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<\/a><\/p>\n\nDirected by Charles Beeson
\nWritten by Matt Witten<\/i><\/p>\n
“Playthings” was the first episode directed by Charles Beeson, and the guy had a field day<\/i> with it. What a fun episode. A director’s dream.<\/p>\n
The “homage” episodes are pleasing on a whole different level of goofiness and association. Even if you don’t get all the references, hopefully the material is handled in such a compelling way that it will at least pique your interest. There are clear visual references in the final episode of Season 2 to “High Noon”, for example – the whole thing is basically a take-off on the desperate last stand in Western films, mixed with \u2026 The Breakfast Club<\/i>. But then there are the entire episodes devoted to homage: The “monster movie” episode. The X-files episode. The Looney Tunes episode. Changing Channels. The Western episode. The homage to Groundhog Day<\/i>. The recent Clue<\/i> episode (which I really enjoyed. I like Supernatural<\/i> best when it is goofy.) The “mannequin” episode with its moody cheesy melodramatic music-video-Dean-driving-and-thinking scene, straight out of a 1980s movie. Say, like …<\/p>\n
\n \nThat whole episode hailed from 1987, no later. The high-school-musical episode. Even the “Christmas special” episode, with its flashbacks and art-direction and shmoopy final shot. All of these represent, for me, high points of Supernatural<\/i>. It’s a chance for everyone on the team to show off, for sure, but it also adds so much<\/i> to the overall texture. It’s also just super-fun. (It works so well in “Playthings” that “Playthings” is one of my favorite episodes in the entire series, for reasons both clear and \u2026 somewhat mysterious. In other words, I don’t know what is going on, I don’t care, but I know I love it, and re-visit it constantly, finding the same pleasure in it. Criticism is fun, it’s fun to unpack meaning – but at a certain point, it is the overall effect that IS the most pleasurable part of it, and to pick it apart is to lessen the impact. I resist. It’s like trying to break down what is so enjoyable about a perfect piece of cheesecake. Just eat the damn thing and be thankful it exists.) <\/p>\n \n<\/p>\n What seems to happen in these episodes where they recreate a specific set of references, either dear to Kripke or Jerry Wanek or the writer or Bob Singer or a mixture of all of them – is that everyone is set free in really<\/i> unpredictable ways. The episodes I listed above are dazzling<\/i>, not just visually\/production-design, but because of what the limitations of the homage DO to the characters\/plot. Limitations are good, limitations can set you free (way more than an attitude “do whatevs you feel like doing” can). Limitations forces you to focus, to zoom in, to choose carefully. <\/p>\n Thirtysomething<\/i> once did an entire episode in Hitchcock-style (it was a Halloween episode, if I recall correctly), and they often messed with the conventional structure of the show so much that it HAD no conventional structure, part of the fun of Thirtysomething<\/i>. They had fantasy sequences, dream sequences, they did a Rashomon<\/i>-inspired episode – with the same event seen through the viewpoint of three separate witnesses. The episode “Melissa and Men” is about Melissa’s desperate loneliness happening at the exact same moment as a career triumph: it is one of my favorite episodes of thirty something<\/i>, and in one fantasy sequence, Melissa is shown giving a slide show to an audience showcasing all of her failed relationships. Melissa wears a tuxedo, her schtick is Borscht-belt wisecracks. The audience – made up of her friends and family – are dressed in mourning: nobody laughs, they look up at her with compassion and pity. It’s a terrifying scene, straight out of All That Jazz<\/i>, and it tells the story of loneliness and disappointment FAR better than a more straightforward approach would. <\/p>\n Supernatural<\/i> is lucky in that it is not hidebound to convention. After all, it is a show about fighting monsters. So while there is “realism”, there are always those little quotation marks about the word. The structure of the show was solid enough that very early on they felt they could afford to mess with what they had set up. I am not sure that Supernatural<\/i> would have lasted as long as it has without that sense of freedom to mess with the structure. Each episode is new: you just don’t know what you’re going to get, week after week. <\/p>\n So while everyone gets to pull out all the stops creatively in these homage episodes, and film in black-and-white, for example, and research old Warner Brothers monster movies, or completely change the style of filming to mimic old Westerns, or whatever the challenge any given episode brings \u2026 what happens alongside all of that (and it’s a somewhat mysterious process) is that the show itself, its underlying emotional architecture, is allowed to operate on multiple intersecting levels, obvious and invisible, almost dream-like in their power and influence. The homages remove Sam and Dean from the world of the show and place them in a familiar-to-us context (Looney Tunes, Frankenstein<\/em>, whatever), and – almost like an improv game – we get to see how characters we have come to know interact with an environment that WE know so well. They enter OUR world. I don’t know: it’s still mysterious to me, how it all works and why it works so well. It’s a sort of Charlie Kaufman meta-ish commentary on itself and on our culture as a whole, accepting that Sam and Dean are ostensibly part of that culture, and we assume that they are “real” people \u2026 and yet here they are, running around in a Dracula<\/i> movie all of a sudden. It’s a cultural swamp, and Supernatural<\/i> wants to swim in it. <\/p>\n These homage episodes become creative Mission Statements, then: Here is what WE are interested in. Come along for the ride.<\/i> I know I’m not the only one who glories in the multitude of cinematic references in Supernatural<\/i>. It certainly was one of the major hooks for me. <\/p>\n And so in “Playthings,” from the first shot practically, they announce their intentions. If you’ve seen The Shining<\/i> you get it instantly. If you haven’t, then there’s plenty else for you to look at, but once you GET those references, the pleasure only deepens. You understand what they’re doing<\/i>, you understand the fun<\/i> they’re having, the sheer breadth of creativity on display in keeping as close as possible to the original source material (Kubrick’s movie, not King’s novel: there are important differences, and “Playthings” sticks closely to the Kubrick. The only thing missing is the snow.) The most important connection being, of course, the hotel-replica a replica of the maze in the movie. <\/p>\n \n \nStylistically, “Playthings” doesn’t announce itself in a splashy way, like the monster movie episode does, or the X-Files episode, etc., with different opening credits or different music. They hadn’t quite gotten there yet in terms of confidence in what they were doing, maybe they were testing the waters, seeing how far they could go, and perhaps they wanted the references to be submerged and subconscious, working ON the plot from behind-the-scenes rather than anything more visible or obvious (kind of like how “Hibbing 911” was an ode to Bob Dylan). <\/p>\n Dean walking around the hotel with the old guy, looking at pictures, and having a drink in the bar is a perfect example: the scene is exposition, explaining the back-story of the hotel, but what it really was was an homage to Jack Nicholson’s nocturnal surreal wanderings through the Overlook Hotel, his conversations with the old bartender Lloyd in the “Gold Room”, with the light shining up from beneath the bar surface \u2026 just as the light shines up through the bar surface in the hotel in “Playthings.” That scene with Dean in the bar, and then walking around with the old guy, are beautiful scenes, beautifully shot, and they work by themselves as Objects of Beauty, they work alone as images, separated from what they might have to do with The Shining<\/i>. You can appreciate the Beauty without knowing the inspiration for it. But it’s better \u2026 so much better \u2026 when you know The Shining<\/i> because then all of those references can unlock associations, flights of fancy, trains of thought like “maybe it’s about this \u2026 or maybe what about THAT connection”, thoughts that don’t necessarily lead anywhere, or don’t “add up” to anything, but an episode like “Playthings” isn’t supposed to “add up.” It’s a part of the journey. It’s really a mood-piece, more than anything else. (I have a beef with the whole needing-things-to-add-up way of watching things that seems to be quite prevalent currently, in our age when Inference and Irony has gone so out of style that people link to Onion articles spluttering with outrage, never once thinking to check the source. And then when they are busted on it, they continue with the outrage: “Well, it might as WELL be true.” Or, worse, being pissed they were tricked, and saying something like, “Why isn’t the site labeled as a joke? GOD.” Uhm, yeah, that’s satire. Ugh. It’s a very literal way of approaching any given piece of material, and there are film-makers who operate in that environment almost solely, like Christopher Nolan, who has almost ZERO subtext in his movies. No, not “almost”. NO SUBTEXT. It’s why I find some of his films insufferable.) But Supernatural<\/i> is all about mood and irony and inference, and so the references in “Playthings” are not A to B, they don’t line up neatly. And there is no satisfaction when you put certain pieces together. You’re still left where you started, with a vague uneasy feeling that things are about to get ugly, that maybe these guys are about to crash and burn, and it’s all filmed so beautifully you don’t even know your own name anymore. That’s “Playthings.” <\/p>\n So the style is both both literal and poetic, real and a dream. Stanley Kubrick in a nutshell (if you could put him in a nutshell). The larger framework of The Shining<\/i> cracks open the episode in really fun ways, so that what we get in Sam and Dean is the urgency of their bond, their closeness – maybe too close, closer than siblings should be, the way the power flip-flops (Dean on top, then Sam, then Dean, then Sam), and the demands they make on one another. If you only watched “Playthings,” without knowing anything else about the series, you might think that those two guys onscreen were not related, and were straight men slipping away for some hot homosexual action, feeling shameful about it, like the guys in Brokeback Mountain<\/i>. And protesting too much in the “we’re just brothers” moment because they felt ashamed. And then one of them getting wasted as a way to deal with the shame. I’m just saying: Remove the larger context, and that is the way they are filmed in “Playthings.” I’m not a Wincest person at all, but those tropes are easily perceivable. One of my problems with the “bro-mance” thing, or with “everyone is gay unless proven otherwise” way of looking at things (not in fanfic – of course people should do whatever they want in their own fantasy lives) is that such a viewpoint has a difficult time incorporating and understanding intimacy between men that is not of a sexual nature. (Or, it also has a hard time admitting that sexual attraction IS part of platonic friendship. You don’t have to fuck someone to be like, “I would like to fuck that person.” And that goes on regardless of your sexual orientation.) It’s true that homoerotic subtext has been around since the beginning of cinema, hell, art itself, but in cinema it’s unavoidable because the milieu is so visual, and so sexually-charged because of bodies in movement through space. The Celluloid Closet<\/i> (a wonderful documentary) has to do with unpacking a lot of those symbols, ignored for decades because \u2026 well, you know, the “closet” of the title. These sexual undercurrents exist in all interactions (an acting teacher of mine used to say to us, when we were stuck in a scene, “Every single scene is either Fight or Fuck. Pick one.” It was a great way to try to break through any impasse. You either want to fight the person opposite you, or you want to fuck them. Try one of those objectives, see if they work.) May be too simplistic, but useful nonetheless. I tend to see acting in that way myself, and basically just accept that almost every interaction has a sexual component to it, expressed or otherwise. Sexual fluidity (more so than our strict modern understanding of “orientation”) is one of the wellsprings of art, in general. (I was just babbling about that the other day in this post about Christopher Marlowe<\/a> and Seamus Heaney’s observation that Marlowe’s sexy-as-hell language and imagery – explicit, not subtextual – and way more fluid and destabilizing than anything that one would call heteronormative – and how that energy opens up space for those that follow. That’s true of most works of art that have any staying power.) <\/p>\n Have any of you seen The Big Year<\/i>? I keep meaning to write it up. It basically came and went, and nobody really talked about it, but it’s fantastic, and a really beautiful film about a bunch of competitive bird-watchers, but what it’s really about is friendship between men. And how that works, and the difficulties men face with it, especially when in the context of competition. It’s a beautiful counter-point to the Judd Apatow vision of male-bonding which wore out its welcome almost immediately upon arrival. Friendship between men, openness and honesty between men \u2026 what does that look like? How do men themselves deal with it, especially if they were raised by someone like John Winchester? Buddy-movies, at their best, help male characters be close to one another, be intimate, be open, and the best DO deal with the fluidity of sexuality that is part of the human condition. Supernatural<\/i> is really really strong in this arena. <\/p>\n To connect it again to The Shining<\/i>, which I think everyone on board wants us to do:<\/p>\n \n \nIn the movie, Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall are married. Theirs is a claustrophobic marriage. Open truthfulness is somehow not possible with those two. She hovers and simpers and whines, and he smolders and eventually goes batshit insane. Nicholson plays a frustrated writer with major writer’s block. Duvall wanders around in long plaid dresses, whining. I don’t think that’s a mischaracterization. (She’s great in the film. It’s a really disturbing and courageous performance.) Nicholson treats Duvall with patience bordering on contempt, at first, until finally he loses his patience until all he has left is contempt and then murderous rage. She seems like a pretty silly person to him (and kudos to Shelley Duvall for being brave enough to actually play her like a rather silly person, hovering around him, annoying him, interrupting him. If the movie works as it’s supposed to, you SHOULD be as annoyed at her as Nicholson is. I mean, the woman does not deserve to get chopped up with an axe \u2026 but you can see how he is driven to it. It’s a sick relationship.) The couple are too close to be able to extricate themselves from their particular dance-step: her as hovering nagging wife, him feeling all the pressure to not only be the provider but get his inspiration back. There’s a sexual component to all of it, a buried sexual resentment, a feeling from him that he has been emasculated by his failure, by fatherhood, by her \u2026 I mean, there’s a reason people are so obsessed with The Shining<\/i> that an entire documentary has been made highlighting different crackpot theories<\/a> (the most crackpot one being that The Shining<\/i> is Stanley Kubrick’s confession that he helped fake the moon-landing footage in 1969.) <\/p>\n Sam and Dean are not quite at that point, but in the episodes leading up to “Playthings” we start to see how their partnership is too close for either of them to maneuver freely, that maybe the claustrophobia is starting to wear them down. Going back to The Shining<\/i>, when Jack Nicholson’s character gets a winter-season job as a caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, cut off from the world by snowdrifts, you think: Maybe his wife should have stayed in town. Maybe this was a terrible idea. Maybe marriage and monogamy is too claustrophobic, maybe men and women cannot at ALL get along in such close quarters, and we need outlets other than one another. But marriage is seen as so absolute, one person must meet all of our needs \u2026 no wonder most people get divorced. It’s a ridiculously high bar to set. And Sam and Dean are, as Bobby observes soon, like an “old married couple.” Dean snarks back, “Married people can get divorced.” The fact that two brothers are treated as a married couple by everyone they meet – strangers and the people in their lives (and it’s still going on, remembering Sheriff Mills’ comment to Sam that “you two have found each other, most people would love to have what you two have \u2026” or whatever, and Sam’s non-verbal response to the comment, great) – anyway, the fact that they are constantly mistaken for a gay couple, and that everyone treats them as though their bond should never be questioned \u2026 I mean, this is the linchpin of the whole show. It feels like their bond should never be questioned, and yet it is constantly questioned. I love that. It provides huge tension. <\/p>\n Even now, mid-way through Season 2, early in the series as a whole, their relationship has started to grate. Dean still feels in charge. His father put him in charge of Sammy. Sam has resisted that, and yet he also relies<\/i> on it, as we will see – viscerally – in the scene in “Playthings” when he gets wasted. <\/p>\n Connecting Sam and Dean to Nicholson and Duvall is meant to make us question the right-ness of their relationship, is meant to make us wonder if maybe they shouldn’t take a break from each other. Dean’s feelings have gone that way, although he assumes that they should stick together WHILE they take a break. Sam breaks the rules by running off by himself. It is their pattern. <\/p>\n All of this is intensified in unconscious ways by the fact that for the duration of the case in “Playthings,” they stay in a family-owned hotel with deep roots. The hotel has been passed down through generations. Family pictures line the walls. Family heirlooms. Sam and Dean have not emerged from a family like that. Their parents are both dead. They know nothing about their mother’s side of the family, or their father’s for that matter. They grew up in complete lock-down isolation. They have a couple of creased family photographs in their wallets, and there are Legos stuck in the grille of Dean’s Impala, but other than that, they have no roots<\/i>. Investigating a family with roots that go back a century, who have stayed on the same patch of ground for decades, brings up fascinating reactions in both of them. Dean is the one who has the line speaking that subtext, during his scene with the old geezer, but it’s running like a river throughout. Unspoken, but felt.<\/p>\n Because they present such intimidating and capable faces to the world, that attitude runs deep for them. In some ways, it IS who they are. People like that are sometimes ambushed by their own depths. They avoid confrontation with their own weak spots, their vulnerabilities. Sam gets wasted, on purpose. Maybe to deal with his pain, his fear of going dark side, but maybe, too, so that he is able go into a space of honesty, in vino veritas<\/em>. Only when really drunk could Sam have the courage to say what he says. Staying in an old weird hotel, surrounded by family heirlooms, makes them feel like orphans. As they are. <\/p>\n And, finally, the real story of “Playthings” is about two sisters, one alive, and one long dead. The dead one has remained a haunting specter, wanting to re-join her sister, at all costs, wanting to stay together. The living sister has spent a lifetime trying to ward her off and keep her out. Now the dead sister has targeted a member of a new generation, using her as a way to keep the family together. The living sister, undone by a stroke, can no longer keep at bay the machinations of her dead sister. Finally, the living sister agrees to sacrifice herself in order that the siblings will get to stay together, in the afterlife of being ghosts, I guess, and the episode ends, hauntingly, with two little girls jumping rope in a misty garret room. Together again, together forever. One does not need a PhD to see the disturbing connections to Sam and Dean. <\/p>\n But for whatever reason, those plots and themes don’t matter to me here. It’s not my area of interest. “Playthings”, instead, is a deep pool of pleasure. It’s cinematic and intelligent, it’s sexy and submerged. There are motivations at work here that I still can’t quite perceive, and every time I watch it I see something new. I treasure it. <\/p>\n Teaser<\/big> \n \nArchitecture is extremely important in “Playthings”: the location is extraordinary and used beautifully and intricately. Over the course of the episode we get to know the lay of the land: where things are, the hallways, the balconies, what’s around the corner, where the bar is in connection to the lobby, the stairways, the attic hallway. Back to The Shining<\/i>, in Room 237<\/i>, the documentary I mentioned, one woman talks about her obsession with the hotel, and how that obsession drove her to create floor plans for it, to try to understand the layout. In so doing, she discovered what she calls “the impossible window” (more here<\/a>), seen in the back-office scene where Nicholson is interviewed to get the job.<\/p>\n \n \nAccording to her floor plan (and also to what we see on screen), there should not be a window there. The window makes no sense architecturally: that should be a flat window-less wall, because behind there should be the elevator banks, if I am remembering correctly. A lot of the stuff in Room 237<\/i> is so crack-potty that I lost interest, but her obsession with architecture caught on. The space is so important in The Shining<\/i>. The hotel is so huge that it seems we can never orient ourselves, and then we get the repeated scenes of the little boy riding his Big-Wheel around the hallways. If you follow his trajectory, you understand where you are, you understand exactly where you are in connection to all of the other spaces you have gotten to know. And so it’s perfect that there is a window where there should be no window. Maybe you won’t notice it (I sure as hell didn’t), but what I did notice was that the scene made me feel uncomfortable. Everyone was talking small-talk, pleasant and amiable, but the overall effect ended up being sinister and uneasy. Now, of course, after watching Room 237<\/i>, all I can see in that scene is how strange it is that there is a window there, and that it adds to the feeling that something is not right.<\/i> <\/p>\n Supernatural<\/i> has only one standing set at this point, and that’s the roadhouse. Next up, we’ll get Bobby’s house as a regular stop-off point, but Bobby’s house isn’t really shown that much in its entirety: we only really get to know the kitchen and that main room, although there is one scene in the upper hallway at one point: but we never see bedrooms, or bathrooms, or what the upstairs is like. The bunker is a more complete set, and we have discussed in the comments section how we should make up floor plans for the thing. They are still having fun withholding the bunker’s layout from us, while also allowing us to get comfy with what we HAVE seen. This is how you work with space<\/i>. Up until the bunker, though, outside of Bobby’s house, there are no regular sets. Everything is either a location shoot or a set built in Vancouver. And God do Serge Ladouceur and Jerry Wanek know how to milk a location for every single drop of ambience and power. The angles, the choices, the backgrounds, every single prop, what we see, what is blurred out \u2026 These are all used consciously and gorgeously, whether it’s a diner setting or a doctor’s office. The sets don’t look cheap<\/i> or generic. They look real, like three-dimensional worlds already in full operation when Sam and Dean enter them. That’s what the Hotel needs to be like. It also needs to be scary, ominous, mysterious, with creepy-ass angles. We get all that. That location is milked DRY. I never get sick of all of the proliferating angles and point-of-view shots that give us altnerate views of the lobby, or the restaurant area – that looks COMPLETELY different in the daytime than during Dean’s nocturnal ramblings – but it’s the same damn space. Great!! It’s one of my favorite locations in the whole series.<\/p>\n The Hotel is the most important character and the episode does a great job of orienting us, not to mention underlining and reiterating the architecture with the replica of hotel in doll-house form. What we see in real-life we then see in miniature. Life is occurring out there in the world, but a little girl is also moving her dolls around in the same space. So who’s the puppet? Is there a puppeteer at work? Who’s in charge? Are we in charge of who we get to be, or is Destiny running the show? The Yellow-Eyed Demon re-entered the conversation in “Hunted,”<\/a> and there’s one shot of the little girl staring into the doll-house (shot from inside the doll-house, so she looks enormous) that makes me think of what life might feel like to Sam and all the other Blue Roses out there. They think they are in charge of themselves, their lives feel real to them, but they are being manipulated from the outside. <\/p>\n The doll-house could be the stand-in for Jack Nicholson’s staring at the model of the maze in The Shining<\/i>, imagining he sees his wife and son, in miniature, running around in there, lost and panicked. He is the Minotaur. <\/p>\n \n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n“Playthings” starts with an impressive shot of the hotel, looking grandiose and singular, a real announcement of Place. It’s not friendly-looking or cozy. It looks intimidating, and wrapped up in itself, wrapped up around its history and its secrets. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n