speaking into swirling whirlpools of blood … you know?
When magic gets as easy as “Abracadabra” you lose a lot of tension in the show. Witch twins are more symptom then cause.
totally with you on this. Whatever happened to witches drawing their power from demons (and dead bunnies), as in Malleus Maleficarium? I know the mythology has to develop but we’re half an episode away from Glinda at this point.
They’ve always used magic as a bit of a shortcut (throw some shit into a bowl and light it on fire) but — you know that Pixar rule of storytelling? A coincidence that gets your protag into trouble is okay but one that gets them out of trouble isn’t? Those are the vectors they have to bring to magic usage. IMO they’ve got to stop thinking of it as an action and start thinking of it as an event or a problem. Maybe they’re too far gone in their casual usage of it now but like — what if the universe rift started breaking how magic worked or something? I gotta dream!
// What’s the heck is that backstory? //
Paula – hahaha I know!
and that RV!!
Other hunters tool around in souped-up beat-up gas guzzlers. Look at Kubrick’s palatial rig!
Overcompensation?
Jessie – // there are parts where the Wurlitzer O’ Fun makes me want to die. //
hahahaha Oh man you and me both.
Jessie – love your observations about the ironic cut! and all the ridiculous things they do to get those comedic buttons they need. It’s so obvious – but with something like this, the obvious style works the best.
Sam scratching his nose – sulkily – after Dean leaves – is sooooooo funny.
// I wonder if something in him is happy to lay down the fight for an episode //
Interesting!!
I mean, if you think about the episodes prior to this one – Dean has pretty much checked out of the family business. Sam is on the verge of being so DONE with the whole thing. But how it manifests – in this big lanky all arms all legs posture, arms dangling down … Padalecki for the win!!
// I also love your digression on how beauty makes demands. How it’s uncanny, unhomely. How it implicates, how it’s never neutral. And then when you bring the emotion in — pain, anger, grief. It’s overwhelming — back to the sublime again I guess. Thank you for taking the time always to dwell on this, it is an extraordinary aspect of the show! //
Never neutral! Yes! I’m re-reading Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae right now and her whole section on the Gothic novel – and Romanticism in general – loops into Burke’s thoughts on the sublime and the beautiful – that terror is akin to pleasure. Paglia surmises (in her typical obnoxious wonderful way) that horror films are stand-ins for erotic experience. That terror like that is the same sensation as pleasure – screaming en masse in a movie theatre with a bunch of other people is a shared erotic experience. I don’t know if I’d go that far but I DO know that if there’s a horror movie I want to see – I make sure to see it when it’s still in the theatre, because that group experience is half the fun of it.
// I miss hunters like Kubrick. Fanatics, weirdos. People on the fringe. //
So much!!
In recent years it seems the hunters portrayed are more of the straight-up commando types. Certainly in S12 – which – well, the whole thing was a love letter to SWAT teams and commando actions. BOO.
I just re-watched Sin City last night – just to keep on keepin on – and I don’t think Richie works at all as a hunter – and his goombah language is so cliche-ridden i just don’t buy it – HOWEVER: he represents an attempt to show the diversity of hunters. I mean, one episode you get crazy Kubrick and sidekick Creedy – the next episode you get Richie? This alone tells the story they were interested in telling: That people get into it from all different walks of life – because of such-and-such horrible tragedy that happened to them (except for Garth). This seems to be, if I’m reading his comments right, one of the reasons why Kripke wanted to burn down the roadhouse. It was too commando-esque, tough guys oiling their guns. He wanted a more individualistic makeshift universe – and I think that was a really smart choice!
It turns out that I don’t really have a lot to say about Bela. She’s not, to be honest, what I most remember the episode for. I really enjoy your discussion of her in terms of femme fatale — and I think I recall your also talking about her in terms of the Howard Hawks woman — these contextualisations really help me into enjoying her in a way I didn’t the first time around. Part of my problem was that I felt Cohen’s performance varied wildly in effectiveness and belief even from line to line — one moment I think she’s magnificent and the next I find her terribly artificial. I never realised it was her real accent until years later! I thought it was unbelievably phony! I warmed to her performance in later appearances, particularly after Red Sky, and by the end I was a convert to Cohen and the character.
So yes, love this discussion of her entrance in particular and the way it’s filmed — that wordless quasi-intimate coffee spill. Great stuff. It may have been that very entrance that set me off on the wrong foot the first time around — where for you it was like, Mystery! Wow! Who’s That! and for me I kinda resented having someone’s Awesome Mystery shoved down my throat. I’m sure this is a gendered thing (and also because we had been informed that “Two Beautiful Mysterious Women” would be joining the cast in season 3, like, way to get your audience offside — I wish I had gone into it without knowing as you did) because I didn’t have the same reaction to Cas or Death’s entrances.
I wonder as well if the shift in the show’s mode — from melodrama to slapstick (+ noir?) — influenced this as well. In a slapstick episode a character can shoot Sam and get away with it — but imagine Dean’s reaction if Gordon had shot Sam in Hunted. So maybe I hadn’t quite bought into the mode enough, or maybe I was feeling the femme fatale grate uncomfortably against slapstick. Not sure. Anyway, love reading other people’s reactions!
Jessie – it’s so funny, I remember discussing Bela with you and probably others a while back – I, of course, binge-watched the whole thing and only started watching in real time in Season NINE. I was fascinated to hear the different responses from those of you have been in the real-time trenches from the beginning. Having “Bela” be built up in condescending trailers and commercials would definitely rub me the wrong way – I try so hard to avoid trailers!! It’s hard because I follow so many cast members on Twitter, so I knew that Eileen was returning and I got my hopes up – and then BAH THAT EPISODE DID NOTHING WITH HER. I almost wish I hadn’t known she would be showing up.
// and for me I kinda resented having someone’s Awesome Mystery shoved down my throat. //
I can totally see that.
I also think that this entrance doesn’t QUITE pan out in the role Bela plays throughout – which is helpful to the brothers, but also kind of minimal/peripheral. Cas/Death’s entrances are appropriate to the roles they will eventually play.
But it’s also interesting to consider that there may be a gendered element to all of this too.
// In a slapstick episode a character can shoot Sam and get away with it — but imagine Dean’s reaction if Gordon had shot Sam in Hunted. So maybe I hadn’t quite bought into the mode enough, or maybe I was feeling the femme fatale grate uncomfortably against slapstick. //
Very interesting points!
I think Bela showing up in a slapstick episode kind of softens her effect – which, now that I’m thinking about it, is a good thing. Because Bela isn’t Abaddon, or somebody else – a “big bad” who will play THE major role in the coming season. She’s just another weirdo thrown into the mix – along with Gordon, Agent Henriksen – the other characters who show up, recur in this season – Bela is intriguing but she’s not the whole shebang. She’s an irritant, a mystery, a parttime nemesis. If she had shown up in a darker episode, she might have seemed even MORE important, if that makes sense.
The episodes she shows up in are pretty light-hearted, across the board. She’s an engine of chaos – as all femme fatales are – but she operates in a kind of ridiculous context – almost like she’s a screwball dame, like Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. She’s NOT a screwball dame, and her Femme Fatale-ness plays no REAL role in the over-arching arc of the season.
In a way, her entrance may be TOO attention-getting for the role she plays.
Whereas Ruby’s entrance – materializing from the darkness – is appropriate to the GIGANTIC role she will play in the next two seasons.
GREAT point about her intro not quite fitting her eventual role! She’s almost more Joel Cairo than Mary Astor, more of a fly in the ointment than a viper in the grass.
There is so much about this episode that I love (again, when it embraces the goofy, I’m all in) but the piece that I constantly come back to are those childhood remnants in the storage unit.
A soccer trophy and a sawed off. Of all the things to save from the childhood post-Mary, that is what he saved (or at the very least, what is presented to us). I think about the likelihood of John Winchester ever keeping the boys in one place long enough for Sam to not only join a soccer league but to earn a trophy. Of course, it could be one of those “participation” jobs that were probably coming into popularity around that time. He may have come onto a team mid-season and managed to stick around long enough to make it to the end of the year team party. Was John present for any of that? I don’t see John Winchester on the side lines of a soccer game or taking Sam to a pizza party. The obvious answer is that he didn’t. That was all Dean, though we know Dean was probably seducing the comely concession stand cashier.
I think about the psychology of John Winchester and why he saved those two particular items. In Dean, he values the loyal, obedient hunter so that’s an easy mark. In Sam, I think he outwardly resented yet inwardly respected Sam’s desire for the other, the life outside of the family. Maybe it reminds him of Mary (surely at that point he would have known Mary’s family history and desire to lead a normal life, even if he never told his boys). And he managed to save the two remnants of childhood the boys themselves would have probably chosen to save given the opportunity.
This was a small moment in an episode packed with so much, but any insight into the family dynamics and childhood experience is always so interesting to me. Character over plot, right?
Tracy –
I think these elements is why “Bad Boys” so many years later moved me so much. Dean had this whole other life, this father figure, an award for wrestling – out on the wall. And he never ever mentioned it. (Obviously because it hadn’t been invented yet by the writers – ha – but that’s the thing with these gaps built into the action – the acting is so good that they work retroactively.) Dean’s silence – over the years – on his time there, where he lived as a normal teenager, with his own sporting triumphs is ELOQUENT.
Thanks for another great episode rewatch – I love all your observations, and I’m particularly grateful to you for pointing out that shot of Kubrick with the Christ painting in the background. I never noticed it before, but now I can’t look away. There’s so much glorious irony in that combination.
//It may be laying it on a bit thick to have Sam find his soccer trophy and Dean find his “first sawed-off” but the point is driven home about how these two did NOT share a childhood. It was two completely different experiences, lived side by side (something adult siblings often experience. Same family, different childhoods)//
I find it kind of terrifying how the items John chose echo his “I want you to go back to school. I want Dean to have a home.” speech in 1×20. In 1×08 Sam complained about how John wasn’t particularly understanding about Sam’s wish to try for the soccer team rather than learning bow-hunting. The trophy proves that a) Sam did get to play soccer and b) deep down John respected and appreciated Sam’s independent streak. It’s John disowning Sam for going to Stanford and being proud of him for it all over again. And right next to that there’s Dean, the eternal tool…
Thanks so much for your comment and your observations! I need to catch up on all the comments left in the last couple of days.
I completely get the symbolism of those objects in the storage unit – I just think it’s laying the metaphor on a bit thick. Too on the nose, as they say.
Sheila, thank you for yet another analytical article on the show! I will definately go over it again and read the comments, but two thoughts immediately popped to mind.
1. On beauty. In Ostrovskiy’s play “The Thunderstorm” (or “The Storm”) there is a line by one of the minor characters who pretty much compares beauty to a curse. It drives others into temptation and makes people around the beauty miserable. And the responsability falls on the “curse bearer”. So the only way out (in the play!) is a swan-dive off a cliff. I cannot for the love of me find a proper quote, but the general idea is that one. So true beauty is a very hard thing to handle for everyone involved. Nothing safe or happy about it.
2. In the scene of Bela vs Dean standoff there’s a moment that struck me. Behind Bela the background is all fiery. But there is a very long noticeable moment where there’s a silhouette of a cross behind Dean. Given the all the Jesus-related details in this episode and symbolism in S04E01 it’s a nice touch.
Barbara –
You know, I have been looking for appropriate extant quotes in re: Beauty, and what I’ve been trying to get at with its uses in the show – especially in regards to how JP and JA are filmed. The closest I can get is Dorian Gray – and also Aubrey Beardsley’s work (there’s a huge piece on him in The New Yorker just this week!) I have not read The Storm – but it sounds very intriguing!
// But there is a very long noticeable moment where there’s a silhouette of a cross behind Dean. //
Wow, I’ll have to go back and look.
Since it did not feel right without the actual quote, I did find a text of the play. Here’s the quote I was talking about.
Act IV Scene VI
The Old Lady
…Beauty! Better pray to God to take away your beauty!
It’s beauty that is our ruin! Ruin to yourself, a snare to others, so rejoice in your beauty if you will! Many, many you lead into sin! Giddy fellows fight duels over you, slash each other with swords for your sake. And you are glad! Old men, honourable men, forget that they must die, tempted by beauty! And who has to answer for it all? You will answer for it all! Better go down into the whirlpool with your beauty! Yes, quick, quick.
Where will you hide away, foolish one! There’s no escaping God! _(thunder.)_ All of you will burn in fire unquenchable!
The character this was said to later killed herself by diving off acliff into the river.
It occurred to me the other day that the best example of a femme fatale in SPN is a man. Jim in the “siren episode.” Even beyond Bela because his interest is targeted to the most vulnerable – Dean.
Perfect for the gender-bending aspect of the show, and Dean in particular.
if I could embed a twenty-foot-high glittering gif of the word yes with Dean on top riding it like a pony I would but I can’t so you’ll just have to imagine.
I just discovered your blog a few weeks ago, and I got obsessed with your Supernatural recaps of the early seasons (yes, I know I am WAY too late to the party)! Your writing is the best on the show I have ever read, and believe me I have read a LOT.
I was just wondering, I am now in season 3 and I can’t find any recaps in that season after episode 6. Did you stop there for the early seasons? I poked around but couldn’t find any more recaps until the more recent ones.
Sorry to bug you but I have gotten hooked on reading your recaps while I rewatch because I love them so much! You really are an extraordinary writer.
Shel – thank you so much! And welcome!
Unfortunately I did stop – not for good, hopefully – my writing career just kind of exploded in the last year and a half and I have had no free time for writing here – I’m doing other gigs now. I only put up 2 or 3 episode re-caps this year. Bah. I do miss doing them and really want to continue. Especially for end of Season 3 into Season 4 which is just so powerful.
I definitely don’t feel done!
Thank you so much for the compliments. I really appreciate it.
and feel free to join in on comments threads – even on old episodes. It’s always fun to talk about the show!
Sheila,
Thank you so much for replying, I didn’t expect you to! I guess for now I will move on to reading your other posts…which I am sure I will enjoy just as much.
I am really glad to hear your writing career is going well–but not at all surprised from what I have seen here on your blog so far.
All the best to you and wishing you continued success!