There'll be peace when you are done: Supernatural as Tragic Male Gothic

When Supernatural first aired back in 2005, I remember thinking “This is a guy’s show”.  The show is one long road trip with two brothers in their awesome muscle car, hitting on pretty girls, killing monsters, and saving the day while backed by a badass classic rock soundtrack. At the time these things set it apart from most of the other shows on the then WB network. From what I remember the shows on the WB were targeted towards teenage girls and at the time Supernatural felt like the show that was being offered to teenage boys. It was, and still is, produced with the male gaze in mind. It wasn’t set in some high school and the character’s problems weren’t centered on their love lives. It was a supernatural-family drama. It was about these two boys trying to find their father and avenging their mother’s death. It had beautiful women and blood and gore. It was creepy as hell.

And yet, despite the fact that it’s written with the male gaze in mind the show has a huge female following. I’m sure a lot of men watch and enjoy it but it’s the fangirls who are the most vocal and the most present at conventions. They’re not just responding to the fact that the show’s stars are gorgeous; they’re responding to its tragedy. The show isn’t just written through the perspective of the male gaze, it’s written in the form of Male Gothic.

Gothic fiction can be split into two categories: Male and Female. These two categories offer us different ways of experiencing the Gothic – from the male perspective and the female perspective. Supernatural presents us the Gothic universe from the male perspective.

How does Supernatural fit the mold of Male Gothic? Well…

Male Gothic is really only ever studied when being compared to its Female counterpart. In Female Gothic the supernatural elements are explained away, like in Jane Eyre when we learn that the ghost is really Bertha Mason or how in The Phantom of the Opera the opera ghost is a masked man. In Male Gothic the supernatural is real, as in Dracula or The Monk.

Check. (The show is called Supernatural after all.)

Also, in Male Gothic, the hero tends to suffer a separation from their mother while in Female Gothic the concern lies with the father. For example, Clarice Starling and Christine Daaé both suffer from the loss of their fathers while Laura in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is motherless and Stephen King’s Carrie suffers under the hands of her own mother. Essentially, Gothic fictions are family dramas.

In Supernatural the drama begins the night the boys lose their mother in a fire. Later on we learn that, if she had lived, they probably never would have become hunters. It is exacting revenge for her death that drives the first two seasons and, as the series goes on, it is her memory that is used to manipulate her boys. The show also has a running theme of absentee fathers with both John Winchester and God being dead-beat dads. While in Female Gothic the hero(ine) finds a replacement father, in Male Gothic the heroes attempt to move forward and away (Carry on My Wayward Sons).

 Lastly, the plot of Male Gothic is generally tragic while Female Gothic plots generally end with happy endings. For example, Jane Eyre marries her beloved Mr. Rochester while Ambrosio from The Monk is damned.

At the end of my first post I mentioned that fans have a pretty good idea that the show will end in tragedy; that it will end with Sam and Dean meeting some tragic end. Even the stars believe this.

In my last Supernatural post I talked about Dean and his sacrifices, however, Sam is an even more tragic figure. When we first met him he was a Stanford student on his way to law school and a happy, normal life with his girlfriend Jess. Then Jess died and he went back on the road with Dean and they’re pulled into a life on the run from the law and destiny. Sam goes from a good kid trying to keep his brother in line to a lost soul, doing the wrong things with the best of intentions (things like drinking demon blood) and spending 180 years in Hell. There is a reason why he is Lucifer’s destined vessel.

However, the tragedy isn’t limited to just the Winchesters.

Since watching the season six episode “The Man Who Would Be King” (6x20) I can’t help but see Cas as a Promethean figure. The Angel of Thursday went from a loyal and obedient soldier of Heaven to a rebel, siding with humanity and the Winchesters and choosing to value freedom and choice over the Will of Heaven. After stopping the Apocalypse he returned to Heaven with the intention of introducing free will to his brothers and sisters, but of course it doesn’t work because “Explaining freedom to angels is a bit like teaching poetry to fish.” But after waging a civil war against the archangel Raphael he has become a bit disenfranchised by the notion, explaining that he should have told them “Freedom is a length of rope and God wants you to hang yourself with it.” In the end he overreaches and falls…hard.

As we stand now, seven episodes into season 8, Cas has fallen and is essentially in exile, Dean is marred by his experience in Purgatory by PTSD, and Sam is struggling with a choice of staying in the family business and finally getting that apple pie life he’s always wanted all the while they try to shut the Gates of Hell forever.

As I’ve said before, the fans have a good idea of how the show will end. When the time comes it won’t be about whether or not they successfully shut the Gates of Hell or who will live or die. They will close those gates. Instead, at the very end, it’ll be about what side of those gates we leave them standing on. Surely Heaven waits for them.

Goosebumps vs. Are You Afraid of the Dark

I'm graduating college in a month so lately I've been taking some crazy nostalgia trips on YouTube. After going through the theme songs for most of my favorite 90s cartoons I stumbled on the openings for two of my favorite live-action series: Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark.

My brother and I used to sometimes argue about which series was better. I preferred Are You Afraid of the Dark because I thought it was scarier and Franklin preferred Goosebumps because it was "weirder and the theme song is cooler". And, okay, he's right, the Goosebumps theme is cooler. Just compare the two:

Goosebumps -

Are You Afraid of the Dark -

 

Funny thing is, these intros are pretty representative of the shows themselves. Although both fell into the kiddie-horror genre, they were fairly different in set-up and tone.

Are You Afraid of the Dark consisted of a frame narrative. Each episode began with the Midnight Society, a group of teenagers who met in the woods in the middle of the night and told each other horror stories around a campfire, and ended with them leaving with someone putting the campfire out with a red bucket of water. In introducing each new story the storyteller would give a brief explanation of what inspired their tale, take a handful of white dust from a leather pouch, throw it into the fire and say "Submitted for the approval of The Midnight Society, I call this story The Tale of..."

Meanwhile, each Goosebumps story stood completely on its own. Unlike Are You Afraid of the Dark, Goosebumps episodes were adaptations of R. L. Stines' Goosebumps book series and the narrators (if there were any) were contained within the story. Like Are You Afraid of the Dark, each episode (and each book) was a stand-alone story, with the exception of one or two sequels featuring a returning villain/monster.

The stories in each series were equally similar and different. Ultimately, what separates the two shows is tone. Both had a sort of kiddie Twilight Zone-esque quality to them, featuring twist endings and exhibiting the dark and creepy underbelly of suburbia. However, my brother and I agreed that the stories in Are You Afraid of the Dark were scarier than those in Goosebumps. Although to be fair that dummy was pretty damn creepy. And so was that mask. For the most part, though, they didn't make me feel nearly as unsettled as whatever was featured in Are You Afraid of the Dark. There was a humor in Goosebumps that was missing in the other show and every episode had a happy ending, even if some of them were more than a little weird.

One of my favorites was the one about a boy and his friends who were actually dogs made human; the episode ended with his pet cat becoming his new baby sister while he and his friends had reverted to their canine forms. Another was one where a pair of siblings who were convinced their neighbor was a monster. Not only did the episode end with the kids being right, but with their parents eating the monster because, apparently, they're the monsters that feast on other monsters.

 These endings, though weird and kind of creepy, didn't keep me up at night. They didn't have me double guessing what that shadow on my wall could be.

Are You Afraid of the Dark, on the other hand, did. One story that has stayed with me all these years is one that stars Tia and Tamara Mowry (the twins from Sister, Sister). They didn’t play sisters in this story, Tia played a normal girl and Tamara played a chameleon that attempted and succeeded in taking her place. I remember how unsettled I felt when Tamara’s character pulled a basket of chameleons out of a well and commented on how lonely Tia’s character (transformed into a chameleon) must be trapped in a well in her backyard.

Those stories scared the crap out of me as a kid and it didn't help that it was the last thing that aired on SNICK before Nickelodeon switched to Nick at Night. While Goosebumps aired in the afternoon with plenty of daylight streaming through the living room, we had to watch Are You Afraid of the Dark just as we were winding down, forcing us to have keep those kid-sized horrors in our minds as we went to bed.

Although both shows dealt with the paranormal and the bizarre and are classified as horror, they seem to do different things, giving us glimpses into the different ways horror may function and appeal to the different facets of an audience.

Goosebumps appealed to the audience that would grow up to seek humor and some gore in their horror stories; the ones who would grow up to appreciate Freddy Krueger. Are You Afraid of the Dark appealed to the audience that would grow up to seek out darker stories, ghost stories, the ones that make you wonder about the things that exist in the corner of your eye, the ones that stick with you long after the lights come on.

Years later my brother and I have come to agree that neither show is better than the other. Ultimately it comes down to taste. He prefers humor and the mildly grotesque and I prefer to be driven into insomnia.

Dean Winchester: Brother, Soldier, Sinner, Hero

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy”.

Well, here’s one of three:

I just want to hug him.

When we first meet Dean in the pilot episode we immediately compare him to Sam and by his actions and attitude deem him to be kind of a wise-ass punk. He drives around in a muscle car listening to nothing but classic rock on cassette, blatantly checks out his brother’s girlfriend in front of him, and shows no respect to those in positions of authority. The only person he seems to really respect and admire is his father, who, we eventually come to learn, is his hero. But then we learn that he spends his time going around the country hunting the monsters that prey on humanity. He saves lives and doesn’t even get recognized for it.  He is both the bad boy of the show and the good son. He is the outsider, the noble cowboy riding on a black horse, the rebel. He is a Romantic Hero. 

The Romantic Hero shares most of the same characteristics as the Byronic Hero: rebelliousness, melancholy, wanderlust, pension for self-criticism, a dark past and/or the suffering of some terrible crime among other things. The big thing that keeps Dean from falling into the Byronic Hero category is that the Byronic Hero is generally a member of the aristocracy and Dean is pretty damn Blue Collar.

In A Study of English Romanticism Northrop Frye describes the Romantic Hero as

…the hero who is placed outside the structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting (41).

I think this describes Dean pretty well. Early in the show he made repeated references to the idea that he would never make it in “civilian life” and even when he tries to settle down in season six it just doesn’t work out. He wasn’t meant for the “apple pie life”; he was born to be a soldier, a hunter. He’s good at killing things and he knows it. 

He also (more than) kind of enjoys it.

However, he’s also a leader. He’s the big brother with a responsibility – Look after Sammy. It’s in his responsibility for his brother that Dean’s tragedy is born.

He’s been looking after Sam since he was four years old, since the night their mother died and their father began hunting. He raised Sam, sacrificing his own childhood so that his little brother could have one and giving up a high school diploma so he could help his father on hunts. He essentially took his mother’s place in the family, trying to keep it together and afloat, mediating arguments between Sam and John.

He continues to look after Sam even after they’re all grown and their father dies.

When Sam is killed in 2x21 Dean sells his soul to a crossroads demon to bring him back, giving him a year to live before he’s dragged to Hell. Four months after he’s dragged down he’s risen by Castiel and declared to be an instrument of Heaven even though, in his forty years in Hell, he spent thirty of those years torturing souls of the damned. 

He is saved, not because his soul is pure and not just because he is righteous, but because it’s his destiny. Of course, Dean rebels against his destiny and spends his time trying to atone for his actions in Hell. It’s in these acts that he truly becomes a Romantic Hero. 

 Many characters, including Sam, describe him as a dick, but at the end of the day, he’s the one who drove onto the field of Armageddon and bear witness because he didn’t want his brother to die alone. He’s a douche but he does things for the right reasons, killing to save people, rebelling against God and Heaven because it would be an injustice to do otherwise.

Bella Swan and Clarice Starling: Someone Needs to Cut These Ladies Some Slack

I have a confession to make: I used to be a Twihard.

Now, to be fair, it was before being a Twihard was a mainstream thing and I immediately saw the light the second I turned the last page on Eclipse and managed to get off the bandwagon months before the first film was released. Since then I've been like a lot of people. poking fun at the series and it's very enthusiastic fans while criticizing it for its sexist, somewhat racist, and just plain problematic contents.

Except, lately, I've been seeing Twilight with new eyes.

Recently, I read a blog post arguing against Bella's position as an anti-feminist figure. The author argues Bella is not anti-feminist because she exercises her freedom of choice. She chooses to to value the role of wife and mother over others. This is one part of Bella that seems to bother people - the fact that she chose a life with Edward over a "normal" life without him. Instead of celebrating the fact that she is allowed to make such a choice, we criticize her for making it.

Then there is the issue of Bella's behavior in New Moon.

After Edward leaves her (for her own protection), Bella falls into a deep depression. The novel famously has four chapters consisting only of "October", "November", "December", and "January", signifying the passage of time and Bella's inactivity. During her depression Bella suffers from night terrors and engages in some extremely risky behavior because in the moments nearest death she is able to see glimpses of Edward. I think people's criticism can be summed up in this meme:

Meanwhile, the argument for Bella can be best illustrated by this post.

Despite all of the Bella-bashing, this Gothic heroine is allowed to do something certain other heroines are criticized for doing - she is allowed to be transformed.

In my first post I talked about how the ending for the theatrical version of Hannibal differs from the novel's ending. Basically, in the novel Lecter and Starling become romantically involved after Starling undergoes a transformation; going from a traditional classical heroine to a Gothic Bride. In the film Starling undergoes no such transformation; instead we leave her standing on the edge of one with her Gothic ending a distant sight on the horizon.

I can't help but wonder why, despite her critics, Bella is allowed to be transformed into a vampire with much consequence while Starling's turn is branded as character assassination. Is it okay for Bella to turn because it's deemed as being "in-character" for her to do so? Is it because Starling's status as a feminist heroine was established from the get-go while Bella's is still in flux? Or was the foundation for her foundation just not made clear enough for the audience to follow?

Why is Bella allowed to be transformed while Starling isn't?

Bella, Edward, and Jacob are descendents of a long line of Gothic tradition - the Maiden, the Shadow, and the Suitor. Yes, Jacob is a werewolf (which serves to throw an almost subversive edge to the series), but if Bella were to choose him then at least she wouldn't be one of the undead. I think this is one of the many reasons why Bella is allowed to choose Edward and become transformed. With either choice she makes she is still remaining in the realm of Other. We already expect Bella to make some sort of transformation, to grow up a little and become something else.

I think one thing audience members failed to grasp is the fact that, when we first meet her, Starling is already existing in the realm of Other simply because of her sex. She is a woman inhabiting a man's world, trying to work in field populated by men who see her as something different, something Other.

If anything, Starling is more deserving of her transformation. Hers has been a long time coming, subtly (maybe too much so) established in The Silence of the Lambs and achieved in Hannibal.

In Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic Anne Williams states "The Female Gothic plot is a version of Beauty and the Beast." Bella and Starling are both Female Gothic heroines. The difference between them and say Jane Eyre or Christine Daaé is that they are the ones transformed and not their respective beasts. They both undergo changes as a result of their choosing to follow their natures and not doing what has been expected of them and yet they are both criticized for doing so.

Is it must me, or does that just not seem fair?