![\"c44\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/c44.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\nDirected by Phil Sgriccia
\nWritten by John Shiban<\/i><\/p>\n
Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows, You do not know the burdens that other people carry. Longfellow wrote those words in 1839. In every era, there are expectations of what a certain thing should look like, be it joy or love or pain. Cultural norms shift and morph over the years and currently we are in a time when the “self-help culture” dictates what things should look like. So things like repression and denial and sublimation are seen as bad, or at the very least unhealthy. This is treated as fact. It is not fact. It is an opinion, a theory, a fad (albeit a long and deeply entrenched fad). And there is a lot of evidence suggesting the opposite, actually: that something like repression is a valid and useful survival technique, honed over thousands of years of brutal human experience, and not necessarily unhealthy at all. Try telling that to someone who has swallowed the self-help culture wholesale. It is as though you are speaking heresy. <\/p>\n I like one of my acting teacher’s definitions of “sublimate”: “You take your pain, and you make it sublime.” I have been doing that since I was a kid. Therapy didn’t save my life when I was a suicidal 12-year-old. Ralph Macchio did.<\/a> Sublimation is a way of life for me. I know that a lot of it comes from loneliness (as a permanent condition, not a phase), but hell, it’s a good deal for me, because I could be sublimating through drugs or self-destructive behavior but I get so much pleasure out of culture and movies and books. It’s a win-win.<\/p>\n This is the landscape of the opening episodes of Supernatural<\/i>‘s Season 2. John Winchester is dead. Sam and Dean are both grieving in their own ways, and neither of them can talk about it, at least not in a way that opens up space. Loss is not a monolith. Not everyone is going to be impacted in identical ways. The issue I have with the self-help culture is that it prioritizes what something looks like on the outside<\/i>. And that’s why Longfellow’s words are so important to keep in mind. Sometimes a loss results in someone recoiling, hunching over their own metaphorical wound, protectively. This is not being in denial. This is an appropriate reaction to being wounded. <\/p>\n \n<\/p>\n \n“Everybody Loves a Clown” is about grief. It introduces us to three new characters, Ellen (Samantha Ferris), Jo (Alona Tal), and Ash (Chad Lindberg), all of whom will be very important. It brings us a new setting, the Harvelle Roadhouse, the main patrons being hunters, and the roadhouse is a revelation, and so is the new knowledge that hunters would gather. (Tee hee). It also presents us with a random case, worked by Sam and Dean basically to kill time. The case plunges them into the world of carnival workers, which is an equally strange and vibrant sub-culture as the hunter sub-culture. Carnivals are populated by people who don’t fit into the mainstream, a culture that is fiercely protective of its own. <\/p>\n The case is a trifle, really, and Sam and Dean work it half-heartedly, and it’s wrapped up pretty suddenly. The first time I watched it I didn’t even realize that the monster had been vanquished. My thought was, “Wait \u2026 was that it?” But the real point is to examine the brothers dealing with grief, and the standoff that heats up between them is going to intensify over the next couple of episodes.<\/p>\n Digression on Grief<\/big> The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted. The act of grieving, Freud told us in his 1917 \u201cMourning and Melancholia,\u201d \u201cinvolves grave departures from the normal attitude to life.\u201d Yet, he pointed out, grief remains peculiar among derangements: \u201cIt never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment.\u201d We rely instead on \u201cits being overcome after a certain lapse of time.\u201d We view \u201cany interference with it as useless and even harmful.\u201d Melanie Klein, in her 1940 \u201cMourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,\u201d made a similar assessment: \u201cThe mourner is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness \u2026 To put my conclusion more precisely: I should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it.\u201d<\/p>\n Notice the stress on \u201covercoming\u201d it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I wrote a lot about Didion’s book here.<\/a> It helped me when I was faced with grief. One of the things people don’t tell you (although they actually do tell you, you just need to listen for it) is how disorienting<\/i> grief can be. I was taken by surprise when easy things became difficult. I was totally confused as to why I could no longer read, why my brain wasn’t retaining language. I remember the day I went back to work after taking off for the death and funeral of my father, and there was a big editorial meeting, and I was supposed to take notes for the new editor of the site. She asked me to read something back, and I fumbled, looking for it. She reprimanded me in front of everyone. “Please write down exactly what I said next time.” She knew that my father had just died 5 days before. There is a word for women like her. In that moment, I was flustered and confused, and I had no presence of mind to pull her aside afterwards and say, “My father just died. Don’t you ever use that tone of voice with me again.” She would have deserved it. She would have deserved much much worse. Maybe I shouldn’t have been back at work, but this is the world we live in: If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. I need money to live. I can’t take a leave of absence unpaid. Not a possibility. I am a firm believer that the Black Arm-Band tradition should be re-introduced. Because it makes visible what is not visible. It says, to paraphrase Longfellow, “I am out and about, yes, life has not stopped, but I am handling a secret sorrow. Factor that in to your assessment of me.” In the olden days, people would wear black arm-bands, or even full mourning, for a year. It was understood that it took that long to even get your bearings again and that grief needed to be accounted for in our dealings with people suffering from it. Grief does normalize after a while, you do start to be able to process things. But it takes that long. Our culture’s bounce-right-back expectation after someone you love dies is inhuman.<\/i> “Everybody Loves a Clown” is one of those beautiful episodes where the brothers are equal in strength, flaws, expression, and objective. They misunderstand, they argue, they resist, they sublimate. The death of their father is complicated by HOW he died, something that neither of them mention in this episode, not yet. It’s an unspoken anxiety, working ON the characters, and it’s an example of how well Supernatural<\/i> tracks these small-arcs. Grief is a whirlwind<\/i>. And it takes some time for the dust to settle. The pleasure here comes from re-watching. When you know where the characters are going with their inquiries (did Dad make a deal? am I alive because Dad sold his soul? I gave Dad a hard time the entire time he was alive, I feel guilty, I need to make it up to him, and be the most dedicated hunter ever, etc.), you can see it all playing out in their behavior, even before they have words for it. <\/p>\n Grieving their dad’s death is also complicated by their already complicated relationship with the guy. Feeling, perhaps, relieved that he is dead would result in huge guilt, as we see go down. Also, having John Winchester dead means that the resentment towards him about what he put them through \u2026 it has nowhere to go now. Nowhere to go but inward. What do you do with all those feelings? And is it somehow a betrayal of his memory to even go there, even if it’s just in your own mind? In the world of Supernatural<\/i>, privacy is seen as suspect. And people’s boundaries are compromised repeatedly. Hell, their bodily integrity is compromised. Your thoughts, dreams, fantasies \u2026 NOTHING is private. <\/p>\n Having two women enter their world in a semi-regular basis, as Jo and Ellen do, two Tough Chicks to the max<\/a>, is both comforting and destabilizing. Actually, comfort itself is destabilizing. Grief doesn’t allow for it. There is no room for it. <\/p>\n Sam wants Dean to grieve in a different way. A way that is more recognizable to him as Grief(\u2122). He doesn’t understand what is going on with Dean, and he turns it into “I’m concerned for you,” when really it’s not about that at all. That’s one of the most elegant things about Shiban’s script: it really understands all of these issues I’ve been babbling about. Shiban’s script understands that Sam is ALSO “sublimating,” sublimating his own feelings about his Dad’s death into concern-trolling Dean, and re-casting his father as someone to emulate in order to assuage his guilt. <\/p>\n The word “freak” has already come up a bunch in Season 1. It’s clearly used deliberately. Sam Winchester feels like a “freak,” and even running away to Stanford didn’t change that. Dean Winchester KNOWS he’s a “freak,” and has seemingly accepted it. Suburbia makes him want to blow his brains out. The carnival world has a similar structure, and, of course, a long history, not only in America but world-wide. A place where “freaks” were welcome, could get work, find a makeshift family. (By the way, if you have not seen the Joan Crawford film Berserk!<\/i> that takes place in a carnival, what are you waiting for?<\/a>) There are some great books about the history of the “freak show,” and Diane Arbus’ photographs<\/a> are, of course, all about that. People argue about Arbus’ photographs to this day. Is she compassionate towards these people? Is she making fun of these people? Is she neutral? What is her stance on them? That pesky Diane Arbus, not giving us a clear thesis statement so we all can know what to think. Dammit, we have to make up our own minds?? <\/p>\n Regardless. The carnival is an interesting corollary with the Winchester brothers, who look “normal,” but who obviously are not, who walk around bringing death and destruction behind them. They don’t vote. They carry fake IDs. They will never have retirement. They will not grow old. You know. That’s some bleak shit. <\/p>\n In “Everybody Loves a Clown” there’s also a twisted eternal father figure in the carnival, a guy who never dies, basically. It’s treated almost off-handedly by the brothers (“Hey, doesn’t the photo of his father look an awful lot like him?” “Hell, yes, brother, it does! Let’s go kill it!”), and nobody puts it together thematically (thank goodness) but the connections are there. <\/p>\n The monster in question targets children, befriending them to gain entryway into the home, and then kills the parents. The child is untouched. Orphaned, but untouched. Sam and Dean have been orphaned now. These are connections working ON the characters in invisible ways. I love it when the scripts have enough confidence to do that, to not underline connections for us, to let it stay murky and unspoken. When Supernatural<\/i> is bad, the bad-ness most often comes from it being too obvious<\/i>. <\/p>\n Phil Sgriccia directed this episode. He started out as an editor. You can see it in his directing. He knows how to piece images together, he thinks of that ahead of time, how to make those collages that work so well. Of course all directors understand editing, but it’s different than having first-hand experience. Take a look at the carnival collage that opens the episode, for example. You’ve got rides. You’ve got fire-eaters. Plate-spinners. You have clowns ogling the camera. Isolated shots of a bored dad checking his watch. A contortionist. Etc. These are editing choices, when put together make a cohesive whole, and gives you a whole world.<\/p>\n Let’s get down to some details.<\/p>\n First off, the declaration in the title is a lie. <\/p>\n Also, please watch:<\/p>\n \n
\nwhich the world knows not; and oftimes
\nwe call a man cold, when he is only sad.<\/em>
\n— Hyperion<\/i>, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow<\/p>\n
\nJoan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking<\/i>, about the year following her husband’s sudden death, has already become a classic of grief literature. In it, she writes:<\/p>\n
\nDigression Over. I Will Re-visit This As We Move Forward.<\/big><\/p>\n