Directed by Phil Sgriccia
Written by Sera Gamble & Raelle Tucker
Dean got laid last week. Good times were had by all, involving unembarrassed cuddling in bed all while revealing a sculpted chest like hard-pewter-breast-plates. Warm fuzzies were experienced as well as blatant PantsFeelings. All of this was then completely ignored forevermore. We are, apparently, meant to forget it ever happened.
Regardless, it’s time to get back into the Season-Wide arc, which has to do with the Thing That Killed Mom. We’ve stepped out of that arc for a couple of episodes now. Dean almost died in “Faith.” Sam is having nightmares that come true. In “Scarecrow,” the audience learned that the whole demon-thing is far more serious and personal than we might have originally understood, and Dean and Sam don’t know any of that yet. Since “Scarecrow,” the boys have seemed even more vulnerable, since we know something they don’t. And stupid Dad is still M.I.A.
Except for two small digressions (“Hell House” and “Provenance” – although there may be some details there I’m not remembering), all of the episodes from now on are strictly Season-Arcs. Layers of complexity and mystery are added, piece by piece, the light slowly creaking in through the slats … as the brothers realize what they are up against, and they realize that somehow Sam is personally targeted. The fact that Meg “appeared” on that misty country road in “Scarecrow,” from out of nowhere, begins to seem more and more ominous. But still, at this point, we don’t know anything. We just have a bad bad feeling.
“Nightmare” is when the series starts explaining itself. It is a giant piece of what will be an enormous puzzle.
Directed by Phil Sgriccia, who is an enormous part of Supernatural to this day, as executive producer, the episode has the look of Supernatural as established in the pilot: it is dark as hell. The shadows are so thick that even light from a table lamp can’t penetrate the corners. Faces shine out from the pitch-blackness behind them. It’s almost painterly, the look. And, of course, there are lots of noir touches, stark shadows, geometric shadows, off-camera light sources making shadows loom huge on the walls.
Written by Sera Gamble & Raelle Tucker, who, so far, also gave us the elegiac “Dead in the Water”, and the eerily powerful “Faith”, “Nightmare” features a performance by a guest star (Brendan Fletcher) that is so wrenching, so real, that it almost tips the episode out of balance. Fletcher almost takes over the whole thing. He is certainly the most riveting thing onscreen in the entire episode, and that’s hard to do with Ackles and Padalecki barreling about in all their hot manly anguish. This is not a criticism, by the way. Max’s pain SHOULD threaten to de-rail everything else. Outside of the “monster of the week” scenario, what we are supposed to see in Max is a dark mirror of what Sam could become. We are also meant to see (as Sam says in one of the final scenes) that, despite their rough upbringing, at least they didn’t end up like Max. Dad did something right. Or, more accurately: Dad had nothing to do with it. The reason they turned out semi-okay (“all things considered”) is because they had one another. Max was an only child, he had no one. Max is extremely important, thematically. He shows us the stakes involved, for Sam, who isn’t even aware yet what exactly is on the table for him, exactly how dark it’s gonna get. But he’s starting to get a sense that he is connected to something much bigger, and Max is his first clue. What he sees in Max is not a pretty picture. The reality of who Max is is the real “nightmare” in the episode, and Brendan Fletcher understood that that was what the “point” of the role was, and he went for it, no holds barred.
I’ve said it before (here, most clearly, but elsewhere as well) and I’ll say it again: Nobody understands Story, and how to fit into a larger Story, like character actors. They are the ones who have to know how to do it, even more than the big handsome stars. Everything depends on them playing their parts. Someone like Brendan Fletcher makes the entire SHOW look good.
If you want to know how to freakin’ OWN a guest spot, watch Brendan Fletcher as the tortured “Max” in “Nightmare”. The performance is so painful that I find it hard to look at, directly. Whatever he needed to do as an actor to enter into the tormented psyche of that irrevocably-damaged young man, he did it. His pain reaches off the screen. It is unbearable to be in the presence of it for more than a moment. Imagine living it. Fletcher has imagined living it, and he presents a person who has lived it. You can imagine another actor in the role, who would have cried on cue, and quivered with anger, and it would all have been appropriate for the role, and not bad at all and nothing to sneeze at. But Fletcher takes it to another level. In his scene with Jared Padalecki, you can almost see Padalecki being confronted with the sheer agony in his fellow actor. You don’t get rehearsal time for an episodic series like this. You do a table-read, MAYBE. You may have a quick blocking rehearsal, on set, but you’re not delving into this stuff in front of everyone else during an in-depth rehearsal process. In many cases, the moment of filming is the first time that Ackles or Padalecki will have even MET their guest star. So Brendan Fletcher showed up with his A-plus game. And you can SEE the power of it land on Padalecki’s face in a series of awesome listening reaction shots.
Ackles and Padalecki are good but they can’t act in a vacuum. They need their guest spots to be awesome. Only then will their own awesomeness be supported. The casting of these small roles is key.
Brendan Fletcher is so good that I would lay money down that his audition was equally as good as the end result. I bet he came into the casting director’s office and gave an opening-night level of a performance. I am betting he was so good that he basically gave the casting directors zero choice in the matter of whether or not to cast him. They would have seen a lot of people for the role. And then Brendan Fletcher came in and read, and nobody would have remembered anybody else who had auditioned.
I’ve seen the episode a bunch of times, and the level of pain he brings to the role is still unnerving.
Teaser
A car pulls into a garage, Bob Seger’s “Two Plus Two” blaring. Bob Seger shows up twice in the soundtrack, because he is a Michigan hero and “Nightmare” takes place in Michigan. It’s fun to look for all of the Michigan details in the props. The mugs, the hats, the motels. You know, if you’re gonna do an American road trip show, you had best have an eye for detail. As the car pulls into the garage, there’s a weird zooming pan-in to the license plate.
Then we basically see a guy attacked and trapped by his own garage: the garage door closes on its own, the car refuses to turn off, all of the car doors are locked and can’t be opened, and the poor sap (although once you realize what an asshole he was in life, it’s hard to feel bad for him) asphyxiates from the carbon monoxide fumes pouring into his car.
The scene then fizzles and blinks into blaring white, and we see Sam sit straight up in bed. He is drenched in sweat. He leaps out of bed, wakes up Dean, and is already racing around the room throwing shit into his bag saying that they need to leave, now.
Dean, meanwhile, like the odalisque that he is, is grumpy and slow to wake up, stretching and creaking and rubbing his eyes with the back of his hands, a waking-up gesture that is so compulsive, so who he is, that it shows up repeatedly, and it makes him look either like he is 6-years-old or, well, like an odalisque.
I went into the odalisque thing before; it’s how I see Dean Winchester when it comes to creature comforts like sleep, sex, and food. And showers. A lollygagging sexually charged pleasure-reveler. Sam is a bad sleeper from the get-go. When the series starts, he is already having prophetic nightmares (although we only learned that recently). The whole “sleep” thing is extremely important, and we can track its development through the series. Dean is pretty steady with it, although there are some bumps along the way, like in Season 7 when he has lied to Sam, and now in Season 9, where he sits up drinking and watching Unforgiven, too miserable to get to sleep. But, for the most part, Dean is a rock when it comes to sleep. Meanwhile, Sam spends half of season 6 not sleeping a wink. Ever. Castiel never sleeps, and sits on the side of Dean’s bed, staring at Dean, waiting for him to wake up, in an unconsciously “rapey” manner. Dean is the only one in the bunch who prioritizes sleep and probably is the type to fall asleep WHILE he is undressing. Except he never undresses for sleep. So he’s falling asleep as he is crashing down onto the mattress fully clothed.
I’m obsessed with the sleep motif because the majority of my recovery in 2013 had to do with sleep. Additionally, I get a kick out of Jensen Ackles’ “sleep work”: He manages to make you believe that he is truly DEAD TO THE WORLD when obviously he, the actor, is only pretending. His waking-up behavior is what I referred to as a “Spectacle of Lethargy” in that “Phantom Traveler” re-cap. He is squirmy and uncomfortable and grumpy upon waking up. Granted, the man can probably count on one hand the times in his life he has slept 8 hours. He averages 4 hours a night. Hm. Sounds familiar. Which is why I went fucking crazy in 2009 and 2012. Sleep deprivation is not to be trifled with. I think Ackles somehow clicked into that aspect of Dean, the reveling he does in regular old physical activities, realizing that this was one of the keys to the character.
Rubbing your eyes with the heel of your palms is what cowboys and gunslingers do. A tough gesture, you don’t care if you get a little grime in your eyes if you’re a tough guy. Cliche, but true. I have a hard time imagining Clint Eastwood rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands. It looks like a child-like “boo-boo” type of gesture. It’s palms-facing-out, which is vulnerable. Look for it from Ackles. It shows up repeatedly. It’s one of those gestures that beautifully undercuts the sincerely tough and bossy and aggressive persona of Dean Winchester. It is important to remember, too, that BOTH sides are true. THAT is what is so destabilizing about the persona, and what some people seem to miss (those who think that the Tough Guy stuff is all a cover-up, that it’s phony, that it’s posturing). There is a LEVEL of posturing going on, although I dislike that term, in general. But it’s not ALL posturing. (I love the moment when Sam clocks him on “overcompensating”, and Dean is taken aback, but doesn’t really protest. He thinks about it, considers it, and then laughs kind of awkwardly, busted. But we’ll get to that fascinating moment when we get to it!). Dean’s tough no-nonsense persona is in place for many many good reasons, made up of qualities he needed to prioritize in order to survive and in order to take care of Sam. It’s a very real part of him. But so is the odalisque part of him, squirming around under the covers and rubbing his eyes with the back of his hands. You know that Dean loves to cuddle after sex. I mean, I don’t even think there can be a question about that. And Sam? Not so sure. He may cuddle because he knows the girl expects it, and if he loves her, sure, he’ll do it, it’s part of the whole thing. But Dean needs it. Other one-night-stand-guys can’t wait to get the hell out of there, but I think he is a cuddle HOUND. Some girls might be like, “Dude, please get off me. I just met you and I can’t fucking breathe.”
We barely see this random motel room and we have no idea where they are, but I just have to compliment the production team for that ridiculous white headboard. Could it be any more random?
Sam is moving too quickly for Dean to follow, and has no time to explain. Come on. We’re going.
In the Impala, Bob Seger is blasting (because Michigan only listens to their native son, apparently – no, just teasing: it’s a great little detail), it’s a rainy night, Dean’s at the wheel, with a face devoid of emotion, all as Sam is on the phone, obviously calling in the license plate he saw in his dream/vision/whatever. Sam is in charge, authoritative, and his panic has been transformed into a tight coil of focus (Padalecki is so good at that, it’s a common dynamic with Sam. Dean is much more flailing-about in his emotions. Sam gets his shit together.)
Production note: They do so many night-driving scenes and they do it on a set, with a complicated stage-managed totally hands-on down-and-dirty effects team, waving lights by the windows, and spraying the windshields with water, whatever it is. They do this to cut down on actual driving scenes, where the car would have to be, you know, towed down an actual road, tons of time, tons of money, you have to close down streets, etc. There are definitely some day-driving scenes, and some of those are clearly green-screened with scenery moving along behind, but for the most part, these guys drive at night. It is amazing how beautiful these shots are, and although they are repetitive, no two are exactly the same. They find innovative and detailed ways to light each guy, from oncoming “headlights” (clearly just some crew guy swooping by with a flashlight in bis hand), or street lamps, or whatever.
Like this.
Or this.
Or this.
That looks so damn high-end, but it’s not. It’s just a hidden dude standing behind the car holding up a red light.
Supernatural has a lot to be proud of, but near the top of the list should be all of the night-driving scenes and how they create the illusion that that Impala is barreling across America when in reality it is being jostled about on a closed set.
/ aaand Scene.
Sam tells the cop to hurry on checking that license plate, and sits there, phone to his ear as he waits. Dean, totally calm, mainly to counter-act what is going on with his brother, tells Sam to relax, it’s probably nothing, the license plate won’t check out. It was a nightmare, that’s all. Sam tells Dean that this dream was like the dream he had about Jess, the dream he had about their old house. Dean doesn’t get it. If you’re gonna have premonitions (and Dean really wishes he wouldn’t), it makes sense you’d have them about people you love. Why would you have a premonition about some stranger dying?
The cop comes back, Sam listens, and Dean can tell that the license plate checked out, it belongs to a real person. So they’re actually going to have to go … what … knock on some random family’s door and say, “Hi? We had a dream about y’all, just want to make sure everyone is okay.” Dean doesn’t like this. At all. But he doesn’t make a fuss, Sam is way too strong and Alpha right now, no one could stop him from trying to get there “in time”. Sam tells Dean to “hurry,” and without a word, Dean does, the engine roaring as it picks up speed. It’s a tiny moment, but beautiful, in its way. Sam is upset. Dean is upset. They both are upset about different things. Sam is being more open about what it is that is actually upsetting him, and Dean is hiding a little bit, for obvious reasons. If they get to this damn house, and a dude killed himself in the garage, then what the fuck is that going to mean about Sam, and how will he, Dean, handle it? But! Even though 25 minutes ago sleepy Dean was “boohooing” the back of his eyes as he was wrenched out of Beddy-Bye Time, he’s there, in the car, not saying much, hating every second of it, but putting the pedal to the metal just the same. He’ll get them there as fast he can. Because Sam needs it.
Still in the Teaser, Sam and Dean pull up to the house of the guy whose license plate it was, only to see a crime scene, with EMTs and policemen and ambulances, and a body being rolled out of the garage on a gurney. A crowd of people huddle in the driveway, staring at the disaster unfolding at their neighbor’s house. Sam and Dean sit in the car, looking on, and they’re both such good actors that what they are doing is multi-layered and not “presentational”. Sam isn’t panicked, and Dean isn’t anxious. They both just sit and stare, faces filled with so many things, and Dean turns and looks at Sam. That’s enough.
They get out and join the crowd. It’s a terrible confirmation, for both Sam and Dean. Any lingering hope that the death may be unconnected to Sam’s vision is erased when a woman tells them that the man committed suicide, and she can’t believe it. She “saw him every Sunday at St. Augustine’s and he always seemed so normal.” Notice she doesn’t say happy or friendly, she says “normal”. It will come up again during “Nightmare.” It’s an important word in the Winchester lexicon, and a very important word to Sam, who ran away from his family to be “normal”. Even with all the trappings of normal, a girlfriend, a college degree, Sam didn’t fit in. He’s starting to give up on being “normal”, but it’s sad for him. Such a moment always is. I went through it myself and still struggle with it. If you’re not mainstream, it’s perfectly okay, but it is definitely difficult. You have to accept being on the outside.
Notice also the shining face surrounded by blackness, one of the looks of this episode.
In “Faith,” the brothers entered into a full and three-dimensional world, with the tent and the parking lot and the field and the grey skies. The frame was RICH with detail. Here, they shine out amongst total blackness. Nothing is fully lit. There IS no bigger world here, just the claustrophobic belljar of their own increasing anxiety, as well as the black-as-pitch human Evil they encounter during the course of the episode.
The woman tells them that the man was found in his car in the garage a couple of hours ago. Sam and Dean exchange glances. Dean is cold and still, and you can sense that Sam is not. It’s starting to get to him.
They stare at the remaining family members on the front steps, the wife is crying and being hugged by another man, and a young man stands off to the side, awkward, unattached to the group. It isn’t made a big deal of, we don’t get a close-up or a zoom. It’s just behavior we notice that makes a lot of sense in retrospect. You can see the whole damn situation here.
Sam is slowly getting too upset to stand in the crowd and pretend to not have any personal feelings about what is happening, so he walks back to the Impala and Dean follows. Here is my favorite shot of the episode. We have the black silhouettes, which make these two heroic figures look like harbingers of doom (a common look in the early seasons), and they’re both in the same frame, and it’s just pretty as hell.
We have already seen the Winchesters race to take the blame for things, sometimes rightly so (they have a very strong code of honor), and sometimes inappropriately. Sometimes they take too much on. Their Dad raised them to think of themselves as expendable, their happiness didn’t matter, what mattered was guaranteeing the safety and happiness of other people. This noble sentiment has been twisted in the Winchester family into something rigid, self-sacrificing, and self-loathing. It is nearly impossible for either of them to ever feel good about themselves. I mean, honestly, it’s a problem. Sam has a couple of things going on here.
1. His dream came true and this is bad news on multiple levels. Something is WRONG with him.
2. If they had gotten here sooner, they could have stopped it. There’s a strange guilt that must come with having someone else’s future in your hands. Sam races to the guilty stance because that’s the attitude that is the most comfortable and known, for both Winchesters. They know how to do that in their sleep.
Dean isn’t showing much here. He’s buttoned-up, practical, and almost stoic, clearly trying to talk Sam down from the I’m Guilty ledge and also trying to beat back his own anxiety. Sam doesn’t understand what the premonitions mean: Was he meant to stop it from happening? Then why wasn’t he given more warning? Padalecki seems lost and very alone, even though Dean stands there, right at his side. As they talk, the energy starts to shift, Dean starts to argue his points more forcefully, which makes Sam counter-act with his own counter-argument. They’re starting to lose it, you can tell. Dean says, sort of laughing, at one point, “I’m worried about you, man,” and it’s a testament to the show that you sort of feel the earth tilt a little bit when he says it. It should be a comforting thing to have your brother worried about you, but it’s totally not. It means something must be very very wrong. Dean, who can’t hide his emotions for long, gives Sam a look which betrays the worry that is really going on (and Ackles tracks this, it’s on a slow boil right now, we’ll get a couple of eloquent closeups in “Nightmare” that let us known the depths of what is going on for him, but the real stuff is coming later and, to put it crudely, Ackles isn’t going to shoot his wad before it’s time. Pacing, people, pacing. We have many episodes to go, all told. You have to modulate what you’re doing, let it seep out, not every moment is cathartic.)
Hearing that Dean is “worried”, and seeing the anxious look flickering in his brother’s eyes, makes Sam say, “Stop looking at me like that”, and Dean replies, and he sounds like a passive-aggressive teenage punk, “I’m not lookin’ at you like anything.”
It’s not the best comeback in the world, and Dean knows it, so he says, glancing at Sam, “Although you do look like crap.” Sam is offended, and Dean, who is yearning, yet again, to crawl into bed to catch up on Sleepy-Beddy-Bye-Time, takes control. The brothers have this great ebb and flow, one goes off the rails, the other holds things together. Here, Sam, even with his panic and upset, is actually VERY together in his conviction that something is going ON here, but Dean has to keep them on course. Nothing to be done tonight. He closes them both down saying, “We’ll stop by tomorrow, talk to them, check out the house.”
Sam says, “They’re devastated. They’re not gonna want to talk to us.”
Dean glances at the Front Stoop of Grief and says, “Yeah. But I think I know who they will talk to.”
1st scene
Tight closeups on Dean’s finger ringing a doorbell, tight closeup on Sam’s annoyed face. Sam murmurs, “This has gotta be a whole new low for us” (which totally makes me laugh) and Dean throws him a cocky grin. The door is opened, and we then see they are dressed like this.
Of course, if you have seen the gag reel, then you know that during one take, the guy opened the door and saw this standing there.
And, I’m sorry, but look at Jared Padalecki’s face in that first screen grab. He is so mortified for himself, so annoyed, so, almost, prissy. While Dean is glorying in his new role. Dean loves costumes. Suit and tie not so much, but give the man a costume, and he runs with it. The show has a lot of fun with how he completely morphs into something else when he puts on the wardrobe. Prison garb? Hell, yeah, I’ll run a black market cigarette business and keep up on the gossip in the yard. Production Assistant on a movie? I will ROCK that headset. Middle Earth battle with a bunch of LARP-ers? I will gladly wear a long blonde wig, paint half of my face red, stroll around with a fake sword and declaim the speech from Braveheart at the top of my lungs. Girlfriend wants me to wear her pink underwear while I fuck her? Yes, MA’AM, and it is one of my favorite sex memories EVER, so fuck you. Sometimes the costume thing doesn’t go over well (ahem, Frontierland), but he LOVES the costume aspect of that adventure (it is his Achilles heel in that case. Castiel: “Is it customary to wear a blanket?” Dying.). Obviously a lot of this is played for comedy, and Dean as Priest is one of them. But it says something about his malleability, his love of movies and actors, for sure, his playfulness with his own persona (very important – like I said in the “Route 666” re-cap, he, more than most of us, walks around like he is the Star of his own Movie – and all of this is like a little girl jumping at the opportunity to play “dress up”), and also his … hollowness, maybe? The gravitational pull he feels towards the Group? The Group has authority, despite his staunch individuality, and putting on the clothes customary to whatever Group helps him relax, he knows what to do then, he knows who to be. After all, he wears Dad’s jacket, listens to the music Dad likes, and treasures the car given to him by Dad. Even the necklace he wears all the time, even in the shower, was originally a gift for Dad. Dean Winchester IS a costume. Sam says to him in “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Does it disturb you at all how well you fit in here?” The thought hadn’t even occurred to Dean. Anyway. This is another one of those Prisms of Supernatural I keep talking about: It depends on which angle you’re pointing it, it’s going to look different from different standpoints.
Dean as Priest is very funny and he’s doing some very funny things in the following scene. The costume sets him free in a strange way. He feels protected by it. He can do ANYthing while he’s wearing it. You can feel the whole situation start to spin out of control from time to time, and Sam, who really does seem and look and act like a priest here, has to rein Dean in.
Also, on the deeper Season-Wide Arc level: religion is starting to play a more serious part in whatever it is they are up against. There are distinctly Biblical undertones to what is going on. They can’t see the whole picture yet. The brothers talked a little bit about “faith” in the “Faith” episode, and Dean point-blank says he is “not a believer”. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the church shows up again in “Nightmare,” and that Sam and Dean, who are (without even knowing it yet) pawns in a celestial/demonic chess game, dress up as priests.
Dean introduces himself and Sam to the guy who opened the door as “Father Simmons and Father Frehley.”
Bless me, Fathers, for I have sinned. And so have you.
Dean explains that they are new priests down at St. Augustine’s (which reminds us of what a good investigator he is. A casual comment by a bystander becomes an eloquent and revealing character detail about the family in that house: they went to St. Augustine’s every Sunday. They would let a priest come into their home in their time of mourning.)
The guy who opens the door is Roger Miller (Avery Raskin), the brother of the guy who killed himself, the guy we saw hugging Blondie on the front stoop.
Wait a second. Roger Miller??
No, another one.
Roger Miller has a sort of tight-lipped anger seething beneath his surface when he sees the priests, but he is polite and lets them in. He’s got a lot of feelings, though, you can tell, and when Dean launches into a small homily about how “the Lord’s guidance” is especially important in times of suffering (what are you TALKING about, Dean?), Roger cuts him off and basically tells him to sell that shit somewhere else. A blonde woman (whom we saw weeping in his arms on the stoop in the first scene) carrying a tray of food says from behind them, “Roger, please!” She is horrified at the rudeness to guests, especially guests who are priests.
This is Beth Broderick, who plays the evil stepmother in “Nightmare”. It’s an excellent performance. Cold, weak, angry (watch her chop up those vegetables), perfect hair/makeup/home, despicable inside. She’s got it down. And I can’t be 100% sure, because it’s not in the script, but I think Beth Broderick is playing this woman as a pill-popper. She is always somewhat medicated. She seems … cut off, blankly smiling, floating above the mess of pain and self-awareness. It’s not just grief, though. It’s also not just the horrible secret she’s keeping of what goes on behind closed doors. What I’m trying to say is, she always seemed just slightly stoned, and I would bet that that was a choice on the part of the actress. This woman certainly WOULD be popping Xanax all day.
But the face she presents is socially appropriate, welcoming, warm, and also sad and confused about her husband’s suicide. This woman is a world-class liar. Of course, too, there is the possibility that she was also a battered wife. I am not discounting that. She, too, was probably terrorized in her own household and found that the best way to deal with it would be to ignore it and pretend it wasn’t really happening.
Roger sulks off after being reprimanded, and she says to Fathers Dean and Sam, “I’m sorry – he’s very upset right now …” Please notice how Sam looks right at her face, and Dean stares down at the food in her hands. You can practically feel the drool starting up in his mouth. It’s such a funny tiny character moment, not underlined by a closeup or anything. But you can see Ackles playing the whole transition: “I stand here with a sad understanding face because I am a servant of the L–ohmygodlookFOODyumyum.”
She invites them in for coffee (there’s clearly a kind of wake going on, people wandering through the house), and as she pours them both a cup (from an actual coffee pot, not a teapot, a la Cassie), she says she is very grateful for the church’s support, and Dean says, “We are all God’s children”, which gets him this look from Sam.
Dean doesn’t notice, though, because from the second he saw all the food around him, he can think of nothing else. The second she leaves, his priestly smile vanishes in a flash, and he basically pounces on the plate of little sausages-on-toothpicks on the coffee table, popping one into his mouth whole. We haven’t really gotten the full-frontal Dean Winchester eating thing, not yet, and we will learn just how much he can fit in there at one given time. Take the double entendre any way you like, and if you don’t like it, blame Supernatural and Jensen Ackles, not me. No matter how many times I see his ballet-of-eating-behavior with this little hot dog on a stick it still makes me laugh. It’s the WAY he pops the sausage into his mouth, closing his eyes for a second, cheeks bulging out, lost in the pleasure of the moment, and then chews, with a sort of dead unself-aware expression on his face, until he notices Sam watching him. A very very judgey Sam.
Sam’s comment always makes me roar. It’s a very good line reading, and it’s a question of Padalecki giving a very very slight pause. Sam says, “Just tone it down a little bit …. Father.”
The show has such a goofy spirit sometimes, a sort of Inspector Clouseau spirit, without ever sacrificing all that angsty Hot Men Crying stuff. I prefer the goofy Supernatural. I might not have hooked in so strongly with the show if it didn’t make me roar with laughter regularly. But that’s just me. Moving on.
Mrs. Miller returns (after popping another Xanax in the kitchen), and Dean, mouth still full, says, “Did your husband have a history of depression?” But he’s still chewing, and he knows he’s coming off badly, but he can’t seem to care because the little hotdog is so good, but he is still trying to keep it under control, his cheek bulging out to the side. It’s hilarious.
Stoned Mrs. Miller says no, he had no depression, they were happy, and she just doesn’t understand why this has happened. She is crying. Sam is totally a freakin’ Priest, sitting there, empathetic, listening. Dean is still chewing. Doing his best. They learn that Max, the Miller’s son, was the one who found his dead dad in the garage, and we see Max, seated by himself in the front room. Sam asks if it would be all right if he went and talked to Max, and he excuses himself and walks out. Dean has swallowed by now, and is left alone with Mrs. Miller, and he knows that he has a job here, that he should still question her, and he will, but he wants another one of those hotdogs and he wonders if it would be inappropriate to snatch one up. He thinks probably it would be. He hands Mrs. Miller a Kleenex, and starts to ask her questions about their “lovely home”. She says they moved in about 5 years ago, and Dean, says, trying to throw it in casually, but totally failing, that the problem with old houses is that they can have some problems. “Electrical shortages …”
But his energy here is off. As it so often is. He just doesn’t “fit”.
Nope, Father. I’m not buyin’ what you’re sellin’.
She thinks a little bit, through the haze of her self-medication, and shakes her head. Nope, the house is perfect. Dean is disappointed. He doesn’t hide it. He is also drawn back to the plate of hotdogs. They emit a warm and welcoming glow. He asks to use the rest room, and before he departs, he can’t help himself, he grabs another hot dog and pops it in his mouth.
In the front room, Sam has pulled up a chair and is talking to Max.
Max is college-age. But he has been so destroyed by his upbringing that he seems like an alien from another planet, not a normal 20, 21-year-old guy. Sam is kind and gentle, understanding that Max has been through a trauma, although he can’t guess yet just how traumatic. Max has a secret. It won’t be revealed until the final showdown. And Brendan Fletcher keeps that secret tight within him, not tipping his hand. I mean, the trauma is all over his face, but his survival mechanism is strong: You do not talk about what goes on in this family. It is a secret. If you tell anyone, bad things will happen to you. It doesn’t matter that he’s a young man now, and not a child. He has been destroyed. The destruction happened early. By the time he was 2, 3, he already had learned everything he would need to know about his parents, and life itself. There is nothing new for him to learn. He has been dealt a shit hand, but he can’t separate himself from it. That’s the thing about shit hands. I am so impressed with how Fletcher the actor handled his “secret”. He is REALLY hiding it, not just pretending to hide it. It’s a subtle difference: good actors all know how to handle the secrets of their characters. Think of Meryl Streep’s entire performance in Sophie’s Choice, and how her secret, the “choice” she had to make, came out in different ways, the alcoholism, the sex, the laughter, the sudden suicidal tendencies … but for the most part, Streep wasn’t playing the secret, because that’s not what real life people do. If you have a secret, you invest in the cover-up, not the secret. Streep played that cover-up. And so is Fletcher. If you think about it, I am sure you can come up with other examples of actors handling secrets well.
And both Winchester brothers grew up keeping secrets. They understood the importance of secrets early on. It’s why they probably couldn’t really have friends, or normal girlfriends, or do anything normal. If anyone got too close, they might find out about the family secret. So the family dynamic was a closed circle. Dad set it up that way. He was a “drill sergeant”, and Sam and Dean were military recruits. If anyone found out what it was they actually did, they could all get in big big trouble. So zip it.
There’s a reason why I think of Running On Empty, often, in conjunction with Supernatural.
Mother and Father were political activists in the 1960s, involved with a violent group meant to be, obviously, The Weather Underground. They blew up a chem lab, as a group, to protest Vietnam, and a janitor who wasn’t supposed to be on the premises, was blinded. That was years ago, and Mother and Father have been on the run ever since. They are on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. They have two young sons, and the boys have been raised in the life of outlaws. The movie is an amazing look at a closed familial system, a family run like a military outfit, with drills and “Yes sir”s and “No sir”s. Dad has set it up that way because it is the only way they can survive, and still stick together. But oldest son (River Phoenix) is 17 years old now. He falls in love with someone. He can’t be with her because he can’t tell the secret. The question starts to rumble through the family: Should the sons be made to pay for the parents’ sins? Should their sons NOT go to college? Ever? It’s a hell of a film. One of my favorites of all time.
Sam asks Max about his Dad, and Max says, face passive, clammy, impenetrable, that he was a “normal Dad”.
Sam listens. Nobody listens like Jared Padalecki, and this is an excellent “listening” episode for him. I’ll get into that in more depth in a bit.
Every actor knows that listening is ACTIVE. Listening is the most important element of acting. If you can’t listen, you can’t be a good actor. There are no exceptions.
Max doesn’t seem to resent Father Sam’s intrusion. He understands that what is coming at him is kindness and understanding, but he also can’t really let it in. And everyone sitting around, saying nice things about his Dad, and his stepmother bringing out plates of food … just imagine what all of that pious grief must look like to Max, knowing what he knows. He tells Father Sam that he’s saving up for school, so he’s living at home now. Max, darling, there are other ways, get some roommates, get an apartment, get the hell out of that house.
Sam probably saved up for school, too. Sam secretly took the SATs and secretly applied to college. We learn a bit later that there was a teacher in middle school who took an interest in him personally. That had to leave a mark. We talk a lot about how Sam leaving the family affected Dean. But imagine how hard it must have been for Sam. To remove yourself from a family that was such a strong and unbreakable unit (however unhealthy). It would be like leaving a cult. There are re-programmers for that kind of thing. Leaving a cult is incredibly disorienting, and many people just up and join another strong Group.
It says so much about Sam’s strength of character that he was able to endure that separation as well as he did.
You can feel all of those connections, and currents, coursing back between the two men as they sit there in the dark dining room.
Sam says to Max, “I know it’s rough. Losing a parent. Especially when you don’t have all the answers.”
Max stares at Sam, and there is so much going on in his face. It makes him so compelling to look at, if you forget you know the ending of the episode. First time around, I stared at him during this scene and tried to excavate what I saw going on on his face. Now I think I see a sort of paralysis, his actual voice stuck deep down inside him, because this priest, sympathetic as he is, doesn’t understand at ALL what he’s going through. He’s not sad about “losing a parent”. But how can he ever tell ANYONE that?
When you are in the presence of a secret like Max’s, it announces itself with a bullhorn, right through the cover-up. You may not be able to put together the pieces until later. But the secret is there, loud and clear. Sam can feel it.
Meanwhile, upstairs, Father Dean takes out his infrared scanner and strolls up and down the hallway. One small moment I love is how Dean walks down the hall, focusing on the small screen of the scanner, and, without looking, reaches out a hand to the table in the hall, sweeping his finger along it as he passes by. Feeling for sulfur residue. Moments like that, automatic and grounded, help us buy into the more fantastical elements of Supernatural. The whole thing could seem like a goof. Ghost-busters in a hot car. But Dean, focusing on one thing, as his hand does another, looks like any multi-tasking investigator. He could be a homicide detective, that’s how much he owns the trappings of his job. It’s also a reminder that Dean is not just a buffoon with a mouth full of hot-dogs.
This shot is absolutely ridiculous, and presented with dead seriousness.
2nd scene
Motel Room Alert! We only get hilarious and specific glimpses of Motel Escanaba. There’s a big skull of what looks like a long-horned cattle hanging on the wall. The walls are big logs, with random birch tree trunks holding things up. You can hear the production design meeting. “So which way do we want to go here? How about a log-cabin motif? Yeah, let’s get some birch trees in there.” There are little dim light-fixtures on the walls with lamps with drawings on them. It’s all quaint and twee, and Sam and Dean seem like interlopers. Pizza boxes piled up on the desk. It’s like they’re hired assassins holed up in the Little Bohemia Lodge.
Dean has all of his guns spread out on his bed and he is cleaning them.
Speaking of John Dillinger: I have a thing about guns. Frankly, I love them, and I love movies that really get into them, and glory in them visually, political/social controversies aside. It’s a huge pet peeve for some people, and I get that, but it is not one of my pet peeves. In fact, I started a series on my site called “Nothing Wrong With a Little Gun Porn,” highlighting how beautifully the guns were filmed in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. I stopped that series because I got too much weird Google-search traffic (I should have known that would happen). I don’t love guns because of the horrible things they do in the hands of criminals and careless people. I think there should be a mandatory waiting period. I think people need to be responsible. I know we have a serious gun problem in America. But all of that is separate from artistic considerations. My love of guns has to do with what they look like, the art of them, what it sounds like when they are clicked and clacked together, the mechanics of them, how they are handled when they are handled by someone who knows what they are doing, the gleam of them, and I appreciate a director who feels the same way. I thought I would have a heart attack from pleasure during The American, when there’s a whole long detailed sequence where George Clooney makes his own gun. (That was going to be my next entry in the series. Maybe I could give it a less provocative title, to keep the weirdos away.) So. The gun thing, and how they are filmed, and how both Ackles and Padalecki handle the guns (they know their stuff, you can tell, they’re both Texas boys, after all), is a huge pleasure-spot for me in Supernatural. It’s similar to my love of cars. One of my favorite places on earth is Elvis’ car museum at Graceland. The place provides an almost sexual pleasure, having to do with the aesthetics of those gleaming vehicles, as well as what they represent: power, speed, independence, wealth, sex, whatever. I love car movies, too. Two-Lane Blacktop? I DIE. Talk about two guys on a road trip in a cool car!
So you can imagine the pleasure a gun-loving gearhead like myself gets from Supernatural.
All of this is to say, Dean cleaning his guns is almost too much for me. I basically can’t take it.
Ackles was asked once, I think it was on Kimmel, if he ever shot guns, or went hunting or something like that, and he said Yes, and you could tell he hesitated being too enthusiastic. He said something like, “I know people have feelings about this …” He played it well. He was respectful. He’s not looking for controversy, or to be a celebrity spokesman used by the NRA. But actors need to know how to handle guns. You can TELL when a gun looks awkward in an actor’s hand. Work that shit out. My cousin Kerry is married to the “weapons specialist” for The Mentalist, and he trains actors in how to handle weaponry, so they will be safe, first and foremost, but also so they will look like they know what they’re doing. That is how they met. Kerry was guest starring on The Mentalist and she and the “weapons specialist” bonded, they went to a baseball game, fell in love, and got married a couple of months ago. When my brother recently appeared on an episode of The Burn Notice, there was a big scene with a gun, and before flying to Florida to film the episode, he knew he had to be prepared, so he asked for some training from Kerry’s husband, who gave it to him, walking him through it. Brendan said later he was so glad he did that beforehand, because on the day of shooting the scene, there was no time at all. He had to just pick up the gun and play the scene. But by that point, he knew how to handle a gun, thanks to Karl’s training. Nothing worse than an actor who pulls a gun and seems afraid of it, or like it doesn’t fit into his/her hand.
So Ackles cleaning his guns? He knows exactly what he is doing. He’s easy with it, familiar. The scene plays out, he and Sam are discussing the Millers, and there’s lots of dialogue, all as he continues on with his physical activity. It’s good stuff, and also hot, for someone like me who wanted to start a series called “Gun Porn” on her site.
Sam is pinning stuff up on the log walls. He’s sweaty, and it’s never explained why. But in just a couple of moments, another “vision” is going to come over him, and perhaps it is already coming upon him. Sam has researched the Miller’s house, nothing weird happened there, no massacres or graveyards or murders.
Birch trees.
Random.
We have another divergence of energies here. Sam is sweaty and starting to get frustrated. Nothing is leading him to where he wants it to lead him, which is ANSWERS. Dean, on the other hand, is starting to calm down. If nothing supernatural is going on, then Sam’s dream was a fluke coincidence, and it doesn’t mean anything. There’s your answer. Dean likes that one.
Sam wonders if the Miller house has nothing to do with it. It may be Jim (the suicide) that is the connection, but as he talks, he starts to wince with pain, clutching his head.
Up until now, we’ve had only two instances of Sam’s prophetic visions:
1. The nightmare he had about Jess dying the week before she actually died
2. The nightmare about the people trapped in their old house
Both of these could be classified as dreams. But now, we watch something start happening to Sam while he is wide awake, something that is both coming in on him from the outside, and cracking open from within him. It hurts. Physically. Sam recoils from the pain of it. Padalecki does a hell of a job with this, because, like I said, what is happening seems to be coming from outside AND inside, at the same time. And how on earth do you play THAT? Well, watch him!
Sam basically falls off the bed, huddled on the floor, clutching his head, and Dean runs to his side.
Brothers: Their Agony, Their Jawlines, Their Hair, Their Guns, Their Random Birch Trees. This show is perfect.
The motel room flashes in and out of focus, static, white flashes of light, until we suddenly are in another place altogether. We are in the vision. A cold unwelcoming apartment. This scene (and the next one) feels almost black and white, which makes the blood splatter that much more … violent and gory.
We see Roger Miller, fresh off his appearance on the Johnny Cash show, come into his kitchen holding a bag of groceries. Nice detail, he removes a beer immediately, pops it open and takes a swig. Knowing what we end up knowing about Roger, it’s eloquent. Alcohol is automatic, no moment is complete without it. He stands there drinking his beer, and we see him from the hallway. A black figure slowly strolls by in the foreground, a la Sixth Sense. Roger doesn’t notice. As he unpacks the grocery bag, the window out onto the fire escape slowly opens by itself. Roger stares, confused, and goes and closes the window, swooping the old-fashioned latch on the sill around. He goes back to what he is doing, and then we get a great close-up of the latch circling itself open.
Seen from outside the now-open window, Roger slowly turns to look. He cannot explain what he is seeing. He goes and tries to close the window. It won’t budge. He leans his body out the window, staring up towards the roof, and you are just asking to be decapitated if you pull a move like that. There’s a great shot from far above, where we see his head sticking out, the fire escape descending beneath him. The window then suddenly closes, and the blood splatter is gruesome and awesome.
The Log Cabin motel statics back into focus, Sam left horrified at what he just saw.
3rd scene
Another beautiful night-driving scene, as Sam and Dean rush to Roger Miller’s apartment. Sam seems exhausted, still with that sheen of sweat on his face. I love the detail, that that clammy sweat would be there throughout the episode. Things are moving past the point of no return. Sam is calling information, getting the address.
Look at the beauty of these shots.
They just seem so ALONE in the world, with shots like these.
Because they don’t know how to talk about emotions, especially ones that are confusing or seem weak, they get awkward, they hesitate with each other. Dean is now so worried that things are starting to change for him. The stoic gun-cleaner is freaking out. He deals every day with the unexplainable, and like he told Cassie in their post-sex pillow-talk – “I deal with it …” He has worked that out for himself. But he can’t work this out for himself. It’s Sam. He can’t be treating Sam like a supernatural problem to be solved. That’s just … way too scary to contemplate. But all he says is, “Are you okay?”
And Sam, who is clearly not okay, says, “Yeah.” Because that’s how the Winchesters roll. Dean says, “If you’re gonna hurl, I’ll pull the car over. Because the upholstery, you know.” It is an honest moment. He’s not being mean. It’s okay if you’re gonna get sick, but don’t do it in my car, please.
As they keep driving, Sam tells Dean he’s scared, which is a pretty major moment. You know it has to really be bad if Sam is admitting to it.
I come from a family of Fix-It guys. It can be totally comforting and also sometimes annoying. I have joked that I can’t tell my cousin Mike that my feet are cold because he will FedEx me socks overnight. Like I said, it’s a beautiful impulse, and I would rather people HAVE that impulse than not have it at all. But we can see Dean’s Fix-It thing here in both lights: It is beautiful, and it is also problematic. He steps up with his own Fix-It nature, because Sam needs it, Sam is falling apart, but it’s also a bit of a lie. And it leaves him isolated. He called Dad in tears back in Lawrence, and never got a response. He is alone. What is he going to do if Sam goes off the rails? There’s a gorgeous moment in “Devil’s Trap,” when the brothers almost come to blows, and Dean says, suddenly helpless, almost in tears, “You and Dad are all I have. Half the time, man, I’m barely holding it together.” You can count on one hand the times he makes such an admission, and that’s the only time he ever makes it so baldly. His inability to admit how much he himself is falling apart is … well, there’s a beautiful impulse behind it (I must hold it together for my family), but it is also a total Trap. It has ruined his life.
All of that is starting for real, here in “Nightmare”.
And look at Sam. It’s heartbreaking.
He says to Dean that the visions are getting more intense and physically painful, and now they’re happening when he’s wide awake. Dean says, “Come on, man, it’ll be all right.” Because that’s what you have to say when your little brother is flipping out and becoming psychic, even though you totally don’t approve of it.
Sam says, “What IS it about the Millers? Why am I watching them die? Why is this happening to me?” Dean says, “I don’t know but we’ll figure it out. We face the unexplainable every day. This is just another thing.” Sam knows this is different. How do you investigate yourself? Is that in the job description? The Thing that Killed Mom emerged from out of a clear blue sky, targeting their family for no apparent reason. Not for a reason that anyone can see yet. Sam is now part of the problem, and it scares him half to death. He wants Dean to admit he’s scared too. Then HE won’t be alone. Honestly, these Winchesters.
Sam says, “Tell me the truth. You can’t tell me that this doesn’t freak you out.”
There is then a long pause, a shot of Dean driving, eyes on the road. He shows no signs of anxiety. None. Not then. Says flatly, eyes ahead, “This doesn’t freak me out.” Ackles is so good at playing the cover-up, while also reverberating the subtext on a supersonic level. You know it when you see it. His quick eye-flicker towards Sam, after he finishes speaking, tells us everything about what is REALLY going on, but it is not in Dean’s code to share that with Sam. It goes against everything he believes in. This doesn’t freak me out. He will live and die by those words.
4th scene
Vertigo-inducing sideways shot of Roger Miller’s apartment building, the camera turning itself around as it comes down to the ground where we see Roger walking on the sidewalk, holding his groceries. The Impala comes roaring up and Sam shouts out the window, “HEY, ROGER!” It’s funny to imagine how Dean and Sam must look to the outside world of the Millers: They are two hot young priests, as far as Roger Miller knows. And here they are, pulling up beside him in a muscle car, screaming his name out of the window? What the hell? Roger shouts back at them, “What, are you guys missionaries? Leave me alone!” and hurries towards the door of his apartment building. Dean and Sam pound after Roger who shuts the door of the lobby in their faces. Dean and Sam scream at him through the glass that he’s in danger, but he waves them off. They run around to the side of the building and Badass Dean kicks down the door leading to the alley. They clamber up onto the fire escape and begin their ascent.
This is one hell of a shot, and it’s done with movement too, it’s not a static shot: the camera moves slowly upwards for the full reveal, of the guys racing up the stairs, and the light beaming down from above. Gorgeous. They’re probably shooting this at 2, 3 o’clock in the morning. It takes hours of work to do a set-up like that.
Of course, by the time Dean and Sam reach Roger’s floor, the dude is already dunzo. The window is splattered with blood. They are too late. Dean and Sam hover there, and, again, even though they are the heroes of the show, they are filmed with such darkness, such ominous noir cliches, casting shadows, black silhouettes – it places them in the sketchy territory where they live, sketchy morally, physically, spiritually, emotionally. If they were well-lit, we wouldn’t worry about them so much.
Like this. LOOK at that shot. Look at the shadow of Dean’s head, hanging there like a phantom gargoyle. Heroes are not usually shot like this. Villains are.
Dean climbs inside to take a look. Hands a handkerchief to Sam to wipe off their fingerprints from the railings. He is take-charge, because Dean feels Sam disintegrating, panicking.
And talk about tracking an emotional thru-line: Sam has to play the whole visions thing on a slow increase of anxiety. It has to build and build and build … over multiple episodes, and it really explodes in “Nightmare”. Padalecki has set that up, he has given us what we need in former episodes, to see how much it all troubles him (the creepy vision of Jess on the sidewalk from the moving Impala), but he has been holding much of it in, keeping it from Dean. He can’t anymore.
They head back out to the car, Sam talking about his vision, and the “dark shape” he saw in the apartment. Small moment I love: as they walk, with Sam talking, they start to cross the street, and Dean stops Sam, holding his arm out in front of his brother, because a car is passing. It’s so parental. It’s so automatic. A big thing isn’t made out of it, although clearly a choice was made that a car would pass at that moment, adding texture/life to the stock scene. It’s just an underlying subtextual detail, Dean’s automatic protection of his 6 foot 4 brother. Arm flung out to the side, stopping Sam.
Sam and Dean, like the good monster-hunters they are, had been focusing on the house, and the land the house sits on. The Roger Miller Decapitation Extravaganza throws a wrench into that theory. Sam wonders if a vengeful spirit could attach itself to a family, and as they get in the car, they discuss the Lore, and I am happy as long as the Winchester brothers geek out on the Lore. I love “the Lore” scenes. I love it when they know shit. Dean says, yeah, there have been cases where a spirit attaches itself to a family. Sam says, “Banshees …” (Because it’s totally normal to throw in the word “banshee” in a conversation. I love banshees, and love it when they are referenced on Supernatural. I’m Irish, it’s in the blood.) Dean says that a spirit like that could act as a curse – so maybe Jim and Roger Miller were involved in something bad, and now the spirit is exacting its revenge. The truth is right in front of the Winchester boys, it just takes them a while to put it all together. But they’re zooming in on it. It still doesn’t explain why SAM is connected to all of it.
Great final moment of the scene: Sam says, “Well I know one thing I have in common with these people.” Now Dean does not like to hear this. “What?” he says. Sam says, “Both our families are cursed.” And he’s laughing as he says it, which is a great great choice. Self-pity must be avoided in a show like this. If all they did was walk around moaning how cursed they were, the audience would react like Eliot Ness does when Dean opens up about his problems in “As Time Goes By,” “Jeez, nancy boy, cry me a river.” Mean, but true. It’s a delicate line the show has to walk. Sam laughing at how cursed they are is a perfect example of how well the tone is set.
Feeling “cursed” is totally not in Dean’s emotional vocabulary at this point. They had a GREAT family and a Dad who cared enough about them to train them properly and treat them like adults. They had it GREAT. Not like the Millers, dammit, there is no way that WE are anything like THEM, what are you TALKING about?
“We just had our dark spots,” says poor ignorant Dean, and this makes Sam laugh even more.
“Our dark spots are pretty dark,” says Sam, seeming relaxed, centered, sure of himself. It’s amazing to see, because he’s admitting to something pretty awful, he’s acknowledging his own secrets, how bad it was for him, for them.
Dean can’t respond at first, and what he finally comes up with is a flustered, “You’re … dark.”
It’s totally weak, and he knows it, so he starts the car up and drives off.
Score one for Father Sam.
5th scene
Back in their priest costumes, Sam and Dean pay a call on Max. Max says his mom is “resting”. I’ll bet she is.
I love the perspective of this shot, one of the few establishing shots in the episode. The highlighting of all the foil-wrapped food on the table in the foreground: Bringing over food is one of the ways kindly people “help out” when someone has died, but the way it’s shot makes it look like all the food may have been laced with salmonella by vindictive neighbors.
Max looks on it with a cynical eye. The kindness of others is hollow to him, he who had been so abandoned and ignored his whole life by those who knew what was going on and did nothing: where was the kindness of neighbors when he needed it?
Max says, and it is a dim and faded attempt at a joke, and it strikes me as tragic: “Nothing says I’m sorry like a tuna casserole.” Max is so far on the outside of Life that he makes Sam and Dean, outlaws with guns in every pocket, seem like insiders. Sam and Dean can still operate, they have each other, they “keep each other human,” as they say to each other later. They make jokes, they go to movies, they … are functioning. Both of them are funny. Max didn’t have anyone like that in his life. It is impossible to imagine Max having friends, and being relaxed with other people. That “tuna casserole” moment is his attempt to be friendly, and like other people. It fails. Sam smiles at him kindly, anyway.
They sit in the front room, and Sam leads the questioning. Thank God. Dean would eff it up. Max says that Roger and Jim were close as brothers, and they used to hang out all the time when he was little. They all lived next door to each other. Things changed once Max and his family moved across town. Everything Max says sounds perfectly on the level, but Sam senses something else, and so does Dean.
“Do you remember anything unusual?” asks Dean. “Why do you ask?” says Max, with a small confused smile (and when you know his secret, you can see the many many layers Fletcher is playing here.) Dean says softly, “It’s just a question.”
“We were totally normal,” says Max. Dean can’t put his finger on what is going on here. And he can’t take a hard line with this kid, obviously, so he just says, “Good. That’s good.” The brothers get up to leave, and there’s a dim flash on Max’s face … it’s almost a flash of abandonment. It is the key to the character. It could be his salvation. Acknowledging how abandoned he feels could actually lead the way to allowing himself to be saved, by Hot Priest with Sideburns, staring at him so gently. I don’t know. Whatever that small look means, it’s there. It’s why Fletcher’s performance is so brilliant.
Cut to the brothers walking back to the Impala outside. I love this shot for some reason.
It’s the whole “walking and talking at the same time” thing, the long-shot one-take thing, that Supernatural does, as opposed to just competing closeups. It helps us place them, it helps the show feel real. Dean is saying, all as he takes off his priest collar, walking towards the car, “Nobody’s family is normal and happy. Did you see him when he talked about his old house?” Sam says, “He seemed scared.”
6th scene
Dean and Sam stand in the Miller’s old neighborhood, across the street from the two houses, side by side, where the Miller families used to live. They talk to a neighbor (Fred Keating) who is out on his front lawn.
They ask if he remembers a family who used to live across the street from him, the Millers? They had a little boy named Max? Fred Keating does a wonderful job with his small part. He’s asked about the Millers, and he says, “Yeah. I remember,” but there is a world of history in HOW he says it.
Also: Michigan memorabilia alert!
The neighbor says, “Is that poor kid okay?”
It is doubtful that Max would have shared his secret on his own. It is the neighbor who tells us the brutal story. The neighbor says he’s never in his life seen a child treated like that, beaten every day by his father, a “mean drunk,” and the uncle, Mr. Roger Miller, would join in. The neighbor called the cops a bunch of times, but nothing was done. The worst part of it was the “stepmother”: she would just stand by, “checked out”. Max’s arm was broken twice. When the neighbor says this was going on “practically every day,” Sam looks down, shakes his head. It reminds me of “Clap Your Hands,” when Dean has to keep reminding Sam about “empathy”. He has to re-train Sam in how a moral compass works. “You have to care … about EVERYTHING.” he says to Sam. In Season 1, Sam doesn’t need that training. He has it intuitively. It’s hard to care … about EVERYTHING. Most people can’t bear it. It’s too much responsibility.
The neighbor says Max’s real mom died in a “car accident”. It is at this moment that Sam is attacked again (from within and without), the pain breaking over him suddenly and irrevocably. He clutches himself, wincing, hunched over, and Dean says to the neighbor, “Thank you for your time,” but he is already going to Sam and helping his incapacitated to the car.
Before they get there, Sam looks up wildly at the two houses across the street, suddenly experiences the same static as before, the same whiting-out of the edges of the screen, until he is in another place. And we see Ms. Xanax 2006 chopping up vegetables at the speed of light back at the Miller house. Max hovers in the shadows, and they are mid-argument.
Max says, quivering with agony, “You didn’t stop them. Not once.”
See what I mean about his naked pain? It’s hard to be with it. And now, because of the neighbor, we know what the boy has endured. It was an atrocity. It is all there on his face.
She keeps cooking, because she’s just a bitch like that, and suddenly we see the gleaming knife she laid down on the cutting board start to tremble, all on its own. And then, slowly, it rises up into the air. The effects here are really simple and effective. So much of it has to do with proper eyelines. The actors always look like they are looking at an actual hovering object, and that is hard to pull off! Stepmother sees the floating knife, and backs away, scared.
I probably don’t need to mention Carrie, but I will. In a way, Max has a Sissy Spacek look about him: the pale freckly skin, the reddish hair, the intense and almost blank look of private suffering endured, suffering so acute that it has transformed itself into telekinesis. The only way to express oneself when all other routes of self-preservation have been closed.
Stepmom is pinned up against the wall staring at the knife, transfixed. The knife then turns in the air onto its side (a detail I love – it’s almost like the knife is sentient, thinking to itself: “Should I go in this way? Or that way?”) Fantastic closeup of the knife almost right up against her eyeball, as a tear trembles and falls. Brill.
Fletcher doesn’t play the rage, he plays the twisted grief and fear. All of the rage comes out in his telekinetic powers, an interesting choice. Somebody else in the role may have chosen to scream all of his lines at her, about what she did to him, which would be … I guess a valid choice … but not as creepy, not as good. It is the KNIFE that is filled with rage, that’s where it’s all going.
The knife pulls itself back from her head, getting the proper distance, and then whoosh, it stabs her through her eyeball, going through her head and into the wall. Blood splatter.
7th scene
Dean and Sam careen over to the Miller’s house, Sam left weak and exhausted from what he has seen. He knows the truth now: it is Max he is connected to, not the house, not the Millers. Only Max. Sam looks like shit. His eyes are squinted up, as though he is battling a low-level migraine. Dean isn’t sure, should he be accepting Sam’s “visions” as actual clues? If he does so, then will that be admitting they are real? I mean, he doesn’t say that, but you can feel the resistance to actually DEALING with the visions.
Sam is confused. Why is he connected to Max. “Maybe because we’re so alike?” he says to Dean. This is a mistake. Dean says, “You guys are nothing alike.”
Sam says, “We both have psychic abilities, we’re both –” He trails off, and Dean says, “You’re both what?” Sam doesn’t answer, and I love that he doesn’t answer. He could have been about to say “we’re both freaks,” but it may very well be something else. Something worse. “We’re both trapped in our families,” for example. But Dean slams the door on that line of thought. “Max is a monster, he’s already killed two people.” Sam says it’s not “that insane”, after learning what Max went through in his life. Dean is not having any of that either. No Twinkie Defense for Dean Winchester. Who gives a shit if you were beaten, it sucks for you, it does not justify murdering your family.
Dean has a hard time with human beings when they do evil things. We’ll see that loud and clear in the episode after this one. Dean can understand demons, in a way. They’re evil because that’s how they are made. But people? When they go off the rails? And they have a choice to be good? People are worse than demons any day of the week. Dean cannot deal with it. There are a couple of moments through the whole series where Dean looks up at Sam, almost helpless, tapping into an ongoing conversation he has with himself, there’s a continuity in his remark: “Humans, man!”
Sam says, “We’re not going to kill Max, Dean.” Sam is almost quiet in his resistance, you would have to be pretty strong (and foolish) to fight him on it. Of course there is also the identification factor, which is coming more and more into play now for Sam, as much as Dean balks at it. Dean is pissed off. He wants to take Max down.
“He’s a PERSON, Dean. Promise me you’ll follow my lead on this one.”
Dean agrees, but still shoves a gleaming silver gun into the back of his jeans. It’s pretty brutal. Sam is upset. It’s not hard to understand why. Something is going ON with him with these visions, and how is Dean going to “take it”? Will Dean … shoot him in his sleep? Like … where is all of this going? Padalecki plays that wild confusion throughout the episode, he’s sweaty for most of it, he’s insistent and brave, he’s thoughtful and urgent … it’s a small tour de force performance. It so could have been “one note” but it’s not, not at all.
9th scene
A repeat of the Knife scene between the Xanax Top Chef and her stepson. As the knife hovers in the air, the door bursts open, and there stand Sam and Dean, the new priests from St. Augustine’s, making a violent house call.
Both Max and Stepmom are stunned at the intrusion, on multiple levels. I love Stepmom’s line: “Fathers?”
Plural.
Dean goes into a mode that is familiar for him: it’s not quite Batting Eyelashes (if you’ve read my re-caps you’ve read my thoughts on those, on Dean’s compulsive flirting with everyone and everything -yes, objects too), but it is along those lines. Not one word comes into his head once he has burst into the house, but he smiles at the two tortured individuals, hoping that the smile will smooth things out … somehow. “You’re … dark.” You know, sometimes Dean loses the plot of things and forgets how to behave.
Sam, however, never takes his eyes off Max, and asks if they can speak to him privately. Sam’s energy is friendly, cautious, and respectful. He gives Max the choice. Max is feeling very uneasy. And Dean is sort of smiling over Sam’s shoulder, a total tag-along to the ultra-serious moment. Sam makes it seem all right. “It’s private, we don’t want to bother your mother with it. It won’t take long.”
Max agrees and slowly, slowly, they all walk to the front door. As Dean opens the door, he throws a grin over his shoulder at Max, right into the camera (we are totally in Max’s point of view right now, so the camera lenses are different, there’s a slight distortion on the images, and in one crucial moment, everything slows down.) And Dean’s friendly grin just is not right, if you look at it through Max’s eyes. As the door swings open, Max gets a glimpse of the gleaming gun tucked into Dean’s pants, and suddenly, with a whoosh, the doorknob whips out of Dean’s hands, the door slamming shut. Then, in a great effect, all of the shutters in the front room and the kitchen swoop their slats shut, one, two, three, four, all around the rooms.
Dean goes to draw his gun, and it flies out of his hand. Max picks it up. The situation feels extremely dangerous. Max could do anything at any moment. It’s precarious.
The rest of the showdown takes place in the interior of the house. And the way it is lit makes it look like it has emerged directly from the subconscious. It doesn’t look like a “house”. It looks like a space for secrets dark and deep. The shadows loom in the corners. I don’t know about you, but my house doesn’t look like that, even on a dark day. It’s a deliberate choice on the part of the director and the team. The characters seem to be jutting out from the darkness behind them, the shadows wanting to claim them forever.
Lighting is thematic, too. Or it should be.
Stepmom moves towards Max, and suddenly she is whipped backwards, cracking her head on the side of the counter and falling to the floor. And see how every window having those slatted shutters gives the space a really noir look, dark, and moody, the eerie light coming through in small slits?
“You never know what’s going on behind closed doors,” murmured the kindly neighbor in the driveway. Nope. Nor through closed shutters. Houses are important in “Nightmare,” the way they conceal, the way they hide evil, the way they act as containers for secrets. Doors are closed in people’s faces, shutters slam shut, and whatever goes on inside can continue with impunity. That’s the feeling you get with lighting like that. It’s not naturalistic at all.
As Stepmom lies wiped out in her Noir Kitchen of Doom, Max is spiraling out of control, trembling, screaming at Sam and Dean, “WHO ARE YOU?”, the gun waving around. Dean is pretty much useless, it’s all he can do to stop himself from tackling the monster outright. Sam has to handle it.
And from here on out, it is the Jared Padalecki Show.
I’ve written before about the importance of Objective in acting. If I could list the three most important elements of acting, in order, “Emotion” would be third on the list.
The first two, in a tie, would be “Objective” and “Listening”. If you do both of those things, then the “Emotion” will follow automatically. It’s hard to explain why this is hard, but if any of you out there are actors, you will know what I am talking about. When teachers focus solely on “emotion”, having the actors learn how to cry, express rage, whatever … sometimes the practical stuff flies out the window, so you have actors who can cry, but have no idea how to play an objective. Which means they have NOTHING. Awesome, you can cry, but what the hell are you DOING in this scene, what do you WANT? Or, they are so busy focusing on producing tears, that they stop listening.
What is an objective? It could be: “I need something to eat right now.” It could also be: “I need to let this person know how much I care about them.” It could be: “I am going to get drunk. NOW.” Or it could be: “I am going to kill my stepmother.” Objectives are everywhere, small, large, and it is what the actor is DOING. (My acting teacher in grad school used to say: “Remember that the name of the job is ACT-or. Not FEEL-er.”)
When you the actor play an objective 100%, and you are faced with an actor opposite you who is also playing an objective 100% … that is when sparks fly, that is when the Magic happens. Because if it’s a good scene, then the objectives will compete. You may have as your objective, “I need something to eat from out of that fridge right now,” and your scene partner’s objective may be, “I must stop him from opening the fridge because it is filled with severed hands.” Or whatever. So one person is trying to open the fridge, the other person is determined that the fridge door stays closed, and if both people are playing those damn objectives? You don’t need to worry about Emotion at all. The Emotion comes from playing the objective.
This is Acting 101. But many people don’t know about the acting process, so I thought I’d share some of it, just in case you may wonder why I look at things the way I do.
What we see in this scene is a brilliant example of two powerfully-played competing objectives. (And you are only as good as your scene partner. If you want to open the fridge door, and your scene partner is only halfway playing their objective of KEEPING you from opening the fridge door – you’ll be acting alone. You’ll be stopping yourself from opening the fridge door, because the scene partner isn’t playing the objective hard enough. And that, my friends, is when scenes look bad. Additionally, writers have to think about Objective, too. If you’re trapped in a script where there are no objectives, it can often be a huge stumbling block to playing anything. What do I WANT in this scene?? I was in a horrible show years ago, horribly written, and I am a very good line-memorizer, one time reading through the script and I have most of it down, but I could not memorize the lines, they would not stay in my head. I was confident enough in myself as an actor to know what the problem was: This script sucks, these lines are terrible, no wonder they’re not sinking in.)
Everything in Story boils down to Objective.
So here we have Max, playing his objective as hard as he can: Keep these people trapped in this house until I can kill my Stepmother.
And we have Sam, playing his objective as hard as he can: Get through to Max.
There really isn’t anything more to be said. The proof is in the end result. Padalecki can only be as good as he is in these next couple of scenes because Fletcher is giving him so much to react against. Fletcher is playing his objective with every single fiber of his being.
And so Sam has to try different ways of playing his objective: Let me see if this gets through. Okay, no, that didn’t go over well. Let me tone it down a notch. Uh-oh. Not working. Okay, let me try THIS.
It’s world-class Objective-Playing.
Young actors: study it. Watch and learn. I mean, you should be doing that anyway. I love studying Objectives. I wrote about it before, with Jensen Ackles, and how good he is at objectives, both long-term (“I need to hide from my brother how afraid I am of going to Hell”), or short-term (“I need to get laid immediately.”) But here I just want to point out Padalecki’s gift at it as well, especially in this scene and the next one.
As Sam tries to talk Max down, telling him he had visions of Max doing these things, the chandelier above the Winchesters starts rattling.
Sam is almost like a hostage-negotiator here, or one of those guys who specialize in talking suicidal people off ledges. Sam knows that to to get what he wants, he has to get Dean out of there. So, with some difficulty, he convinces Max that Dean and Stepmom (still prostrate on the floor) can wait upstairs. Dean doesn’t like this at all. Of course if he hadn’t brought the gun in they wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. (Also, Dean wouldn’t get shot in the head in about 5 minutes. Death stalks Dean. Or, he courts Death. He races towards it. He’s almost died twice now in this season alone.)
Max has had moments with Sam before. Sam was the one who came over to talk to him at the wake. Sam was the one who smiled at his lame “joke” about “tuna casserole”. Sam is the one offering to help. So, after what feels like an eternity, Max agrees. Dean goes into the kitchen, and helps the Stepmom up.
I love the off-kilter perspective of this shot, it’s so disturbing and dark, the depth of frame.
10th scene
This scene begins with one of the really fun Supernatural edit choices. I mention that they don’t use “establishing shots” in a conventional way. An “establishing shot” does what it says it does: it establishes the “where” of any given scene, shows you the whole room, and shows you where the people are placed in said room, and then, methodically, as the scene goes on, the camera moves in, to medium shot (head and shoulders of characters), and closer in on to close-ups. That’s the conventional way and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s used so often because it works. It is an efficient way of imparting visual information to the audience.
Supernatural often holds off on giving establishing shots, sometimes we don’t see the whole room until mid-scene, which completely throws you off guard (even if you don’t know why). You can’t tell where people ARE. You are made to GUESS at the placement of characters. We can only guess by inference. I love this part of Supernatural, and it works mostly invisibly. Most of the time you don’t even notice it.
But this one is a fun cut. We see Dean help up Blonde Stepmom, all as Max continues to hold the gun on Sam in the hallway behind.
Then we cut to a closeup of an end table, with a pen knife slowly rising up, on its own and twirling around like a top. No people. No establishing shot. We don’t know where we are. We are only inferring. It is our entryway into the next scene. Look for how other TV shows use establishing shots. Most of them start off each scene with one. Supernatural doesn’t, and in that, Supernatural feels cinematic.
The twirling pen knife has something almost … playful about it. It looks almost funny.
Then we see Sam looking at the pen knife, anxious. We don’t know where Max is in the room, until Sam looks over at him. It is through such detailed building blocks, not showing us the placement of Max at first, that you get the Creep Factor. When we finally do see Max, he sits collapsed on the sofa, staring at the twirling pen knife. It’s a really cool and frightening effect.
The scene that follows is a logical continuation of what happened in the front hallway, and is more of the Competing Objectives Master Class. It’s practically a stalemate, both objectives are being played so strongly. You can see what Sam sees: he and Max really are connected. They really are so much alike. Dean will never see it. But we can.
Even with all of the stress and emotion, what is happening between these two people is clearly Truthful now. No more lies. No more dissembling. Sam knows everything. Max knows that Sam knows. Max stands, and pulls up his shirt, to show his torso covered in scars and horrible bruises. The beating never stopped. His dad beat him up last week. The look on Sam’s face when he sees this poor young man’s body is heart-stopping.
How can we say that what Max was doing, and wanted to do, was wrong? Sam would probably throttle Mr. Miller with his bare hands if the guy was still alive.
Max tells Sam that when he first discovered he could move things, “It was a gift. My whole life I was helpless. But now I had this.”
And now, many lines into the scene, we get our first establishing shot. A conventional-looking show would have started here, and then moved in close. Not Supernatural. We see the whole room, and Max, Sam, and a third character, that creepy whirling pen knife between them.
Max almost has to spit the lines out, his emotion is so tremendous and uncontrollable. Seriously, this guy is amazing.
Look at Padalecki’s face, listening to him.
You see what I mean about the importance of Listening. It is everything.
I hope this isn’t too technical but one other thing I want to mention: To save time, Supernatural often films these two-person scenes with two cameras running, one on one face, one on the other face. That’s not how it’s done normally. Or, it’s rare to film a scene like that. Most of the time, in order to control things better, shows will do one side of the exchange first, and then do the other side separately. Supernatural films them both at the same time. It makes a huge difference. It is why so many of the reaction shots seem so spontaneous, so lived-in, so off-the-cuff and real – because they are. They are not overly-planned “closeups”, they are images of someone who is actually listening to the actual other person in the scene that is actually going on.
Max says, “When my Dad used to look at me, there was hate in his eyes. Do you know what that feels like?”
And, important and revealing, Sam says, “No.”
There may have been all kinds of messed up things going on in his childhood and his Dad has many sins to answer for. But he did not look at Sam with hate. Or Dean. Sam admits that. It’s important and will come up later at the end of the episode.
Now we get into the Major Moment, where the Season-Wide Arc starts revealing itself like some huge awful inevitable chain. Max says, “He blamed me for everything, his job, my mom’s death.”
“Why would he blame you for your Mom’s death?” asks Sam.
Because Max’s mom died in his nursery in a fire while he was asleep in a crib. That’s why. And his Dad told some crazy story about how she died, burned up and pinned to the ceiling.
Sam tries, struggles, to take in this information, and he has no idea what it means, but it means something terrible, but this scene is not about what Sam FEELS, he can’t indulge in that: he realizes that now there is yet ANOTHER way for him to play his objective.
Sam tells Max that what happened to his Mom back then was real. Because it happened to Sam’s Mom in the very same way.
“Your abilities – they started 6 or 7 months ago out of the blue, right?”
“How did you know that?”
“Because that’s when my abilities started … For some reason … you and I were chosen.”
It’s an interesting word choice. Ominous. Prophetic.
There’s a trembling here of a breakthrough in understanding. A glimmer that maybe Sam has gotten through. You can feel it almost change. But Max is too far gone. What was done to him was too awful. To know his Stepmom got away with it and was still alive … No. “What they did to me … I still have nightmares. I’m afraid all the time. I’m just waiting for the next beating.”
Seriously, I almost want to turn the TV off, it’s too much, what he’s doing.
He gets up, shattering the equilibrium of the moment, and Sam follows.
“The nightmares won’t end, Max, not like this,” says Sam, and he’s talking to himself as well. The connections are so clear between them, as well as where they diverge. It’s life or death that he gets through to Max. Because then maybe there will be hope for him too. Sam isn’t present to that intellectual stuff, not at the moment, he is too busy playing his objective, because that’s what you do in a life-or-death moment.
Max breaks the moment, and Sam is flung into a nearby closet, the doors slamming (and of course they have slats too, it’s the look of the episode), and then a huge cabinet swoops across the room to land in front of the closet doors. Sam, trapped inside, loses his shit, screaming for Max at the top of his lungs.
And that, people, is how you play an Objective. Take notes.
11th scene
As Dean ministers to Stepmom in an upstairs room, pressing a washcloth against her head, after probably giving her a couple of downers, the door swings open on its own, and there’s no one there, not at first. Max then appears, and we see into the room from behind Max, Dean standing up beside the bed to meet the threat. The framing is great, with that really low camera placement again. You know you’re in a horror movie when you see a camera on the floor.
Dean starts forward towards Max but then is flung back, through the air, where he crashes into the wall onto the floor. Like a rag doll, like he weighs nothing. As Dean tries to get to his feet, muttering his favorite curse word (at least in the world of network television), “Son of a bitch …” Max draws out the gleaming gun, and the Stepmom says, in her “checked out” Xanax voice, “Max!” You can just FEEL her disengagement from reality in where she places her voice. I’m sure she married Jim Miller, and had nothing but contempt for the son her new husband brought into the marriage. Max was probably not a cute child, was awkward, needy, damaged, and not ingratiating. She married Jim, and treated Max like an annoyance, a creepy little kid raining on her perfect parade.
Max points the gun at Dean, and Dean, face hard, strolls right towards it. He does this a couple of times in the series, and it’s so … hot? Is that the word? It’s insanely brave, and also insanely reckless. Whoever he’s up against, especially if it’s a human, he knows he’s better at fighting than they are. He’s more comfortable with guns than they are. He is the Alpha here, nobody else, let me walk right towards that gun because this douchebag will be too freaked out to do anything about it, and voila, I’ll grab it right out of their hands and whack them upside the head. But here, suddenly, Max lets go of the gun and it hovers in the air, still pointing at Dean.
How cheesy could this floating gun thing have been? And it’s not at all. It feels like a real three-dimensional object floating in real space.
The gun cocks itself in mid-air, and floats around to point at Stepmom. Dean tries to intervene, and the gun points back at Dean.
Max says, and it’s a warning, “Stay back. This isn’t about you.”
But Dean Winchester don’t play that way. It also, if you think about it, IS about him. It’s about his family. We then get a huge closeup of the guy, face half in shadow half in light, stubble, freckles, no fancy-tricky-glamorous-TV lighting, it feels natural, and gritty, his face filling the screen. “You want to kill her you have to go through me first.”
Max says, “Okay.” We see the trigger pulled back, and then, horribly, the wall behind Dean is splattered with blood all the way up to the ceiling. I love how smoke rises out of the hovering gun in mid-air.
I am now remembering my first reaction when I saw this, the first time. I mean, obviously, I knew Dean would live, he was in the next episode, and it’s not automatically clear that this is one of Sam’s visions. The screen didn’t static or white-out when Sam was in the closet – it’s a clean cut. So they’re tricking us, essentially. Like all good horror films do. So you think you’re seeing something that is actually going down, and something about the way the blood flies up on the wall, Dean’s blood … it was terrible. The camera then pans down and we see Dean lying on the floor, a bloody hole in his head, and his eyes are open and dead. (I’ll eventually get to how awesome Ackles is at that most difficult acting challenge: dying with your eyes open. How do you make your life/soul/essence drain out of your eyes?? While the camera is on you? Jim Beaver has talked about how difficult it is. It’s way easier to “play dead” when you can close your damn eyes. How do you force the life OUT of your eyes? Ackles can do it great.)
The scene statics and whites out and we are back with Sam, trapped in the closet.
Dead Dean is still before him, and we now know that what we just saw was a vision. Sam screams, “NOOOO” in protest, and suddenly, as he screams, the huge cupboard against the closet door flies out of the way.
Uh-oh. Sam’s a spoon-bender now, too.
Dean’s gonna flip.
Back upstairs, we see the beginning of the scene again, the floating gun pointing at Stepmom and Dean saying “Go through me first.” Sam bursts through the door at that moment, and everyone stands as if posing for a portrait, the gun floating, Max looking down. Look how Dean’s arm is out across the Wicked Stepmom. That protective thing again. That protective arm. Lady, however bad you may have been in life, Imma let you finish and take a bullet for you, cause that’s what I’m about.
Sam says, “Max. What you’re doing. It’s not the solution. It’s not going to fix anything.”
Max stares at Sam. The anguish. I mean, what could be done to help this poor human being? What could ever take away that look on his face?
I’m over-identifying, I suppose. Hard not to with a performance this invested. Max says, “You’re right,” and for a second Sam looks relieved, but that is before the gun swings around and shoots Max in the head. Sam can’t stop it. It happens too quickly.
12th scene
Later that night, the cops have arrived. Stepmom, a bandage on her head, answers questions in the living room and her tone of voice makes her sound like an automaton. I have a feeling she’ll be “checking out” permanently, via overdose of sleeping pills, and soon.
Sam and Dean hover over to the side, surrounded by the blackness of the room, listening. They seem to emerge from the darkness. They are filmed slightly from below, which, again, makes them seem … strange. As, indeed, they are.
You can see the cop glancing over at the two of them, wondering about them. Something doesn’t quite sit well with the cop, and that is often the case when anyone in law enforcement questions the Winchesters. The cops can’t quite put their finger on it. But … wait … who are these two guys again?
Beth Broderick does some really good work here. She falls apart. “I’ve lost everyone!” she sobs. When emotions come for this checked-out messed-up woman, it is self-pity that comes first. Isn’t that usually the way. Dean looks a tiny bit grossed out at her display, and Sam keeps staring at her, impassive. Dean almost has to nudge Sam away from the scene.
As they head back out to the Impala, Sam goes to the Guilt Place again, wishing he had gotten there sooner. Dean makes a great point, “Yeah, maybe if we’d gotten there twenty years earlier …” It acknowledges the LEVEL of damage going on with Max. How do you recover from 20 years of hard abuse? Two days in his presence wasn’t going to change anything. Dean’s point is: You risked your life for him, don’t do that, don’t take this on. Dean doesn’t know yet that Max’s mother died in the same horrible supernatural way. Sam hasn’t had a chance to fill him in yet.
Once at the Impala, a small quiet scene goes down between the brothers. It’s simple, revealing, and very well-written.
Sam says, “I’ll tell you one thing. We’re lucky we had Dad.”
Dean isn’t even sure he heard that right. It literally stops him in his tracks. It’s endearing somehow. “I never thought I’d hear you say that,” says Dean. He almost looks like a weight has been lifted off his shoulders.
Sam says, “It could have gone a whole other way after Mom. A little more tequila, a little less demon-hunting, we would have had Max’s childhood. All things considered, we turned out okay. Thanks to him.”
No. Thanks to each other. Not thanks to him. But it’s not time for that yet. It’s a start, though.
It’s a lovely little scene. Dean likes what Sam just said. It makes him … feel good to hear Sam say those words. He doesn’t want to walk around thinking he had a “cursed” “dark” family. (“You’re … dark.”) He can’t deal with life if he’s forced to turn a cold or critical eye on his father. He just cannot do it. But he also needs Sam to be in sync. As long as Sam keeps fighting it, Dean can’t really relax. (This is the “are we okay? We good?” thing that Dean often has going on, with Sam and with others. I talked about it in the “Wendigo” re-cap.)
13th scene
Back at the motel: Sam has obviously filled Dean in on what Max shared. Dean is back to normal now, after the openness at the Impala about “all things considered”. Normal for Dean means: he’s brusque, efficient, somewhat sarcastic, and refuses to freak out. Of course he is totally freaking out, but the cover-up is back in place. They’re packing up their things, getting ready to take off.
Sam says, “Dean. I’ve been thinking–” and Dean says, “That’s never a good thing,” and he glances over at Sam, and look at his body language. I’m sure this was unconscious on some level, but it’s like Dean is trying to get away from Sam, without seeming like he is trying to get away. Can your body tilt away from your brother at any more of an angle, Dean?
Dean is such an emotional hot-mess that it is important to remember that this guy finances their living scamming others at poker and pool. He knows how to lie when he needs to (and it’s interesting to track when Dean is a bad liar and when he is a good one). It’s not for Sam to know how freaked out he is by the situation because Sam is freaked out enough. Sam needs Dean to be strong and casual and Fix-It, and so that’s what we’re getting here.
But the body language is a “tell”.
Sam wonders if the Demon that killed Mom, that killed Jess, that killed Max’s Mom … Sam wonders if maybe the Demon was coming for HIM, for some reason? Without even knowing it, he’s getting close. It seems incredible at this stage in the game, literally it seems beyond belief … but if you’ve seen the series then you know that’s exactly what was going on. Sam had said the word “chosen”. It FEELS that way. Was he CHOSEN for something? Was Max? Their abilities … both starting at the same time … what does it mean?
Sam sounds here just like he’s trying to spitball ideas or theories, and naturally he’s met with a brick wall from his brother. Chosen for what? Come on, man. “Sam, if it wanted you, it would have just taken you. It’s not your fault. This isn’t about you.” An echo of what Max said to Dean earlier. But it will be: it will be about both Dean, and Sam. They both seem to know it. They’re resisting it though. I mean, hell, wouldn’t you?
Sam says, “There’s one more thing.”
Dean is near the end of his rope with the Confession Hour, he’s almost at the rolling-eyes stage of all of the revelations coming at him. “Oh, God. What.”
Sam confesses that he “moved” the cabinet out of the way with his mind. Dean doesn’t respond, not right away. It’s bad news for both of them. Dean’s got the poker-face on, and then reaches for a spoon, holding it out to Sam: “Bend this.”
Sam balks. He’s almost offended. It’s not something he can turn on and off. The moment in the closet just came out of him, “like a punch.” He’s not gonna bend a fucking spoon.
Dean is looking over at Sam. We saw this look a couple of times in “Home”. He’s uneasy. He’s scared. He’s helpless. We so rarely see him look like this, and it’s unsettling. He’s a Fix It guy and he doesn’t know how to fix this.
Sam says, “Aren’t you worried? Aren’t you worried I could turn into Max?”
That will be the question, Sam. Get used to sitting with it. Dean, though, finishing up his packing, is back to his Tough Guy self, saying, “No way.”
“Why?”
“Cause you got one advantage Max didn’t have.”
“Dad? Cause Dad’s not here, Dean.”
Dean slings on his Dad’s over-sized leather jacket, and says, grinning, “No. Me.”
Which actually IS the truth of the matter, and it actually has been their saving grace, and it will also be their downfall many times over. The tragic flaw. The dynamic between them that started out for very good reasons when they were children has now outlasted its usefulness by, oh, two decades at the point of Season 9? And it is the thing that has ruined Dean’s life.
Dean says, easy, comfortable now, no more right-angle-tilting-of-body, “As long as I’m around, nothing bad will ever happen to you.”
Dean is not only back to normal, but he is back to his Super-Sized “I am the Star of My Own Awesome Movie” persona. The uneasy moment has past. He walks up to Sam, and the two stand in the open doorway of the motel, in a beautiful and moody shot. We have the interior, we have the brothers, we have the Impala, we also have a depth of frame, including the neon Vacancy sign and the Motel sign, plus the darkness beyond.
Dean says he knows what to do next about Sam’s premonitions, he knows where they need to go. He is total deadpan. You think Dean may actually have a helpful suggestion, but when Sam asks, “Where?” Dean says, “Vegas.”
Sam huffs out of the room to the car, offended, what, you think I’m Rainman now? I’m trying to talk to you seriously about something that scares me, and this is what I get? Dean follows, saying, “What?? The crap tables, you, me …” shutting the door behind him.
The episode could have ended there. It would have been satisfying, I guess, but a little bit of a cutesy dead end. It wouldn’t have launched us into the next episode, it wouldn’t have kept that other Arc alive.
We have one tiny moment to go in “Nightmare”, one final moment when Dean closes the door, where we zoom in on his face, in the midst of his Vegas joking, and he stops, and we see, flickering like phosphorescence, like heat lightning, the anxiety underneath.
Because, you see, it’s been set up. The burden of Dean’s personality is placed on him by his father, and by his brother, that’s true. They expect him to be a certain way. I would also suggest that it is something innate in Dean. The eldest son thing. It existed before his world fell apart, it was born in him. We saw how 4-year-old Dean comforted his mother when she was upset in “Heaven’s Door”. He knew what to do, Mom was crying, she needed a hug. Dean was born this way, he wasn’t made this way. But it is reinforced by Dad and Sam. And even if Sam rebels against it, he still confides in Dean in a “what are we going to do about this??” way. As long as Dean isn’t worried, you feel safe. So Sam and Dad do that to Dean, they always have, and Dean doesn’t just “play along”. It is his life, his personality. But there is another group of people who do that to Dean, and that’s the audience of the show. Dean is its moral center. Often Sam is our “way in,” but Dean is the core. And wanting Dean to be happy, okay, safe, is a major major part of how the show works on its audience. And the show denies us that satisfaction time and time again.
If the episode had ended with Dean heading out to the car, joking, “What?? Let’s go to Vegas, man, and get you to the crap tables …” we all would feel safe out there watching, because Dean was joking and Dean wasn’t worried. His viewpoint carries that kind of weight.
“Nightmare” doesn’t end with a big grim cliffhanger, like an 18-wheeler smashing into the Impala, for instance, or Meg making a phone call using blood from a slashed throat.
But Dean’s sudden heat-lightning flicker of anxiety, endured privately while standing at the door of the motel, before going to join his little brother in the Impala, is a cliffhanger in its own way. It will move us forward. It keeps us worried.
Yay! Another one! I have nothing smart to say, but I will say thank you again for doing these :)
You’re welcome!!
Hey Sheila! Been reading your recaps since you started putting them out and they are fantastic! I cannot express how much I love them! and being a huge Dean girl and major fan of Jensen Ackles work I especially love your commentary on him. C
I did have a question or perhaps just a thought about one part of your review for this episode. Hopefully this wont sound too ‘tinhatty’. I should perhaps preface this by saying that I cannot stand the character of John Winchester (although JDM does an excellent job). I truly believe he was abusive (if not physically, which I will get to) definitely in every other way. Particularly to Dean.
The part of the review that gave me pause was this…
“Sam says, “I’ll tell you one thing. We’re lucky we had Dad.”
Dean isn’t even sure he heard that right. It literally stops him in his tracks. It’s endearing somehow. “I never thought I’d hear you say that,” says Dean. He almost looks like a weight has been lifted off his shoulder”
I had a totally different take on this. Look at Dean’s face from Dark Side of the Moon here and here You cannot convince me (or maybe you can…you are pretty awesome) that John did not abuse Dean. (not sure if I linked those correctly…newbie here) =)
So when I watched this scene from Nightmare I guess I saw it through a different lens. To me Dean did not look relieved, his face looked blank as Sam was saying ” little more tequila…” and for someone as expressive as Dean/Jensen, he seemed to be hiding/repressing something. And when Sam said ‘thanks to him (john)’ I thought I saw an expression of hurt on Dean’s face. He then looks away from Sam and when he looks back his face has changed from the blank slate it was a minute ago and he half halfheartedly agrees with Sam. I for one was not convinced. I don’t know…I am not expressing this very well. Ignore me.
Sorry for that jumbled mess of thoughts. Thanks so much for doing these recaps! They are so insightful and entertaining!
Stevie – Thanks so much for reading, and also adding a comment to the mix. I appreciate it!
I agree with you that Dean was abused by John. I think at this point, though, he’s still in the Cult of Personality set up by abusive situations – and if he admits how bad it was with Dad … he’d be lost.
But I like your interpretation a lot of what’s going on with Dean at that moment at the Impala. I like it better than mine. There’s definitely something interesting going on there – a hesitation, a stunned thing – but your interpretation goes deeper than mine. I will have to watch it again and see what I see.
So, just throwing this out there: Maybe as long as Sam is the critical one of their childhood, Dean gets to play a familiar role – the Fix It It Wasn’t So Bad guy – and if Sam changes that dance step, maybe Dean will be abandoned. He’ll be forced to actually LOOK at how he was treated.
AND if Sam says “it wasn’t so bad” then Dean will be forced to say, “The HELL it wasn’t.” Because, of course, slowly, over the course of the next couple of seasons, Dean comes to terms with how bad it was for him – and how much he took from Dad. It has ruined him. He’s not there yet during “Nightmare”, but maybe that moment you’re sensing at the Impala is sort of the start of something.
But he’s just so not used to it … it is extremely threatening for him to question how he was raised. Dad is inside him. The lack of self-worth, all that … if he turns on Dad, he will be out in the wilderness.
I also think definitely that we are meant to make a connection between the abuse Max endured to what went on in the Winchester family. The identification factor is huge. We don’t know yet what really happened – and in “Something Wicked” we get our first real glimpse, and it is devastating. Especially because Dean has internalized his Dad’s treatment of him – he can’t see yet how unfair it was.
And on some level, he still can’t. He’s still defending Dad in Season 9 in “Bad Boys”!!
Poor guy. He’s the one who needs to be deprogrammed from the Cult of Winchester.
Thanks again for reading – and for reading so carefully! I love discussing this show!!
I should have read your comment before posting mine Stevie! I felt like Dean had a few simultaneous things going on there. Sheila I think you’re pretty close: when Sam expresses something positive about their upbringing it gives Dean permission to critique, in the extremely limited way he is capable of at this stage.
This episode also reverberates through season two from Croatoan to Playthings, when Sam and Dean are grappling with the idea that Sam might be/turn into a monster, and that Dean will have to deal with that by killing him. How completely they reverse their positions: Sam asks Dean to kill him, and Dean refuses to entertain it.
Yeah, it’s a real switcheroo from Sam, and it knocks Dean off his stride a bit. He’s still not ready to lambast Dad, way too threatening, but … something is stirred up here (and his face in darkness looking back at the Miller house, as you pointed up – such a great stylistic detail. Nothing is irrelevant on this show!)
And I love those long long Arcs that Supernatural pulls off, on occasion – so much is being set up in Season 1, before they even knew they’d still be going strong in Season 4, Season 5 – it really ties well together.
It’s pretty astounding how many balls they kept in the air and how neatly they caught them. In this very episode, playing the John Winchester long con. It’s still paying dividends!
I know!! I imagine they have a whole wall of associations in the writers’ room – pinned up like the Winchesters pin up clues for their cases – to keep these Long Arcs up in the air and working.
They don’t miss much. They come back to stuff, sometimes years after it’s introduced. It’s a lot to handle.
Also (sorry…me again…) the comment from Sam about if John had drank more (implying he was not a heavy drinker) does not seem to ring true for me. In the pilot we have this exchange between Dean and Sam in the pilot.
Dean:
“Um. Dad hasn’t been home in a few days.”
Sam:
“So he’s working overtime on a Miller Time shift. He’ll stumble back in sooner or later.”
But much more telling is this convo between young Sam and young Amy in 7×03
Amy:
“Yeah, well, she has a temper. Sometimes. It’s… no big deal.”
Sam:
“My dad does, too. You don’t want to see him when he’s drinking.”
I think maybe there are levels of drinking. John may have gone on periodic benders – and the text supports that – but he didn’t check out entirely. He had his shit together enough to keep Hunting.
However bad it was, it wasn’t as bad as what went on in the Millers.
Also, I think it’s so key that Sam and Dean had each other – and THAT was what made the difference. Not how Dad raised them. They turned out well (“all things considered”) in SPITE of Dad, and BECAUSE they had each other.
So, if there were a scene where Sam and Dean put on ties and then cleaned their guns…
That sounds like the start of some slash fanfic. “Dean is a pre-op transexual vegan cosmetologist working her way through college delivering pizzas and Sam has a hankering for something with lots of hot pepperoni…”
Oh wait, would a real vegan deliver pepperoni? How unrealistic.
You had a lot of fun writing this up, what with Roger Miller (no “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd” references?) and Blunted Affected Step Mom.
//“Dean is a pre-op transexual vegan cosmetologist working her way through college delivering pizzas and Sam has a hankering for something with lots of hot pepperoni…”//
Ha! You forgot to put the obligatory ‘closet’ in there somewhere. ;-)
// So, if there were a scene where Sam and Dean put on ties and then cleaned their guns… //
Well, that would just be unfair. There’s only so much I can take.
Roger Miller. hahahahaha. I love him.
// Sam has a hankering for something with lots of hot pepperoni… //
Don’t we all, Sam, don’t we all.
“Cleaning their guns” sounds too much like a euphemism from a Farrelly Brothers movie. Dean used the “should have cleaned the pipes” comment when Jo rubbed up against him in “No Exit” when they were in a tight passage (!) looking for the ghost. I liked that she hit him after she processed it. And put me on the “I miss Jo” team.
Love Jo so much, and love that moment. How openly he acknowledges what’s going on, embarrassed. Hahaha. Such a funny line.
Jo with her wad of cash, renting the apartment. She’s a terrific character and I miss her. That female presence on the show as well. These guys need it!
It’s funny to me that while reading your recap/analysis I identified with Max/Brendan Fletcher. Certainly not from child abuse, but for a different set of reasons.
I mentioned in the “Faith” thread that I had joined a Pentecostal church in my 20’s. As part of wanting to evangelize, I joined the drama group at the church. I really enjoyed acting in the skits that we wrote. The director/leader was a very good looking guy (now on his fifth marriage. If a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, I wonder what a fifth is), as was another of the guys in the group. I was usually the comedy relief nerd. But I could identify with Brendan in terms of acting with some very good looking guys. It takes some serious chops to pull our eyes off Dean and Sam, and he really does it. As you and Jessie mention, he is so raw and bruised that you ache for him even with the terrible power that he has.
I thought I would enjoy and be able to act because I enjoy public speaking. I’m normally an unsociable person, but I enjoy getting in front of a group and explaining something or convincing them of something. Playing an objective. I don’t think I ever thought of acting in those terms though. I wish I had your comments way back then. Not for any career change reasons, just so I could have been better at what I was doing. I do really like hearing about the mechanics of acting, so please keep putting that in your posts!
Mutecypher – wow, thank you so much for sharing that! So deep, so interesting.
I too get a huge empathetic response to Max. It’s hard not to.
And yes: “chops”, you’re right: if you look like Brendan Fletcher to think/know: “I have as much right to the screen, to an acting career, as these hot guys do.” That’s the thing with good character actors. Brave. You need to get over thinking that “acting” is about being handsome and sexy. It’s not. Self-esteem issues can’t play a part in it. One of my acting teachers in college said to a fat woman in our class, who was upset that she would never play the sexy leading lady roles – and she felt bad about her weight – and he was pretty rough on her. “Either lose the weight so you can play the parts you want to play or accept that you are a character actress and be the best actress you can be.” Obviously there is unfairness in casting – why can’t someone fat play a leading lady role? You can certainly set out to change people’s opinions about what kinds of roles you should get. But before you can do ANY of that, you have to accept and be okay with who you are. That same acting teacher said to her, “You sound like a violin crying that they are not a piano.” hahaha It all sounds meaner than it was – she actually got a lot out of it, and he really gave her confidence in her TALENT and let her know: “If you want it, there is a place for you in this business. It will be hard. But there is a place for you. But you can’t feel bad about what you look like. You have to just put it out there.”
Professional people don’t waste time wishing they were someone else. They go out and be themselves and hope someone casts them.
Some really good lessons for all actors! Or, hell, people in general.
// I enjoy getting in front of a group and explaining something or convincing them of something. //
That’s it exactly!!
Playing an objective is the funnest part of acting. I will certainly keep sharing stuff like that if it comes up – I just thought it was so applicable to how JP was playing those scenes!
//Some really good lessons for all actors! Or, hell, people in general.//
Preach it, sister! Can I get an amen?
Yes – an Amen, preferably without a Reaper right on its heels!
//All of this was then completely ignored forevermore. We are, apparently, meant to forget it ever happened. //
If this is still bothering you, Sheila, I know of a couple of new priests (hot, if a little violent) over at St Augustine’s who may be able to help you deal with your grief. Just lay on a plate of hotdogs for the short one.
Love the way the priest thing steadily backfires over the course of the episode. ‘What are you, missionaries?’ – I’m sorry, makes me laugh every time (in what is basically a build up to someone’s violent death. Sorry, lost that moral compass down the back of this sofa somewhere.) And by the end of the episode they’ve forgotten they were ever priests thing, so that when they bust through the door Mrs Xanax says, ‘Fathers?’, it’s a complete bust. That tiny moment when you see them remember, ‘Shit, we’re supposed to be priests!’ hilarious. Sam’s hands automatically come together in that priestly gesture, Dean’s face jerks into that faux-beatific smirk. So Father Ted.
// Sam’s hands automatically come together in that priestly gesture, Dean’s face jerks into that faux-beatific smirk. //
hahahahahahaha
“Fathers?”
It kills me.
// Sorry, lost that moral compass down the back of this sofa somewhere. //
I know, me too.
Ugh, MAX. What a combo of acting and direction and makeup. I too find him hard to look at sometimes. His physicality, how boneless he is on that sofa at the end, the almost lolling way he walks into the bedroom. Fletcher’s obviously been working consistently for a long time but I can’t imagine him playing a character in equilibrium! And Boderick, too. I love her voice, it’s so sonorous and scratchy at the same time.
Except he never undresses for sleep.
In Dark Side of the Moon they are asleep fully clothed with their boots still on. What a life.
Lovely note on the lighting and claustrophobia of this episode.
Dean and food! It begins. Trying to talk with that little sausage (oh man) in his mouth. Ridiculous. Sam trying to pull on his reins in these “trying to get on the good side of strangers” scenes is also a hilarious and ongoing theme.
Ha ha what is that green laser thing? It looks so out of place. It looks like the X Files. Get out of here laser thing. Great note on touching the table, never noticed that.
Everything you say about JP is spot on. He is stunning in this episode. The fear in his voice on the line “it’s never been us”; the drive in his run to stop Roger getting into the building, how he makes his huge body soft and non-confrontational. Great episode for him.
There’re like three or four brotherly moments in this episode when Sam is freaking out about a new revelation and Dean does this deadpan almost-mocking of it to kind of defuse all the feelings. And it doesn’t make Sam happy or even calm him down much, but you can see him reacting to the “hey everything might weird but I’m still your obnoxious brother it’s okay it’s okay” vibe of it. It’s nice writing and well-played.
The end of this episode reminds me of Bugs, because of the moral the guys learn — and in Bugs the show presents it pretty straight — about how their Dad could have been worse, all told he did right by us etc. But here it’s undercut by a couple of things. Walking back to the car after Max’s death, and Sam goes “all things considered, blah blah,” and Dean looks back towards the house and his face is in shadow — I find that and his reading of “all things considered” pretty ambiguous, although I agree with you that he’s also relieved.
The other thing is that jacket, which illustrates EXACTLY who was doing the caretaking.
They expect him to be a certain way. I would also suggest that it is something innate in Dean.
I would disagree. I tend to resist this idea of innateness especially in children so young, especially when it comes to Dean and caretaking. There’s a great meta by amonitrate on tumblr, I will try and find a link but tumblr is impossible, about that scene, and about how when children see their parents upset, it makes them anxious, and the comfort they offer is actually a way of relieving their own anxiety. So it’s kind of naturalising Dean’s Caretakerliness at the expense of his emotional wellbeing. Offering comfort to a parent (cf Dean looking after John when he got home from a hunt) and being called an angel, and the reward of pie, that whole scene is kind of tilling the earth for what comes later.
The little button at the end. It’s Sam’s episode, but we end again, on Dean. We’ve talked about this before. But it’s another moment in the transition to Dean’s POV on the Question Of Sam.
Great write-up Sheila, thanks!
I love that Fletcher works consistently – he’s always working. I am not at all surprised. He’s amazing!
Right – two laser beams? No. Give me the homemade-walkman EMF please.
// how he makes his huge body soft and non-confrontational. //
I love that observation – Yes!! JP is aware of how he comes across – I’m sure he got that tall pretty early in his life, so he knows how to deal with it and present himself in different ways. He can be imposing, he can also turn that off and seem friendly and gentle. Really good work.
I agree that all the brothers stuff is really well-written here (unlike in “Bugs” – our benchmark for Obviousness). It’s explicit, but there’s that subtext too – it’s not on-the-nose. The way they are acting strikes me as very much “in character” – you’re not going to just be totally open about your fears. You’re going to look to the other for assurance, or try to put on a brave face. That’s all going on for both of them.
I am re-thinking my interpretation of that final moment at the Impala. I love the look back to the house – his face in shadow. You can’t see what’s going on with him at all – totally ambiguous. It’s like his own past. The depths have been stirred for Sam, for sure, in this episode – but for Dean as well. That “house” represents their childhood as well – Dean will be slower to acknowledge all of that. But yeah, it’s being stirred up here. He doesn’t like it at all.
// about how when children see their parents upset, it makes them anxious, and the comfort they offer is actually a way of relieving their own anxiety. So it’s kind of naturalising Dean’s Caretakerliness at the expense of his emotional wellbeing. //
Most definitely. It’s very sad. Sam sees that, sees what his brother had to deal with, while Dean is still in automatic mode – Mom is crying, I have to go hug her. He got all of that head-on in his childhood.
Nature/Nurture is an interesting conversation and is certainly swirling about in the subtext of Supernatural. Also: who the guys “take after”. I’m still thinking about all of that!! Mary turns out to be a badass hunter, but she’s a woman, therefore has that soft/empathetic/give thing (in the Winchester world, anyway) – and you think at first that Dean is a carbon copy of Dad, with the clothes and the music and the Tough Guy – but then you see how much he is like his mother. Maybe John hated Dean for that – Dean would be a constant reminder of his own loss.
Which then makes his using Dean as sexual bait for vampires even sicker.
I guess the “innate” comment from me was put a little awkwardly – my point really was that it pre-dates Mom’s death. Dean was already soaking up the vibes around him and caretaking everybody before that event. If Sam had been the eldest son, he would have done that as well. It’s kind of part of the deal.
If you can find that Tumblr link, that would be great! Sounds interesting!
And yeah, I love that final close-up at the motel door. It’s both obvious and subtle at the same time. It keeps that tension going!
ok, I found it: here, re: this gifset.
ahhh you know how much I love the “who they take after” equations!
my point really was that it pre-dates Mom’s death. Dean was already soaking up the vibes around him and caretaking everybody before that event.
Well put! Yeah. “Long as I’m around, nothing bad is going to happen to you.” Oh cool, that’s nice.
Okay that last Gif is making me roar. hahahahaha
Thanks for the Tumblr link – will check out!
Dean’s face when he says “It’s okay, Mom.”
JA is so good – there’s almost a blank-ness there, a nothing-ness. Of course he’s re-enacting a memory, but there’s also that automatic feeling – so touching and also disturbing. He looks so … empty.
Shelley must have watched the season 3 finale just before filming that scene.
Yeah, that blankness is a really interesting choice. Kind of childlike, uncertain. Happiest memory, really? I don’t know if Ash told us the full picture there. That conception of Heaven is pretty disturbing on the whole.
I want to hang out with Pamela at the Meadowlands. It’s a 10 minute drive from me after all.
I mean, I want to hang out with Pamela, in general.
But yeah: happy memory? Maybe it’s where he knew who he was the most. Comforting Mom. He was 4 years old – how much would he actually remember of her? Bits and pieces. That one stands out.
But the way JA plays it – as often happens with him – undercuts our certainty of what we are actually seeing. He looks so un-formed.
//I find that and his reading of “all things considered” pretty ambiguous, although I agree with you that he’s also relieved. //
I’m in the ‘ambiguous’ camp … from way Dean repeats ‘all things considered,’ with that little shrug and turn towards the house, the lighting. He doesn’t smile. There’s a semi-return of the hawk-like stare from the end of ‘Asylum.’ There’s a kind of ‘get you, now’ roll of the eyes.
And Sam is delivering the mother of back-handed compliments here. Dad didn’t beat us up everyday! Yeay! But it’s that phrase he uses – ‘all things considered’ that turns a ‘what have we learned’ moment, into something more ambivalent. It hangs in the air between them. What does it means for Sam? Whatever it means, Dean instinctively senses Sam is leaving him out of the parental picture here, or lumping him in with ‘all things considered’. Given Dean basically raised Sam, this expression of gratitude to dad maybe sounds very ungrateful to him.
Sam is good at saying thank you. He does it again and again to Dean, sincerely. So this is odd. And Dean is not going to ask for thanks here, or say that, all things considered, Sam should be grateful to him rather than Dad – that would destabilise the image of Dad he clings to now. But it’s odd, and hurtful, that Sam has somehow missed something so important in the family picture, and why it’s different to Max’s. Dean, for his own sake as much as Sam’s, has to remind him of it explicitly in the final scene. Sam actually says, ‘Dad’s not here’ to protect him. And Dean says, putting on Dad’s jacket, but I am. Sam is still fixed on the idea of ‘redeemed’ Dad as the protector in the family. Dean sees himself as acting ‘in loco parentis.’ But he is, and was, the parent, rather than the poor substitute. Um, does any of that make sense? I feel I’m rambling a bit.
// Dean instinctively senses Sam is leaving him out of the parental picture here, or lumping him in with ‘all things considered’. //
Nice.
The moment is far more interesting than I first picked up on. I like it.
So then Dean, slinging on Dad’s jacket, is kind of reminding him – see? I’m Dad. I’m the one. I’m important.
This is why Sam “abandoning” Dean in Season 9 – leaving him up against himself – is so horrible for Dean (and yet healthy! Dean needs it.)
Sure, very healthy! In a way that renders you a gaunt, bestubbled, insomniac, devious, chronic alcoholic junkie!
No, seriously.
I really, really want Dean shuck all that family history of crap, and be his own person, as long as that person is not a fratricidal maniac, and I hope the series goes there and lets this happen.
However, I ain’t bettin’ on it.
// Sure, very healthy! In a way that renders you a gaunt, bestubbled, insomniac, devious, chronic alcoholic junkie! //
hahahahahaha
With periodic hairnets!
I know. SPN, bringing the Good Times since 2005!
It is definitely going to get way way worse before it gets better!
Dean needs to knock someone up.
He needs a baby in his life to take care of. Maybe he should adopt. Hahaha. Like he would ever pass muster.
Dean, I realize you live and die by the “no glove no love” rule. But bend those rules, let one slip by (preferably not with an Amazon), and get yourself a baby.
I am speaking out of mere desperation at this point. I can’t take much more of this. I have no other defense.
//It is definitely going to get way way worse before it gets better!//
Excellent! Bring it on!
//Dude, I realize you live and die by the “no glove no love” rule. //
Dean, setting a GOOD example there, actually.
Maybe he do the same sort of job as Sonny. He’s good with kids. Especially haunted kids. He could be a supernatural social worker.
Right – Sonny. Something like that. The way he was with that little pipsqueak boy in “Bad Boys”? Heartcracking. He’s good at it – and it doesn’t have all of that trauma attached to it.
And then he can hook up again with the woman who runs the diner nearby … and get his necklace back … and, I don’t know, drive a freakin’ tractor. Something along those lines.
… all of which just goes to show how well SPN works.
I am worried about a fictional character and flailing about trying to think of a “way out” for the guy that would suit him.
Sam’s gonna be fine. I’m really feeling that now in Season 9. He’s so … integrated. I’m sure that won’t last though.
Dean Winchester, closet tractor driver. Yes, that fits.
And somehow the woman working in the diner turns into … Cassie? Have I got where you’re going with this?
I think I need to accept that Cassie is out of the story.
I still think the best fit for Dean that we’ve seen yet is the psychic in “The Mentalist”. Those two very well might work.
That’s another thing I’m gonna have to let go, because that clearly was just a one-off episode-relationship. But I liked them and felt potential.
“I need a drink.”
“I support that.”
Obvi, whatever happens – Dean’s gonna have to find a way to be alone. It’s not gonna be someone swooping in to save him, a perfect woman (or man?) – that would be betraying what they’re setting up.
But still, Dean without sex would just not be right.
So I like to think the psychic will show up again.
I’m pathetic. hahahaha
//But still, Dean without sex would just not be right. //
So, not the priesthood, then? Though he still has the outfit. And previous experience.
Shacking up with a psychic would be … poetic justice in a way.
Right, and a psychic who blatantly doesn’t believe in the “woo-woo crap”. She’s practical, cynical, funny, and is also very intuitive about body language – which he needs. He needs someone who’s gonna pick up on his symphonies of behavior and not buy the bullshit outer surface. The way he looks at her when she picks up his hand in the last scene …
I maintain that something is there, something real.
Yeah, Dean can’t give up sex. It would be like deciding to give up sneezing. Can’t be done.
Well, if this lady does turn out to be The One, then I’m sending a bottle of non-alcoholic fizz to O’Malley mansions.
And Sam … ends up running a dog shelter? Or having a pack of huskies in Alaska? He really likes dogs.
I know. If that psychic returns … I will dance in the streets triumphantly. And be hauled off to a rubber room.
Sam shouting “Mush” as he careens through the Yukon? I can totally see that.
and Dean will never visit because, you know, DOGS.
//But he is, and was, the parent, rather than the poor substitute. Um, does any of that make sense? I feel I’m rambling a bit.//
YES. I agree 10000%
I think that this is something Dean needs acknowledged, fully and openly, from Sam, as well.
//My cousin Kerry is married to the “weapons specialist” for The Mentalist, //
Actually, I think I’ve nailed the job thing for Dean. Right there, Sheila. Weapons Specialist for TV shows. And you’ve sorted him out on the relationship front. And Sam’s happy with the huskies.
So. No need for Season 10.
Noooooo!!!
OMG Dean Winchester as a weapons specialist? Kathryn Bigelow flying him in to location in Jordan to show these wussy Hollywood actors how to handle guns? He’d be badass.
Copy that.
Meeting up with Jeremy Renner, talking about the whole Tough Guy in a Supermarket thing …
“Man, I didn’t know WHICH box of cereal I was supposed to pick. Am I supposed to eat or shoot it?” “Sure thing, man. And don’t get me started on baby-butt creams.”
Exactly!
Bigelow said that Jeremy Renner was confused by the scene where he sits alone in his bunk back at the camp and puts on his IED helmet. And then just sits there, looking around. He’s off-duty. He’s by himself. Renner was like, “Why am I doing this? What is going on with him?” Bigelow said she said to him, “Jeremy. He’s weird.”
Renner got it.
(Maybe it seems obvious “why” he would put on his helmet by himself – even off-duty, he’s waiting to be “on” – but it’s a very different thing to figure it out as an actor. Renner was figuring it out.)
If you can’t tell, I love that performance so much!
Dean, however, would not have been confused. Of course. Huge helmet? I’d wear that shit all day long.
//Dean needs to knock someone up.//
That has been my exact thought for the past 5 years or so. This is partly a desperation theory of mine as well—a grab at anything, ANYTHING, to shift his focus to something positive. Learning to be alone would be best, but I think Dean might be too damaged to ever be fulfilled that way. A child of his own, however, would give him a purpose for his life and take all that pressure off of his relationship with Sam. They could actually be grown up brothers!
But, I also think Dean is well suited to fatherhood. I don’t resist the idea of innateness in children. I tend to believe in a combination of nature and nurture: you are born predisposed to certain skills/likes/things, but how that manifests or develops is hugely influenced by nurture. So I think Dean does have an innate caretaking instinct, that his environment just piled on and twisted.
May –
// This is partly a desperation theory of mine as well—a grab at anything, ANYTHING, to shift his focus to something positive. //
hahaha I know, right?
Normally I would never suggest someone have a damn baby to solve their problems, but honestly I think it would be good for him. He clearly would be good at it, and maybe work out some of the shit that happened to him as a kid – you know, do it differently with his son/daughter. Wouldn’t be easy. But nothing’ll be easy for that guy. Especially at this point. Jeez, dude, your eyes look watery, you’re pale, you are consumed with misery, you don’t take pleasure from anything anymore and that is just NOT RIGHT for a natural odalisque such as yourself.
How much worse can it get?
Don’t ask that, Sheila! Not at this late stage of Season 9!
I’m going to live in La La Land and imagine him running into that psychic again at some point and maybe knocking her up. Stranger things have happened. Way stranger.
Fatherhood – of course. He’s a natural dad. Loads of practice on Sam, Ben, Lisa’s cousin’s whatever, baby shapeshifter …
Would love to see it in Series 10 – would be like … what’s that Japanese series called, Lone Wolf and Cub? Playpen in the bunker, with guns, samurai swords and busty asian babes all safely tucked away? Uncle Sam teaching it to do the Times crossword?
But the perils of being a dad and hunter? It’s Bobby all over again.
How about when the Campbells were gonna adopt the shapeshifter baby? I was like, “Say what??? How is THAT gonna work? You people are CRACKED.”
I’m trying to imagine a toddler running around the bunker with a binkie in its mouth. There is something wrong with this picture …
Hopefully, though, he learned his lesson on what a terrible TERRIBLE idea it is to erase a child’s memory of him.
Still not reconciled to that one.
//How much worse can it get?//
Nooooooooooo! Don’t say that! That phrase is as dangerous as “I’ll be right back!”
hahahaha I know. I’m just ASKING for trouble with that.
Once again, Sheila, I love your analysis. And once again, you’ve allowed me to see Padalecki’s acting in a better light.
As to the notion of Dean being an actual father (not counting Emma), I cannot get on board with that despite how beautifully he handled the shapeshifter babies. He’s been a parent far too long in his life already with being a de facto Dad to Sam and step-ish Dad to Ben. Dean needs some time to explore friendships, get some distance from Sam, have some more casual sex and then and only at the very end of the series, maybe he becomes a father. Mileage varies, but I don’t want to watch Dean become a stay at home Dad in the lair. No thanks!
Cat – Well, I don’t want to watch it either – it would be just as bad as seeing some of the cutesy “Dean is a barista” fanfic come to life. :) but as a suggestion of the End Game for him as the series rides off into the sunset whenever that is? I’d be fine with that. He’s good with kids, he likes them, and it channels his caretaking instinct (which will never be got rid of) into a situation that actually warrants it. Although more casual sex would be great too.
In my alternate reality, Dean knocks up the psychic from The Mentalists. hahaha Nobody else cares about the psychic at all but I am so invested in her. I enjoy living in a dream world. :)
In all seriousness, as I’ve been saying all along – I don’t think Dean’s gonna get out of the horrible existential torture he’s in now through any outside plot point – running into a romantic thing, or “finding himself” again by having to save Sam again – please God no. Dean is way way out on a limb right now. Good. It seems like they are highlighting how much he doesn’t want to be alone, and that is the key to Dean’s problems. Which we’ve seen from the get-go. That’s why Season 9 has been so gratifying for me. Dean is up against something different now. It would be a huge cop-out to have him re-focus on Sam or get a girlfriend or whatever. But End Game? Riding off into the sunset, so we are left to imagine it? Dean as Dad? Hell yeah. It’d be a good fit for him. Also give him a little bit of hope, Jesus Mary and Joseph.
and thanks in re: JP. This is a really good episode for him! Objective objective objective! Play those objectives!
//Hopefully, though, he learned his lesson on what a terrible TERRIBLE idea it is to erase a child’s memory of him.
Still not reconciled to that one.//
Yeah…I have a lot of trouble with that, too. It always felt more like lazy writing (to me) than a real attempt to show how deeply messed-up Dean is.
Me too. It makes no sense once you start to examine it. How would it work? Wouldn’t everyone else in Lisa and Ben’s life remember Dean? Wouldn’t one of her friends say, “Hey, did you and Dean break up?” and Lisa would be like, “Who’s Dean?” Won’t Lisa’s sister say, “Hey what happened to Dean?” And Lisa will say, “Who is this Dean person?” Ben’s classmate will say, “Hey, where’s that Dad-like guy you had who threw around the football with us?” Ben will say, “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
Really?
It was a lazy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind type plot thing to get Lisa and Ben out of the story. And unsatisfying.
You can certainly understand why you would want to erase someone and why you would want them to erase you. But that just didn’t feel right to me. Plot-wise. It happened too quickly. It was over too fast. It was good that at least Sam called him on how “shady” it was, but still. Didn’t like it at all.
My fanwank is that Castiel went and erased all evidence of Dean having had been in their lives, including mindwiping anyone that was involved in their lives, the neighbors, the sister etc., getting rid of family pictures etc. It’s all I’ve got.
Agreed. It made no damn sense. How would that keep them safe? Now they don’t remember anything about demons, ghosts or monsters, but all the baddies still know about them. Now they can’t protect themselves. I have a very hard time believing that Dean would leave them defenseless like that.
I think occasionally the writers are so focused on keeping Sam and Dean together (and isolated from everyone) that they write themselves into some corners. SPN is often very smart, but it can be very, very stupid sometimes, too.
Kripke in one of the commentary tracks talked about the fan response to Ruby and how vicious fans were to her. But his larger point was how hostile much of the fandom is towards romantic interests or anyone “outside”. Misogynistic, even – “get that skank off the show”, etc.
Clearly Ruby was leading Sam down a dark path – but it was a great storyline. Do these fans just want cuddly emo conversations over the Impala, and zero tension or growth? I don’t quite understand it. But there you go.
I think the Lisa/Ben storyline had certainly run its course by that point – and there was that killer scene (better every time I watch it) from Mannequin between Ben and Dean in Ben’s room. AND – best of all: it ends unresolved. No teary hug, no relief. Great writing, great tension.
But unless it was going to go to another level, it was time for that story to end – but I just really disliked that. I can justify it as evidence how effed up Dean is when it comes to having hurt/let down people – but I still don’t really buy it. He played the hell out of it as an actor, but that’s no surprise.
//his larger point was how hostile much of the fandom is towards romantic interests or anyone “outside”. Misogynistic, even – “get that skank off the show”, etc. //
I don’t like to bring up the fandom too often (I have issues…), but I think the above is a factor in Cassie, Lisa & Ben, Amelia, and Jo’s departures from the show. In Jo’s case, I’d heard that she was intended to be a love interest for Dean, but the chemistry wasn’t right—she seemed more like a little sister than potential girlfriend—but I think fan-dislike was an element as well. I don’t think it is a coincidence that she became more accepted after they dropped the romance element of her story.
(I like Jo, though I didn’t think it worked, either. Oddly enough, I always thought Jo/Sam would have been a better pairing.)
Ellen and Jodie are probably the only women who were accepted by that element of the fandom, because they were viewed as too old to be romantic interests for Sam or Dean.
I never understood the hatred for Bela and Jo. I’m rather glad I came into the show after all that had passed because I’m largely unaffected by those kinds of things. I thought Bela was a great match for Dean and rue that we never got that angry sex scene but instead I got stuck with Sam kissing her even if it was a dream sequence. Bleh. Stupid Sam with all the sex and Dean with what 3 on-screen encounters? /miffed
Yeah, I don’t really want to get into that aspect of fandom either – or focus on it too much. It gets a bit too intense, and that’s just not a fun level of conversation for me.
I didn’t think a romance would be right with Jo either – although of course Dean had to give it a shot. A couple times. :) I like him in these platonic little-sister relationships, like with Charlie, too. It’s a good fit. Gives good shading to his character too.
Who the hell could dislike Jo?
I don’t understand.
I get why people disliked Amelia, I guess – she was a hot mess – but I liked her. I liked the mess and ambiguity of her. I thought it was so interesting that that would be Sam’s choice of woman, after the conventional sweetness of his first relationship with Jess. A lot has changed for him!
I was actually glad that Kripke addressed the viciousness of the comments towards Ruby (Genevieve) and called out her acting in that final episode of Season 2- which really was excellent. And he was doing it explicitly as a message to the fans who were so mean to her. I appreciated that. I’m sure she did too.
Bela is one of my favorite characters on the entire show. In any season.
She just brought SUCH a tension. She was so UP to NO GOOD, in every scene – you just never could trust her, and yet … she was funny, too, entertaining. Sizzling. Annoying. Selfish. I love that performance and when she bit it, I was bummed out (although I thought it was wonderful, telling us her backstory – which makes all of her behavior make sense). I still miss her randomly swooping into the action and effing everything up for them.
Also, she has to have one of the best character introductions in the entire history of the show. When she tosses her wig into the dumpster … I still remember thinking, “Well, hellooooo there, who are YOU?”
If people want the show to just be Sam and Dean in the Impala, with a different cast of guest stars each week, they are watching the wrong show. For 9 seasons.
And Charlie is safe because she is gay!
*sigh*
It is difficult to discuss SPN without going into the fandom a bit. Hell, the show does it too (Oh, Hai Becky!). I never really engaged deeply with SPN fandom, but I have friends who have. I’ve been to a few conventions with them and we’ve talked about the fandom a great deal.
All fandoms have their problematic fans. SPN just seem to attract a higher percentage of them. They aren’t the majority, but they are VOCAL, and unfortunately have come to represent the fandom to many people.
OMG Becky. Right.
I figure there is room for all kinds of people in any given fandom. I’m not really a Tumblr person – although I have an Elvis Tumblr – I just use it more as a storage unit though, honestly – a place to archive all my Elvis stuff. But I know Tumblr is huge in this fandom (and others). I’ve seen some good stuff out there. And that’s mostly where I hear the rumblings of this other side of fandom – the mean emotionally damaged side.
I like hanging out here. :)
The show really is so rich and deep and entertaining – even with some of the glitches we’ve discussed – it’s been so worthy my time discovering it and writing about it. I mean, look at the people who have shown up once I started posting! That makes me happy.
It’s good to keep the focus on the show, not the fandom.
A similar type of thing happens in film criticism (my circle). The reactions of certain fan bases to negative reviews of films in their fandom is often violent and vicious. Not even mean reviews – all in all good reviews which point out flaws or whatever fly people into a tizzy. A friend of mine who writes for Time Out got death threats. I think that’s despicable and disgusting.
You’re always gonna get some wackos, but that is taking your fandom way too far.
//I like hanging out here. :) //
Me too! :)
I think we’re all here for the right reasons…
hahahahaha Never ceases to please. So brilliant.
Jessie – I read that Tumblr link – thank you so much for tracking it down. Excellent compassionate stuff, and also loved the side-by-side comparison. Very astute analysis. It was a hell of a burden to place on a 4 year old – and that stuff happens all the time. I liked the point that it is very difficult to recognize this as abuse. Children pick up on everything. And they need to feel safe. They do what they need to feel safe. And then lifelong problems can result from that.
She takes the comfort from him – not recognizing that it is him who needs comfort.
It’s such an excellent scene (the one with his mother), isn’t it? Because back in Heaven, this is what he remembers – and it’s not all lollipops and sunshine: he is remembering a moment of anxiety. He, as a 4 year old, probably felt a mixture of feeling great/important (“I get to be there for Mom, she needs this of me”) and being scared (“Is Dad never coming back? Why is Mom sad?”)
and this kind of duality – this “a moment is never just one thing” thing – is what the show really is all about.
It’s one of the hugest hooks for me. Because it is not just surface reality or awareness. It’s deep. And it all depends on where you’re standing: things LOOK actually different when you’re looking at them from different perspectives – either in time or space.
Tom Robbins wrote in Still Life with Woodpecker: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood”, a line I have always loved. You can see that re-visiting the past … as men … makes things start to shift. And things look different.
Maybe this is resonating with me because of the Cognitive Therapy stuff I’ve had to do in my recovery. You can actually change how you perceive things (something that seems impossible when you’re in the feedback loop of illness) – by deciding to change your stance, change your thinking, use different words to describe something, whatever. It takes practice.
Maybe that’s Dean’s End Game. Finding a good cognitive therapist in the area. No, just kidding.
All of the childhood stuff – Sam seeing their Christmas one way – Dean having another memory of it … You can’t say that either one of them is WRONG. Because they were children back then, and children see things the way they need to in order to survive them. An adult can look on and say, “This is effed up” … but still, when you’re IN that feedback loop, it’s very hard to discern.
So much of what happens with the brothers is on that level. It’s such a delight – the writers really go for it. The show really is about family.
Yeah it’s a very good and memorable piece of meta! We’ve talked about deromanticising John but a surprising amount of work has to go into deromanticising Dean at times.
The thing about cognitive therapy I found the most useful was realising there were names for the kinds of stories I would tell about my relationships to events in the world and in my mind – it’s a similar feeling to the clarity and perspective a diagnosis can give you. When you’re a chronic overthinker these names and structures give you the boundaries and strength you need to work on yourself because it’s all about perspective, conceptualising. You can finally grasp it. I’m super happy it’s working for you; high five!
It hurts to think of the Mark of Cain shutting down all of the potential for Dean to work on himself in that way. You know; ask yourself some questions Dean. Why can’t you be alone? Why are you afraid all the time? Why do you think you’re poison?
Re: your below comment about hugs: I like how none of that pleasure-seeking is pathologised into covering up the pain. I mean that’s partly it, of course, especially the alcohol, and you’ve also done a great job discussing why small and sensual things give him so much pleasure. But it’s not the big dramatic cover-up of his inner torment. It’s part of him — that duality.
// names for the kinds of stories I would tell about my relationships to events in the world and in my mind //
Yes! Before I got into recovery, I never would have believed that choosing different names, or putting a name to things in the first place, would make a difference in actual perception. You would think I would have picked up on it, being a writer and all. My doctor corrects my language all the time. At first I was like, “Fuck off. I know words. The word I just used is the right one.” But now I get it.
You can see those mini-implosions on Dean’s face when words come up like “family” – all of those associations, what it means to him, who he is in that framework.
Total agreement about the sensual aspect of Dean not being pathologized. Thank goodness!! In one way, you could say that the fact that he DOES derive so much pleasure from things like hamburgers, orgasms, Led Zeppelin and spark plugs was perhaps his saving grace. It helped him stay alive! What would Max have been like if he had really gotten INTO things like that, even if it was just something “surface”, like, “I live for sushi.” or “I love Star Wars so much I want to cosplay every day.” Whatever it might be.
I can be a pretty ascetic person. Pretty rigid. I’ve had to learn how to relax, and learn how to do things just because they feel good and they make me happy. That Tough Guy I keep mentioning helped me with that too. He’d be like, “Stop your worrying. Planet of the Apes is on. Let’s watch it, and chill out, and please stop talking.” hahaha
It seems to me – not sure what you think about this – that the pilot set up Dean in broad strokes. Common with pilots. The way he treats Jess, for example. And they never really address it afterwards. Of course she dies, so everything changes. But I think he was originally conceived as the Badass Womanizing Douche – compelling, yes, but kind of rude – and then almost immediately, JA started bringing other elements out.
It’s not that I don’t like the scene where he sexualizes Jess and humiliates his brother. That is obviously about feeling totally threatened at Sam having a whole other life.
But it’s a bit on-the-surface. The coolest thing is how SPN decided to go deeper than that, almost immediately. And give Dean that duality.
No, I definitely agree that Dean is only sketched in in the pilot. The Han is strong with him. My partner was completely turned off by that macho cockiness. Possibly the worst crime of all, his hair is all wrong.
What’s funny is you can kind of fanwank it (there’s another for you Helena! Meaning coming up with in-universe explanations for inconsistencies in the text) by saying that he’s putting on a bit of an act, or even show (as he definitely does re: Jess and I agree that’s not all about lechery), after all this time apart from Sam. Look at me Sam, I’m so UNCONCERNED!
The hair is definitely all wrong. Extremely boy-band. Sort of standy-outty all around. No.
It gets more military pretty quickly afterwards with the nice thick cowlike-type-thing in the front he’s rocking to this day.
Yeah, you’re like: Huh, this guy is hot, but what a dick.
That would have gotten old pretty quick. Because he is awful in that scene, awful towards her. Certainly you can see why Sam would flee his family if his brother was like THAT towards his girlfriends.
But, in general, I think it was just shallow writing, sketching him in in broad strokes.
//Finding a good cognitive therapist in the area. No, just kidding.//
A good cognitive psychic therapist, maybe?
//Yeah it’s a very good and memorable piece of meta! //
Jessie, what’s meta?
Meta is in-depth commentary on thematic issues brought up in the show. “Meta” is like a commenting-on the commenting-on that the show already does – creating a mirroring effect. (Intriguingly, an upcoming upside in Season 9 is called “Meta Fiction” – can’t wait).
“Changing Channels” is an example of how “meta” works in the show – or the show where they go to the SPN convention. It is the show commenting-on itself.
It’s also shorthand for in-depth fan commentary on character backstory.
//Meta is in-depth commentary on thematic issues brought up in the show. //
Thanks for this. This is teaching me a whole new vocabulary. Like ‘shipping’ and the whole combining characters names together etc. I really thought there was a character called Destiel for a while and couldn’t figure out why I kept not spotting him/her/it
I remember having a conversation with my friend Keith after he hosted a QA with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson recently – I linked to a clip of it here, it’s so entertaining!! You can see Keith in all his glory.
http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=71477
And he (obviously) was not just an X Files fan … it was so much a part of his life that he could talk about it for hours (and has). I love to get him going on it. He takes it seriously as an art form, he loves all of the different elements, how cinematic the series was, but also what the actors brought to it. I keep telling him to check out Supernatural, especially with that X Files Kim Manners Vancouver connection. I think he’d love it.
He and I had a great conversation about the fandom of X Files and the “wars” that broke out between different “shipping” contingencies. The same kind of thing happens on SPN, obviously – Destiel and all the others – It was one of the things that got my attention and made me check out the show in the first place! “Wait, why are these people screaming at each other on Tumblr? I’m intrigued.”
I thought I’d watch one, two episodes – to just familiarize myself with the landscape so I could understand the “shipping” going on – I thought maybe I’d write something about it – and then of course couldn’t stop watching, and here we are today.
I had mostly heard the term “meta” in literary circles – how “meta” Thomas Pynchon’s books were, or those other big mid-2oth century guys – Philip Roth and others – whose books were always stepping outside the narrative to also comment ON the narrative. In current day, Dave Eggers is Mr. Meta.
Helena, come with me…and you’ll be…in a world of pure imagination…
For me, meta fiction is Borges. Basically, read him and you’re done – that’s the Western canon in a few slim volumes of short stories.
hahaha look at Bert’s face!!
and yes – Borges! Exactly!
Self-aware, self-referential, encyclopedic!!
//I thought I’d watch one, two episodes//
I’m sorry, but HA HA HA HA HA!
Just not possible.
Plus I’ve broken my own second seal regarding Superwankery by visiting a tumblr site (damn you, Jessie. It was a good one. But I think that way madness truly lies for me.)
// I’ve broken my own second seal //
hahahahaha
And looking back, firing up the pilot on Netflix, I could have no idea how hooked I would get. Screw Tumblr wars and Destiel – Oh my God, this show! These actors!!
I was like, “Oh shit. I now have 9 seasons to get through. Buckle your seat belt, Sheila.”
Speaking of Tumblr, I am getting a shit-ton of traffic right now to that first Jensen Ackles piece – someone is linking to it, but because I can’t find my way around Tumblr, I can’t figure it out.
Anyway, welcome all of you people flooding my site right now!
And someone linked to that same piece on IMDB, saying I was “over-thinking” it. Don’t they realize “over-thinking” is my middle name??
Life isn’t worth living if I don’t over-think something at least once a day.
Dead serious. :)
So welcome to all you IMDB people too.
I’m glad you liked the link Helena!
And to be honest…well I mean this kind fandom has been one of my homes for many years. Probably I am pretty desensitised to what you find when you dip your toe in the bathwater but I see a few babies being tossed. I wouldn’t want you to think there’s nothing you could relate to out there :-) There is a decade of it!
As you say Sheila this show works so light-speed fast on your identifications, projections, aesthetics, it basically rewrites your neural pathways. I don’t want to jump my hobbyhorse over the Seine here but I am always surprised when people are surprised that female fans had a strong reaction a female character (especially one defined by romance) disrupting male relationships in a show specifically designed to create investments in intense male relationships!
I’ve been thinking about Sam’s tears a lot lately and emotionality and excess — how because they’re brothers there’s that space for melodrama. Like, that is where this show is. It’s bonkers. Of course it makes people bonkers.
Jessie – I appreciate your perspective! And I agree that one of the reasons the show works so well is that investment in the primary relationship of the brothers.
Fandom like this has not exactly been my milieu – although I guess love of old movies, or pre-Code movies, or Cary Grant does qualify – people feel passionately about this stuff, and I love to get in there and argue my points.
And when I’ve gotten “into” something, I really get INTO it. This has been true of me my whole life – although I mostly grew up pre-Internet, so you are kind of just swirling around in your own passions then, buying movie magazines and writing fan letters, which is what I did back in the day.
Speaking of fan fic, (and Han Solo) when I was 12 years old I wrote an entire screenplay featuring “Han Solo’s 12 year old sister”, and their cantankerous loving relationship, Han Solo having to deal with his “little sister” in the Millennium Falcon, feeling protective of her, yet also annoyed that she is tagging along, and her having to prove herself with the laser gun – and how she surprises everybody by being totally bad-ass.
I think I still have it somewhere!
Like my Elvis Extravaganza. Basically I was not seeing what I wanted to see “out there”, so I set out to put my voice into the mix, and engage with all the stuff that was being said, some good, some bad – Obviously I don’t think I’m the only person to “get” Elvis – it’s just I felt he was (is) being taken for granted a little bit, and the narrative was too set in stone for me. It was extremely gratifying, and you really can’t find more passionate fans than Elvis fans – and they have been made fun of for their passion from the get-go. People snicker about Elvis fans making pilgrimages to Graceland, the fact that Elvis inspired women to take off their underwear and throw it at him onstage – that’s been dismissed as “kooky women being all kooky” instead of actually understanding that Elvis was tapping into an extremely important and repressed strain in human experience, and saying, “It’s okay, it’s fun, follow me, it’s all good, nothing bad about it.”
No, instead the “middle-aged women” crying at his concerts in Vegas were scorned by the press, still are. (This gets into a deeper conversation about how when women, en masse, choose to love something – the critical establishment, often mostly-male, sets out to scorn that thing. Envy is at the bottom of it. They are jealous of Elvis because he is so successful with women – they don’t “relate” to what women see in him and refuse to try to understand. People don’t like it when women choose something so powerfully, all on their own, bless their hearts. It happened with Elvis. Women fans MADE him. The same thing is going on with SPN, with a largely female fan base. So the show is dismissed as eye-candy, JA and JP seen as male models, as though women can’t possibly be choosing something for any other reason.)
It actually hurts me when I see Elvis dismissed. It fires me up. It fills me with a desire to prove everyone wrong.
So I certainly get it.
I don’t mean to sound dismissive at all. But some of the “get that ugly skank away from our boys” stuff … Fandom can feel like a closed circle, know what I mean? It’s NOT but it can feel that way if you’re “into” something but engaging with it on another level (or, if you’re just coming in late to the conversation).
That’s certainly been part of the fun of writing these re-caps. Is talking to you, Helena, Mutecypher, May, Cat – and the others who have shown up – who enjoy “over-thinking” things, and discussing them in-depth.
Hobbyhorse over the Seine! Go for it!
// I’ve been thinking about Sam’s tears a lot lately and emotionality and excess — how because they’re brothers there’s that space for melodrama. //
Great point. The sibling thing again, so key to the show being able to go into the areas it goes into. That understood shared-history.
Also, one more thing to add to my long comment about women choosing something:
It’s also rude when “it’s just eye candy” is used to dismiss something, especially when it’s seen as “eye candy for women”.
What, we’re not allowed to revel in the beautiful too? We’re not allowed to objectify? Like YOU GUYS DO every day of the week, back to the beginning of Art?
This goes back to the whole “women aren’t visual” thing, which I’ve discussed before – a LIE foisted on the public, which has still somehow “stuck”.
Yeah, men who parrot that lie WISH women “weren’t visual” because then the pressure would be off them to actually look presentable.
Women ARE visual. And when “we” CHOOSE something, we are in it for good. Women fans are the most powerful demographic on the earth – financially. We can actually make someone’s career. Elvis understood that – and always played right to the women, he knew they loved him, and he didn’t judge them for it or try to reach out to “serious” fans (i.e. men). Women buy memorabilia, show up at cons, keep the flames alive, obsess, buy shit … and the actors who benefit from that kind of attention are very lucky, and the smart ones don’t try to “dis” that original female fan base.
(A couple years ago, Zac Efron made some dumb comments, in my opinion, about how he wanted to seem “serious” now – which basically was a dis of all of those teenage girls who helped MAKE him. You can certainly try to broaden your fan base, but it is a huge mistake to alienate those original fans. Elvis never did. He devoted his life to those original fans.)
And yet, still, with this type of loyalty and buying power, stuff that appeals “mostly” to women is either dismissed/scorned or worried about unnecessarily. “Why do women love this so much????”
Because we appreciate beauty. Get a life.
I mean, who cares, right, I’ve always just loved what I loved. But it certainly is interesting!
You get it Sheila! Part of the reason I jump on my hobbyhorse is out of an instinctive refusal to disavow amazing female communities. Smart and passionate and throwing their knickers, it’s all there and what more could you want?
You’re fabulous about Elvis and your particular interests and knowledges have brought so much to the table; I appreciate your perspective.
// Smart and passionate and throwing their knickers, it’s all there and what more could you want? //
Totally.
And bless the male stars who have benefited from that kind of attention and GET IT.
Not all of them do. I get that it can be alarming when women are running at you, screaming, crying (there’s a great picture of a teenage girl at an Elvis concert literally biting her hand – that’s how much she’s feeling) – but people who respond to you in that way (especially girls) are in it for the long haul. They will stick with you. They will love you forever.
Really nothing like that kind of fan base. It doesn’t happen often.
Managers/PR people/agents try to manufacture it. It may work for a little while, but not in the long run.
And oh my god your Star Wars script, that’s so awesome. I would do the exact same thing at that age with fantasy novels but never wrote it down. Just thinking about it and thinking about it. It’s a great training in narrative.
// I don’t want to jump my hobbyhorse over the Seine here but I am always surprised when people are surprised that female fans had a strong reaction a female character (especially one defined by romance) disrupting male relationships in a show specifically designed to create investments in intense male relationships!//
Jessie, that answered a question I was going to ask. I don’t follow the fan sites and so I was curious about who would have such a strong reaction to Jo and Ruby and Bela – other than a strong reaction to what great characters they are. Now I know (and yes, I did suspect).
//What, we’re not allowed to revel in the beautiful too? We’re not allowed to objectify? Like YOU GUYS DO every day of the week, back to the beginning of Art?//
Sheila, we’ve talked about this a bit over the years. It really is all the pathetic things you say. And a big dollop of “I don’t want to be judged as just fuckable/unfuckable the way I’m judging you.” When life is unfair in your favor, a person becomes a big advocate for the status quo. I think a lot of “principle” in politics gets tossed out the window in those situations. A lot of things in life (not just politics).
And there is no over-thinking but that under thinking makes it so.
When I’m accused of overthinking I just recall Uma Thurman’s bad joke from her failed pilot in ‘Pulp Fiction’, “Catch Up!”
Jessie –
My screenplay! I know! I was so swept away by Empire Strikes Back that I just had to write a character my age into the story. I wanted to LIVE in it!
The only scene I remember is a big shootout on the ground – and everyone was running into the Millennium Falcon, ready to take off – and “my” character was late – she was off in an alley shooting her laser gun at some monsters – and Han, ready to take off, was FURIOUS that his “little sister” wouldn’t show up on time, but still: he would not leave without her.
And of course she then emerged from the alley, triumphant, shooting her laser gun behind her – as she ran up the ramp into the ship.
I cannot even tell you how satisfying it was to imagine playing that scene. hahaha
Mutecypher –
“Catch up!” Ha!! Love that!
Exactly.
mutecypher —
I remember when the official character description for Amelia came out. It was something along the lines of, “She is prickly, but beautiful, and has a dark secret in her past.” I was like, come ON. It’s hard not to bring a lot of baggage to female characters introduced explicitly as love interests.
Sheila —
busting out of the alley with your lasers, ha ha! So fierce. Mine were all about my amazing magical powers and the mysterious and slim magicians who loved me.
You know, 12-15 — THAT’s when you want your mysterious and slim love interests.
YES. YES. YES.
You have my back on this.
//Smart and passionate and throwing their knickers//
This is going on a tshirt, by the way.
Actually, talking about that scene with Mary when he hugs her – makes me think of my guess that Dean is probably a big CUDDLER (and would punch you in the face if you found out about it). I mean, he was wearing a shirt that said “I Wuv Hugs” when he was 4 years old. hahaha
JP’s line reading of that shirt always makes me roar. “Apparently … you … wuv hugs.”
Good luck with all that tumblr/IMDB traffic.
Don’t know why I feel compelled to confess this now, but this so reminds me .. A VERY long time ago I was a big fan of a series of historical novels (romantic fiction, basically) which I think was one of the first (Austenites aside) to create first an offline community (pre internet days) and then a online community. It had started up not least because the books were so densely peppered with obscure words and literary references that, pre internet, it required access to a university library to get them all, and then a PhD to understand how they worked in the context of how they were being used. Fans got together and pooled their knowledge. If I tell you just about every character, but especially the lead character, quoted at length and with semi-colons … it was the author’s way, I think, of creating a ‘historical’ language without going ‘prithee.’ (Though prithee is used once, and it’s very funny. But I digress.) For instance, you’d get a snippet of a quote, and then another and with both it wasn’t the words being quoted that bore the full weight of meaning, it would be the next couple of lines, not actually quoted at all. So yeah, pretty high falutin, and a few devotees created a newsletter and then various forums to share the love. The books inspired a great deal of devotion and pretty much the same kind of conversations – ranging from erudite and sane, to the, er opposite end of the spectrum.
The other day I was thinking about this and how of course, these books were totally different to Supernatural, being set in the courts and mercenary armies of 16th century Europe. Until I started made a list.
a very witty, kickass, TRAUMATISED hero/anti-hero central character with a mile- wide, decade-long trail of collateral damage, hemmed in by factions who want to co-opt him to their cause. Starts out appearing a violent, amoral badass, turns out he’s a teddy bear, quel surprise (check)
Guy’s got a saviour complex , and destructive tendencies (check)
Oh yeah, and there’s a brother thing! There’s even an amulet moment.
Problematic parents – mum (yeay! then woah!) vs dad (boo – and also, not my dad?).
Questions of family and inheritance, including A Very Important Grandfather
A problematic half sibling
a supernatural element (a witch is involved, and John Dee)
A fascination with bad ass weaponry, because, dude’s a fighter as well as a lover
Erm, a very active and fluid sexuality (cue raging debates about whether the guy is in the closet or not)
Are you getting the picture here? I could go on, but I’ll spare you (ok just one more thing, there’s even a season in a hell and a season in purgatory thing going on.)
Just to say, it’s deja vu all over again
Wow, Helena! Now I am fascinated by these books. Would you mind sharing what they are?
Well, in for a penny, The Lymond Chronicles, by Dorothy Dunnett. I started reading them when I was 13. I don’t know if I could even read them now, but for a while I could have recited bits verbatim. They are six hunks of doorstop, btw. They start off rather flowery, but by about book 4 she’s honed a rather brilliant style, weaving in all the historical background you need with a convoluted plot. There are also a prequel series which some readers prefer, and I can see why – more sex and bad language, for a start. She’s still a byword for historical accuracy and depth of research, but maybe always a bit of a ‘cult’ read, with a bigger readership in the States.
Oh yes, I’ve heard of her!
Cool. Don’t know if she’d be up the O’Malley alley, tbh.
I’m not sure either – I’m not a big historical fiction reader, although I love the Master & Commander books – those are probably the closest I’ve come to really being hooked by that genre.
But I love to hear about anything that generates a passionate personal fan response.
Also on the topic of ‘If women like it, they must just like it for the wrong reasons, and basically know nothing about it’ Glenn Kenney touches on this in music journalism here. The articles he cites are very pertinent to this debate!
I saw that piece, Helena – it was wonderful!!
There was a great piece recently too about sexism in film critics who were basically unable to properly evaluate Scarlett Johnansen in the latest Captain America film – due to their unfamiliarity with the material, and their eagerness to objectify her. It was really about sexism, though – from a frustrated female writer, who thought ScarJo did a great job, and was pissed OFF.
I’ll see if I can find the piece.
Here’s the piece I mentioned:
http://www.dailydot.com/fandom/black-widow-reviews-wrong-captain-america/
//”What about my brain? What about my heart? What about my kidneys and my gallbladder?”//
Ha!
I know – she comes off as smart and feisty, good for her!
But look how the writer of that interview took her very funny words – and then skeeved all over them in his final line. And the chummy “fellas” in that final line? It grosses me out!!
Yes. Bleh.
//But I love to hear about anything that generates a passionate personal fan response.//
Thanks. But still. Overshare, dude.
The parallels with SPN though! Come on! Overshare away.
I particularly enjoyed this bit:
// A fascination with bad ass weaponry, because, dude’s a fighter as well as a lover
Erm, a very active and fluid sexuality (cue raging debates about whether the guy is in the closet or not) //
Yeah.
Those bits are good. Dude can do anything with a longbow.
But seriously, there is an amulet moment, with his brother. His brother returns a gift to him when their relationship hits rock bottom. And he get to give it back to his bro years later. So I feel hopeful.
Okay, that gives me hope too!
Ah! So many interesting comments, so little time to post!
I just have to jump in and agree with Sheila regarding her comments about the sexist, jealous scorn heaped on the stuff that women love. It is one of the subjects I will rant on about until people are sick of me talking. If something is associated with women in our culture, it is automatically devalued, seen as weak and/or superficial. It also ties into stuff like the “Fake-Geek-Girls” blow up. Must stop typing before rage induced blackout. Argh!
re: Dean in the pilot. I think, originally, the show was supposed to be more about Sam and his journey (to become a Jedi, like his father). And then they discovered how much JA brought to Dean and shifted focus.
Also, Jessie, you will have to tell me where you find all of your amazing gifs! I love them so much. Oh Bert…
Yup – it is my contention that although Elvis, obviously, is not under-appreciated – he is definitely under-analyzed, and the whole “sex thing” as I called it has not been explored the way it should be, due to the general vibe that maybe it’s all a bit silly, women fainting and making fools of themselves. I don’t want to say every male critic treats it that way – it is definitely not the case – but it’s definitely present and colors how he is talked about.
To me, the fact that Elvis generated such a response is almost the most important thing about him we can discuss – and it’s interesting, I wrote about what he was tapping into sexually once, and I got this sneering comment from a male who seemed to feel I was denigrating Elvis or something. Because HIS idol was more “serious” than just a guy who made women go crazy.
But I submit that “women going crazy” is one of the most important and life-affirming and AWESOME things that happens in pop culture.
And it’s fine, obviously, if you’re a straight male and you don’t see Elvis that way – but to discount that effect, or to sneer at it, or be embarrassed by it because it makes you feel weird … that’s YOUR problem.
Lots of envy there. Many male fans of course love Elvis unabashedly – Elvis fandom crosses gender lines, race lines, socio-economic lines. It’s the commentary really that seems lacking.
Lester Bangs (a straight male music critic) wrote one of the most famous things ever written about Elvis – an obituary for the Village Voice. And in it, Bangs admitted that when he saw Elvis live, when he saw Elvis walk out onstage, he got an erection. He wrote he “went mad with desire, self-projection” – which is an extraordinary admission and the only one of its kind that I could find. I appreciate it so much. Because these “erotic muse” figures, these pan-sexual almost God-like sexual archetypes – cross gender lines. Marilyn Monroe did it. Her fan base was both passionately male and female. And Jensen Ackles has it too – although his fans are mostly women. But it’s an appeal that goes into some other realm, something universal … It honestly can’t be manufactured. You just have to “have it”. Marlene Dietrich had it. Cary Grant had it. A really strong yin/yang appeal – both feminine and masculine. You know? These types of figures.
“Sexual persona”, as Camille Paglia calls them, sort of resist classification – but they are also worth examining in-depth. When women start screaming and writhing and crying about someone – the press out there should seriously stop sneering and follow the screams to try to see what the fuss is about.
Because usually, those screaming women are “onto something”.
END LECTURE.
But I am glad we are all in agreement on this!
Finally, as a writer: Of course I have “fangirly” responses – and most of the things I choose to write about I choose them because I love them and I want to talk about them. But the challenge is to talk about WHY something works – as opposed to just saying, “This works for me! It’s hot! These guys are hot!”
There is a place for that kind of fangirl stuff – no judgment whatsoever – but because I have this need to examine WHY these mysterious things work (like Elvis, for example) – I need to get past that initial response and start to pick it apart. It’s a lot of fun!!
Here’s part of that Lester Bangs 1977 obit I mentioned. You just don’t hear straight male music critics writing like this about the sexual impact of Elvis – there usually is a little sneer behind it towards the women. Here, he acknowledges that power, and how it worked on him – someone who didn’t “swing that way” – He doesn’t make fun of the women. He certainly admits that Elvis was fat, and his description of the jumpsuit makes me laugh out loud – but you’re gonna SNEER at power like that, boys? Jealous much?? Lester Bangs felt the sexual power and admitted to it:
“He was the only male performer I have ever seen to whom I responded sexually; it wasn’t real arousal, rather an erection of the heart, when I looked at him I went mad with desire and envy and worship and self-projection. I mean, Mick Jagger, whom I saw as far back as 1964 and twice in ’65, never even came close.
There was Elvis, dressed up in this ridiculous white suit which looked like some studded Arthurian castle, and he was too fat, and the buckle on his belt was as big as your head except that your head is not made of solid gold, and any lesser man would have been the spittin’ image of a Neil Diamond damfool in such a getup, but on Elvis it fit. What didn’t? No matter how lousy his records ever got, no matter how intently he pursued mediocrity, there was still some hint, some flash left over from the days when…well, I wasn’t there, so I won’t presume to comment. But I will say this: Elvis Presley was the man who brought overt blatant vulgar sexual frenzy to the popular arts in America (and thereby to the nation itself, since putting “popular arts” and “America” in the same sentence seems almost redundant). It has been said that he was the first white to sing like a black person, which is untrue in terms of hard facts but totally true in terms of cultural impact. But what’s more crucial is that when Elvis started wiggling his hips and Ed Sullivan refused to show it, the entire country went into a paroxysm of sexual frustration leading to abiding discontent which culminated in the explosion of psychedelic-militant folklore which was the sixties.
I mean, don’t tell me about Lenny Bruce, man – Lenny Bruce said dirty words in public and obtained a kind of consensual martyrdom. Plus which Lenny Bruce was hip, too goddam hip if you ask me, which was his undoing, whereas Elvis was not hip at all, Elvis was a goddam truck driver who worshipped his mother and would never say shit or fuck around her, and Elvis alerted America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives that had been stifled. Lenny Bruce demonstrated how far you could push a society as repressed as ours and how much you could get away with, but Elvis kicked “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” out the window and replaced it with “Let’s fuck.” The rest of us are still reeling from the impact.”
and, since, I can go on about Elvis forever, I will spare you anymore:
To your point in re: the pilot, I think you’re right. It was automatically obvious that JA was bringing depth to the role that wasn’t really written into it so they started writing to that depth. Smart smart move.
I’ve just picked them up on my rounds over the years May! Livejournal, tumblr, buzzfeed. Sorry.
And here I thought I hit the gif jackpot! LOL!
I’m going to have to start a folder in my bookmarks for them…I love animated gifs so much, I worry it’s unhealthy.
//a groin with imperatives//
Dear God. I love this.
No matter how many times I’ve read it it still gives me goosebumps. He so gets it.
//And it’s fine, obviously, if you’re a straight male and you don’t see Elvis that way – but to discount that effect, or to sneer at it, or be embarrassed by it because it makes you feel weird … that’s YOUR problem. //
It must be awful to be Dean Winchester and be so beautiful. Women love him and men… hate him? Seriously they hate on him so much. Probably one of the reasons he uses his sexuality so much, to disarm other men (like “I’m not the rival, I’m into YOU!”) and if that doesn’t work he’s still walking away with having grossed them out, made them uncomfortable, baffled them. But we ge to see that he’s paying a price for using himself that way. He’s removed those boundaries and no one is letting him put them back up.
//It was automatically obvious that JA was bringing depth to the role that wasn’t really written into it so they started writing to that depth.//
JA seems to have been “writing” his own parts for a long time. In Dark Angel which I just watched, he’s outstanding, also you can see a lot of Dean in that role. He was so well recieved that he went from what was supposed to be a guest-spot in the first season (he actually dies) to them bringing him back in season two and he maneuvers in and takes over the whole show. He’s the most captivating person on screen at all times. Makes me think of Bette Davis and the reaction I always have to seeing her, I basically can’t take my eyes off her beacause she is ALWAYS doing something interesting. JA is like that. Although I agree that Brendan Fletcher does a pretty amazing job of competing with that in Nightmare. And JP is awesome and his heart is breaking looking at those bruises. It’s an overall great episode.
About Dark side of the moon:
I was taken aback too that this was supposed to be one of his happiest memories, being left to take care of his mother emotionally with his father leaving. I always thought that was pretty indicative of John being an asshole before mom died too. Also I’m sure something freudian can be said about Dean getting to be close to his mother with his father out of the picture at the age of four, but I don’t know how up to date that interpretation would be.
Love that you mention Two-Lane Blacktop AND Running on Empty. Two favourites! River Phoenix man, I would have loved to see what he would be doing today.
You also talked about the love-interest hate in fandom. Yeah I can have some heavy emotional reactions to some of them as well but for me it’s always about the actresses and how good they are. Like I loved Bela, she was awesome in so many ways, written great, but it only worked because they had a great actress. That’s the same reason I didn’t like Ruby 1 or 2. Although Ruby 2 was a much better fit and in that season (4)her character really helped take Sam’s story to a whole new level. Sorry I don’t find Jo compelling to watch at all but she was important for showing Dean in a new light. However I would get on board with Dean finding love with the Mentalists chick. Of course Cassie would be ideal. She was so great. I don’t think I’ve seen her in anything except a guest-spot on ER. Maybe she’ll be available for the big comeback in the final episode..? (I’m hopeful, it’s my nature.) And I agree with you Amelia was great! I LOVED what a mess she was and you’ve made some very interesting comments about what it says about Sam.
Sorry about the long comment and thanks for another great recap.
Never apologize for a long comment!!
// Probably one of the reasons he uses his sexuality so much, to disarm other men (like “I’m not the rival, I’m into YOU!”) //
Yup. He’s sort of playing on the fact that these men desire him and don’t even know it. It’s like how certain types of men sneer at women they find attractive. Or if she’s not into them, their come-ons turn to sneers immediately. “She will be made to PAY for making me want her.”
Women don’t do that to Dean. They may drool over him, but it’s friendly. It’s such an interesting dichotomy.
// Makes me think of Bette Davis and the reaction I always have to seeing her, I basically can’t take my eyes off her beacause she is ALWAYS doing something interesting. JA is like that. //
Nice comparison! So true! I haven’t seen Dark Angel – will have to check it out! I’ve seen JA’s films, and he’s always good – although the material isn’t as deep or meaningful as SPN. But he’s still “showing up” in that spontaneous way that seems to be one of his trademarks. It’s how he works.
So you’re a Two Lane Blacktop fan!! Yay!! It’s really not a well-known movie, and I am baffled as to why. I mean, obviously, it’s seen as a masterpiece of not only early 70s malaise but car culture – and film fans know about it – I am always evangelizing about that film to my friends. Especially my James Taylor loving friends! And Warren Oates?? He’s one of my favorite actors ever. Great film. I keep meaning to write about it.
I agree, that Bela works so well because of how good she is as an actress. She brings up all these seething feelings of hate and desire in the brothers that I find so entertaining. Dean, about to call her for help: “I feel dirty just thinking about it.” Hahaha. I liked her arc a lot.
I actually liked First Ruby. I’m interested to hear other people’s responses. And I liked that I felt the continuity somehow between that actress and Second Ruby (“You married Fake Ruby??”) – it seemed like the same “essence” – tough, sarcastic, sexual, and strangely emotional (for a demon). But yes, Second Ruby was so essential to that season – and it’s hard to picture that same arc with the actress playing First Ruby. I mean, Sam and Ruby were like two junkies together – and she is so TINY and he is so HUGE – it just made them look so mis-matched, and yet so bound together. And when he sucks her arm?
Sexiest moment in the show, bar none. And sickest. (Although there’s lots of competition for “sickest SPN moment” I guess.)
And thank you for seeing the potential with the Mentalists chick. :) I have a feeling it’s a doomed pointless wish though, but like you I am hopeful by nature.
And in re: Amelia: yeah. She was all messed up. So was he. He would be way too messed up at that point to settle in with someone who was all put together. They recognized the mess in one another. And – unlike Dean – Sam was sort of comfortable in that mess. Even when she was torn between him and her husband … he was like, “This sucks. We shouldn’t have just slept together. I’m not ready to walk away though. I don’t know.” So honest.
The show let her be complicated, the show let her be unsympathetic, the show let her be vulnerable. I liked her a lot, and I loved seeing Sam have to be Boyfriend Meeting Dad … we never saw the Winchesters before in that environment. Having to meet a girl’s parents?? I loved that scene.
For me sexiest moment bar none is the scene in I know what you did last summer. No not that one, although god I wish that was me he was throwing his sheening veiny muscular manly man-arms around. But for me it’s the scene after they get their asses kicked by Alaistair when Sam is sewing himself up and Dean is spitting blood with a dislocated shoulder. Alcohol is being poured into mouths and over wounds. Best part? Sam is gonna pop Deans shoulder back “on three” but only counts to one before he does. Jeeeesus, I’ve never ever seen such hot tough-guy stuff! But yeah, sucking Ruby’s blood is definitely sick/sexy. I also found it strangely hot when Sam is licking the blood, that he keeps in a flask ( “Really, from a freaking flask?!” as Sam himself says in Shut up, Dr Phil) from HIS OWN hand. Why is that?
HELL yes to that scene!
On three or licking his hand?
On three! Such butch. So arms. Very sex.
Right? It’s practically ancient it’s so Manly. It might be my favorite ever. You know, if I don’t have to think too much with my upstairs brain.
Oh good LORD THAT SCENE.
That scene is amazing. I think it’s really cool how real they made Sam’s stitches and him sewing it up look.
Also about Dark Angel. If there is one reason you should see it: bomber jackets. Like the neo-nazi kind (awful people, great look). Yeah, they wear them.
I’ve clicked through some of the John C Hines blog and like his take on it. Also he doesn’t come across as the big male righter of wrongs, you know ‘so brave of him to do that’ – just puts himself in the same position as the female cover images and letting us work it out with him. And takes on some of the ‘male’ covers too.
This kind and level of objectification does no favours for women or men.
Personal favourite, the Avengers male ‘butt’ poster .
In stitches.
Kind of germane – here’s an article from today’s Guardian about what if men were depicted in the same way as women in sexy photos shoots and film posters. The links in the article are great, too.
You have to roll over this bit of text – (html wierdness …)
what if men were depicted in the same way as women in sexy photos shoots and film posters.
God, it’s just so amazing, isn’t it – when you really see it laid out like that … How used to it we are from women, how “weird” it looks with men … The sexualization of women, ugh. It’s so rampant.
Right – it’s a really great way to just present the issue. Why does it look so ridiculous when men present themselves as women are presented every day? It’s a questioning kind of project. And yes, the humor is killer!
Men sneering at women who are hot but don’t want them is the absolutely unsexiest thing ever.
Yup. Totally not a good look, guys. Try being friendly. You might actually get a better response.
Spoilers about Dark Angel:
It would be really great to hear what you have to say about JA in Dark Angel. He is really really good. I don’t think I can oversell it. There’s a cage-fighting scene which is all manner of hot and he’s fighting…the golem! Also Jessica Alba in another superhot cage-fighting scene. There are a ton of other SPN actors in it. Benny has a fighting scene with undercover JA. Ellen’s there. Alpha vampire (loved him). Undercover JA is also bespectacled. It’s awesome.
Max, seriously, these aren’t spoilers …
And wearing glasses? (faints)
And OMGolems!
Right. Some people are very touchy about knowing anything they haven’t seen though :)
Good point. ;-)
I just mean, these details alone would seriously tempt me to watch Dark Angel, rather than spoil it for me.
Why do we find glasses so hot?
Dunno. I just know the minute a good looking guy puts a pair of glasses on the hotness goes up 200%
Just does.
Can’t wait for ‘Supernatural: the Varifocal Years’
You really should, JA is so young and already so good. I’ve seen almost everything else (including the “Clownana” short film!) and it’s definitely the best thing except Dean Winchester.
Varifocal! ha! Had to look that up. Yeah that would be a great show!
In re: Ackles’ other work:
I love his big rambling monologue in the grocery store about buying tampons in the movie “Ten Inch Hero”. It’s not really a good movie – and what a TERRIBLE title – although I love many of those actors – and to see him in a green mohawk and a kilt? Brill. And Clea DuVall is always good. Hated the totally gratuitous nudity of Danneel (Ackles’ now-wife) – and felt actually bad for her that they made her do that – but she was sweet too. She gives a very sweet performance. There are some good things in that movie.
My favorite, though, is Jensen Ackles being sent to buy tampons and having this whole weird embarrassed “fuck you” monologue to the other guys in the store whom he imagines are judging him. Standing there in a kilt, holding tampons, saying to the entire store, “YES. I’M BUYING TAMPONS.”
That monologue — and the amazing peace-to-bird conversion that ends it — is easily the best thing about TIH. A criminal waste of Clea Duvall, although it’s nice to see her in a sweet role. I actually am kind of really peeved that they cleaned him up in the end. Neuters his whole philosophy and doesn’t speak well of Danneel’s character.
Yup. Cop-out. Let’s take this gentle guy expressing himself through his clothes and make him look like everyone else!
His jokey “blow-job” thing that he does when he says “Sausage party” – in the store? There he is: Jensen Ackles bringing the crazy comedy. Making it work.
I will second the appreciation for JA in Dark Angel. I really love Alec almost as much as Dean, and for me, I really don’t see much of Alec in Dean after the first couple of episodes in S1 of SPN. And yes that cage match is outstanding.
Cage match?
You don’t need to say anymore. I’m there.
Also I’ve always had what I found to be a…disturbing reaction to the gun-cleaning scenes. You made me feel a little better about it. Also like you’ve said about other things, it’s so cool when they know what they’re doing. Someone should put all those scenes together and put it on youtube.
Yup. I embraced my gun-loving self early on in my life when I saw Rambo. hahahaha. And it is disturbing, especially since movies that revel in them have to do with crime and violent death – the guns we see definitely are in the hands of criminals. But still. When they’re filmed right, they’re almost seductive. Phallic. Similar to cars, when they’re filmed right. Like Ameican Graffiti. Or Two-Lane Blacktop. An extension of the cock, to be crude.
Sometimes it can be too much, or over the top, or a shallow form of shorthand – but that’s true of anything.
Again, a tribute to the detail in Max’s character that he doesn’t know how to handle the gun – picks it up from the end and holds it really awkwardly. No wonder he prefers to float it in the air.
Right – the gun looks so much more dangerous when it’s being held by someone who is afraid of it and doesn’t know what he’s doing.
I love that Charlie knows how to handle a gun. That small scene with her and Dean in the shooting range … brill.
Yes it’s the cock. Of course, that’s what they’re tapping into.
//It must be awful to be Dean Winchester and be so beautiful. Women love him and men… hate him? Seriously they hate on him so much. Probably one of the reasons he uses his sexuality so much, to disarm other men (like “I’m not the rival, I’m into YOU!”) and if that doesn’t work he’s still walking away with having grossed them out, made them uncomfortable, baffled them. //
That’s a great point, Max. I hadn’t really thought about it that way until I started reading these discussions. The fact that he is “beautiful” rather than “handsome”—other men seem to HATE beautiful men, yet seem relatively indifferent to handsome ones.
RE: Bela – I actually didn’t like her character at first. Not because of the actress (who I just now realized is on The Walking Dead. Sometimes I’m slow)…I just found her first few episodes, jarring, I guess. The first one particularly. I kept thinking “is this a crossover with a show I don’t know about? Is this some sort of back door pilot?” To me, it felt like she was plopped in from another show. She was TOO developed, if that makes sense.
RE: Ruby – I liked Ruby 1, but Ruby 2 worked better for the blood/romance plotline with Sam (obviously they have better chemistry).
RE: Dark Angel – Worth the watch. And there are only two seasons, so it isn’t a big time investment! HA ha heh. (Everything I like gets cancelled. I’m still shocked SPN has been on this long! I was worried it’d be cancelled after season 2).
In re Dean’s beauty: “Such delicate features for a hunter.” Everyone picks up on it, everyone is … disturbed by it. It’s such an interesting element. And you can see how men punish him for their own internalized homophobia. It’s all unspoken – but it goes on all the time!! I said somewhere – maybe my first post about SPN? – the beauty like his puts him in “Freak” category. It’s as noticeable as a physical disability – and sometimes people like that are shunned, stayed away from – in the same way people shun/stay away from someone who is visibly disabled.
I said somewhere else that I saw Heather, one of the America’s Top Model contestants, on a street in New York. She was wearing a parka, big boots, she was dressed totally anonymously, like anyone else. But she was almost 6 feet tall, skinny as a rail, and so beautiful she literally seemed like an alien. Even if I hadn’t recognized her from the show, I would have stopped in my tracks at the sight of her. It’s not welcoming, beauty like that. It’s … so striking that it makes people act weird. I don’t know, it’s very interesting.
There are great stories from Elvis’ early days when he was first becoming successful – and stories from other men who met him. It was obvious why the women were freaking out. But the acknowledgements from other men … It was an element that just HAD to be discussed, because he was not just handsome – many people are handsome. Carl Perkins met Elvis, shook hands, told him he loved his work, and the second Elvis moved on, Carl turned to Scotty Moore and said immediately, “That is the best-looking man I have ever seen in my life.”
hahaha
I mean, what must that be like? To have people react like that to you??
Especially for someone like Dean, who needs to put up such a tough front in order to survive his job. He wants to be perceived as impenetrable and yet … obviously, he isn’t.
I am relatively new to Supernatural (and by relatively new, I mean I started watching a week ago and am now almost all the way through season 2), and I somehow stumbled onto your post about JA’s affinity for schtick yesterday and have only been able to stop reading to watch more episodes (at the expense of both my grad school obligations and eating – it is no exaggeration to say that this show like a drug for me). I am so enjoying the level of the discourse both in the blog and the comments, and your posts have helped me to clarify for myself just why this show has sucked me in and hasn’t let me up for air yet (and also why I fell SO DAMN HARD for Dean so fast). This is so well written that I have serious reservations about linking to my blog, which I’m afraid will read like 5th grade essays in comparison.
Anyway, I’ve wanted to comment on entries I read before this one, but I HAD to comment on this. I used to work for child protective services, so this episode was pretty tough for me to watch. I have worked with Max and his stepmother before. (Hell, for that matter, I worked with teenage Dean and Sam before.) That scene where they’re talking to Max trying to figure out what’s going on – it just killed me. I have been that interviewer. Knowing that there’s something off, that I’m not getting all the information, and having no way to get it. In my case, the neighbors usually weren’t too helpful – either they didn’t know what was going on, or they were complicit with the parents on some level (in more of a “it’s none of my business” way than an actively malevolent way). And when Dean made the “maybe if we’d gotten here 20 years sooner” comment, that resounded with me, too. I primarily worked with teenagers, and I saw quite a few that I was pretty sure were beyond redemption, and I had very similar thoughts to Dean’s comment, more than once.
I had a few thoughts about Max’s stepmom as I was reading this post. First, I was able to empathize with the stepmom somewhat (as I always was when I worked with someone like her). It was part of what made the work so stressful and tragic. I dealt with a few truly evil individuals, but most of the parents I worked with were doing the best they could with severely limited resources. Parenting, for them, was like trying to dig a house foundation with a garden spade, and it was impossible not to empathize with them. I think this was the case with stepmom’s character. Even if she wasn’t a victim of domestic violence in her marriage (she so totally was, though – definitely verbal/emotional abuse, if not physical), I would bet that she had been abused as a child (or was at the very least the child of an alcoholic), so in her marriage, she was continuing the dysfunctional patterns she learned as a child. I didn’t get the impression that Max was an annoyance to her – at least not primarily – but more that she was just so damaged herself that she COULDN’T protect him. This is why her default reaction is self-pity. No one ever took care of her, either. And I think this is part of why the heavily parentified Dean is willing to step in front of a gun for her, despite the fact that she’ll never ben in the running for mother of the year.
Natalie – Welcome, and thank you for your comment!
You are in for quite a ride in the next seven damn seasons – but remember to eat!! It’s a marathon, not a sprint! :)
I don’t think I could ever do the job that you did with CPS, and you have my admiration, totally! It must be so so wrenching to be in the presence of what you know is wrong – but you can’t put your finger on it, or nobody’s talking. This episode really really gets that.
And we’re talking a lot about the Winchester childhood in the comments section to the next re-cap – “The Benders” – and how we are being asked (sub textually) to see their childhood in connection to these horrible abusive situations in the episodes.
I like your take on the mother, and I very much like your perspective on Dean’s arm out in front of her. Nice catch!!
I think her husband and his brother had a lot of fun beating up on Max, it was how they let off steam, and once they got going it would be impossible to stop. So she kept cooking (and popping pills) and looked the other way. Totally awful.
I just got back from vacation, so I am behind on your recaps. I haven’t even finished this one, because I have learned that I need to comment on what strikes me-or I forget what I want to say about certain things.
I feel like I need you to basically translate my feelings into words. I feel the EXACT same way you do about guns.
” My love of guns has to do with what they look like, the art of them, what it sounds like when they are clicked and clacked together, the mechanics of them, how they are handled when they are handled by someone who knows what they are doing, the gleam of them, and I appreciate a director who feels the same way.”
I feel that many of them are so beautiful, especially the older ones. I am all about gun control,and not to get too political-I feel there is no reason for a regular citizen to have an assault rifle. Yet, I love the feeling of my shotgun in my hands. I think my .22 is gorgeous. I feel like their aren’t many people who love guns for the reasons you expressed, so thanks for articulating why I enjoy them.
They are beautiful. Partly because they ARE dangerous, perhaps. But not only because of that. Really it’s just the look of them and the sound of them. And people who know how to handle them? Love it. There’s a scene in Black Hawk Down when Eric Bana is basically putting together his home-made gun, with all the doo-hickeys on it that he needs – it’s completely jerry-rigged to his purposes – and he’s lying in his bunk in Somalia – and it is sheer aesthetic pleasure watching that.
Supernatural is a great gun show. And JA and JP totally look like they know what they are doing, and I am sure they do. You can’t fake that. Actors who don’t know how to handle guns take classes in order to learn it – it’s a really important skill-set. Nothing worse than seeing an actor handle a gun and you can tell they have zero idea what they are doing!!
And welcome back, Maureen – hope you had a nice vacation!
CPS is a thankless line of work – so thank you for the admiration. There’s a a reason I don’t do that work anymore (well, really, there’s a bunch of reasons, but I digress) – I lasted about 3 years in that particular branch of social work, and that’s about average for the turnover rate.
I think there was a self-preservation aspect to stepmom’s choices, too – not only would it have been impossible to stop them from beating Max, but I’m sure there was a part of her thinking, “As long as they’re targeting Max, they’re not beating me.” And the guilt from that was probably a big part of the reason for the pill popping.
// “As long as they’re targeting Max, they’re not beating me.” And the guilt from that was probably a big part of the reason for the pill popping. //
Ugh. Horrifying.
and her performance really has all of that in it, if you think about it. She’s doing a great job with a very small part – it’s all there.