What is home? What does it mean to bring Dean home?
What does it mean to strive and to lose?
Sam=Cole, and the worst thing Dean and Crowley did is “let” them live.
This is something that I’ve wanted to talk about for a while, and I think I’m finally in a place where I can express it specifically.
I came to Supernatural in late Season 1 because it was a story about two brothers who saw family and each other through the lens of their father’s values. John defined the family and the roles that were served in it. In the first few seasons we saw two brothers discovering that they weren’t quite what they had thought, that there was more to them that they could discover about each other once they were out from under John’s authority. They were starting to reconnect. It gave me hope in the belief that we can heal each other. That we can remain true to who we are, be valued for it; that we don’t have to sacrifice large parts of ourselves in order to be accepted and loved.
Whether or not you agree that Dean’s behavior has been abusive, at some point in the last season his behavior tipped over a very scary line. While I can sympathize with his heat of the moment decision to more or less violate Sam’s DNR wishes, I have a much harder time with the gas lighting, ongoing violation of Sam’s body and memory, assumption of control over Sam’s will by not allowing him to decide, and only looking for a way to overpower Gadreel’s control when DEAN decided it that what he wanted out of the situation wasn’t enough to justify the escalating risk. That’s just far too much of a pattern of treating Sam like an object and less like a person.
And that assumption that you are something that belongs to me, that it is okay to ask you to sacrifice your autonomy to preserve this relationship is one of the primary beliefs that lay the foundation for abuse. Ironically, it’s also the belief that underlies what John asked Dean to do, to sacrifice essential parts of who he was in order to preserve the family. It’s how John defined family for Dean and why Dean defines family the way he does. It is both why Sam and Dean have survived this long and why they are as broken as they are. So many images of double-edged swords in this season. I can only hope this is the reason why we’re seeing them.
But at this point, two things have happened that discourage me. In the past couple seasons some of the lessons have been quite the opposite of what we were being shown early on.
Sam experienced the one thing that so many of us who have been physically or emotionally abused fear. That if we speak up and insist on our right to be ourselves, to not allow ourselves to be violated to meet someone else’s needs, it will destroy the family. What happened in season 9, is that essentially Sam sticks up for his autonomy, his right to hold people responsible for facilitating his physical and psychological violation, and his family is destroyed. Dean goes off the rails, spirals off into despair, shuts Sam down and out, and puts himself in a situation with no support and gets himself killed.
As well, whether the writers intended it or not, now we have season 10 where Sam’s POV, his willingness to fight for the right to not be lied to, to call Dean out when Dean needs someone to call him out, in the same way that every other female character this season has called Dean out, has essentially disappeared. In it’s place, Sam is being incredibly emotionally supportive of Dean. That’s lovely, in it’s way, but it’s coming of the cost of Sam’s autonomy, again.
It’s like we’re rehashing the message that the best way to heal someone who has done awful things to you is to just accept them and love on them. WHICH IS SO WRONG. This is exactly the message that someone who has been abused gets all the time. It’s the message that YOU are the one who is responsible for the relationship and the psychological state of the other person in it. That hope that maybe you can do something about it and heal the other person. Maybe if I could just love you enough, put aside my needs, thoughts, and feelings enough, you’ll be healed. It’s essentially the very belief that John reinforced as being the foundation of family that lead to where we are. You must sacrifice essential parts of yourself in order to be in this relationship. And if you don’t, the family will be destroyed.
Does Dean need to forgive himself? Oh yes, very much so. But he also needs to be held responsible. Does Dean have a huge emotional hole that needs healing because he sacrificed so much of who he was for so long? Yep, but if it comes at the cost of someone else’s autonomy, then we’ve just robbed Peter to pay Paul and changed nothing of significance.
At the same time, we’ve had stories of young women embarking on journeys of self-determination and self-discovery. Charlie, Alexis Anne, Kate, and Claire, they’re turning their backs on their pasts, taking control, and making themselves anew.
it was their pasts that formed them. People they loved. Traumas they endured. These were the source. Out of their experiences came both the good and the bad. Both the Good!Charlie and the Bad!Charlie with an “anti-authority disorder.”
Charlie’s journey took her back to the source of her duality. In search of the source, Bad!Charlie invaded and destroyed homes.
Until the journey lead her the person who caused the trauma, who broke her home.
He had his own duality. He was both a creator and breaker of homes. He built and he destroyed.
Charlie found a way to integrate that duality. She confronted the source of the duality, accepted it for what it was, and forgave herself. She made peace with what it made her.
All this foreshadowing, and we even have Crowley directly confronting his own less than stellar parent. "I don’t eat and you don’t cook.“ His experiences set him off on the journey of his own duality: The Kind of Hell and the feeling addicted demon who was abandoned to a work house and only wants to be loved.
And if the foreshadowing of Dean’s need to go back to the source of his own duality, both the good and the bad, wasn’t enough, we’ve been given a visual hint. Here we have a incongruous, nicely lit and centrally located orange flower both at Rowena’s introduction and during Dean’s story about who John was as a father.
I’ve written before about the use of flowers to hint of secrets, things yet to be revealed. It’s rare to see orange flowers on Supernatural. Someday I’ll actually finish my meta on the use of the color orange. Here I’ll only say that we’ve most often seen it during themes of temptation, the effects of staring into the abyss for too long when fighting monsters make us monstrous.
Here, in Russell Wellington, we have a character who has tried to put his ugly past behind him. Like Celeste Middleton, he’s split himself in two. He’s hidden away the monster, but the duality remains.
It can be seen in an office split between stark black and white. Symbols of wealth, prosperity and recognition housed alongside alcohol and cars.
It can be seen in a handshake between figures in dark and light hovering just over his shoulder.
He is a man who builds homes. He’s created his own environment. He lives in a cage of his own making. We can see it in the bars that shutter him in.
Charlie, too, has found a way into the cage.
But also a way out, busting through the bars. Wellington and Middleton – both city names. The town of Welling and the town of Middle. Russell chose the path to rejecting his duality. It did not end well for him. Celeste accepted a middle way. She accepted her duality and forgave herself. She destroyed the cage and found a way out.
Charlie: “I forgive you Dean.”
Dean: “Yeah, well, I don’t.”
Charlie: “I know. That’s kind of your move. How’s that working out for you, huh?”
The visual imagery of ships, moving water, and stars by which to guide them have popped up throughout season 10 so far. They seem to be coming to a head in the 10th episode, The Hunter Games. Visual imagery associated with journeys is everywhere.
I present to you the only two times Warrant’s “Sweet Cherry Pie” plays in all of Supernatural, both times over shots of Dean at strip clubs either real or dreamed. (eta: Grrrr first .gif isn’t working. I’m workin’ on sorting it out.)
The first time we hear it is in 5×13, “The Song Remains the Same.” Dean is dreaming at the time. He is initially fantasizing about the demon woman alone, but at one point closes his eyes for a moment and opens them to find, to his surprise and delight, that an angel has joined her.
The second time is in 10×02, “Reichenbach,” as Dean sits in the Angelz strip club (and behaves really disgustingly). He watches a stripper dressed in an American flag bikini top (n.b., I have no idea what the American flag imagery is there for!), and fights with the bouncer when she refuses to let him touch her; “Sweet Cherry Pie” continues to play as he beats the bouncer. He then heads outside the club, where Crowley confronts him.
My tentative theory about this is sort of twofold. First, I think that the use of “Sweet Cherry Pie” in “Reichenbach” is meant to show just how driven by violence Dean is at this point. Violence and killing has earned a place alongside sex (and pie, for that matter) among things Dean gets a strong hankering for. This is demonstrated by the way the song keeps playing as Dean whales on the bouncer; violence is Dean’s “cherry pie” these days.
But I also think they may have intended to reference the show’s first use of the song and bring to mind what was going on in that scene—Dean fantasizing about a demon and an angel. They could have picked any other song, but they chose this one. As dorkilysoulless and I have already discussed, it seems that Dean and Crowley were having some form of a sexual no-strings-attached fling at the beginning of Season 10, so that takes care of the demon half of Dean’s fantasy.
When Dean walks out of the club, Crowley confronts him. Dean stands between Crowley (demon) and a sign that says “Angelz” (angel).
So if the demon from 5×13 is personified in Crowley, where the hell is the personification of the angel in the whole “Dean caught between and fantasizing about an angel and a demon” thing? Well, they cut away from this shot directly to a shot of Castiel washing his hands… I guess he’s the angel they’re referencing. (“No!” gasps the Destiel-shipping meta blogger. “You don’t say!”)
Bonus bi pride colors in the “mirror” above the pole in the club and in the neon lights to one side:
(If anyone knows more about how the American flag and mirrors fit into this, I’m all ears!)
Mirrors are often used in SPN to hint at the truth beneath the surface, revealing the monster or monstrous within.
We’ve seen overhead mirrors a few times. The times they reflect things upside down are rare.
Here’s one from Season 3: Sin City – which was all about the tenuous line between demon and human.
And then another Season 4: Lazarus Rising- again in which Dean is struggling to come to terms with the monster within that was revealed in his time in Hell.
A similar parallel can be seen in Dean’s deliberate examination of himself in the mirror, here in Season 4 Lazarus Rising and Season 9 Meta Fiction.
Together the visual motifs evoke: red/white/blue/flag = free will, mirrors on the ceiling = everything turned upside down, and mirror reflection = reveals the monster hidden within (Dean’s “monstrous” behavior with the stripper).
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And then I ran into this, which is the hotel Sam and Dean stayed in in Lazarus Rising. Verrrrrry innnnnnnteresting. 🙂
Here we have the scene in First Born in which Dean and Crowley convince Tara to show them how to locate Cain and the First Blade.
First off: It’s a pawn shop. No symbolism there, right?
And then take a look at the items that are displayed. It’s a pawn shop which sells:
1) drums, guitars, banjos, stereo equipment, tape decks, speakers, headphones, horns, and golden records
2) watches, rings, necklaces, and shirts/jackets
So here we have on one scene: a place in which people sell things that are precious to them in a time of desperation, in exchange for things to wear, and in which there is everything you need to play music.
Hearseeno 