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.