#set dressing narrative

This episode feels like a really significant one, so I went and had a re-watch, this time specifically to take a closer look at the set-dressing (hello set-dressing narrative, my old friend).

There’s so much in there which speaks to Narrator-Dean’s subconscious and (significantly, given the episode’s title) to Dean’s own death.

The barn (a barn was, of course, the mise-en-scène of Dean’s death):

The shots of skulls (twice - one in Losy’s van, and the other in the background as Carlos sews up John’s shoulder):

The Soucouyant is a type of vampire, just like the vampires were the monsters at the scene of Dean’s death. But the Soucouyant-vampire here itself is (double?) dead. It’s only animated because it is being possessed by Mac’s vengeful spirit (layers and layers of correspondences and death and spirit symbolism). 

The claw of the Soucouyant and the bloody wound this double-dead vampire makes in John’s shoulder recall (in the way in which, in dreams, objects symbolise other objects) the cursed rebar at the scene of Dean’s own death:

Then there’s the beautiful, slow sequence of Darla’s hunter’s funeral with Judy Collin’s “Joan of Arc” (1971) (written by Leonard Cohen) playing in the background. We don’t know Darla, but the funeral is given great emotional depth. Her body is prepared, and she is wrapped in white and tied with yellow cord. The scene is shot in golden light, with long lingering sorrow. And the song, about Joan of Arc’s death, is couched in the metaphor of a marriage:

"Then fire, make your body cold, I'm going to give you mine to hold," saying this she climbed inside to be his one, to be his only bride. And deep into his fiery heart he took the dust of Joan of Arc, and high above the wedding guests he hung the ashes of her wedding dress.“

And what has Narrator-Dean already explicitly told us? He’s picking the music. 

This funeral really recalls the funeral for Castiel in SPN 13x01 Lost and Found - the way Dean prepared Castiel’s body, wrapping it in white and tying it with the torn yellow curtains. In his heart, it was a funeral for his husband; that’s what The Winchesters’ Narrator-Dean’s song choice here suggests (as if we didn’t already know, Dean):

And oh look, there is a freaking (Soucouyant) hand-print on the barn door to the right of Tracy!

Which of course recalls the significance of Castiel’s own death hand-print on Dean in SPN 15x18 Despair:

And in this episode, Losy is wearing a necklace that says “Love” in 1960s lettering (recalling Cas’ dying “I love you” confession to Dean). But (hello wish-fulfillment for Dean’s subconscious) Carlos manages to get a date with his crush, Anton, (not a funeral):

And is that a statue of Michael and Lucifer locked in combat on the left there by the window?!?! Why, yes, yes it is, Dean’s subconscious:

There’s an Ankh symbol on the chest behind John in the post-possession talk he has with Mary. The Ankh is the Egyptian hieroglyph known as the “key of life” which had enormous significance for the passage of the soul after death to eternal afterlife:

There is also a triquetra symbol in Tracy’s house. The triquetra is a Celtic symbol which is sometimes understood to symbolise the cycle of birth, death and rebirth:

These symbols of life after death, and of life, death and rebirth, fit with my earlier 1x06 meta musing on Narrator-Dean as being in the liminal state between dying and rebirth (known as the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism).  

All of which is to say, that one way we can read The Winchesters is as a dream-like sequence where God-Narrator Dean re-mixes things of deep emotional significance to him. And this episode, read that way, seems to be a re-mix in particular of the scene of Dean’s own death in 15x20, and his painful experiences of Castiel’s deaths in 13x01 and 15x18.

NB: This reading does not promise a Dean/ Cas reunion - this level of The Winchesters’ narrative is subtextual (no surprises there - hello subtext my old friend) and will probably remain there.  

Something about Losy’s van feels really familiar:

It’s the same colours as that ubiquitous orange rug which showed up repeatedly in Supernatural (here it is in 10x01 Black):

Back in the day, many folks wrote meta about that rug, and we often associated it with Castiel, or with the presence of angels, so much so that it has its own Superwiki entry now!:

http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/Braided_rug 

Losy and Lata do feel like angels to me, but the actual benevolent kind, rather than the controlled or rebellious angels of Chuck’s universe. Lata and Losy are both much more emotionally intelligent and open than John and Mary are able to be. 

Kinda fascinated by the monster-anatomy x-ray images very prominently in-shot behind Tracy here. 

What do they look like (from left to right)?

1) Angel with wings

2) Skull 

3) A foreign object in the gut (front shot)

3) A foreign object in the gut (side shot)

Just some of the shots that caught my eye where the cinematography plays with reflections, in thematic keeping with the narrative.

Mary framed by window reflections in blue light which give the appearance she has angel wings:

Rockin’ Roxy the Akrida Leader, in reflection in Losy’s van as she lays claim to the Ostium, which we now know is a trans-dimensional portal (portal shot to match): 

Mary seen through a port-hole window as they track the Akrida looking for the Queen:

Lata and Losy lit by light reflecting down from the windows and the candelabra lights either side (highlighting them as the angelic beings they are) in Ada’s bookshop-lair where she (hello Dean’s mind) keeps a pool table:

Enjoy 15x14 Last Holiday everyone. 

Look forward to catching up tomorrow.

I just watched 15x13 Destiny’s Child (missed it at the end of last run). 

This shot is a lovely piece of visual subtext, which really encapsulates where the romantic subtext between Dean and Cas lies.* 

I’m sure you all pondered it at the time (I was away from Tumblr dealing with IRL stuff during original airdate). 

Double rainbow doors placed side by side, as if inviting Dean and Cas to walk through together. Their marriage of Heaven and Earth presided over by a triptych, bearing the Son of God in the middle, as their own (angel-human hybrid) son returns from Eden with his soul. 

It’s Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve. 

And goddammit - I just realised Bobbo gave Cas the perfect alias, in “Steve”, in 9x06 Heaven Can’t Wait.

*usual disclaimer - reading the subtext doesn’t claim or imply it’s gonna break cover...

Just watched the ep, so catching up British time as usual. And there is SO much going on in Meghan Fitzmartin’s lovely episode, but I had to note the alchemical symbolism first.

In alchemy, the rooster is associated with the phoenix, so with rebirth and rising from the ashes:

“The rooster’s crow heralds the solar logos, the Christ force which resurrects because of the solar power of sacrifice and love.”

http://www.gnosticmuse.com/meaning-of-the-rooster-alchemy/ 

Then we have the orange of Room 214: 

And the matching green of Room 219:

Major Arcana Tarot Card 14 - in the Crowley Harris Deck - Art (representing alchemical synthesis)

Major Arcana Tarot Card 19 in the Crowley Harris Deck - The Sun (representing light, a new dawn etc.)

Renaissance art made use of alchemical colour symbolism, like this:

“In GrŸnewald's Resurrection (c.1515), the alchemical significance of vermilion may have been put to use in the picture itself. The union of alchemical Sulphur and Mercury in the perfect proportions produces the Philosopher's Stone, often known as the Red King (for it was reputed to be red). GrŸnewald shows Christ as a Red King robed in vermilion, surrounded by an extraordinary halo of orange and green light-spiritual perfection encoded in the very material of the painting.”

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-resurrection-of-christ-from-the-right-wing-of-the-isenheim-altarpiece-matthias-grunewald.html 

Remember in the Jungian take on alchemy the SPN writers’ room is drawing on, alchemy is symbolic of the evolution and integration of internal psychic forces.

Hi Everyone, catching up UK time as ever, and looking forward to all your posts!

Here’s my first bit of musing on the ep...

This is the final shot of 15x05 -  the curtains of Chuck’s “play” (now visible to us and to the Winchesters) framing the scene:

So now, the Winchesters know what we’ve already guessed. 

This is it - they either follow Chuck’s script, in which one of them, inevitably, kills the other, or they’re going to have to fight God.

As this is the “reveal” episode, in which the Winchesters learn they are not, in fact, “free to move on” (as Dean said, albeit miserably, in 15x04) Yockey has a lot of fun with the “All the world’s a stage” metanarrative quality of the text (from Shakespeare’s As You Like It): 

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts..”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-worlds-a-stage

By resurrecting Lilith and sending her to undertake the reveal, Chuck is taunting Sam and Dean with the (apparent) inevitability of their “fate” - a Swan Song redux, but Chuck’s way this time. No wonder he wanted Cas out of the picture, as it was significantly thanks to Cas’ input that things went sideways for Chuck’s narrative back in S4/5 (the era of Lilith).  

Chuck’s “old script” versions of the brothers (particularly Dean) is very apparent, from their baby-faced historical fake IDs, a nod to Kripke’s original pitch for the show (a Luke Skywalker and a Hans Solo type-pairing) and his ridiculously out of date vison of Dean’s sexuality. We know present-Dean is not gonna seduce a traumatised girl who’s just suffered a werewolf attack that killed her best friends and who is barely in her twenties (plus we know who Dean’s heart really belongs to) but Chuck wants his fantasy of Dean as Valentine’s-Day-is-drifter-Christmas back.  

Lilith also overtly spells out the SPN narrative’s use of parallels, when she declares (again to Dean) that the Winchesters had to see one werewolf brother kill the other because, “You know - foreshadowing.” Lilith is (in fact, against her own will) God’s messenger on the side of Fate.

Yockey thus invites us to consider the other parallels in the episode (and SPN at large) like the three best friends at the start of the episode, who can be read as mirrors for Team Free Will:

 One of the girls, Ashley (the one who, sort of, survives as Lilith’s vessel) has “a philosophy degree” but “drives an Uber” and is being left behind by the other two (who have found “good” jobs after graduating from college). A philosophy degree but drives an Uber? Sounds like a pretty good (Chuck) description of an angel who spends his time on the earthly plane, right? And a split in their threesome, followed by the death of two, leaving the traumatised philosophy degree major alone? We can see this as Chuck’s-way-of-fate foreshadowing (Cas is split from Sam and Dean, the Winchesters die, Cas is left alone to mourn them). 

Of course, the theme of hearts continues strongly, from Belphegor’s “heart spell” re-referenced in the recap opener, to the werewolf brothers’ penchant for eating hearts, to the Biblical Proverbs 17:3 reference in the title: 

“The refining pot is for silver and the furnace for gold, But the Lord tryeth the hearts”.

And look at the fairytale cabin in the woods where the two werewolf brothers live, with the little hearts on the shutters:

 But, it was actually the bear and lion and deer/ stag motifs I wanted to discuss in this post, which are in part connected to the heart symbolism.

A “hart” is a medieval word for a stag (deer). So we could argue there is a connection between the heart symbolism and the deer symbolism.

When Ashley is startled by a noise in the forest at the start of the episode, her companions reassure her it was “just a deer”.

When the Winchesters meet the town’s Sheriff (with her “I am the Sheriff” mug - which we can read as more Chuck-taunting to highlight the fact the Winchesters are in a script/ more Yockey metanarrative fun) she has a stuffed stag’s head on the wall behind her:

In the werewolves’ cabin there are lots of mounted deer antlers on the walls (one of which Lilith eventually deliberately gores herself with):

Then there’s the wallpaper in the motel which the Winchesters take Ashley to (by then Lilith!Ashley). See the antlered stag on the right:

Because we know Chuck has significant control of the narrative at the moment, and because of the hint in the episode title to consider Chuck’s first great work, before he wrote The Winchester Gospels - the Bible (as Proverbs 17:3 it is a reference to a Biblical proverb) it seems like a good idea to look up the significance of stags/ deer in the Bible, right?

And guess where they appear? In the Song of Solomon, that most emotive of love poems:

“My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Behold, he is standing behind our wall, He is looking through the windows....

Turn, my beloved, and be like a gazelle Or a young stag on the mountains of Bether ...“

The stag/ deer is also a long-standing medieval symbol of the hunt. 

So I interpret the deer/ stag symbolism as partly about the fact that the Winchesters are effectively being “hunted” by God. But also (through the connection to the heart symbolism - hart/ heart) a note in the subtext about the state of Dean’s heart in particular right now (i.e. ripped out, just as the werewolves ripped out the hearts of their victims) because of his break-up with Cas, which, in case, we missed it, was overtly referenced in the recap opener of the episode.

Now let’s talk about the bear and the mountain lion symbolism. 

As the Winchesters are talking to the Sheriff about whether the girls’ murders were animal attacks, they discuss the public theory that it was either a mountain lion or a “psychotic bear”. And look - the Sheriff is literally flanked by a stuffed lion and a stuffed bear (more Chuck/ Yockey metanarrative fun):

Now, where do lions and bears appear in the Bible?

Ah yes - in the story of David and Goliath. 

This is David, pleading to be allowed to go up against the giant Goliath:

"'Your servant has killed lions and bears; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, for he has defied the armies of the living God.’  David said, moreover; ‘”The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine.’"  

(1 Samuel 17:35/7 King James Bible)

What a perfect Biblical reference - because the Winchesters going up against God himself? That’s a quintissential David vs Goliath story.

And, to return to the heart/ hart subtext, David in the story of David and Goliath is the same David in the story of David and Jonathan (also in the Book of Samuel).  David and Jonathan had a love “surpassing the love of women”, which has been read by some latter day scholars as a depiction of homoromantic/ homoerotic love.  

I don’t know if you remember, but there was, in fact, a textual SPN reference to The Book of Samuel in 14x19 Jack in the Box, when Pastor Ames asked the congregation he was visiting, “So, who’s ready to take on The Book of Samuel?”

Foreshadowing is a thing - hasn’t Yockey just told us?

I wrote a meta about the Dean/ Cas subtext of Book of Samuel reference at the time:

https://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/184308630909/so-whos-ready-to-take-on-the-book-of-samuel

So deer (hart/ hearts), bears and lion symbolism brings us to the Song of Solomon, one of the greatest love poems in the world, and to another book of the Bible, The Book of Samuel, which:

a) Is called the Book of Samuel!!! A reference to the key role Sam will likely play in defeating Chuck thanks to their connection through the God-wound

b) Contains the story of David and Goliath where the little guy (the Winchesters) goes up against the big guy (God)

c) Contains the story of David and Jonathan - a story of a deep and abiding soul-bond between two men...  

All seems.... highly relevant to the SPN endgame. 

What a lovely tapestry of an episode. 

Gah, I’ve been thinking about that little graffiti fish on the stone bench Dean is sitting on. 

It looks a bit mecha, like one of those fish-machines in The Matrix, which fits with the “Atomic Monsters” theme of the episode title.

But, of course, it also made me think of the rich symbolic grammar of fish in SPN, and therefore of Castiel.

I’ll have to dig out some of my fish meta.

Here we go. 

I’m re-mixing/ quoting from this meta here:

https://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/157376279084/holy-and-unholy-families-in-12x12-stuck-in-the

Fish sometimes stand for humans and sometimes for angels in Supernatural’s metaphorical repertoire, but always for angel/ human convergence.

”Don’t step on that fish, Castiel. Big plans for that fish” (The Man Who Would Be King, 6x20).

“I love that fish” (Dean about Finding Dory/ Castiel) in Regarding Dean, 12x11.

In 10x01 Black, we meet the angel Daniel, who has “gone fishing”, both literally, and figuratively, in terms of his desire to remain on earth rather than return to Heaven following Metatron’s big “angel fall” spell. Castiel and Daniel have that lovely metaphor-laden discussion about fishing:

Castiel - “Daniel, what are you fishing for?”

Daniel - “Trout, mostly…”

Castiel - “Do they put up much of a fight?”

Daniel - “The ones who truly want to be free…” 

And 12x12 Stuck in the Middle With You, is the episode in which Ramiel Prince of Hell (who has also “gone fishing” - as in gone AWOL from Heaven and Hell) stabs Cas with his fishing spear; a metaphor for Cas being pierced with love. This, remember, is the episode in which Cas tells the Winchesters: “I love you, I love all of you...” 

So, in 15x04, an episode in which the glaring negative space of Castiel (after the Dean/ Cas break-up of 15x03 The Rupture) is highlighted by Becky’s metanarrative commentary, this little graffiti fish is another, symbolic reminder of Cas. 

Castiel, who has struggled so hard to be free of Heaven’s control, a struggle which has often been symbolised by fish. 

Castiel: “Explaining freedom to angels is a bit like teaching poetry to fish”  (6x20 The Man Who Would Be King).

Despite this struggle with his bretheren, Castiel himself did “learn poetry”. He learned to be free.

Cas knows that him and Dean are “real” (15x02 Raising Hell) because it was his connection to Dean that gave him the strength to rebel successfully and finally against Heaven. 

Castiel learned the poetry of free will from Dean.