Directed by Peter Ellis
Written by John Shiban
When we first met Dean Winchester in the pilot, he was cocky, brash, and bossy. Other shadings came in pretty quick, once Ackles settled into the role, once they moved to Vancouver, once the show was picked up, and on and on. The character had a pretty steep curve, if you compare what we see in Episode 3 to what we saw in the pilot. Sam’s transformation was not quite as radical (his transformation would come later). Sometimes it’s hard to remember how these characters presented themselves to us in Season 1, because so much has happened since then. We’re 9 seasons in now. But part of the fun of doing Season 1 re-caps, all as Season 9 is unfolding, is to “go back” and remember what it was like to see it all for the first time, what it was like to be in the dark about these guys, watching other elements/shadings appear. The show had great flexibility, and it utilized it early on. The backstory was sketched in just enough to be properly ambiguous, so that we could re-visit it, and learn more about it. Even the teaser to the pilot, which seemed so explicit in “what happened”, was later up-ended and turned inside out, as we slowly figured out what was REALLY going on in that nursery. But for me, the fun of these re-caps is to try to forget that I know what’s coming. Not always easy. But certainly worthwhile, because it is then that you can really see how well the writers and the creative team and the actors set up all the themes and motifs – EARLY – themes/motifs which are still paying dividends in Season 9. I mean, hell, we got a flashback episode in Season 9 about Dean’s teenage years, and you would think we had already learned everything we needed to learn, but nope. There are still some intriguing blanks.
But erasing everything we eventually learn, and erasing how we have settled in with this guy by now, Episode 15 of Season 1, “Benders,” is a revelation.
It’s a revelation because it is yet another moment in the slow-reveal striptease of Dean Winchester’s inner life, an admission of his motivations and not only that, his feelings about said motivations. Basically, where this guy is coming from. The brothers are men now. They haven’t “worked together” as men before. Sam left for college at age 18, which would put Dean at 22. Before that point, Sam was a teenager, Dean the older brother, and before that, they were both children. Dad was always there, focusing them, training them, dragging them around. But now Dad is missing, and they are grown men, in the Impala together. Everything is new. It’s important to keep that in mind. Dad’s presence would have inhibited the brothers from creating a real and open relationship. He would always be intervening, correcting, adjusting. It’s hard to picture the two of them goofing off in Dad’s presence, or getting into a fight. Dad would have stepped in and said, “Knock it off” and they would have obeyed. So now they are out on a limb, without Dad. Their dynamic is changing in ways they can’t understand yet. Dad is more powerful in his absence, almost, than in his presence.
Dean’s natural tendency, it feels like a moral imperative, is to fill Dad’s shoes. It’s an eldest son thing, and it’s also a codependent thing. If Dean isn’t running the show, then what the hell is his entire personality? Who the hell is he? Sam and Dean have already butted heads, multiple times, when Dean tries to set the tone, or steer the ship. Sam reminds him that he is an equal player, he’s not “Sammy” anymore, he’s “Sam”, a grown man. The show will revisit this territory constantly.
How unstable Dean is is not quite clear at this stage of the game. We got a glimpse in “Scarecrow,” we got a huge glimpse in “Skin,” “Home,” but he’s not telling us his secrets yet. All of this is complicated (beautifully) by how appealing Ackles is an actor. Everyone gives him the benefit of the doubt. Everyone makes excuses for him. It’s part of what he’s doing with the character, it’s part of the sucker-punch of Dean Winchester.
The dynamic is also complicated because Dean refuses to be a victim, he refuses to indulge in self-pity, and he refuses to get all mushy-mushy in emotional conversations. It’s how stars are made, being able to put all of that together. What the hell else do you think Gary Cooper was doing in his roles? Or John Wayne? It’s why someone like Humphrey Bogart was such a compelling leading man (and an unexpected one: the man was short, balding, and had a lisp. But he had such power onscreen, and one of his powers was the power of withholding. He held back, he doesn’t “show us all.”) If Dean Winchester “showed us all” the show would have been over quick. There would be no tension. There would be no deep unresolved issues, no schisms in personality. We need those things to remain interested, to continue.
One can certainly say that all that stiff-upper-lip stuff is damaging to him. One can also say that the tough-guy-stuff is a pose. I happen to not agree, not entirely, but it’s certainly an argument. I see every part of Dean Winchester – the tough stuff, the bravery, the cockiness, the arrogance – and then the other stuff he is not quite in control of, his sexualization of most moments, his flirtatiousness in situations where it is not warranted, swaggering his cock around (metaphorically – or, hell, probably literally on occasion) as a diversionary tactic – is all part of how he survived. He NEEDS those things. Until … he doesn’t need them anymore, until … these things start to kill him (which is what is happening now in Season 9).
There’s that metaphor about relationships being like a dance step. When the couple is in sync, dancing the same dance, there is nothing more beautiful to experience. But when one person changes the dance step, the partner either has to adjust or stop dancing. Marriages fall apart when one partner changes the dance step (“The kids are grown, I want to go back to work” or “I’m sick of my high-pressure job, let’s sell everything, and move to a cabin in the Ozarks”). The reaction is often: “Wait a second. I thought we had an understanding here. I thought we were in agreement.” Sam, in Season 9, has changed the dance step. It’s no longer working. Sam is rising in strength and cohesion and Dean is disintegrating. That’s what happens when a dance step that one person thought was set in stone is changed.
See, it’s difficult to not look ahead! But I blame “Benders,” and re-watching it in preparation for this re-cap. Because what we see in “Benders” is Dean’s clear statement of how he understands the dance step with his brother. We may have guessed, and it’s certainly been implied and suggested, but we have never heard it from him so clearly and so vulnerably. Again, there’s that thing of giving Dean the benefit of the doubt, making excuses for him, because he is such an appealing human. Nothing wrong with that. But “Benders” looks very different when seen in the context of Season 9. And Dean’s understanding of the dance step, and the role he has taken on for himself (first, given to him by his Dad, and then owned by him outright, all on his own) is the very thing that has ruined his relationship with Sam.
And THIS is why Supernatural is such a good show. Because these very subtle and emotional thru-lines TRACK. There are times when it can get repetitious, and you can wonder why nobody is moving forward, or why we are dealing with the same ol’ same ol’ thing again. That’s gonna happen in a series that lasts as long as Supernatural. They don’t always get it right. They spin their wheels sometimes. It happens. But one of the reasons Season 9 has been so satisfying for me, personally, is that schism in Dean Winchester, the brokenness, (the qualities that also makes him beautiful – his caretaking instinct, his willingness to do the dirty work, his selflessness) – is now coming back to kill him. And that I know from my own life. I know it so well. It’s existential, it’s “why am I here,” it’s “am I worth being saved”, it’s all of the questions which come up during moments of crisis that can either help bury you or help redeem you.
I’ll be honest: on my first viewing of “Benders,” before I watched the rest of the series, I wasn’t crazy about it. I didn’t like that there were no monsters, that they were “just people”. It felt like an episode of Criminal Minds (and I love that show, nothing against it). I felt that the hillbilly family was way over-the-top in stereotyping, and I was frustrated that the Arc was somehow not even mentioned. The Arc of “where is Dad.” I wasn’t seeing it in its metaphorical power. It felt like filler, but filler from another show. Obviously I was very wrong, and how wrong I was is only obvious to me once I watched the entire series, and then went back to re-visit “Benders”.
When Dean opens up to the deputy sheriff about what he sees as his role in life (looking out for Sam), there are no games, no cover-up, no bossypants behavior. Suddenly, we see beneath the veil. And what we see behind there is soft, bruised, pliable, and vulnerable. Up until now, we have seen Dean in the context of his relationship with Sam. And he’s not going to talk to Sam in this way. Sam needs him to be strong, certain, and, yes, bossy. It’s Dean’s side of the dance step. The only person we’ve seen Dean with, outside of that context, is with Cassie. And they don’t talk about Sam at all, they talk about their feelings. And racist monster trucks. You know, like any totally normal relationship.
Bread crumbs dropped along the way:
Pilot: In the confrontation by the Impala in the pilot, Dean says, “I can’t do this alone.” Sam says, “Yes, you can.” And Dean replies, “Yeah. Well, I don’t want to.”
“Wendigo”: Dean’s soft open reaction to Haley’s concern for her missing brother. It’s subtextual what he’s doing there, except for his one line to her, “I think I know how you feel”, but it gives us a “way in” (and with Dean, it’s hard for a “way in” because his language is often surface-level bossy pants stuff.)
“Dead in the Water”: A huge bread-crumb, suggesting the level of trauma under which Dean operates. Dean tells Lucas about his mom, and how his mom would want him to “be brave”. Dean admits how scared he was when he was a kid. Sam’s role here is to look on, in growing understanding, at who his big brother is. You realize how they have never talked about ANY of this.
“Phantom Traveler”: Dean is afraid of flying, which can be seen as another bread crumb leading into the forest of his psychology. But that’s about it, in this episode. There are other concerns here, having to do with Dad being missing. “Dean can help,” says Dad’s new outgoing message.
“Bloody Mary”: Sam’s Arc starts to rise. Secrets. Sam admits to Dean he has a secret, a secret he won’t share. Dean’s reaction is completely inappropriate. His world starts to shatter a bit, when he starts to feel Sam’s separate-ness from him. Huge clue. We can certainly see why Dean is this way, but it doesn’t make him any less annoying. You start to feel that … he has some serious problems.
“Skin”: Essential bread crumb. Through the self-pitying monologues of the shape-shifter, we get a sense of Dean’s feelings of abandonment when his brother went to college. Best of all, though, we aren’t sure if it’s true, because it wasn’t actually Dean saying it. But the show trucks in that kind of ambiguity.
“Hook Man”: Kind of a filler episode, a bit stock, except for the masterpiece of editing that is the final scene (which is nearly wordless). Dean’s focus on Sam through the rear-view mirror, his worry, his sadness, his empathy towards what Sam is giving up. Dean is totally Sam-focused.
“Bugs”: The episode featuring the shortest night in human history. It lasted only 10 minutes! Well, whatever, the argument between the brothers about how to interpret their childhood and how to interpret Dad’s parenting is a running theme. Sam seems logical and grown-up, Dean seems childish and resistant, also not all that bright. Dean needs to feel his childhood was not all that bad, and he needs Sam to be in sync with him. The dance step is changing, Sam is changing it, and Dean hates it.
“Home”: Putting out an SOS call to Dad, in tears. Key. So much about this episode is key: Dean’s growing anxiety, his inability to hide it, his fear of what is happening to his brother.
“Asylum”: The confrontation between a possessed Sam and his brother near the end of the episode is a huge bread crumb: Sam’s awareness of being bossed around, his bucking against Dean’s authority, and Dean’s willingness to do what it takes to get the job done. But it makes you wonder: if the conflict between the brothers ever comes out into the open, for real, without a Monster to blame it on (“It was the shape-shifter/Mad Doctor talking, not me!”), what the hell is gonna happen? Hugely unstable relationship.
“Scarecrow”: The conflict explodes. Sam finally rebels against Dean’s bossiness. Dean is so shocked you could knock him over with a feather, which speaks to his lack of self-awareness at this stage of the game. Dude, you should have seen it coming.
“Faith”: We see Dean facing death in a kind of careless over-it way. It’s his time, it’s a dangerous gig, what are ya gonna do. A glimpse of his sense of self-worth (or lack thereof). Sam has to fight FOR him because Dean can’t do it himself. By the end of the episode, through the encounter with Layla, that dynamic has shifted just a little bit.
“Route 666”: PantsFeelings and Pillow Talk. Like “Dead in the Water,” what this episode does is see Dean through Sam’s eyes, we see how much Sam has under-estimated Dean, or labeled him, or made assumptions. Dean is full of surprises, the main one being vulnerability. That’s what that episode is about.
“Nightmare”: Sam’s Arc taking over again, and so we see how unstable Dean gets when Sam starts moving into areas he doesn’t understand. No one could fault Dean for worrying about Sam. If you have siblings you’re close to, you know how much brain-space they can take up, especially if one of them is in trouble. I think my own siblings in 2012 were out of their minds with worry about me, and spent a lot of time with one another talking about me. It’s embarrassing to be “the one” everyone is worried about, but that’s how families operate. “Nightmare” is complex, though: Dean promises Sam nothing will happen to him as long as he’s around. You wonder though: what price has this guy paid for his devotion to his family?
And then we come to “Benders”. Like I said, it’s helpful to remember how what we’ve seen in “Benders” hasn’t been seen before. Or it’s helpful to me, since I wasn’t a fan of the episode originally.
The whole thing is about family. Even the hillbilly stereotyping (which makes Deliverance look subtle) makes sense if you look at it in terms of a metaphor of the ugliness beneath the surface in so many families, of the way roles are set up, of the way a “family business” (in this case, hunting) can be twisted into something grotesque. Everyone in “Benders” has family problems. Everyone in “Benders” is trying to get back to a time when things were simple, when their family was together. But dark things are afoot, dance steps are changing, and everyone starts to fall apart. The Bender family is horrifying, a closed system. The siblings in that family all have their roles and they play them with gusto, especially when in the presence of outsiders. The family unit MUST be protected. It’s not difficult to see the correlation with the Winchesters. We have seen 14 episodes where Dean and Sam try to find their father. John Winchester remains a bit of a mystery. We get that he raised his sons in a certain way, and we get that Sam fled the first second he saw his opening. We also get that Dean saw that as a betrayal. It’s the Prism theory of Storytelling that I keep going on about. The next episode after “Benders” is “Shadow,” when Dad finally re-enters the picture. That’s a whole other ball of wax. FINALLY we see the three men in the same place at the same time, and it is incredibly revealing. And then two episodes later, we get “Something Wicked,” an essential episode giving us our first flashback to Sam and Dean as kids. We’ll never see their childhood the same way again. Up until that point, we’ve had competing viewpoints, Sam’s, Dean’s, and then Dad’s … but “Something Wicked” feels more objective: Here is how it was. Even though it’s Dean’s memory, there’s something rock-solid about that piece of the puzzle. It changes everything.
It changed my relationship to Dean, too. Like I said, the show wants you to give him the benefit of the doubt. He is such an appealing character and Jensen Ackles is so appealing. The show wants us to feel safe when he’s around, to take his word for it that he will take care of things, and the show wants us to revel in his casual manly heroism. But it ALSO wants to implicate us in that. It ALSO wants us to realize what we have been supporting, that what we admire in him is the thing that is most hurting him. Supernatural is AWESOME at implicating its own audience. So yeah, I was taken with the Han Solo aspect of Dean, I love characters like that, they have a long tradition in cinema and I love them. “Something Wicked” showed me something else, and from that point on, I stopped taking Dean’s word for it about his childhood. I stopped trusting his interpretation, in other words. The show let me KNOW him a little bit better, and let me in on his secrets, let me see what he was hiding (the abuse, the shame, the scars) … stuff he would never acknowledge outright. It creates a beautiful tension which still exists now. Secrets/unresolved stuff like that is one of the reasons why the character is such a huge HOOK. Drama is not made up of beautifully resolved and open people being all loving and open with their deep trauma issues. Drama is made up of deeply unresolved people doing the best they can with shit they barely understand.
Creator Eric Kripke said that Supernatural wasn’t really about monsters. If he had to boil it down, he would say that the theme is “Family is hell.” “Benders” makes that explicit with a family of people who are, quite literally, monsters, albeit of the human variety. We could judge them, and, of course, we do. Please stop putting people in cages. And brush your teeth once a decade. Kthxbai. But “Benders” is asking us to make the connections with the Winchesters. It isn’t doing so obviously, but it is pleading with us to fill in all those glorious blanks. “Like my father and my father before him …” says the brown-toothed patriarch. We remember Dean’s urgent monologue to Sam in “Wendigo”, where he says “pick up where Dad left off … the family business …” It’s not so much that the Benders represent where the Winchesters could go if they went off the rails. It’s that the Winchesters are already off the rails. The things they kill may not be human, but killing is killing, and organizing your family around the shared experience of Murder is, how you Americans say, totally fucked up.
It is eloquent that it is Sam who is abducted and imprisoned in that cage in the barn. You would think it would be Dean, because Dean is usually more susceptible to attacks, he just walks around like he “has it coming”. But if you think about it in terms of how the Winchester family set itself up: Sam felt trapped, and had some Outside Eye on his own situation (the Outside Eye that Dean totally lacks, part and parcel of PTSD). Sam looked around at his own family, and thought, “This is messed UP.” He dug up graves, and stabbed monsters, and then packed his backpack to go to school, and he had some awareness that everything was screwed up and maybe he could choose something else for himself. His experience could be seen as being locked up in a cage by his protective father and brother. (I don’t think “Benders” is straight metaphor, but it works on that level.) And John Winchester is the patriarch, setting the tone, and probably chopping up bodies in the motel room bathroom in order for easy disposal, similar to the horrifying scene where we see the guy sawing up the body in the sink. Sam and Dean would have been watching cartoons in the next room, as Dad sawed up a werewolf in the sink, and they wouldn’t have thought any of it was weird. The little girl in the Bender family is perhaps the scariest one of all of them, and tragic as well. She is a child, and should be innocent, but she isn’t. She is part of that family too. She accepts it without question and does what needs to be done. She is violent, protective, and ferocious. She also knows how to use people’s perceptions of her (Little girl = sweet = innocent = guileless = cute) to her advantage. She is Dean. Dean was like that by the time he was 12. So of course she would then be told to watch over Dean, which she does, waving a knife around in front of his face, glorying in her power over him. He would have done the same thing when he was a child.
We’ve already talked a lot about Nature/Nurture. The show seems to demand it. You cannot blame a child for crafting its personality accordingly in order to survive abuse. The child is the victim. The child cannot be blamed for trying to survive, trying to please its parent. That little girl is a monster, but she was turned into one by growing up in the closed system of her family. Phone call for Dean Winchester.
We get two journeys in “Benders”: Sam imprisoned, doing his best to figure out the situation, and escape, and then Dean, out there in the world, trying to get his brother back. The separation in “Scarecrow” was because Sam walked away. It was awful for Dean, but he also came to the realization that Sam needs to live his own life. A huge concession. But having Sam snatched out from under him, vanished into the ether … it’s the worst possible thing that can happen, and for the first time, we see how Dean sees his role. And how his whole life depends on that role. And if Sam does vanish, it means Dean has failed. Even if Dean could never have prevented Sam’s vanishing (and he couldn’t have) … it doesn’t matter. Dean’s role is not graded on a curve, and there aren’t actually even separate grades at all. You don’t get a B+ in protecting Sam. It is strictly Pass-Fail.
And we are moving into another Arc with the next episode, the return of Dad. “Benders” makes sure we remember the stakes before we start on into that hot mess.
1st scene
Hibbing, Minnesota
The little Bender girl isn’t the only Dean stand-in in the episode. We meet another one, in Evan (Ryan Drescher), a little boy, sitting up late at night, watching a Godzilla movie on late-night television, with little plastic monsters on his windowsill. (Speaking of Godzilla, yesterday was his 60th anniversary. In other words, it was Godzilla’s anniversary on the day I wrote this post. I love it when that happens.)
A blue neon “Tavern” light is outside the apartment window. In a road-trip show such as Supernatural, they could have gone “generic” with the worlds they stepped into (and actually the show has gone more in that direction in later seasons, which is a bummer). You know, generic meaning all of America seen as immaculate homogenized suburbia. Everyone lives in a nice little ranch house with a lawn, blah blah. In the early seasons, the show made it a point to take us off the beaten track, both atmospherically and economically. Supernatural takes place in a world full of country roads, one-pump gas stations, ramshackle biker bars, junk yards, and cheese-ball motel rooms. It is an America made up of spare parts, and duct-taped together. It is not brand-name America. It is unique, hardy, eccentric. Like the music the guys listen to, metal and classic rock. This shit was built to LAST. It’s an America not often shown in prime-time television, and reality shows that take place in this particular America are usually set up as Freak Shows. Mockery being the main proponent. Supernatural loves off-the-beaten-track, and loves the weirdo eccentricities of America, and gives us blue-collar heroes who maneuver in a very different world than the health-conscious politically-correct bottled-water-drinking enclaves on both coasts. They’re from what people on the coasts refer to condescendingly as “flyover country”, and they’re damn proud of it. You don’t fly over this great country. You drive through it. See how homogenous it looks THEN.
Evan and his mom clearly live in what is probably a one-bedroom apartment, right above a tavern. I bet Mom sleeps on the pull-out couch in the main room and lets Evan have his own room. We see a glimpse of the apartment later. It is tiny, cluttered, and a total mess. There is no Dad in the picture (at least, he’s not shown in the scene, but I think it’s understood that he doesn’t exist at all). Evan stays up late, by himself, watching scary moves, all as the blue Tavern light gleams right outside his window. These are visual cues. We see so much homogenous shit on television, or when we see low-income environments, it’s patronizing. Here, it’s barely even acknowledged, except visually. But it’s part of the world of Supernatural. Dean and Sam grew up rough, grew up on fast food, and grew up on scary movies watched when Dad was out of the room. They’re Generation X. They grew up not wearing seat belts, or bike helmets. They grew up without Internet. They grew up playing on blacktop playgrounds where they could fall and bust their head open, no padded-ground playgrounds for them. They grew up during the dying gasps of the Cold War. They learned about porn and women’s bodies by sneaking peeks at Dad’s Playboy. (They also grew up slinging shot guns and killing ghosts, but besides that anomaly …) They were probably AGOG when they were invited over a friend’s house (the one or two times it happened) and saw the nice clean living room and the refrigerator filled with food. No wonder Dean shovels food in his mouth, as though he grew up in a Romanian orphanage. He never thought there would be enough.
All of this is to say: it’s the subtle choices, like making Evan and his mom live in a dump apartment, and not even making a big deal out of it, that helps give the show its depth in these early seasons. It doesn’t look or feel like other shows. Too many people in Hollywood write as though “flyover country” is just that. They need to get out more.
Evan hears something strange going on outside, a sound that doesn’t seem right, so he goes to the window. He looks down on the cluttered junky parking lot. The Tavern light suffuses the whole scene in ghostly blue. A guy is walking around down there, amongst the cars. The guy, too, hears something that is not right, and stands and looks around. We see his feet from beneath the cars, a totally creepy POV change, and then suddenly he is grabbed, and we see him dragged underneath one of the cars, his hands (horrifyingly) scrabbling at the pavement as he disappears. Evan sees the whole thing.
We cut to an overhead shot of the apartment. You can see what I mean. That is some detailed production design right there.
Mom and Evan stand talking to two state troopers, wearing hats and uniforms that make them look like Smokey the Bear. Since we first see them from above, we don’t know immediately that it is Sam and Dean. Mom (Sadie Lawrence) is saying that the police have already been questioning her son all week, and the more he tells the story the more he believes it’s true. Evan stands next to her, thoughtful, upset, he’s been through a lot in that week. He knew the guy he saw taken. Mr. Jenkins. He also knows his mom doesn’t believe his story. He’s got an old soul, this kid.
Sam and Dean take off their Smokey the Bear hats, ready to go in for the kill. Sam’s tactic is gentle and encouraging, “Don’t worry how crazy it sounds, Evan …” And Dean is, what a shock, a little bit “off”. He usually is in these situations when he is forced to lie. He basically just wants to cut to the chase: Tell us what you saw, but he has to go this rigmarole of play-acting first. Dean says to Mom and son something about how this is a “matter for the state police,” but the way he says it is strange. No other word for it. It’s these initial stages where Dean comes off weird. Sam has to intervene. Often.
Evan tells them he was up late watching a movie, and he heard a weird noise, like a monster. Mom, who has already been down this path and is clearly tired of it, says, “Tell the officers what movie you were watching.” Evan says, “Godzilla vs. Mothra,” and Sam smiles, the way you smile at a kid when you are encouraging them from your Adult Plane of Existence, while Dean starts laughing, totally enthusiastic, saying, “That is my favorite Godzilla movie.” He is not on the Adult Plane, he meets the kid on his level, and it’s not a ploy. Dean has no boundaries, which can be problematic, sometimes it’s awesome. It makes him not treat kids like they are kids. (And, of course, kids gravitate towards him for that reason. He seems like one of them.) Who cares that the kid is 10. We need to talk about Godzilla right now.
I love, too, that Dean knows all of the different versions of the film and has clearly done a compare-and-contrast exercise in his spare time. So has the kid. There’s the original, and then there’s the remake, but if you know anything about the Godzilla franchise then you know that there are multiple ways you can interpret the terms “original” and “remake”. I’m thinking he’s referencing the 1992 remake, but that’s just a guess. Dean says, confidentially, “That’s my favorite Godzilla movie. So much better than the original.” Evan lights up, in the middle of his grim circumstances, and agrees, and Dean, caught up in the moment, gestures over at Sam and says, “He likes the remake,” with an eye-roll and Evan looks up at Sam and says, “Yuk.”
And with that moment the episode has won my heart. Dean is about to say, “That’s what I keep saying,” when Sam clears his throat to interrupt the inappropriate off-topic bonding, not to mention the fact that these yahoos don’t care for the remake which is CLEARLY superior. Dean catches himself, and sort of reins it all in, in a very funny “Oh. Right. I’m a state trooper. Whoops” moment, and Sam takes over, because, once again, Dean cannot be trusted with the simplest of interrogations. At least he’s not flirting.
2nd scene
Sam and Dean hang out at a biker bar, Dean playing darts, Sam going through Dad’s journal, and the local police reports, and talking about the case. Their conversation is punctuated by the clack of pool balls in the background. There are some pretty funny visual jokes interspersed through this pretty stock “let’s talk about the case” scene, and I’ll get to them. It’s one of the ways the directors, production designer Jerry Wanek and the DP, Serge Ladouceur, have fun. The brothers are talking about how this could be a standard missing-person’s case, “not our kind of thing”. Sam isn’t so sure. Dad had earmarked the area in his mythical journal as possible “hunting grounds” for a “phantom attacker”. Dean had somehow missed the connection, even though he probably knows the journal by heart.
Sam says Dad found a lot of folklore about a dark figure who drags people off into the night. Dad also discovered that this particular county has more missing people than any other county in the state. Dean is drinking beer, looking on, but definitely more intrigued now.
Please look at the neon numbers behind his head.
So many levels. Subtext. Fun. An inside joke.
Dean knows about “phantom attackers” and he knows they usually snatch people from their beds. Mr. Jenkins vanished from a parking lot. Sam has a broader interpretation of the Lore, which I love him for, because I love “the Lore” conversations. It sets me on Google searches too. We’ve got Spring-heeled Jacks (which, thanks, I’m gonna have nightmares now), and phantom gassers. These entities take people anywhere.
Beautiful shot.
Dean goes back to playing darts, and he’s seen with the big neon “MEN’S” sign above his head in the next couple of shots. We saw him framed in a similar way in “Home”. And let’s not even discuss (or let’s discuss) the whole “Men’s Room” thing in the last episode just aired in Season 9! I’ve said it before: Supernatural, on its deepest most hidden most unspoken level, is about masculinity, and what it means to be a man, especially men like Winchesters, who were raised in a tough strong military tradition. It does not scoff at those things, those things have given us much to be proud of in our culture, men who are willing to do the dirty work for the greater good. I would never scoff at such a thing. But it also asks, repeatedly, in ways that can be heard only on a supersonic level, what COST men like this pay. It is not a question that is currently in vogue. Trust me, I am not a member of the MRA movement. I find those guys despicable. But I do think that shaming entire generations of men for cultural/psychological traits that have been encouraged in them for centuries (for often very valid reasons, not just misogynistic ones) is really not the way to go. In fact, I can’t stand it. I don’t believe in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I want my nephews to grow up not being ashamed of themselves. It’s not THEIR fault American women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920. Just like it’s not MY fault that some dude sees all women as sluts and gold-diggers. That’s HIS limitation. I am proud of being a woman, and I want my nephews to be proud of who they are, too. There’s nothing worse than toxic resentful men, and that is often the result of a culture-wide shaming campaign. That’s partly where your misogyny (in its current-day virulent strain) comes from. No thanks. We need to give each other more space!
We recently were chatting about what the “hottest” moments in the series was for us. I mentioned Sam sucking the blood out of Ruby’s arm, because I am basically a sick individual. I’d also put the look on Dean’s face in his dream when he’s staring up at the two strippers. It’s so private. That’s Dean alone in his Happy Place. We almost never see that. But then Max brought up the scene after the first showdown with Alistair in the church when they are protecting Anna – and Sam is sewing up the gash in his arm, pouring whiskey into the wound, and then taking a swig, all as Dean paces in the background, in agony with a dislocated shoulder. Sam finishes sewing himself up, and then goes to Dean, saying, “On three.” Dean gets ready. Sam says, “One” and then jams Dean’s shoulder back into position. And yes. That, I believe, wins, hands down for the sexiest fucking thing ever seen on this show. As Jessie summed it up: “Such butch. So arms. Very sex.” Exactly.
To sort of tie all this back in: The human race has continued on, has survived, because humans were able to endure pain, able to go on despite pain. Women gave birth in fields and caves, with no anesthesia. I am sure it fucking sucked. Millions of them died. But they were able to endure it, because … well, that’s how we are built. We are STRONG, not weak. John Adams’ daughter was given a mastectomy with no anesthesia. One cannot even comprehend what she went through. However, thankful to the great site Letters of Note, we have an extraordinary letter from a missionary woman in 1855 who describes her experience of a mastectomy sans anesthesia. Tough tough stuff. I forced myself to finish it, basically because if she was strong enough to survive it and tell us about it, I was certainly strong enough to get through the letter. Men endure because they can do shit like sew themselves back up, swing an axe, make themselves a peg leg if need be, anesthetize their pain with shots of whiskey, and move on to get the crops in. Whatever. This is how the West was won (from people who already lived there, granted – but, to quote Eddie Izzard: “Do you have a flag?” KIDDING.) This isn’t just how the West was won (and the Winchester rifle, incidentally, is known as “the gun that won the West”), this is how the human race has progressed. Survived. People can get a little bit too intellectual, at times, about this, in our post-modern universe. Sometimes that’s a good thing, it’s good to question things, to examine the way things are set up, and to question the validity of the set up. Unexamined privilege is Bad News. But sometimes it ain’t a good thing. And a scene like that is fucking old-school. This kind of grit is what it takes to fucking survive. That’s not posturing. That’s reality.
It is also super-hot.
I am interested in these questions for the ambiguity they encourage. More grey areas, please. I am interested in these questions because in addressing them, and in NOT looking for answers, but in sitting in the questions, breathing space and room is opened up around the conversation. And we need more of that. All of us. Cut each other some slack, and stop putting the vice on one another. Supernatural has great empathy for men who don’t know their place, who question their position, who struggle with the role placed on them by their Dad (and the larger world).
Yes, it’s just an image of Dean standing underneath a Men’s Room sign. I wouldn’t even bring it up if it didn’t appear repeatedly, visually, and if the show as a whole wasn’t interested in questions of masculinity, male-ness, and hoping that we can actually add another paradigm to how we talk about all of this stuff. (This is why I don’t like the word “posturing”, in re: Dean’s behavior in particular. I know Tough Guys. There is nothing “posturing” about what they are doing. And they don’t give a fuck if you shame them for it. They’re not paying as much attention to you as you are to them. They’re too busy running into burning buildings to drag your ass out to safety.)
Sam, the workaholic, is ready to go back to the motel. Dean, darts in hand, wants to stay. Let’s have another round, Jeez, Grandma. (Again, it’s fun to picture that this kind of thing: two brothers out for beers – is NEW to them. The whole dynamic would have been different back before Sam left for college. Dean would have been wrapped up in pleasing Dad, Sam would have been keeping so many secrets he would already be withdrawing. But now, here they are, without Dad, and Dean is loving it. Beers and darts with my little brother? This is great!)
Sam wins the battle though. They should take off, they have to get an early start tomorrow. Dean goes to hit the head, and Sam walks out into the parking lot. It’s a cold night, you can see his breath, and the gleaming line of Harleys in the foreground. Sam heads to the Impala but then hears something strange.
He crouches down to look under a car, and we have a classic “It’s just a cat!” moment, common to horror movies since time began.
I love this super cut of “It’s just a cat” moments:
The cat has scared the shit out of Sammy, and he laughs to himself. Because we have seen horror movies, we know the laugh is a terrible sign. Don’t relax, Sammy! But he does. We see his feet from beneath the car next to the Impala, and then there’s a quick cut to an overhead shot of the bar.
We don’t see Sammy being taken. Nice tense choice.
Dean emerges into the night and as he walks through the parking lot, he is struck by the cat cleaning itself on the back of one car, and then he notices Dad’s journal, resting on the back of the Impala. No sign of Sammy.
Ominous music starts to rise. He looks for Sammy. He goes up to people coming out of the bar, asking if they’ve seen his brother. The way Ackles is playing this is very vulnerable. It’s not tough or clenched in energy, it’s open and wild. It’s in the look in his eyes, it’s in the way his head swings around, it’s in how high the breath is in his chest. The panic comes immediately. The last episode ended with Dean assuring Sam that “as long as I’m around, nothing bad is going to happen to you.” He seemed so certain, so cocky, when he said that, draped in Dad’s too-big jacket. So it’s eloquent that the second it becomes clear that Sam has vanished, Dean falls apart. I mean, he’s still thinking and investigating, he’s not sobbing in a corner, but he is freaked OUT. He goes from zero to 100.
Dean catches a glimpse of the traffic cam at the top of the parking lot, and, helpless, walks out into the middle of the lonely country road, with a great crane shot, showing Dean as very very small down there, looking up and down the dark road. He isn’t screaming Sam’s name anymore. He just breathes to himself, “Sam …”
It’s very well-played. Kripke has made the observation that Ackles always goes for the vulnerability lying beneath the scene. That’s why his fight scenes, physical or verbal, are so electric, more so than Sam’s, who can launch himself into the purely physical realm far more easily than Dean can. There’s that susceptibility again, the susceptibility of Dean, his most beautiful quality, and the thing most often used against him.
3rd scene
The following morning, Dean is at the sheriff’s office, presenting himself as “Greg Washington,” a state trooper, working a missing person’s case. He talks to local deputy sheriff, an Officer Kathleen, played by the absolutely wonderful Jessica Steen. I love her face. I love her forehead wrinkles in certain expressions. I love her light eyes. I love her obviously slamming body, lean and athletic, when we finally get a chance to see it. I love her competence and tough-mindedness. I love her ability to keep going on in her work, despite the personal tragedy in her past. I love that she is not snowed by Dean, and also that she ends up seeing herself in him, which makes her kind. Dean lies to her, but except for one half-hearted joke, he doesn’t flirt. None of that is going on for him, a clear sign that he is totally disarmed. One could say he is disarmed by Sam’s disappearance, and I think that’s partly true: he is thrown off into space once Sam is gone, without his normal things to rely on. But I think his flirt-mechanism is, in part, disarmed because of who Officer Kathleen is. It’s not just that he recognizes he better not bullshit her, although he does recognize that (he says he realizes he is “pressing his luck” twice to her in the episode). It’s that he recognizes a worthy ally. He concedes ground to her. She clearly deserves it. Dean’s relationship with law enforcement is cagey at best. After all, he spends half of his time wielding fake badges and pretending to be someone else. But Officer Kathleen … even before he knows her story … there’s something about her …
Trauma sensing the presence of trauma in someone else. Like an echo, or a ghostly halo, even if it is not stated. People carry wounds with them. Those wounds almost have sound frequencies. Dean probably isn’t even examining his feelings in this regard. He’s too upset. But he treats her differently than he treats other cops, and that was clearly a choice.
One wonders how this all would have gone if the cop he had talked to was a man. Dean can be soft with women. He feels he can “afford” it. They are less likely to turn it against him.
Dean looks like shit, and the police station (naturally) is very dark with noir shadows across the room, plunging his eyes and the side of his face into shadow. I mean it’s damn near Joan Crawford-esque this look.
She is confused at first as to why he is there. Mr. Jenkins’ disappearance is a local matter. He explains that no, someone else has gone missing. His cousin. She listens. She asks questions. She feels like a real cop. She lets Dean come behind the counter, and suddenly they are shot from the office behind them, through glass that has those little wire threads running through them, distorting the image. I like it. It’s cinematic and moody.
She looks up “Sam Winchester” (“like the rifle?” she asks. “Like the rifle,” Dean says, for probably the 9,000th time in his life), and there’s a great little moment where we see what she sees on the screen. Dean Winchester is listed as dead, after being a prime suspect in multiple homicides in St. Louis. Like I said in in that re-cap, what went down in St. Louis will come back to haunt him again and again, for SEASONS. She mentions this to him, and Dean gets uncomfortable, referring to Dean as “the black sheep,” which I love. And then he can’t resist, he adds, “He’s handsome though.” Glorious. She throws him a glance and he grins at her, like, “Just stating the facts.” It’s the only time, and it’s very dim, he’s not giving her the full Batting-Eyelashes Dazzle, that he flirts. It’s so inadvertent though, he’s sort of having an inside joke with himself, in her presence. He’s so bizarre.
She comes up with no leads, and he says he already has one. The traffic cam. She is interested. Dean says, “I’m thinking the traffic cam might have picked up whatever took him. Whoever.” Ackles is playing this scene very vulnerably, very straight, no tricks. It’s almost like he’s “telling” her everything, even though everything he is saying is a lie. She’s a good cop. She probably senses something weird is going on before Dean is even revealed. But the vulnerability seems (and is) kosher. When she gives him a missing persons report to fill out before she goes to get the traffic cam footage, he knows he has to speak up, throw himself on her mercy. This would be much more difficult for him if it were a man. Dean says, “I kinda look out for the kid. Sam’s my responsibility.”
He brings up how many missing persons cases there are in the area. “Any of them come back?” he asks. This stops her. She has history with that question, and she’s playing it. This is a wound, her wound. Dean doesn’t even know he’s touching it, but he sensed it was there, I’m sure of it. Supersonic, again. He wouldn’t know how to put it to words. But “Sam’s coming back. I’m bringing him back.”
Her cool and yet kind assessing eyes take in his face, and everything that’s going on there.
4th scene
Sam wakes up in a metal cage that makes the lair in Silence of the Lambs look like Chuck E. Cheese. Speaking of Silence of the Lambs: I have some issues with that movie, but one of the things I love is Brooke Smith’s performance as the girl who ends up at the bottom of that well.
What is so great about her performance is that she’s terrified, but also smart, wily, and willing to fight to get herself the hell out of there. She doesn’t just scream and cry. She is going to go down fighting. The other thing I LOVE is that when Jodie Foster rescues her, she is NOT grateful.
Clarice Starling: Catherine Martin?
Catherine Martin: Yes?
Clarice Starling: FBI! You’re safe!
Catherine Martin: Safe? Shit! Get me outta here!
Clarice Starling: You’re all right, Catherine. Now, where is he?
Catherine Martin: How the fuck should I know? Just get me outta here!
Clarice Starling: Catherine, you’ve gotta be quiet! Now, shut that dog up!
Catherine Martin: Just get me outta here!
Clarice Starling: Catherine, I’m gonna get you outta there, but right now you listen to me. I’ve gotta leave this room, I’ll be right back.
Catherine Martin: NO! DON’T YOU LEAVE ME HERE YOU FUCKIN’ BITCH, NO!
I don’t blame her for any of that. Her fury at the incompetent rescue is one of the reasons why she is so memorable in the role.
Sam and Dean are set up so strongly as heroes that honestly you could gag on it if it weren’t undercut at every possible moment, and the moments when the people they rescue are NOT grateful, or forget to thank them, are awesome and important. Mr. Jenkins (Jon Cuthbert), trapped in the cage beside Sam, is one of those people. Mr. Jenkins is like, “You’re doing a piss-poor job of looking for me, jackass. Obviously. Because you’re locked up too. Jesus H. CHRIST.”
Sam, totally freaked out, investigates his situation, the bars, the locks, he tries to rattle the cage. He sees Mr. Jenkins passed out in the next cage. Sam is seen through the bars, and it makes me remember both Ackles and Padalecki mentioning how difficult jail scenes are, because you have to make sure you don’t hide your face behind the bars, and you have to track where the camera is even more so, and align your movement with it, and it’s a pain in the ass.
5th scene
Officer Kathleen obviously let Dean come along with her to pick up the traffic cam footage, having related to his feeling of responsibility for his missing “cousin”. Dean waits for her on a bench outside the county works department and she comes up holding print-outs from the traffic cam. She has already taken a look and seen what she needs to see, but she hands them over to Dean. He flips through. He was hoping to see, oh, I don’t know, a big scary monster dragging Sam off. She tells him to look closely at the last image. He glances at her. It’s an interesting tiny moment: she assumes he is a cop, and so she assumes he knows how to look for things. And he DOES. Only in this case he’s looking for the wrong thing.
In that tiny moment, without even knowing it, she is coaching him in how to be a better observer. He takes the coaching immediately, looks at the image, trying to see what she sees. She points out the plates. He sees what she sees. The thing is a bucket of bolts (it’s the RV we saw out the window from Evan’s window), and the plates are shining and new.
I just like the moment because it’s Dean not being in control (she knows more than he does), and being okay with it. He’s learning.
At that moment, a big rusty van drives by, the changing of the gears making a horrible whining sound, and it catches Dean’s ear. He watches the van go by, and asks her if it sounds like a “whining growl” (Evan’s description of what he heard). Now it is Officer Kathleen’s turn to look up at Dean, wondering where his mind is going, and what she can learn from him. It’s great, it’s two investigators, trying to piece something together, respecting each other’s “hunches”, because hunches are so much a part of good police work.
6th scene
Meanwhile, back in the Cage Lair. Sam is trying to kick himself out of the cage. He’s going to hurt himself. He is ferocious. Seen metaphorically (which I think “Benders” wants you to do), Sam is trying to escape the traps set for him in his life, traps he didn’t ask for. It’s so UNFAIR and there’s a lot of rage in his sense of the unfairness of it. How the hell did he get HERE?
Mr. Jenkins wakes up groaning in the next cage. The first thing he says shows he’s not a cringing victim.
“Are you okay?” says Sam.
“Does it LOOK like I’m doing okay?”
Love it.
The bars on the cages are so thick that you can barely see either of the men, so we only get them in fragments as they speak, and it gives an incredibly claustrophobic feeling. We are rarely inside that cage with Sam, only one or two times do we move on inside and get an unobstructed view of him. We are forced to deal with the reality of those reinforced bars.
Sam says, “I was looking for you,” and Jenkins shoots back, “Oh yeah? Well, no offense, but this is a piss-poor rescue.” And it’s hard to argue with that. Sam says, “My brother is out there looking for us -” and Jenkins says, “Yeah, well, he’s not gonna find us.”
Of course Sam is under the impression that, oh, some sort of high-end monster familiar with power tools has grabbed them. Sam presses himself up against the cage and asks Jenkins, “What are they? Have you seen them?” Poor Jenkins must be like, “Couldn’t I get someone COMPETENT to rescue me?” It is at that moment that the huge lock on the main door opens, and someone enters. We never get a good look at him. The door to Jenkins’ cage has swung open and Jenkins cringes off to the side screaming, “STAY AWAY FROM ME” all as Sam desperately tries to get a look at the Monster. A plate of food is slammed down in front of Jenkins, who grabs it and starts shoveling it all into his mouth, the cage door closing and Sam watching greedily, hungrily, as the food-giver strolls past and on out, the door locking behind him. Sam, with a beam of light falling on his face, watches and says (my favorite line in the episode), “I’ll be damned. They’re just people.”
“What did you expect??” Jenkins barks, which makes me love him even more. Jenkins tells Sam the locks are somehow controlled by that panel over there and they feed him once a day. But he is just waiting “for Ned Beatty time, man!” (Deliverance is used as a joke multiple times in the series, it is even in the pilot. The fear of rape, the threat of rape, overhangs the entire thing, which brings us into the whole consent/possession thing in delightfully sick-puppy triggery ways.) Sam laughs at the Deliverance thing and says that “that” is probably the least of his worries. Sam is not as susceptible to those fears as others are. He probably should be, all things considered. Sam can’t stop trying to escape, a feat that makes me love him, and is something I certainly will keep in mind if I am ever kidnapped and trapped in a cage. He sees some sort of coil leading down to the cage and he starts pulling on it. He wonders what these people want. If they can figure that out, maybe they can find a way out.
7th scene
Officer Kathleen and Dean cruise the country by-ways through a misty rainy night. In terms of the psychological reveal, it is the most important scene in the episode. And it almost sneaks up on you. It almost starts happening before you’re ready for it. You can feel it change the air between the two people. And, like we saw in “Route 666,” when Dean was naked and vulnerable and holding someone in his arms and opening up as he shared intimate relationship talk after sweet hot lovemaking through the night (Dean? Really??), what we see in this scene is new. It’s hard to remember that, considering how well-trod this particular piece of ground will end up being. But here is Dean’s Mission Statement. Here it is, in no uncertain terms. And it is not said to Sam, which would change the context. It’s said to an outsider. It’s a safer space for Dean to let it out.
Again, we see Officer Kathleen in the alpha position, and Dean riding shotgun. There are no more traffic cams for 50 miles, so obviously that mysterious RV pulled off somewhere, but a lot of the back roads are private roads, not marked on a map. Dean listens, looking over at her, taking it in. It’s bad news. Officer Kathleen gets beeped on her police scanner, and glances down at it. Whatever she reads makes her glance over at him. He’s looking out the window.
She says, “So, Gregory.” Dean is slightly startled. Is that his new name? She tells him she ran his badge number, strictly routine for accounting purposes. Dean knows he’s in deep shit, but he listens, with a face telling no tales, his body tilted all the way away from her, because he is getting ready to lie. I love the body language.
She pulls the car over, Dean looking around him like, “Wait, what, why are we stopping, help …” (haha) She says that his badge was stolen, and there’s a picture of officer Greg Washington that just came over the wire, and he is a heavyweight black man. They both stare at the picture. Dean’s comeback is so clumsy you almost feel bad for him, saying to her in almost a confessional humorous tone, “I lost some weight.” She’s like, “Okay,” and starts to get out of the car at this bullshit, and Dean keeps going, more lamely, “And I have that Michael Jackson skin disease …” He’s not even trying.
She asks him to step out of the car, and he asks her to wait. She can arrest him, fine, but please can we try to find Sam first. Up against the wall, the only thing he has is honesty. And his objective (which I believe I covered to the fullest extent in the last re-cap. Without an objective you got NOTHING as an actor.) She is suspicious, probably pissed at being used by this … whoever this guy is … She doesn’t know what’s going on, but impersonating an officer is a serious offense. Identity theft. Dude, you have no call asking me for anything.
So Dean comes clean, in a way we haven’t seen before. There were glimpses of it in “Home,” but there the situation was complicated by trying to put on a strong face for Sammy (and failing, mostly). He says, “Here’s the thing. When we were young, I pretty much pulled him from a fire.” You can see that hit her. Woah. He says that head-on to her, but in his next lines, he goes off to someplace private, looking outward, inward, not at her. It’s a private moment we are being let in on. It’s a soliloquy. “And ever since then, I’ve felt responsible for him. Like it’s my job to keep him safe.” He seems very young. 10 years old, tops. She is getting that, too. You can see in how she listens. Then he turns back to her, “I’m just afraid if we don’t find him fast … ” (Bit of a cheese ball choice to have a thunder clap come in here, but it’s forgivable. It’s forgivable mainly because Jensen Ackles is already acting the thunder clap. The thunderclap acts as what he CAN’T say … he can’t even finish the sentence.)
He acts the hell out of that small monologue. Imagining it in less capable hands is pretty dreadful. He underplays constantly, he complicates, he adds ambiguity through the potent pauses, he hides, he reveals, all at the same moment.
She is taken with him, she is sympathetic. But still. She’s a cop first. “You’ve given me no other choice. I have to take you in,” she says, and she almost regrets it. His pain is vibrating on the surface of his skin and it reaches out to her own, which is why she glances up at her visor, and sees the photo safety-pinned there, of her and a smiling guy. She stares up at it, as the rain pours down on the car, and then quietly makes her decision. Puts her seat belt back on and says, “After we find Sam Winchester.”
Dean was just … honest … and he got what he wanted. What country, friends, is this? He looks shaken.
8th scene
Return to Cage Mountain. Sam keeps working on that coil, pulling on it, hoping it will … what … break free in his hands, leaving him with nothing but a totally exhausted body? Mr. Jenkins, crabby, looks on and says, “What’s your name?” Sam says, “Sam,” and Mr. Jenkins says, “Give it up, Sammy. There’s no way out.” Sam keeps pulling, saying with gritted teeth, “Don’t call me Sammy.” It’s a call back to the pilot, when Sam tried to get his brother to stop calling him “Sammy”. He finds “Sammy” infantilizing, it means he’s still a chubby 12 year old, not a grown man. Dean doesn’t quite mean it that way, and it’s always interesting, when he says “Sammy” as opposed to “Sam”, it varies. Sam eventually is resigned to it, so much so that when Gordon calls him “Sammy,” Sam sneers, “Dean’s the only one who gets to call me that.”
So we’re being told to dovetail all of this, we’re being told to see Sam and Mr. Jenkins in the context of the Winchester childhood, which was (metaphorically) similar to what is going on between the two men in those cages. Sam trying to clamber his way out, and Dean, crabby, saying, “There’s no way out.” (Because Jenkins is no pussy. When he finds a way to escape, he does. He “shoots first, asks questions later”, which obviously does not work out well for him, and it doesn’t work out well for Dean either, a lot of the time.) But Jenkins has become crabbily resigned to his fate, and Sam has not. There’s something in Sam that is perhaps so naturally intimidating (how tall he is, that overhanging brow which makes him look gloweringly serious, whatever it is) that people call him “Sammy” to sort of neutralize him. One of my best friends is named Mitchell. He is a small wiry man, his body made entirely of muscles. He is gay. Mitchell is a powerhouse. He has noticed that when straight men meet him, and are told his name, they often shorten it to “Mitch” immediately. Maybe it’s a way to “butch” him up, although Mitchell is already as butch as they come. It’s not hostile, not exactly, it’s just interesting.
Sam’s rage at being called “Sammy”, even in the middle of what is a shared super-fucked-up kidnapping, says a lot. He is NOT “SAMMY”. HE IS SAM.
And at that moment, maybe the rage gave him the adrenaline push he needed, but the coil snaps off, spraying dust down on him, and a metal bracket falls into his cage.
Another cranky exchange I love:
Jenkins: “What is it?”
Sam: (in a tone of hope and excitement) “It’s a bracket.”
Jenkins: (contemptuous) “Oh, thank God. A bracket. Now we got ’em.”
Sam’s exertions with the coil are over, and suddenly, randomly, the door to Jenkins’ cage swings upon. Jenkins takes his chance and exits, all as Sam warns him it’s probably a trap, get back in the cage, something isn’t right about this. Ya think, Sammy? Jenkins says he’ll send help and his last comment as he exits, eyes forward: “Bye, Sammy.”
Sam is just “Sammy”, that’s all there is to it.
Outside it is nighttime, pouring rain, and Helena, I am sure you are thrilled to see that the grounds are oozing with mud. Squelchy squelchy mud. Jenkins is basically wandering around this wilderness of a property, in the rain, in the dark. There are all these weird falling-down out-buildings, and junk cars, and the whole place is surrounded by woods. Jenkins finds a sharp knife in the mud (which, if it was a plant by the Bender clan, seems like a long shot that he’d even find it.)
Then comes a whole creepy barely discernible section where he runs through the woods. I like Jenkins a lot, I’m sure you have already been able to tell. He’s got a good survivor’s instinct and he took his shot when it came. Yes, it ends badly, but still: I like his spirit. The woods are pitch-black and there’s a blue glow of light off to one side, so everything looks spooky. Cackles and hoots and war whoops are heard through the woods, and suddenly he is attacked by the two “redneck hillbillies” we caught a glimpse of before. He gets away. He is jumped again. He gets away again. Lots of jagged hand-held stuff as he runs forward, and then gets caught on a trip wire. It’s horrible. It’s most horrible because of the open glee on the faces of his attackers. This is fun for them. Needles to say, brave Mr. Jenkins bites it.
His screams are heart-rending, and it’s real effective: we don’t see him die. We just see the black trees and the rain, and then suddenly we get our first shot of the Bender house, from far above, the screams ripping through the air. Sam hears them too.
That sudden pull-back to the house is a great example of how Supernatural constantly inverts the natural order of shot-procession (which is: establishing shot – whole picture, medium shot – head/shoulders, closeup – huge freakin’ face). It wants you to not know where you are. Often it stays in closeup until you ache to get a sense of the larger surroundings.
9th scene
Dean and Officer Kathleen obviously spent the night trolling those backwoods roads, to no avail, and it is now a grey morning, and the two of them, having just bought coffee at a coffee truck, stroll back to her car. Dean is still in that interesting place he is in throughout the episode, once Sam has vanished: Officer Kathleen is the alpha throughout, in other words. Dean would certainly be handling the situation if he hadn’t met her, and he might flail a bit, but he would figure it out. He’s an excellent investigator. But he needs her. And he’s, strangely, okay that he needs her. It’s a clue to how afraid he is.
And she is still keeping him on a very short leash, which he seems to respect. He says, “Listen, I don’t mean to press my luck –” and she cuts him off with, “Your luck is already so pressed.”
Truer words, Kathleen!
He says, “I was wondering. Why are you helping me out anyway?” He’s totally unguarded. Which helps us into the next moment, when Kathleen tells him that her brother Riley disappeared three years ago. They looked for him. Never found him. She says, “I know what it feels like to feel responsible for someone.”
Steen does not betray her character by shedding tears or getting sentimental. Kathleen is too much of a tough customer for that. But this is what happened. Dean has gotten to her. She gets it. She’s a cop and she knows that something happened to Sam. If she can help this weird Liar Guy find his “cousin” … maybe … maybe that would feel good, maybe that would help her deal with what happened to HER family. She doesn’t say any of that though. She gathers herself together, and says, “Come on, let’s get going.”
She’s a lot like Dean.
I love the framing of this medium shot, of Dean watching her leave him and get in the car. Just had to point it out. I love the layered colors: the blue, the grey/green, and his head rising above.
Dean/Kathleen is one of those small one-off relationships in Supernatural that has a lot of depth. Kathleen goes through a lot. Sometimes these random characters who show up don’t have a journey to go on, they don’t end up taking up a huge space in the Winchester story-line. Kathleen does, though. It’s satisfying when that connection works, like it does here.
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Dean asks Kathleen to pull the squad car over. There’s a back road right there, the first turn-off since the traffic cam. It’s a completely uninviting looking muddy drive, going off through the woods. Dean is out of the car practically before she stops it. The spidey-sense is going. This feels right to him, somehow.
She tells him to stay with the car, she’ll go check it out, and that goes over as well as you might expect. “No way,” he says automatically, and she stops, with such natural authority, that Dean stops too, turning to look at her quizzically. Almost like he doesn’t get it. But he’s so in tune with her, so paying attention to her, that his behavior is almost like, “Oh – wait – what’s happening with her right now? I sense it’s important.” Imagine how he would try to use his batting-eyelashes wiles on someone else, imagine how he would, oh, punch out a male cop who tried to stop him from going down that drive, imagine how he would do all SORTS of things to get what he wants … but not with her. He listens to her. He likes strong women. He responds very well to them. I mean, Ellen is so strict with him that he basically stands there, and says, “Yes, ma’am” when she scolds him. The women he chooses, when he does choose to get involved, are substantial quality people. He doesn’t like manipulative bitches, but Jeez, neither do I. I am pointing this out because the “Dean is sexist” thing gets very boring, mainly because it is totally incorrect, so I am just playing Whack a Mole with those arguments. Just because he’s sexually promiscuous doesn’t mean he’s sexist. And the way he responds to Kathleen’s authority is interesting. She’s quite pretty. He doesn’t flirt. He may have random thoughts like, “I wonder how big her boobs are under that puffy parka,” but that’s as everyday-normal as wondering what the soup of the day is. His dealings with her are straight-up and open, and right now she knows something about him that he has never told anyone else. How he sees his role in life. He trusts her.
So they have this little standoff. They are equally matched in conviction, smarts, and determination. She says, “You’re a civilian. And a felon, I think. I’m not taking you with me.” He takes this in and says, bluntly, “You’re not going without me.” This is clearly going to be a problem, so she basically dupes him, which I love. Dean walks right into it. He’s a good poker player but she is better. She says fine, he can come with, but he must promise to let her handle it. Dean lies, “Yeah, I promise.” She holds out her hand, asking him to shake on it. And he DOES. The whole “you’re getting rusty, kiddo” thing comes up a bit later, Dean teasing Sam about getting snatched, but seriously Dean, you didn’t see this one coming? Of course she pops handcuffs onto his hand and then cuffs him to the squad car.
Dean is annoyed and embarrassed. She strolls off without him (I love how she locks the door with the remote over her head – this woman is on top of her game!), as he calls after her, “Kathleen, I really think you’re gonna need my help!” (First name basis. Just saying. Not “Officer.”) Dean still thinks there are Monsters in there. She could be walking into a nest of demons!
But off she strolls through the rain. Dean rattles the cuffs, helplessly, his hand searching for paper clips, which he knows he doesn’t have.
Back to Kathleen, walking up the drive, past the rambling out-buildings, falling apart and derelict. The rain makes everything look worse. The house sits on the muddy drive, with a wraparound front porch, and it looks okay, not bad, and one wonders if Kathleen would have ever heard about that weird family who lives out there. It’s a small town presumably. The RV is parked by the house.
Kathleen knocks on the door and it is opened by a young girl (Alexia Fast) who would give Nell a run for her money. She’s around 12 years old, with rat’s nest hair with a strange little barrette clinging to the tangles. She is pale and dressed like a ragamuffin from the old Dickensian workhouse days. Kathleen’s face when she sees this child is so taken aback that you know if she weren’t attacked in the next 5 minutes, she would go back to the police station and call Child Protective Services. Kathleen just has that LOOK on her face. She is kind. She tries to engage the girl. The girl says her name is Missy. Her affect is so off, so strange, that Kathleen is struggling with a million different things, keeping the conversation going. Talk about spidey-sense. But she does take out the photograph of Sam and hands it to Missy, wondering if she’s ever seen this guy.
The child is grotesque. Her childhood is grotesque. One doesn’t even want to imagine what she has been put through. She fully participates in the horror show that is her family, and she does so in order to get praise and pats on the head. Because of course, that’s what you would do.
Missy suddenly grins up at Kathleen, and it’s creepy, but you hope that maybe she’ll suddenly “present” as a normal child, maybe, but no. She’s grinning because her dad has approached Kathleen from behind and whacks her upside the head with a shovel. Kathleen collapses into a heap on the porch, and now we get our first look at Pa Bender (John Dennis Johnston), who looks like a cross between ZZ Top and My Brother’s Keeper. He says to Missy, “Sweetheart, tell your brothers I want to see them” in a tone that makes my skin crawl, and her “Yes, Daddy” doesn’t help the situation.
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Of course Dean is not going to rest until he has managed to get out of those cuffs. He catches sight of the little antenna on the back of the squad car and then comes a great bit of physical pantomime where Dean, cuffed to the front of the car, tries to stretch his body out long enough in order to grasp hold of the antenna. I actually worry about his groin muscles at a couple of points along the way. He throws his head off to the side, trying to make himself as wide and long as possible, and seriously, Ackles, hats off. It is funny and desperate and real. It’s dealing with reality. You are actually seeing him try to reach that antenna. It’s not done with tricks or edits. I mean, like this.
But it goes on like that for a while. As he struggles to reach it, and it is just out of his grasp, he hears that “whining growl” down the muddy drive, a car starting up coming his way. Turning up the heat on him, he’s cuffed there like a sitting duck. He finally is able to grasp two of his fingers around the antenna, and starts to unscrew it, but his body is so stretched out it’s actually hurting him at this point and he has to take breaks. The car is coming closer. Dean finally gets the antenna out, but his fingers fumble it and it falls to the ground, a tiny bit out of his reach, but he stretches himself out yet again to pick it up.
The whole thing is agonizing to watch. It creates its own tension. You don’t have to do much, people. You just have to set up a situation really really well and let it play out. Get out of the damn way, directors. Let the actors play make-believe. It’s better than any CGI you could cook up.
Frantic now, Dean starts to jam the antenna into the cuff’s locks, wiggling it around, all as he hears the approach of the two guys down the lane. It’s not clear up until the last second that Dean will be clear of those cuffs by the time the evil cackling brothers reach the squad car, but with a nice sweep of the camera as they approach we see that Dean has vanished. The cuffs are gone too. Good boy, Dean. The cuffs would be a dead giveaway that someone else was “out there” besides that crumpled cop on the porch.
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We see Kathleen crumpled in what was Jenkins’ cage. Her cop stuff is off, and the thought of those dirty horrible people touching her to take off her clothes makes me angry. At the same time, I think to myself, “Her body is kind of smokin’.” Sue me. No wait, don’t. She’s got a big gash on her forehead, and is slow to wake. Sam crouches in the next cage, watching. As horrible as the space is, it’s filmed beautifully.
Kathleen looks across at the man in the other cage. “Are you Sam Winchester?” She is still out of it, probably a concussion, and tells him his “cousin” is looking for him. “Thank God,” says Sam. “Where is he?” I love her line reading here: “I, uh … I cuffed him to my car.” Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The door suddenly opens and we don’t know who it is. We hear footsteps. Sam and Kathleen both peer nervously towards the sound. And of course it is Dean, trying to basically tiptoe into this horrible dark space. He doesn’t even know what he’s doing or where he is. Then, he gets a glimpse of Sam. Sam sees him and starts laughing, in relief, glad to see him. Dean runs to the cage, grasping onto it, saying, “Are you hurt?”
Then, he can’t contain himself, and slams his hands against the cage, saying, “Damn, it’s good to see you.” We’ll have a couple of Huggy moments with the brothers, and since they aren’t really huggy types, not with each other anyway, it is always pretty cathartic when they do embrace. They really have to be pushed to it. They have to decide to not give a shit anymore. To care. To show they care. All that jazz. I’m not a huggy type myself. If I touch you, I MEAN it. Therefore, I don’t touch all that much. Got it? But they don’t embrace once they are “safe” from a monster. There’s that great “Wendigo” reunion, as the other sibling group is embracing and crying, and Dean and Sam nod to one another across the dark space, holding up torch guns. That’s their emotional reunion.
Dean’s reaction here is the most jubilant and emotional we have ever seen him yet. It’s so vulnerable. You knew it was coming, but it’s still surprising.
Kathleen, still struggling with pain and probably seeing double, asks up at Dean, “How did you get out of the cuffs?” Dean glances over at her. He says, with minimum cockiness if you can believe it, “Oh, I know a trick or two.” He then goes to inspect the situation and is daunted by the gigantic locks and bars on the cages. No picking that noise. I love how Kathleen looks on at this next interaction between the two men, and you can see her wondering what the hell these two guys do, who they really are, what exactly is the story here? Cousins, my ASS.
Sam fills Dean in on Jenkins, and the automatic controls, and Dean asks, “Have you seen them??” Sam says, “Dude. They’re just people.”
What is confusing to both of them is what they “want”. If you can figure out what a ghost wants, you can figure out a way to kill it. Dean, futzing with the control panel to no avail, says (and this comes up again and again in the series), “With our regular … playmates … there are patterns. But people are just crazy.”
Dean can’t understand people, especially when they choose to be cruel. He can’t understand it at all.
So Sam and Dean keep chatting about the case, and Dean mentions having seen a bunch of cars in the back with plates from different states. Kathleen interrupts and asks if he saw a black Mustang, about 10 years old. Dean has been very BUSY ever since he came into the Cage Area, looking, pressing buttons, scanning, walking around, and this stops him. Now. Of course Dean would have clocked every make and model of every car back there. Probably noticed the plates too. It would be automatic for him. He’s got that kind of analytical mind. He looks down at Kathleen and says, “Yeah, actually, I did.” And he says it knowing it’s bad news for her, but there’s a tone there, an almost forced casualness, as though he’s putting off the inevitable. He tries to “throw it away”, in other words – “Mustang? Yup. Saw it” but then can’t go on with that. He sees her face. He knows. “Your brother’s?” She looks away. He says, “I’m sorry.” It’s a beautiful moment. Sam looks on, wondering briefly what the hell had gone down while he was locked up. He’s not sure what’s happening.
Dean heads off to find a key for the automatic panel which sounds like the worst job in the world. I’d be like, “Dammit, can’t somebody else take on this task?”
Jerry Wanek et al outdid themselves with the Bender household. It’s as in-depth and well-thought-out as the asylum in “Asylum”. We’ve seen the house’s exterior but the interior appears to go on forever. It is a maze. The DETAIL in the set design, the props, every single corner filled with some creepy specific object. It’s all deliciously awful, like the worst place you could ever imagine, straight from a nightmare, and they obviously had a lot of fun planning out what the hell these Freaks would have in their home. On what seems to be the first level, Dean, with his flashlight, comes across a shit-ton of creepy stuff, including musty jars filled with gross objects, and Polaroids up on the walls everywhere.
We get some closeups of those Polaroids. It’s totally Abu Ghraib stuff. It’s the worst of war, the two yahoos we saw earlier cackling over the dead bodies of their victims, putting them in horrible poses. And the team had to create these Polaroids with various extras. That must have been a super fun day. Those Polaroids look REAL, like real out-takes from snuff films, or trophy pics from conquering armies. The stuff you do not want to be leaked to the public. I find them truly disturbing. Dean looks at all of them, murmuring to himself, “I’ll say it again. Demons I get. People are crazy.” He’s almost offended.
He comes to a stairway leading up to the next floor. I see in it a distinct visual call-back to Mary Winchester at the top of the stairs in the teaser in the pilot. I don’t think that’s too far a stretch.
Same exact camera placement. Same number of stairs.
And up Dean goes, into the mess that is someone else’s fucked-up family. “Nightmare” showed us the end result of years of abuse, the trauma Max endured. Dean’s resistance to seeing his childhood is abusive is a survival tactic, and also something he consciously creates in order to protect Sam. “It wasn’t so bad …” “Our family isn’t cursed …” And etc. But we’ve seen enough, Dean. And the very next episode is going to bring us Dad, and then “Something Wicked” is coming down the pike, and our feelings are going to start shifting. We are going to stop seeing Dean as a reliable narrator of his own life.
Dean walking up those stairs, so exactly like the stairs his mother walked down … is sort of entering the world where all of this stuff is ABOUT to start getting HANDLED. Or at least acknowledged.
In the meantime, though, Dean is just trying to get through moment to moment. Where is everyone?
Then we get a creepy-ass high-up shot of what looks like a main room, leading into the next room with a big open doorway. A ceiling fan is going. There is debris everywhere, but there is some semblance of order. There’s a tiny table with a bunch of objects crowded on top of it. Papers are scattered on the floor. It’s dingy, grimy. The worst detail, in terms of the creep factor, is that a scratchy record is playing, old-timey piano dance music. It’s a great shot, because we never see Dean enter into it. We just see the empty room, an example of how Supernatural messes with our expectations in terms of shot construction (I know I keep drumming that point home, but HOW things are put together is important). Giving us an establishing shot like this one where there are no people, and yet the camera is moving, slowly coming down from its position on the ceiling … it’s fucking scary, that’s all.
Dean is seen coming down the Worst Hallway in the World. Blue light blasts through the window in stark Venetian blind shadows, and there are weird things hanging from the ceiling. Dean bumps his head against one of them and it looks like … I don’t know … a freakin’ skeleton. Bones are hanging from the ceiling. Dean is in love with hygiene and is skeeved out by germs. He probably scrubbed himself with a Brillo pad when he finally got back to the motel that night. He had to TOUCH things. In that PLACE. He will NEVER BE CLEAN. Meanwhile, that dance music keeps floating through the air. We’re with Dean totally, we can’t see what he’s walking into.
How the hell is he gonna find a key in that place.
We then get a huge closeup of a giant old-fashioned gramophone, record spinning, and in the background we see a figure at the sink, and along with the dance music we hear the terrible unmistakeable sound of a saw going through bone. The guy at work is grabbing different tools off the big table behind him, and the gramophone looms in the foreground, and the whole thing is super INSANE. Peter Ellis, you are a sick man, and I appreciate your talents.
Dean has no idea what he is dealing with. He is peeking around corners. If it were a demon, he’d know what to do. But people scare the shit out of him. He creeps forward into the ceiling fan room and sees a little tin box of keys on the little table. As he goes to investigate, he sees a jar sitting next to the little box, a jar full of molars. Like it’s a collection of beach glass or something. Grisly. He picks it up and stares at it, morbidly fascinated and grossed out.
He hears a squeak on the floor behind him and the camera is right up in his grill, and we see him realize someone is behind him. He gears up. Whirls around. And sees Missy standing there, seemingly terrified. He is in darkness, he looks as scary as she does. He is holding a giant BOARD. Dean with kids, though. He’s susceptible to kids. It’s a beautiful quality, it’s an Achilles heel. Kathleen had the same thing.
He says to her, “I’m not gonna hurt you …” I’ve mentioned how often Dean says that. More often than Sam does. He says it because he knows what he seems like. He knows he seems like a bad guy, and maybe the lines are a little blurred, true, but he’s really not a Bad Guy (™) but regular civilian types won’t be able to tell the difference so he races into the void of fear saying, “I’m not gonna hurt you.” It’s self-aware. He knows he seems dangerous. And he is. But he can control it.
I mean, here is how he is lit in this scene. Does that look like a Good Guy (™) to you? If I saw that in my house, I’d fucking stab his thigh as well.
But he makes a mistake here. She says, “I know,” and stabs him in the thigh with a knife, completely startling him, and then she starts screaming, “DADDY!”
Now comes an EXCELLENT fight scene. Three on one. Dean against the Bender men. Dean is outnumbered. He is thrown into walls. He gets a couple punches in. One brother holds him, and Dean kicks out at the other brother. At one point he is reduced to kicking a couple of crates in one guy’s direction. Great fight. And it ends with one of my favorite pratfalls from Jensen Ackles. It’s done in one shot. You see him get hit, you see him fall. It’s worth it to slow down the episode to watch him go down. I mean, it’s almost like a cartoon. He is bashed in the back of a head with a frying pan. He crumples down, and you can practically hear little birdies tweeting in his ears.
The fight choreography on this show is so good, and both Ackles and Padalecki are superb physically. They both do most of their own stunts. That shit HELPS. The fights feel real, urgent, and are creatively choreographed using found objects at hand (crates, frying pans), because that’s how it would go down. It’s not just people sparring with one another cleanly.
The music never stops. It sounds PSYCHOTIC.
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I love how the next scene opens. We get a big dark closeup of Dean, head bowed down, waking up from being knocked out. So that’s our establishing shot: close in on Dean, we have no idea where he is. In the cage?
And in the next moment, we are flown back (visually) across the room and up in the corner, so we see where he is, we see the full picture. And it’s worse than we could have imagined. You WISH he was in the Cage Area with Sam.
His pose, too. That spread-legged pose. It is both aggressive and receiving. This is Dean Winchester, this is the blend he has in his makeup, his defense mechanisms, his fighting instinct. It’s extremely male and extremely female, in the same moment. When threatened, he has a tendency to run towards the threat, baring his throat to it. Barking sexual come-ons. You know, I’m just saying. Clint Eastwood doesn’t act this way. The way the family is positioned around him, hovering like vultures, drooling over him, is disturbing. The dirty intimacy of family secrets. We saw what secrets can do to a family in “Nightmare”. We see what Sam’s secrets have been doing to him. We see Dean’s suspicion of secrets. But he’s keeping secrets too. Even worse, he doesn’t even know that he is. How could he let it in, how bad it was back then for him? How hurt he was by his Dad, how destroyed? That fact just cannot be allowed any play at all in his understanding of himself. It’s too destabilizing. It will come, and when it explodes (that awesome confrontation with himself in “Dream a Little Dream”) it’s traumatic.
The Bender family is presented so grotesquely that one may resist making these connections. I think Supernatural wants you to be drawn that way, and wants you to resist. It’s ugly. Where we are going is ugly. Perhaps not Bender ugly, but ugly nonetheless. Family is hell, remember. Dean can’t get that yet. He loves Sam, he clings to Sam, he survived his childhood because he had Sam to protect. Imagine how much worse it would have been if there had been no Sam? If it had just been Dean and Dad? But even still: the Bender siblings are completely in thrall to their deadly father, to their family tradition, to keeping the secrets. They leer and drool at Dean, who tolerates it, as grossed out as he is, because, frankly, this is just another day in the office for Dean Winchester. I mean, he would prefer demon drool, because he knows how to deal with THAT. But being looked at like a piece of meat is Old Hat for him. So fuck it, he opens his legs to acknowledge it directly.
One of the Bender brothers giggles that he looks like he would be “fun to hunt”. Pa Bender then goes off on a gleeful monologue about how he has “hunted” all his life, animals and people. Bears, deer, cougars, and man. People are the most fun to hunt! (It’s reminiscent of 1932’s The Most Dangerous Game, the movie that played such an important role in Zodiac. Most Dangerous Game features people being hunted like animals by a total Mad Man on a creepy island. Starring Joel McRae, one of my faves. He’s sexy as hell.)
Dean listens to this monologue with growing disgust and alarm. He is also disgusted and alarmed by the lack of hygiene in front of him. The teeth. Every time the guy leans in to Dean, you can see Dean recoil, from the sight, from the rancid breath.
The relish Pa Bender expresses during the monologue is chilling. It’s fun to watch someone’s fear, to watch their eyes go dark. Dean is scared. It’s weird to see him truly scared, but he’s scared now. They start circling him. He’s tied up, he’s hurt, he’s vulnerable, and his brain is working a mile a minute.
Pa Bender says they’ve been doing this for generations, but never “sloppy” enough to bring the cops down on them. He leans in to Dean, grinning again, saying, “You with that pretty cop?” You see, Dean Winchester suggests sex, just by showing up. He can’t fucking help it. No, he’s not “with” that cop, but there’s enough there between them that it can already be used against him. And even something that is innocent, like his interactions with Kathleen, is twisted. Some people just ARE Erotic Muses, and Dean is one of them. I can imagine him at 16, 17, as this aspect of him started to blossom, thinking, “Why the fuck is everyone so WEIRD to me all the time? Jesus CHRIST. Stop LOOKING at me.” He hates being the center of attention, and yet being the center of attention is his destiny.
In that sexualized threatening environment, Dean’s wise cracking goes into gear. It’s automatic. He makes a wisecrack and one of the brothers belts him across the face. Pa Bender says, “Tell me something I want to know …” and Dean says, “How ’bout it’s not nice to marry your sister.” Dean is careless in the face of danger like this. He runs towards it screaming taunts, hoping to blast his way through. But he can’t do that now. He’s just got his fresh mouth.
Pa, who has (ominously), drawn a red hot poker out of the fire behind Dean, asks if there are any more cops out there. Dean says, “Eat me.” And then draws up short, “No, no, you actually might.” Classic. But then one of the brothers grabs his head (and it looks real, it looks rough, lots of trust between these actors!) to hold it still, and that is when Pa brings the poker into Dean’s view.
“You brought this down on my family,” says Pa, and then says to the hovering yahoos, “Looks like we’re gonna have a hunt tonight after all, boys,” and they get all super-psyched. Pa says to Dean, “And you get to pick the animal. The boy or the cop.”
Dean drops the wisecracks and starts to negotiate, frantically, his nose bleeding, his head being held by those awful hands. Nobody else is coming, it’s just them. Pa grins and says, “If you don’t choose, I will” and then plunges the poker into Dean’s chest. Dean screams and cries. The poker goes right where his heart is. I think we’ve covered Dean’s heart before. And how important it is. “Faith”, etc. The tattoo will eventually go there. It’s an important area. Pa goes right for it.
Then we get a great shot where Pa puts the poker right up to Dean’s face. You can see it reflected in his eyeball. Awesome.
Pa says, almost soothingly, “Next time I’ll take an eye.” And Dean caves, shouting, “All right all right, take the guy, take the guy.”
You know why he does it, as terrible as it is. You know why it feels like shit, too. We have just heard from Dean how it has been “his job” to keep Sam safe, his whole life, and here he is, choosing to throw Sammy to the wolves. But in his code, putting Kathleen (as awesome at her job as she is) in that position would be unforgivable. Sammy is a professional hunter. Sammy can fight his way out. But still. It’s a hell of a choice. It gets worse, too, in the next moment, when Pa hands a key to one of his sons and tells him to go shoot Sam in the cage. Dean isn’t sure he heard right? He’s been betrayed. The son goes off to do the deed, and Dean starts screaming. The episode really is structured beautifully, and somehow it doesn’t feel manipulative. You know, like:
1. Have Dean tell us what he needs
2. Make him lose what he needs, make him face the death of his brother, TURN THE SCREWS ON HIM TEE HEE.
It feels a bit more organic than that somehow. It all seems to happen so fast, unfolding like a car crash, their run-in with the Benders. They both have to think on their feet, re-evaluating, re-assessing every assumption, and they get things wrong left and right. Dean’s face when he realizes he has been tricked, that they are going to shoot Sam first, is heart-rending. And they’re all so up in his face. Pa says, horribly, “When you’re done with the boy, shoot the bitch too.” It’s so reductive. And he says it so casually. She’s a dog. An animal. A bitch.
Down in the Cage Lair, the door opens, and both Sam and Kathleen look wildly over, trying to see who it is. The brother presses on the control panel, and Sam’s cage door swings open. Sam demands, “What are you doing” and somehow, it’s even more terrible to see these guys entrapped by humans. They didn’t sign up for THIS. When did they enter an episode of Criminal Minds? Where’s the fucking monster? Sam seems totally on edge, alert, crouched there. If it were a ghost, he could gear up. But this? He swipes up the bracket on his floor (we knew that would come in handy), and Kathleen starts screaming, “Hey!” to stop what’s about to go down. I love her. Tough broad. Brother Bender appears, holding up his rifle, and Sam throws the bracket at him, distracting him, and the gun goes off wildly.
Back upstairs, Dean hears the shot. He screams that he will kill them all. Pa Bender moves off to the side, calling downstairs to see how it’s going. Dean is a blur in the background, hovered over by the other brother and Missy. They are just on TOP of this guy.
Back downstairs, Sam is now struggling for the gun on the floor of his cage with the brother. Brother Bender may be good at fighting people who are lost and scared in the woods, but he is no match for the Ninja that is Sam Winchester. Sam knows how to fight and knows how to grab the reins of any fight, and he also is a giant. He can cover his height up to appear gentler and less intimidating, but when he wants to dominate, he seems enormous. He’s on top of Brother Bender, and smashes the rifle butt into the guy’s face repeatedly.
The entire Bender situation has gone south because a cop is on the premises. This must be cleaned up. Pa and the other brother leave Missy in charge of Dean and head off downstairs to see what is going on. Dean is a wreck, and little Missy stands right in front of him waving her knife in his face tauntingly. It’s terrible because she is so young, and you wonder: What the hell will happen to that child? Could she ever re-integrate? Dean, too, was a world-class killer before he hit his teen years. No wonder he had nightmares the entire time he was living with Lisa and Ben, pacing the house in his pajamas and bare feet, checking the locks, swigging down whiskey before crawling into bed to try to forget. Hold Lisa, try to be normal. How could he ever enter into a normal world? Is it even possible?
Dean and kids. A motif. Turned against him here.
Back downstairs, we come to the final showdown. When Pa and Brother #1 burst into the Cage Lair, guns drawn, they find both cages open, both prisoners gone, vanished into the shadows. It’s a big sprawling place with lots of areas to hide. They move out into the larger barn area, looking around. The Bender house of cards is tumbling. The generations-long tradition of “hunting” is stopping tonight and they know it.
We see Sam skulking in the shadows. We don’t see Kathleen at first. The barn is enormous, with equipment and hay bales, all swathed in darkness. The Benders skulk around, looking. Kathleen (it seems she’s on the other side of the barn from Sam) makes her way towards a nearby cabinet-structure, and goes to open it, maybe her thought is to hide, but more likely she is looking for a tool, a weapon of some kind. A hoe, a shovel. The door creaks just slightly. The Benders hear it. Brother Bender goes over to that area, staring at the now-closed cabinet, before shooting into it repeatedly. Opening the door, he sees only darkness. He thinks (slowly) about this, and it is at that moment that awesome Kathleen leaps onto him from above, grabbing him around the neck. She’s a total Ninja herself. They struggle. Sam has peeked above the hay bales to see what is happening and Pa gets a good look at him, shooting in his direction. Sam dives off to the side. Bender Brother knocks Kathleen off him and looms over her, pointing the gun at her. He takes the time to sneer, “You stupid …” (If these villains and monsters wouldn’t take the time to speak in these final confrontations, they might have more of a chance of surviving. But noooooo, they always gotta run their mouths off.) Sam bursts into view, screaming, “HEY” as a distraction (I love how Sam and Kathleen didn’t have time to come up with a plan, and they both clearly are improvising, urgently, and yet they are in sync – they are connected – they are going to survive this TOGETHER – totally unspoken.) Brother shoots at Sam, who ducks, and the shot goes into Pa Bender’s shoulder who has also burst into view, right behind Sam. Good times. Brother shoots his own father. I have to admit I found that deeply satisfying.
In the uncertain moment following Pa Bender going down, Sam grabs the reins, charging at the brother, whipping the gun out of his hands and smashing him in the face four times. I love violence that is morally correct.
14th scene
Sam has dragged Brother Bender into one of the cages and slams the door shut. Kathleen, freaked out but strong, stands over Pa Bender, who is conscious, holding a gun on him. It’s disturbing, but it’s a gorgeous shot, too.
Kathleen says, “I’ll watch this one. You go ahead.”
Sam hears her words. He knows what is about to happen. It’s not that he can blame her. He doesn’t seem surprised or judgmental, but it certainly is a grave moment. A moment of acknowledging the power of revenge, and how we have to maybe fight against it, especially in our line of work, we have to keep cool heads … As he says to Dean, twice now in Season 1, “We don’t kill people.” If they start killing bad people, they will have totally lost the plot and point of their lives. You can see why Sam literally loses his mind in Season 6, as the reality of what he did when he had no soul, starts coming back to him. Sam is deeply moral. Again, he doesn’t look judgmental. He just looks at Kathleen, and a glance passes back and forth between them.
Supernatural is about grey areas. This moment is a perfect example. Sam leaves. He knows what is about to happen. It’s wrong, legally, but it’s also justice. You can see why you have to be careful throwing around such concepts.
Pa Bender basically digs his own grave because he’s a mean sonofabitch. Maybe she would have let him live. I doubt it, but maybe. Instead, he sneers up at her, ugly ugly words, “You hurt my family. I’m gonna bleed you, bitch.”
She says, struggling with her emotions, just like Dean, “You killed my brother. Just tell me why.”
Pa Bender starts laughing hysterically, and replies, with a taunt “Because it’s fun!”
We hear the gun shot, but we don’t see it go down. We cut to Dean and Sam, emerging from the house, Dean clutching his arm, his hand, his shoulder, basically clutching his whole ruined body. Kathleen emerges from the barn, head bleeding, filthy. She is no longer holding a gun. She walks calmly, she’s probably in shock. She’s been injured. She just killed a man. What a night.
Mud.
Dean and Sam hurry over to her (squelching through mud). Their language here is official, catching each other up … but the subtext is what everyone is playing. Everyone knows she just killed Pa Bender. Dean is assessing Kathleen’s face, reading the emotions he sees there. He’s worried, maybe. Kathleen’s brother is dead and he died horribly, at the hands of these monsters. Polaroids were taken. You can’t even imagine anything worse. You see Dean factoring all that in as he looks at Kathleen.
“Where’s the girl?” asks Kathleen.
“Locked in the closet,” says Dean.
Oh, Missy. You are in for a long hard road.
Dean asks, “What about the Dad?” and Kathleen says, “Shot. Trying to escape.”
We then get one of those great triangulation series of shots, the energy flowing from one person to the other to the other. Kathleen, lying, knowing they know, but lying anyway. Dean taking it in, considering the implications, glancing to Sam, Sam looking at Kathleen, taking it all in. Nobody says anything. There is nothing more to say.
Then we get a repeat of those closeups. The silence goes on. Kathleen, to Dean, to Sam. Silence.
Nice. That it just sits there, in the air, between all of them. The implications are left to us, how we think about it is left up to us. Supernatural gives the audience a ton of room. One of the reasons I love it so much.
Kathleen, who has retrieved her jacket, her cop stuff, is now calling for backup, and Dean murmurs to Sam that the Impala is back at the police station. They’re kind of stranded. Out in the drive, Kathleen tells them that the FBI are on their way, plus the state police. “They’re gonna want to talk to you,” she says. “I suggest you’re both long gone by then.”
Grey areas. Swim in those grey areas.
Dean again says he doesn’t want to “press his luck,” but could they maybe catch a ride back to the police station so he can get his car? I absolutely love her response. There’s an underlying note of “You have got to be kidding me” in her tone, but all she says is, “Start walking. Duck if you see a squad car.”
But there’s something else to be said, and Dean steps in to say it. Something transpired between these two individuals, something important, a shared acknowledgement of loss and confusion and panic. She was there for him. He found his brother. She “found” hers, too, and she’s living with the terrible knowledge of what he went through. He says he’s sorry about her brother. Kathleen has been so official up until now, her job is in her blood, her DNA, she can do it competently even when she’s wounded and frightened, but at his words, something else starts to happen. She smiles. But it’s only to keep from crying. It’s a great look. She thanks Dean for saying that. She sort of looks around, back at the house. Starting to blubber would just not be right for her right now. Best to wait until she is alone. It’s going to be a long night. I just think Jessica Steen did such a wonderful job with this part.
She says, “It was just really hard not knowing what happened to him. I thought it would be easier once I knew the truth … but … it isn’t really.”
A little boy went missing in my home town when I was a kid. We were the same age. He vanished from his front yard, all while his mother was washing dishes at the window, keeping an eye on him. A state-wide and nation-wide search ensued. I remember the helicopters hovering over my neighborhood. I remember the posters everywhere. This was before John Walsh, this was before milk cartons. I remember how the disappearance changed my childhood. Suddenly we weren’t allowed to play in the woods anymore. Suddenly our mothers would come out into the backyard and do head counts. Suddenly cops came to our school and taught us about how to stay safe. I was haunted by that little blonde boy who was my age who disappeared. Years passed. The father of the little boy was (is) an appliance repair guy and occasionally he would come to our house to fix our dishwasher, and I remember standing in the living room as this guy knelt in the kitchen with his toolbox, and I was, oh, 10 years old, and all I could do was wonder how this man dealt with it. His son was gone. Here he is in my house fixing our dishwasher. There were rumors that the little boy’s mother kept a place set for him at the table. It was an extremely eerie thing to experience as a child, especially since I was the same age as the boy. We all identified, fearfully. It completely destabilized our sense of safety. For good. When I was a teenager, I was living in Ireland with my family (my dad had pulled us all out of school to go on sabbatical there). My friends back home would write me letters care of various American Express offices, and when we would get to a certain town, we would go and pick up our mail. It was always so exciting. But I will never forget the one batch of mail that came when we arrived in Dublin. Every letter from all of my friends had the same news: the little lost boy had been found. The news broke over my home state like a tsunami. No one had forgotten the disappearance, even though it had been 8 years earlier. But he was found. Or, a box of his bones was found. In the house next door to his own. The story of what happened to that little boy is almost more awful than the disappearance itself and when we learned all the details the only thing you could think was: “I hope he went quickly.” But there is no getting away from the fact that the final moments of this little boy’s life were horrifying to a degree that makes your mind shut down. The whole thing “broke” because the villain in this story (someone I actually fucking knew, peripherally – everyone knew him) had attempted it again with a teenage boy (whom I also knew, he was in my gym class). Said teenage boy fought back, got away, told his parents, who told the cops, who then searched the house, and found the box of bones. Anyway, as you can imagine, this is a scar from which our state will never recover, and it keeps coming up, it keeps re-emerging. Just a couple of years ago the Villain was up for parole. Some deal had been struck, good behavior, all that. All hell broke loose. Suddenly all we were talking about, again, was that disappearance. It was as though no time had passed. I joined a FB group to protest his release, I wrote letters to the district attorney. Everyone did. Finally, the Villain himself decided to voluntarily commit himself to a mental institution for the rest of his life. He didn’t want to get out, he was afraid he would be killed. The entire state seethes with hatred for this man. I’m actually surprised that he wasn’t killed in prison.
So that story is what I think of (and I think of it often) when I see the twisted look of pain on Kathleen’s face when she says “it was really hard not knowing what happened to him,” and that she “thought it would be easier” once she knew the truth. One cannot imagine the pain that that family in my state went through. First of all, the years of not knowing. YEARS. How can a child vanish from his own front yard, in the, what, 45 seconds when his mother turned away to the fridge? I mean, you can’t even think of anything more horrifying. And then years of nothing-ness. He was GONE. But then … to realize … that he was next door the whole time … or, his remains were, anyway … hidden in a box … that it was over probably before nightfall on the first day of his disappearance … and that he had died scared and alone, with his mother right in the next yard …
It’s too much. Knowing is almost worse than not knowing. Or, no. It all sucks.
Sorry. Pretty intense digression. But that’s what I think of when I see the look of loss and confusion on Kathleen’s face. That type of trauma is what she’s tapping into.
Dean and Sam trudge off down the drive, and the first thing Dean says is, “Don’t ever do that again.” It’s so parental. The camera is far off, we see the two of them in long shot, no more closeups. They’re back together again, and so they’re shown together in the frame. As they walk, slowly, the camera pulls back up and out, so we see them in a birds’ eye view.
Sam laughs, almost flattered. “You were worried about me.” Dean won’t go THERE, no SIR. Instead he says, “All I’m saying is, you vanish like that again, I’m not looking for you.”
Famous last words.
‘Oh thank god, a bracket.’
Following Checkhov’s dictum, ‘If you loosen a bracket from the wall in the first act, it must be thrown at a gun-wielding psycho in the third.’
hahahaha Yes! Playwriting 101!!
wooo, Benders! I love this episode so much. Perfectly paced, it just flies by, and memorable for characters, setting, guest stars, story. And also a big yes to family in Benders. Obviously the characters and that amazing house are ridiculous, their presentation the extremities of stereotype. But this is what I meant about Racist Truck, Who Gives a Fuck — not that there should have been stereotypes there. But Benders, as over the top as it is taps into a whole dark sewer of awful family issues that are also operating in the Sam-Dean story. You pull out some neat parallels. I love the connection you draw between Missy and Dean. Never saw that. Of course there’s a Dean-Kathleen thing going too. Dean and his lady-shadows.
I think part of the Legend of John also comes from the way they consult his journal every case in season 1. Every time John has been there before them. He’s practically built the case here and he maybe never even visited the town. Makes him look like a superhero.
Two Huntin’ Bros in Bars. I love Dean clicking to himself, so chuffed at his bullseye, and Sam’s genuine smile at being teased, which is nice coming after Nightmare. I also love the lurking motorhome making a reappearance from the cold open. It’s so cool when directors work to give you that holy shit! moment on a rewatch.
It’s just a cat, HA! I was ready to scream if Yellow Fever wasn’t in there.
The lighting in the police station — his eyelashes are the most ridiculous thing that’ve ever happened. Kathleen is one of the best one-and-done’s the show’s ever had. I love her. Her presence is so STEADY. She’s always observing, always trying to figure it out. The pain in her final monologue, how unresolved her tone is, it’s just heartbreaking. I also love Alexis Fast. That little slide she does just before Daddy hits Kathleen on the head is great; and how she walks off staring at Sam’s face ha ha. Poor thing never even got to threaten him with a knife.
Ned Beatty time
Nope, Sam’s not worried, and the show’s not worried for him. Tie Dean up though and it’s there immediately — I bet if Dean was in the cage it would be there too. I think Dean’s legs are actually tied to the chair legs in that scene – so it’s not even his choice to have them spread.
Dean, what are you muttering to yourself when you walk into Cage Mountain? You weirdo. And ugh, Sam’s face when Dean finds them kills me.
“Playmates”? Why don’t you try to find a grosser and more psycho sadosexual serial killer word to use in front of the awesome and competent cop. Go ahead Dean try.
Brother shoots his own father. I have to admit I found that deeply satisfying.
O hai Devil’s Trap!
And the last parallel of course — Hunting Things, The Family Business. Death as a vocation and the narrative you write to make your place in that okay. Like you say there’s a great double impulse going on here to read each episode in light of what comes after as well as what is fresh (you do a great job of that btw). Benders is pretty terrifying for the dark mirror it holds up to the Winchesters. What might Dean have been if he accepted himself as Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument; what might Sam have been had he not struggled against his blood corruption. Not that these are innate or that this is what it would end up like — but how material our projections can be.
// But this is what I meant about Racist Truck, Who Gives a Fuck — not that there should have been stereotypes there. But Benders, as over the top as it is taps into a whole dark sewer of awful family issues that are also operating in the Sam-Dean story. //
Yes! It’s a direct correlation and it is NASTY. I missed it the first time around.
// Dean and his lady-shadows. //
I love that phrase. I might have to steal it. She is definitely a lady-shadow. Nice nice connection between them, a whole nice arc. For both sides.
// He’s practically built the case here and he maybe never even visited the town. Makes him look like a superhero. //
Never thought of that. You’re right – the book is so much a guide. They should start keeping their own books.
// I love Dean clicking to himself, so chuffed at his bullseye, and Sam’s genuine smile at being teased, which is nice coming after Nightmare. //
Yes, nice dynamic. I get so worried about them, I want them to relax. It’s a great tension thing with the show. Have another beer, Sam, come on! But of course if he DID, he wouldn’t be Sam!
// his eyelashes are the most ridiculous thing that’ve ever happened. //
Seriously. He’s all tough in his jacket and work boots but then his eyes are like a bathing beauty from the 1930s emerging from out of a gleaming Beverly Hills swimming pool. Ridiculous.
And yes, Missy strolling off staring at the picture is totally creepy. You know she’s memorized the faces in all those awful Polaroids.
// Tie Dean up though and it’s there immediately — I bet if Dean was in the cage it would be there too. //
Yes! Just one of those disturbing currents in the character, how the show uses him, how he uses himself.
Damn, his legs are tied open. There goes my theory. The man suggests Sex, plain and simple, even when he’s being abused, and it’s effed up and awesome.
// “Playmates”? Why don’t you try to find a grosser and more psycho sadosexual serial killer word to use in front of the awesome and competent cop. Go ahead Dean try. //
HAHAHAHA
Why didn’t I pick up on that? You can see her WTF look from inside her cage.
// O hai Devil’s Trap! //
hahaha Yup!
// What might Dean have been if he accepted himself as Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument; what might Sam have been had he not struggled against his blood corruption. Not that these are innate or that this is what it would end up like — but how material our projections can be. //
Totally. And I love that at this point it is completely unspoken … we’re a tiny bit ahead of the characters, in other words. They aren’t talking to each other in that way. There is so much they still don’t know about themselves, their own past. But it’s starting to get churned up.
and thanks in re: the re-watching thing. There are so many “I need to keep you safe, Sammy” scenes by now that I almost want to open a vein if I ever hear those words again. But it’s good to remember that this is the first time. And it’s quite an amazing moment.
The “I need to keep you safe, Sammy” scenes do get tedious. I’m up to re-watching early season 3, and I’m ready for them to stop. Maybe they wouldn’t be tedious if I were watching the episodes on a weekly basis, as broadcast. I know it’s a common observation that comedy is best watched in a group – that laughter is increased when it’s shared. I wonder how the impact of the show is different when one watches multiple episodes in bursts. David Duchovny’s comment about watching the pilot broadcast of X-Files as they were shooting later episodes – and how that was a unique experience in his career, to watch the show with the people he made it with – got me to thinking about how the audience itself has a context for viewing and that will affect our reactions. If I get caught up in time to watch season 10 in real time, I’m wondering how the wait for new episodes will change my enjoyment of the show (I have no hopes of catching up in time to watch season 9 in real time).
Yeah, the “Keep sammy safe” thing is still going strong in Season 9! Well, not really. The relationship has pretty much disintegrated because of it and all kinds of messed up things are happening – and I’m excited, because it feels new – like that conversation may very well be about to end, once and for all.
Season 10 will probably be the final season. So it would be nice to sort of bury that damn hatchet before we ride off into the sunset.
And I know, in re: real time!
I binge-watched the series by myself. I think there is a lot to be said for doing it that way – although you certainly notice the repetitive themes (and sometimes even conversations, word for word repeated). Others who have watched in real-time during the entire thing have said that it feels like some of these issues take forever to play themselves out – so I guess it depends.
In a way, I liked watching them back to back. Season 6 is one of my favorite seasons, and it really plays out like a film, really – watched back to back. I have no idea what that season would have felt like spacing the episodes out over a whole season. I still think the earliest seasons were the strongest – 1 through 4.
A question about John’s journal: it is considered “canon” right because it was put out by the show itself?
You mentioned Missy being 12 and her correlation to Dean and his belief in his family “mission” and it struck me that in John’s journal he stated that Dean killed some other hunter(s) who were attacking Sammy when he was 11/12.
I never thought about Dean being an unreliable narrator of his own life but I think he ALSO seems to know that things aren’t exactly what Dad said either (later he mentions in Dark Side of the Moon that things weren’t perfect in the Winchester household BEFORE, all the memories became perfect AFTER).
So is he lying to himself; not remembering exactly what did happen (and that scene in Something Wicked convinces me absolutely that John left Sam and Dean in that motel room as BAIT for the striga but did not tell Dean anything useful about protecting himself and Sam) sort of like he remembered letting go of Castiel in Purgatory when it was Castiel who let HIM go; deliberately lying to Sam.
I enjoy your comments on the vulnerability JA brings to the part and how the audience WORRIES about him.
Interesting thoughts! Thanks for commenting!
I am in agreement with you about the striga, and how John W decided to handle it, and Dean. Ugh.
Not sure what you’re saying about the journal though: could you elaborate??
Do you mean: should we also consider the journal an “unreliable narrator”?
I found “Benders” appalling on many levels, because they *were* “just people.” I am fascinated by the whole panoply of monsters the boys fight on SPN, but now and then we need to be reminded that humans, too, can wield terrifying threats, horrible end-games. The Benders are drawn with broad, splashy strokes, but then that’s what horror–psychological and physical–is all about. SPN always takes things to the extreme, even when certain elements are underplayed. Because “Deliverance” is a touchstone film for so much, it makes sense that SPN would often bring up those elements–and then, with this episode–take it to the max. Because that’s what SPN does. They take a trope and then twist it, or shove it out into space–or they dial back, depending on what the “heart” is. Dialing back from “Deliverance” would have completely undercut this episode. So they went the other direction, but it was two-fold: Sam caged and hunt-bait; Dean at real risk for being assaulted. I’m completely engaged with all of the supernatural monsters, but I’m with the Winchesters: People are crazy. Throw humans into the mix from time to time, and it knocks Sam and Dean well out of their comfort zones and almost emasculates them to some degree.
Another Chock Full O’Fun recap!
The music playing on the record player is Gershwin’s “Sweet and Low Down.” At least on the version of the show on Netflix. It sounds like the DVD (your source, right?) might have different music. But the choice seems so weird, it has to be a reference to something. Being a philistine, I mostly think of Gershwin from Woody Allen movies (though I’ve recently started listening to him just to listen, ’cause his music is so beautiful) and I keep trying to find something to reference the choice to. Woody has used it several times: in Manhattan after Mary dumps Isaac and he starts thinking about Tracy (never should have let her go, I don’t think the reference is to THAT) and as the title of one of his films. Maybe it’s an extended comment on Sean Penn’s career? Nah. I think it’s used in Zelig, though I’m not as sure of that. But the song tasks me. I must find out why it was chosen.
/I love violence that is morally correct./
You and me both, sister.
I get a kick out of Dean startling when he turns on the flashlight in his own face as he begins looking around the house. Like, God I’m such a doofus to do that.
And Godzilla’s birthday. *Happy sigh.* I’m so looking forward to the new movie. My daughter and I have watched so many of the movies together. We almost stood up and cheered when we saw the trailer for the new one. And then I learned that Bryan Cranston is in it, wow. The crazy little fairies in Godzilla vs Mothra… Well, that’s a different thread.
And today’s birthdays are Garry Kasparov and Thomas Jefferson. A good day for clever folks to be born.
And the Joan Crawford comparison is awesome.
I mean, she literally carries bands of shadows around to go across her brow and eyes. Those lighting folks back then knew what the hell they were doing.
The newest Godzilla trailer (there have already been a bunch) is absolutely terrifying. Have you seen it? Let me try to track it down. It launched last week. I’m really looking forward to it.
More to come! I am not sure if it’s the same song on the DVD as on Netflix – let me check on that too. Yes, I’m watching these on DVD.
I missed the flashlight-in-his-own-face moment. Which, of course makes me think of this brilliance from a later episode.
and yes! Thomas Jefferson! Just to piss off his ghost, I went this morning with my coffee to sit by the statue of his nemesis Alexander Hamilton (well, he was everyone’s nemesis) near my house, to do some reading and writing in the beautiful morning.
Here’s the new Godzilla trailer. Really more of a “first look” thing, but really good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64c6VLNJQiE
Mutecypher – Looked it up – yes, same song!! I didn’t recognize it!
Okay, so let’s discuss. Obviously the song is totally incongruous to the setting – which makes it creepy – but yes, there must be deeper levels to why they picked it. Great-Grandpappy Bender probably passed on his records to his kids. Part of the tradition. Part of their total separation from the modern era.
My other avenue of investigation would be into horror movies with murderous families. Was the song used in The Hills Have Eyes or something similar? I usually prefer supernatural horror to murderous human horror (just like the Winchesters!). I’m not too familiar with that sub-genre. So I’m going to poke around looking for soundtracks of those sorts of movies.
Or it may be as straightforwardly random as you mention. (But then I’d never find out. Damn those loose-end creating Writers! Damn them to 10 seasons!)
Yeah, I like paranormal stuff better than, say, torture porn and all that stuff.
Let me know what you come up with. There’s GOT to be a connection to some other film.
The film to link this episode to is the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Particularly internal scenes of Leatherface in his kitchen, and the amount of body parts used as home decoration. I haven’t yet read through all the comments in this thread, so maybe someone has already pointed it out re. the Bender family collecting jars of teeth etc but, as a reflection of the Winchester motto ‘Saving people, hunting things’ the Benders could be said to be ‘Hunting people, saving things’. Darkly hilarious. I love this episode! Thanks for this classy and perceptive blog, I am delighted to have found it.
//I love violence that is morally correct.//
//You and me both, sister.//
That’s why I like Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby so much. Nicholas beats the crap out of Squeers. When I read that part I literally cheered.
Ha!! Great example!
Yes, I wondered if you “honored” TJ with your Fantasy Boy Friend. He’s a polarizing figure (guess which one THAT refers to).
And OMFG, I had not seen that Godzilla trailer. Thanks for posting it.
The Changing Channels intro is just brilliant. It just puts you into a happy place.
It really does. I love the Casper in the wardrobe. Hahaha.
//effed up and awesome. //
And this is the official title for this episode. Or maybe the whole series.
Though I can see it wouldn’t have got past the suits.
Also, would someone mind explaining why this is called The Benders. I just have no idea what The Benders is refering to.
I’m so pleased you have come to appreciate this episode, Sheila. Every scene is a Faberge egg of awesomeness.
Yes, plenty of mud and real and metaphorical muddiness. Love it. Also, disgusting things in jars.
I love that Jenkins is a cantankerous git. ‘Oh thank god. A bracket.’ God bless you, John Shiban.
I love the doppelganger element of this episode – it’s so truly dark, it’s so ballsy to destabilise the Winchester family dynamic in ways you actually can’tpick up on until much later, until a few more pieces of the puzzle are in place.
And the children. Evan and Missie are doppelgangers, too – he’s a kid surrounded by plastic monsters: life maybe ain’t great, so he loses himself in monster movies – kid sounds like a connoisseur already. But he has a mum, with no time for nonsense, so he’ll be ok. But Missie – surrounded by real monsters and well on her way to becoming one herself. She really is the key to the true horror of that family.
Kathleen. What this actress does. Cannot. Describe. The Ways.
//Kripke has made the observation that Ackles always goes for the vulnerability lying beneath the scene. That’s why his fight scenes, physical or verbal, are so electric, more so than Sam’s, who can launch himself into the purely physical realm far more easily than Dean can. //
And that explains the difference between the two fight scenes in this episode. Sam is cool and efficient (man, those elbow strikes!) Dean is, well, all over the place. ‘I’m gonna kick your ass first. Then yours.’ Doooiiiinkkkk!
//Nope, Sam’s not worried, and the show’s not worried for him. Tie Dean up though and it’s there immediately//
Hi Jessie. And WHAT a turnaround from the pilot, with The Woman in White all over Sam. This is kind of the ur-Dean as Damsel in Distress episode. Just when you thought in ‘Nightmare’ that the emotional stakes couldn’t get any higher, they do. Being forced to choose who will be hunted first? Just horrible. Breaking someone under torture, making someone complicit in your evil? Hello, Season 4. This is really what so many of those skeeving demons want – and it’s a human being who actually manages to do it: to see Dean panic, to cry, to beg, to break down. Here it is in that powerless ‘I will kill you all.’
How do you process all that?
The music and sound design in this episode is awesome – the counterintuitive rinky dink music for the cannibal house, the sawing and chopping noises (who needs to see what’s happening when you can hear it), the eerie, metallic Zimmeresque sounds for much of the later part of the episode. Just as well it’s not in Smellovision or we’d all be fainting when Pop Cannibal appears.
Yes! Gross Jar Detail!
“Oh thank God. A bracket.” hahahaha Love that actor, totally got the feeling of the guy, who he was.
// it’s so ballsy to destabilise the Winchester family dynamic in ways you actually can’t pick up on until much later, until a few more pieces of the puzzle are in place. //
I know, right?? They just laid it out so carefully – well, “Bugs” notwithstanding. They’re just laying down those bread crumbs. It’s amazing how well it all goes together – and also really makes it a great pleasure to go back and re-watch (something that is not always true with episodic television!) The episodes actually LOOK different once you know the whole story – that happened for me with “Benders” and a couple other episodes.
Oooh, I like the Evan/Missie doppelgänger – and the monster on the windowsill. Missed that. Subtext, subtext!
// Kathleen. What this actress does. Cannot. Describe. The Ways. //
I know, man. Her face. Her authority. Her kindness. She’s such a PERSON. When she speaks, they don’t sound like “lines”. Wonderful.
// ‘I’m gonna kick your ass first. Then yours.’ //
Haha. Dean! Just throwing himself into that fight and kicking crates and being thrown into walls and then BOINGGG.
// This is kind of the ur-Dean as Damsel in Distress episode. //
Totally! And sort of an example of something you said early on in our discussions – about the show taking away things from the characters after we see how much they need said things. This is an extreme example. But it works so well – his agony is just horrifying.
// This is really what so many of those skeeving demons want – and it’s a human being who actually manages to do it: to see Dean panic, to cry, to beg, to break down. Here it is in that powerless ‘I will kill you all.’ //
Nice observation.
And good Lord yes, the sound of sawing is far worse than any visual we could ever get!!
//So it would be nice to sort of bury that damn hatchet before we ride off into the sunset. //
Or maybe drive off the edge of the Grand Canyon with Ramble On blasting from the cassette player.
You know, I can see that.
In my book, it’s not even a worst case scenario.
Kinda Butch and Sundance. Freezeframe.
Nope. Like Thelma and Louise, making it a triumph. It could be epic.
Yes. Let’s go for epic.
Anything else will be a let down.
I mean, it IS supposed to be a Western!
I just hope whatever happens … it’s satisfying.
Basically I need to have some kind of catharsis. I don’t care what kind – just need it to be real, and earned.
I felt that with Sopranos. I felt that with the final episode of MASH (killer). Six Feet Under had a very cathartic wrapping-up final episode. I just want it to be GOOD.
De-lurking to gush about how much I love every one of these recaps, Sheila. Now I anxiously await both Tuesday and Sunday. You have definitely caused me to actually, you know, WATCH Supernatural more closely. And by closely, I mean with all the lights off, and the laptop and the computer turned off, and the teenagers banished to another room entirely. Multitasking in front of the computer had become such a habit, and with most shows it didn’t hurt my understanding of the material at all. I guess they’re called procedurals for a reason. The laugh track is there to conveeniently tell me when there’s a joke.
It shouldn’t be so crazy to acknowledge that TV is, duh, a visual medium. So many of the performances in Supernatural are non-verbal, or the words that come out of the actors’ mouths are in such direct contrast to the emotions you read on their faces, that it becomes an entirely different show if you’re not looking directly at the screen. (Like watching Dean’s reaction to Sam telling Dean he can finally, “Take care of himself.” In Season 7, Time for a Wedding.) Or I must watch each episode twice. I never “get it” all in one viewing.
Multitasking is like watching the show with a disability! Can you imagine trying to tell a blind person what’s going on in a single scene? You’d have to interpret every look with a paragraph of description, because it’s all up there on the screen. As it is, if I watch with family I get crazy when they’re not LOOKING.
My question for you, Sheila, is about your own recap process. It is obviously not the same as Chuck’s! You are a trained professional. Do you watch a season 1 episode all in one go, or scene-by-scene? Or a mix? I think I’ve seen season one at least four times, and when I read your recaps, I go back for a scene-by-scene viewing. I did go out and buy the disks, for season 1, because the original music for that season is a must for me. My reaction to other recaps was, “Whadda ya mean they used a Rush song?!?”
I love convention videos because the actors seem so much more comfortable in a more predictable environment. The few late night interviews I’ve seen of Jensen were excruciatingly uncomfortable to watch, not because of him, but because of the reactions he gets. Like you mentioned the Chelsea Handler interview. Speaking of eyelashes…(at 4:15) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifotPPd7PYU
Jeeezus! (Watching through my fingers.)
Terri – Thanks for delurking! So glad you are enjoying!
I love the nuts-and-bolts of film-making and I also love performance – Supernatural is so JUICY in both those regards. Especially because it makes all this room for goofiness and schtick – I mean, the show is laugh-out-loud funny! I totally would not have lasted 9 seasons if it hadn’t been so consistently funny!!
And in re: interviews. JA comes off as pretty shy, and sweet – handles all the screaming pretty well, appropriately humble – in red carpet stuff he’s always kind and shy and strangely open. He’s on the red carpet telling some bimbo with a mike that he felt “inferior” directing his own father. So charming. He doesn’t seem all that “handled”. It’s refreshing.
I usually watch the episode straight through, jotting down stuff I want to mention. (“The moment by the car” “The look on JP’s face in scene 3” “Awesome crane shot”) – or things it reminds me of – fleeting thoughts that I think might be interesting to share. (Like Brooke Smith in Silence of the Lambs – she KEPT coming up for me when I watched the episode through so I just jotted down a note to remember it.) My memory is not all that good – but if I write stuff down it sticks!! That’s how I do it for movie reviews too – although there I’m usually in a screening room and I have to scribble thoughts down in the pitch-dark. Total chicken scratch that I then have to decipher later.
Then I go through and pick out the screen-grabs. It sort of cements the episode in my mind. Specific cuts, dolly tracks, scene construction – the way it’s all set up.
And then I write the whole damn thing in one fell swoop, popping in the screen grabs as I go.
It’s a bit high-maintenance. But it’s a process I enjoy – and have done it before (only mostly with movies, not TV shows).
I’ll try to keep up a regular schedule. My life is pretty insane right now!! But I’m having a lot of fun and glad people are enjoying!
and Amen to your comments on multitasking. It is so worth it to try to only do just one thing at a time, and watch the movie/TV show, whatever it is. We used to do it all the time as a culture, and we just don’t really anymore …
Getting rid of the multitasking for the time spent watching a movie/TV episode brings you into a whole different brainspace. It’s “deep focus”. I try to do it as much as I can!
No pressure Sheila. I am around for however long the ride lasts.
No judgment on JA with interviews. He seems genuine and spontaneous at conventions where he’s surrounded by a familiar audience and peers who love him. It’s more the questions and comments of Chelsea Handler and Jimmy Kimmel. How is the man supposed to respond? Then again, it was a ridiculous questions segment.
I love Rosie Perez’s pose. She is literally curled up in her chair next to him like she can’t even believe she gets to be close to him. Kind of adorable. He handles it real well. And then Kimmel comes in, adding to the mix, “He’s naturally beautiful” which I actually think is hilarious. Like – what?
I don’t watch much convention stuff.
As I’ve said before: so happy that JA found SPN and that they found him and that it lasted this long. He could very well be lost on another ensemble show. Wouldn’t get to show his full range. Guy can do anything. He’s a perfect leading man.
Oh Terri I can’t watch interviews either! I get SO MUCH second-hand embarrassment. I sweat, my heart races. It’s excruciating. I am so desperate for interviewers to ask him something substantial about his process or whatever but it’s the same fluff and pointing at his face and pointing at fandom over and over again. I will watch clips from conventions but only ones that have JA and JP together and they’re joking around — I love those so much but it’s like wading into a river with unstable rocks underfoot. I don’t think I could ever go to a convention myself. The whole idea of it makes me quite uncomfortable.
Good process interviews are so rare in general!
The couple of times I’ve interviewed famous people and asked them about process they have freakin eaten it UP.
I ended up talking to Ron Eldard on the phone for an hour and a half when I interviewed him. I was so nervous (I’m a huge fan) but I went in prepared and asked him serious questions and he was so awesome and generous and forthcoming.
But so much of interviewing is just PR or junkets where everyone asks the same questions.
JA and JP have kind of outsider status in the industry. You can tell that people don’t quite know what to do with them. And SPN is still on!! Incredible! It’s such a weird phenom.
Oooh, Ron Eldard! He was great on Justified last season. Don’t know much more of his work though. Speaking of Justified, both of our illustrious Ghostfacers have been on that show, and the most recent season featured A J Buckley as a really awful and terrifying asshole. Complete transformation and very odd to watch him as a Ghostfacer in the same week.
JA and JP have kind of outsider status in the industry.
Yeah, in a way it’s lucky (for my mental health) that they’re so under the radar and there are almost no promotional demands put on them. Some of the better interviews/events are then from people like Aisha Tyler and Zach Levi who are actors themselves and it’s more long-form and wide-ranging and personal.
Yes! Justified! My cousin Mike was great on that too – who knew he could be a terrifying bad guy?? I know he had so much fun.
I’ve been a fan of Eldard’s since his ER days – and he was a minor character on that. Recurring, but definitely support staff.
He was in a movie called “Roadie” that I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival and fell in love with – he was the lead. He played a roadie for Blue Oyster Cult. But it’s really about this loser guy trying to come to terms with his life. He’s fanTASTIC. So I basically tracked down the producer of the film, told him I wanted an interview with Ron Eldard, and he set it up.
Here’s the interview, if you’re interested – Roadie is a really good movie! Jill Hennessy, Bobby Cannavale and Lois Smith. A quiet sort of sad character study. Great stuff, and Eldard is awesome.
Humorous story about the interview: I was told to text Eldard. I did, asking when might be a good time to chat. 4 days went by and he never responded. I was headed on a trip to Memphis – and ALSO Roadie was opening in New York and I wanted my interview to “go live” in time for that opening. Wasn’t sure what to do. Text him again?? Be a pest?? I reached out to Roadie’s producer saying, “Haven’t heard back from Ron – any idea why?” Clearly the producer immediately contacted Ron – and then the producer basically set up the interview, texting the both of us at the same time. When I finally got Ron on the phone, he said, “I’m not sure what happened there – ” and I said, “It’s okay – I texted you and didn’t hear back – wasn’t sure if I got the right number–” He interrupted and said, “You texted and never heard back???” I said, “Uh … yeah … ” He then moaned, “Oh my God, you must have thought I was such a dick.”
hahahaha
But he hated the thought that this random person he had never heard of might get a bad impression of him, or his manners. I liked him immediately for that reason!
And we were on totally awesome ground after that. Our wires had somehow crossed. Maybe I had been given the wrong number. He was saying, “If I got a text from you, I would TOTALLY have responded. I am so sorry!”
Sweet. He was so excited to do the interview – mainly because this was a tiny film, and nobody was paying attention to it, and he wanted people to go out and see it. He was proud of his work in it.
Also, there is the disheartening factor that because SPN has a mostly shrieky-girlie fan base – it’s not taken seriously. So nobody is examining seriously what these guys are doing, how good they are.
We’ve mentioned this dynamic before.
Okay, so obviously JA is eye-candy. So he’s treated that way by the press, many of whom have clearly never even seen the show. And because girls scream when he appears, he is “written off”.
Phone call for Elvis Presley.
This shit has been going on for 80, 90 years now. Rudolph Valentino experienced it too. Because women fainted in the aisles during his movies (literally) – the press went about attacking him, and scorning his masculinity, and all that. Cutting him (and the women who loved him) down to size.
Not to keep giving you reading material – seriously, only read it if you feel like it – but I wrote a whole thing about Rudolph Valentino and how threatened the culture/media is when women CHOOSE something all on their own. When women choose something because it’s beautiful, sexually pleasing, aesthetically pleasing. Men don’t like that because it makes them feel bad about themselves.
I think it applies in this case as well.
But hey, JA and JP are laughing all the way to the bank. This has to be the longest-running underdog show, like, ever??
Oh my god, your cousin is NICKY AUGUSTINE?? My jaw just hit the floor! He was amazing! I never put that together, d’oh. Wow, so much Justified-Supernatural crossover right now. Even with Eldard and Blue Oyster Cult, ha ha. My dream of JA popping up on that show just got a little more cosmically possible.
Great interview! Love the story behind it. Seems like a very articulate, grounded, passionate guy. I’ll have to keep an eye out for Roadie.
Yes!! Cousin Mike! Such a BADASS. From Glee to THAT?? I mean, he’s always been a superb actor, but that role on Justified was such a gift – to show his range. I thought he was amazing!
And yeah, Blue Oyster Cult – hahahaha. It’s fun to think of other ensembles JA would fit into -Justified is definitely one of them.
Yeah, that’s a huge part of what’s disheartening about it. Hurr hurr, those crazy girls. And so then you end up in a situation where women who scream are disproportionately representative of the fandom. I can’t identify with that mode of expression — screaming? in public??? Good heavens, one must never. And even though I’ll tell them to shut up every now and then so I can hear the answer given by the love-object I’ll be goddamned if I’ll shame or disavow them, for all those reasons you point out in other places including that excellent Valentino link (thank you).
It frustrates me when people evangelise Supernatural to guys by going basically “forget the good-looking dudes, it’s got man-things like violence and monsters and cars.” F you. I hereby claim those as LADY things. PERSON things. Guns and cars and good-looking dudes with feelings, they all come as a unit and they are MY thing. Can we not all agree to at least sometimes suspend the fiction that things all belong to either one half or the other?
Jessie – your last paragraph is so right on the money!!!
I get so sick of the “chick flick” conversation, and the “women don’t like war movies” conversation – and the “women don’t like comics/games – these are Boy Things” – just as much as I hate the assumption that men go to the movies in order to NOT feel things.
That is so not true.
Back in the 40s, the real prestige pictures were the “women’s pictures” starring Joan Crawford and others. There was no sneering at these things – audiences flocked to them – they won Oscars. It was kind of a given to the industry that women were a GIANT part of the ticket-buying demographic – so to alienate them would be suicide. The position of women in the 40s in the industry was far stronger than it is now. The greatest stars were women. The entire industry was set up to give them great parts. We have fallen pretty far since then.
I love guns, cars, sex, and feelings. And hot men.
I will not be left out of that conversation.
I get it, and I accept/celebrate that some fans are in it for the eye-candy and the “emo” stuff (but even referring to emotions as “emo” pisses me off – it’s basically saying that men should be ashamed of these things: Dean and Sam are both caught up in that vibe – thanks a lot John Winchester – and so the show really EXAMINES how DAMAGING it is to men to leave feelings OUT. To be afraid of feelings. On a really deep level, the show is about that!)
I can certainly get into war movies, where women don’t play a role. I like entering into worlds that don’t necessarily include me. I’m fine with that. It’s fascinating. Politically, I am happy that mostly male institutions are letting women in further and further … but I do NOT just love Nancy Meyer movies and rom-coms, and I’ll be damned if I’m pigeon-holed. It makes me very very cranky. :)
//I get SO MUCH second-hand embarrassment. I sweat, my heart races. It’s excruciating.//
ME TOO! I can’t stand it. I’ve been to a couple of conventions and was mostly uncomfortable the entire time.
(I can’t watch reality TV or shows like American Idol for the same reason. When people ask me why, I always say “They may have no shame, but I have enough for the both of us.”)
Oh, and Helena, I just assumed the episode was called that because of the family’s last name. Am I missing something?
//Am I missing something?//
Probably not.;-) Just a bit of an odd choice, maybe?
Yeah. I guess, though, if you think of it in terms of what you and Jessie saw in it before I did: that we should really be focusing on the Bender family – we shouldn’t “write them off” – they are going to be KEY in how we interpret the Winchesters …
The title is a clue in how to watch the episode, maybe?
Bit of wire crossing, I think. I just meant the actual name ‘Bender’ is a bit odd. (And in the UK it would come across as a bit rude.) So often Supernatural ‘refers’ to things that add or supply meaning, it’s just a bit unusual to just give them a name which didn’t resonate or refer to something else.
Bercowitz, now, that’s a good name. Or Aframian. Or McGillicuddie.
Oh I get it now! Sorry. :(
To me bender means pouring alcohol down your throat for four days straight. Yeah, doesn’t really lead anywhere.
What’s the name on the card he gives to Lisa when he’s trying to get her out of the house? Bernard Houdini or something like that? I love the fake names.
Yeah, to go on a bender. Bender is also a kind of makeshift tent. And at my school it was used as an insult. I’m afraid to google it in case I get arrested.
hahahaha
According to the SuperWiki it’s a reference to a real-life murderous family called the Bloody Benders.
Benders! I love it when answers are provided!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Benders
I’m pretty sure these Benders are based on the Kansas serial killing family from the 1800’s. They were fascinating – the young woman was used as bait to lure men in various capacities, like she posed as a spiritualist, for example. They killed and robbed their victims and buried them in the backyard. I don’t believe they were ever caught.
I’m loving your recaps! They’re so thoughtful and make me want to watch even more carefully.
Melissa- thank you!
I feel like the Benders have come up in one of my “famous psychopaths” type books I read. I’ll have to look through. The bit about the sister is ringing a very dim bell!
Thanks, Jessie and Melissa!
I love these so much. Seeing Ackles and then having you show me WHY that worked it really neat. Definitely find myself watch him more closely, which is totally not a hardship.
I always figure the people who call his tough-guyness “posturing” don’t actually know a tough-guy alpha type. There are facets to everyone, just cuz that front is up doesn’t mean that’s all there is. To say otherwise is dismissive and insulting.
// I always figure the people who call his tough-guyness “posturing” don’t actually know a tough-guy alpha type. There are facets to everyone, just cuz that front is up doesn’t mean that’s all there is. To say otherwise is dismissive and insulting. //
100% cosign.
Thanks for reading, Alli – so glad you enjoy! The whole thing seems so much deeper than I even originally realized when I first watched it! Fun!
It’s fascinating how many memorable one-episode characters the early seasons gave us (or gave me, at least). Almost every episode of s1 has at least one of them, and I remember when I first started watching SPN, this was one of the reasons I really liked the show. Of course, there were the pretty Winchesters (duh!), but what made the show special for me was how the MotW stories and characters didn’t feel just like plot devices. These are real stories with real, multi-layered, interesting, individual people that you care about, and when they’re onscreen, I’m not thinking “go away, you’re not important, I want to see my boys” because I actually care about them too.
Which is something I kind of miss in the later seasons… although s9 gave us some pretty memorable one-episode characters too, so I guess not all hope is lost :)
Anyway, awesome review, as always. Thanks!
Hunenka – Nice observation about the guest spots, and the one-off people who show up, especially in Season 1. Three-dimensional. I mean, like Haley, in only Episode 2! She was a real person. They set that up early.
We still get those on occasion (like the pudgy Sheriff in “The Purge”, eating powdered donuts with Dean, who then showed up at the evil fat-sucking spa – she had some spark to her, some life, some “oomph”), but not as much, you’re right. I miss it too.
It’s one of the reasons why the show reminds me sometimes of Quantum Leap, because that show was all ABOUT the people they met on the various “leaps”.
That BellJar of the Men of Letters Bunker gets pretty stifling.
Thanks for reading and commenting! Much appreciated!
Yes, there were several memorable characters in s9. I absolutely loved that lady in the church who talked to Cas about faith in “I’m No Angel”, then we had several really good, strong characters in “Bad Boys”, the museum curator in “Blade Runners”, Tara the hunter in “First Born”…
And personally, I absolutely loved the teenage girl in “Heaven Can’t Wait” who talked to Dean about her friend killed by the Rit Zien angel. The way she was annoyed with Dean’s stupid questions was hilarious. “Kinda… bummed.”
hahahaha that’s right.
And I, too, absolutely loved the lady in the church – I loved that whole scene.
Just wondering – and I rarely speculate along these lines – but do you think Dean would ever admit to Sam (or to himself) what happened, that he basically threw Sam under the bus?
My gut instinct is absolutely not. I think he’ll take that one to his grave.
… which basically means a shit-ton of graves.
Hope no one digs it up, then.
‘But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?’
The motto of the show. From Sir Thomas Browne.
You rock.
I’m imagining Bobby, Sam or Dean screaming that at Cas when they discover Cas didn’t burn Crowley’s bones. :)
Dunno. I’d go with Effed up and Awesome. ;-)
We need T-shirts. Pronto.
What size are you?
Large. I’m stacked.
Your question intrigues me.
//The motto of the show. From Sir Thomas Browne.//
And when you do your long awaited interview with JA on the actor’s process, will you get him to read the quote out loud, please? And I’d like a version by both Bobby and Crowley as my outgoing voicemail message, please.
Well, you know I’m already thinking about doing such a thing. :) Already put out feelers through my Special Ops connections. I’ll keep you posted. The timing has to be right!
Awesome!
Will have to get the tshirt sorted for the interview, then. Girl’s got to be dressed right.
Cue JA running screaming into the night…
hahaha
I think Sam would say it was the right call, though; I can picture them discussing it. I think what Dean takes to his grave(s) is is freakout after the fact.
Yeah, Sam would definitely get it. You’re not gonna throw a civilian, cop though she may be, to the Bender wolves.
And, crying and screaming? Nobody needs to know about THAT!
And I get that Sam would get it. I do. It’s where it leaves Dean and his mission in life I’m wondering about.
Right! It’s really well structured – giving Dean a chance to express his mission in life, and then being forced to make that choice.
Kind of like what you said a while back, about showing us what they need, and then denying it to them.
//I think Sam would say it was the right call, though; I can picture them discussing it.//
Sober or drunk?
while banging
ew
hahaaha
lol!
I ask about this because I find a lot about that scene – the choice scene – not just highly disturbing but a bit discombulating too.
Dean’s usual response to this kind of situation is to say – go ahead. Is this so situation different – and if so what am I missing? Giving up Sam – is this a just poker bluff that he miscalculates?
There’s so much horror at having to make the choice, and the emotions run so high (‘I will kill you all!’) but there’s no pay off or catharsis for Dean. He can’t redeem his mistake. It’s just left there. In a way that’s cool. Supernatural leaves a lot of stuff unresolved, to percolate.
oops, posted before finishing.
… It’s just that the emphasis at the end seems to shift so firmly to Kathleen, while I’m still going, ‘Hang on a minute, what happened back there in the kitchen?’
You can kind of hear his whole experience back there in the house in the tone of voice when he says, “Don’t ever do that again.”
But yeah, it’s kind of just left hanging there.
I think he felt it was the best choice in a terrible moment. Traumatic and totally discombobulating.
I wonder if – deeper, much deeper – there’s a flashback-type thing going on for him. That unspoken connection between the Benders and his own family – which he is completely unable to see at the time. So being faced with this “sick puppy” family totally throws him for a loop – he doesn’t realize he’s facing what was done to him.
I don’t know … there might be something there in his response.
Hmm. ”“Don’t ever do that again.” That’s all we’re ever going to get. And ‘Ha ha, sidelined by a 13 year old’ from Sam. I mean, this is Supernatural’s modus operandi.
But I’m just thinking – I need a drink. Now.
I love this episode. It is effed up. And awesome.
Yeah, they are definitely gonna need to go out for more beers once they get back to the Impala. But hopefully at a different bar. Or, better yet, buy a 12-pack and drink it on the hood of the car, because humans are crazy and cannot be trusted.
//humans are crazy and cannot be trusted.//
Ha! Humans. Aren’t we awful.
I think in Scarecrow Dean fails to make a plan because he’s dealing with humans and can’t just kill the murderous – sorry, sacrificing – buggers outright. Once that’s off the list there’s not much else you can do.
Hmm. That’s interesting. He is a bit “off his game” there – no Sam, humans, etc.
And then we get two episodes – Faith and Nightmares – where Dean is ready to kill a human being and Sam has to talk him off the ledge.
Hadn’t really noticed that before. Are there other examples I’m missing?
//He is a bit “off his game” there – no Sam, humans, etc.//
Indeed, and outnumbered, with someone else in tow …
//Faith and Nightmares – where Dean is ready to kill a human being and Sam has to talk him off the ledge.//
Yep. And a good reminder that Benders isn’t the first episode to feature trouble with (living) humans.
Can’t think of any other examples, so far in the series.
I think he told him; the girl would be telling the whole story to the police.
He was not throwing Sam under the bus, he believed Sam (who already knew what would be happening) would beat both Bender boys.
At least that’s my theory.
AND it is weird that Dean WILL “let Sam go” here and in the panic room scene when Bobby said that Sam might die due to his demon blood addiction, then he dies human.
I wish the show would have him ALWAYS saving Sam or NEVER saving Sam.
This whole situation has gotten weird.
/ I wish the show would have him ALWAYS saving Sam or NEVER saving Sam. //
Oh Lord, no!! :)
People are inconsistent, people change – people sometimes don’t succeed at their “mission statement” in life. Also, Dean adjusts, based on what he’s getting from Sam. Like real people would do. So the situation morphs, changes.
I think if it was always one way or the other, it would have gotten old by season 3. I mean, it’s kind of old at this point anyway.
Human beings are almost never “always” or “never” in their motivations/actions. We’re all a mixed bag, and so is Dean. He is not a “consistent” human being. He sometimes lies to himself, to others, he sometimes doesn’t know what he is doing, or why he does what he does.
//Dean adjusts, based on what he’s getting from Sam.//
Yes. My impression has always been that, more often than not, Dean truly thinks he is doing what Sam wants. He is just interpreting things wrong. (Part of his “Is everyone OK?” compulsion.)
Dean would have interpreted what happened at the end of Season 8 (Sam agreeing to stop the trials, his confession about not wanting to disappoint Dean, etc) as Sam wanting to live. That is why he let Gadreel in. And I think that is why Sam’s anger is hitting him so hard this time. He thought they both wanted the same thing.
Plus, think of how horrible it would be for Sam to die without even completing the trials. It would have been for nothing. Dean could never allow that to happen.
//Yes, it’s just an image of Dean standing underneath a Men’s Room sign. I wouldn’t even bring it up if it didn’t appear repeatedly, visually, and if the show as a whole wasn’t interested in questions of masculinity, male-ness, and hoping that we can actually add another paradigm to how we talk about all of this stuff.//
I love this aspect of the show. I used to half-jokingly say to my friends that SPN is a show about the many evils of Deadbeat Dads. The show is overflowing with absentee and/or abusive fathers (including God Himself). Everybody, even John, has Daddy issues. What does it mean to be a man when your role models are so flawed, or absent altogether?
(The Bad Dad theme is another one of the reasons I’d love to Dean to become a father. It would be a nice way to end the show on a hopeful note—breaking the cycle of abusive/absent fathers. Family is hell…but the one you create doesn’t have to be.)
Abusive/absent Dads – yup!
It’s just this ongoing keen of anger and loss! And how uncertain men can be when they didn’t have that role model. Everyone survives in different ways. These issues come out in different ways – it doesn’t only look one way, if that makes sense. The issues aren’t presented literally all the time – it’s more poetic and symbolic. These things work ON us even if we can’t name them.
Like I said, men don’t get a lot of sympathy these days for their issues. There’s a lot of anger about privilege and all that. But once we get so abstract that we forget we’re talking about human beings, our fathers, brothers, boyfriends, sons, whatever … well, that’s no good either. It infuriates me, actually.
This is trigger-y stuff for some people. I obviously feel very strongly about my own take on it.
SPN, without being preachy, really looks at all of this stuff. Or – like I said – opens up a little bit of breathing space around that conversation.
I’m with you – I love it!
//Like I said, men don’t get a lot of sympathy these days for their issues. There’s a lot of anger about privilege and all that. But once we get so abstract that we forget we’re talking about human beings, our fathers, brothers, boyfriends, sons, whatever … well, that’s no good either. It infuriates me, actually. //
Yes. And so many of these issues of “maleness” are rooted in sexism! The cultural attitude of women as weak/inferior, as objects, harms both women and men. What are boys told? Don’t cry. Suck it up. Don’t be weak. DON’T BE A GIRL.
I have a problem with slash fan theories/shipping because of this (well, some slash, not all). Men just aren’t allowed to have deep, platonic friendships with other men, without it being sexualized. As if men don’t have the capacity to love deeply without sex being involved.
I’m sure many of you all of seen it/heard it, but I really like what Simon Pegg pointed that out in a podcast (WTF with Marc Maron):
“You can be affectionate with each other, you can love each other and it doesn’t have to be some – you know, and even if it does turn into something, which it didn’t, then it’s okay… We always sort of flinch at this “bromance” buzzword that’s come up – there’s no equivalent for women, because it’s not weird if women are friends… because of this homosexual terror that straight guys have, it’s ridiculous. Now there has to be this word for it, and it’s crazy. It’s totally sad.”
SPN really shows Dean struggling with all of this. And Sam doesn’t. At all. Sure, he has serious issues with being seen as a freak or impure, but they don’t seem to be in terms of his masculinity. He is very comfortable with it. I keep coming back to Dean-as-parent to explain Sam’s relative stability/confidence. Sam had a positive (if still flawed/damaged) male role model in Dean. I can’t remember which episode it was, but Sam basically says he looked up to Dean when they were kids. Dean had his Dad :(
May – may seem off-topic – but it’s not! Not sure your taste in movies, but have you seen The Big Year? It kind of came and went – it stars Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson and it is about three competitive birders racing around the country all year looking for snowy owls, etc. But it is ACTUALLY about male friendship – and how to make friends – even with that competitive thing – and the loneliness of men – who are not allowed to have these feelings, and get comfort/companionship with other men.
I found it to be quite profound and pleasing – and also very funny – but it really treated the topic with such KINDNESS. None of that “let’s bond by killing a hooker in Thailand” stuff, none of that doofus man-boy stuff that Judd Apatow has saturated the culture with … but just men … trying to be able to BE with each other – all while racing to find the yellow-tufted titmouse. It’s a wonderful movie!
I spent so many of my formative years – 16 to 26, 27 – in the theatre, so basically I flourished in an environment of intense friendships based on emotion and shared interests. Where everybody was an outlaw, choosing to be artists, choosing to step out of the mainstream. You know. It takes a certain type of person to choose that. Male and female. Gay and straight. Every combination in between. The men in our group are INTENSE friends – they fight, they love, they have each others’ back, they goof off, they play football, they throw each other down and hump each others’ legs – it runs the gamut – some are married, some are not, gay men and straight men having intense friendships like that is awesome – on both sides. Because while the sexual orientation may be different, they can certainly bond on what it means to be men, and they can actually talk about these issues with one another. It’s kind of awesome. I know how much my male friends value these friendships.
These friendships exist in the real world. They don’t exist onscreen, not all that much. I LOVE it when I see a film attempting it – which is why I love to pass on the word about The Big Year.
I love that Simon Pegg quote! Very smart!
And you’re right – my sense has been from the get-go that Dean struggles with male-ness – not sexual orientation (although I think he certainly could go either way, or all ways, who cares, sex is sex), but male-ness, being a man. That uncertainty he shows … Hats off to Ackles for bringing that so palpably to the role, and so early on. Many men refuse to show that side of themselves as actors. It’s too vulnerable, it’s letting the audience too far in. Ackles doesn’t care – to him, that’s the whole point.
John just crushed any sense of agency/pride/power out of Dean, made him forever unsure, forever an alien in his own body. It’s why he could never just “hang out” with a group of guys – he would always stand out, and he feels he has to “act” somehow when he’s with other men. So as a defense mechanism he pours on the sex, because he’s Dean, which then of course exacerbates the situation.
I love Frontierland so much – because it really really shows that in the clearest way possible. (And the funniest, too.) The interactions with the bartender kill me.
“I see you got a new shirt.”
Dean, nodding. “I look good.”
The bartender’s look in response to that … makes me laugh every time.
Dean just can’t “pass”. It doesn’t matter that he’s wearing a blanket, and chaps. Other men look at him and go, “Huh. He’s not … really one of us …”
That subtle thing men do to one another. Sniffing out an outsider.
Hell, I experience it as a woman too when I am around big groups of women sometimes. I feel different, like I can’t relate, like everyone else is a valid grown-up and I’m just pretending and everyone can see right through it. I am old enough now to know that everyone feels that way from time to time!!
And there’s Sam in Frontierland – it didn’t matter WHAT he was wearing in Frontierland because his masculinity and male-ness is settled, it doesn’t depend on a costume, he just strolls right on in, easy-breezy. he just doesn’t worry about it. At all.
What an interesting thing for a little show on a little network to actually delve into repeatedly!!
And THAT, I think, is what they are finally addressing – or at least approaching addressing – with this whole Mark of Cain thing and the drumbeat of “you don’t know how to be alone, Dean” that has been going on for the entirety of Season 9. It’s that THING that has been there from the beginning.
Also: this whole thing is one of the reasons I found the Benny Arc so incredibly moving. I know the friendship with Castiel gets a lot of chatter, but I found the relationship with Benny even more profound.
A friend. Dean has a friend. A war buddy, yes, and, uhm, a vampire, but a real FRIEND. It’s a passionate relationship. Intimate in a way he hasn’t been with anyone else. Their friendship admits vulnerability, it’s all ABOUT vulnerability – (when they ask each other “How are you” they really want to know the true answer.) They’re like AA buddies, they have gone DEEP with one another.
When they hugged in the Season 8 premiere episode, I was like, “Holy SHIT, who is THAT??”
I just love that relationship. Dean has nothing else like it.
I haven’t seen The Big Year, but I will check it out! (Literally. We have it at my library YAY!) I have fairly eclectic tastes. I gravitate towards sci-fi/fantasy/horror—I love comic books and their movies, I love mythology—but I also love Jane Austen. I really appreciate suggestions like yours…I often have trouble picking something to watch/read in the vast sea of choices and end up sticking to my “safe” genres.
I’ve always pushed back against those stereotypes of men (and women). I hear it a lot from the older women I work with—complaining about husbands/fathers/brothers not understanding things, etc. I’m always baffled.
In my own life (please excuse me as I get personal for a moment), my father was the more emotionally open parent. My mom is reserved and sarcastic, almost never talks about her feelings. I’ve never seen her cry (I’ve seen her fight back tears, but never give in to them). My dad is all about feelings. Movies make him cry. TV shows make him cry. Hell, I’ve seen sentimental ads make him teary. And he is very much a “tough guy.”
Men and women aren’t that different!
Yeah, The Big Year was kind of “written off” – people were expecting a wacky comedy – and it is quite funny – but I really got it as a story of men, trying to break through and be able to BE with each other. As friends. Or at least be connected to their emotions. We all need friends!
Thanks for sharing the snapshot of your family. It just never works to label an entire gender one way. It just doesn’t WORK. It hurts everyone.
In my experience, lots of Tough Guys are far more emotionally flexible and open emotionally than so-called “enlightened” guys, who want to be congratulated on being so enlightened, and therefore end up being huge douchebags half the time. Ha. Tough Guys often are great listeners too – they know how to FOCUS. Because they are outer-directed not inner-directed. They are not self-consumed.
And there I will end with the generalizations. I mean no harm. But boy, when I hear SPN labeled as “macho posturing” – or when I hear constant sneers about “men” and what “they” are like …
I mean, talk about generalizations! It’s like a certain type of man can’t even be PERCEIVED properly anymore because of all this abstraction/labeling.
I love SPN for running right towards that. For rolling around in it for 9 seasons. For giving us a character like Dean, who is really … conflicted about all of this. He wouldn’t even know how to put it into words. But it is running his life.
It’s awesome!
RE: Benny. I loved that arc as well. Benny was a true friend. Castiel, and I love him, is a lousy friend most of the time. I can excuse it, because he is an angel with no social skills, but still.
Benny is probably the first real friend Dean ever made. Cas and Dean don’t have an equal relationship, especially in the beginning. And as they become friends, Dean starts to parent him as well. Dean and Benny are on equal footing. They can just be friends. I was disappointed Benny didn’t get to stick around longer.
//Hell, I experience it as a woman too when I am around big groups of women sometimes.//
LOL. Yeah. I actually started to cut my own hair because I found it too awkward to try to have conversations with my hairdressers! I mean, yeah, I’m a bit socially awkward, but it was more about how I DO NOT FIT IN in a salon environment. I was Dean in a blanket.
Ha!! I think we’ve all been “Dean in a blanket” from time to time.
“How you doing? You’re acting a little weird.”
“Ah, it’s okay. I’m just Dean in a blanket right now. I’ll get past it.”
“Uhm, I don’t understand that reference.”
Hahaha! Dude, we’ve all been Dean in a blanket on a few occasions.
(Is that like being ‘cuffed like a sitting duck’ to a police car? ;-) )
Now THAT we should get on a tshirt…
Sorry for the wonky link! Damn my typos! *shakes fist at self*
Durnit, I tried to fix it and messed it up. Let me try again. It’s hysterical.
LOL. We’re blanketing all over the place.
Fixed! I’m so proud.
Look at Dean’s face. You want to tell him to be a little bit more self-protective, he’s revealing too much. Sooooo funny.
Yay! Thank you :)
And yes. Be careful Dean! I’m getting embarrassed for you.
and then there’s Sam, lounging at the bar, drawling, “this sarsaparilla tastes just fine,” and he totally fits in. EASILY. Meanwhile, Dean dribbles moonshine down his chin.
Glorious.
Oh, I totally agree. The fact that Sam was able to grasp, even for a minute, any kind of normal? Total credit to Dean on that. I mean, to have had the confidence to even reach like that? Dean may have never been a “kid” but because of him Sam is almost disturbingly normal (at least here in the early going, I haven’t seen everything yet!)
De-lurking to remark that if you managed to arrange an interview with JA it would absolutely make my life (well, my SPN life, at least). I’ve watched quite a few interviews with him, and my recollection is that though he has provided some interesting answers about his Dean-based acting choices, he hasn’t ever gone into much detail about process other than fairly cursory explanations about how he goes through the script a few times after he receives it and makes notes about his interpretations. If he were to speak with an interviewer interested and knowledgeable enough (both about acting and the show) in a format that would allow for follow-up on these matters, I imagine the conversation could go to some really cool places. (Not to mention what fascinating angles you’ve already touched on here.)
I generally watch SPN with a couple friends who could be deemed pop culture snobs (they “hate watch” it for purposes of pointing and laughing, while I tend to sit back pouting and shushing), and convincing them of the show’s merits is just so difficult. I suppose sometimes taste is just taste, but I do get the impression that JA and JP’s pretty boy, perceived macho affectations may be part of the problem. Anyway, encountering assessments of the show that seem to “get” it is a real relief for me.
Your posts are truly a treat, and a treasure of insight. Thank you so very much for sharing your knowledge and passion.
Morgan – thanks so much for de-lurking! I’m glad you’re enjoying what I’m doing – it’s a lot of fun for me too!
Good “process” interviews are so hard to come by and I am thrilled when I come across one. You have to care about the nuts-and-bolts of acting – not just the end result – and many people don’t even know about the nuts-and-bolts of acting so they don’t even know what questions to ask. So many questions in interviews with actors are character-based: “So what was your character feeling when that went down?” “So what’s next for your character?”
I’m not interested in that at all, that’s too much like a fan question – although the answer can be an interesting glimpse into how the actor or actress thought about what they were creating. I like to talk about the creation itself. I’ve managed to do it before in other interviews – and it’s very gratifying. A lot of times actors can’t quite talk about what they do – they just DO it – that’s the definition of talent. But sometimes, if you ask the right question, you’ll get GOLD beneath the surface.
As silly as James Lipton is (and I went to that school, so I know of what I speak – look for many closeups of me in the audience during the Tommy Lee Jones interview – ha! My boyfriend called me after the episode aired and said, “One of the cameramen has a crush on you and I’m pissed off about it.” haha), one of the great things about Inside the Actors Studio is that the questions are all about process. “How do you think about a comedic scene as opposed to a tragic scene? Is your process different?” “What was your favorite movie or actor growing up? What inspired you about it?” “Can you talk about listening? How important is listening as an actor?” (Actors should ALWAYS be asked that question. Any time the question is asked, the answer is FASCINATING.)
This is the stuff that interests me, anyway.
And in re: JA and JP and the pretty boy thing: I had no preconceived notions about the show when I started to watch it last fall. I was mainly curious about the passionate fandom and thought I would write something about that. So I figured I should watch one or two episodes as research. Well, we know how well that went. Suddenly I was binge-watching the whole thing over the course of two months.
In the next re-cap, I’m gonna talk a little bit about the beauty factor – and how that element shouldn’t be discounted when talking about the show – what’s wrong with beautiful men filmed beautifully?? But also that: this has got to be one the longest-running underdog shows ever. You don’t get to 9 seasons by having pretty boys posing and posturing. Or at least I can’t think of an example where something like that would fly. Not for 9, 10 seasons.
The posters don’t help. Or, they don’t help with “outsiders”. I would never have watched the show based on the advertisements. They look pretty silly. Lightning bolts, and pouty faces, and biceps … Of course that’s not what the show actually IS but the ads (granted, they’re really for people who are already fans of the show) don’t give a sense of what the hell is really going on in SPN. It’s like this awesome best-kept secret.
I’m thankful that the fans of this show are so extreme – because they got my attention – and made me dig deeper into what the hell everyone was screaming at each other about on Tumblr. :)
Thanks again for your comment! I really appreciate it!
Could you ask him to not have any more showers please, I would like my internet and peace of mind back.
Jesus Mary and Joseph. Too much. Too much.
Unfair, basically. I haven’t recovered yet.
I was typing my below comment and describing the scene and I literally had to take a moment to get myself under control. Ridiculous.
Totally ridiculous. I relate.
What???
There needs to be another Berlin airlift maneuver.
Tormented Dean-alone-in-shower scene. Freckles. Shoulder muscles. Face in hands. Lifting face up to the stream of water. Dark anguished stare at himself in the foggy mirror afterwards.
Sexy as hell.
Unfair.
Jaysus, 9 seasons in and FINALLY a shower scene. Talk about deferred gratification. What is it with Season 9?
There’s wasn’t someone outside the curtain wielding a knife, was there?
That was the earthquake you felt the other day Helena.
Ha! That earthquake in the East Midlands – must have been someone sneakily downloading the goddam SHOWER SCENE. Attendant orgasmic upheaval on at least 3 continents! I’m amazed the planet survived! Damn you, Supernatural!!
Oops and bad editing there – didn’t mean to go all italics on you, and the word lied sneaked in there from a previous edit. I’ve not seen the thing and I can’t even type any more.
// Attendant orgasmic upheaval on at least 3 continents! I’m amazed the planet survived! Damn you, Supernatural!! //
hahahahahaha
Oh yeah – italics – I just went and fixed them!
Hilarious. The Erotic Muse TM finally gets in the shower. About time. Was it a steam shower?
I’ve heard the water pressure is awesome.
It was one of those wide almost industrial looking shower heads.
After all the blather about steam showers, and “marvelous” water pressure, over multiple SEASONS, SPN obviously decided they had teased us enough and gave us a glimpse.
But, classic: Dean is tormented, and swirling with emotions, and upset, and blah blah …
So yes, they give us what we want. But they add that twist to it. “Okay fine. Here he is in the shower. But he is also in Hella Pain.” In other words, “I’m Darren Nichols. Deal with that.”
Just a normal, everyday shower. Or is it? Or is it?.
It was so damn intense. Look at his face. I watched it 5 times in a row trying to pick it apart. As well as get my rocks off. Both.
I loved Castiel’s line: “I don’t understand what a fictional battle station has to do with anything.” And Sam and Dean’s stunned silence in response. Then, Dean: “Did you just make a Death Star reference?”
And I loved Sam’s glance at Dean: “It’s halfway there.” hahaha Like, they’ve discussed Castiel’s cluelessness before, and this moment is hopeful. Still only halfway there, but it’s a start.
I felt like it was a little less than the sum of its parts but I LOVED many of those parts. I will confess that I have no clue what happened at the end there with Cas though; and I wish that the Metatron-as-authorGod conceit had bent more of the episode to its will. And if the writers don’t start giving me more Sam I will begin to suspect they’ve forgotten how to write him.
That hand-swipe over the mirror x 2. Glorious. Scrubbing away — at the blemish or the self? Are you beginning to suspect that the blemish is the self, Dean? Are you gonna publish that story finally, and allow us to refute it in the light of day?
My feeling about the Cas moment is that Cas is self-absorbed and in his recent self-absorption has completely forgotten to watch out over Dean. So that moment on the phone where he suddenly says, “And how are YOU Dean.” It comes off as weird, because Castiel always comes off as weird – but you can see Dean almost balk at it. Like, why me? Why you zooming in on me? Get off me.
Like, leave me alone so I can go Dark Side.
And Sam isn’t really paying attention – he’s keeping his distance. That’s what I got. Castiel suddenly realizing: “Wait. What the hell has happened to Dean since I last saw him.”
It would have been fun to have some Metatron fake-outs – like: “Here is how I want the scene to go,” – “oops, just kidding, here’s how it really went.” I love that actor.
Yeah, Sam isn’t really doing much now. He’s got to get some kind of Arc going – clearly Dean as Darth Vader is rising. but, you know, we’re closing in on the end of the season – probably going into the last season – Something needs to start happening for Sam too!
I was glad that we were at least seeing Castiel in connection with the brothers (mostly). I’m bored with the Infighting Angel Drama. Don’t care. Except in how it affects the brothers.
I did love all the nods to Masterpiece Theatre, a huge part of my childhood. The silken smoking jacket, the luscious sitting room, the fireplace, the music.
// Are you beginning to suspect that the blemish is the self, Dean? //
I mean, the LOOK on his face both times. Totally chilling. I have this thing about Man in the Mirror shots. Travis Bickle, etc. Men searching for themselves in the mirror. I’ve written about it before. Men looking in the mirror is different than women (at least cinematically). Women, typically, look in the mirror to perfect their mask (touch up lipstick, etc.) Men, typically, look in the mirror to peel OFF the mask (“who am I? here is how I see myself. Here is who I want to be.”) Men trying to match up their inner lives with their outer appearance, somehow. It’s just a different relationship with Self.
Too many examples to count of men looking in the mirror in that way – but Dean’s two mirror moments are exactly the kind of thing I mean!
I wrote a little bit about the mirror thing here, in this post about Richard Gere in American Gigolo, – a couple of really great “mirror moments” in that film.
http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=53418
Also, talk about an Erotic Muse! A man who uses himself in a stereotypically female way, at least in that film.
Man looking in the mirror at himself is way more vulnerable than woman looking in mirror at herself. At least it is in how we receive those images.
So Dean having a moment like that with himself – TWICE – it tells me some deep deep stuff is being stirred.
My favorite Dean mirror moment?
“I’m a painted whore.”
Hits the spot, every time.
Love your mirrors breakdown, that’s a binary that feels really familiar to me but I’ve never seen it put into words. Never seen American Gigolo but I love that clip and your write-up is great.
Ha ha, painted whore! Dean’s had a few great mirror moments — that one where it crack’d — that one in Lazarus rising — that line about how he hates what he sees in the mirror. Can’t think of any for Sam, though — maybe because mirrors are also about divided selves and Sam for all his issues has a solid sense of self (when he’s in his right mind? Will have to think on this).
But what was happening with Cas at the end? Did Metatron “rewrite” him? Or did he change his mind about being a leader? I strongly dislike the latter — the former would be interesting but doesn’t that mean Metatron has unlimited power?
Terri:
// As it is, if I watch with family I get crazy when they’re not LOOKING.
//
HA yes! I don’t watch this show with anyone anymore because they just don’t GET IT! It fucking HURTS me. It HURTS me when people don’t pay attention or misunderstand or think I’m overthinking it. Or if they don’t get the genius of Jensen Ackles acting. I can get really really mad (I don’t say that though, generally). I know that’s crazy. I don’t know what this show has done to me. It’s absolutely insane.
And like Terri and Jessie I also feel that most of the interviews are excruciating. I don’t think Rosie Perez came of as gushing at all. That comment about if he curls his eyelashes came off as downright hostile. Creepily similar to “such delicate features for a hunter”.
Oh yes Jessie, this thing with Zach Levi on Nerd HQ 2011 is one of the more awesome things out there. Jared Padalecki is so fucking hilarious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oeB6IkLuBU
//do you think Dean would ever admit to Sam (or to himself) what happened, that he basically threw Sam under the bus?//
Helena: My two cents is: definitely. I think it’s part of their moral code in a run of the mill monster situation like this that he assesses that Sam has a much better chance of living than Kathleen does. However if Dean actually thought Sam would be in serious danger he would without a doubt have chosen to save his brother. I can’t imagine he would lie about it. I can’t really explain why I feel that way except that it would feel so… without honor. He only really gives that up to protect Sam. Lying to Sam about protecting him too much or in a bad way. But he wouldn’t lie about NOT protecting Sam. Saying that he did when he didn’t. If he makes a choice like that he will make sure that he can defend it. Gonna think about if there are other examples that can prove me wrong but right now I can’t remember any. Either way it’s a very hard decision and you can see that on JA even though it plays out so fast. He’s definitely gonna beat himself up no matter what choice he makes.
//And when you do your long awaited interview with JA on the actor’s process, //
This has to happen!
I also found the relationship with Benny to be so important for Dean. He finally gets to breath and be with somebody who completely accepted him. He didn’t have to guard himself constantly. He could really use Benny right now. Castiel can’t give him very much comfort with what he’s going through now with the Mark it seems. You can see in Meta Fiction that he doesn’t find Castiel very helpful at all. Would Benny perhaps get through to him with this Mark business?
So cool that more and more people are discovering this site. When do we become the Sheila-movement? There’s really nothing like this out there. At least I’ve missed it.
I agree with Morgan it would be awesome to hear how JA does it. I’m not generally for actors psychoanalyzing their characters. They just have to be able to defend their characters decisions and make choices that are “true”. I can’t really express what I mean, I don’t know enough about acting. I just feel that sometimes actors seem to make way too specific and deliberate, super-organized interpretations. Like you can hear the running track of the ACTORs thoughts instead of the characters.
What did you think about Meta Fiction?
Isn’t Missy also Dean’s amazon-child?
My brother’s keeper. I think about those words so often when it comes to Dean.
About the journal and why Dean and Sam doesn’t have their own: Dean is showing some black little book in Something Wicked that he seems to keep as a journal. It looks like they were gonna do that but dropped it. Probably because they realized it would be a huge deal and kinda take away from the importance of dads journal.
I think the Benders is an amazing episode. Great recap Sheila!
Max – in LOVE with Meta Fiction. A whole episode on storytelling structure! Yay! The writers saying: “We know where we’re going with this show. But we aren’t sure how we will get there. But trust us.” I love how it kept looping back – to unreliable narrators – not sure who to trust – it all depends on where you’re standing.
And Dean! Those two – not one, but two – long stares at himself in the mirror. This is where we’ve been going all season (all along, really) – and they are really driving it home, again and again.
I loved Castiel’s exclamation of dismay when he saw the Mark of Cain – because … Dean’s been so alone. Castiel basically expressing concern was painful and yet beautiful – SOMEONE needs to be concerned about what’s going on with that guy. Of course Dean couldn’t bear the concern and cringed away from it, but that’s perfect too.
But yes: Castiel won’t be much help. Dean is too far gone at this point. I think you’re right – Benny would certainly have interceded earlier. “Brother, this is not the path you want to travel on …” or something along those lines.
I loved it. And Castiel’s admonition to Sam at the end – to keep an eye on Dean, he’s worried. The focus is shifting – for a season now Dean was so Sam-focused, everyone worried about Sam … I’ve needed Dean to be on the rack for a change. :) Just because it felt like it was necessary – Dean can’t JUST be an “I am worried about Sammy” guy – it’s too repetitive – it’s already been done – and so now he is actually going off out on a limb, and it’s very very dark – and it’s been such a satisfying Arc for me, this past season with him.
// I’m not generally for actors psychoanalyzing their characters. They just have to be able to defend their characters decisions and make choices that are “true”. I can’t really express what I mean, I don’t know enough about acting. I just feel that sometimes actors seem to make way too specific and deliberate, super-organized interpretations. Like you can hear the running track of the ACTORs thoughts instead of the characters. //
Totally agree. This is complicated by the fact that the actor’s process is a mysterious one – and often they CAN’T explain why they do what they do. Meryl Streep is totally inarticulate when it comes to her own process. So is Robert DeNiro. “I just … try to be truthful … and get up and do it …”
But when an interviewer has asked questions specific enough – like “can you talk to me about listening?” – like James Lipton did with both of them – both actors are able to talk with great passion about THAT and it is very revealing.
But I know what you mean. I do like character analysis stuff – “How do you see the main conflict of the character?” – stuff like that. Actors are super smart about motivation and Arc – they understand those things. But so many interviews are basically: “Please tell us how your character felt when he had to make that choice.” Duh – we KNOW how he felt, we could see it onscreen. How about: “was that scene difficult for you? Do you remember any moments in creating that scene that stand out?”
I like to hear about how they approach things. “Do you sit with the script for a day or so?” “Do you make choices AS you read the script or do you hold off?” “How do you handle it when you don’t know what to do in any given moment? How do you jump-start yourself into ‘the moment’?” These are all challenges ever actor faces. You know: “You had to break down in tears in that scene spontaneously. Was that difficult for you? How did you get yourself to that point?”
Anyway. These questions are rarely asked because … I think a lot of people doing the interviews don’t know about the actor’s process – it seems mysterious and magical – and so the questions reflect that confusion.
It’s been so great for me, too, to see more and more people showing up here to talk about the show. Very gratifying!! It has also spurred me on to continue. Sheila Movement. Ha! I like that.
What did you think of Meta Fiction?
Oh, and in re: Rosie Perez: I respectfully disagree. :) She is curled up in her chair, leaning in towards him. Gaga.
I would suggest that it is not only Dean Winchester who has to deal with people openly drooling over him and behaving like weirdos because of his suggestive beauty – what we see in that clip is the same thing happening to JA. Everyone there (except JA) has fallen apart because of the sheer casual SPECTACLE of him. It’s not a great interview, definitely not, but that’s what’s going on. People like JA are “freaks”. And people act silly around beautiful people – I mean, Jimmy Kimmel is reduced to saying, ‘You’re naturally beautiful” and he’s kidding – but what other man would he say that to?
I love SPN for actually acknowledging this – repeatedly – in the Dean character. People respond and react to him strangely, and he is strange in response. Beauty like that is strange, and nobody knows what to do with it – so they drool or are hostile or try to cut him down to size before he’s even DONE anything. I mean, they got JA for the role and they were smart enough to incorporate that beauty INTO the role – it doesn’t always happen that way. We’re meant to pretend that the gorgeous specimen in front of us isn’t a head-turner. Please. But with SPN he’s allowed to sort of acknowledge that, play with it, destabilize it. It’s so cool.
The fact that he rarely does press is eloquent – and also I think works in his favor.
I don’t know much about him personally, and I don’t want to. He’s not all over the place, ruining the persona of what he is creating with Dean. Everything that is truly interesting about him is up onscreen – and that is usually the case with actors. Yes, they have to do publicity, but sometimes you end up knowing too much about the actor – and it ruins their ability to disappear into a role.
JA, in a way, has played it very very smart. We’ll see what happens post-SPN.
Is there a link for this clip?
Watched the JP Nerd thing – being a Brit, I thought the discussion of the Tardis and being terrified at an English football match(‘you’re well dodgy, mate’ – just what?tf – hilarious. And they are right to be scared of English football fans.
It’s upthread somewhere (the link). It’s sheer fluff, but it is interesting to see how everybody falls apart in his presence and JA is just sitting there, not doing anything. He can’t help himself.
Erotic Muse.
Has there ever been a movie about the whole British football fan phenomenon? I read Bill Buford’s book Among the Thugs and always thought it should be turned into a film.
Of the top of my head, there have been quite a few films/books on football fandom, usually hooliganism. ‘The Firm’ is probably the best known, with Gary Oldman (not seen it.) I think Elijah Wood was in a film about hooliganism recently, too.
I’m no fan of soccer, but it’s the water we all swim in, and back in the 70s and 80s soccer was in a horrible, horrible place, really toxic behaviour from fans, gang style behaviour, beatings up before after and during matches were common place, abuse of players, the lot. In Glasgow there was the whole Protestant/Catholic tribal allegiance to Celtic and Rangers. Football had a terrible name. Unfortunately this culture worked against ordinary fans, families with kids who just wanted to enjoy a game. Stadiums were dangerous fire hazards – one burned down during a match in ’85, and the Hillsborough inquest is basically reverberating 25 years on. 800 odd fans injured, and 89 (children included) who basically died, abandoned on the pitch. The dead fans were blamed by the police for creating the crush which precipitated the disaster and the press colluded in name vilifying them. A disgusting chapter in soccer and policing.
Nick Hornsby’s book Fever Pitch about being an ordinary Arsenal fan came out in around this time, and actually did a lot to soften attitudes to football, and there was a lot of ‘me, too’ style books. Suddenly football was ok. They filmed it too. I can’t really remember what else happened to change football culture, but it really began to change for the better around the time of the World Cup in Italy – 1990. The national squad did ok (semi finals – a miracle), nobody died and there was lots of opera on the telly.
One thing I hate about football culture in this country (and specifically England) is that we’ve never got over winning the world cup back in 1307 or whenever it was. After that, it was like we were entitled to win. Unfortunately the English team kept getting thrashed by superior teams and instead of fixing it the reaction was always the most horrible, all encompassing jingoism. Whenever the English squad plays Germany it’s still World War 2 over again. It makes me want to leave the country.
Did I mention I can’t stand football? I was, however, utterly riveted by the Italia 90 semi finals, England playing Germany – a whole Ring cycle of thrills, tears, white knuckling it to the veriest, bitter end, you name it. But of course, England lost.
Sorry, still can’t find the link :-(
You’re not missing much. Just Google Jensen Ackles Jimmy Kimmel – it’s from 2007, I think.
In re: football: Interesting, thank you for all of that.
Yeah, “Among the Thugs” was truly terrifying, in terms of crowd behavior – the Mob mentality – added with alcohol, xenophobia, racism, the lot. I can see how average fans would feel defensive, and also hesitant about taking the family out to a match while all that was going on.
The Firm – hmm, don’t know that.
Ryzsard Kapuscinski – one of my favorite writers of all time – do you know him? – wrote a really interesting essay called “The Soccer War” (it’s also the title of his most famous book) – about how one of his contacts as a journalist on the ground in El Salvador was just a street kid, nobody “connected” politically – but the kid predicted (correctly) that El Salvador and Honduras would go to war after a couple of soccer games in the qualifying matches for the World Cup. Honduras won the first round, El Salvador won the second, and then El Salvador won the playoff match. There was rioting at all of the games. Street kid looked around and said, “There’s gonna be a war.”
Obviously there was a hell of a lot more going on there than pissed off football fans and the two countries were aching to go to war with each other anyway – but soccer acted as a “release valve” for all that tension.
Sports and politics are often so connected! It gets wicked ugly.
Oh I agree, JA is very clever about handling his press and all that. He seems like one of the most sympathetic people in the industry. I’ve read that he’s rude and all that but that’s not what I get from what I’ve seen at all. Yes reserved at times but rude? Far from it.
Meta Fiction had it’s moments but I wasn’t very excited about it. I hate saying that and I feel I have far too often lately. Gadreel’s becoming quite an interesting character though. I feel like JA and JP are criminally underutilized. I like Dean’s Arc too, very much, but I just want MORE you know. Unreliable narrators, yes it’s interesting to think about when it comes to SPN.
I love to hear your thoughts on acting. These are exactly the kind of questions I would want to hear JA answer.
Also agree with everything you say regarding how they acknowledge his looks, and JP. Like you say it would be silly not too. It’s a fascinating aspect of the show.
So happy you will be going into Kim Manners and his directing. He’s my favourite director of the ones they’ve used a lot. He makes every episode into this brilliant little movie. Metamorphosis, which was his last, is on of my favourite episodes. That scene where they fight, brilliant.
Why do you think season 10 will be their last? I’m just surprised because I’ve heard that they actually wanna keep going. The CW’s Mark Pedowitz I think said that.
I don’t know, just a hunch. JA and JP both signed this weird almost unprecedented contract – three years – and it’s up next year. But who knows. I know they are devoted to the job, and both of them seem to feel that they are the luckiest sons-of-bitches on the planet to have gotten this gig. So we shall see.
Gaddreel is very interesting. There’s a sort of Dean-reflection going on there with him, too – in the death wish.
Kim Manners is a true artist. Yes, Metamorphosis!!
As you commented earlier, Sheila, JA, “knows this in his bones.” There’s a funny bit at a convention when a fan asked JA and JP what is it like to be so beautiful? JA slowly turns to JP and says, “I’ll think I’ll take this one.”
I wanted to mention a Facebook post I saw on JA’s page. I don’t know if it’s true or not but someone wrote he’d been to high school with JA and was new and a nerd and was worried he’d be bullied. Then JA walks by with his group of jock friends and says hi to him and that was it. He was in and never bullied. Reminds me of your Kevin McAuliffe post.
I know you said you didn’t want to know much about him personally but I think what JA brings to Dean, and is allowed to bring to Dean, is so fascinating. Part of being a fan is wanting to know where the actor ends and the character begins. We want to believe the actor is the character. And, as you say, we don’t want the actor running around ruining the character. I think this particular confluence of character and actor is a lucky one; both fit so well. Like Spike, played by James Marsters, a perfect mix of character and actor.
I am very curious to see what happens with JA post -SPN. Not that I ever want to say good-bye to Dean. . .
Oops, found it.
My god, the screams.
Yup! He was on Kimmel again – and they had a brief conversation about the difference between men seeing a beautiful women and women seeing a beautiful man. Men sort of sit back appreciatively, and women tear their hair out. It’s hard to imagine men SCREAMING like that when a beautiful woman walks on the stage. Kimmel was basically acknowledging the decibel level and also the almost frightening vibe that if these women got their hands on JA they would tear him apart. JA handles it all very well, I think.
Cue Elvis!! Cue the screaming girls! Let out that tension!
Beating my dead dead horse: Such is the destiny of an Erotic Muse.
Men tend to ‘scream’ in other kinds of contexts – football and gigs/rock musicians being two I can think of. There’s definitely a homoerotic element to it, it’s just wrapped up in ‘acceptable’ layers.
Definitely. Yeah, the footage in Metallica’s latest movie (which I loved) shows guys going absolutely apeshit – literally ripping off their shirts a couple of times because they have so many feelings. Love it!
Ha! Love that image. Screaming dudes chucking their shirts around.
Yes, it’s great – they literally are so in love with Metallica they have to tear off their clothes and strain against the barrier towards the stage.
We all need catharsis like that.
I don’t care if you get it through a Nascar race, the Olympics, or the movies – I love people who LOVE things like that.
Oh no, that horse is very much alive. Give it a sugar lump from me.
How many times can Sheila say the words “Erotic Muse” on her site?
Can she eventually become #1 on Google for the phrase?
Sheila O’Malley and The Male Erotic Muse. That’s your next book, right?
I kind of need to write that book.
Before Camille Paglia does.
Her whole “sexual personae” theory in her book on the subject really informs how I think about all of this. The forces of sex coursing through all of these figures – from Nefertiti to Peter freakin’ Frampton – and the androgyny inherent in most “sexual personae”. Artistic ones, anyway.
Most big movie stars have a fraught mixture of maleness/femaleness in them – and it is that cohabitation/mix that we respond to. John Wayne is not just tough and strong – he is also tender and vulnerable. Barbara Stanwyck is not just womanly and sexy – she is also tough and cunning. So we get that mix. Most stars have that mix.
She goes into other icons – like Emily Dickinson and Byron – and sort of weaves it all together – and it’s a bit of a huge mess, but I do like her take on it.
While I think JP is a good actor, he is mostly male in his “persona” – which is fine, no judgment – it’s what he brings to the table.
But JA brings that mix – the mix that Gary Cooper had, Cary Grant had – tough guy stuff, and emotional vulnerability – a feminine sense of himself as an object – and his awkwardness with that awareness – and how he uses it – I could go on and on – and it’s that fluidity of gender (which all the great stars seem to have to same degree) that I mainly respond to in his work. It’s old-school in a way, it has a long tradition behind it.
Loving this convo. And there’s something interesting going on too where you have to be in front of a camera (ie that whole apparatus) that sees it. There’s a shift from how the camera/actor constructs sensitive to how they construct feminine. JA’s direct antecedents are Dark Angel and Smallville (this is the maturing of the actor too of course); in Dark Angel he’s a smart alec with a sensitive side; in Smallville he’s a nice guy sensitive jock (until the end but the plotting on Smallville was a shitshow). They tap into the sensitive matinee-idol side of things but then they STOP.
Meanwhile on Supernatural, Dean takes a shower and you don’t see his pecs or abs — you see water cascading over his face, and his eyes are closed, but he’s exposed; I mean, that’s not how you photograph men (not trying to draw a direct parallel there though). Beefcake this ain’t.
// where you have to be in front of a camera (ie that whole apparatus) that sees it. There’s a shift from how the camera/actor constructs sensitive to how they construct feminine. //
REALLY interesting point.
The whole beefcake/cheesecake thing is endlessly fascinating. Yeah, it’s not Bay Watch, hot guy showing his bod. It’s interior, and there is also (somewhere) an awareness that he is being revealing. He’s playing with what we want from him … and yet never tipping his hand that he is playing. This is mostly the territory of women. The Joan from Mad Men thing.
And good comparison with Psycho.
I’m gonna talk in the next re-cap about how Kim Manners basically LOVES on the face of JA – like revels in it, loves on it – in a way that is almost extreme (it gets almost ridiculous in Season 2). It’s not homoerotic. It’s erotic, PERIOD.
I can’t wait for Dean’s Face: An Essay by Kim Manners [translation Sheila O’Malley]. Shadow is great for Dean’s face, especially during The Conversation when he is pretty much the only thing in the episode that is not in shadow! You can’t escape us Dean.
I don’t mean to compare with Psycho in particular, except in that Pyscho is the progenitor of all shower scenes, and I didn’t want to risk getting banned from your site by linking to the shower scene in Bugs……. Really there are two references in Dean’s shower scene: Women in Peril in the Shower; and Women Surveilled In Locker Rooms. Together these references give us a Dean Feeling Perilous Feelings while we all agree that we are watching his pain pervily. Epic.
// I didn’t want to risk getting banned from your site by linking to the shower scene in Bugs //
hahahahahahahaha
Yes, there’s that whole question of nudity, female, male, how we react to it, what we bring to it, blah dee blah.
That shower scene in Psycho played on all of those fears/erotic feelings. “Ooh, Janet Leigh naked, yay! Oops, Janet Leigh stabbed. Boo.”
Epic indeed. Also, there’s the added tension that we just never see Dean’s body. He doesn’t dress to show it off, he’s had, what, three sex scenes in the entire 9 seasons? Plenty hinted at, but we only see a couple. We just never see the damn thing, and yet the camera drools over his face (Kim Manners, going in as close as he can – highlighting every freckle – seriously, it’s almost obscene in Season 2). So they don’t let us see his body. And so everyone’s imaginations run riot. Then they give it to us in this totally weird emotionally dark pervy way.
It’s awesome.
//– I could go on and on – //
Just keep going, Sheila, just keep going.
Dean as Nefertiti.
It’s all making sense now.
//(Kim Manners, going in as close as he can – highlighting every freckle – seriously, it’s almost obscene in Season 2). //
Yep, what was going on with Manners – did he do this in any other of the shows he worked on?
Season 2. Snip out all the plotty bits and it would look like a Wong Kar Wai film – just lots of moody staring in extreme closeup. The only thing missing is the wreaths of cigarette smoke. Heavens. There’s a shot in the one about dead things staying buried or whatever where Dean’s staring at some suspicious looking gravesite. And it’s like everything has just ground to a halt so you can stare at his face. Seriously, maybe only Marlene Dietrich got kind of attention before …
I mean, he basically “loved on” the faces of Gillian Anderson and Duchovny – He knew how to surround them in darkness, moody and romantic, and highlighting the planes of their faces – going in really close.
I love the Wong Kar Wai comparison – so true. It’s an extremely ROMANTIC style.
//Ryzsard Kapuscinski – one of my favorite writers of all time – do you know him? //
Yes, I’ve read Travels with Herodotus, a long while back though. Loved his writing.
Soccer War is good – a collection of his impressionistic war reporting.
BTW, did you ever catch a book, I’m a Man, by Ruth Padel on men and guitars/rock music.
I never actually finished it, but it was an attempt to examine this whole male/phallic thing going on with rock music/guitars – the Dionysian aspect of rock music. I’m afraid I gave up early on it, not least because more or less on page one she fails to recognise that the National Steel Paul Simon sings about in Graceland is a kind of guitar, not a reference to the steel industry. And this in a book about the rock guitar.
Oh dear. No. I haven’t read it.
It’s a fascinating topic, though.
First off – where were you last summer when I was searching the internet for intelligent discussion of this show! I watched SPN for the first time last summer. I had binge re-watched (is that even a word?) “Breaking Bad” before the series finale began. I felt a need for some more good story and noticed SPN on Netflix. Once I started watching I was hooked. I came across your posts a couple of weeks ago and and have been reading through and following sense. Just wanted you to know that I am really enjoying your posts and thoughts on the show. I love a good long story and tv has gotten so much better at telling good stories. I hate straightforward episodic, case of the week television. It becomes background noise while I do dishes or cook dinner after work. What’s as important as story (if not more so)is good characterization. I’ve always read a lot, and the authors that I return to again and again have characters I care about. Love Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone, Michael Connely’s Harry Bosch or Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus. I really love an epic, immersive story with characters that I can really get into. Read all of ASOIF books. Snappy dialog is important as well. I think of SPN as a wonderful, epic story that’s almost as satisfying as a good book (with the added bonus of beautiful men.) I hope you continue your reviews beyond season 1 – you’ve inspired me to rewatch the series – with a more critical eye and a greater appreciation of what the show is doing. I’m afraid I originally I watched a lot of the 1st season while multi-tasking and didn’t take in many of the show’s detail and genius. I’ve gone way ahead of you in my rewatch but have been popping back into the episodes you’re covering for a “refresher”. I’ve gotten a lot from the commenters as well. I’m glad there haven’t been any haters chiming in – you’re like the NPR of SPN fan forums. I thought Benders was a great episode and I had a lot of thoughts on it at the time I watched it, next time I’ll jot down a few of my thoughts as I watch. Anyway, love this discussion.
Kim – Hi! “The NPR of SPN discussion” is such a complement – I want to put it on my banner!! Thank you!!
// I really love an epic, immersive story with characters that I can really get into. //
Me too! You’re right: that Television has gotten so much better at that. We are all so lucky to be living in a second Golden Age of Television! It’s overwhelming – I can’t see it all. But I, too, am so glad I hooked into SPN – it’s been so satisfying for all the reasons you describe.
Yeah, I’d love to hear you chime in your thoughts on these early episodes. Whatever comes to mind. The discussions have been so great!
I am definitely planning on re-capping the whole damn series. That means I’ll finish by, oh, 2016? Jeez Louise. We’ll see how THAT goes.
One of the things I also love about SPN is that it is fun to re-watch episodes. I always see something new. Or – with the funny episodes – like Mystery Spot or Changing Channels or French Mistake – they’re ALWAYS hilarious to me. It’s like watching His Girl Friday – I will NEVER not find that movie hilarious.
I treasure the funny episodes the most. That is the real “ace in the hole” with SPN – how WELL they goof off.
Thanks for commenting. I hope you return!
and I know, no haters yet!
What would they hate, do you think? Are there people who despise the show and troll fan message boards?
Or would it be more along the lines of: “Dean is a big strong macho man, shut up, slut!”
I’ve certainly received all kinds of horrible comments over my years of writing – people react badly to the weirdest things.
But so far so good with SPN!!
:)
“The NPR of SPN discussion” We are going to have so many t-shirt designs by the end of this thread. We’ll have to open a shop.
RE: haters. I’m sure there are people who troll all message boards just to be trolls, but my impression of “haters” in SPN fandom is that they are very defensive of their favourite character or interpretation of the show (so the “Dean is a big strong macho man, shut up, slut!” variety).
You see a lot of confirmation bias in fan discussion (as well as some professional reviews). Shows, characters, actors are put into nice little categories that must be adhered to at all times.
Right. I guess that’s just a testament to the strength of the show, if people are willing to argue for their interpretation so strongly.
There are writers out there who would KILL to have that kind of constant fan brouhaha in response to their work!
Sorry for the length of that post – didn’t realize it was so long until it posted. I’m a talker so I suppose it makes sense that I get overwordy in posts. I love the funny episodes as well. I happened to watch Changing Channels and The Real Ghostbusters last night. I cracked up. I plan to continue to hang out and hope to chime in. I have lots of thoughts on Dean – I used to be a linguist in the Army so had occasion to hang out with a lot of special ops guys (I was even married to one for awhile) and I see a lot of those guys in Dean. And thanks for being so welcoming to all your new folks. I think May sums up my thoughts on the type of haters that could appear. Party on!
Kim – Hi! The more the merrier!
He’s totally Special Ops. You wouldn’t know this, but my love of guys like that – and the fact that I have dated one or two of them – has made my group of friends give me “Special Ops” as a nickname.
“Hey, Special Ops, what you doin’ Friday night?”
“Who are you dating now, Special Ops? Lemme guess, he’s totally Special Ops.”
hahahaha
It also works because of my initials.
Special Ops guys are a rare breed.
You certainly “get it”, having been married to one! It’s a really good “way in” to the character, I think. He sort of shuffles into place seen through that context.
Frankly, nearly as hot/worrying as the shower is the “justifiably” violent whuppin’ Dean put on Gadreel. Gadreel thinks he’s getting the good cop/bad cop scenario, but once Sam goes to find Cas, Gadreel’s confronted with the bad cop leaving, and the worse cop staying. And we don’t even see the battle, just the aftermath: Dean sporting bloody knuckles, and they’re both unconscious. Dean is totally cracked when he comes to, finding an anxious Sam returned, and hovering over him. Still sprawled on the ground, Dean looks for reassurances from Sam that he did the right thing in stopping short of killing Gadreel. The pitch of his voice rising and falling unevenly, he seems helpless to reason out a plan. The first time Dean moves is to touch the MOC.
Sam was worried about Dean well before Cas tasked him with stepping up the vigilance. That was more by way of affirming what Sam already knows. He gets one of two responses when he asks Dean what he’s feeling. Dean either jumps down his throat or says I’m fine. “You gotta stop asking me that.”
Yeah, loved that we didn’t see the battle with Dean and Gadreel. Good storytelling.
I have no idea what show most reviewers are watching when they post their comments. Sure, some episodes have issues, but this darn show means something!
//I love the Wong Kar Wai comparison – so true. It’s an extremely ROMANTIC style.//
Have lost the will to try and keep connecting to the same thread, so I’m down here now.
It’s weird – I guess other people pick up on the horror and pop culture references, but I don’t know them, so instead I get reminded of ‘In the Mood for Love’ – glamourous, iconic stars, cramped interiors with CRAZY set design with TONS OF MIRRORS, deep, Sternbergian shadows, inarticulate emotion – it’s just SPN has also monsters, mud, guns and hot cars.
WKW is super romantic and good-looking, and really knows his film history: by ‘In the Mood for Love’ he recreates a particular kind of glamour from the ’50s and ’60s, but filtered through his own culturally specific lens. It was Ang Lee who said in relation to Brokeback Mountain that the classic Chinese story trope is forbidden love (love that opposes the wishes of family, society and ancestors). The conflict between personal feelings and massive weight of cultural pressure is a complete impasse, and there’s literally no way out. WKW taps into that with all of his films. So these glamourous closeups are not just for us to revel in, they portray people who do not feel permitted to articulate their feelings and what we see is the play of this internal conflict over their beautiful faces.
Lack of agency, sacrifice of personal happiness, family pressures, moody closeups – dear god, where am I going with all this? I’d better stop now.
// glamourous, iconic stars, cramped interiors with CRAZY set design with TONS OF MIRRORS, deep, Sternbergian shadows, inarticulate emotion – it’s just SPN has also monsters, mud, guns and hot cars. //
I really like this connection – it hadn’t occurred to me, but you are right. Wong Kar Wai’s screens often ache with beauty – I did a whole post about how In the Mood for Love seems to be from the point of view of the radio. The entire thing is shot from that perspective. I’ll see if I can dig it up. And so what we see is off-kilter, and yet also a SWOON of the romance that is coming out of that radio, the classic love songs of the period.
Some of those closeups of Dean (in particular) in Season 2 are almost claustrophobic – total objectification – you want the camera to move back to give him some privacy. But it’s awesome. The beauty is so much a PART of what they are doing. Season 1, too – but Season 2 takes it over the top.
It’s like a big ol’ closeup of Joan Crawford. The entire POINT is to revel in the angles of her face and how her eyelash-shadows go down to her chin, and there’s a show-off aspect to the style: “Let us just revel in what we can do with light and cameras. LOOK AT WHAT WE CAN DO. And by the way, is she a knockout or what?” And of course the power of a closeup like that is that it demands we project stuff onto it. The audience puts onto the screen our dreams, whatever … and there’s nothing like a closeup to help that process along. A closeup IS cinema – THE thing that differentiates cinema from stage. It’s psychological/emotional in nature. I love how SPN gets that. Those closeups are crazy!
Here’s the In the Mood for Love piece. http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=10015
I’m going to keep the WKW connection in mind as we move forward – he really is “classic Hollywood” style, with his own twist. It’s a very unembarrassed style – it’s not trying to hide its love of beauty. Beauty is not just surface – it’s a mood, a vibe, how objects look when they are placed in a romantic story.
Kim Manners, who helped really set the look for SPN, is not embarrassed about “loving on” these guys’ faces. He goes in as close as he possibly can.
I’ve already read your piece a couple of times, Sheila and loved your take. The music for ITMFL is so important – also great eating scenes, so worth a rewatch ;-)
WKW is about style, very much so, but in ITMFL a particular style is used carefully to evoke a lost period of time (places that no longer exist, people no longer there), to create a specific mood and, something i thing gets a bit lost when consider the use of style, in particular to articulate emotion the characters cannot express out loud. What’s the line about Sergio Leone’s films? “Operas in which arias are not sung but stared.” In ITMFL it’s the wallpaper and lampshades which sing arias, as well as the close ups of silent faces. The ‘decor’ really tells a big chunk of the story.
Obviously many, many other directors do this and it will be great to explore all of this, Joan Crawford included. WKW just happened to be a bit of an obsession for a while (and, to be honest, so was Tony Leung.
oh, god, editing – that should read ‘something that gets a bit lost’
Oh, Tony Leung. Pitter-pat.
Yes, when style is just used to be pretty – I mean, that’s fine, and you can get some amazing images. But when style can somehow signal/put across emotion … like the old films in the 40s, of course, but there are others … there’s nothing quite like it!
It’s this beautiful marriage of content and form. SO hard to do – otherwise it would be done more often!
It’s not enough to just have pretty images. What do they mean, what do they signify – what world are they entering us into? Those shots from In the Mood for Love are so beautiful … but taken as a whole, they enter you into this experiential world of love and yearning and The Past … it’s really kind of a miracle.
I couldn’t believe what a rich experience it was, seeing that film for the first time. I ached!!
//I couldn’t believe what a rich experience it was, seeing that film for the first time. I ached!!//
Sobbing. I forked out for the Criterion edition so I could see all that lovely agony in detail.
And the use of mirrors and reflections is just fabulous. You can see the characters sneaking glimpses at each other via the mirror or catch them looking at each other in a way only the mirror sees.
//but taken as a whole, they enter you into this experiential world of love and yearning and The Past … it’s really kind of a miracle. //
I think what I’ve been struggling to say about WKW’s use of style is that it’s a form of channeling – a deliberate channeling the romantic films of the 40s, 50s and 60s and the feelings of love or loss that they dealt with. So that Cheung and Leung aren’t expressing the feelings of their individual characters, they are deliberately freighted with all these other associations, both specifically Chinese or ‘Hollywood’, that would enrich and add meaning to the story for viewers. Like your reference to the Joan Crawford close-up: by using extreme closeup we’re invited to view the SPN characters not just as ‘individuals going through stuff’ but also tap into this deeper and extremely rich stream of emotional association with other by now archetypal movie characters and situations.
Hmm, I think you’ve already said this several times more articulately than this, but my widow’s mite anyway ;-)
No, I think you said it better.
I love what you said about the images carrying a “freight” of associations.
That’s my thing with those old movie stars – Wayne and Bogart and Davis and Crawford – and why they have a much longer shelf-life than some more modern actors.
Their work is never less than totally specific – yet they are also tapping into ARCHETYPES that are timeless.
That’s really not “in” right now. We like our movie stars to show up as “real” people, complete with lisps, accents, and prosthetic teeth. It’s just a trend in acting style – and some very good work is being done in that realm.
But it doesn’t touch the grand scale of what was going on with those old-timers.
A handful of actors now are in the “old school” type of acting. These are my candidates: Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Leonardo Dicaprio. Meryl Streep, too, is “old school” – in that she understands the medium requires a full body – it’s NOT just about closeups. Watch Bette Davis walk across the room. She IS the picture in those moments. She is the hook on which everything else hangs. Streep moves like that.
Harrison Ford, too. He’s old-school.
It is not a surprise that these people are also our most bankable movie stars. Just sayin’.
Those old movie stars found endless variety in their personae. John Wayne is not the same character in Red River that he is in Stagecoach or The Searchers. The archetype may be the same but the diversity he found in it!
Actors want to be “diverse” now – it is what is demanded of them and it is the kind of work that gets them Oscar nods. But I think a lot of it is quite facile, quite shallow. Doesn’t hold a candle to watching Bette Davis walk across a room in The Letter or All About Eve.
Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung too are old-school. Old-school movie stars. They know that people are projecting onto them all kinds of things – cultural, societal, our memories of them in other roles … and they wear it well, they aren’t trying to “disappear” into their roles – why do that? Why not show up powerfully as themselves in the context of any given story and let the audience do half the work for them? It’s very INCLUSIVE, that kind of work. It’s not self-congratulatory.
And to bring it all back:
Dean Winchester is an archetype. And Jensen Ackles knows that. He is working the way Bogart worked, or Grant, or Wayne. Because he himself, the real guy, is NOT that guy. The voice, the posture, the entire energy – it’s like his molecular structure has shifted when we see him in the role.
Working in archetypes is very very powerful – and very few people have the power within them to do it. (And there’s nothing worse than someone TRYING to play an archetype. You kind of just have to know how to do it, and know that you are tapping into something that is far far greater than yourself.)
//Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung too are old-school.//
And they are both great at playing comedy, too.
Oh, they can do ANYthing.
Have you seen Actress? It’s also called Center Stage? It’s a biopic of the first female silent film star in China, and it stars Cheung. It’s unbelievable – hard to find, though.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102816/reference
Tony Leung’s first entrance in “Red Cliff” still gives me goosebumps every time I see it. It’s so quiet, so still and thoughtful. Surrounded by a martial environment, soldiers and drums and scenery, and he sits there, holding a feather.
He’s so damn handsome.
//Have you seen Actress? It’s also called Center Stage?//
I have a copy – not watched it all yet, tho, just bits. This weekend!
Still loving all the recaps and comment discussions! Don’t stop, not a single one of you!
I love how ubiquitous the show is becoming — everything’s coming up Ackles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/arts/television/secrets-to-the-long-life-of-supernatural.html?_r=1
Can’t. Resist….”everything’s coming up Ackles“
//“It’s about manhood and these guys who vacillate between testosterone-infused knife fights and gun battles and then crying on one another’s shoulders, having their intimate brotherhood-of-men moments. And I think that’s something you don’t see that much of on television.”//
Damn, right, Misha, damn right.
(Again, haven’t read all comments since I’m only just now starting to watch and they often discuss later seasons).
I liked that they didn’t take a cheap way out and have “bender” also refer to Sam’s psychokinesis. I was waiting all episode for him to use that to get out of the cage, and it didn’t happen. So far the only time it has happened was when he knew Dean was in danger–a good choice that shows that maybe, Sam is also seeing himself as Dean’s protector.
But.
Why, why, why, set this in Minnesota if you are going to give the Benders (esp. dad) a stereotyped southern accent? This bothers me here even more than it did in Faith. There it was given to a character to show his allegiance to revivalist Christianity, which does have deep historical roots in the US South. It was a bit sloppy, but harmless.
Here it was used as a shorthand for “these are crazy-rural-evil-abnormal-scary people” because ….? I can’t think of a single justification. If you want to reference Deliverance even more strongly, then just set the damn episode in the South.
Rural families in MN sound NOTHING like this. I know nothing about acting (except what I’m learning from this blog!), and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it’s a hard one. My inlaws are from rural Minnesota, and their accent is a very soft, gentle one. Trying to imitate it is tough; you go too hard and you’ve ended up in Fargo (which is a much stronger version; the vowel rounding is more pronounced in ND). So maybe that was a factor in the decision, but I doubt it. I think it was a deliberate characterization choice, and it’s offensive.
This isn’t just a harumph about dialectical accuracy, either. Using a speech pattern that is a genuine part of life for many people as a way to shorthand negative character elements goes beyond just directorial / acting laziness. There are real-life consequences for people when this manner of speech is used to signify “evil-stupid-lazy-etc.” It’s the dialect equivalent of blackface for African Americans, and I don’t think I’m overstating. I teach in Appalachia, and I see my students struggle with these consequences whenever we go to conferences or events outside our region. They open their mouths and people assume they are ignorant, lazy, etc.
Hoping Supernatural doesn’t keep repeating this issue as I go through the seasons. Will this get better?
That is a very valid point about the southern accent. I can’t answer your question because I must admit it didn’t jump out at me.
(I am mentioning a later episode in this next paragraph, but nothing I’m saying gives any part of the plot away.) I did, however, notice when they set Swap Meet in Housatonic, Massachusetts. That is a village in Western Massachusetts in Berkshire County. The sheriff’s car in the episode even said Berkshire County. But then there was one short scene with a background of a quaint Fisherman’s Wharf with the masts of small sailing vessels . The Berkshires are actually hills, small mountains, that are an offshoot of the Appalachians. The Wharf that they depicted looks more like something that would be on the Eastern side of the state along the Atlantic Ocean. This inaccuracy bothered me. I’ve lived in Berkshire County. Sometimes I think people connected with the entire Hollywood industry are a little bit out of touch with the entire rest of the nation. I know Supernatural is filmed in Vancouver, but that also is far away from other areas of the country. I loved the road trip aspect of Supernatural, but sometimes I don’t think they’re too accurate.
Yes! I had the same eyeroll about “Cape Girardeau, Missouri” in the episode with Cassie (Rt 666?). The dock scenes were comically out of place. Cape G is on the Mississippi, which is about 10-15 feet deep. There certainly isn’t that kind of fishing going on there, and shrimp don’t actually get harvested out of the Big Muddy!
I guess if you’re looking for accurate regional accents in Supernatural – all I can say is, you won’t find them!
I am from the South and I hear the Benders’ accent as generic backwoods not southern. I suspect it is purposeful to place these very unflattering portrayals of people (not ‘monsters’) in less likely settings to avoid insulting viewers with stereotypes such as your students encounter. I appreciate that the Racist Truck episode was not set in Alabama or Mississippi for the same reason. It reminds us that ignorance and racism are everywhere not just the deep south. I have begun to be very amused by bad southern accents. And since learning how many TV shows are filmed in Canada I get a laugh from ‘spot the Canadian extra”.
As for the lack of even 5th grade geographical accuracy it’s either lazy, cheap, stupid, or condescending – likely a combination. The early years were somewhat better when they were still going for that ‘Route 66’ vibe. A great deal of suspended belief is required when watching Supernatural in any case.
Rebecca is right! Don’t eat anything caught in the lower Mississippi River.
Well nobody did a Rhode Island accent – which is a doozy – in the episode taking place in Rhode Island. These things don’t bug me. (I did like the seafood-waterfront-ish joint Sam and Dean went to – which felt very Rhode Island-ish.)
What does bug me is we’ve lost much of the “road trip” aspect of it in general – now that (spoiler alert) the bunker exists. (Burn. It. Down.) I like the attempts to use Vancouver and environs for its diversity – which they haven’t done as much recently. I’m thinking of their use of that town in Wishful Thinking – how beautifully and cohesively they used that location – it may have all been in different places, the waterfront, the main street, etc. – but it FELT like one location, like a real town. We really REALLY don’t get much of that anymore.
Their location scouts are amazing, in general.
But regional accents? I just don’t care.
Fine if you all do, but it’s not something that pulls me out of the show.
All these delicious gray areas … NOM NOM NOM. Another great episode and review!