Supernatural, Humanity, and the Soul

Over nine seasons, the television series Supernatural has inspired a large and still growing fandom—with conventions, fanfic websites and blogs, comic books, an animated series, and a series of novels. At the same time, like similarly fan-centered or cult shows, such as those of the Star Trek franchise, The X-Files (1993–2002), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), throughout its run Supernatural has delved into social, philosophical, literary, and theological themes—as well as issues related to gender, family, capitalism, and postmodernism—that not only contextualize and add depth to the show’s ongoing plots, but also reflect our era’s intellectual concerns and may, in the end, be part of the reason for the program’s popularity.

When most people hear the word “allegory,” they think of a text like The Pilgrim’s Progress, with characters named according to the virtues or vices they represent, or The Romance of the Rose, which is clearly about something other than what the surface of the text suggests. Even texts that are not deliberate allegories can be read allegorically however, and this is true of Supernatural. The show is not an intentional allegory, but each of the three main characters seems strongest in one of the theological virtues—faith, hope, and love—which allows for a moral reading of the story. If Sam’s (Jared Padalecki) chief virtue (with soul intact) is faith and Dean’s (Jensen Ackles) is love, the chief virtue of their surrogate father Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver) is hope. Examining these virtues in classical Christian thought can explain a great deal about these characters, their relationships to one another through the first eight seasons, and the problems they face in a world where God is willfully absent.

The issue of monstrosity lies at the heart of the TV series Supernatural. It is not simply that monsters are what the Winchester brothers, with their earnest yet world-weary modus operandi, track down and destroy. It is what constitutes the monstrous that gives their pursuit meaning, edge, and terror. The alien-looking, merciless creatures such as the Wendigo are not only, perhaps not even primarily, what strikes fear into the series’ spectators, but rather the creatures with ostensible proximity to humanity—shapeshifters cloaked in lamb’s clothing whose savagery soon belies itself. Scholars have long defined monsters as the commingling of two or more different types of creatures (Burke), noting that the hybrid nature of entities with both animal and human elements creates a source of “confusion and horror” that “threaten[s] to destabilize all order, to break down all hierarchies” (Hanofi 2–3). Such creatures are as often rendered pity-inspiring victims as formidable enemies, whose demise poses ethical dilemmas. These monsters bring life to Supernatural’s fundamental questions: Are Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles)—having both taken on a demigod’s burden of guilt, Hell-harrowing, and losing and regaining of a soul—not themselves beings of a dual nature? Are they killers first or saviors? Moral or heartless? Worthy of trust or forever a potential threat?

Of the genre shows on contemporary television, Supernatural is perhaps the most savvy in its knowledge and use of contemporary fan practices. In a number of episodes, the writers make it clear that they are fully cognizant of their fan community by establishing a self-referential dialogue and promoting active viewership among their fan base. On the other hand, some fans view the depictions of fan practices as unkind parodies of their activities. Given the depiction of some fans on the show, such as the nameless, shapeshifting film buff of “Monster Movie” (4.5) and the socially awkward and Sam-obsessed Becky Rosen (Emily Perkins), fans view their depiction on the show with some trepidation. While the Supernatural fandom is proud of the open relationship it has with the show’s creators, the use of such plot lines reinforces both the creators’ awareness of fan practices as well as their discomfort with these activities. The characterization of Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) as a man who has fannish tendencies but denies them (“it’s a guilty pleasure,” he says in “Changing Channels” 5.8) and mocks them in others (in “Let It Bleed” 6.21, he comments that while Sam and Bobby were reading H. P. Lovecraft he was “having sex. With women”) provides the most straightforward of the writers’ surrogates. The appearance of Chuck Shurley (Rob Benedict), fictional pulp writer and prophet, as an exasperated and put-upon (and possibly literal) God-creator ¹ is another instance of the writers’ reaction to fans and fan practices. This chapter articulates and examines the friction between fan activity and the creators and production staff of Supernatural as it is expressed in the show’s fictional context to demonstrate the complex relationships of fans and media producers.

Supernatural relates to the Gothic ancestry of horror, where terror arises from supernatural agents rather than the atrocities of crime and war. But one element ties the Gothic to the contemporary: the emphasis on the vulnerability of family. Robin Wood observes that in the 1970s horror moved from the Europe of the (Gothic) past to contemporary (post-1970s) America, where family is the source of both security and threat. The obsession with family relations and their vulnerability drives much of Supernatural. Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) Winchester’s desire for family—and connections with significant women—is consistently thwarted by the dangers around them. They live in the world of the “hunter” where family is vulnerable. Evil often invades “the life” and malevolency follows. The series can be read as Sam and Dean’s constant quest to keep each other safe while they protect the normal world from the world of monsters. Domesticity, then, creates an opportunity to study how evil is constructed in the show. At the same time, as both Julia M. Wright and Lorrie Palmer have argued, Supernatural presents a primarily masculine point of view and the understanding of evil in Supernatural is almost exclusively masculine, with only a few exceptions.

In Supernatural’s second episode, “Wendigo,” Dean (Jensen Ackles) establishes the Winchesters’ life as “saving people, hunting things—the family business.” Like the huntsman in the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap,” who chooses to cut open the wolf’s stomach and save his victims rather than just shoot the wolf, the brothers do not simply hunt monsters, they save people from the monsters. Supernatural is more inspired by this fairy tale huntsman than the alternative male role of aristocratic prince who rescues and marries the damsel-in-distress. Like the huntsman, the Winchesters simply move on to the next monster. Yet the family business is as much about the lore that explains monsters and how to kill them as it is about weapons stored in the Impala’s trunk and people saved.

In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jo the Monster Killer: Supernatural’s Excluded Heroines,” Mary Borsellino argues that Supernatural is less a philosophical heir to Buffy and more of a reaction to and refutation of Buffy’s challenge to gender paradigms, arguing that “Buffy gave the world a story in which the traditional roles of masculine hero figures were questioned, and Supernatural responded… by attempting to restore those pre-Buffy tropes” (112). Borsellino reads Supernatural as a response to and a “refutation/backlash” of the feminist reclamation of traditionally masculine hero tropes that Buffy represents and suggests that Supernatural privileges a “traditional form of American masculinity” (110), one that she implies is inevitably tinged with misogyny. Borsellino ultimately positions the show as a text wherein women are effectively silenced.

By the finale of Supernatural’s fifth season, God is gone, Lucifer briefly escapes Hell and is revealed to be the instigator of the series’ narrative arc, and two brothers fight to save the world and their small family by repeatedly defying powerful patriarchs’ plans. In its ninth season at the time of this writing, Supernatural continues to push at the powerful and interlocked metanarratives ¹ of Christianity and patriarchy, but it is in its first five seasons and their concomitant apocalyptic narrative that the show’s structure, story lines, and characters represent its most trenchant challenge to the patriarchal concept of God-the-Father. It does so by presenting various iterations of literal fathers—and, notably, bloodline-begetting fathers, leaving out fathers of choice like Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver)—at terrestrial, infernal, and celestial levels and then deconstructing the figures’ claims to power. The human father dies and is usurped by a demon, Azazel (Fredric Lehne), who is acting for his father, Lucifer (Mark Pellegrino), to end the world. Throughout the seasons, humanistic fraternity is upheld as father figures come and go and the Devil is revealed to be the best example of the God-the-Father power structure.

From the beginning, Supernatural has clearly been rooted in family, specifically in a male-only family. In the series pilot, the brief glimpse viewers have of the Winchesters as an intact household is quickly replaced by that of a family ravaged by the death of a beloved mother and wife. Following Mary’s (Samantha Smith) death, the family becomes less like kin and more like an elite fighting squad with John (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as the stern general. John’s shift from loving, nurturing father to disciplinarian will have far-reaching effects on Dean and Sam and the men that they will ultimately become. Yet their experiences with John as father are vastly different from one another. In Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, the father or father figure is beloved and hated, admired and feared. This duality can be confusing for children, especially those whose fathers are frequently absent and cannot offset the negative emotions that this delicate balance needs. This chapter examines the characters using several psychological indicators of present/absent fathers: the father hunger scale designed by Paul. B. Perrin et al. and the schemas developed by several other father-focused theorists. These indicators will help explain the motivations that drive Dean (Jensen Ackles), Sam (Jared Padalecki), and to a lesser extent the Winchester’s family friend Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver). Based upon this exposure to fatherhood and father roles, Dean and Sam seem to be fulfilling a destiny that was decided, not by fate, but by their relationships with their father.

Since Supernatural’s first season, the use of well-known music from the classic rock and heavy metal soundworlds has been central in the show’s diegetic and nondiegetic contexts.¹ Music frequently takes center stage as characters listen to songs from the late 1960s through the 1980s, share stories and anecdotes about these works and the bands that created them, and argue over different notions of musical aesthetics and authenticity. In addition, selections from this repertoire punctuate moments of intense emotion, character growth, and narrative development. By using a familiar catalog of preexisting popular music, Supernatural draws on a wide range of emotional, historical, and cultural associations that have accrued to this repertoire over the past several decades. These discourses become key resources in the show, as producers mobilize the deep cultural resonances of these songs in order to bring texture and depth to key moments.