Supernatural: Hook Man pt 2
Images borrowed from here because my efforts to screencap anything would be laughable.
Lori: I know this is your first time really living alone since Mom died.
Reverend Sorensen: That’s not it. I worry about you.
Lori: There are 22 girls in there! I’m perfectly safe.
Reverend Sorensen: That’s exactly what I’m worried about. You don’t think I know what goes on in there?
Lori: Dad, do we have to have this argument again? I’m over 18. I can live my own life.
Reverend Sorensen: Oh, which means drinking, partying with that roommate of yours!
Lori: I’m an adult. I can take care of myself. Good night.
…
Sam: Why would the Hook Man come here? This is a long way from Nine Mile Road.
Dean: Maybe he’s not haunting the scene of his crime. Maybe it’s about something else. Dude, sorority girls! Think we’ll see a naked pillow fight? … Oh, sorry!
Sam: Be quiet.
Dean: You be quiet!
Sam: You be quiet! … ‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?’ That’s right out of the legend.
Dean: Yeah, that’s classic Hook Man all right.
Meanwhile, Lori arrives back at her university lodgings late in the evening, apparently having skipped the ‘girls’ night in’ to spend time with her father. And now we see where at least some of Lori’s problems come from. Her father seems to have fetishized the idea of university living to the point where he would prefer that his daughter not just spend time with him, but come home to live with him, where she will be safe from the things he’s imagining. When Sam and Dean, having extricated themselves from the grasp of the police, arrive on the scene the next morning to continue their investigation, Dean will express a hope that they will ‘see a naked pillow fight’ in the girls’ house. He’s clearly joking - manic grin, silly voice and all - but Reverend Sorensen doesn’t seem to be. Undoubtedly the students do drink at least a little since Taylor references tequila, and probably they have parties on occasion, but, while Reverend Sorensen may not be imagining them randomly cavorting naked, he seems to think that the 22 students with whom Lori shares a home have nothing better to do with their time than work on corrupting his daughter with their … fun. When Lori goes inside, the absurdity of her father’s notions becomes clear: it’s Sunday night, these people probably have classes in the morning. She finds her housemates quiet, studying, and the infamous Taylor is already sleeping - a real threat to the moral fabric of society there. It’s no wonder Lori is confused. Her father is making loud, angry noises about problems that don’t exist. The girls she lives with may be riotous sometimes, but none of them seem to be imperilling their futures with alcoholism and a failure to study. What Lori’s housemates tell her is normal, her father tells her is dangerously immoral behaviour; what Lori’s father says is normal, her roommates see as bizarrely puritanical behaviour. Her religious upbringing has distorted her views of the way other people live. Her connection with Sam, whose eyes she has been meeting across crowded spaces for much of the episode so far, is clear: in his world, going to university was marching off into exile because his father’s lifestyle did not admit higher education; his idea of ‘normal’ is almost a fairy tale, based on everything his life isn’t … and not necessarily matching up very well with the decidedly peculiar lives many supposedly normal people actually lead. To Sam, Lori Sorensen is ‘normal’: university student, respectable family background, firm roots in her hometown. But Lori doesn’t feel normal to Lori.
After a failed effort to wake Taylor, Lori goes to bed … and awakens in the morning to find her roommate dead and the phrase ‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?’ scrawled on her bedroom wall. And … No. Just no. No matter how many times I watch this, I cannot make sense of any of it. I wish somebody would explain this sequence to me, because I just don’t get it.
First, when Sam and Dean see the writing on the wall, they will insist that this is ‘classic Hook Man’ … but I don’t think this story has anything to do with the Hook Man or its sister legends. Those are anti-sex stories, about young people who seek the privacy of secluded areas to be together and are punished (or at the very least threatened) by psychopaths who lurk in the woods. The message is clear: stay at home where your parents can see you (and also stop you from having sex!). ‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?’ belongs to a completely different body of legends - there’s a similar one about a person who believes that their pet dog has licked their hand, when actually that tongue belonged to an intruder lurking under the bed. There’s no particular censure in these stories - the girls don’t seem to have done anything particularly risky; they’re just unlucky, and unprotected. These stories are about the fear of living away from one’s childhood home for the first time, with no ‘adults’ around to look after you. I can see how this story applies to Lori, but not at all what it has to do with the Hook Man - and tacking on a moral judgement about Taylor’s lifestyle doesn’t automatically make it make sense.
Second, the sequence of events here just makes no sense. Lori does turn on the light - the bathroom light which, while it might not have been bright enough to wake Taylor, is good enough to see by. And I am quite certain that the point of ‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?’ is that when the heroine of the story comes home, her roommate is already dead. Had she turned on the light, she would have seen evidence of the murder and raised the alarm, and the killer would have been forced to kill her to silence her (he doesn’t appear to want to do her harm - one dead girl is enough for him). But light or no light, both the audience and Lori herself can see well enough to tell that Taylor is alive and well when she comes in the door - they take care to show her shifting in her sleep, so there can be no possible doubt. In the morning, Taylor is obviously dead: bloody and sprawled, her eyes wide open. If Lori had turned on the light the night before, she would have seen nothing amiss; the murder obviously happened while she was sleeping. Nor do I understand why Karns would care whether Lori saw him or not; he’s a ghost, if it bothers him he can just be invisible - and it’s not as though she or any of the other girls in the house could do anything to stop him. No. I just don’t get it. This was written, discussed, filmed, edited and at no point did anybody say ‘Wait, what?’ I must be missing something.
Oddities aside, Taylor’s murder has clearly taken Lori’s internal conflict to the next level. You could reasonably argue that Rich’s behaviour was genuinely creepy - taking his date to an isolated spot and disregarding her objections to his groping - but Taylor has harmed no one. She has encouraged Lori to participate in the activities of her housemates, but she hasn’t forced her to do anything. Rather, she is the unfortunate victim of Lori’s anger at her father. Reverend Sorensen has constructed an image of Taylor as a worrying dissolute; Lori, raised on his views, has little choice but to agree … even if she has strong suspicions that the truth is more complicated than that. Instead of arguing that Taylor is not immoral, she lashes out rebelliously: she’ll have debauched friends and be debauched herself if she wants to! Since she can’t work out how to change her father’s mind, she ultimately (if subconsciously) deals with the problem by eliminating Taylor - with her gone, there is no conflict as she is left with only one point of view. You sometimes see similar behaviour from Sam, lashing out at Dean because John is beyond his reach and disinclined to listen to him anyway; Dean offers a different point of view about what they should do about John’s absence - but he isn’t responsible for the situation in which they find themselves. But this has not (yet) gone as far as murderous rage and isn’t strongly addressed in Hook Man anyway, so these seem to be free-floating character parallels; it could be more tightly plotted, but I get the general idea. I still don’t understand the scene, though.
Sam: I heard you guys fighting before.
Lori: He’s seeing a woman - a married woman. I just found out. She comes to our church with her husband. I know her kids! And he talks to me about religion? About morality? It’s like, on the one hand, you know, just do what you want and be happy. But he taught me - raised me - to believe that if you do something wrong you get punished. I just don’t know what to think anymore.
…
Lori: Sam?
Sam: Lori, I can’t.
Lori: That someone you lost? … I’m sorry.
Reverend Sorensen: Lori? Come inside, please.
Lori: I’ll come in when I’m ready!
The Hook Man scratches the same symbol on Lori’s bedroom wall that Jacob Karns wore on his hook, both confirming his identity as Karns and strongly suggesting that he is stalking Lori - so Dean goes out to locate and destroy the body, whereas Sam is tasked with keeping an eye on Lori herself - now at home with her dad; at this point, having in the meantime uncovered Karns’s past history of haunting religious leaders, they assume that Lori’s father is directing the murders in an effort to shield his daughter from things he believes are immoral. Dean is unbelievably lucky: the supposedly ‘unmarked’ grave in which Karns has been buried turns out to bear his trademark cross on the headstone after all, so while the digging is undeniably arduous, Dean has no trouble. Things go downhill pretty quickly for Sam, though, when Lori spots him lurking inexpertly outside and comes out to chat.
For a start, she describes this behaviour as ‘sweet’, which is the very last thing it is. As the audience, we know that Sam’s behaviour, if a trifle inept, is necessary: he and Dean are the only ones who understand what is going on here and it is their responsibility to stop it. Sam is the equivalent of a cop on a stakeout - watching for trouble. He’d do this for anybody, not just Lori, because this is part of his job. From Lori’s point of view, this situation ought to be creepy: a man she’s just met, who’s popped up shortly after both the murders she’s witnessed, has now started hanging around outside her house and staring in the window at her. In what way could this possibly be a good thing? But Lori has no idea of what constitutes ‘normal’, and her attraction to Sam is based on his attitude of forlorn oddness; she senses another conflicted, kindred spirit. For all she knows, nice boys are supposed to stalk the objects of their affection - but while she’s right about Sam being nice, she’s completely wrong about his intentions.
And now we come as close as we’re ever going to get to doing the actual Hook Man legend. Lori explains that she and her father were arguing because she has just discovered he is having an affair with a married woman - nicely ironic, considering the things he was complaining about in her life; she then decides to act on her attraction to Sam but he, still grieving for Jessica, pushes her away. Reverend Sorensen emerges from the house to plead with Lori - and she, still angry, sets the ghost on him; only the fact that Sam came armed to fight ghosts saves his life.
In the Hook Man tale, a young couple have sought out a secluded spot to spend time together. While the boy is eager for sex, the girl refuses and insists on being taken home. Frustrated, the boy drives away in a hurry - and when they get home, they find that both his outburst and the girl’s reluctance have saved their lives: a hook belonging to a murderer is hanging from the doorhandle of their car, torn off him by their hurried exit. In Hook Man the Supernatural episode, the elements are all there: Lori has come out into the darkness to be alone with Sam, there is a romantic advance and a rejection, a hook-handed murderer and an outburst of frustration. But whereas the story of the dead boyfriend at the start of the episode was basically textbook, this one is twisted and complicated by the lives and personalities of the characters. It is Sam, not Lori, who is not ready to deal with sexual situations - and it is grief and fidelity, not bowing to the demands of an anti-sex culture, that guides his choice. Lori, like the boy in the story, is frustrated, but not especially at Sam - instead she vents her rage at her father, who has weighed her down with strictures even he isn’t inclined to obey, and who is nevertheless getting everything he wants when she can’t even get a kiss from the boy she likes. Like in the story, the ‘young lovers’ are spared - but here somebody else pays the price, and it’s not a doorhandle that hook digs into.
The complications of the scene expose Lori’s difficulty: her morality is not based on a well-thought-out personal philosophy or system of ethics. Rather, she has been taught a series of ‘dos and do nots’ based on her father’s religious beliefs - and they’re not serving her at all well in making choices. She’s attacked three times, for a variety of reasons: Rich’s behaviour was not exactly stellar, Taylor was an innocent who hurt no one, and there are too many potential variables in and too little information on Reverend Sorensen’s situation to make a judgement on whether what he’s doing is wrong or not - although in any case you could go after him for hypocrisy. When Lori rants about her father, her remarks suggest a fear of a loss of social standing: these people attend her church, she knows their kids. You can practically hear the ‘What will the neighbours say?’ behind her words. She does not ask whether any harm is being done, or if it is at least being minimised - to her, ‘doing what makes you happy’ and ‘doing the right thing’ are mutually exclusive options, because she is hedged in by arbitrary restrictions. She doesn’t know what is right. She doesn’t know what is normal. All she knows is whether or not something is on the list of ‘do nots’, and she is baffled by her mixed feelings on the matter. Hook Man, then, is a cautionary tale about cautionary tales: do not rely too much on the simplistic morality of urban legends (or religious doctrine), because the real world doesn’t work like that at all and - as Lori is finding out - you probably wouldn’t like it very much if it did. It links neatly both into Dean’s insistence on framing his moral ideas around what John would think, and Sam’s desperate belief that ‘normal’ is in itself an ideal to strive for … but I think they could have done more to relate the matter back to the main characters than they do.
Dean: Okay … so she’s conflicted. And the spirit of Preacher Karns is latching onto the repressed emotions and maybe he’s doing the punishing for her?
Sam: Right: Rich comes on too strong; Taylor tries to make her into a party girl; Dad has an affair …
Dean: Remind me not to piss this girl off. But I burned those bones, I buried them in salt, why didn’t that stop him?
Sam: You must have missed something.
Dean: No, I burned everything in that coffin.
Sam: Did you get the hook?
Dean: The hook?
Sam: Well, it was the murder weapon, and in a way it was part of him.
Dean: … So, like the bones, the hook is a source of his power.
…
Sam: Does it mention the hook?
Dean: Yeah, maybe … ‘Upon execution, all earthly items shall be remanded to the prisoner’s house of worship, St Barnabas Church’.
Sam: Isn’t that where Lori’s father preaches?
Dean: Yeah.
Sam: Where Lori lives?
Dean: Maybe that’s why the Hook Man has been haunting reverends and reverends’ daughters for the past 200 years.
Sam: Yeah, but if the hook were at the church or Lori’s house, don’t you think someone would have seen it? I mean - a bloodstained, silver-handled hook?
Dean: Check the church records.
Sam: ‘St Barnabas donations, 1862. Received: silver-handled hook from state penitentiary; reforged’ … They melted it down, made it into something else.
The attack on Lori’s father, fairly obviously directed by Lori’s outrage, shifts the suspicion onto her - and Sam and Dean set about finding out why destroying Jacob Karns’s corpse didn’t stop him. In the wake of Bloody Mary, this conversation just looks awkward. There they discovered that Mary Worthington, despite being cremated, had attached her soul to the mirror in front of which she died and was using it as a conduit to go after the living. This surprised Sam and Dean not at all - in fact, it was the first thing they asked after once they learnt that her body had been burned. While I’m sure there are many good reasons for shifting episodes around, I think it’s probably a bad idea to move the ones that establish the basic world-building. It just makes it look as though our heroes can’t remember what happened a couple of weeks ago. I’m also a bit confused about this reforging business. The plan is to locate the thing that used to be Karns’s hook and melt it down … because the hook has already been melted down. That … seems a tad redundant. I realise that salt is usually a part of their destruction ritual, but they don’t seem to be being careful about applying salt when they’re melting down all the silverware, and the ghost is defeated at the moment the silver liquefies so … No, I give up. I’m just going to put this one on the list of things I wish someone would explain to me, along with the ‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?’ business.
Lori: I’ve been trying to understand what’s been happening. Why? Now I know so I’m praying for forgiveness.
Sam: Forgiveness for what?
Lori: Don’t you see? I’m to blame for all this. I’ve read in the Bible about avenging angels …
Sam: Trust me, this guy - he’s no angel.
Lori: I was so angry at my father. Part of me wanted him punished - and then he came and he punished him.
Sam: It’s not your fault.
Lori: Yes, it is. I don’t know how, but it is. I killed Rich. Taylor, too. I nearly killed my father.
Sam: Lori …
Lori: I can see it now. They didn’t deserve to be punished. I do.
…
Sam: Lori, where did you get that chain?
Lori: My father gave it to me.
Dean: Where did your dad get it?
Lori: He said it was a church heirloom; he gave it to me when I started school!
Sam: Is it silver?
Lori: Yes!
Since they have no idea what Karns’s hook has been reforged into, Sam and Dean decide that the best plan is to burn anything in Lori’s home that looks like it might be silver. While they’re doing this, Lori turns up, having picked the absolute worst moment to engage in a bit of soul searching. You could say that she’s halfway there - she’s stopped wishing judgement and punishment on other people for failing to adhere to one narrow set of rules. But she’s clearly not all the way there, because of what happens next: the Hook Man appears, this time intent on killing Lori herself. In examining her conscience, Lori has found herself guilty: she has envied other people their freedom while condemning them for their actions; she has characterised as ‘bad’ things that she has felt she would like to try herself. What she hasn’t done is realise that this whole game is rigged against her and everyone else, and she needs to try a new way of looking at the world. Throughout the story, Lori has struggled to find an identity for herself, caught between her father’s world and the world of her student friends. On different days and in different ways she has condemned both, even unfairly so … but what harm have her condemnations done? On their own, they were merely thoughts in the head of a confused and unhappy girl, or at worst a short argument with her father. It took Jacob Karns’s actions to make them abhorrent (and as an aside, Sam’s insistence that Karns is no angel is unintentionally hilarious, because Uriel would probably have found this funny, and Gabriel would definitely have found this funny), because that is why people are getting hurt. Lori is praying for forgiveness, although she has no idea what she has done wrong. So ironically, the thing she is doing wrong is praying at all - she’s relying on someone else to judge or save her, rather than thinking the situation through for herself and deciding how best to go on. She is attacked because she insists that some outside force should enforce morality for her, and that has to stop. Let’s all wave to Sam’s character foil for the episode. Although, given the weight of his problems, I think he might actually be less screwed up. Amazing.
A hurried conversation reveals that Lori’s crucifix necklace was almost certainly made out of Karns’s hook - and, well, of course. Under the circumstances, what else could it possibly have been? That does tell you everything you need to know about the people who run this church, though. Who the hell looks at a bloody murder weapon and thinks ‘That would make a nice piece of jewellery’? I suppose at least it wasn’t cutlery. Dean hurries off to destroy the necklace while Sam defends Lori from her tormentor - and when the crucifix melts into a formless puddle of silver, the Hook Man vanishes. Problem solved - more or less.
The story ends with an air of ambiguity. Lori has been saved from the ghost and liberated, if only in the most literal sense, from her chains. She remains, however, obviously confused and conflicted about what has happened to her - she doesn’t really understand what she has seen, and at no point did she really take action to save herself; even now, Lori is still following the script of an urban legend. We’ll never see her again, so we’ll never know if she was able to find her place in the world. In a way, that’s fitting, since the idea is that she has to do it for herself; there would hardly be any point in having Sam or Dean walk her through the process. We leave her as a reflection in the mirror: small, isolated and confused. What she does next is up to her. As for Sam, he has virtually nothing to say - just a single word in the entire scene. I think his hopeless silence here is actually a step back from the end of Skin, and it’s unfortunate that the episode order was changed; he is building towards his confession in Home, and this looks more like one of the first steps than one of the last - he's already had the consequences of demanding an external judgement for his actions demonstrated to him. Dean suggests that they stay a while, clearly hoping that a fling with Lori might lift his spirits. Linking back to Lori’s tragic date at the beginning of the episode, Sam quietly and uncomfortably refuses romantic entanglements. He is perfectly within his rights not to want that yet - and so soon after Jessica’s death I would be very surprised if he did; Dean lacks experience with long-term relationships - but like Lori he needs to start moving on and making choices about what to do next. He’s not going to have the luxury of silence for much longer - or people will get hurt.