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kitewithfishYeah, so the show with the characters who cannot stay dead is, apparently, not staying dead. The end of Supernatural has felt like a shockingly active time for the fandom!
Which is not to say that I recommend getting into it. I don't. This show is Not Good. As Benoit Blanc says, it compels me, though.
I've been undertaking what I'm calling A Fully Spoiled Rewatch with my friend, iphys. My idea is largely modeled on a podcast I have really enjoyed (and highly recommend!), Still Pretty , a 'fully spoiled' podcast with Lani and Noelli hosting it and analyzing each episode in the context of the canon and their media studies background.
So, what's the ethos behind this rewatch?
1. Queer Reading - The show does not really *want* a queer audience or a female audience, but, we're here and we're going to be reading the show with a particular interest in that. Why do people read Dean as queer? What parts of the text support this? What parts have heterosexual explanations that we, two queers, would not have noticed without careful analysis?
2. Fully Spoiled - Taking each episode in the larger context of the canon, and drawing parallels where we find them. (Example: Season One's "Faith" has the DNA for Season Four's "Lazarus Rising," and also echoes into the Series Finale.)
3. What You See Is What You Get - Fandom tends to really encourage reading the text with an understanding that there are generous margins, places where you can set a story or speculate a headcanon into being, or tease out a thread they left dangling. Fandom lives and breathes in the nooks and crannies of a text. But, there's also something to saying, This is what the show put on the screen, so let's give that more weight in our analysis than the spaces they left blank. As a corollary, deuterocanonical sources like the Journal of John Winchester (as available online) are also sources we're looking at - but where the show contradicts those external sources, the show wins.
4. Do Your Homework - Season One is really a love letter to horror films, so we've been doing our homework and watching those (Example: Season One's "Home" does not really make sense without watching Poltergeist, and I liked the episode a lot more after having watched it. I watched Texas Chain Saw Massacre yesterday! It was really good!) Kripke cited Kerouac's On The Road as an influence, so we're going to read that. We're also doing some academic reading - I've got Carol Clover's Men Women and Chain Saws out of the library for this very reason.
5. Who's the Main Character? - Some episodes are clearly meant to highlight of the Winchester brothers above another, some are balanced, and some of the later ones are not even really about the Winbros at all! It makes it a fun question to ask.
Already, this approach has yielded some really interesting insights!
One of the weirder, but more revealing episodes of season one, "Home," where the Winbros return to their childhood home to find it haunted, are really much more comprehensible with the source material that they are drawn from -the film Poltergeist, which focuses really intensely on a mother saving her child from a spiritual/supernatural danger.
Likewise, I had a really interesting insight into John Winchester that I never had before - that he reads to a straight audience as feeling tremendous but unspoken *guilt* for failing to save his wife from a supernatural death in their own home prior to the start of the series. Which might be one of those things that the show's writers, largely straight, had assumed would be Too Obvious To Need Saying, but honestly was quite a revelation to me! (Not one that reflects well on John, not even a little, but inflects his abuse towards his sons in a different light.) It's implied that he failed as a husband/man in a duty to protect his wife - and that's not a dynamic I had ever once considered as being even a little bit part of *my* conception of marriage! But is very clearly part of some ideals set out for a heterosexual couple.
Which is not to say that I recommend getting into it. I don't. This show is Not Good. As Benoit Blanc says, it compels me, though.
I've been undertaking what I'm calling A Fully Spoiled Rewatch with my friend, iphys. My idea is largely modeled on a podcast I have really enjoyed (and highly recommend!), Still Pretty , a 'fully spoiled' podcast with Lani and Noelli hosting it and analyzing each episode in the context of the canon and their media studies background.
So, what's the ethos behind this rewatch?
1. Queer Reading - The show does not really *want* a queer audience or a female audience, but, we're here and we're going to be reading the show with a particular interest in that. Why do people read Dean as queer? What parts of the text support this? What parts have heterosexual explanations that we, two queers, would not have noticed without careful analysis?
2. Fully Spoiled - Taking each episode in the larger context of the canon, and drawing parallels where we find them. (Example: Season One's "Faith" has the DNA for Season Four's "Lazarus Rising," and also echoes into the Series Finale.)
3. What You See Is What You Get - Fandom tends to really encourage reading the text with an understanding that there are generous margins, places where you can set a story or speculate a headcanon into being, or tease out a thread they left dangling. Fandom lives and breathes in the nooks and crannies of a text. But, there's also something to saying, This is what the show put on the screen, so let's give that more weight in our analysis than the spaces they left blank. As a corollary, deuterocanonical sources like the Journal of John Winchester (as available online) are also sources we're looking at - but where the show contradicts those external sources, the show wins.
4. Do Your Homework - Season One is really a love letter to horror films, so we've been doing our homework and watching those (Example: Season One's "Home" does not really make sense without watching Poltergeist, and I liked the episode a lot more after having watched it. I watched Texas Chain Saw Massacre yesterday! It was really good!) Kripke cited Kerouac's On The Road as an influence, so we're going to read that. We're also doing some academic reading - I've got Carol Clover's Men Women and Chain Saws out of the library for this very reason.
5. Who's the Main Character? - Some episodes are clearly meant to highlight of the Winchester brothers above another, some are balanced, and some of the later ones are not even really about the Winbros at all! It makes it a fun question to ask.
Already, this approach has yielded some really interesting insights!
One of the weirder, but more revealing episodes of season one, "Home," where the Winbros return to their childhood home to find it haunted, are really much more comprehensible with the source material that they are drawn from -the film Poltergeist, which focuses really intensely on a mother saving her child from a spiritual/supernatural danger.
Likewise, I had a really interesting insight into John Winchester that I never had before - that he reads to a straight audience as feeling tremendous but unspoken *guilt* for failing to save his wife from a supernatural death in their own home prior to the start of the series. Which might be one of those things that the show's writers, largely straight, had assumed would be Too Obvious To Need Saying, but honestly was quite a revelation to me! (Not one that reflects well on John, not even a little, but inflects his abuse towards his sons in a different light.) It's implied that he failed as a husband/man in a duty to protect his wife - and that's not a dynamic I had ever once considered as being even a little bit part of *my* conception of marriage! But is very clearly part of some ideals set out for a heterosexual couple.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-16 11:17 pm (UTC)It's more like the ideals in toxic masculinity, derived from marriage's origins where a wife is property and if his property is stolen or damaged in some way it reflects badly on him for being an irresponsible owner. But then SPN has always had this masculinity ethos behind it which is a big reason for the ugliness of its approach.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-17 03:48 pm (UTC)Part of my reason for re-watching is trying to tease out what the writers *thought* their show was about, and what parts they thought were too obvious to need to be shown clearly. Stumbling onto something like this, where they have such a generous reading of John's internal life that never *really* gets clearly on screen, has helped me make more sense of why the show keep portraying John as a "good man with some flaws" because, man, that was NOT the reading of him that I came away with.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-17 08:51 pm (UTC)Speaking of that and analyzing what was intended, I wrote about the original pilot draft and you might find that of interest: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6768631
no subject
Date: 2020-12-18 03:42 pm (UTC)TV seems extremely skittish about showing fathers as evil unless they go very far over the line. It's been interesting to look at this again in detail.
I think the comparison that has been sticking in my head is the way Mad Max Fury Road depicts the impact of rape and captivity on the escaping women by showing the injuries inflicted on them and their reactions to that suffering - but the audience doesn't have to see the act of rape or them in chains.
The impact of John Winchester's actions are everywhere in Dean and Sam's behavior. But the show hasn't really committed to John being the villain of their story, so the show gives JDM a lot more softness in his appearances than the damage he had done to his actual children would suggest. So the show ends up forgiving John for things that attentive fans will consider unforgiveable. Which inadvertently makes for one of the more nuanced portrayals of an abusive parent that I have seen on screen???
This show would not be so good if it were not so damn bad.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-18 05:39 pm (UTC)That's a great way to put it! I mean, historically, there's been a way of approaching that indirectly. For example, I understand that traditionally the actor who plays the father in Peter Pan also plays Captain Hook in stage productions. We also see it in Guardians of the Galaxy where the actor who plays Peter's grandfather also plays his father figure, Yondu. This takes on particular resonance in Guardians 2 where the adoptive father ends up being set against the biological one who is revealed as the villain of the film.
However I do think that actor bleed and resistance can account for a good deal of how things play out. If one reads a script vs sees it performed, for example, there can be considerable differences in how it's interpreted. (I know that HP fandom discussed this a good bit in relation to the Cursed Child production). I talk about that some with Sam and Dean here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6720337