Directed by Allan Kroeker
Written by Sera Gamble & Raelle Tucker
Sera Gamble & Raelle Tucker established themselves early on in Supernatural as a powerhouse writing team, with their script for Episode 3, the beautiful and elegiac “Dead in the Water”. In an interview, they both talked about how they came up with the idea for “Faith,” mapped it out, and then had a small discussion amongst themselves about how it would NEVER fly with the creators/producers. Should we even hand it in? Kripke et al would take one look at the script and say, “Are you all out of your minds? What is this? Where is the Monster? What is all this about Christianity? Why isn’t there a big fist fight and at least one blood splatter? What show do you think you’re working on? Get outta here with this.” But none of that happened. The script was embraced wholeheartedly. And it, in its own way, cracks open the series as a whole, and broadens the spaces where it will feel free to go. Up until now, the depth in the series has been psychological in nature: family drama, emo-conversations, sibling rivalry, mixed with some hell-raising, some thrills and some gore. Morality and ethical issues have not shown up, at least not in any profound way. “Faith” announced that the show would not be afraid to “go there”, that it would go where angels fear to tread. Religion was hinted at, in “Hook Man,” with Laurie’s rage at immorality and hypocrisy, and the church setting. But that was just a world that Sam and Dean entered into and left, like any of the other worlds they enter into when working a case, it didn’t have anything to say to them, personally. “Scarecrow” is filled with Biblical allusions, not to mention the final scene of Meg calling a mysterious “Father” after slitting a guy’s throat. Obviously Supernatural was headed in that direction. “Faith” pulls back the tent-flap and the show strolls right on inside.
There is no monster here. The only “monster” is of the human variety, and she started out doing what she was doing because she didn’t want her husband to die. And the Reaper (our first glimpse of them) is “trapped” by her to do her bidding. Reapers are not monsters. Reapers are an essential part of the natural order. They do not act from petty motives. They have no motives. Everyone dies and it is their job to “take” those who die. Reapers are, therefore, detached. Only humans (and spirits/ghosts) feel attachment.
Creator Erik Kripke loves this episode, and was amazed that anything this “classy” would be associated with his name (he’s very funny in interviews). He had created the show out of a love of horror movies and American folklore. But of course once you hire a writing staff, those individuals are going to come to the table with their own take on things, their own strengths, their own interests. “Faith” stands out. And not in a bad way. It doesn’t feel like it’s from another series. It feels more like it is a bold announcing of intentions: Here is where we are going to be going. So get ready. Or even a challenge: To those of you who are into this show only for the gore, you’re gonna need to adjust your expectations a little bit, because this is what WE want to do. You could lose a big chunk of your audience with an episode like “Faith”. It’s like the bozos who complained about the psychiatrist-heavy episodes in The Sopranos, wanting more tits and violence. Apparently they didn’t remember the pilot of the damn show, which clearly announced its intentions and interests. It’s a delicate balancing act, maintaining the tone of the show, while also keeping it interesting and fresh each week.
Audiences can be very wise but they also can be really dumb. They want to see what they already KNOW. Well, but what’s the fun in that? A talented director or writer can lead an audience into areas that they DON’T know. I think of Bob Dylan “going electric” and being Booed by his audience, and his response to that was to turn his back to the audience, and keep fucking playing. Because HE was in charge of his own art, NOT the audience, who wanted him to keep just doing the same thing over and over again, because that’s what they already knew. Fuck them.
So, you know. You have to walk that line.
Supernatural is only halfway through its first season when “Faith” comes along. They had no idea at this point that they would still be going, 9 seasons later. Hell, they didn’t know if they’d last 2 or 3 seasons. But to keep just doing the same thing over and over would be tantamount to NOT exploring the full potential of the topic of the show.
And it was time to start talking about morality, it was time to start examining ethical issues. It was time to face death, too, in a very real way. You don’t need any monsters with that. Death is the ultimate monster to all of us.
“Faith” is a startling and bold 42 minutes of television. It’s up there in my own personal Top 10 list of episodes. I prefer the comedic episodes, that’s when the show really finds its stride, for me, and when the actors shine the brightest. The comedic episodes, often dismissed as “one-offs”, or “filler”, are actually GENIUS, and show how bold the show really is, how innovative, how CERTAIN of itself. It’s hard to imagine another serious show actually indulging in something like “The French Mistake” and getting away with it. “Faith” is not a comedic episode but it is profound in a way that feels earned. It is not imposed, or artificial. Supernatural has already earned the right to ask these questions, AND – even better – to NOT provide answers. Because when you’re talking about the human condition, there are only questions. Those who think they have the answers are the ones you have to look out for.
“Faith” is about death. It threatens to kill one of the lead characters. It actually floats that out there as a possibility. We could do this, ya know … It is also about God, and those on earth who declare that they speak in His name. “Playing God” is a risky proposition and almost every character in the episode plays God, to some degree. The motives may be good or evil, but it’s still just Playing God. Sam ignores the doctor’s diagnosis for his brother, and decides to play God by bringing Dean to a faith healer. The faith healer picks people out of a crowd, lays his hands on them and heals them of various illnesses and conditions. The faith healer’s wife is the puppet-master, actually choosing folks to kill off (through the Reaper) in order that someone else may live. She plays God: he is immoral, he deserves to die, so that this sick person may walk again. And Dean, caught up in his own healing, realizes that someone has died so he can live, and then – he ends up playing God with Laila’s life. Every single aspect of “playing God” is presented, in these four different situations, all melded together into one symphonic whole. “Faith” also acts as a warning against judgment. You may think it’s bad to play God, but playing God can also mean you do what it takes to make sure that Good triumphs. Is it bad to play God when you are doing what it takes to help your loved one heal? Those with easy answers are also the ones who are quick to judge.
“Faith” is an introduction of a vast and indefinable grey area, at the heart of the series. The brothers are almost forced to choose black-and-white paths. It is the way they were raised. Dad was a black-and-white guy. Both brothers have black-and-white aspects, which are still being highlighted and pointed out and twisted, in Season 9. They STRUGGLE. They are drawn to the grey areas, but their behavior must so often be black-and-white. It’s killing them, Dean, in particular, who is more of a 100% grey-area kind of guy than Sam is. Even with his moral certainty that what he does he does “because it’s the right thing”, as he said in a recent episode. But moral certainty like that is often a smokescreen for a huge and impending awareness of the grey areas. I mean, we see it in politics and religious leaders all the time. It’s almost become a joke: any preacher who rants with too much certainty about the evils of gay marriage, is almost sure to have a gay scandal just waiting to explode, a massage therapist ready to talk, ball gags and butt plugs in his closet. I mean, you don’t even question it anymore. Moral certainty like Dean’s is necessary for someone like him, who is so tormented by his own susceptibility, his own attraction to the grey areas of life, its softness and its UNcertainty.
The Winchester brothers face all of that here. It’s subtle, but so much of where the series actually goes, can be traced back to “Faith”.
Also, it is one of the best-looking episodes of television I have ever seen. (Hence, the number of screen grabs.) Allan Kroeker directed the episode, and it’s his only Supernatural credit. He creates a mood with “Faith” that borders on sheer impressionism. The show is always good at entering us into a different and specific world each week, the production design team and props team pulling out all the stops on a low budget to give us a realistic Frat House or Sewer System or abandoned mental asylum. But “Faith” makes all of that look like set dressing. “Faith” is an actual WORLD. And Kroeker and team make us enter that world in a moody meandering way, with strange cut-aways to extras unconnected to the main action, strange sudden pan-ins to this or that face, glimpses of faces, hands, sudden alarming shifts of point of view, making us not sure where we are in space and who we should be looking at, an editing style that borders on the dream-like. Faith itself is not realistic, and therefore the style of the episode is not realistic. People who have faith do not need proof, and do not track faith in a literal way. Those who huddle in that revival tent in the middle of a muddy field become lost in the zone of their prayers, and their hopes, their fears, their desires, all poured into a group experience: individuality is somewhat lost in that environment. All of that is reflected in how the episode is put together.
I am interested in the mechanics of film-making. “Faith” should be studied by directors and editors. It’s a high watermark of the form, especially in episodic television.
Teaser
Right away in the teaser, we feel that “Faith” is different. In every episode up until now, the teaser sets up the Monster of the Week story, showing us a violent and unexplainable death completely unconnected to the Winchester brothers (except for the pilot, where the teaser was a flashback). The brothers enter the series after the teaser. But not here. Here, they are the teaser. This is a clue that our journey here will be a little different. The episode will be primarily about them.
It’s a misty night and the Impala pulls up in front of an abandoned house in what appears to be a neighborhood of abandoned houses. The brothers, in medias res, grab weapons from the trunk, talking in low urgent voices about what they need to do, which involves Tasers. Whatever the hell they are hunting (and we never learn what it is), it needs to be deep-fried. Wielding flashlights, Dean and Sam break into the house and head down into the basement. Their lives always bring them to such spaces. It’s always night. It’s always dirty. They never get to break into a clean house. Or rarely. One understands why Dean would jump at the chance to do so in order to try the “steam shower”. Once in the basement, they throw open the doors of a rotting wardrobe and see two little terrified kids hiding in there. You would certainly need a lot of control with a gun to NOT blow someone away, to hold off pulling the trigger, despite the surging adrenaline (and both Sam and Dean seem VERY tense in this teaser – maybe because we, the audience, are not filled in on the backstory, we are just tossed into the middle of it). They stare at the two kids, and Sam whispers, and he’s so intense, “Is it still here?” The two little kids nod. It’s a beautiful moment, somehow. Dean and Sam grab the kids and Sam goes to hustle them up the stairs. He is grabbed by a hand through the rotting slats of the stairs and falls, and everything feels extremely chaotic and dangerous. Sam recovers, throws his Taser down to Dean, and races back up the stairs with the kids, leaving Dean alone.
The floor of the basement is covered in about an inch of water, so when Dean is attacked, by some big looming creature, he falls into the water, and then scrambles to grab the Taser. As the creature comes at him, Dean shoots him with the Taser, sending blue lightning-bolts through the creature’s body, but then the electricity is conducted through the water on the floor directly into Dean. Dean is basically electrocuted, lying in a heap in the water, writhing and screaming, his chest heaving up with each volt (amazing physical work from Ackles, who is always great when he’s in pain, or injured),. Finally, the currents stop, and Sam comes back, seeing Dean unconscious in a dark wet corner. Sam huddles over him, calling, “Dean! Dean!”
1st scene
At the hospital, the receptionist says, a bit awkwardly, to Sam, who looks out of his mind with worry, that there isn’t any insurance on file. Sam, matter-of-factly, hands over a card. She looks at it, looks back at Sam. Says, “Okay, Mr … Berkowitz …”
It’s one of those funny moments when Supernatural acknowledges just how far off the grid these guys really are. They don’t just reach criminal levels. They are out-and-out criminals, fraudulent liars, wielding fraudulent IDs. It’s awesome. They don’t even care that the names on said cards are either ridiculous or clearly do not match who they are. They get away with it. Two cops nearby stand and watch Sam, and there’s an incredibly serious vibe to the whole thing. While Sam and Dean’s story may be suspicious (“Yeah, we were just driving through the neighborhood and heard screams …” Neighborhood??? Is that what you call a series of rotting ruins swathed in mist??), the cops are kind and grateful for their help. It’s lucky Sam and Dean got there when they did. But still, there’s something in how they treat Sam: he is not like other people. Neither brother is. We often get these shots, in the series, of total outsiders reacting to the sheer REALITY of the Winchesters, it’s almost like people fall silent when confronted with them. That’s kind of what’s going on with the cops there.
Sam rushes off down the hallway to meet up with Dean’s doctor, who has emerged from Dean’s room.
A certain thing happens when you get bad news of this kind. It takes a while to sink in. You keep asking questions, because you aren’t sure that you even heard right. The conversation starts off as a “So here’s the status” and slowly, you start to realize … that this is very different. That you are getting Bad News, the worst possible kind. I remember so vividly my own moment in my own life that was like this, and it comes rushing back into my mind when I see Padalecki play the reaction shots in this small scene with the doctor. It’s all done in one big beautiful listening close-up and you can’t even list how many expressions go across his face. Concern, fear, gumption, but then, as the realization sinks in what he is actually hearing, stark disbelief, a brief laugh followed by tears welling up … It’s one hell of a small piece of acting on Padalecki’s part.
The doctor says, “His heart. It’s damaged.” Dean’s heart is a big deal, metaphorically and actually: here it is the actual organ that is damaged, but the “heart” comes up again and again. Dean doesn’t “do” feelings. He hates having them. Or he hates having certain kinds of feelings. The heart is the organ of feelings and Dean has a messed up relationship to it, and those who get in there into that heart, are rare beings indeed. And once they are in there, Dean will never let them go. Hearts break, too. Dean’s heart breaks repeatedly. Sometimes in big ways, sometimes in small. It’s a defining event when your heart breaks at the age of 4. The damage, in many ways, is irrevocable already. But, as Anna says to him in the junkyard in Season 4, pain is part of what makes humans human. She wanted in, on all of it, even the pain. Dean doesn’t get that, but he starts to, in that scene, with her guidance.
So. Damn right his heart is damaged, doc.
Sam can’t actually comprehend what he is hearing. You’re telling me my brother has a couple of weeks to live? Wait … what did you just say to me?
“Faith” very well could have been one of those manipulative Very Special Episodes. Where you place a lead character in danger as a ratings grab. “Faith” doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels like an implicit acknowledgement of the dangers of their life. The series needs to deal with that: otherwise the Winchesters are untouchable superheroes and that would get real old real fast.
The doctor’s final comment, said very gently, is “We can’t work miracles.” The line is a bit on-the-nose for me, considering where we are going, but it does pour us into the thematic thrust of the episode.
Sam rushes into Dean’s room. Dean is lying in bed, flipping through the channels. He looks like absolute shit. His eyes are bruised, he is pale, and he is clearly suffering. This is not just a makeup job, this is pain from the inside. He looks damaged, and let’s face it, with Ackles, that is not easy to do.
I love it when Dean gets to look like shit. It evens the playing field. Kinda like when Hitchcock made Cary Grant do this.
Hitchcock reveled in making the most beautiful man in the world cower in the dirt. Hitchcock knew that audiences have complex relationships to beauty, and lust/desire is only a part of it. There’s envy there, too. I’ve written about that before with Elvis, as well. If beauty is untouchable, there is certainly a fascination in that, and we can flip through a fashion magazine and ogle at the models to get our Beauty Fix. But in the world of cinema, in the world of acting, that beauty needs to be filled with something else, the actor’s essence. Beauty that is not illuminated by talent (which equals soul) is, ultimately, un-interesting. Without Carole Lombard’s insanely brilliant comic timing, her delicate beauty would have been dime-a-dozen. Cary Grant is the most beautiful man to ever practice the craft, and yet he too understood that audiences needed to see him struggle, it would be cathartic for them. He did not say, “No, Hitch, you cannot make me, Cary Grant, cower in the corn fields, looking desperate and dirty.” He said, “Hell, yes, this will be amazing.” Actors who protect their beauty, who can’t bear to be seen in anything other than a positive light, may have a brief moment in the sun, but it won’t last. It won’t have any lasting resonance.
Supernatural cast two crazy good-looking guys in the lead roles. Acknowledging their beauty, and the eye-candy factor, is a huge part of the show, often utilized in subversive or gender-bending ways. To pretend that either of these guys is “normal” would be to completely deny reality. My friend Mitchell said something interesting about Angelina Jolie, and her performance in Changeling. We both are Jolie fans, so treat that as a given. Mitchell said, “My issue with the film is that it did not acknowledge how drop-dead gorgeous she is, and so every single scene didn’t feel real because of that. If you have Angelina Jolie walk into a police station, and every single person in the room DOESN’T stop what they are doing to gawk at her, then you are not dealing with reality.” It’s a fair point, and I imagine that being beautiful like that can be frustrating and limiting. (I know, boo-hoo, right? But I am not interested in that tone of conversation. Beauty is interesting to me, especially when USED by those who know they have it and feel comfortable messing with it.) I understand why beautiful actors feel the need to “ugly up” in order to prove that they are more than their looks. They often win Oscars when they do so.
All of this is to say: Jensen Ackles is not a dumb man and he knows what he looks like. He clearly has made some kind of peace with it, because he operates in a very casual unself-conscious way about it, as though his beauty doesn’t interest him. And it probably doesn’t, although his hair always looks cool, and he always looks good when he’s out in public. He’s not an idiot. But he also is not trying to convince us that he is not good-looking, that we shouldn’t care about that aspect of him. He is USING himself to the fullest, in other words, and he is doing so in a way that is compulsively fascinating to watch. It has no SELF in it, strangely. It’s all about the WORK. Sometimes when beautiful people “ugly up”, they want to be congratulated for it. You can FEEL it in the work. I remember when Shallow Hal came out (I actually love that movie), and Gwyneth Paltrow made all these comments about what it was like to wear a fat suit, and how it changed her perspective, and how weird it was, and hot it was, and blah blah blah what, you want a medal for playing an obese woman, Gwyneth? Yeah, we get it, you’re a twig and it was super interesting to pretend to be fat for 2 days. Stop talking. Immediately. It was a huge turn-off. Vera Farmiga was talking in the special features for some film, and she mentioned having to gain 10 pounds for the role, and she interjected, “And on me that’s a lot.” She just had to remind us that she was normally very thin. And don’t get me started on Bridget Jones. It’s not strictly the actress’ faults for being insensitive about this. The entire industry is set up to shame anyone who weighs more than 2 pounds. But I don’t want to hear you go on and on about how much pasta you ate to pork out for your role. Stop asking to be congratulated for doing your damn job.
Jensen Ackles doesn’t “show his work” at all, so his actual looks, then, become a “given”, and we are only reminded of it when he looks like shit, or when he is hit on/noticed/drooled over/creeped on – which happens all the time. As it must happen all the time in real life, too. Beauty is a magnet. Magnets don’t just attract the positive, they attract the negative, too. I’m telling you: Beautiful people often can’t bring all of this to their roles, or that awareness, because the industry is set up to PROTECT the beautiful, it is set up to ONLY value the beautiful. So beautiful people are not encouraged to use themselves to the fullest in Hollywood: nobody wants them for that. Thank God Ackles found Supernatural. It wants ALL of him. It ALSO acknowledges the beauty. So it’s best of both worlds for this particular actor. Imagine him in a series that did not allow him to be a goofball/clown. How would anyone have known how funny this guy is, nearly world-class funny, if he hadn’t done Supernatural? Look at those looks. We are all judged by our looks, unattractive people and the beautiful ones. Who would have even WANTED him for that?
Beauty Digression over. There will probably be more. I blame Supernatural for that.
So it’s startling to see really how truly bad Dean looks. And Ackles is doing it from within the context of the character, he is lost in the situation of it. In other words, he is not winking at us, in a vain way, “Look how BAD I look.” We all have seen Beautiful People (™) play roles like that. It’s gross. We never get that from him. His concerns are elsewhere. When Sam walks in, Dean is disgruntled by what is on the television (or, more accurately, what is NOT on, meaning anything good). He murmurs something about wanting to hunt down the fabric softener teddy bear and “kill the bitch”, a line that always makes me laugh.
It is fascinating to watch this scene in light of Dean’s existential struggle in Season 9, as well as his other struggles in Season 4 and 5, where he had to actually accept the fact that he was “worth” saving from Hell. Dean is always on the rack, soul or body. He knows he’s going to die. When Sam enters the room, upset and trying to keep it together, Dean greets him with as much strength as he can muster. It’s not easy. But he sees Sam’s face, and he tries to ease the pain. “It’s a rough gig, Sam …” Sam later calls Dean on this “laughing in the face of death thing” and calls it “crap”, but I think there’s more sincerity there to it. At least this first time. Dean always had a death-wish, on some level. He could never have seen his way out of the road he was on, and he accepted young that it would probably end violently, but there was no other way for him to go. He never would have done what Sam did, see a way out, and try to make it happen. Dean’s a warrior. His only milieu is war. (It’s not a coincidence that I often think of Jeremy Renner in Hurt Locker and John Wayne in The Searchers when I think of Dean Winchester.) How does society deal with its warriors? They are not like you or me.
Dean, also, is too weak to fight right now. Sam is gonna have to do the fighting for both of them. Sam tries to get Dean to stop talking like that. Dean is too weak to protect Sam, and that alone tells you how bad it really must be.
There’s more there, though, of course there is. Sam’s urgency to save Dean brings up an equal urgency in Dean not to be saved. We’ll get into that more. It’s not just self-loathing, although that, of course is a huge part of it. I also sense that Dean flat out does not like to be the center of attention. It makes him itchy. Unfortunately for him, he is the center of attention in almost any room, by default (Angelina Jolie in Changeling), so he has incorporated that fact into his personality, through the sexuality he throws around recklessly (not just in sexual moments), and the flirting he can’t help but do. It’s his way of dealing with the fact that, through no fault of his own, everyone is always staring at him and wanting something from him. He is NOT that special, he seethes. Everyone just leave me alone. So it’s a complex tangle there. It’s not just self-loathing, that’s too simple. Being as sick as Dean is means you are the center of attention in your own particular family (well, not Dad’s attention, but Dad’s a dick). The scales are now way out of balance. Dean knows who he is when he’s strong and he feels “above” Sammy, a hovering protective presence. To Dean, Sam is the center of attention and that’s the way it’s always been. Unhealthy, sure, but that’s his reality. Now it’s him. He does whatever he can to side-step the attention, even if it means being blasé in the face of death. It won’t be the first time. It takes half a season for Dean to even be able to admit that he doesn’t want to die in Season 3. He just cannot carve out space for himself like that.
And that’s where we stand in Season 9, too. He’s carving out a space for himself, all right, and it ain’t pretty. But it makes perfect sense.
Dean fully expects Sam to leave him there in the hospital and move on. Even though that’s not what he would do. He says, “Take care of that car, will you?”
Dean doesn’t have the strength to meet Sam’s energy. But that’s why Sam steps up to the plate. Dean is weak. Dean is never weak. It’s time for Sam to be strong. The scene ends with a great exchange:
Dean: “I’m gonna die. And you can’t stop it.”
Sam: “Watch me.”
2nd scene
So let’s talk about Sam’s choice in “Faith”. His desperation leads him to follow a pretty sketchy lead from one of Dad’s friends, who tells him about a faith healer in Nebraska, who seems like the real deal. The whole crossroads-demon thing is in the future for the brothers, who can’t seem to stop themselves from making deals and trying to sacrifice themselves for the other. Later in the episode, Dean, once he realizes just how bad the situation is, and what the faith healer is actually doing, says to Sam, “You never should have brought me here.”
And Sam does not defend himself. He is crushed. He has led Dean to this. He has made things much much worse.
We all make mistakes. We all make errors in judgment. But when Sam does, the ramifications are always enormous. Well, I guess that’s true for Dean, too. The question on the table in “Faith” is faith itself. Does the faith healer work because people believe in him? Are they being duped? Played? What role, if any, does faith play in it? We learn in a later episode that Sam prays every day. Dean is shocked by that revelation, and also a little bit jealous. There’s a lot to unpack here. But I have a hard time believing Dean would follow the lead to that muddy Nebraska field. The religious aspect of it would be a turn-off. The brothers argue about this, briefly, in “Faith”. Dean believes in what he can SEE. He has no problem with magic, because he has seen it in action. But God? Faith? You can’t even SEE it and that is bull shit, he wants no part of it. But Sam is a believer in his own quiet stealth way (and I would love for the series to address what has happened to that belief, and what it has transformed into, after everything. It hasn’t really done so.) People are getting healed in Nebraska. It’s worth it to go check it out. And if it works, why question it? If you need faith to have it work, then why not try faith?
These are existential issues separate from their own Family Drama that Supernatural had not yet attempted. This is philosophy. This is theology. It’s new territory.
Because I am obsessed with the Motel Room motif: the one Sam sits in in this scene is a sickly green, with limp plaid curtains, low light, and a scratched dirty white door. It looks like a furnished apartment, as opposed to a motel. They do such a great job in finding variety in these motel rooms and I never get sick of them.
The opening of this scene is heartbreaking in so many different ways, the text itself, and also how Padalecki plays it. Sam sits on the bed, laptop open, with fliers about heart health spread out on the bed. He is on his phone, leaving a message for Dad. The last time he spoke to Dad was, what, a week ago or a month, and it did not go well. Dad got cold and short with him and Dean grabbed the phone to finish the call. Sam is probably still seething about that, but Dean is dying and he needs to call Dad. We hear Dad’s outgoing message again which ends with: “Call my son Dean. He can help.”
But who can help Dean?
Sam launches into his message, and he keeps it together. He expresses no anger, he doesn’t reference the former call, or the Thing that Killed Mom, he doesn’t make any demands, he doesn’t cry. But there’s also residual intimidation: it is hard to go to Dad for anything, and it is hard to be the one in charge, as Sam is right now. Both brothers have a skewed vision of childhood: to Dean, Sam was the one Dad “doted” on, and to Sam, Dean was the “perfect” one. Neither version is true. But in Sam’s version, now he has to be the son who is a Disappointment giving Bad News about the Favored Son. Padalecki is juggling all of that and it makes the phone call heartbreaking, and also enraging. This father, I swear. Sam does not ask Dad to come and help. He makes it a strictly informational call: “Dean is sick and he won’t get better … ” Then he laughs, and says in a false and awkward chummy way, “But they don’t know the things we know, right?” The laugh is awful and empty, he doesn’t have a close relationship with his father, he has never laughed with his father, he can’t be close to this man, ever. It’s such a great choice, that small laugh. Sam seems so alone. He ends the call with: “Don’t worry, cause I’ll do whatever it takes to get him better.”
Dean called Dad crying about Sam. Dad was probably already in Lawrence at that moment, and he didn’t answer the phone or reach out in response. Sam is now calling Dad telling him Dean is dying. He will never hear back from Dad about that either. Dad is a dick. Dean will lay into him for that later in the season in one of the more satisfying cathartic moments in Season 1. I didn’t realize until that moment how much I needed to see Dean get pissed off about Dad.
When Sam hangs up, he sits there for a while and he actually bites his nails. It’s so vulnerable, totally unconscious behavior, making him look very young and anxious.
A knock comes at the scratched white door, and Sam goes and opens it. Eventually, any time a knock comes at the door, the brothers treat it like it is a monster, bringing out their guns, peeking through the peephole. It’s standard. They’re not at that level of paranoia yet in “Faith”.
Dean is slumped against the door jamb, with a giant glowing vending machine behind him. Vending machines crop up often in Supernatural. It’s fun to count their appearances, and loop them to the scenes around them. They’re usually important signifiers. I mean, think of Crowley in last week’s episode, trying to steal candy out of this random glowing vending machine that looks like it’s standing in the middle of a park. Classic. Anyway, just another one of their Americana Motifs that they have a lot of fun with.
Dean has checked himself out, saying, and he can barely stand up, “I’m not gonna die in a hospital where the nurses aren’t even hot.” Yes, I can see how, to Dean, that would be Hell on Earth. It’s destabilizing to see him out of breath, unable to walk, weakened. We are already invested in his strength, in him existing.
Sam tries to break through the facade, tries to speak Truth to Power, whatever it is he is doing, “You’re laughing in the face of death and I don’t buy it, you’re freaked out” – which feels very Little Brother-ish to me. Dean is the heroic big brother, the guy he has looked up to always. He gets the sense Dean might be trying to be strong for HIM. I think Dean is just trying to be strong because Dean is always trying to be strong. That’s his deal, basically. So Sam’s little impassioned request to admit he’s freaked out is rewarded with Dean murmuring, “Whatever, dude”, which seems so real.
Dean limps his way over to a chair, asking if Sam has slept. Even in his own trauma, he is Sam-focused. Maybe he feels relieved he’s going to die. But I think it goes back to Dean feeling uncomfortable when he is the center of attention. When he was the center of Dad’s attention, it meant he was in trouble. When he is the center of attention to a monster, it means he’s about to die. He feels more comfortable being the center of attention in sexual contexts, because he can kind of control that, and nobody’s getting hurt, and it’s all fun. But Dean does not seek attention. It seeks him. As much as he loves getting drunk and macking on willing broads, he does so in a quiet stealth-bomber sort of way. He’s not the guy hogging the mike at karaoke, or getting sloppy drunk causing scenes. He actually exhibits great self-control, all things considered. But being sick, or dying, changes all that. It’s way too much attention. He would, literally, rather die than have it continue. Just leave me ALONE, I can’t take everyone CARING for me and WORRYING about me. Let me die.
I am always grateful when they decide to give an establishing shot of the Motel Room as a whole. Here it is. I revel in it.
Sam does not tell Dean about calling Dad. Knowing he will meet resistance, he barrels forward on what he has found out. He has been calling Dad’s contacts, and one has told him about “a guy in Nebraska”. That’s all he says. He knows his brother well. Dean listens to this, looking tired, and says “You’re not gonna let me in die in peace, are you.” Sam says, “I’m not gonna let you die period.”
There’s a nice shot of Dean with Sam thru the mirror. Thru such visual choices, you avoid the repetition of close-up to close-up stuff, which is typical television filming. This looks cinematic. There is great depth-of-frame.
3rd scene
I’m gonna get pretty nuts-and-bolts technical here, because the WAY this first faith healer scene is filmed is key to the episode’s eerie dreamy power. We move out of literal film-making, which Supernatural has never been really interested in anyway. By literal I mean: establishing shot to medium shot to closeup. That’s the way it goes, that’s the way you get your coverage. Supernatural HAS establishing shots, but very often they “bury the lede”. They don’t start out there, they start out in close-up, or in medium shot, so that you can’t tell where you are, you want to peek at the edges of the screen to see more. They hold back on their establishing shots, in other words. This creates a destabilizing effect.
So there’s THAT. “Faith” is destabilizing to the extreme. We get close-ups, but they are off-kilter. We see someone’s face, but only part of it. We see hands, but then they move up and out of the frame. The camera lands on someone, and then moves in halfway close, but not as close as we want them to go. It is bold and emotional, it requires deep thought and planning to create a mood like the one created here. And what it also does, painstakingly and invisibly, is create a world. It’s a fuller world than we’ve been in in any other episode. This world existed before the episode began, and it will continue after the episode ends. The mud, that field, the house, the tent, the people coming from all around … that world is engrained part of American history: the tent revivals, the various Great Awakenings, the Chautauqua circuit, the Pentecostal explosion in the Southern poor, its down-and-dirty acceptance of Sin, a far more redeeming attitude (in many ways) than more affluential sects, giving lost and helpless people a great deal of comfort, the history of showmen/conmen like P.T. Barnum who utilized similar tactics as the tent-revival circuit to showcase his Greatest Show on Earth … ALL of that, that entire history, reverberates through the scene in a full-immersion-baptism kind of way. This is America. In all its chicanery and all its beauty.
It is presented without condescension. It is certainly not above critique. But it is not looked at from an “aren’t we so superior to those people” Northeast-elite attitude (you know, those folks who were disgusted by Elvis because he was both sexual AND openly religious, two things they could not reconcile, and two things they did not approve of. The Southerners “got it” immediately.) The people who flock to that tent are not filmed as though they are “grotesques”. They are filmed in all their pain and hope, their brave determined slog through the mud to get their asses in the seats.
All of this is merely conceptual if you don’t find a way to bring it to the screen. If this material was approached with too much reverence, it wouldn’t have the strangely political bite that it ends up having. If this material was approached with no reverence, you would be being unfair and reductive to an important and powerful strain in American culture (one that has done a lot of harm, yes, but has also done a lot of good). In Supernatural, both sides are true. That is difficult to pull off in a mere episodic. Kroeker and team splice up their film, giving us the scene in fragments, snatches, glimpses, Sam and Dean sometimes surging back to take over the frame, but then receding, so we zoom in on something else. It is meticulously edited. The sound is meticulous. The colors are meticulous: everything is grey, nobody is wearing a primary color in that tent. You can feel how cold it is, you can see everyone’s breath.
MOOD is the most indefinable thing to create, and you cannot rely on accident. You have to make careful choices, each step along the way, in order to create such-and-such a mood. And Supernatural, above all else, can create Mood like nobody’s business. Every single person who works on the show, from producer on down, has said that this is the most challenging job they have ever had in show business. It’s a road trip show, with very few standing sets. You have to create an entire world each week. The fact that they do so so consistently is a great tribute to their creative power as collaborators. But they really outdo themselves in Faith.
The location and the weather help. The field is drowning in mud. The sky is dark and grey, and everything looks both cold and inhospitable and also warm and welcoming, so you figure out how THAT works out. But it’s the WAY it is filmed that help the sequence land. We see the Impala driving up the muddy lane, the white tent revealed off to the side. Cars and people fill the field. We then cut to a closeup of the muddy ground, and we see a person on crutches (or, we see them from the knees down) squelch through the thick mud. Then we suddenly get a wider shot of people heading towards the tent as other people hover over a trash-can fire in the background. We then get a shot of an elderly lady with a walker. And only then do we see Sam and Dean get out of their car. Elegant and atmospheric editing. Sam and Dean have nothing to do with those establishing shots. We are not really seeing the world through their eyes, not at first: we are seeing something that exists whether they are looking at it or not.
Sam races around to the passenger side to help Dean out of the car, who gets annoyed immediately by this, and annoyed even further when he sees the “FAITH HEALER” sign at the entrance to the tent. Somehow, in the drive to Nebraska, Sam has failed to mention where he is actually bringing his brother. Which can’t have been easy, since Dean is a bloodhound who senses Untruth whenever it occurs in a 4.5 mile radius. Dean isn’t wearing his Dad’s leather jacket here. He’s wearing a bulky jacket and under that is a hoodie, and it makes him look like a teenager. And he’s hunched over his own body, which makes Sam just loom even taller. The whole thing is pissing Dean off.
More shots away from Sam and Dean, of the other people heading to the tent, the mud, the fires, the obvious signs of physical weakness (crutches and canes and walkers), but all done in an almost documentary-like or collage-like effect. It’s an impression being given. The way we see things when we see them for the first time.
As Dean grumbles loudly about being brought to some quack, a woman passing by under a grey umbrella, responds, “Reverend Le Grange is a great man,” which also gives us more information about the power of this world they are entering into. Nothing has been set up for us about the “guy in Nebraska”, we are as much in the dark as Dean is. There’s also a lone protestor standing near the tent, handing out fliers, calling out to people about how this is a cult and the Reverend is dangerous. Two cops hover near the protestor. Sam and Dean pass by, and we see them from afar, which is, again, a directorial choice and editing choice. We could have had portentous closeups of Sam and Dean looking at the protestor which would have underlined for us its importance. It would have telegraphed: “The protestor will be important.” But we don’t get that at all from how it is filmed.
The protestor is as much a part of the atmosphere as the old lady with the walker and the Grey Umbrella Lady. It is hard to parse out what is important when things are filmed this way. And, in a way, that is how Reverend Le Grange runs his operation. It is a group event, where individuality is smoothed out. That’s how groups work. There isn’t one person that is “better” than others, or more important. All of this is suggested in how the sequence is edited. We would not have gotten it otherwise and we get it in the best possible way: by osmosis, through visual information. It works ON us, as opposed to TELLING us.
Dean is grumpy, and struggling with things like walking and breathing. A dude is protesting, doesn’t that tell you something about Mr. Faith Healer? Sam tries to break through the wall, saying that when people don’t understand things, there is always controversy. Sam says casually, and it is a clue of where we are going, not only in this episode but later ones, “Maybe it’s time to have a little faith, Dean.”
Now. If this show were about how having faith in God somehow saves you, naturally I would not care about it and probably would not watch it. My own feelings on faith are private and I grew up in a faith which is extremely important to me. But I have no interest in didactic preachy art. Sam is not seen as better because he does have faith, and if anything the show is tilted in Dean’s more skeptical direction. But faith doesn’t have to mean religious faith, and that’s the sucker-punch hidden in this particular conversation between Sam and Dean. It will come up again and again. In Season 3, Sam looks at Dean, who has been dealing with his impending death by ignoring it, by having threesomes, for example, while poor Sam waits in the car. Eventually, Sam says to Dean, “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you care about yourself?” So faith can also mean that you believe in yourself, that you believe your life has worth, that you believe you are worth saving. That will never be easy for Dean. Religion will come into it, and feelings about God, and anger towards a God who never shows his damn face or intervenes on the side of good. Faith comforts those who have it. Isn’t that enough? Dean doesn’t think so. Dean has faith in reality. Sam asks him how he can be a skeptic, knowing what they know? Sam says, “If you know evil’s out there, then how can you not believe good’s out there, too?”
Ah, Sam Winchester, that is the question.
They are talking quite loudly and a blonde woman, standing near the door of the tent, overhears, and interjects, “Maybe God works in mysterious ways.” Her smile is friendly. Everyone they meet here is friendly, by the way. These people are not portrayed as creeps or weirdos or drones. They exist in the grey areas of life, immune to our judgments.
She is very pretty and that, and her comment, stops Dean dead in his tracks. As I’ve said, probably most explicitly in “Wendigo”, Dean is surprised by women. He can’t get “over” them. It’s not just the sexual aspect of it although that of course is operating. It’s that women don’t factor into his everyday world. He grew up in a military commando-style all-male family. Softness was punished. Softness here is represented by women, although I’d put Dean in that bucket too. Sam, with his empathy and sensitivity, does not seem soft. Dean does. The softness in him reaches out to the softness in women. Speaking stereotypically. Again, it’s not just about the sex. It’s about the space of kindness that they provide him, the cushion of understanding and listening. Dean isn’t “over” that. He NEEDS it. He needs it from men, too, but he always seems to mess that up by sexualizing his moments with them, flirting, and “acting”, and men clock him as … “off” way more than women do. Dean obviously sees a pretty girl and gets a boner instantaneously, not trying to say he doesn’t, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Some people seem to think Dean “reduces” women to sexual objects. Bull shit. He likes to fuck, and he puts it out there that he’s up for it, and if a woman is responsive, he moves in to seal the deal. Please Lord, don’t ever let men STOP doing that. Of course, they have to take No for an answer, but Dean always does, if a No comes. (Kali in “Hammer of the Gods”, bluntly: “No.” Dean: “10-4. Copy that.”) But he doesn’t see women as JUST sexual objects. He doesn’t judge them, for either NOT sleeping with him, or, worse, sleeping with him. He doesn’t think they’re whores if they “put out”. His misogynistic language like “skank”, etc., are reserved for demons, and maybe it’s a way of letting off some steam. But he’s not sneering at women AS he’s coming onto them (a classic component of the guy who “reduces” women). He’s happy he’s invited along. Dean is in a constant state of flux with women, adjusting how he sees them, which seems to me totally normal. “Oh … okay … so you’re this way … I had clocked you as this way … moving on … so are you into me? Am I coming on too strong? Okay, let’s have a drink and talk some more then … I ain’t in no rush …” And if he gets a “no”, he totally takes it. Dean never pushes himself in where he is not wanted. Because he knows intimately what that feels like from his side of the fence. He knows how creepy it is. But boy is gonna give it a TRY, and I say go for it. But then I am used to Irish men, who seem virtually OFFENDED if you sit by yourself in a pub in Dublin. They can’t BEAR it. They see it as their DUTY to swoop into your life and try to make you laugh. Yes, it can get annoying. But whatever, say, politely, “I’m waiting for someone” or “I’m actually enjoying my book” and we can all move on with our lives, no harm no foul.
I’ll probably return to this. It will come up again. I suppose it depends on the personal filter through which you see Dean Winchester. I will certainly concede that. But I’m putting my own filter out there. He is a friendly womanizer.
So. Dean, at Death’s Door, sees Layla, and immediately perks up.
Well, hellooooo.
It’s so obvious that Sam gets embarrassed, but she doesn’t get embarrassed. Dean introduces himself. They all shake hands. Her name is Layla and she is played, beautifully, by Julie Benz. Layla says to Dean, and she is not being exclusive or rude, she is truly curious: “If you’re not a believer, then why are you here?”
At this point, Layla’s mother (the wonderful actress Gillian Barber) comes up, with a huge anticipatory smile, thrown Sam and Dean’s way, and brings her daughter into the tent. It’s tragic, when you know the backstory to that smile. This woman BELIEVES. She has staked everything on it. Quit her job, mortgaged her house, whatever, so that she and her daughter can come to all of these meetings, in the hopes that the reverend will pick Layla.
Sam and Dean enter the tent, which is a whole other atmosphere, set up beautifully and impressionistically. There is almost no outer soundtrack to “Faith”. There are a couple of music cues, but they are few and far between. Inside the tent, there is an almost bluesy-sounding piano trilling underneath the low hubbub murmuring of the crowd settling in to their seats. We don’t see the piano, not a closeup anyway, so it seems that the piano music is in the air, in the minds/hearts of the people, trilling between the molecules. And it’s a great sound. It’s not an organ, droning a familiar hymn. It’s improvisational almost ragtime-blues piano, which also grounds us in Americana, its long tradition of gospel and blues and religion and burlesque. It’s all in that sound. Excellent evocative choice.
Dean wants to sit in the back. He doesn’t want to have a fuss be made over him. This, inadvertently, loops us in with the celestial “fuss” made over him by the angels when he is pulled out of Hell. It can’t be denied, and it is here in “Faith” too, the feeling that: This one is important. This one the world needs. Roy Le Grange will pick up on it. His wife may be pulling the strings with her black magic, but Roy may be able to “see” things after all.
The moral issue comes into play there: why is Dean more important than Layla? Than anyone else? How is that fair or just? Dean has been raised to believe his life is expendable. He is required to sacrifice himself for the greater good. That’s how he will be able to measure whether or not his life has meant something.
Dean can’t live in a world where he is seen as special, so even Sam helping him walk down the aisle of the tent makes him angry. “Dude, get off me.”
And, amazingly, there are two seats together up front, even though the whole place is packed. How did THAT happen? Dean feels exposed. He can’t hide up here. Sam and Dean are sitting behind Layla and her mother, who sit with rapt expectant smiles. Sam looks around. We see the others gathered, huddled together, or separately, seen in a line across the aisle, or moving in on a specific face. The mood is so thick you could cut it with a knife. RICH atmosphere.
At some unseen cue, the service begins. The piano keeps its ragtime-blues-y trilling throughout. Reverend Roy Le Grange (Kevin McNulty, fantastic) stands, and a woman comes to his side (his wife, Sue Anne, played by the excellent Rebecca Jenkins), and helps him take off his jacket. The Reverend is wearing dark sunglasses. With no fanfare, he begins speaking.
The Reverend speaks casually, intimately, and since you can’t see his eyes, there is an added level of mystery to his down-home persona. He speaks of how he wakes up every day and his wife reads him the news. “There’s so much bad news out there…” he says, and the crowd murmurs “Amens” in response. Sam, sitting next to his hunched-over uncomfortable brother, looks around him, taking it all in. A sponge, that one. The cut-away editing style continues here, beautifully: as the Reverend speaks, we get fragments of the crowd, cut-away to oxygen masks, people sitting in a line, people praying, people rapt with listening. Collage: that’s what filming is all about.
Sam, alert, notices a Coptic cross on the altar, but it’s just a quick shot, part of the establishment of atmosphere through detail. It will become important later but like everything we’ve seen thus far, the protestor, the Reverend’s wife, they are not filmed as any more important than anything else. Sam, without even knowing it, is working. He will remember that cross later. It is an acknowledgement that Dean is out of commission, wrapped up in his own suffering, not to mention his annoyance at being at a tent revival meeting, as well as his embarrassment at sitting up front. Dean is not working. Not at all. Sam is.
Roy talks of the immorality in the world. He does not rant with anger. He speaks with sadness and familiarity. He talks about his relationship with the Lord, and how the Lord shows him who to heal. The Lord helps Roy see into people’s hearts. The heart again.
Dean snarks to himself, under his breath, “Yeah, you see right into their wallets.” Layla hears the comment, and she pauses in her own engrossed reaction to the Reverend. It is a glitch in the mood. It doesn’t pain her, not exactly. If anything, she is pained for Dean. Even when Dean is trying to be invisible, he is the center of the room. Roy hears the comment and calls him out on it from the platform. It’s creepy and yet somehow loving and inclusive too. Roy is not defensive. Nothing Dean says “offends” Roy. People who truly have faith – like Roy, like Layla – do not get “offended” by non-believers. They may feel pity but they don’t feel the need to attack. The best advertisement for your faith, by the way, is to show love to your fellow man. That’s it. All else is just PR tactics, doomed to alienate anyone who might be on the fence.
Dean is embarrassed. He didn’t mean his comment to be for public consumption. He says, “Sorry.” Roy says, “It’s okay. But watch what you say around a blind man. We got real sharp ears.” He is not threatening. He is laughing. It is a great performance. You can actually see why people from miles around would come to hear this man speak. It is not a cliche. It comes from the earth, this performance, it is grounded in the reality of what it might mean to desperate people, of how he would be a draw.
During this next conversation with Dean, there are multiple and dizzying point-of-view shifts. You don’t know who to look at. You don’t know who to side with. We are close on Dean, then suddenly we are behind the Reverend, looking out at the crowd, where we can see Dean, only now he is tiny. Then we switch, and we are looking close at the Reverend, only from the side of his face. You don’t know where you are in space. You are being flown around the room. This reflects Dean’s own experience.
The Reverend says, “What’s your name, son?”
Dean is hating life right now. He clears his throat briefly, a tic that is compulsive, and shows up all the time. I love when it shows up because you know he’s about to get vulnerable. It is probably somewhat compulsive on Jensen Ackles’ part, and he knows to utilize it, because it works. It shows up when he feels awkward, shy, or like he is not sure he wants to “go there” emotionally. He needs to get his shit together, and so he clears his throat to buy a little time. It’s also a way of gathering the remnants of his politeness together. Because Dean actually can be very polite. But it takes a second. The clearing-throat thing shows up a lot. It’s a great emotional “tell”.
Roy, who can’t see, is sensing Dean’s energy, emanating at him throughout the space. He is listening on another plane, and gestures for Dean to come up onto the platform. The audience starts clapping in excitement, but you can see, briefly, as the camera moves by her, the look of agony on Layla’s mother’s face. It reminds us of the stakes for every single person in that tent.
It’s a space of pain and need. Everyone wants to be “the one” picked. It hurts to be passed over. It doesn’t just hurt: it’s life-or-death. But being happy for others’ good fortune is part of the experience: you MUST rejoice in others being saved. Otherwise you can’t be healed yourself. But the pain is still there, in the applause.
Now comes a fascinating small sequence where Dean initially refuses to get up on the platform. No, it’s okay, I’m good, I’ll just watch.
He doesn’t want to get up there on that stage in front of everyone where he won’t be able to control what goes on. That seems to be the most obvious reason. He’s embarrassed. Seasons later, he says he hates it when he’s singled out at birthday parties. You totally get that. And when there’s a woman he actually cares about, his main response to her is shyness, because his vulnerability is alarming and in that state she has so much power over him and he is totally out of control. But in the moment the Reverend calls him up, with the clapping, the praying, the sudden sense that he is now the Important One … he doesn’t like it. And why would he? Sam has left an urgent phone call to Dad that Dean is dying and Dad doesn’t pick up or respond.
Sam is looking at Dean, wondering what the hell is going on, and the camera is moving around, from one then over to the other, or there is a sudden small zoom in to Sam and Dean before a quick cut-away to the Reverend. Seriously: every single one of those camera moves represents hours of conversation beforehand, and choices, and diagrams, and shooting schedules. It LOOKS off-the-cuff and it isn’t. If you want to know what people mean when they talk about emotional film-making, or how the camera is an actual EYE that picks up spirits/souls, this is what they are talking about.
Dean just does not want to get out of his chair. But he also knows he doesn’t want to be rude. He isn’t about to storm out. He doesn’t have the energy for that, and Dean is perceptive: despite his skepticism, he feels the friendliness from the Reverend, he feels the good-ness of the man. Fine, let him have his fun, I don’t want to ruin it, but “Why don’t you pick someone else?” he says up to the stage. Not in a bratty way, but almost in a tone of helpful suggestion.
Roy again, laughs, and said, “I didn’t pick you, Dean. The Lord did.” Roy, from the get-go, treats Dean with kindness and humor. Total openness. It’s a fascinating dynamic. We are primed, as audience members, to see him as sinister, maybe even a cult leader, or somehow disingenuous. The episode sets us up that way and then stings us at the end.
The peer pressure, from the crowd, and from Sam pushing in on him from the next chair, is impossible to resist without making a huge scene and Dean doesn’t have the energy for that. A part of him wants to believe. A part of him wants to be saved.
Reluctantly, he gets up and a wave of energy/support/prayers come at him. He makes it up onto the stage, at one point making a little, “Okay, here I go” face, to himself, making him look like a self-conscious Best Man about to make a bad speech. We see Sam looking up at Dean, hopeful, his own heart pouring out of his eyes up at his brother. Maybe this will work. Maybe I’ve done a good thing here? It’s heartbreaking.
Once Dean is up on the stage, he says to Roy, “No disrespect but I’m not actually a believer.”
He is not embarrassed saying that. He is also not defensive or pissed. And when he says “No disrespect” he actually means it. Dean may have no boundaries. He obviously doesn’t. But part of that means that other people are allowed to do whatever the hell they want to do, as long as they don’t hurt people. Dean doesn’t bother himself trying to police the behavior of human beings (and he will be tested in “Faith” in that regard). He is focused on evil things, not people. Let people be flawed and messy and do stupid shit like cheat on their wives. Sucks for them, but they don’t deserve to DIE just because they’re dicks. He has skepticism about faith. But when confronted with Roy, he does not sneer with sarcasm, or flaunt his lack of belief as a battering ram. He concedes ground to Roy. He is also trying to give helpful information before they get started.
Roy doesn’t tar and feather him, he barely reacts. He just laughs kindly and says, “You will be, Dean.” Which could be (and often is) quite obnoxious, but not, somehow, in the way he says it.
In a slow ritualistic way, Roy opens his hands (we get many closeups of his hands throughout), gathering into them whatever healing powers he feels he has. On cue, everyone in the tent raises their hands in the air, clutching the hand of the person next to them, bringing the group together. It must be horrifying for Dean: such a fuss being made over him. What if he faints? Or cries? What if it doesn’t work? Or, worse, what if it does work? What then?
Obviously I am totally in love with almost every edit in this sequence.
Dean doesn’t know what is going to happen next, and he seems like he wants to vanish from the stage, evaporating into the floor.
As Roy raises his hands in the air, he reaches over and touches Dean on the shoulder, startling Dean. Dean doesn’t like to be touched. Those porous boundaries, remember. Warn me before you go touching me. But he submits, uncomfortable as he is, and when the Reverend moves to cup Dean’s head, everything changes. His discomfort disappears, his embarrassment disappears, he forgets that everyone is looking at him. Something is happening.
Roy feels that something, too, and says, almost to himself, but really to whatever it is he is sensing, “All right now, all right now …”
Suddenly, in that moment, for the first time we get a keening note of outside music. It is our first real editorial choice that comes from outside the world of the Roy’s tent. Something is draining out of Dean. Whatever it is is flowing from him and into Roy’s hand, and as it occurs, somehow without even realizing it, he has fallen to his knees. The crowd is electrified.
Roy is still saying, to the unseen thing, the fight going on within Dean, whatever it is he senses, “All right … all right …” and it manages to be both mysterious and soothing. Dean, on his knees, suddenly gives out, and, with the film suddenly going slow (but not too much, not lingeringly so, it’s slowed down a tad), he collapses to the floor in a faint. We see it from the back of the tent, we see it from Roy’s point of view, and we also see it in a closeup on Dean. Again, with those dizzying point-of-view shifts.
The crowd gasps, and Sam runs up to Dean, once again huddled over the unconscious body of his brother. Dean eventually wakes, with a start, groggy, out of it, but we see his eyes focus up at the Reverend, and suddenly sharpen into alarm. Behind the Reverend, looking down at him, is a strange grey figure which suddenly dematerializes. Nobody else has noticed.
4th scene
Back at the hospital, Dean is informed by a baffled and yet friendly doctor that his heart is totally fine and there is no record at all that it was even damaged in the first place.
Sam is elated. Dean is suspicious. The doctor tells him that yes, it is strange, but a guy died just yesterday of a heart attack: “guy like you, 27, athletic, out of nowhere, a heart attack.” (Thank goodness she said something. Otherwise the plot could not move forward and then where would we be. But she says it in such a casual incidental way that I didn’t pick up on its weirdness the first time I saw the episode. It took me a while to catch up.) When the doctor leaves, the brothers are (as always) in two totally different emotional states, and they clash. Dean is not relieved to be saved. Something doesn’t feel right. Sam is overjoyed. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? Dean doesn’t believe in gift horses. Everything in life has a price. The noir lighting in this relatively stock scene reflects that uneasy feeling (and also places what is a pretty generic doctor’s office set into the creepy Supernatural universe).
Dean can’t shake the feeling. He saw that grey man. It had to be a spirit of some kind. “When I was healed, it felt … wrong. I felt cold.”
Sam doesn’t think what Dean saw was a spirit, because Sam didn’t see it. Why wouldn’t Sam have seen it, especially when he’s been “seeing a lot of things lately.” It’s been a while since we’ve dealt with Sam’s psychic visions (well, one episode) but it’s a good way to loop us back in to that ongoing Arc, even though it’s on the back burner in “Faith”. Sam says it casually, as though he is starting to accept it, and Dean hates it. Hates the whole Psychic Shit, wishes it would just go away already. Dean is putting on his coat, he’s already on to the next piece, and says, “Excuse me, Psychic Wonder. You’re just gonna need a little faith on this one.”
Not “trust”. But “faith”. Something is switching in the mythology. Something else is coming into play. Dean normally asks for “trust”. Or, more accurately, demands it. But not here. Faith is asked for. You have to go delicately with this stuff, otherwise you are smack-dab in the middle of Touched By an Angel and who needs that. It’s more interesting than anything else, that Dean would explicitly use that word.
Padalecki has a moment where he is struck by the intensity of his brother’s objective (it happens a lot – and when Dean has an objective, he can literally move mountains). Sam feels that intensity coming at him, and then laughs a little bit, he knows he can’t fight it. And it doesn’t seem to cost him all that much, not yet. The big fight between the brothers in “Scarecrow” has obviously cleared the air in a lot of ways. In this moment in the hospital, Sam knows it’s easier to follow Dean, especially when Dean gets like this. Padalecki finds a lot of variety in such moments. There are so many times when the brothers argue about a situation, and then Sam says, “So what do we do now?” I haven’t kept a running tally but it’s got to be in the low hundreds. Here, there’s almost a sense of humor behind it. “Okay, Dean, okay, we’ll do what you want to do … I know you’re like a dog with a bone …” Still, he’s just so relieved the faith healer freakin’ WORKED.
5th scene
Dean sits in the living room of the Reverend’s big rambling house that sits right on the edge of the muddy field, tent still erected, parking lot empty. (This scene is another example of how we don’t get a full establishing shot until halfway through the scene. We are left to infer where Dean is, through close-up details, and we can’t see the entirety of the room until the scene is almost over. For the most part, we stay in gigantic closeups of both Dean and the Reverend.) Sue Ann, smiling and warm, pours Dean some iced tea. Dean and the Reverend, sitting side by side, are in the same frame, and the focus shifts from one to the other. Whatever is going down here is mainly between Dean and the Reverend.
When Dean says to Layla in the final scene, “He’s a good man, he doesn’t deserve what’s happened” – it is this scene from where that feeling comes from. Dean is good at reading people (when he sits back and stops flirting with them, that is). He doesn’t flirt here. It’s not the space for it at all. He doesn’t even seem tempted (and for Dean, that’s saying something.) He is quiet, accessible, and gently skeptical. It’s a beautiful and interesting mix. Sometimes, when Dean asks a question, the wife will interject with an answer. “It was a miracle what happened to you,” she says. The actress plays this part great, and the director holds off on prioritizing her. She is mostly a blurry figure on the periphery, incidental to the main action.
Dean also treats her as peripheral. He asks the Reverend about the miracles and when they started. Watch the Reverend’s restless hands. He sees with his hands. He relates his story to Dean: he had cancer and was given a month to live. He and his wife prayed for a miracle and he was cured. He was left “stone blind” but the cancer was gone. He discovered he could heal people shortly after that.
It’s hard for Dean, but he asks Roy, “Why me?”
And Roy says, “I looked into your heart and you just stood out from all the rest.”
Heart working on multiple levels of meaning here, the organ that was damaged, the feelings that are repressed, his whole Self included there. Dean asks, “What did you see in my heart?”
And forgive the granular observation, but God is in the details, performances are made of details and behavior: His eyes close briefly on the word “heart”. It’s another “tell”. He’s embarrassed. The conversation is verging on touchy-feely. He is not talking about the Heart the Organ, he is talking about the Heart as the Seat of his Self, his Emotions. And that’s all a bit … girlie, maybe, and it’s hard for him to say the word without a flicker of his feelings about all of it.
Roy considers this and answers, calmly, in a gigantic closeup: “A young man with an important purpose. A job to do. And it isn’t finished.”
Does Roy have Castiel on speed-dial, I wonder?
Dean throws an uncomfortable glance over to the wife. He is uncomfortable in general. Being special is not Dean’s goal.
Too bad, Toots.
6th scene
Sam interviews the attendant at the gym where the other guy had the sudden heart attack. If I’m not mistaken, the entire scene is shot in one take, from the locker room, through a hallway and up the stairway to the pool. Ideally, you don’t notice these things. But they help with the show’s look and feel. They don’t make it easy for themselves, by just doing “coverage” and then doing back and forth closeups. They find ways to make it interesting filmically. The guy who died yesterday was healthy, swam every day. It makes no sense. The guy said “something was after him” but nothing was there. And the clock on the wall stopped at 4:17, at the moment the guy died.
7th scene
Dean comes out of the Reverend’s house and runs into Layla who is on her way in. It is a grey rainy day (grey and rainy throughout the episode). She is happy to see him, and he is happy to see her, but sadness is in the air. She wants to know how Dean is feeling. He says he’s doing great, but he’s focused on something else, and no longer has the appreciative leer that he had when taking her in in the first scene. Dean let that go. Layla is obviously sick. He knows that now. She is very sick. Something in him, the part that knows what that is like, reaches out to that part in her. What transpires between Layla and Dean is profound, one of the most profound one-off relationships he ever has in the entire series. They cast her beautifully. In another environment, Layla would be someone Dean would want to kiss and roll around with. But he can’t see her that way now, although he is drawn to her. If you didn’t cast her right, you would never get the pay-off of their moving last scene together.
Sue Ann comes out to meet Layla, and apologizes, “Roy is resting.” He won’t be seeing anyone else today. Sue Ann is not cold, on the contrary she is warm and loving, which makes her rejection even worse. Layla’s mother, who has come up beside Layla, is devastated. Her urgency is heartbreaking. She pleads with Sue Ann. They’ve come to every meeting and Roy has yet to pick Layla. Why? Again, the rejection comes, sweet and loving. The Lord will let Roy know when it is time, he is fully aware of Layla’s situation.
Once Sue Ann goes back inside, Layla’s mother turns to Dean.
We see him get the full force of her anger: he almost physically draws back from her. Dean has guilt, it was already starting up in his “Hey I’m cured” moment with Layla but he doesn’t have the full picture yet. Dean doesn’t need an excuse to feel guilty. But here, his worst nightmare comes true. Layla’s mother wants to know why he is still here. You got what you came for.
Dean’s beauty – and it is there, it will carry him through some of the other scenes with Sam later – is that he doesn’t say “Hey, back off, lady” or “Don’t blame me.” Instead he hears her subtext and feels her despair. She is totally allowed to feel the way she is feeling. It sucks to be attacked, and you can see it is painful, but something is very very wrong here, and now he’s sniffing it out. He was chosen over Layla, and that’s already a bad deal for him. Layla tries to intervene, gently, and her mother is having none of it. They are devoted followers of Roy, and yesterday he chose to heal a “stranger who doesn’t even believe.”
It’s a hostile environment for Dean. But it somehow doesn’t matter. He is in the presence of grief. He does not take it personally. He leans in to Layla, asking what is wrong. It is a beautifully compassionate and caring moment. Layla, trying to remain strong, she is similar to Dean in that self-pity doesn’t really exist for her, or at least it is something to fight against, tells him she has an inoperable brain tumor and will die in a couple of months. Layla’s mother is in tears, and Layla touches her mother comfortingly, and Dean is looking on at all of this, helpless.
Then comes a three-way exchange that I just think is so awesome:
Dean: “I’m sorry.”
Layla: “It’s okay.”
Mother: “No. It’s not okay.”
The entirety of the human condition is in that exchange. And each part of it is totally true. Not one piece of it is prioritized or privileged over the other. Nobody is wrong on those porch steps. Every one of them is right. And therein lies our tragedy. And you don’t need 5,000 words to say it. You only need eight.
If Dean is somehow connecting with Layla, she is also connecting with him. She wants him to know it is okay that he was chosen. She is starting to make peace with her own death. Her mother is like Sam, pushing Layla into this wild goose chase, and she will go along with it because she loves her mother. She feels how troubled Dean is. All of this is suggested without any dialogue, it is just in how she looks at him. Dean doesn’t need to know her darkness, that is not his burden to carry. So she smiles at him instead.
Layla’s mother, ravaged by grief, looks at Dean, and asks, “Why do you deserve to live more than my daughter?”
It’s an amazing little scene.
8th scene
Back at the motel room: Sam is on his laptop when Dean returns. It is a dark dank room, with moldy-looking wallpaper and 70s light-fixtures (we don’t get an establishing shot until later, n’est ce pas). Dean is lost in thought but Sam is even more so. All he says to Dean is, “I’m sorry” and you can tell he’s almost near tears.
He has done research. He has learned that heart attack guy Marshall Hall (the poor guy was cut from the episode, although his scene in the gym is included in the special features) died at 4:17, the exact time Dean was healed. This is bad bad news. On multiple levels. It is a tragedy for Dean, who already feels pissed that Sam talked him into this, and pissed that he was singled out instead of Layla, who really should be living a full life, or the old lady with the walker, or the guy with the oxygen mask. It is not part of Dean’s nature to push to the front of the line like this. The whole thing has felt wrong from the get-go.
Sam has cross-referenced the people Roy’s healed with local obituaries. Every time someone is healed someone else dies of the same ailment.
Now we come to a masterful sequence, one of the best in the entire series bar none. It won’t do for me to break it down, because it works on a flow, but each piece has to fit into the larger whole, so that the entire thing we are seeing becomes ONE event. Information is given during the sequence, so that by the end we understand what has happened. All of this goes down to the accompaniment of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” (low at first, but then growing in power). The entire thing is:
1. masterfully conceived, first of all – it’s bold and complex
2. masterfully executed – you never lose the urgency, or the drive
Intercut with other images over the scenes is Sam and Dean continuing to talk in the motel room, so that we understand what we are looking at. Often, though, we just hear their voices, as we watch other scenes unfold. We see a woman running in the woods. We see Roy back in the tent with a crowd watching. We hear Sam telling Dean, “Somehow Le Grange is trading a life for a life.”
The music builds, and the cross-cuts come quicker. From the girl in the woods (whom we have never seen before), to Roy in the tent, to Sam and Dean, and then back, and then back, and then back.
As we see Roy heal someone with emphysema, we see the girl in the woods running from the Reaper who then cups her head, and she falls. We go back to Sam and Dean talking about it. The implications are horrifying. Dean is yelling, “Some guy is DEAD because of me. You never should have brought me here.” Sam is in tears.
As they talk, and as the Blue Oyster Cult song builds, and we see the other scenes, Dean leans in to Sam, saying dead-serious: “There’s only one thing that can give and take life like that. We’re dealing with a reaper.” Bursting lyrics from BOC, which draws it all together, all the unconnected threads we have been seeing, now they all converge.
A+ sequence. You don’t see shit like this in normal episodic television.
9th scene
Motel room decor alert.
Dean is more experienced in this Lore than Sam is. Sam is like, “The Grim Reaper? What?” Dean corrects him: “It’s not THE reaper, it’s A reaper.”
Surrounding them on the table are pictures of Reapers, and Sam is researching it on the laptop. I love how Dean is holding a print-out saying FAMINE.
Considering what happens to him 3 seasons later, when Famine rolls into town, it’s an awesome (if inadvertent) dovetail. Famine affects everyone in town except Dean. He is immune to hunger. Why is that? Well, here he is, visually contemplating that question years beforehand.
They put together what they think is going on. Somehow Roy is “trapping” the Reaper to do what he wants. Dean knows Reapers stop time, so that would explain the clock in the gym. Sam is still hesitant. Maybe his own guilt at getting Dean into this is holding him back. Because Dean is pissed and upset. Marshall Hall haunts him.
Sam suddenly remembers that Coptic cross on the altar, and reaches around on the table for a Tarot pack, which, naturally, the brothers carry. Sam finds the card he’s looking for and hands it to Dean, giving us a brief explanation of what the Tarot is, in case we have been living under a rock in Chad for the last 500 years. If Roy is binding the Reaper, Sam says “He’s riding the whirlwind, it’s like putting a dog leash on a great white.”
I love it when the brothers know shit.
The episode, as jam-packed as it is, allows for pauses, and now we get one, as Dean gets up, full of thought, walking to the sink, standing there. Pauses are part of why Supernatural works, because it is so much about what ISN’T being said, and about thought itself.
Dean’s thinking about what Roy is doing, deciding to kill someone in order to save someone else. That’s wrong. And it’s doubly wrong because Dean personally has benefited from it. So he bears some responsibility here for making it right.
Here we get into an ethical dilemma, the first one of its kind. Dean’s position is totally the opposite than what it will be later, in Season 6, when Sam is suddenly willing to kill human beings in order to get to the monster. Dean basically thinks they should kill Roy. He’s doing bad things, “he’s a monster in my book”.
Dean’s guilt must be tremendous to even contemplate going down that road, and Sam is the voice of reason. “We’re not gonna kill a human being, Dean.”
Sam is so strong in that moment, that Dean’s next comment is a dig, “Any bright ideas, college boy?”
Actually, college boy does. There must be some sort of binding spell Roy is working. They need to figure out what it is and figure out how to break it, all at the same time that they stop Roy from healing anyone else. Should be super easy.
10th scene
Next up, is a stunner of a shot of the muddy field, the lowering sky, the Impala spraying mud as it barrels forward, and a makeshift old lightbulb sign, straight out of a carnival.
Sam and Dean launch themselves out of the Impala, and the hardy Protestor is still there, all by his lonesome, calling out warnings to the flock. Sam says to him, as they pass by, “Keep up the good work, brother,” a small almost invisible detail I love. Skepticism has grown in the middle of his faith. He has second thoughts about what he has done. Maybe the only person doing “good work” here is the protestor. We see Roy being led out of his house by his wife and an associate; the service is almost about to start. As they disappear from the frame, Sam sneaks by around the side of the porch, and climbs through the front window of the house. So Dean is on Stop Roy Duty, and Sam is on Binding Spell duty.
Roy’s house is dark and Victorian, with huge glassed-in bookshelves, no overhead light, lots of objects, a sort of faded genteel atmosphere. Sam goes straight to the study, looking around. He sees a shelf of big important-looking monochromatic books (does the prop department scour old book shops? These are great-looking props.) The dust on the shelves stops at one book, suggesting that it has been removed a lot (a cool effect used again in Dad’s storage unit).
Sam pulls out the book and looks through it, lots of text, he isn’t sure what he is looking for. But his eye catches a glimpse of something hiding in the shelf space behind where that book was resting. He reaches in and pulls out a small black leather book.
Yahtzee.
The book is clearly old but the pages are crammed full of newspaper clippings. One is about a gay teacher (Marshall Hall), and another about an abortion rights activist (I didn’t get a look at the picture, but I imagine that’s the girl in the woods). It’s a pretty hard critique of political Christianity and how it manifests itself currently. Obviously these people are targets due to their “immoral” beliefs.
Lastly, Sam comes comes across a newspaper article about the protestor outside the church where he calls the church a “cult”.
11th scene
While Sam is inside the house, Dean hovers inside the tent, floating around in the outer aisle, as people gather. Things are about to get started and he doesn’t know what to do. Dean’s phone rings, and he answers it – Sam fills him in, but says, mainly, “You can’t let Roy heal anyone, all right?” He’s out in the parking lot looking for the protestor, who is obviously the next target.
In “Faith”, the brothers are often separated. They split up to do their job better. In the following scene, we are shown their experiences simultaneously, another excellent editing job of two totally different thru-lines.
Dean is looking around desperately, trying to come up with a plan, and all of that whooshes out of his head in the next moment, when Roy calls from the stage, joyously, “Layla Rourke! Come up here, child!”
The crowd whoops in what sounds like sincere excitement. They are a community. They have all probably gotten to know each other very well. Layla is probably beloved, and everyone knows her struggle. You can feel that in the surge of excitement/approval. People hold up their hands in thankfulness, reach out to Layla, as she looks around, smiling, her mother reaching out to hug her, all as Dean looks on from the sidelines. This is the worst possible moment for him to stop Roy. Now Dean has to play God.
Layla moves along the aisle, surging with energy towards the front, where Sue Ann stands, smiling and supportive, holding out her hand to Layla. Dean stops Layla and there is an intense and painful conversation where he tries to stop her from going up there. He can’t explain why. “Something bad is gonna happen.” Layla is almost hurt, although she is as perceptive as Dean is, and can tell he is upset about something that is probably very real to him, but it confuses her and hurts her: “He healed you!” she says. Why would he not want the same for her?
Looked at from one angle, Sue Ann is seen in the background, between Dean and Layla. One the other side between them is Layla’s mother. Layla cannot go back or forward. She is drawn to Dean. He seems good to her. She sees the internal man. But she does not understand where he is coming from right now. She is not angry, she is hurt, and torn. Which, of course, makes it worse for Dean. He would rather you be pissed off at him than hurt.
Outside, in the muddy field crowded with cars, Sam hears panicked cries for help and comes across the cowering protestor who sees something Sam cannot see.
Layla, with one last hurt confused look at Dean, has gone up onto the stage, after being hugged joyfully by Sue Ann. She is ready. The scene lingers, drawing out, intensifying the tension. We see Roy’s hands slowly open and rise up. Layla waits. We see Roy slowly reach over to hover his hands near Layla’s head and that’s when we hear Dean shout (we don’t see him), “Fire! Everybody out!” Panic breaks out, and in the following melee, Roy has lowered his hands, and Layla stands there, abandoned. Layla’s mother, standing off in the crowd, screams, “No!” and I can’t look at her face without wanting to cry. This actress freakin’ goes there. And Dean is shattered.
In the next couple of moments, we will see Dean against these Biblical quotation backgrounds, placing him in direct opposition to matters of Faith.
Back out in the parking lot, though, the Reaper has reappeared and has grabbed hold of the Protestor, whose life is draining out. Sam calls Dean back, shouting that Roy must not be in control of the thing. That is when Dean, again placed in front of a big quotation, gets a glimpse of Sue Ann, back to him, over in the corner, huddled into herself and praying.
Stylistic choice alert: When he sees Sue Ann, there are three razor-sharp quick cuts, with a percussion sound accompanying each cut (a very frightening stylistic choice, popular in every horror movie since the beginning: time the sound effects with the cuts. As Hitchcock said about the shower scene in Psycho: The cuts in the film are the stabs of the knife.) We go from a long shot of Sue Ann’s back to a medium shot of Sue Ann’s back and then back to a shot of Dean, taking it all in, with Boom Boom Boom on the drums. It’s effective: going from long shot to medium shot tells us we are seeing what Dean is seeing, Dean has put it together. Dean runs to her, and when she sees him, she holds up her Coptic cross necklace, almost like she is trying to ward him off. At that moment, the Reaper outside lets go of the Protestor and backs off. Sue Ann, busted on some level, cries out for help, and the cops swoop over and grab hold of Dean. He never breaks eye contact with her throughout his “arrest”, just nodding at her, grimly (“Dean, grimly”), like, “I know what you’re up to, sister. I SEE you, bitch.”
He’s dragged outside of the tent, where he is then confronted by a gentle sad-eyed Sue Ann who tells her that she is “disappointed”, “after everything we’ve done for you.” She finds the perfect note for her creepy character. She is a True Believer.
Layla then walks up to him, and the second he sees her he is immediately caught up in her pain, it almost takes his breath away. This is the blessing/curse of having no boundaries. And he can’t explain, he can’t make her see it, he doesn’t even try. Why does he get to be saved? Her mother’s question: why do you deserve to live more than my daughter? Well, Dean knows that’s bull shit. Layla deserves to live more than he does. He’s alive by the luck of a shitty draw. Layla, who had seemed somewhat peaceful about her death on the steps, is now crushed. She was given a glimpse, a moment when she thought she would be healed. To have that taken away …
Dean is almost pleading, but there’s so much guilt that it effs up his delivery. “I know it seems unfair. And I wish I could explain. But Roy is not the answer I’m sorry.”
It’s terrible. What is even worse, is when she walks away and turns to look back at him. It is one of those “outsider looks” I keep mentioning, a moment when someone outside the Winchester world takes them in, really sees them. The brothers don’t quite know how extraordinary they are. They think they suck, basically. They hate their lives. They do what they have to do but they certainly aren’t puffed up about it. Layla’s look isn’t quite like that, but it is definitely from outside of Dean’s normal experience. It is kind. It is loving. Unconditional. Even with what he just did. She somehow knows he felt he had to do it. She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t want to leave him shattered.
She says, “I wish you luck.” Dean is practically beside himself.
He fights to get out the words, “Same to you.” We then have a nice big juicy pan-in to his face, really reveling in his pain and self-hatred, and he murmurs, “You deserve it a lot more than me.” Totally dramatic, and totally earned at this point in the episode.
Dean heads through the mud back to the Impala, and passes by a small grouping of people, with Sue Ann and Roy telling Layla’s mother that he will give Layla a private session that night. Everything will be all right. The choreography looks accidental, with all of them in the frame, but of course it isn’t.
12th scene
A very important scene, but before we begin, another glimpse of the glorious ridiculous motel room.
I mean, what the hell.
Dean is pacing back and forth, looking out the window, going back to pacing, still beside himself. He says, “I don’t think Roy has any idea what his wife is doing.” The not-knowing part is also getting to Dean, because he had a conversation with Roy, and he got a good vibe from the guy. Roy being tricked is a betrayal of a clearly good man with good intentions. The intentions are what matter to Dean. It is why he lets people off the hook when they are clearly not in control of themselves. He is amazingly generous that way. “It’s not you, Sam.” “It wasn’t you, Bobby.” “Ben, that’s not your mother.” Even when she says those horrible things to him. He can put it aside. He judges people who consciously hurt others, who choose to be cruel. Like Sue Ann. But Roy? He wants to heal people. Ain’t nothing wrong with that impulse.
Sam is holding the little black book and has done his homework. It’s a spell book and there’s a spell in there about how to trap a Reaper. Sam shakes his head, after delving into such dark stuff, thinking about what Sue Ann is doing. He says, “To cross a line like that … the Preacher’s wife … black magic?”
An interesting moment, because Sam will be all about crossing those lines in later seasons. The line between being a hunter and being evil, like the things they hunt, is a fine one. The same is true for True Believers. What happens when you start to control others using your Faith? No good can come of that. As hunters, using black magic for their own ends would be tempting. How could it not be? Sam isn’t there yet, and perhaps is … unconsciously … thinking of himself, with his own psychic powers, and what that might mean. Sometimes when we know something about ourselves, we react with judgment against that very same thing (i.e.: fundamentalist anti-gay preachers with a collection of butt plugs, again). I’m just saying that Sam is pretty judgmental here. It gets Dean’s attention, and we then get two gigantic competing closeups over the following dialogue.
“Evil,” Sam says.
“Desperate,” Dean corrects.
Grey area again. A flip-flop.
This is where the show inverts our expectations of these characters, set up so strongly in the pilot that we are still invested in watching them flip-flop/deal with all of this stuff 9 seasons later. We may think, from first impression, that Sam is the more reasonable one, the more cool-headed one, and therefore the one more open to “the grey areas” of life. Let’s think things out, let’s not just shoot and ask questions later. But that’s not actually the case, not entirely. Dean is, in many ways,on the side of complexity, nuance, and understanding here, even for Sue Ann. She was desperate. Not evil. She may be evil now, but her original intentions were not. People do crazy things when they are desperate. It’s better to try to understand.
The whole damn world could change if we could understand that.
Sue Ann is obviously now using the binding spell to sic the Reaper on people she thinks are immoral. Dean sits in that, thinking about that. He has clearly not been in a Batting Eyelashes Mood for about 24 hours now (which must be a record), but that doesn’t mean his eyelashes don’t cast shadows halfway down his face.
Dean, thinking about Sue Ann, mutters to himself, “God save us from half the people who think they are doing God’s work.”
It’s a strong political point. The writing is subtle enough to handle statements like this. The mood of the episode is so strong it can take a lot, unlike, say, the reviled “Bugs”, which is so weak, narratively, that it can’t take anything without falling apart.
Once more, unto the Tent. Both Sam and Dean overheard the Reverend invite Layla to come for a private session. They’ve got to find Sue Ann’s witchy headquarters, un-do the spell.
13th scene
It’s nighttime, and lights gleam from out of the tent flap doors. The muddy parking lot is almost empty, and Dean pulls up next to Layla’s car. It’s raining lightly, speckling the windows of the Impala. There’s something going on with Dean, a hesitation, a regret, and he doesn’t get out of the car right away. Sam hesitates, looking at his brother, and Dean finally says, “If Roy had picked Layla instead of me, she’d be healed right now.” Sam tries to counsel Dean out of that. How could he know? Please don’t think like that. Etc. Dude, you need to gear up in regards to your brother’s self-loathing and get ready for more of these arguments. We’ve got 9 seasons more of it.
Dean says, “If she’s not healed tonight, she’s gonna die.”
Dean has a problem with death. I mean, everybody does. But he really does. It seems wrong to him. I suppose if you watched your mother burn up on the ceiling you would see all death as Unfair. I love it when Dean can’t deal with Death. And he flip-flops on that, too, his strong statements about “what is dead should stay dead” completely being erased when Sam is involved. I love it when he is drawn to Tessa the Reaper (all of their scenes together are so phenomenal, some of my favorites in the series). He yearns for death, because then he could fucking relax, and he’d be off the hook. He fears death, because who the hell doesn’t. He wants everyone to live Happily Ever After, because he’s Dean Winchester and that’s what his whole life is about. He doesn’t include himself in that scenario, but that doesn’t negate his wish for it for everybody else. He’s just not philosophical at ALL about death. “When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.” No. Dean does not believe that. Everyone should live to be old, everyone should be happy, “are we okay? You okay? We okay now?” Dean wants everyone to be OKAY. (I went into that in the “Wendigo” re-cap. His “are we okay now?” thing.) His feelings about death are childish and unfinished, and they cause him so many problems in later seasons that he has destroyed most of his relationships. Being unable to accept death as part of life is maybe his greatest flaw at this point? This is the part of Dean that is the PTSD Dean. The unfinished traumatized Dean. The one who was broken in pieces when he was a child and never given the chance or opportunity to put everything back together for himself.
The situation with Layla is obviously exacerbated by guilt because he got to be healed and also he just fucked up her chance to be healed.
Sam speaks to the moral core of Dean, the older brother who knows what is right, saying, “What’s happening to her is horrible, but what are you gonna do? Let somebody else die to save her?”
And, of course, once we know the end of the episode: Dean is the next target. So in not saving Layla, he has inadvertently saved himself. And in the years to come, he will think of Layla, of that I am sure. He knows he owes her his life. Dean has to be tricked into fighting for himself. He won’t do it on his own.
A small hearty group has gathered in the tent. Dean and Sam move off into the shadows at the edge of the field, and Dean uses himself as bait for the cops who threw him out of the tent before, calling out to them, “You gonna put the fear of God into me?” Dean often uses sexual come-ons in such moments, sexually charged language, he can’t help it. He taunts them, and they give chase, Dean racing off through the parking lot, giving Sam a chance to make it to the house undetected.
Dean hides from the cops behind a little RV and is scared to death by the sudden barking of a dog inside. Dean and dogs do not mix. They want to eat him. Well, join the club, dogs. There’s a great moody atmosphere: randomly parked cars and campers, thick mud, mist, darkness, fire coming out of the trash cans. Dean crawls onto the top of the RV and the cops wander around below, wondering where the hell that assclown went. Sam, meanwhile, skulks around like the criminal that he is, looking for signs of … black magic fakery. Peeking over the edge of the porch, he sees light shining through a little bulkhead.
Sam descends into the creepy stone space, seeing all the lit candles, and an altar, covered in candle wax and weird objects and a picture of Dean, taken from the video camera inside the church. The photo has a big red X over his face.
Suddenly, Sue Ann is there, speaking to Sam in a droning voice, intense and yet still somehow measured. She is not shrill. She is certain. “The Lord chose me. To reward the just and punish the wicked and your brother is wicked.”
Has she SEEN what is going on with Dean in Season 9? She needs to cool her jets until THEN.
Sam tips over the altar, but by then Sue Ann is back outside, locking him into the bulkhead, calling down to Sam almost in a pleading tone. Everything will be all right, the Lord wants this, blah blah blah. I love how she chose to place her voice. Her persona is so ingrained: she is a kindly warm Godly woman, they do not shriek or sneer or yell. She may be feeling all of those things in this desperate moment, and the struggle against her outer persona shows in her voice.
Sam, trapped, easily busts out one of the cellar windows. You can’t keep a Winchester locked up, lady.
Outside, Dean hustles through the mud back towards the tent, and suddenly, the overhead lamps surrounding the parking lot go out, one two three, with the same percussion/cuts that we saw in the Sue Ann sequence. Roy, inside, has raised his hands to touch Layla, but his energy has changed. He senses something different, he senses a change, an alteration. Dean, still freaked by all those damn lights going out, suddenly sees the Reaper coming towards him through the darkness. The Reaper is threatening, but not like a regular monster is threatening. He is threatening merely because of what he is.
As all of this is going on simultaneously, we also see a desperate Sue Anne clutching her cross, standing outside the tent flap, and praying to her black magic Gods. Inside the tent, Roy has laid his hands on Layla’s head. She stands, eyes closed, waiting.
Meanwhile, outside, the Reaper grabs hold of Dean’s head, echoing the gesture going on inside the tent. Dean, such a fighter, can’t fight the Reaper, and falls to his knees, at the same time that Laila falls to her knees inside the tent. Soul mates in experience and illness.
The Reaper, looking down on Dean, has an intent expression, almost gentle, as though he is encouraging Dean, he will be there for him as he transitions. Reapers may be able to be trapped and used for Evil as Sue Ann has done, but they have an important place in the world, they maintain the natural order.
This will come to its full fruition in the gorgeous portrayal of Tessa at the start of Season 2. Now THAT is a reaper. Dean may hate that death exists, but it does, and the Reapers take their jobs seriously and there is no morality behind it. People die. Immoral people, moral people. It’s not fair who is “taken”. Fairness has nothing to do with death. People like Sue Ann will never understand that. And, on the flip side, neither will Dean. Dean and Sue Ann are two sides of the same coin.
As Dean goes into his second set of death throes in one damn episode, Sam runs up to Sue Ann, grabs the cross off her neck and smashes it to the ground. The Reaper, with no emotion, it is not connected to emotion, lets go of Dean, and walks away, glancing behind him. Inside the tent, Roy lets go of Layla. Something is not right. Roy does not feel what he normally feels. Roy is troubled. “I don’t understand.” Layla, hoping for something else, looks around her, lost.
Back outside (seriously this episode is giving me whiplash), Sue Ann crouches over her smashed cross, screaming in despair, “My God, what have you done?”
Sam has one of the best lines in the episode, and he says it from his position behind her: “He’s not your God.” It’s tremendously vindicating. He sounds furious. Sue Ann looks up and sees the Reaper off in the darkness, waiting for her. And this time, this time only, when facing her, the Reaper has emotion. He smiles.
Reapers don’t like being used.
Inside the tent is gentle confusion, a deflation of energy, both Layla and Roy lost and grasping, while outside the Reaper grabs onto Sue Ann’s head, and she goes blue and collapses into the mud with a horrified look on her face.
The brothers meet back at the car. Dean looks wrecked.
14th scene
Back at the cheese ball motel room, Sam is packing up, and Dean is sitting on the bed, silent, distracted. Sam, the caretaker, as he has been this whole episode, for good and ill, asks Dean what it is. It’s not easy to ask Dean what’s the matter. But Sam does anyway. Dean doesn’t quite respond. So Sam asks again.
Small acting observation: The framing is that Dean is in the foreground, the focus on him, and Sam is in the background, standing, and he is in a blur. When Sam asks Dean again what is the matter, he puts his hands on his hips in the background, a slight challenging smile on his face. It’s so real. It’s unconscious. Acting is all about behavior and Sam’s behavior in that moment tells you EVERYTHING. He is intimidated by his brother, and you usually don’t ask Dean things twice. But here’s what I want to say, and this just says something about who both Ackles and Padalecki are as actors:
The focus is on Ackles, as I said, and Padalecki is a blur. But Padalecki is acting the shit out of his moment anyway. He’s doing something interesting enough that it would warrant a closeup or his own focus. But he, the actor, doesn’t care. That’s a nice moment he’s having, even without the focus being on him. It is the meaning of generosity and talent. It’s why Supernatural sometimes feels like live theatre: there is life in the takes, there is spontaneity. To compare: I have a couple of friends who have done guest spots on Grey’s Anatomy and they have said that the set is a nightmare of ego. This is not talking out of school. It’s common knowledge. The majority of the main cast members wait for their individual close-ups to do their A-game work. It’s selfish, in other words. It’s also understandable, since Grey’s Anatomy is such a close-up heavy show, it’s like a soap opera in that way. You don’t want to be doing Emmy-award winning work in the background. Save it for your closeup. But you can see how that attitude is also selfish, and creates a selfish atmosphere, which guest actors pick up on. The attitude of the main cast members leave guest stars hanging out to dry, having to act by themselves, essentially. Casts are an organism. Some casts create a true ensemble, others are all in it for themselves. And word gets out. People never have anything bad to say about appearing on ER, for example. The cast reaches out to the guest stars, are there to support them during the guest stars closeups, make them feel welcome. Same with Supernatural. You never hear horror stories of egos. People like working on that show. People like Padalecki and Ackles. In the commentary track for “Phantom Traveler”, Ackles and Padalecki were watching the teaser, and Ackles said, in almost a sad tone, “We never get to meet these people in the teaser.” He sounded truly sad, and then said something like, “But they always do such a great job.” That’s meaningful. Guest spot people pick UP on that shit.
So it’s a tiny thing, but Padalecki choosing to do this whole big illuminating behavioral thing when the camera isn’t even focused on him, when he is a blur in the background, when it is Dean’s closeup, not his, is an example of the generous manner in which both of these guys approach their work.
Dean wants re-assurance that they “did the right thing here”. Sam is like of course we did, but Dean isn’t sure. He feels like shit.
A knock comes at the door.
This small next moment is another example of how the brothers COULD operate if they were halfway normal human beings with normal sibling boundaries. You can count such moments on no more than 10 fingers. Sam, quietly, over the course of their time in Nebraska, has sensed the exchange of energy and yes, love, going on between Dean and Layla. Without having to ask questions, he knows that it is a circle that will need to be closed and Dean, because of his sense of guilt, will not do what he needs to do to close it. So Sam has intervened secretly, like a six-foot-four Bossypants, and has given Layla a call saying, “Dean wants to say goodbye.”
It’s intimacy. A moment passes between the brothers, vulnerable, Sam knowing Dean, Dean shocked at being known. It’s embarrassing, a little bit, for both of them. But there is also a weird relief for Dean that someone is taking care of him, not just physically but emotionally. Because he sure as hell wouldn’t have been able to do it. When Layla appears, Dean stands up, and he looks blasted-open at the sight of her. He’s speechless. He cannot hide. He doesn’t even think to try to hide.
He asks her, all soft and pliable and shocked, “How’d you know we were here?”
Dean appreciated Layla’s outer beauty for one leering second and then threw that away when other considerations came into play, considerations having to do with her humanity, her kindness as a person, and her illness. This is one of the many many MANY examples of Dean’s dealings with women which make me confused when people casually refer to him as a misogynist. Why? Because he sleeps around? Because he makes “you’re a girlie-man” comments, and associates being a girl with being weak? I get it, it’s rude, but these people need to get out more. These people need to meet some REAL misogynists. The kind that make your skin crawl. The kind that want to implement public policy that curtails women’s involvement. Seriously. A Tough Guy saying “you throw like a girl” is the most soft-core misogynist imaginable, Jesus Christ, and more often than not, if you say, to Tough Guy, when he says, “He throws like a girl,” “Dude, that’s offensive, why is throwing like a girl BAD, besides I can throw a baseball just fine,” he’ll say, “What? It’s offensive? Get the fuck out of here.” And then you tell him why, and he’ll be like, “Oh. That’s totally not how I meant it.” And you say, “Well, now you know. Stop saying it.” And he won’t do it again, except right in your face, to annoy you and make you crazy. I speak from experience, having had that exact conversation, word for word, with my Tough Guy ex-flame, who was so macho that he rolled his cigarette packs up in his T-shirt sleeves as though he was an extra in a Roger Corman biker movie. And he did this un-ironically. He looked/acted like a freakin’ Thug, and he was the kindest best guy in the world.
So. That is my Dean filter. That guy. It’s where I’m coming from. Misogyny is a real thing. Dean don’t qualify.
Sam, busted on calling Layla, and “assuming” that Dean wants to say goodbye: Padalecki, again, is doing a symphony of awesome behavior at the door, which honestly makes me ache for .. the Road Not Taken for the Winchesters, who they COULD have been to each other. Sam is embarrassed, afraid Dean might be pissed, but also … he’s enjoying the moment. He can see the look on Dean’s face at the sight of Layla, and he’s a little bit proud that he helped make it happen. He’s happy to give this to Dean because Dean needs it and Dean wouldn’t ask for it. Dean throws Sam a quiet glance over her head. Not annoyed. There’s an inarticulate relieved and yet somewhat scared “thanks” in that look.
Sam excuses himself. Dean is too moved by Layla’s presence to be pissed off at Sam butting in. He is so soft that you wonder how he gets through the day, actually, when he’s like this.
Layla walks by Dean into the room: and watch how he follows her with his eyes. He is so drawn to her, so filled with conflicting feelings. And not one of those feelings has to do with wanting to kiss her. I don’t think that’s present for Dean at all.
She looks up at Dean and says, “I went back to see Roy.”
Dean doesn’t say, “I know” even though he knows what happened. He instinctively gives her space and asks her what happened. It’s her story to tell. Her grief. Her life. Her death. It’s not for him to own. They sit on the bed together. Dean says, “Must be rough. To believe in something so much and have it disappoint you like that.”
These are not just words. He means it. He could be thinking about his Dad too, although Dad has not been a presence at all in “Faith”. It’s just one of those hovering deeper connections that COULD be going on.
Layla looks at him, with a growing warm full smile and says, “You want to hear something weird?”
Dean is thinking about something else for a second, and then says, “Hm?” looking over at her. It’s a counterintuitive take. I am sure there was another take where he was already looking at her, already glued in on her, but they chose THIS take. It’s a bit destabilizing. It is suggestive. Dean has to be pulled back into the gentle moment.
She says, “I guess if you’re gonna have faith you can’t just have it when the miracles happen. You have to have it when they don’t.”
Dean, who lacks faith, is stunned by what she has said and also by her, in general. Who is this amazing person? How did she get to be like that? Can he have what she has?
He asks her, “What now?”
She slowly shrugs, almost girlish, and there’s a tragedy in that. But she is not present to the tragedy, not anymore, and she says, “God works in mysterious ways.” That could have been so sappy but the way she plays it – she is clearly referencing them back to their first meeting outside the tent. It’s a callback. She reaches out and touches his forehead. Being touched is a big deal for Dean. His boundaries are always so compromised, he’s never sure if it’s going to be a caress or a slap. He lets her touch him and they sit there like that for a second. (I am very glad they didn’t kiss. What happens here has nothing to do with romance, lust, attraction. It’s soul meeting soul, human meeting human.)
She gets up to leave and there’s a moment where we see the impact of her leaving on Dean – he’s upset. He won’t see her again. She is going to die soon. It’s almost a grasping moment. Just a second. He stops her.
And again, he clears his throat. Compulsive. He knows what he wants to say, and it will be hard to get it out, and he clears his throat, clearing a path for himself. He says, “I’m not much of the praying type … but … I’m gonna pray for you.”
There is nothing this actor can’t do. There are 1,000 things going on for him in one tiny moment. It’s a powerhouse.
And she feels his powerhouse nature. She felt it from the beginning. She says, “Well. There’s a miracle right there.”
Honestly, in another show, I might gag. In Supernatural you have to wipe me off the floor.
While I gather any thoughts I can add to this awesome recap, I’ll just second this:
//Because I am obsessed with the Motel Room motif://
The thing on the wall of the first motel – what the hell? Could you sleep with that horror above your head? Talk about clamouring souls in hell. (And that wallpaper actually reappears in Season 4, I think.)
(Sorry, you may have to fix my html link, not sure if I got it right.)
,
Good call on the wallpaper. I would love to take a tour through their “Cheesy Motel Room” store room with all this random crap to be re-purposed. And the MURALS. We haven’t seen one yet, I don’t think? Well, in Phantom Traveler – but murals in the motel rooms. So much fun!
Sheila,
Once more, your insights leave me floored. And I just have to loudly complain about Netflix not using ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ for that sequence. The use some other terrible song that completely is wrong. Ugh. :(.
They don’t use Don’t Fear the Reaper? Music copyright laws can be a real bitch!
You can tell that they actually built the whole sequence around that particular song – or it fits so well it seems like they must have!
thank you for reading and commenting, Cat!
Yes on the hotel rooms: the lighted Schultz Beer signs as room dividers in “Night Shifter,” the fish and bobber plaques-on-poles as room dividers in “Born Under a Bad Sign,” the trucker mudflap girls as tiles on the wall in “Houses of the Holy,” the crayon-on-the-walls town scene mural in “Heart”- someone is having a lot of fun.
I was involved with a Pentecostal church in my 20’s and I was very happy to see how this episode treated the folks in that milieu, a rare thing for a TV show. Just regular people, often kind and generous.
Man, 4 movie reviews, a couple of Supernatural seminars, an iPod shuffle and some Mark Twain – you are sleeping, right?
Mutecypher – ha, I know I have been busy. But not to worry: I’m sleeping great. Thank you though.
In re: Motel Rooms: totally fun! I love how blasé Dean and Sam are about it, even when they walk into the disco-themed room. They’re like, “Huh” and move on with their lives. They’ve seen much weirder.
I am glad to hear that the kind treatment of the folks in this episode also struck you. Would have been way too easy to be mean to them – and also would not have helped drive the various points across about faith and belief. Considering how WACKY they eventually get with religion (I mean, angels possessing humans and carrying around giant silver blades?) – it’s good that they grounded it in the dirt/mud of the tent revival first.
The way the episode is filmed reminds me of Robert Altman. I was trying to put my finger on it.
The episode is done with so much imagination and sympathy, with such a deft touch. I was surprised to read that Allan Kroeker has only directed one episode for them.
I always love Julie Benz, I always want her to have more screen time and more lines. The first time I saw this episode I had only seen her as Darla on BtVS and Angel, I kept expecting her to turn up the purr in her voice and get nasty. But there’s nothing of that in Layla. Yeah, acting ( without the ‘k’). She’s this decent, hopeful person with a terrible illness.
She really is an example of what Faith looks like. Very hard to portray, since it’s so indefinable really. But it’s really about Love.
I was surprised too that Kroeker only did the one episode – he’s a very busy man.
I guess the style of “Faith” is really only appropriate to that particular episode – if you think about it. It’s so impressionistic, and Altman-ish – it’s not the style of the rest of the series, not really. Maybe that’s one of the reasons “Faith” stands out so much, not just thematically, but stylistically.
No other episode really feels like this one.
Speaking of angels, it’s funny in season 2’s Houses of the Holy how strongly Dean expresses disbelief in angels. I think that’s the episode where Sam mentions that he prays daily. Dean can’t believe in anything good in the supernatural realm, at least not at this point.
Right! Foreshadowing, obviously, of how important angels will eventually be. And his mother’s bed-time comment to him, all that – it’s like she knew.
Of course angels turn out to be giant douchebags. The worst black-and-white thinking mo-fos Dean has ever encountered.
How far have you gotten in the series? Have you gotten to Purgatory? Season 8, really?
Not giving anything away, but Dean says to Castiel at one point, “I prayed to you every night.” We see Dean praying in Season 9, too. Not to God. But to his guardian angel. At least he knows THAT one is listening.
As far as Dean is concerned, God is just another “dead beat dad”.
Yes, Altmanesque. The show is focussed on the heroes, but you certainly get the sense that everyone in the tent has a real and compelling story. And the Reverend’s hands are almost characters with their own cameos.
I love all the hands shots so much!
I’ve watched up to season 6 when it was broadcasted. My wife and I used to watch the show together, but she left me during season 6. The pleasure of the show diminished for me when it wasn’t shared.
I’m three quarters of the way through re-watching season 2, getting in about 3-5 episodes a week. The show is truly excellent.
Mutecypher – Ugh, I am so sorry to hear that. Totally understandable that a show would be wrapped up in memories. Very sorry!!
Thanks. Life happens amidst the art and entertainment.
Sorry, off topic, but just can’t help but post this – do these ‘book covers’ for True Detective remind you of something?
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/true-detective-goes-hardy-boys-in-vintage-book-cover-mashups-20140321
Ha!! Those are awesome! Carver Edlund inspired!
Stunner of a write-up! It’s such a shame Kroeker only gave us one. He was a perfect fit for the show. I love your observations on how it’s shot and edited. You pick up on so much in this impeccable and crucial episode. It’s not in my top ten list of personal favourites (impeccability is not a requirement there) but it’s so well put together, and tremendously interesting in retrospect. Almost like the 9 seasons so far in microcosm: it quickly transitions from saving people/hunting things to a close examination of the deep and endlessly troublesome precursors to and consequences of life-trading, which is like horsetrading but with more single perfect tears.
Indeed it always surprises me when I watch it how quickly Dean is healed. In another show saving Dean would have been the plot; in this one, it’s just the preface to the character (emotion) story.
The cinematography this episode makes everyone look exsanguinated. It’s so bleak, almost in black and white. The lines they pick up on Layla’s mother’s face are devastating. It’s lucky Nebraska looked so much like Canada this episode!
I love what JP does in this episode. He’s so earnest. Earnestly devastated, earnestly hopeful, earnestly eager, sincere, sorry, relieved, determined. It’s a great Sam episode.
“A young man with an important job to do that isn’t finished.”
What’s fascinating about this is that it actually devalues Dean again. We don’t save Dean because he’s DEAN. He’s not special because he’s DEAN — he’s special because (let’s pretend Roy can see future seasons): Mary needs avenging/Sam needs protecting/Sam needs resurrecting/the first seal needs breaking/Michael needs a vessel. And Dean’s like, yeah, that’s ominous, but it sounds about right.
She is a True Believer ….. He could be thinking about his Dad too.
I hesitate to get into my John is the Name of the Father bullshit here but YES. I see a direct parallel here. Sue-Ann illustrates two critical things for us about violating the natural order to save someone you love: she shows how it corrupts you, and, via Roy but mostly via Dean, she shows how it can ruin the people that you’re trying to save. Because the other place this episode takes us of course is In My Time of Dying, in which John dies in Dean’s place.
So in the very first season(ish) Dean gets a double-whammy of living a stolen life. It happens to him TWICE — “I don’t deserve to live and this person died for me.” The ultimate in pulling the focus of the room. You write about his issues so well in here. “The only time John paid him attention was to punish him.” Exactly — or reward him or abnegating himself. There is literally no other possible way he could have dealt with Sam’s death.
It’s not just that the picture says Famine; it says Famine! Like, Jazz Hands Famine. So funny.
I think every time they leave a motel their garbage bins are full of print-outs of crazy satanic woodcuts. How hilarious it would have been to watch Victor Henricksen travel behind them. “So they went to the library and photocopied twenty pictures out of a book on Appalachian folklore and looked at them for a while. Then they emptied a can of salt onto the carpet of their motel room. Then they walked around the victim’s house and had a D&M with his five-year-old. Then they bought a gong from a hippie shop and went and got drunk on top of a car in a park somewhere. Then they murdered three dudes and desecrated their corpses. Then they had a Dr Sexy MD marathon on pay-per-view and the next day they drove 3000 miles to some podunk town in Florida.”
The Don’t Fear the Reaper sequence is a high-water mark. They did some great work with classic rock for many seasons but this one is immaculate. Off the top of my head its only peer is Renegade in Nightshifters and even that’s not as complexly knit together.
Sue-Ann and Dean after he ruins their service are perfect. She is so shameless and coy, and he is so over her bullshit. And then there’s that little capper with his eyelashy reaction to the hick cops threatening to put something in him, who can’t stand to touch him after he calls them on their creepy bullshit, and then later on want to kill him, like jeez, get a room. Like you say the hypocrisy of certainty!
The last time Sam could have gotten out of a basement window that size I think he was still an abnormally tall and moose-y spermatozoon.
People are touching Dean all OVER this episode. It’s weird. They’re trying to heal him or comfort him or help him or bully him or take his life and they’re doing it with their hands all over his face. This episode really is a full-frontal assault. Except at the end, when the way Layla touches him is the same way his mum touches him in WIAWSNB. Actually People Touching Dean’s Face is probably someone’s art history dissertation by now.
Julie Benz is so good in a very difficult role in this episode. “That’s a miracle right there” is a line that should be impossible to pull off without descending into self-pity or annihilating the character into existing solely to Teach a Moment, but she does it.
I think this is our first Let’s End On Dean Having A Feeling! Shots all around.
Jazz Hands Famine.
dying…..
What are your favorite episodes? It might be fun to hear people’s different choices. I’ll think about mine.
Your internal monologue of Agent Hendriksen has had me laughing out loud for 5 nonstop minutes.
I need a second to get my shit together before I comment more …
well then my work here is done
// In another show saving Dean would have been the plot; in this one, it’s just the preface to the character (emotion) story. //
Right! And so it avoids being a manipulative “Let’s whip our audience into a frenzy” ratings grab. Nothing really wrong with those either but that is not what is going on here.
// It’s a great Sam episode. // It really really is. He’s doing some really subtle good work, supporting the main thru-line, which is Dean’s. The show flat out would not work at all if these actors couldn’t support each other as well as they do. And it’s interesting, considering where we are now in Season 9 … and the whole “you would have done the same thing for me” comment Dean has made to Sam, and Sam’s devastating response … Boy, is it in an indication of how far they have traveled, for good and bad.
// We don’t save Dean because he’s DEAN. He’s not special because he’s DEAN //
I missed that subtlety. You’re right. It’s another way to lessen the space in which Dean operates, another way doors close on any possibility of this guy ever being able to be normal. No wonder he revels in food and showers and magic fingers. It’s the only shot he has at relaxing, ever.
// I hesitate to get into my John is the Name of the Father bullshit here but YES. //
I’m glad you see that direct parallel – I was wondering if I was reading into it. The show, of course, asks you to read into everything. It’s great because, like in other episodes that have nothing to do with Dad – he is still kind of everywhere. AND the writing team was bold enough to not make that explicit at ALL. The only connection with Dad in the scene is Sam’s phone call. He is never mentioned again. But thinking back on “Scarecrow” – and that argument – it’s clearly still working on both of the brothers. And it’s on Dean’s mind.
// Dean gets a double-whammy of living a stolen life. //
I haven’t kept a running tally of the number of times he dies. At this point in his life, how could he even put a value on his life? How could he straighten that out for himself? All of it feels stolen now. He isn’t supposed to even BE here anymore.
And Sam. The same is true for Sam. But … would you agree that, somehow, Sam is making peace with that? That even being angry with his brother in Season 9 is somehow a part of that? I don’t know, there’s something there.
Both of them have flirted with death, have died, have bargained to bring the other back … but their reactions, ultimately, have been very very different. It’s almost a philosophical difference at this point.
I don’t know. Will have to think more on that.
// Then they bought a gong from a hippie shop and went and got drunk on top of a car in a park somewhere. Then they murdered three dudes and desecrated their corpses. //
Still laughing.
// And then there’s that little capper with his eyelashy reaction to the hick cops threatening to put something in him, who can’t stand to touch him after he calls them on their creepy bullshit, and then later on want to kill him, like jeez, get a room. Like you say the hypocrisy of certainty! //
Right!!! That’s all there, in what is a pretty standard cops chasing a dude dynamic. But they twist it, invert it, sexualize it … or Dean does. He is intimately aware of how everyone wants to “put something in” him, to be crude, and so he taunts people with what they aren’t saying. I LOVE that the show has incorporated this as part of his character – and it’s a huge part of why the character is so … unlike anything else out there right now. I can’t think of another example. It’s more stereotypically feminine than masculine. I’m thinking of Joan, a little bit, on Mad Men, who is aware of the sexually charged atmosphere that she seems to create, merely because she is formed the way she is. So she USES it to her advantage, whenever she can. It’s not an exact replica of what Dean is doing, but it’s the first thing I thought of. It’s definitely not a typical way that men “use” themselves, at least not in regular episodic television or cinema, for that matter.
// abnormally tall and moose-y spermatozoon. //
Dying … Yeah, how exactly will he wriggle out of that teensy hole, please?
// This episode really is a full-frontal assault. //
It really is. And his reactions to being touched are always so interesting. You might miss some of it because he’s such a physical actor and of course Dean is always getting in huge fist fights which involve tons of touching. But outside of that violent context, touch is a big BIG deal to Dean. I don’t think he ever even says anything about it – it’s all in the behavior.
I love when Soul-less Sam in “Clap Your Hands” touches Dean’s knee supportively and Dean looks like he wants to throw up, and Sam slowly removes his hand. Hysterical.
Even sexually – someone touches him and he’s … I don’t know … he’s not “cool”, he’s “hot” – which I know I keep saying. Everything is close to the surface. So if it’s a sexual vibe, and the woman makes the first move (which she actually usually does) – he has this whole RESPONSE to it. He’s not “cool”, he doesn’t think anything is his due. You know? It’s hard to describe. He is surprised when a touch is soft, or tender, or doesn’t demand anything from him. It’s like he leans into it – like that moment you mention with his mother touching his head.
The whole Dean-Touch thing is so interesting. Because he is such a floozy, and he is such a fighter – you might miss all of the complexity JA is bringing to the mere act of being touched in other contexts.
This all could go back to trauma, of course – of never having enough mother love to counter-act all the violence he has experienced. Or, those “missing years”, 18, 19, 20, 21 … I know you and I have discussed this but shit went down during those years, especially once Sam left for college. Something happened beyond the normal hunter life that made him who he is. Something changed him from the kid in “Bad Boys” to the guy in the pilot, and it wasn’t just monsters.
// Let’s End On Dean Having A Feeling! //
I haven’t kept track but I think no less than 4 episodes in Season 9 end with “Close Up on Dean’s Feels”. They are really pouring it on thick.
I love how a Dr. Sexy MD marathon is incorporated into the itinerary.
This show is so insane.
it avoids being a manipulative “Let’s whip our audience into a frenzy” ratings grab
And “let’s raise the stakes in this artificial way”. It has been a crazy ten days for TV deaths. Two of my favourite shows, which also happen to be two of the best shows going, have just done it. And it doesn’t sit right at all. Supernatural manages to incorporate death in staggering amounts, but that’s because everyone but Sam and Dean are basically collateral damage waiting to happen, and we figure that out pretty quickly.
the whole “you would have done the same thing for me”
Sam has learned a lot of very, very hard lessons. Mystery Spot, the whole of Season 4, & the entirety of his life where is body is both corrupted, liable to possession, and marked for another. His capacities are astounding. It makes my heart flutter when I think of everything he’s been through, and he is still such a decent guy. Anyway so it’s interesting that Dean had two hard lessons on this subject before his deal, and he goes ahead with it anyway, because he is still beholden to his, I’ll use the word pathology to indicate the morass of his issues. To link it in with what you say about Dean & feminisation, that existing-for-others is so much a part of female socialisation. He needs to attend a Take Back the Night rally.
Speaking of feminity Joan is SUCH A PERTINENT point of comparison! You blow my mind. Just existing in this state-of-being-desired. Maybe in an alternate universe Joan and Peggy are the mid-century version of Dean and Sam. Except of course Joan and Peggy have to struggle very hard to be allies.
If they don’t get some more of Sam’s POV in this season it’ll end up being dramatically unbalanced. I hope that this last third of the season does so, as he now has to react to what is happening to Dean.
Getting back to this thread:
// His capacities are astounding. It makes my heart flutter when I think of everything he’s been through, and he is still such a decent guy. //
I know! I wonder if the fact that he didn’t remember a childhood at all has actually HELPED him in a way. Like, he was BORN tough in a way that Dean wasn’t – because he had those 4 years in Eden with his parents, and so nothing has ever felt “right” since. But Sam adapts, he’s freakin’ tough.
I love him.
// I’ll use the word pathology to indicate the morass of his issues. To link it in with what you say about Dean & feminisation, that existing-for-others is so much a part of female socialisation. He needs to attend a Take Back the Night rally.//
Ha! I know. He needs to know it is okay to have boundaries, and to set them. Such a “feminine” problem, or at least we associate it that way.
Has anyone else compared Dean Winchester to Joan on Mad Men? Have you heard any other chatter along those lines, or is this new ground? I might do a little compare-and-contrast if I’m the first.
// state-of-being-desired. //
YES. They both walk around in an atmosphere that sexualizes every single move they make. It’s got to be a head-trip. The best way to survive it is to try to beat ’em at their own game. Makes you wonder about who Joan is when she’s in the sack. Marilyn Monroe didn’t start having orgasms until the last months of her life when she discovered pleasuring herself. But she was a world-class actress in bed, and would say to her friends, “I should win an Oscar for the performance I’m giving in there.” You know: so caught up in being the fantasy of her lovers, who put all that on her – there was no space for her to figure out what SHE wanted. And I always wondered if that might be going on for Joan, too. Her sexuality is so outward-directed. It HAS to be – it’s the only way to survive. Dean’s got the same thing going on. It’s why whenever we do see him in bed, he seems to be a pleaser and a giver, rather than a taker (unlike, ahem, his hottie-tot brother, who will basically throw you down and MAKE you love it- which is hot in its own right.)
I don’t know – I have a hard time imagining the writers actually talking about all of this – but there are so many signals and images that support all of it – it’s got to be conscious on some level.
I agree with you in re: your last point. Dean has really taken over the narrative in Season 9. Something’s gotta give – especially to push us into next season.
I haven’t seen anyone write about Dean and Joan in conjunction. It’s an interesting link, because there’s a lot of difference obviously. Certainly though where they come together is they way they critique those kind of extreme pole positions of masculinity and femininity by embodying them. Unfortunately Mad Men is not The Joan Show and there’s less scope to investigate feminine masculinity vs Dean’s masculine femininity :-(
//How hilarious it would have been to watch Victor Henricksen travel behind them. //
Seriously, if this guy did recaps.
Kripke commented on one episode on the trail of stolen cars and dead bodies left behind after each ‘intervention’ by the brothers. It’s like having General Sherman come to town – there’s a mile wide trail of destruction behind that Impala.
hahaha I know. They leave a huge mess and then take off.
Off the top of my head, favorite episodes:
French Mistake
Changing Channels
Dream a Little Dream of Me
The End
What Is and What Never Should Be
Mystery Spot
Yellow Fever
On the Head of a Pin
Sam, Interrupted
Dark Side of the Moon
My Bloody Valentine
Live Free or Twihard
All the Trickster episodes. All the Charlie episodes – but the first one, especially, although LARP and the Real Girl is really special too. The entire “soul-less Sam” arc – as painful as it was, I LOVED the entire thing. FASCINATING.
I am missing many but those are the ones that pop into my mind at the moment.
Oh, and the episode where Sam hides in the bar, and has forgotten who he is, and meets that awesome bartender and then encounters himself in the woods …
I cannot remember the name of the episode. But it KILLED me. That actress killed me. Sam killed me. That whole episode was a stunner.
The one where he joins the bits of his soul together. I don’t know the title – surely some reference to the Bourne Trilogy – but it’s a great one. Great throwaway line in that – Sam can’t remember who he is but knows that he’s being followed by ‘some older guy and a male model type.’
After a point the DVDs stopped giving each episode a title, and they are written in tiny type on the covers, so I just don’t know the names of tons of episodes. So my list, generally, would have to go:
Anything to do with dreams.
Anything where they die, come back to life, or do a deal with a devil.
Anything with Charlie.
Anything with Chuck.
Anything with Gordon.
Anything with Bennie.
Anything with vampires.
Anything with Agent Hendrikson
Anything about going back in time or going forward in time,
Anything with young Mary and John.
Anything with babies.
Anything with mud.
And I forgot – anything with Golems.
ooh, I like doing it that way too. “Anything with mud.” Awesome!
I love the Golem!
We’re in sync on a lot of these. The time travel episodes are always great. Frontierland? Please. Dean in his blanket. Saying to the bartender: “I look good.”
I just. Can’t.
I also love:
Anything with Chuck
Anything with Benny
Anything with Agent Hendricksen
Anything with Pamela
Anything with Rufus
basically yes
If I have to limit it to ten:
A Very Supernatural Christmas (always #1 in my heart)
Playthings (The Shining! Feelings!)
Mystery Spot (Pig in a poke! Feelings!)
What is and What Should Never Be (Feeeeeeeeeeeeeelings)
It’s a Terrible Life (Feelings in an office building)
Changing Channels (family biz, two hunting bros)
The French Mistake (Dean grimly)
Everybody Hates Hitler (These guys are psychopaths)
All Hell Breaks Loose Part 2 (FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELINGS)
Depending on the day: Jus In Bello/Jump the Shark/Yellow Fever/The Monster at the End of this Book/Heart/The Benders/In The Beginning/Bad Day At Black Rock/Monster Movie/Roadkill/Good God Y’All
Phew, I’m ruthless.
Oh the Christmas one, of course.
Kills me. I watched it again last week, I think, and thought: “how on earth did they pull this off?”
That final shot???
With the lights reflecting on the Impala, yes. That whole episode is so perfect it makes me want to set myself on fire.
hahahaha
“I love it so much! Light the match, dammit, I’m ready to combust!”
Seriously though: how GROSS could that episode have been? Like, way too much. Too sweet. But it wasn’t at all. Super important episode on so many levels.
I love how they don’t know the words to Silent Night.
“round and round and round …” like, sorry, guys, I know that song and I don’t remember that part.
I’ll play. Holy crap this is really hard !
My top ten:
1) The End(double Dean, “And you know what? We kind of liked it” with that hilarious look on Dean’s face cracks me up every time., stoner Cas, Samifer)
2) Lazarus Rising(the opening and closing sequences IMO rival anything on film or on TV. Reunions, tears and introductions: “I’m an angel of the Lord; I gripped you tight and raised you from Perdition)
3) What Is and What Should Never Be(worst wish EVER :( also everything else )
4) tie between All Hell Breaks Loose Pt2(Dean grieving over Sam and trying to keep the secret. Best Crossroads Demon EVER) and Dark Side Of The Moon (opening sequence is shocking. Sam’s face before he gets shot looking so confused and scared and Dean’s face after followed by “When I come back, I’m gonna be pissed! Let’s get this show on the road” and BLAM! Jensen Ackles transforming into a little boy with his face and body when comforting his mother just kills me.) (How does he exist? And thank you universe for his existence)
5) First Born (Crowley/Dean snarkfest and Dean fighting off 3 demons alone, Jensen stuntwork and Mark of Cain)
6) French Mistake(because funny throughout)
7) Mystery Spot (because brilliant writing that perfectly combined comedy and drama. Jared was great here)
8) No Rest for the Wicked(I cannot fucking believe they really sent Dean to hell)
9) The Man Who Would Be King(Castiel why!?? and Dean’s face when he realizes the betrayal)
10) Hollywood Babylon(because Dean having fun and being a PA is just perfect really)
Ahhh this is too hard! Ask me tomorrow and my list will change towards the bottom half but my top 5 or 6 remains the same.
Dean into the mike in Hollywood Babylon: “Oh they’re aware …”
and I die every time.
//“A young man with an important job to do that isn’t finished.”
What’s fascinating about this is that it actually devalues Dean again. //
God, yes. This guy gets handed more poisoned chalices than Danny Kaye in The Court Jester.
Yeah, it’s kind of the Dark Side of being “special”.
Jessie and Sheila, together you’ve expressed pretty much why this is in my top three episodes of Series 1. And I think the Secret Diary of Agent Hendrikson, age 35 and half should be made into a spin off series right now (along with Sam and Dean Winchester, Fake Priests!).
It sits on the shoulders of all the previous episodes so far, stands quite alone, and prefigures so much to come, in terms of character and plot. Yes, the constant presentation of poison chalices to Dean, yes that his life is only valued in relation to its usefulness to others, yes to being ready to give his life up for someone else (here, Leila – you can really see it when the Reaper comes – he doesn’t even try to run away, he’s ready.) Yes to Faustian pacts. Yes to reapers. Yes to God and also no, or not yet, to God. Yes to Sam’s increasingly complicated and compromised attitude to what it takes to get a dirty job done.
I loved your point about Dean’s heart, and I think that’s why I used to think this episode was called Heart, rather than Faith. Dean’s heart is not just the Seat of his Self and emotional centre, it is the thing by which he maintains a hold on life, and the engine of his enormous personal courage. Heart and courage are pretty much synonymous for Dean, as his courage is used generously in the service of other people, mostly complete strangers who’ll never thank him. What I love about the character of Roy is that he is allowed to see this much about Dean, even though his healing is bogus.
The episode reminds me of the look of Rembrandt paintings and etchings – people waiting for Christ to heal them, the rich browns and reds of the colour palate. Something to do with that camera hovering behind Dean and Roy’s shoulder and Dean collapsing to his knees made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up – I remember thinking, what on earth is going to come of this, where is this going?
I’m curious, on the subject of raising the dead through the power of faith alone, have you ever seen Ordet, by Dreyer?
I haven’t seen Ordet – I’ve always meant to. Tell me more about it.
// he doesn’t even try to run away, he’s ready. //
Right! I didn’t pick up on that, but you’re right. This is how to make things right. He submits.
// Heart and courage are pretty much synonymous for Dean, as his courage is used generously in the service of other people, mostly complete strangers who’ll never thank him. //
Beautiful!!
I love the moments when he gets annoyed at not being thanked. Or when someone thanks Sam and not him. It doesn’t happen often but when it does, his feathers get all ruffled. Like: I’m here, too. I helped too.
// Something to do with that camera hovering behind Dean and Roy’s shoulder and Dean collapsing to his knees made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up – I remember thinking, what on earth is going to come of this, where is this going? //
I know. It is amazing. I had the same sensation the first time I watched it. The camera angles help so much in that effect – wonderful.
Ordet – hard to summarise, but you could say it’s about the difference between ‘being religious’ and having true faith – loving God, in fact. Many people can be religious but lack true faith in their religion’s message, or in the promises it makes to them, in this case, that can God answer a grieving family’s prayers. It’s set among a small community of farmers in Northern Denmark who are very caught up and divided by matters of religion, but who have to confront what it really means when the daughter in law of one of the main character’s dies. I won’t say more, you’ll have to watch it!
Oh I totally will. It sounds amazing.
Roger Ebert wrote about it, too, you can read his piece on his site.
It really is amazing, I still think about it a lot, and now want to see it again. It is also in many ways the most diametrically opposed, anti, opposite to Supernatural, but actually given discussion here makes a really interesting point of comparison.
Sam and Dean Winchester, Fake Priests!
Salvation Just Got Sexy.
So many great opportunities for spin-offs! Who wouldn’t watch fifteen seasons of The Jew and The Golem? Why (I mean, I know why, but whyyyyyyyy) are they choosing to make another urban-fantasy-Romeo-and-Juliet? Yawn.
Heart and courage are pretty much synonymous for Dean, as his courage is used generously in the service of other people, mostly complete strangers who’ll never thank him.
oh man, this guy, this big goddamn hero. And yet the show isn’t afraid to examine what lies underneath that, and what its toll is. Unlike so many prestige or wannabe-prestige shows where “dark anti-hero” stands in for subtle discussion of the nature of goodness and heroism. In Supernatural we have two out-and-out heroes, but jesus, heroism is a treacherous house to live in. Reminds me of Bullock (albeit he is not presented as a hero) in Deadwood (if you like brown you’ll love Deadwood, it’s stunning).
//So many great opportunities for spin-offs! Who wouldn’t watch fifteen seasons of The Jew and The Golem? //
Maybe we could persuade Michael Chabon to write it? I’d donate on Kickstarter.
More spinoffs, please.
Great list, Jessie.
I forgot to mention.
anything with Rufus
Pamela
Bobby, it just goes without saying.
I’m at home so I can be more specific now.
I tend to go for sets of episodes which really work together for me, such as the the first four of Season 1 (lots of mud and prelapsarian innocence running around in the woods) then Home-Faith in (mom, dad and demons – and mud). After that it’s The Benders (MUD!!! cannibals.) and Dead Man’s Blood (it’s really grown on me. And mud.). Then it’s on to Season Two episode 1 for the next corker. I love Nightshifters (mainly I’M NOT WORKING FOR THE MANDROID, I think my favourite line in Supernatural and that’s saying a lot). Crossroad Blues – I just happily watch it for that scene with Dean and the Demon.
The final three of Season Two I could also watch again and again by themselves (demons, pacts, oodles of mud, Bobby!, and Dean popping Yellow Eye’s clogs. Love it.)
Season Three – Jus in Bello probably pips Fresh Blood.
Season 4 Lazarus Rising – fantastic reboot to the series. And Castiel! And the two after that (fraught conversations with Castiel about god. Time travel. More priest outfits. Mom’s a babe! Er, so’s Dad!)
I’m still not so familiar or fond of post Season 6, although – Charlie! Golems! LARPing. The one where Bobby! dies.
Oddly enough, given the comprehensiveness of the list there, there are plenty of episodes I can easily skip, but it doesn’t seem fair to mention them.
Dammit, forgot to mention
Anything with Death in it
Oh my God I need to add that to my list too.
Death is phenomenal. The line readings. The bad food. LOVE HIM.
His intro montage still gives me chills. Hooray for the show that could put something like that together in episode 5.21.
Death’s intro montage is a masterpiece.
//Death is phenomenal. The line readings. The bad food. LOVE HIM.//
Isn’t it just great to be able to write ‘I love Death’?
I tend to say I’ve got four favourite episodes: the second half of s1, the second half of S2, every other episode in S3 and the first and last third of S4. They reached some really sustained heights, and the first and last bits of the season are often devoted to the mytharc which creates momentum. You get super invested when bingewatching those episodes. And it’s a rare MotW episode in S2-5 that don’t comment in some way on the mytharc. Some of my faves (you can tell) are the apparently isolated ones that pivot in the last five or ten minutes to reveal something huge about the larger story. I still remember the feeling I had watching It’s A Terrible Life. Whoa dude, this is actually totally about angels!
Yes, those second halfs of Season 1 and Season 2 are superb. You can almost feel the motor of the Arc revving up. They are so good at that.
I’m almost feeling that going on now in Season 9 – in a way I didn’t in Season 7 or 8. I liked a lot of Season 7, and I adore Dick Roman (that actor is phenomenal) but I think I mentioned I didn’t find the whole Leviathan Turning Us Into Food threat particularly compelling. Maybe I need to invest in it again – it felt more abstract to me (for some reason) than the Apocalypse did. Which, I realize, is insane.
There’s a lot of great stuff in Season 7 – I like, particularly, Dean basically becoming a functioning alcoholic. It’s so deliberate and it’s mentioned outright maybe once or twice, tops. But he is drinking throughout the season, morning noon and night, constantly. “Can you even get drunk anymore?” asks Sam. I love how they handle his drinking.
I always thought they were gonna follow through more on the drinking — not that I wanted a very special episode, and it worked in the background, as an indicator of Dean’s stress levels. Welp, someone I care about’s just died, time to turn to the oooold coping mechanism!!
If nothing else S7 gave us Dick Roman’s shark smile. And the jokes. “You gonna look at more anime or are you strictly into Dick now?”
//“You gonna look at more anime or are you strictly into Dick now?”’//
‘It’s an art form.’
One of my favourite ripostes.
hahaha Yes, Season 7 was one long dick joke. I know it drove some people crazy. I thought it was super stupid and super funny (I love it when stupid and funny work together and it works).
It was sort of allowing everyone to let off that homoerotic steam that had been boiling for freakin’ seven seasons at that point. An acknowledgement. Come on, everybody wants to fuck everybody else on this show, we all know it, we know it’s going on, but we don’t want to have a big conversation about it, so let’s just make dick jokes for an entire season instead. Hahaha.
Speaking of dicks, when Sam talks about the “ball washer” in the clown episode and Dean makes him repeat it 3 times? So funny.
Dean getting pissy about anime being an art form … DYING. Yes, great exchange.
Jessie – I, too, had hoped the drinking would maybe be developed more – not in that “Let’s put Dean into rehab” way, or in a tearful “I need help, Sammy” way (God help us and save us, thank goodness it didn’t go that way) – but it was just so OBVIOUS. Clearly it was somewhat about Bobby’s flask – drinking heavily as a way to be close to Bobby, who was a drinker – and using his flask –
But it was pretty suggestive of a deep dark strain in Dean – that self-destructive thing – I guess Purgatory cleaned him up. Very effective rehab, Purgatory.
lol! I forgot about that line. Is that the first or second clown episode? The first one had Sam saying “The little boy fingered a clown,” heh heh heh.
Arrested Development was genius at those sort of gags. “Maybe I’ll put it in her brownie” continues to kill me on a regular basis.
“The little boy fingered the clown.”
DYING. So sick.
It’s the second one – where Sam ends up covered in glitter – I’m pretty sure. That’s the second one, right?
// Maybe we could get Michael Chabon to write it. //
Hahahaha!!!!
Jessie – The whole “anti-hero” thing is interesting – because, right, these guys aren’t anti anything. They’re big heroes. They are iconic. They stand in a long long tradition in cinema/art – they are throw-backs in many ways. But it examines what all that means in a way that is so interesting. Some of John Wayne’s later films, when his persona was firmly established, did the same thing – like The Searchers, that I keep mentioning – but there are a couple others. You could never ever call John Wayne an anti-hero – but The Searchers comes close and is really de-stabilizing to our IDEA of heroes. And it asks that we look at his flaws, and admit those flaws, and see them – it wants you to be uncomfortable – it wants you to question his motives – and yet you still weep for him at the end. Some people can’t stand Searchers for that reason. It is a very confrontational film. It’s racist, it’s violent … but it is really a strong CRITIQUE of those things, and the “hero”‘s place in it.
Heroes are totally out of favor right now, unless they are wearing tights or were bit by a spider.
The anti-hero thing is so engrained now – and I think that is where some of the more dismissive commentary on Supernatural comes from. I read someone refer to the show as “macho posturing” – it was a comment in a comments section somewhere – and I was like, “Say wha???”
So people see the guys with guns and the hot car and the scantily clad babes (on occasion) and they literally can’t see past that surface. They can’t see the ironic twist on the genre going on, and also to those really deep elements that we keep going on about – that Supernatural is actually interested in masculinity in a way that you don’t really find elsewhere right now. And they KEEP going after it. They KEEP delving into it.
I’m so glad that there seems to have been a consciousness in that direction in the creative team – who ran with the possibilities of two brothers on the road. I am not sure that sort of “let’s really ask questions about masculinity – and what it means to be a hero – and what it COSTS to be a hero ” level was in Kripke’s original conception.
I’m gonna have to watch The Searchers, aren’t I? *ducks*
I think Kripke would agree that that level of examination and critique was not in his original conception. Some never-to-be-repeated magic happened in the first half of the season to set it on this path. The Pilot and Wendigo work, in their parts, and as a part of the whole tapestry, but if it had locked down and pursued the qualities of those episodes rather than Home or Faith — and IMO if Edlund hadn’t gotten involved in S2 — it would have been a very different and almost certainly less interesting show.
The Searchers is a hell of a film – and takes the tropes of the Western, which were unexamined to some degree, or at least presented in a totally one-sided way, and talks about all of it. The fight against the “Indians” is admitted to be racist – and the racism is in John Wayne’s character. It’s ugly. But because he’s John Wayne, and a hero, we have a hard time seeing how bad he is, how beyond the pale. Or, not “bad” – but limited. And the final shot is one of the greatest in American cinema – both for what it looks like, and also what it reveals about John Wayne. I’ve written about it before.
And John Wayne has, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest closeups in the history of cinema in The Searchers. If you watch it, it will be instantly recognizable. It is when he is at the trading post, and he sees a bunch of wailing women huddled in one of the rooms – they are out of their minds, after being rescued from abduction – the threat of rape hovers over the whole film, and is one of John Wayne’s character’s driving forces – an obsession with white women being “sullied” and how it would render them useless/like animals – it’s super ugly – and these women were obviously raped repeatedly. He stops and looks at them. The camera pans in close.
I could write an entire dissertation on that closeup. The best part about it is that it does not reveal its secrets: you could argue about what is going on there for hours (and I have). It does not say “Here is what I am feeling.” What he is feeling is … incomprehensible, complex, can’t be boiled down into one thing. John Wayne was asked by Peter Bogdanovich about that closeup and all John Wayne said was, “Yeah. That’s a helluva shot.”
He knew.
There are a lot of connections between John Wayne in The Searchers and Dean Winchester. Both men yearn to enter into domestic life, and that yearning is something they would never express to anyone. But both men silently yearn for a regular life, with a woman and kids and a warm bed and company. Dean tries,think of the scene when Lisa lets him in and he cries on her shoulder – how many times Dean is shown standing at the door of that house, with the same shot practically – of his hand rapping on the door. The Searchers is all about doors. There is always being “on the inside” and then “being on the outside”. Here’s a post I put together about that:
http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=25214
People still sometimes think that The Searchers is endorsing the racism expressed. But it’s not. It’s presenting it and it is presenting it through the character of John Wayne – which completely rocks the foundations – because we expect him to be a hero. And despite his actions, we love him. It’s not strictly his fault that he is limited. Blame the whole culture for his limitations. He’s just playing his part. He is also brave, smart, committed, and a Leader. You can’t discount those aspects.
The final shot of the film shows the COST to such a man.
Anyway. It’s a great film!! :)
// The Pilot and Wendigo work, in their parts, and as a part of the whole tapestry, but if it had locked down and pursued the qualities of those episodes rather than Home or Faith — and IMO if Edlund hadn’t gotten involved in S2 — it would have been a very different and almost certainly less interesting show. //
I totally agree. You can see the format and how it could go in those first two episodes – guys traveling around, having arguments, fighting monsters.
Dead in the Water is a bit of a crack in the atmosphere – letting in sadness and trauma – but it’s once we get into this second half – with Faith and on out – that the series starts to get truly existential.
Love Edlund.
Thanks for the preparatory remarks! I look forward to reading your posts on it once I’ve seen it. I think Red River must be the only pre-Searchers Western I’ve seen. Most Westerns I’ve seen are always already commenting on the genre (so of course I lose a little of the comment, being academically familiar with the tropes and meanings without being inculcated.) Sounds like Searchers might have been at the start of that shift.
So, we’re putting together some supplementary course materials for ‘A Supernatural Reader’ here?
So far
Film:
The Searchers
The Hurt Locker
Ordet
Innumerable horror films, especially The Shining and Carrie.
One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Books:
The Bible. All of it. Especially the wrathful and vengeful bits.
A Dictionary of Angels. (I used to have a copy, goddam.)
Paradise Lost.
The Divine Comedy.
Sir Gawaine and the Greene Knight (multiple resurrections, extra marital sex.)
Anything else?
On the Road should be on there too!
I love that when Misha Collins got cast, he pulled out his Bible and re-read Revelations immediately.
Your discussions about Dean never wanting to be the center of attention make so much click into place!
Yeah – it’s kind of a stealthy subtextual thing he’s doing, isn’t it. He’s such a dazzler as an actor and as a character – you might think he wanted to be so, but it’s something he never really asked for, and all the attention he gets creeps him out.
For me as well!
Agree completely. I relate to Dean in this area of not wanting to be the center of attention and it’s a conundrum because I can be quite gregarious and friendly and outgoing. I love this entire discussion! Just as an aside, I’ve only come to SPN in the past few months and in that short amount of time, Dean Winchester has quickly risen to being in my top 3 favorite characters of all time (and I’m not young!). I put him up there with Gaius Baltar and Wesley-Wyndam Price for completely realized and multi-dimensional characters. And Dean actually seems like he could be a real person I might meet one day, he’s so well-realized. Yes I know he’s a fictional character! LOL
I realise I’m two years late here but I couldn’t agree more with this. He could be so one-dimensional and obvious, but instead he’s such a beautiful complex, nuanced, REAL character. Fantastic writing and even better acting.
Again, sorry, this is again off topic but somehow germane. The link says it all, by the way.
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2014/mar/25/teacher-punishes-students-with-game-of-thrones-spoilers
Has civilisation come to this?
Not to mention – civilization. My bad.
mua ha ha my Australian English is subtly working on you. It’s gonna be esses and extra us and footpaths all up in here.
Ha – this is awesome.
Well, I’m a Brit, so I have no excuse at all.
whoa, you guys use the z? that’s crasy.
I think it’s a symptom of rarely having to type the word civilisation, let alone say it.
If it’s good enough for Kenneth Clark, it should be good enough for me.
I wanted to comment about your musings on Dean being a misogynist or not.
While I’m never thrilled with Dean using ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ and ‘skank’ as much as he does but like you pointed out he reserves it for demons. I’m generally pretty sensitive to misogynistic tendencies in male characters but I am so glad that you don’t see it because I was starting to think I was just being blind to it in Dean but I agree with you that it doesn’t apply to Dean, not if you really look at his interactions with the non-demon women in the show.
And Dean’s use of that language is a way to deal with the sexually-charged atmosphere that always comes with demons (for him, anyway). It’s a survival tactic. It may not be pretty or politically correct but survival usually isn’t. And there you can see Dean’s need to “reduce” something – he is trying to “reduce” a supernatural being into something that is “just” a whore or a skank – or whatever. Not because he hates women or thinks that’s all they’re good for – but because he feels the power imbalance and that’s his way of dealing with it. It’s childish and limited – but misogynistic? Like I said: these people need to get out more and meet some real misogynists.
Dean’s dealings with real-life women are always very complex, vulnerable, and sometimes charged. He under-estimates people sometimes. He under-estimates Jo. But everyone under-estimates Jo. She’s a petite pretty young blonde woman. If you think the whole WORLD doesn’t underestimate her, then you don’t live in reality. Dean is also scared of Ellen. Haha. So Jo showing up is bad news because now he’s going to be in trouble with Ellen. He also has a bit of a drive towards flirting with Jo – he has her in that bucket – so to have her knife-wielding young self butting in on a hunt – it just destabilizes him, and he wants her out of there. Also, up until that point, we have not met a female hunter. Only men. So it’s not just Dean who’s surprised at the advent of a chick hunter – the whole show has set us up for that.
It’s not misogyny. It may be a little bit sexist, but, “a little bit of sexism” does not equal misogyny, which is far more serious, endemic, and political in nature. Seriously, we all need to toughen up a little bit. A little bit of sexism is not the worst thing in the world. And Dean’s version of it is totally harmless. Charlie’s comment about the “Men of Letters” being a sexist name – takes him aback for a second – you can see him blink with surprise – he hadn’t even THOUGHT of that – because he’s a man, and men in general don’t notice that stuff. You have to point it out to them. But Charlie is capable, awesome, and he loves her – almost from the get-go. And her “calling out” the sexism in the language is a great detail. Which then … I mean, when Sam hugs her and calls her a “woman of letters”, I want to weep.
And back to Jo – of course we all know how he eventually ends up treating Jo. With love, care, kindness, concern, overlaid with sexual tension, because he always wants to kiss her on some level. That’s life. But he doesn’t INSULT her – like: “Listen, you’ll always just be a hot piece of ass to me … no matter how capable you are … I will never see you in any other way than someone I want – so too bad for you.” You just cannot make that argument because it doesn’t exist in the text at ALL.
Maybe some people think that finding women sexually attractive equals misogyny? I have seen some commentary that almost goes in that direction. It’s a scary attitude, frankly. Do these people want the human race to die out? Ha.
There is not one example in the ENTIRETY of the show where Dean sneers at women – sneers at them for thinking they can be equal to men, sneers at women for being sexual, sneers at them for anything. Not ONE.
Now, on the flip-side: there are a lot of comments where being “girlie” is equated to being weak or bad. “Haha you got beat by a girl” “Ha ha Paris Hilton beat your ass …”
That’s not misogyny though. Not in my book. Like I said with the anecdote about my Tough Guy (who was a lot like Dean Winchester, including a traumatic background, overlaid by tough-ness so thick it was like a wall – but when we were alone, he was so tender and gentle I never got used to it – the contrast) – he would say shit like “He throws like a girl” and I would balk at it, and we would argue it out, and he would be skeptical that it was offensive, but then would listen to me, and Oh, okay, I won’t do it anymore.
Boys need to differentiate themselves from girls. And putting down girls is a way to do that. It sucks and most people grow out of it. Dean hasn’t grown out of it. But being Tough and Strong was set at the highest premium by his father – you can imagine him teaching Dean to shoot a rifle when he was little and criticizing him by saying he “held it like a girl”, or “don’t be a girl now, shoot that thing”.
They live in a completely-male bell jar.
That is why Dean is “surprised” by women, you can see it – he’s not “over” them. Misogynists are “over” women – they think women have nothing to contribute, nothing a woman says can surprise them because they have already decided who we are. You never once see Dean treat a woman like that.
Maybe people are reacting to a man who loves strippers, porn, and sex – and isn’t embarrassed about it. They want him to be better, softer, nicer, more “enlightened”. But .. but … then we wouldn’t have tension, contrast, drama. We wouldn’t have Dean.
I don’t know. I travel in a world where most guys are into that stuff, who love sports and burgers and boobs, and still manage to be nice to the women in their lives.
//Dean’s dealings with real-life women are always very complex, vulnerable, and sometimes charged. He under-estimates people sometimes. He under-estimates Jo.//
The Dean-Ellen-Jo triangulation is pretty hilarious. Dean really is sent ricocheting around all his conflicting, emotional … thingummies, don’t really know the word for them – flirt and drageur extraordinaire, protective big brother, obedient son, and the respecter of other’s individuality and their right to make their own choices. He’s instantly dragged in to the argument between Ellen and Jo, and of course comes down on Ellen’s side, not just because he is scared of Ellen (with absolute reason, but also, he likes her and wants her approval) but she’s also a parent and, as his father’s son, he won’t challenge her in her wishes for her daughter, plus he agrees anyway. Jo doesn’t understand his opposition to becoming a hunter, because derr, he’s a hunter. He, on the other hand, once he’s finally got how smart Jo really is, can’t understand how anyone with that sort of smart would throw it away and opt for the hunting life (apart from Sam, of course.) And of course, the minute he starts ‘colluding’ with Jo, it goes tits up and confirms worst fears about involvement with him will get her dead in short order. (Although she’s of course awesome, and not put off by the experience, the opposite in fact.)
I love that moment in the roadhourse when Dean first tries to flirt with Jo and realises that it’s not succeeding. And decides to stop. It’s like you can see the gears actually reversing. It’s not just because she’s resistant. It’s because he suddenly sees her, and that what he’s doing almost thoughtlessly could lead somewhere disastrous. She’s younger, vulnerable – whatever happened, he’d be responsible. After that, she’s just not flirting material (last night on earth notwithstanding.) The body language is very funny (that cringe when Jo says ‘the second side of Zep 4 and a six pack’) but you can see that Dean has not only been busted, he’s busted himself. It’s not just because of dad dying. He’s grown up a bit.
//But everyone under-estimates Jo. She’s a petite pretty young blonde woman.//
She’s awesome. Not enough Jo. It’s a shame that you only get to see how truly independent she is after she’s dead.
// you can see that Dean has not only been busted, he’s busted himself. //
Yes!! The whole flirting with Jo thing is great. She is saying, basically, “Please, you’re like all the rest of ’em.” And in that moment he is and decides to course-correct. And he doesn’t resent her for it. It’s very adult.
And right – if Ellen hadn’t been in the picture, if Jo hadn’t been connected to a family that Dean knew about – he may not have had the reaction he did. Dean knows about family, respects family, and he sees her in that context.
I love the moment when they’re inside the walls and Jo has to squeeze past him – and he has that moment where he looks up, dealing with her brushing up against his crotch, basically, and murmurs to himself, “Should have cleaned the pipes.”
hahahaha Basically regretting the fact that he didn’t masturbate earlier, it’s biting him in the ass now.
And then when he kisses her in that damn convenient store at the end. Their entire relationship is there. It’s freakin’ awful, but beautiful. EMOTION. LOVE.
Also I think the show was very smart to course-correct itself – I think Jo was being floated about as a potential love interest – they probably discussed it. Then realized that it wouldn’t be right, somehow … and didn’t go that way. A sensitive understanding of what she brought to the show. It removed her from “Love Interest”, and put her into her own category.
And to then bring her back – when Dean is “on trial” – in Season 7, I think … it’s awful. The show still misses those women.
What do you find awful about it. I can think what I find awful about it, but what about you?
I hated that Jo was being used. That she was being forced to “blame” Dean – when she didn’t really feel that way. That she was being put into a black-and-white world, which left Dean no room for softness – when her role in life was all about complexity and nuance with him.
I tried to put myself in her shoes: If I were forced to face my family and remove the nuance from past events, and “put them on trial” for it.
I felt her agony in that. How unfair it was to do that to her.
Because she seemed to have made peace with her choice in the convenient store. She died a HERO. Dean knows it, she knows it. And to have that resurrected by an outside force and used to condemn Dean – I felt that that was an awful thing to do to these two people who had made a sort of bruised peace with the awful thing that happened.
I could probably boil it down more succinctly – but that was what I felt was awful there. Jo being used. Jo being forced to condemn Dean.
How about you?
Thanks, Sheila. That’s a really interesting point about how being put on trial forces people into choosing between black and white.
I’m not sure if I can put my thoughts down succinctly either, but what I recall of that episode is that it’s basically Dean putting himself on trial, so the charges are his own, and he condemns himself. Sam and Jo absolve Dean pretty much entirely, they take full responsibility for their own decisions and destinies, but I think what I find awful about the scenario is a) what’s hovering over it all, fact that Dean can’t come clean about killing Amy That’s really why he’s on trial, isn’t it? And not even for killing her, but for hiding what he’s done from Sam. It makes Sam’s ‘testimony’ toxic for him, somehow. Crucial evidence is missing. It reinforces his abjection. And I find his abjection pretty awful – my hands were over my eyes at various points, I think.
b) I’m not sure he’s made his peace about Jo, otherwise why would she be there? I made a comment on another post about series 8 about Dean’s need to protect others (Sam and Castiel, iirc) being rejected by them, and Jo’s testimony also seems to feed into that. Dean torments himself as someone who fails to protect Jo, and she kind of says, dude, you weren’t in the picture for that, I made my own choices. He’s not really in a place where he can accept what that means.
Dammit, I need to watch this episode again.
//I could probably boil it down more succinctly //
Please, never do that.
Yes on all counts – there’s a lot of subtlety in what you say. You’re right: her death haunts Dean, which is why she is called back – her presence will be “used” against him. It’s awful on her side – because she knows Dean and knows that he races towards guilt, and assumes too much on his shoulders – and she is being forced to twist the knife in. She made that choice that day in the convenient store of her own free will – she is a hunter – she knew her life may very well have ended violently. She’s a grown-up. She is going to “go down swinging”.
Dean will never recover from her death – or from Ellen’s.
And right, the whole thing turns on Dean lying right in Sam’s face about Amy. And how he starts to really lose it in the episodes following – nightmares and drinking and all that. He is so transparent – way more than Sam is – Lying like that is bad news for him, he can’t handle it.
That hilarious bit of singing in the car. Sam’s face. Dude.
hahahahahaha
To those of you who did not see last night’s episode: Here be some thoughts, so consider yourself warned:
OMG I was in love with every second of it.
1. Sam is rising in the narrative. YAY. His releasing the souls and them going back to their rightful owners made me want to weep. A callback, too, to “soul-less Sam” – and the demon saying they want him to join the army. His refusal to do so, to act as a redeemer instead. WOW. That is certainly going to come back – something is going to start tempting him too.
2. Dean’s scene with Crowley at the bar. Superb. Every single comment from Crowley was sexual harassment, little niggling teasing and poking the bear – and Dean feels that as an assault. Why can’t Crowley just treat him like he’s a freakin’ man – why does he have to put up with this shit from EVERYONE? It’s emasculating and humiliating. But Crowley is getting at the deeper issue: that holding the First Blade made Dean feel “virile” – oh shit, we’re getting into the masculinity conversation, the “what it means to be a real man” thing that is SO KEY to the character of Dean Winchester. Not only did holding the blade make him feel “virile” – but it also made him “afraid”, right, says Crowley? – afraid to be a man. Ahhh. That’s it. That’s where we need to go. I will need some time to contemplate all the implications of that – but it was some deep shit – and also totally presented in this context of basically sexual harassment from Crowley’s side. Crowley’s comments were all about Dean’s cock, and Dean’s virility – and how he is drawn to that side of himself but is also “afraid” of it.
Additionally, as I mentioned somewhere else: since his hook-up with Carmelita, ages ago, Dean’s libido has been in hiding. Crowley is picking up on that. Shaming him for it, goading him towards “getting it up”.
It also makes me think of what that hippie-dippie waiter said to Dean in The Mentalist: “You are a virile manifestation of the Divine.”
I don’t have a spreadsheet in front of me listing the number of times the word “virile” has been used in the series – these are the only two times that come to mind.
It is KEY.
3. Ahhhh, Jessie, maybe they “heard” us discussing Dean’s drinking – because now it’s back. He has a freakin’ bottle of Scotch in his bag, and he waits until Sam leaves before pulling it out? And Crowley connecting them as “junkies”. Dean jones-ing for another fix of what it feels like to be “virile”? God bless you, Supernatural, for … basically going deeper into what interests me personally. Hahahaha.
4. Abaddon’s backstory. Oh WOW. GOOD. I love that actress very very much and I am glad to see her get filled in a bit. It gives what happened to Josie a tragic energy: she was a hero. She sacrificed herself so that Henry could live. She’s like Sam and Dean. Good stuff.
5. Fantastic episode. Go, director Misha Collins. I loved it.
Gonna be out all day – but thoughts on this? Reactions to the episode?
So many women in this episode being fabulous all over the place!! Aliana Huffman has been a great addition. She has such striking features and uses them well to transition from Josie to Abbadon. I also liked that Sam was hanging with (/being tortured by) women most of the episode. His (non-demon) relationships with women are so, um, clean and strong. Like two pillars facing each other.
Dean and virility: did you notice that shot of the busty waitress serving Dean with her cleavage practically rubbing his eyeballs, and he didn’t even notice? That was a big tip-off.
The bar was such a saturatedly masculine space. Like it just reeked of homosociality that Crowley of course always tips into homoeroticism. There were two hilarious shots: Crowley stands by the corner pocket and Dean hits the cue ball (um) directly at his crotch, while Crowley makes a sexual quip; and Crowley says “I think you felt powerful, virile” as Dean holds the cue at an upstanding angle and strokes it. Misha you’re such a trickster.
Dean could “tell” that guy was a hunter. I could “tell” that was a dude having some crisis of homosexuality. I don’t think my instincts are as good as Dean’s somehow.
There is a lot going on with Dean’s drinking and the Mark of Cain and exactly what his addiction is. I don’t want the show to leave it at “addiction”. Addiction is always about something (as well as physiology). His drinking has always been about dulling intensity of feeling. The Mark of Cain serves that purpose nicely too, but he’s not ready to admit that. Sam’s addiction was about power and relief from despair. And Jane’s addiction was about 80s alternative rock.
I think Dean feels like he has very little control over his life: his feelings, his relationship with Sam, his relationship with Cas, the war. His being, basically. Of course the Mark of Cain is seductive. To paraphrase myself from elsewhere I think it’s also a perverse kind of relief for him to surrender to the role he’s always secretly suspected he is: Daddy’s blunt little instrument. So part of his struggle with the MOC I hope will involve the realisation that he is something more than protecting Sam and the family business.
Good call on Sam’s relationships with women. I loved that final moment by the car where she said she doesn’t “date anyone under 65” – “too much drama” – I felt like she was my kindred spirit. And I loved his laugh. It was a beautiful long interview scene, really – that stretched over the course of half of the episode. Not really a normal Supernatural structure – and I thought it worked.
Sam needs a girlfriend.
And Josie/Abaddon – I was so into what she was doing in her performance a while back that I looked her up personally (normally not my thing). Shocked to find out she is a mother of four. It made me love her even more. She is Angelina Jolie gorgeous – and finds a lot of nuance in “playing evil” – the laugh, the sudden squinting of the eyes – she is truly menacing but also gorgeous in a way that seems damn near otherworldly. To see her backstory … it was really touching. Unrequited love? Self-sacrifice? Amazing.
I totally noticed the busty waitress who may as well have not even existed.
I loved how when Dean broke the pool balls – the 8 ball remained perfectly stationary in the middle of the swirling chaos of the other balls. Hell of a break, JA.
// Dean could “tell” that guy was a hunter. I could “tell” that was a dude having some crisis of homosexuality. //
Hahahahahaha My thoughts exactly. The vibe was super-gay. I also loved the two of them having their confrontation by the men’s room with the giant word MEN on the door behind them.
// I don’t want the show to leave it at “addiction”. //
Neither do I. And the way JA is playing it – when he took the gulp from the bottle, you could almost see his whole face go dead. And his posture at the bar, when he was sitting at the booth, talking to Sam – he was so hunched over – he was just hating himself. But there’s so much in that self-hatred now – I mean, there better be – we’ve had 9 seasons of it. Now it’s even more tormented, because that mark on his arm is burning – it’s THAT that he wants to touch again. Poor Dean – you can see how the show is systematically depriving him comfort. I was thinking – if Bobby were still here – if Castiel wasn’t dicking around in his angel war (or … directing the episode) … if Charlie weren’t still in Oz … these people balance him out – they almost force him to. He got to be soft and human with them. He can’t do that with Sam anymore. So where else is this guy gonna go?
// And Jane’s addiction was about 80s alternative rock. //
hahahaha
// I think it’s also a perverse kind of relief for him to surrender to the role he’s always secretly suspected he is: Daddy’s blunt little instrument. So part of his struggle with the MOC I hope will involve the realisation that he is something more than protecting Sam and the family business.//
Please God, let it be so.
It FEELS like that’s where they’ve been going – with all the “you can’t stand being alone, Dean” conversations they’ve had in Season 9. It feels like they are going in a more existential place with his character – which is where he needs to go and almost wants to go.
Ironically – Sam has always been the more practical one. Dean is the existential one, the abstract one. He’s really facing that now.
Aah, Jessie, (covers face, writhes in agony) trying not to read this is absolute torment.
Seriously, I want to airlift you links to the episodes or something – there’s got to be a way to get it through customs.
Like the Berlin airlift?
UK users can’t sneak into USA Amazon’s downloadable episodes, no surprises there. Maybe smuggle in bootleg recordings in a cake?Though that would probably take a long time to clear customs too.
When it finally comes, though, I’m cancelling all engagements for a week.
hahahaha You’ll have to keep us posted on when that happens.
Yes, exactly like the Berlin airlift.
Customs official: “What do you all think you’re doing?”
“I think I’m sending someone a Totes Important package, that’s what I think I’m doing.”
“Medicine? Intel?”
“Supernatural, Season 9.”
“Oh. Well, in THAT case, breeze right on through …”
Ha! I so wish this could actually happen.
The Winchester brothers could swing it.
I love in French Mistake when rumor gets out that they are smuggling body parts through customs.
Do you have a private jet?
hahahahahhaa
Helena – remind me: am I responsible for getting you into Supernatural?
Look at what has happened in 3 months. We are now commiserating on how to smuggle Season 9 into England and I am so happy. THIS is what my blog is ALL ABOUT.
//Helena – remind me: am I responsible for getting you into Supernatural?//
Well, only in the sense that Dean is responsible for Jo’s death.
Oh okay, so I can’t take credit for it as the Mastermind, is what you’re saying.
//Oh okay, so I can’t take credit for it as the Mastermind, is what you’re saying//
Yeah, I’ll go with you being the Mastermind – do you want a side order of ‘evil’ with that?
I’ll definitely take a side of Evil. As long as I can down it with a shot of whiskey. I wish I still drank. Bummer. But I can pretend.
//As long as I can down it with a shot of whiskey. I wish I still drank. //
Rats, where’s a handsome demon to snog when you need to seal a deal.
I mean, my life decisions are my own, dammit!
No, sorry Sheila, you are totally guilty on this one. Grr!
hahahaha
Yes, you set your own boundaries! Your life is your own! You’re not freakin’ Dean Winchester!
Anyway, back to how I can get my hands on a private jet …
Ooops, meant Sheila. Sorry, Jessie.
Aagh, the wait for series 9 is awful.
Frankly, I’m angry about it on your behalf. Can we come up with a work-around? No, right?
//Frankly, I’m angry about it on your behalf. //
;-)
Well, I guess mortification is good for the soul, and as soon as it becomes available in the States – hopefully before it does it the UK – I’ll buy it.
Helena……you have to know there are ways……
Seriously, Jessie – that sounds tantalising. (Do I have to sell my soul the process, because, you know, I would consider it …)
Perhaps Sheila would prefer if I email you rather than get it all over her blog? She can probably link us up.
I’ll place myself at Sheila’s mercy on this one.
Yeah, I live in Sweden and can’t possibly wait to catch it on tv or DVD, and we’re only behind a few weeks :)
Loved the recap as usual, but I don’t really agree with you on this last episode Sheila. I feel like they’re really holding back on moving the story along, perhaps because they know they’ll still be on for at least another season. Of course it’s thrilling to hear the talk that they might keep going for much longer than that but that shouldn’t keep them from bringing their A-game. And what’s with this repetitive dailogue between Dean and Crowley? Sorry don’t mean to be all negative, and JA and Mark Shepperd don’t care what dialogue they have, they’re still gonna act the crap out of it. But I do love the masculinity discussion that Dean is so super conflicted about. That’s what this show is about isn’t it? It’s conflicted about everything. What it means to be a man, what’s right and wrong, how far you can go to do the “right” thing, lying, what to live for and what to die for. Or simply living or dying. Of course consent and to what extent you should let peolple make their own decisions.
I loved the proud look on Crowleys face when Dean walked away after doing what Crowley had hoped he would! It looked like affection even. Like he was really happy that Dean would save him.
Thank you for really sorting out this “misogynist”-bullshit. It’s such a huge misconception! I mean it’s had just so few of those moments if you want to compare it to other shows. The characters may not be politically correct but like you say that’s not the same as true misogyni. And the characters that do have misogynistic ideas are not having their ideas endorsed. The opposite in fact.
A few of my favorite episodes:
Free to be you and me
Dark side of the moon
Metamorphosis
Sex and violence
Houses of the holy
The end
Faith
Everybody loves a clown
Asylum
Live free or twihard
Can’t handle the truth
Tall tales
Bloodlust
Born under a bad sign
Heart
A very Supernatural christmas
Mystery spot
On the head of a pin
My bloody valentine
Southern comfort
Clap your hands if you believe
Everybody hates Hitler
Sorry there are just too many! Worst ones if we’re gonna mention those?
Bitten (so bad!)
Defending your life (sorry! I just thought that was horrible!)
Freaks and geeks (I found those teenagers incredibly annoying!)
Thanks again Sheila, your stuff is great!
Thanks, Max!! I thought this past episode was very A-game – more so than the one with Castiel killing Bartholomew and all the angel shenanigans (Yawn) – and the ghost-facers episode. But then again, this episode was all about my own personal pet obsession – the masculinity conversation (outside of sexuality) – and what that MEANS for these two guys.
I liked the angels better in Season 4, 5, 6 – Balthazar! Uriel! Gabriel! Now THOSE were some compelling villains/protagonists. Not crazy about what’s happening now – I don’t care about it. I know it has some meaning, and I know they’re trying to give Castiel stuff to do – but Castiel is better when he’s sidekick-ing the brothers, not off on his own (in my opinion – I know there are many fans who would vehemently disagree).
// What it means to be a man, what’s right and wrong, how far you can go to do the “right” thing, lying, what to live for and what to die for. Or simply living or dying. Of course consent and to what extent you should let peolple make their own decisions. //
Yes!! That was all there.
I adore Mark Sheppard.
I was listening to the commentary track for the episode where Bobby dies – and Jim Beaver made a really interesting observation, which had to do with the feel of the show but really had to do with the writing: On Supernatural, you don’t have a bunch of characters who all talk alike. Each person on the show has their own cadence, vocabulary, way of expression – That is not easy to do. I mean, you see feature-length films where everyone talks the same way. Like Juno, the most obvious example. Nobody has a VOICE.
Supernatural: people have VOICES. And it’s not schtick or catch-phrases – it has to do with rhythm, the way they make jokes, all of that stuff that makes us individuals.
I don’t know if there is one writer who “specializes” in Crowley, for example – but Mark Sheppard makes it sound like he wrote his own dialogue. I mean, it’s so CROWLEY. And nobody else talks like him on the show. I love that.
And yes, in re: misogyny.
People have a big problem separating out the presentation of an attitude and an endorsement of said attitude – I wrote about that in my piece on Wolf of Wall Street (also under the Supernatural tab, because Supernatural came up as an example). People can be so puritanical and they want art to be a pamphlet about their pet topic, saying “Here is why this attitude is wrong”.
They want to neuter art. They don’t know that that’s what they are doing, but that is what they are doing. To watch Wolf of Wall Street, and think Martin Scorsese was “endorsing” that lifestyle – (now THERE’S some misogyny – people who call Supernatural misogynistic would spontaneously combust if they saw Wolf of Wall Street) … is insane. And of course Scorsese filmed the debauchery in a compelling and sexy way – because to those who lived that lifestyle, it WAS sexy. It was the best life EVER.
Dean isn’t misogynistic at all. He may be slightly sexist. Not the same thing at all and very common with men who do mostly all-male jobs. Have these people who criticize the show as being “misogynistic” ever hung out with a bunch of Navy SEALs? Or firemen? There’s a certain thing that happens with men who spend all their time with men and do a dangerous job that mostly men do. The same thing happens on the flip-side of gender: Hang out with a bunch of midwives. It’s going to be a pretty female world, with a specific perspective. I don’t see any of that as sexist. I see it as realistic. If you say to a woman, you CAN’T be a fireman – well, then, I am glad there are women out there who set out to change those rules. But they had better be able to lift their own body weight and more – because I don’t want someone who CAN’T do that bursting into my flaming apartment to save my ass.
People can get really really theoretical about this stuff – and I get it – theories are important, and how we categorize people is very important. You can categorize people out of existence. You can have theories about them that erase them from the public sphere. And that must be fought against.
Misogyny is a serious issue. Supernatural just doesn’t qualify as an example of an endorsement of that attitude. It does not hold up at ALL. Especially if you look at Dean’s interactions with women. I honestly don’t know what these people are talking about.
I can’t not mention:
Skin
Bad day at black rock
All hell breaks loose part two
How the hell can they have so many unbelievably great episodes?
I know – all in all, it’s a very consistent show, which is pretty amazing.
any thoughts on “Faith”?
Someone here alreadey mentioned the “Don’t fear the reaper”-sequence. It blew me away the first time I saw it. Actually it blows me away every time i see it. Love anytime they use BÖC but that was so fantastic. I loved the first two “god”-episodes. Faith and Houses of the holy. It speaks to me on such a personal level and really make me identify with these guys, yearning for faith, something to hold on to, “A higher power”. Also that Dean don’t really believe but just really really needs to just as much as Sam. Feel like there’s something missing from your life, but that doesn’t make it true. This is just what I struggle with. Belief is so attractive to me and I’m in love with this whole revival-tent part of your country
They use music in an awesome way in this show. There are like a handful of times that are as great as this Don’t fear the reaper-sequence.
I love the guy playing the reverend he’s unbelieveable. (“I didn’t pick you Dean , the Lord did!” and that little authentic laugh)
Yes it’s true they do all have a uniqe voice. I don’t know if I actually ever thought about it consciously. It’s certainly nothing one should take for granted though. And it was the most interesting part of the episode (Dean Crowley) but i thought the dialogue was cirkular.
Seriously, Dean really did look like a hustler standing outside that bar like that. Also he was at the Milton bar…had he followed Dean to Milton?
Ha, I know – The Milton bar!! They are really pouring on the John Milton stuff, and as a Milton-lover, it is awesome. And yeah, totally, no matter where he goes, Dean will never ever blend in. He just wants to blend in, dammit. He tries. And the things he love – booze, Busty Asian Beauties, Clint Eastwood, burgers – these are sincere loves. Yes, he inherited a love of a certain kind of music from his Dad – but that’s normal. I grew up listening to the Clancy Brothers because my parents listened to them and I still love those guys.
But to be “one of the guys”, or accepted into a larger community … Dean just can’t do it. Even when he was with Lisa – there’s that great scene in the first episode of Season 6 – where he’s out for beers with a co-worker. And the way that guy treats Dean – like he’s a traveling member of a circus show, or possibly a CIA operative – “Come on, man, tell me about your past – I want to know about you …”
Dean is like, ” Uhm … not interesting … I was in pest control … stop LOOKING at me like that.”
It’s one of the many ways the show implicitly just acknowledges the star power of JA … the good looks, and the effect they have on people. And they do so in a way that is ironic rather than adulatory. If the show treated him in an adulatory way – it would be gross. It’s really more just commenting on him, and seeing what it would be like to be a guy like Dean … who looks that way, and gives off a sexual vibe that everybody picks up on (whether they “swing that way” or not) … and how he maneuvers through those land mines.
I am in total agreement with you in terms of your reaction to the “faith” conversation in the show – the desire to believe – the comfort in it – how they both are drawn to it, in different ways. It’s pretty cool that the show introduced it early – in “Faith” and “Houses of the Holy” – it’s heavy stuff, very personal stuff, and also potentially controversial, as any religious topic is. And Supernatural strolled right on in to claim that ground for the series. Love that.
I mean followed Sam to Milton
Yup, got it!!
The case Sam was working was Milton and then you see Dean at Milton bar! That’s pretty fucking dysfunctional stuff. And then Sam gets home and Dean’s pretending he’s been there the whole time!
Sorry, of course you do!
Yeah I haven’t read Paradise lost, just sort of wikipediad the topics, and obviously there ‘s a lot of what’s fundamental issues in Supernatural. Would love to hear you get in to that a little.
Paradise Lost is difficult – but definitely worth it to get through ! One of the main contributions is the character of Lucifer – and how much we get into the story through Lucifer’s eyes. The tragedy of Lucifer. How we “relate” to Lucifer. It is the age-old problem: how do you not make a villain the most interesting guy in the story??
We’re supposed to hate Lucifer – but it is nearly impossible to do so when you read Paradise Lost. Milton obviously knew that.
It’s ferocious and beautiful. I miss Lucifer in the show – Mark Pellegrino is a hell of an actor. Sexy as hell, too. :)
Also I’m from the country that invented the Blechdel test. We’re all about neutering art here. I fucking hate it.
While I am all for diversity in art (especially when it comes to casting – casting directors need to be open to more diverse choices – it just makes shows so much better) – I am not for having a “checklist” attitude about art. It goes against everything I believe in. Some of my favorite movies of all time would not pass that test. Nor should they.
I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater – you watch the American films of the 1930s (my favorites) and if you were an idiot, you would think there no black people in America who did anything during that decade besides tap dance and wear porter’s uniforms on trains. Obviously, America needed to grow the fuck up, and so did the artists – and that has happened over time. But those aren’t “bad films” – on the contrary – they’re great films. Of a certain era.
I don’t think these are bad movies because they don’t line up with modern attitudes. Bah.
We’ve come a long way. Thank goodness. But the current way of judging art in terms of approving of the attitudes expressed in said art … Very dangerous. Do I “approve” of Macbeth? No. Is he a great character? Yes.
Is Travis Bickle a fucking freak? Yes. Do I want to watch him onscreen? Yes.
Is Wolf of Wall Street a bad film because everyone in it is an assclown and a misogynistic hateful person? NO. It’s a very good film and a lot of fun.
Everyone has different triggers, that is true. Some people have triggers that mean they can’t watch violent films, or films with rape in it, etc. I totally respect that. But to ask art to respect every single individual’s individual triggers ….
I mean, just stop. Manage your own triggers. Avoid stuff that is trigger-y for you. Stop asking art to be comfortable.
I certainly don’t want to be “reduced” – as a woman – to my “value” as a sex object, and I don’t like films that reflect that attitude in a way that seems unconscious. Scorsese’s films are all about testosterone and how men operate in that bell jar – his is a very conscious “reduction” of women – to how they are seen by men who operate in that type of environment.
But if it’s used in a sneering toxic way (I see that in some of Judd Apatow’s stuff) … then I’m not interested.
As always, art is about the grey areas of life. The best art is anyway.
I’ll definitely try and give it a read, i’m usually all over biblically themed stuff, especiially involving Luficer.
It’s definitely tough-going. I remember haaaaating it in high school. I wonder if there’s a good “book on tape” of it – with some awesome actor like Patrick Stewart reading it or something …
But it’s quite a glorious work, once you absorb it!
I’ve just bought two separate translations of Dante’s Inferno … do I need to see a doctor?
and by the way, this.
// do I need to see a doctor? //
As long as that doctor isn’t …. in Chechnya … I think you’re safe.
and BBC Radio – Nice!!!!
Yep. Don’t know if you can catch it in the States on Iplayer, but John Hurt is always worth listening too – honeyed gravel.
He does have such an awesome voice.
Totally in agreement on Judd Apatow. It’s not that that kind of reduction makes me all furious and put on my flaming feminist locks (there’s a time for that) but rather it’s dull. He’s not really reducing women, he’s reducing himself, and men. What small petty lives they his characters most lead and how dreadfylly boring doesn’t it make his art?
Yes, the triggers.. sigh. Too paraphrase Bobby Singer “Are you under the impression that art is suppossed to make you feel good? Bake you an apple pie maybe?”
Goes without saying but some of the most obvious films where misogyny is presented are the ones that really does the greatest jobs of wanting us to reject such ideas.
// Goes without saying but some of the most obvious films where misogyny is presented are the ones that really does the greatest jobs of wanting us to reject such ideas. //
Amen. Present the evil of the world – even present it in a way that it looks attractive – because that’s how it seems to those who live in those ideas … it’s a compelling argument AGAINST those ideas. It’s tough stuff, yes, but that’s the art I really respond to.
I think one of the things you mention about Apatow is my real beef with his stuff – his reduction of men to doofus man-boys who all want to just hang out with the bros and actually … treat women like no-fun nags.
I suppose there are people who live in that world. Apatow clearly does. But it’s not the ONLY world. My boyfriends have never been like that. They actually liked hanging out with me. They didn’t sneer at me while they were coming on to me. They were dude-bros, in many ways – I have a hankering for a guy who is obsessed with his fantasy baseball league, it’s a type, and I cop to it – I love sports myself … but they liked women, and didn’t try to exclude them. Why would you exclude something you LIKED?
Apatow is way too dominant right now – his influence is far too wide-spread.
But it’s a phase. Art goes through phases.
I mean, I watch The Thin Man movies, made in the 1930s, and Myrna Loy was totally equal to her husband – and also, they just LOVED each other. It was all witty barbs and sexual tension and FUN. Men and women actually can have FUN together too, Mr. Apatow. Just because YOU can’t doesn’t mean it’s the same for everyone.
Hmm, spelling seems to indicate i’m getting tired.
Ha – what time is it there?? It’s 8 a.m. here!
Ah, the Internet – chatting with folks from other countries about Supernatural. Love it.
Yeah it’s 14:10 am actually. I just didn’t get any sleep last night.
Also one of the reasons why I can relate to Supernatural, their troubles with sleeping. And the boozing. Also why I can relate to so much you say about the show, we seem to relate to some of the same stuff. Didn’t one of your comments also indicate you had some trouble with that too (drinking). Sometimes this show though, really makes me want to reach for the bottle. Like trying to watch a Bogart Film Noir without having the need to light up a cigarette :)
Not being able to drink is because of my mental health diagnosis- I was never a big drinker and I miss the social aspect of it. But have needed to stay away from depressants for now.
And you are not kidding with smoking. I’m an ex-smoker (my only real vice) and I have to white knuckle some of those noirs they make me want to light up so bad!!!
That whole “escape from myself” aspect of Deans drinking is so compelling to me. And how constant it got in season 7! It was just so obvious what was going on!
This last episode is probably the worst we’we ever seen it, sneaking around with the bottle so Sam won’t know. This is seriously addict behaviour. And there’s the addiction of the Blade and Mark, the total need for Dean to have his will taken from him like with Magnus, to sumbit, not to have to face the consequences, or at least not give a shit about them. That relief of not giving a shit.
pm is obviously what i meant. I think
I remember that talk that implied mental helth issue/trauma related stuff. and yeah just to say i know where that coming from too. Maybe truly damaged individuals have an easier time relating to the show in general.
That was probably way too personal. gonna get some rest.
It’s okay. I write personally. And Supernatural is about prolonged trauma and it’s aftermath. Love it.
Hi! This is my first comment here so I might be a little all-over-the-place! I’ve just finished reading all of your Supernatural posts, and the comments. I love everything so much! I have so many thoughts and responses built up…
I’ve been watching Supernatural since the pilot first aired. I can actually pin-point the exact moment I feel in love with the show: “Tall Tales” – lady in red. I think I nearly died laughing. I love the myths, the horror, the amazing sibling dynamic, but I keep coming back for the humour.
//I wonder if the fact that he didn’t remember a childhood at all has actually HELPED him in a way. Like, he was BORN tough in a way that Dean wasn’t – because he had those 4 years in Eden with his parents, and so nothing has ever felt “right” since. But Sam adapts, he’s freakin’ tough. //
They say in early childhood development that the first 5 years of life are crucial. The fact that Dean experienced such an emotional trauma in that age bracket was HUGELY damaging. In a way that it could never be for Sam.
Plus, I’ve always thought that Dean was a big factor in Sam’s adaptability, as well as Sam’s relative emotional health…for lack of a better word. Dean really stepped into their mother’s role, after her death. We see it throughout the series, especially in the childhood flashbacks. Dean cooked, cleaned, protected and offered emotional support to both Sam and John. And he made sure that Sam got to experience some fun (the fireworks, the attempted Christmas, etc.). Dean wasn’t just an older brother, he was a parent, and he isn’t able to let that go. Sam may have hated his childhood—and it did suck—but he had a better one than Dean. So he is able to see past some things that Dean can’t.
Oh my God, “Lady in Red”. Dying!!
May, thank you for reading all of my SPN stuff – I really appreciate it! More to come. It’s been so much fun.
I’m with you: While I loved the emotional aspects of the show, and also the horror elements, the hook for me was the humor. I laugh out loud regularly watching it. Like, ROARING. And if you can do that? You have my eternal love.
And good point about Dean parenting Sam. Dean got Dad at full-throttle, he put himself between Dad and Sam – which older siblings often do in abusive situations. So Sam actually got a little soft care taking during those childhood years – because Dean actually wanted to protect Sam, and give him a Christmas, and let him be a kid. Meanwhile, Dean was, what, 10 years old?
This goes back to the “rigid” thing I keep mentioning – and how rigidity can be interpreted different ways, depending on the angle of the prism.
And my favorite analogy: An oak tree snaps in hurricane winds BECAUSE it is so rigid. While a willow tree could survive a nuclear blast because of its give. In other contexts, the oak tree is the strongest tree around: indestructible, huge, stalwart, the King of the Walk in the forest. I come from a state that goes through hurricanes and there is nothing more hair-raising than sitting in your dark house, listening to oak trees cracking all around you.
Dean is an oak tree. Sam is a willow tree.
Both strong, and both weak – in different ways, in different weather.
and thank you again for commenting – I look forward to hearing from you again!
//And my favorite analogy: An oak tree snaps in hurricane winds BECAUSE it is so rigid.//
I love the tree analogy.
Back in 87 in the UK there was a massive storm. Apart from the sad loss of 19 people, the most visible and devasting effect was the downing of an estimated 15 million trees. The landscape was suddenly strewn with upturned oaks, ashes, beeches, hundreds of years old, many ancient and historic specimens. People went into mourning for the trees they loved.
The usual tactic then was to completely clear away the dead trees, tidy up and replant. But gradually we began to learn this was not Nature’s way. It was realised that a downed tree is not necessarily a dead tree and that even with its roots in the air it could regenerate itself. A destroyed crown could and would regrow, if left alone. It wouldn’t be beautiful as before, but it would survive. Trees actually could benefit from being lifted up – compacted soil would loosen up and bring in much needed oxygen to damaged roots.
So there’s that ;-)
15 million trees? Holy mackerel. Devastating.
But I love where you go with the imagery. Yup – it really is part of the circle of things. I so hate change. An oak tree fell in my parents’ back yard in 1985 and I honestly still haven’t gotten over it. I mean, it’s not even funny. I loved that tree, and still miss it.
People become friends with trees, that’s for sure. They love them. I think, after that storm, if the landscape had been strewn with dead elephants instead, people would not have been more upset.
This is how one writer describes how the trees fell.
‘… in the mounting din of the storm I heard none of the crashing sounds that go with the felling of timber. It was not until later I realised that the trees, held to the last by their root systems, toppled only gradually, and because they were forced down so slowly by their crowns, which were entangled with each other, did not shatter but remained virtually undamaged. In this way entire tracts of woodland were pressed down flat as if they had been cornfields … The ancient trees on either side of the path were lying as if in a swoon, and beneath the huge oaks, ash and plane trees beeches and limes lay the torn and mangled shrubs that had grown in their shade … ‘
(From The Rings of Saturn, by WG Sebald, my go to book for melancholic quotes, and where I discovered Sir Thomas Browne.)
I love that circle of blasted trees in the opener of Season 4. Such a powerful image.
What an extraordinary passage, Helena!!
Thank YOU for writing it! I’ve been watching the show for so long (holy crap it’s been 9 years!) that my enjoyment was starting to wane. But your insights really rekindle my love of the show! They are also relief. For the most part I’ve avoided SPN fandom. My brief foray into it only served to reinforce my unease with sections of the fandom (and fan culture in general). So to find a discussion of SPN as ART has been a real pleasure.
I laugh much harder watching Supernatural than watching most comedies. Perhaps because, even after so long, the humour is often unexpected.
I love the tree analogy!
// For the most part I’ve avoided SPN fandom. My brief foray into it only served to reinforce my unease with sections of the fandom (and fan culture in general). So to find a discussion of SPN as ART has been a real pleasure. //
I am so happy to hear that!!
I also was a bit … alarmed … by the fandom when I first started looking around for other discussions. Maybe most of them are very young. I don’t know. I’m Generation X, dammit, Sam and Dean’s generation, basically – so I’m coming at it from my own perspective.
It’s been wonderful to start writing about it – and have these amazing people coming out of the woodworks to discuss it seriously. Fun as hell!!
and yes, the humor. I cherish it for its humor. I get so excited when the show gets totally silly.
“What does the robot look like?”
“It’s as big as a building with laser eyes.”
“Well, then at least I’ll see it coming.”
//I also was a bit … alarmed … by the fandom when I first started looking around for other discussions. Maybe most of them are very young. I don’t know. I’m Generation X, dammit, Sam and Dean’s generation, basically – so I’m coming at it from my own perspective. //
Age-wise, I’m right between Sam and Dean, which is certainly another one of SPN’s draws for me. While I encountered quite a few younger people (mostly women) in the fandom, there were many people my age and older (again, mostly women). And they were just as…intense.
I don’t want to derail the discussion into a dissection of fan culture, but I do think many of your insights help understand SPN’s rabid fan base. As you’ve mentioned, the show wants us to worry about Dean (and Sam) and perhaps some fans take that emotional investment to a bit of an extreme.
I also think that SPN remains a “cult” show largely because it is often viewed as a show for women. Women make up the vocal part of the fan base and so it runs the risk of getting lumped in with things like Twilight and boy-bands—as sort of attitude that it is shallow fluff with hot boys (which is another topic I could rant about for hours, so I’ll just stop here).
Personally, I have encountered that attitude more than once. Mostly from straight men, who enjoy genre shows, but won’t even consider watching SPN. I find it incredibly frustrating and fascinating at the same time.
May – interesting observations!!
I, too, wanted to avoid sort of critiquing fan culture because, duh, I’m a part of it – but I encounter a lot of this kind of thing in my work as a film critic – only it’s in a much more extreme form here. Emotional investment is KEY and is the #1 reason this genre show with a small following is going into its 10th year. But the characters NEED to grow/change/develop – they need to go through dark patches – this is what is known as Drama. Drama does not run on resolution, it runs on conflict.
Now I’m late to the series so I do not know what the chatter has been all along in real time.
For example: I ADORED soul-less Sam. I know many people dislike it, and found it unbearable. I get it. I mean, it was terrible, and I was dying for him to get back to normal – but I thought it was such a fascinating and tense and almost philosophical situation to have set up – and they really mined the depths of it (even getting into the humor of it in the Fairy episode – one of my favorites). I love that whole Arc almost more than any other Arc – it was just so revealing of character, and also an in-depth study on what exactly it means to be human, what a soul means, what someone’s essence means. I get the sense that some fans hated soul-less Sam because they missed the old Sam – and of course, we are meant to miss the old Sam – but that’s the conflict, that’s the drama – it was fantastic BECAUSE of that.
And when Sam did get his soul back – the catharsis in that hug between the brothers was HUGE. They really made us WAIT for that catharsis – and I know a little something about classic Drama. Catharsis shouldn’t come easy, and it shouldn’t come in the course of one episode – Supernatural makes you wait. That was a great example of the patience of the show.
Same thing with “bad Dean” now. I mean, I am practically swooning with pleasure the deeper we go into “bad Dean” because it feels like that is where the character has WANTED to go – and NEEDS to go – and it also is DIFFERENT – it’s not just “Dean worrying about Sam” and “Dean lying to Sam” – which has been done. This – this – is NEW. It also gives JA something real meaty to chew on, and I’m thrilled about it. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, watching some of the shit he is doing now, the misery, the look 6 feet behind his eyes, the loneliness … it’s a bold and consistent thru-line all through Season 9. I get it, we love Dean, we want him to be happy – but he is facing what he needs to face right now – and it is going to get worse before it gets better – and I say bring it on!
I do understand that people love this character, and I do too. But this is really WHY I am loving what the hell is going on with him in Season 9. Because I was getting sick of him saving Sam and worrying about Sam – it was getting monotonous. We seem to be getting close to the heart of the matter now – “you don’t want to be alone” – and the seeds of that go all the way back to the pilot.
It’s an awesome arc!
I think the fireworks (Bob Dylan) in Dark side of the moon is where i actually fell in love with the show May. And the Simple Man (Lynyrd Skynyrd) sequence in Free to me you and me. Those two episodes are the first I remember seeing and I still think they’re my favorite ones. Although it’s hard to really choose.
I really miss the music. my favorite scenes are the ones where they use great music. Like Heaven and hell. Deans sex scene with Bad Company’s Ready for love. So fucking great!
Max – I miss the music too.
And God, yes, when Bob Dylan came in? Heart freakin’ CRACK.
yeah and in Houses of the holy again, I saw that after DSOTM, just as great!
I also miss the music. The “Renegade” sequence in “Nightshifter” was, to quote Dean, “awesome.”
I think I wept actually, with the fireworks. Right then and there I saw everything that makes JA a genius, that was probably my in to the show.
I think I got rather teary at the fireworks scene, as well. That scene was heartbreaking. One of Dean’s happiest memories is of making his baby brother happy. His other happy memory is of comforting his mother. Dean is only happy when the people he loves are happy. It is so selfless and terrible.
“selfless and terrible”
Beautiful. That about sums it up!
Those chickens are coming home to roost in Season 9. They really seem to be heading towards actually DEALING with that dynamic. Fingers crossed.
I hope so! I so want the show to end on a hopeful note.
Oh yes, the End Game (whatever it may be) has to be hopeful. It won’t be despairing. I just hope it feels RIGHT.
You know how some series end and it’s just so perfect and satisfying? Even if there’s a bittersweetness at having to let it go? That’s what I hope happens here.
I just want it to feel right, whatever way they choose to go.
I’ve yet to watch an episode but I really enjoy these recaps and your analysis. Kind of bummed to hear that the Netflix episodes lack the original music.
Dan – actually most of the music is intact on Netflix! There are a couple of exceptions, but for the most part – it’s all there – Bob Seger, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ozzy … it’s awesome.
I’m psyched you’re enjoying these without having seen an episode – that’s a huge compliment!!
“Now I’m late to the series so I do not know what the chatter has been all along in real time.”
I can only speak from personal experience here, but I think some of the arcs benefit from condensed viewing. Objectively I find many of the character arcs realistic—Sam and Dean live traumatic lives, have received very little emotional support, so of course they continually fall into old/unhealthy patterns of behaviour, etc—but MY GOD sometimes it feels like it has been going on forever! It can feel repetitive (“So, what is wrong with Sam this year?”). I know a few long-term viewers who are experiencing SPN burnout, only continuing to watch because they have been watching for so long (as my brother put it “I’m not going to stop now! But I just want it to be done.”).
I imagine watching all 9 seasons in a short period of time lessens the knee-jerk “this again?” reaction many long-term viewers feel and allows for a greater appreciation of the character arcs and explorations.
It’s why I’m so excited to see how the current arc turns out. Finally some progress!
P.S. Hopefully this will be the last of Old Lady May’s “Why, I’ve been watching this program so long…” comments. But the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt. Which was the style at the time.
// I think some of the arcs benefit from condensed viewing. //
Really really good point – I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, when it’s stretched out, it can feel like: “THIS issue again???”
Onion on your belt – ha!!!
I just re-watched Faith, and then re-read your recap and the comments, and wanted to add a couple things here.
//Charlie’s comment about the “Men of Letters” being a sexist name – takes him aback for a second – you can see him blink with surprise – he hadn’t even THOUGHT of that – because he’s a man, and men in general don’t notice that stuff.//
I’m taking a class on working with diverse populations right now, and one of the major discussions is the concept of privilege – white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, etc. So I love the point that you make here. People with privilege don’t often recognize the systemic forms of oppression that they benefit from until it’s pointed out to them, as Charlie points it out to Dean in this scene. And, in fact, it shows how enlightened Dean actually is – because the unenlightened, when it is made clear to them that they have privilege at the expense of others, often react defensively (see the #notallmen response to the #yesallwomen movement). Dean is not defensive. He is surprised, and then he adjusts his thinking. She has a point, and he’s open to it.
//Maybe people are reacting to a man who loves strippers, porn, and sex – and isn’t embarrassed about it.//
Maybe this is an audience reaction (and maybe even on a subconscious level) to the ways that the show has “feminized” Dean? (“Don’t objectify me.”) Women are supposed to be sex objects, but not actually seek out or enjoy sex (or, at least, not too much). I remember reading something once about how Anya is the only female character on Buffy who is not punished for being vocal about enjoying sex and seeking it out. She has a very Dean-like attitude about it. But, then, Anya also has many characteristics that are more traditionally masculine – she is often painfully blunt, and she is ambitious and money-driven. So maybe, because Dean has all these more stereotypically feminine characteristics, the audience is on some level punishing Dean for having a healthy approach to sex, because he’s supposed to be a sex object, not an equal participant. (I’m not sure if I’m actually expressing what I mean very well here, but I hope I’m getting my point across.)
Natalie –
Thanks! Interesting!!
I think your last paragraph is fascinating. There’s a lot to discuss. I do think that some viewers have an innate hostility towards men who do “men things” and want to break it down and describe it as trauma/overcompensation/bad behavior – when, I don’t know, the guys I date have liked porn and sex and strippers (on occasion) and still managed to be nice to me. I see no problem. There’s a wish for Dean to be more politically correct – but … but … at least in many respects, I see him as fine the way he is. I mean, the man is a NIGHTMARE, but there’s nothing wrong with his attitudes – he’s a humanist, he has great morals and values, he has empathy. His problems are NOT because he is “politically incorrect” (a phrase I don’t care much for anyway) – his problems are because he’s a traumatized alcoholic MESS-BALL who cannot differentiate between himself and his brother. I’ve said before that those who see Dean as a misogynist need to get out more. Misogyny is a real problem – and the “yes all women” and “yes all men” thing shows that loud and clear. Dean does not qualify – and I don’t like really important words like “misogyny” boiled down into areas where they don’t apply. It lessens the impact of the word.
So Dean sleeping around is then interpreted as him “using” women – but that’s not at ALL what we actually SEE. Not ONCE. He’s appreciative. He takes “No” for an answer when someone says “No”. He knows what that is like from his own life, he knows what it’s like to be pushed and assaulted and poked and prodded and drooled over – the man has probably been Roofied a couple of times – and so he picks girls who are up for it. In his own promiscuous way, he chooses wisely. He never ever tries to push a girl who doesn’t want to. He would never do that. He never ever JUDGES a woman for sleeping with him, and he also doesn’t judge a woman for turning him down. “Can’t fault a guy for trying …” is his attitude.
And yeah, I think Dean’s very healthy (to my standard, anyway) appreciation of sex – and the way he prioritizes it because he knows he needs it – is confronting to some viewers who see it through their own filter. (Nothing wrong with having different filters! Just asserting my own here!)
Someone else said in one of the comments section somewhere – that people who balk at that side of Dean probably don’t know any actual real Alpha Male types. They really aren’t as horrifying as they’re made out to be. I think we have more to fear from Angry Resentful Nerds than Alpha Males, at this point.
But I like your thoughts in re: Buffy, and the stereotypically-feminine sexuality that Dean’s got going on. Seen through that filter, and imagining if Dean Winchester were actually a woman – then you can almost see that the reaction to his womanizing, the almost judgey-Victorian reaction in some circles, is quite sexist in its own way.
Oh – so you just want him to be an Object, then. Because then you feel comfortable. You don’t want him to USE his powers as an Object then? You ONLY want to see him as a victim, as opposed to a healthy active participant?
Huh. All righty then.
Thanks for that!! Never get sick of the Dean-gender conversation.
// I think we have more to fear from Angry Resentful Nerds than Alpha Males, at this point. //
Truer words have never been spoken (written)!
I never get sick of the Dean-gender convo, either. Dean fills the feminine role on SPN. I think that is partly why I have real issues with objectifying him. I mean, I try to not objectify anyone (because it sucks when it is done to women and I’m not going to turn around and do it to men), but it seems that much worse when done to Dean. It makes me uncomfortable.
Right – it’s the whole “put on your shirt, you look too vulnerable” thing that happens with him. It’s fascinating to have that go on with a gorgeous hot guy. It just doesn’t happen often – either because the role doesn’t call for it, OR the actor just doesn’t “use” himself in that way. Any hot guy can take his shirt off – and 99% of them we don’t feel worried about – but with Dean, we do. JA is totally creating that – it’s his essence, I don’t know, it’s the vulnerability and sexuality he brings to the role. It’s not on the page, not really, it’s not written into the role – but it’s there. It’s what makes it so endlessly interesting.
I have a friend – a big jock-y straight guy friend (an actor) – who has said he feels uncomfortable watching some of Marilyn Monroe’s movies – particularly 7 Year Itch (with the skirt flying up) – because he feels so protective of her, even as she is shimmying across the screen in a bathing suit or whatever. We’ve had many interesting conversations about this. MM wasn’t a sultry knowing sex bomb like Ava Gardner, a dame who could take care of herself and “owned” her sexuality – MM always had an innocence about her, a wide-eyed naive thing – and I think my friend is really picking up on the real power of her appeal. Men loved her, of course, and loved her body – but there was also that “oooh, Jeez, I’m scared for her” thing going on as well – which you don’t often get with female sex symbols. It was a very interesting combination – and she was totally in charge of that. That persona was her creation.
So when my friend sees her in those clearly sexualized moments – like her skirt flying up – he knows that the image is SUPPOSED to get him all hot and bothered, but instead he gets uncomfortable. He wants to pull her skirt down for her, and take her out for coffee. Not in a judgmental way – but in a “Honey, your undies are showing. I’m scared for you!” kind of way.
I’m not explaining it right, I think. But boy, when fans start to feel protective of your character … worried for your character – that’s when you know you’ve hit the mother lode.
Many people have tried to imitate MM’s particular brand of sexuality and all have failed.
JA is doing something equally as delicate and organic with Dean W. – and it’s all him. Think of how he is written in the pilot. He is NOT written that way, he was not conceived that way. He was conceived as a smart-ass Han Solo. But look at what has happened in the meantime. Pretty awesome.
I, for one, glory in MM’s beauty and sexiness — and am glad how fully she shared it with us. But I also understand my friend’s reaction and think it’s really interesting. Especially coming from a guy.
//I think we have more to fear from Angry Resentful Nerds than Alpha Males, at this point.//
Absolutely. The portions of the Santa Barbara shooter’s manifesto that I read were a chilling example of this. True misogyny comes from a place of insecurity and a sense of entitlement. I can’t think of anyone – real or fictional – who could possibly feel LESS entitled than Dean, and while he definitely has his insecurities, women ain’t one of ’em. Again, it comes down to privilege. Misogynists feel threatened by women, and as a result feel the need to assert their male privilege by trying to dominate and control women. I saw this with every single domestic violence perpetrator I ever worked with. True alpha male types do not have this need, whether they’re fully aware of their level of privilege or not, because they are secure in their sense of self and their masculinity. (And for all his feminine qualities, Dean actually IS pretty secure in his masculinity, I think – it may actually be that security that allows him to express those more feminine qualities.)
//I don’t like really important words like “misogyny” boiled down into areas where they don’t apply. It lessens the impact of the word.//
Agreed!! 100%!
I love the moment in the SPN convention episode when the woman at the bar takes a look at him, takes him in, and says, “You don’t seem afraid of women.”
He seems a bit taken aback by that. But it’s true. Women can SMELL “fear” or “entitlement” on a man.
And yes: he’s NEVER entitled. He doesn’t treat his hookups as “his due”. He pays for sex sometimes – but not all the time. Other times he submits himself to the rigor of the bar scene where he has to make conversation and all that. He has success there too. It’s probably more fun for him that way because he gets a small contact-high from what it means to be “normal”, and chatting up girls, and flirty-flirt.
And then, of course, as we see with Layla – a “hookup” may have entered his mind briefly on first meeting her – because he’s a sexual being and he can’t turn that off – who of us can?? – but he totally throws that out the window when he learns more about her, and he gets involved. He’s not being a dick, and leering at her throughout the episode.
I honestly don’t know what people are talking about when they call him a sexist. Maybe one or two eye-rolls with Jo, when she tries to come along on the hunt? But that’s just him being protective and, sure, RUDE, about this little blonde woman coming along with them and trying to elbow her way into their scene. He underestimates her. Like most people do. But it’s not like he persists in that attitude for episodes on end – he cares about Jo. They’re very alike. He gets that. He realizes he has underestimated her. He gets over himself.
There seems to be a desire to domesticate Dean in some of the fans. A discomfort, as we’ve discussed, with a man who has such a healthy appreciation of sex and isn’t embarrassed about it. I am glad the show has resisted. The fanfic can be all about Dean making salads and drinking lattes – that’s what fanfic is for – but the show has kept the integrity of his character. And so when he does devote himself to “nesting” …. I mean, it’s so PERFECT. It’s so EXACTLY what he would do – and yet it still feels like a beautiful surprise. How much he revels in domesticity – in a way he was “better” at it than Sam was: when Dean was with Lisa, he was a mess – but he jumped into it with both feet. And I honestly think if Sam hadn’t returned, Dean would still be with them. He’s a commitment guy. If he says he’s gonna do something (be with Lisa and Ben), he does it. Whereas Sam …. I may be somewhat in the minority in really liking the whole Amelia arc – even with its soap opera tendencies – I liked that she was a total WRECK. Dean would never have been able to tolerate being with such a wreck. Lisa was stable. He gravitated towards that. But with Sam in that mirror-situation – you sensed he always had one foot out the door. He was clinging to the life he found with her – desperately. I didn’t get that sense from Dean with Lisa. There was other stuff going on – gratitude that she took him in, contentment in being able to be a father to someone, and an acceptance of his role there.
It’s still fascinating to me – those two relationships, Dean/Lisa and Sam/Amelia. I totally get why the relationships didn’t work ultimately – but as story lines they were great shadings for both characters.
A couple of thoughts which no one will read, probably.
1. On the misogyny–it’s not overt and deliberate on Dean’s part, but he’s absorbed cultural notions of gender that can be harmful in more ways than one. He heard LaGrange’s narrative, in which he said that he was in a coma when the first miracle occurred. Right then the boys should have looked elsewhere–especially when Sue Ann says “and this is just the beginning” in that same scene. SHE’s ambitious, and SHE’s the one who was “praying” when LaGrange came back. But Dean overlooks her, because middle aged women are so harmless, right? Not actively, of course, but he has the cultural blind spot that many people have without knowing it.
2. I agree that the portrait of LaGrange was sympathetic, but why oh why did they give him the cliched Southern accent when he lives in Nebraska? That put my back up a little at first.
I’m slowly reading your reviews — because I have the attention span of a gnat — but I jumped here because this is one of my favorite episodes, and you hit every point why. Gorgeous job. Gonna hop around to some of my other faves…
I’ve been watching a few scattered episodes of SPN and Faith was the first one where I thought, ‘damn this was really good’. I love reading your reviews of the episodes I liked, I love the seriousness and thoroughness with which you treat the subject matter and you make me value aspects of production and acting that I took for granted. I don’t agree with all of your interpretations but it often intrigues me and opens up new food for thought or perspectives on the text. Also, I appreciate your humor.
To me, Faith is particularly interesting because of how deep it delves into the thing that I love about SPN, the Americana. The entire setting with a charismatic healer in a tent in the middle of nowhere is impossibly exotic to me little European, and I loved how real and rough the entire setting felt. Everyone stomping through the mud, trying not to fall flat in their face, you can almost feel the sticky air of the crowded tent that smells of wet coats. Love how you analyze how the production manages to create this dense, rich and real atmosphere.
It’s really fun discovering this show, watching a 40min episode then reading a 40 minute essay dissecting it. Makes me want to watch with more focus and anticipate what you’ll pick out.
Anywho, thx and cheers
Jade – thank you so much for taking the time to comment!! I love to hear from people – and love to hear observations and also responses to mine. I get so sucked into the filmmaking choices (in the early seasons) – it was one of my “hooks”.
This is such a good Americana episode. The mud, the tent, the weird house in the field – the REAL faces of the people in that tent – the WAY it’s filmed – in a kind of documentary way – I so agree: you really feel like you are in that tent. It’s the best of the show back in the day – how it could immerse you into a whole different atmosphere every episode. quite amazing.
again, thanks for your comment!