The Winchesters vs Industry: Or How They Fight Dick with Organic Food

So, in the past several posts in this Supernatural series I have discussed how the series takes common motifs and themes from Romantic literature and utilizes them as a working example of a Gothic narrative - themes of anti-establishment, medievalism, and favoring imagination and feeling over reason. There are more themes to explore, however, and I think they and everything I have discussed so  can be summed up in the Winchester's fight against season seven's Big Bad: Dick Roman.

Does he remind you of someone?

Dick is clearly part of the establishment, embodying the ideals of industry and rationalism. Even his name, Dick Roman, has Classical connotations, giving it more meaning than the numerous dirty jokes and homoerotic double entendres would imply. He is a clear example of what "The Man" is today: corporation.

Except Dick is also a Leviathan.

Meet the real Dick

Actually, he is the leader of the Leviathans; one of God's first creations, made before angels and humanity. According to the show's mythology they are hungry and powerful and God decided they were too dangerous to be kept either in Heaven or Earth, so he Purgatory and locked them there. But, of course, they got out and, through some weird black goo and a town's water supply, they managed to possess large number of people and begin to take control.

What Dick and the Leviathans are after isn't just world domination. They want to consume. Specifically, they want to consume the human race and the means by which they pursue this endeavor is really industrious. Like, The Jungle kind of industrious.

They go about building slaughterhouses for humanity and put additives and other stuff in processed foods to control us and kill the monsters that feed on us, causing our boys to adhere to a somewhat restrictive organic diet.

The Leviathans rely on new technologies to advance their scheme and hinder the Winchesters. The boys, on the other hand, start to do the same and then kind of stop trying. They may get some of their info via electronic means, but at the end of the day they get the job done by crashing the Impala into SucroCorp, storming the headquarters and ganking Dick with a weapon forged from some old school magic.

The Winchesters versus Leviathans in some ways might as well be the Pastoral versus the Urban and Industry. This is yet another common theme in Romantic literature and is one of the foundations for Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth that is generally considered to mark the beginning of the Romantic Age.

The 18th century saw the spark of the Industrial Revolution with factories and mills sprouting across the British countryside, dotting green with grey and black. Remember the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony? Remember when it went from being all nice and pastoral with happy shepherds with their happy sheep to a bunch of coal miners? That's what happened and the Romantics responded to it.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Another Tainted Piece of Childhood

This past week my niece discovered Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series and I am over the moon about it.

I adored these books as a kid. The moment I realized I had read just about every Goosebumps book I could get my hands on I moved on to these urban legend anthologies and devoured them. Whenever I felt the need for a good scare I would turn to these books and crawl under my covers and allow myself to become unsettled by the stories they contained. The illustrations were scary enough on their own that sometimes I wouldn't even bother to read the stories and just stare at the weird pictures that preceded or followed them.

Sleep? What's that?

So, as we drove home from school, I listened to my niece rant and rave about how creepy the stories are and how they sound like they could be real (which makes them even creepier). I became excited at the prospect of being able to share the experience of rediscovering the books with her.

And then I asked her what she thought about the illustrations.

"They're okay."
"Okay? You don't think they're scary or creepy or gross?"
"Not really."
"Not really?"
"They're just drawings."
"JUST DRAWINGS?"
"Why are you yelling?"

I calmed down when we got home.

And then I flipped again when she showed me her copies of the books.

WHY?

So, it's been over twenty years since they were released and, really, I should have known that the publishers would have re-released them with new covers but it never occurred to me that they would dare change the illustrations.

Stephen Gammell's illustrations were half of the appeal of the books. (Okay, maybe more than half.) Sure, the stories were creepy as hell, but compounded with his bizarre drawings the became terrifying. His artwork is...something else. They are grotesque, surreal, nightmarish, gory, and gorgeous. At times they seemingly have nothing to do with the story they accompany but it doesn't matter because they set the tone.

I'm not sure what's going on, but I like it.

Like the opening for The Twilight Zone with the floating eyeball, randomly breaking windows, and ticking clock, the illustrations (even the book covers) let the young reader know they were entering a whole new dark and otherworldly realm; one that looks and feels like one resting just under the world we inhabit.

After finishing my tirade on how Harper Collins ruined my favorite childhood anthology and how nothing ever stays the same, I finally calmed down and showed the old illustrations to my niece.

She loves them.

She also hates them because they gave her nightmares and now her mother is mad at me.

I think I understand why they changed the illustrations. Sorry Harper Collins.

But the thing is, her reaction kind of proves a point. The stories alone are scary but accompanied with the right illustrations they become something else, eliciting a more profound response from the reader.

In my first post I talked about how the storyteller can do things with the written word that simply cannot be done through a visual medium. Well, this notion goes both ways. Brett Helquist's illustrations serve as extensions of the text while Gammell's augments them, causing the reader to become unsettled and wary before even reaching the story. They can stand on their own while Helquist's cannot.

Granted, Helquist does what illustrators are kind of supposed to do - illustrate the action in the narrative - but Gammell took the job to a whole new, ingenious, and disturbing level and there is just no going back from that.

How Sam and Dean Are Kicking It Old School... Way Old School

Dean: I take it we believe the legends.
Sam: When don't we? (3x10)

In my Halloween Is the Greatest Month post I mentioned how critics once considered the rise of the Gothic novel as a movement that just happened to coincide with the Romantic Movement. It wasn't just critics who held this belief as poets like William Wordsworth who described the Gothic as "stupid and sickly" despite the influence Gothic themes in his early works. But not all Romantics held such dislike for the Gothic. Most appreciated the genre and, like Wordsworth, began (or attempted to begin) their writing careers within it. Some, like Byron who tried to deny the genre's influence on his poetic drama Manfred despite the title character's use of alchemy, attempted to distance themselves from the genre while others like Coleridge and Keats seemingly embraced it.

There is a reason why the Romantics had become fascinated with the Gothic and the imagery that came with it. Yeah, it's the rebellion thing.

The philosophers and poets of the Enlightenment were big fans of the neoclassical aesthetic. If it reminded them of Ancient Greece or Rome, then they were all over it like white on rice. The Romantics? Yeah, not so much. They favored Medievalism over the Classical, bringing about a Gothic Revival not just in architecture but in art and literature.

This rejection of the Neoclassical also resulted in a different in a different view of classical mythology. The Romantics still used classical mythological figures in their poetry, but they simplified them, seeing them more as figures that served as metaphors for different facets of the human condition and psychology. Ultimately, the Romantics were more interested in folk lore, legends, fairy tales, and old customs, creating academies dedicated to the study of these largely ignored genres.

This is where the Romantic gets really tied up in the Gothic mode.

In the legends and folk tales finally being studied they found references not only to ghouls, ghosts, witches, and demons, but also alchemy, curses, and other creepy stuff. Creepy stuff that came to be found in their Gothic narratives.

As Supernatural is a Gothic narrative it's no wonder we find this theme of favoring the older, more medieval customs, superstitions, and tools being utilized by the characters.

Sam and Dean don't go after ghosts and monsters armed with Proton Packs or the latest in ghost hunting technology (with the exception of an EMF reader Dean MacGyvered out of an old Walkman). They go in with iron and shotguns packed with rock salt. And going against demons? They relied on just holy water and devil's traps until they got a special knife (Ruby's Knife) that killed them once and for all.

The Impala's secret stash

The boys don't generally use high-tech equipment on their hunts. For the most part they rely on old school tools of the trade, things their medieval ancestors would recognize - holy water, holy words, salt, iron, and anything they can learn from researching "the lore".

That's where most of the knowledge on the supernatural comes from on the show, what Sam, Dean, and Bobby refer as "the lore" - folk lore and legends. Whenever a monster hunter comes across something they're not quite sure about they go back to these tales, reading medieval and sometimes ancient texts to identify the monster of the week and how to kill it.

Actually, what many viewers would believe to be "lore" created for the show is actually founded in reality. The sigils and incantations used on the show come from real texts such as the medieval Key of Solomon and it's 17th century companion The Lesser Key of Solomon. Meanwhile, the incantations  they use for exorcisms are derived from other medieval manuscripts made by monks and used by priests and laymen to do what Sam and Dean do on the show - track down the things that scare people and banish them.

Medieval

Gothic

See the resemblance?

The makers of Supernatural clearly know the Gothic genre's heritage of medieval folk lore. It's directly acknowledged on the show by Sam and Dean's maternal grandfather Samuel Campbell (Mitch Pileggi) when he tells the boys, "You know you had ancestors hacking the heads off vamps on the Mayflower" (6x01).

Apparently the family has been in the monster hunting business since the Old Country as the Winchesters continue in the tradition, so does Supernatural.

Halloween Is The Greatest Month

So, here we are again, the greatest time of the year - Halloween!

I don't like Christmas. I never really liked Christmas. I might sound a little selfish here, but the best part of Christmas was always sleeping in and getting presents. It might have something to do with growing up in Florida and "the magic of Christmas" not being all that potent in ninety degree weather.

This is what the heat does to you.

 Halloween, on the other hand, I have always loved.

I love dressing up and walking around the neighborhood getting candy. (Yes, I still trick or treat. I am not ashamed). I love the crazy, elaborate, freaky decorations people put up. I love the weird paranormal/occult documentaries on TV and all the Halloween specials on my favorite shows. I love that I get to wear t-shirts with skulls and other morbid things on them. I can dress up like Wednesday Addams and I won't get judged because I'm just "getting into the spirit of the holiday".

My spirit animal and fashion icon

And that's basically what I love about Halloween - I get to express my interests and not feel like I'm being totally judged for it. It's the one time of year that I get to blend in with the "normal" people.

Except, the things I'm interested in - horror, the Gothic, the macabre - are kind of becoming a little more mainstream.

Thanks to Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood, vampires are cool again. And people are going nuts over zombies thanks to The Walking Dead. Meanwhile, the Biography Channel seems to have abandoned presenting actual biographies about celebrities and historical figures and is focusing on Celebrity Ghost Stories and biographies about mobsters and serial killers.

Studying the Gothic has also gone a little mainstream with the genre gaining a degree of legitimacy in recent decades that it didn't really have before. A hundred years ago the Gothic was the barely acknowledged bastard red-headed step-child of Romanticism. Now,  most critics, such as Anne Williams and Peter Thorslev, no longer consider it to be a movement that happened to coincide with the Romantic Movement but ones that is a  byproduct of Romanticism itself.

It's a little like Halloween has become a year-round thing. Awesome!

That Good Old Winchester Logic

 "Alas! there is no instinct like that of the heart." - Don Juan; Lord Byron

Team Free Will vs. The Agents of Fate: Romantic Liberty in Supernatural

 'Tis to be a slave in soul
And to hold no strong controul
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.

 - The Mask of Anarchy; Percy Bysshe Shelley

Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art,
For there thy habitation is the heart—
The heart which love of thee alone can bind;
And when thy sons to fetters are consign'd—
To fetters and damp vault's dayless gloom,
Their country conquers with their martyrdom.

- Prisoner of Chillon; Lord Byron

Peeking from Behind the Sofa: Fear and Doctor Who

Last spring my eight year old niece developed a somewhat random and irrational fear of the mannequins at departments stores. She would stare at them with wide eyes and hold my hand in a death grip whenever we walked past one and wouldn't let go until we were out of the store.

And then I made the mistake of introducing her and her sister to Doctor Who with an episode featuring the Autons.

Oops.

Sorry Meli!

Supernatural and the Romantic (like Shelley and Blake and not, like, kissing)

Back in 2005 the then WB aired the pilot episode of a little show called Supernatural. Despite low ratings, eight years later, that show is still on the air. It probably has something to do with the absurdly loyal fans. (Be aware, I am one of them.)

(FYI, they moved it to Wednesdays)

For those of you who don't know, the show follows two brothers, Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) Winchester as they travel across the back roads of America in a black 1967 Chevy Impala and hunt all the things that go bump in the night - monsters, ghosts, and demons. The first three seasons dealt with pretty straightforward urban legends and the basic staples of the gothic horror genre - poltergeists, vampires, hookmen, witches, and curses. You know, the stuff that make up the campfire tales.

In season four angels and Lucifer himself were introduced and the Romantic foundations of the Gothic began to be apparent in this textbook American Gothic series - themes of anti-establishmentarianism, the preference of emotion over reason and the elevation of old folklore and practices among other things.

That's what I want to explore in a series in a series of posts - how Supernatural is a working example of the Romantic and Gothic thematic in the media of television and how they are ingested and absorbed into the new media created by online communities. Basically, I'm going to take themes and ideas from the Romantic movement and the Gothic genre and apply them to the show.

I plan on posting them on Wednesdays, hopefully before the show airs at 9/8c.

Warning

If you are not a fan of this show and my posts inspire you to start watching it, beware this is not a happy show. Seriously, there are no happy endings here. This show will anger and frustrate you and tear out your heart and set it on fire and like a crackhead you will just come back for more. 

In time, you will see that this is kind of the point of the show.