#still subtext

The Winchesters of course is a relatively PG show, we’d probably label it (thus far) “mild drug references” (to weed), “light kissing”, and “some horror”.

However, the fact it is inhabited by insect aliens (the Akrida) invites musing on other insect-alien narratives and their resonances within the show.

“This is Mugwump, he specialises in sexual ambivalence” (Cronenberg, Naked Lunch, 1991):

 “We are all insects, groping towards something terrible or divine” 

Phillip K. Dick The Man in the High Castle. 

The prominent reference to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five in 1x01 Pilot, alerts us to the qualities of that narrative which may be relevant here; aliens (in Slaughterhouse Five, the Tralfamadorians), the impermanence of death (Tralfamadorians see space/time with non-linearity, in four dimensions, so just because you are dead at one point in time isn’t an “end of the road” moment for them) non-linear narrative, an unreliable narrator, the presence of the author/narrator in the story). All interesting resonances, regarding Narrator-Dean. 

The aliens in The Winchesters, the “cricket” Akrida, are able to possess human bodies, seemingly shapeshifting to look like humans in doing so, and they mind-control humans by pushing a stinger into their brain-stem. This kind of insect mind-control/ body-horror/ body-penetration, really made me think about Cronenberg’s film Naked Lunch (1991). 

Naked Lunch is based on William Burrough’s (1959) novel of that name (which is already semi-autobiographical) mixed in with events in Burrough’s own life. Burroughs of course, was a Beat Generation author, as well as being queer and a drug addict. His novel is very much not PG. 

Cronenberg’s film captures Burrough’s atmosphere of queer desire mixed with self-loathing/ internalised homophobia, very well. Remember, Burroughs was writing in 1959; everyone queer had internalised homophobia, that’s why we needed to develop a Pride narrative for ourselves. 

This queer desire/ queer horror is evident in the giant bug with a talking asshole on its back. It asks Bill, the main character (Burroughs’ avatar) to rub some of the yellow bug podwer on its “lips” (the rim of the asshole) and makes obscene noises of pleasure when Bill obliges: 

What the heck does that have to do with The Winchesters, you ask?

Well, in a much more PG way, we have the Ostium, which means, literally, “orifice in the human body”, the Men of Letters’ mystical box/ trans-dimensional portal which can blast the Akrida back to their alien home-world, and Carlos specifically joke-compares it to a sexual body “hole” in 1x07 Reflections:

Lata: “They call it the Ostium.” 

Carlos: “Oh. Latin for an opening in the body. What, didn't any of you guys ever go to Sunday School? So is that thing organic? Is it a mouth or...( chuckles ) any other kind of hole?” 

Lata: Let's just stick with a mouth, please. https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/viewtopic.php?f=1550&t=58479 

In Naked Lunch, the bug reappears, as a talking typewriter, and asks Bill to type the words “Homosexuality is the best all-around cover an agent ever had...” into it, and again, it makes obscene erotic noises of pleasure as he does so. 

Bill reveals his own  self-loathing/ ambivalence, telling another character he has a family “curse... I am a homosexual... impossible I am one of those simpering things... a wise old queen... told me I had a duty to live and bear witness..” 

Later, as Bill makes out with a woman, a giant centipede alien with a long fleshy appendage (cock) and a human-looking butt slithers out of another typewriter and appears to join their love-making. 

The Naked Lunch is a subterranean allusion in The Winchesters’ subtext. It’s not name-checked in the way Slaughterhouse -Five has been, which provides a clearer indication of authorial inter-textuality. 

However, there are some interesting resonances; insect to human body-horror penetration (Akrida stinger into the brain-stem) a talking asshole/ a mystical “body hole” portal (the Ostium). 

One more, being that in Burrough’s novel, and in Cronenberg’s film, much of the story takes place in “The Interzone”, which is partly an imaginary Morocco and partly Bill’s drug-fulled hallucinatory dream-world, but is, above all, a liminal space, which is symbolically representative of the space queer people in the 1950s inhabited, as “outlawed” subjects.

Narrator-Dean currently inhabits such liminal space himself, also in two senses:

1) We saw him die in 15x20, so he is, apparently, narrating from Heaven, or from the liminal space between dying and rebirth, as Holy Ghost Narrator Dean/ Dean’s soul in the Bardo (the space, as set out in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, between dying and reincarnation). 

2) Dean continues to inhabit a liminal space with regard to his queerness in the SPN/ Winchesters narrative. He may be bisexual in a thousand ways in the narrative subtext, and in its (romantic) narrative architecture, but a heterosexual interpretation (they were best friends/ brothers) remains possible.

Yup its Lovers Quarrel. I actually tried to search to see if this was a real book and well, there are lots of books with that title, but none with that cover that I could find. Though it’s always possible it was an old prop they had lying around.

However, because I like hypotheticals, and because nothing on this show is random, especially not an obvious prop like this, lets imagine for a second that they DID make this book cover up specifically for this episode, during this scene, in which shortly after Cas has to make an awkward call with his subtextual ex husband...

Who he is in the middle of an actual lovers quarrel with.

Hmm.

Like sometimes I think the production team put this stuff in here just to fuck with us on purpose. Like they found this old book lying around and thought LOL we’re using that. But these people do take this show which is their life’s work very seriously.

Those cake plates have been haunting me since 12.08 and by now they’ve warranted their own meta. I’m still not entirely sure what all this means, but it’s interesting. 

There has already been a ton of meta about Dean and cake and pie. How he generally prefers pie but he occasionally goes for cake and so on. Someone else is probably better versed in it than I am though.

So since 12.08, the Eldritch Diner has presented us 3 cake plates. Each with a baked good in them:

In 12.08, they were behind the counter, uncovered. They appeared to be a cake, and 2 pies. 

In 12.12, the cake plates are presented like this:

Edmund White’s novel of that name, is about growing up gay in 1950s America. It ends with the protagonist and his lover at the Stonewall riots. But, when they check the morning papers the next day, after their momentous experiences from the night before, there is no mention of those queer events in the news.

So it goes…  comrades, veterans in the subtextual trenches of Supernatural.

Was it bold to dream that the rubber horror mask could be ripped off, to fully reveal the queer romance between an Angel of the Lord and the outward embodiment of nostalgic, alienated, rebel road-trip, all-American masculinity?

It was, my dear queers and fellow-traveller dreamers. It was.  

That holy blasphemy may have had its tongue cut out; it may not appear in the papers, but those of us who were there? We lived it; we will always have lived it.  

And so, Dabb tells us, (by means of a final mirror-monster) - more than a hundred years after the Wilde trials, there is, still, a love that dare not speak its name, in a Biblical fan-fiction genre-show, about heroic, monster-killing brothers-in-arms.

But what lies beneath, in that place of narrative in-dwelling which we have haunted in this story together?

Beneath the rubber mask, is another, familiar, monstrous visage. The final villain is a vampire; that rich repository of sublimated queerness in gothic fiction, since Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Dean tells us that the masks are, “Bad Wes Craven porn.”

Scream (1996) is a metanarrative text which invites us to reflect on the conventions of the genre it draws from.      

In my wish-list for the finale, I wanted a quote from Kerouac’s On the Road.

The entire episode is a quote from On the Road.

If Supernatural is a metanarrative text about masculine American road-trip mythology, which Kerouac burned into the consciousness of Boomer rebel youth; then, sublimated homoeroticism is the prima materia of the romance of homosocial bonding, in the masculine frontiers of the American imagination.

Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, holy bums on the open road.

Sam’s sweet hetero life is a hazy mirage with a nameless, faceless woman on the porch.

While Dean waits on a parallel porch at Harvelle’s, in the New Heaven, for both his true loves to return to him.

Dean: “It’s almost perfect…”

Bobby: “He’ll be along…”

The doubling structure, inherent in the Supernatural narrative to The End, allows the audience to choose which, “he”; Castiel or Sam.

Sam is the surface text reading, because we see the Winchester brothers reunited in Heaven, at last.

Castiel, who became queer subtext half-manifested, in his “coming out” speech in 15x18, must remain in the final fan-fiction gap.

Love and…. love.

In Heaven, the heart is a lonely hunter.

This is a queer story written in the old language (visible to some, invisible to others, by design) and so, it contains old pain.  

If you speak your queer truth, the emptiness will come for you.

Beat God and the Devil, but you can’t, really, truly, escape your (queer) trauma; death becomes you.

The glass closet remains. 

But we must remember that queer poets are freer than queer television writers.

So, I’ll close, not with Kerouac (also subject to the censor’s pen) but with Ginsburg’s Howl:

“Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…

…who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim”

These are the words I found, for now. 

Hi everyone,

I am late to the party as usual, and I haven’t jumped into the Tumblr hive mind yet.

First of all, I know this episode will have felt very painful to many of you, because of Cas’ absence and Dean’s contained grief. 

Look, those fuckers in the writers’ room are toying with us. Dean running up to the door to greet Cas, only to find The Devil instead? A deliberate twist in the narrative negative space, which screams in the story (lovers parted, and surely reunited). 

This episode does a lot of heavy lifting, in that it both serves as a “Brothers Only” ending for certain audience segments (who can, perhaps, depending on what happens, forever pretend 15x20 didn’t take place) and also, I surmise, for certain audience markets, whilst, at the same time, undercutting that ending (15x19) as sad, lonely and cheesy [that montage at the end, lol]. 

The visual narrative, which has always been one of SPN’s best features, had plenty to say of interest, so I thought I’d start there, with an angels and mothers theme.

Chuck’s empty world contains this shot of New York, which depicts a rainbow on the right, and on the left, a billboard which reads, “Switch, and get 100% total satisfaction”, whilst the billboard in the middle, for Coke, reads “Staying apart is the best way to stay united.” 

Cryptic, huh? But accidents don’t just happen accidentally. 

An LGBT rainbow, first off.  “Switching” could refer to bisexuality, but it also refers, perhaps, to a double ending structure, i.e. 15x19 and 15x20 as endings you can “switch”, in which case, “Staying apart is the best way to stay united”, could be understood as commentary on the two ancient SPN fandom strands (Bronlies and Destiellers) which a double ending structure seeks to accommodate. 

In that case Chuck (meaning the writers’ room) really is (as they told us themselves, via a reconstitued Lilith, in 15x05 Proverbs 17:3) a “low rent Dean Koontz”. I wrote about the possibility of a double-ending structure here, in relation to that Dean Koontz comment:

https://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/189090087949/hes-more-of-a-low-rent-dean-koontz-15x05

Next visual narrative marker (in my mothers and angels theme) was this shot of Dean next to the Margiekugel beer, which, as all the crazy and marvellous SPN beer meta writers taught us, is the beer associated with mothers in SPN. Dean as a nurturing figure here, yes, but I remain convinced we will see Mary Winchester again in 15x20. That would fit beautifully with Dabb’s Ouroboros narrative, because Amara resurrected Mary, and now, Amara is part of Jack-the Divine-Unity, and he [as her, apparent, killer] would surely wish to bring happiness to his adopted Winchester family by restoring her again:

Oh look, a Mary figure in the Michael church:

And an angel besides:

 Which recalls Mary’s line, long ago, in 5x13 The Song Remains the Same, spoken to baby Dean in-the-womb,  “Angels are watching over you.” Which now, resonates emotively back into the story, in a new way, through Castiel’s final, loving, sacrifice for Dean in 15x18 Despair. 

This shot was also interesting - Route 66:

On one level, this is a visual joke about one of Bucklemming’s (also the writers of 15x19′s) most joked about SPN episodes, 1x13 Route 666, otherwise known as the “racist truck” episode. I actually think that characterisation of the ep is a little unfair - it at least tried to tackle the horror of historic racism, albeit with a rather ridiculous horror show twist. 

BUT, on another level, that episode contains Dean’s lover, Cassie. And Cassie  has been read by many, as equated (by naming elision) with Castiel, in the show’s narrative subtext. So, we can (if we choose) read this sign as another poignant, subtextual, reminder of absent Castiel, in 15x19. 

Then we have this shot, of Dean by the “Men” and “Ladies” doors at this gas station, choosing “Men”:

Yes, of course he’s chosing “Men”, Silverfish - he’s going to the loo (I’m British). 

Neverthless, this kind of visual, symbolic, bisexual coding of Dean, is also a deliberate Ouroboros in the narrative, because Dean has been coded as bisexual, in the show’s visual and symbolic subtext, since S1:

https://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/115161057824/bisexual-in-the-subtext-since-s1

 And now? Now that the Winchesters are free of Chuck’s control, at last? Chuck, for whom Castiel’s rebellion, and Castiel’s love, for Dean, was never part of the story? 

Ah, well, that’s still to play for. 

Dean’s character is, in my view, at this point, still structured by the narrative glass closet (meaning, his queerness is visible to some, invisible to others, by design); a doubling structure. 

What even, are Adam and Seraphina?

Are they sacred, are they profane?

Well, they are, apparently, magic mushroom tea-tripping, cosmic hippies; the first man Chuck created, and an angel, in an intimate relationship. 

This is not like the intimate relationship we learned that Benjamin the angel shared with Madrid, the woman who had consented to be his vessel, in 12x10 Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets. That relationship was depicted as loving, and profound, but whether it had an erotic or romantic component was obscured. It was certainly a different, and more consensual and shared, take on the possession of a vessel, from poor Jimmy Novak’s description of being possessed by Castiel as like being “chained to a comet” (4x20 The Rapture). 

The text in 15x17 Unity doesn’t leave us in any doubt that the relationship between Adam and Seraphina (who do not share a vessel) is an erotic and romantic relationship. Adam refers to Seraphina as his “Old Lady” (a known synonym for wife) and there’s some on-screen, physical, foreplay:

We don’t know whether there is a human soul also inside the vessel Seraphina inhabits. The text provides no insight into that.

Adam and Seraphina are, apparently, in a Bonnie and Clyde, millennia-old, lovers’ pact to kill God, and they will get bloody to do it:

Seraphina wounds Adam, and then she heals him:

They donate Adam’s rib, imbued with divine spark, to Jack, as an ingredient which will, apparently, fuse his soul and his grace into a “metaphysical supernova… a living black hole for divine energy.”

Remember all the times Cas has healed a bloodied Dean? Of course you do...  Like this time, in 5x22 Swan Song?

Remember when Cas carved warding sigils onto Dean’s (and Sam’s) ribs, in 5x01 Sympathy for the Devil? Of course you do...

Cas: “They're Enochian sigils. They'll hide you from every angel in creation, including Lucifer." Dean: "What? You just branded us with it?!" Cas: "No, I carved in to your ribs.”

But are Adam and Seraphina entirely creations of Chuck’s pen? 

Are they Chuck’s twisted, sarcastic, mirror of Dean and Cas, held up before Dean’s eyes in order to confuse the hell out of him, because Chuck is so pissed that Dean and Cas, of their own free will (and outside of Chuck’s control) formed a “profound bond” which has disrupted his narrative?

Are they Glynn’s mirror of Dean and Cas, held up before the audience’s eyes (or rather, before the eyes of a certain audience fraction, clued in to reading SPN’s narrative mirroring structure, and willing to do so, in relation to Dean and Cas)?

Well, they are both; and that doubling structures the narrative closet.