omg I did the thing
...and it is so not the thing you were expecting.
Password: thechosenone
Woke Up This Morning (Supernatural vid) from Ella Pea on Vimeo.
You woke up this morning
Got yourself a gun
Mama always said you’d be
The Chosen One.
She said: You’re one in a million
You’ve got to burn to shine
But you were born under a bad sign
With a blue moon in your eyes.
You woke up this morning
All the love has gone
Your Papa never told you
About right and wrong.
But you’re looking good, baby,
I believe you’re feeling fine,(show nobody),
Born under a bad sign
With a blue moon in your eyes.
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
(So sad Goddamn,Goddamn shame about it)
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
You woke up this morning
The world turned upside down,
Thing’s ain’t been the same
Since the Blues walked into town.
But you’re one in a million
You’ve got that shotgun shine.
Born under a bad sign, shame about it
With a blue moon in your eyes.
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
(So sad Goddamn,Goddamn shame about it)
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
Just can't help yourself
When you woke up this morning everything you had was
gone. By half past ten your head was going ding-dong.
Ringing like a bell from your head down to your toes,
like a voice telling you there was something you should
know. Last night you were flying but today you’re so low
- ain’t it times like these that make you wonder if
you’ll ever know the meaning of things as they appear to
the others; wives, mothers, fathers, sisters and
brothers. Don’t you wish you didn’t function, wish you
didn’t think beyond the next paycheck and the next little
drink? Well you do so make up your mind to go on, ‘cos
when you woke up this morning everything you had was gone.
Woke up this morning,
Got yourself a gun
Got yourself a gun
Got yourself a gun
This is, of course, the song that plays over the opening credits of The Sopranos. It’s a little bizarre to compare - well, any character to Tony Soprano, DA KING, who made television antiheroes happen, but especially a character attached to a network fantasy show about love, and heartbreak, and….love (IT WILL ALWAYS BE FUNNY). Even if you do accept that Dean deserves to be mentioned alongside the prestige grimdark antiheros of this era of television (and you should!) there are closer matches in disposition and genre.
AND YET.
On top of the fact that the song itself is perfect for Dean on its own, I do actually think Dean owes a great deal to Tony. Like T, he’s the dutiful son in the very high-risk family business, proud of his ability to take over for and even surpass his father, but also repressing a lot of sadness and fear that he’s only doing it because he can’t do anything else. The tendency toward supernatural weirdness as occurs through the vessel carrier lines is, among other things, a great metaphor for more mundane heritable vulnerabilities, like the streaks of mental instability that run through both Johnny Boy’s and Livia’s families, and it sets up a similar feedback loop where the carriers are more likely than average to get sucked into abnormal and unhealthy situations, which have more of an impact on a person with their inherited issues than on the average bear, and nature and nurture start snowballing into a whole ball of awful until you can’t really pick them apart. They’re slick charmers, experts at getting everyone to underestimate them* and then swooping in for the kill. (Not always literally, but, you know.) &c, &c.
*There’s a scene in The Sopranos which just painfully nails how people react to this personality type IRL and how people respond to Dean specifically. Carmela (Tony’s wife) says to Janice (Tony’s sister) that oh, my husband blows his stack but he doesn’t really mean it, underneath his temper and outside of the job he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Like, she has convinced herself that because he acts like a child throwing a tantrum, he must also have childlike guilelessness underneath. And Janice says, no, *I* blow my stack and then let things go, Tony lashes out but he can also make nice and lie in wait until you give him a chance to knife you in the back. And then within ten or twenty minutes the episode shows you an interaction between Tony and an underling which shows that Janice is totally right.
Which, once you see it, you can’t un-see it. (Like, I hear my guido-est uncle in the cadence of Ackles’ voice, and friends, it is deeply unsettling.) Really, once I shake out the foul poison of genre snobbery, and a few very specific ethnic markers, the main difference between my reaction to Dean and my reaction to Tony is that I’m pretty comfortable with my reaction to Tony: I get that he’s not an admirable guy, but I understand him and have a lot of sympathy for him. I am not comfortable feeling that way about Dean. This project, I think, is about my taking a crack at him from that perspective.
Because here is my deep dark Dean-related secret: I want to love this character. SO FUCKING BADLY. This is why I get pissed off! Because I want to think “okay I understand you I feel your pain” and instead I think “OH MY GOD I WANT TO SHAKE YOU UNTIL YOU CRACK A MOLAR!!”
You woke up this morning
Got yourself a gun
your mama always said you’d be
The Chosen One.
She said: You’re one in a million
You got to burn to shine
I use the ambiguity of the second person throughout the vid. The line sounds like the narrator telling the subject he has to burn himself to shine. Dean literally burns someone else in these clips, but he is burning too.
But you were born under a bad sign
With a blue moon in your eyes.
Whatever else he is or isn’t, he was born under a bad sign with a blue moon in those pretty green eyes, and I tried to honor that throughout here. I’m not going to say I tried to be fair to him - I always try to be fair to him, it’s just that a fair judgment on Dean at this point is pretty damning IMO - so much as I tried to err on the side of being charitable. And sometimes I had myself! I’d get through one or two clips and remember why I used to like him, and then the next one on my list would make me even more furious at him. “Poor guyyyyyI WANNA PUNCH HIM IN HIS DICK FACE!!” is a thing I have thought a lot over the past few days. Which would not be a very nice attitude to have about a real person, but I think it’s quite a tribute to the strength of the character.
You woke up this morning
All the love had gone
You look at him come back to life in S4 and it’s like GOD, CAS, YOU COULD PULL HIM OUT OF HELL BUT YOU LEFT HIM IN THE GROUND? RUDE. And then when Cas pushes him out of Purgatory…he obviously feels abandoned, in a way he didn’t when he didn’t know Cas, but at the same time, GOD, DEAN, DOES HIS ATONEMENT HAVE TO BE ALL ABOUT YOU? RUDE.
Your Papa never told you
About right and wrong.
THESE LYRICS ARE APT AS FUCK, right? And I specifically wanted to intercut John with Henry and Alistair as sort-of father figures, who wave John in his face in different ways (Henry completely unknowingly, Alistair 100% for manipulation purposes) and push that button of John’s failure to teach him right and wrong.
But you’re looking good, baby,
I believe that you’re feeling fine,
(show nobody)
This is a pattern with him: he has a self-contained sense of purpose, then he glomps onto Sam and becomes Superdouche. And he thinks he shows nobody, and you will occasionally see viewers claim that Dean ~bottles up his feelings, but it’s actually more like, he refuses to admit his feelings, but he’s still showing them by lashing out damned near constantly.
This is a place where Dean really does remind me of Tony. During an early S1 session with Melfi, Tony says that he has to hide all of his pain, he feels like the sad clown, starts idolizing the “strong, silent” model of masculinity, and Melfi rolls with it. Then during a later session, he says the same thing, and she calls bullshit, says no, you’re not hiding your feelings, I look at you and I can tell you’re angry, just because you won’t admit your emotions doesn’t mean you’re actually suppressing or even hiding them.
But I do think it took Melfi some time to cotton on to him. Melfi, along with other characters in-universe, she sees that he has big, seemingly ill-considered outbursts, but he’s not always violent and awful, so she decides that means he’s foundationally soft and squishy. At times she compares him both to a little boy and a puppy dog (his idealization of the innocence of children and animals is proof of his sociopathy, but it’s okay for her to put a grown man into those same boxes in order to allow herself to like him). This rings totally true to me, that this intelligent, mature, perceptive professional therapist would take a long time and a lot of dashes of cold water to the face to see through the whole woobie goombah act.
I’m saying all that on this post to make the roundabout point that a naif like Garth, bless his big soft heart and his simple little head, doesn’t stand a chance against a similarly skilled player.
Born under a bad sign
With a blue moon in your eyes.
So sing it now
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
(So sad Goddamn,Goddamn shame about it)
Dean tries to suppress by drinking, and he tries to force his suffering down others’ throats. Literally, in the case of Alistair, though that’s a visual representation of a major pattern with him. I’m loath to define Dean’s drinking as a problem in and of itself, because it strikes me as symptomatic of all the other issues here, but it’s a worrisome pattern with him. But oh, Sam’s the addict who needs to be locked up and tortured.
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
Dean’s externalization of his own substance problem is of a piece with his use of violence in his relationship with Sam. I chose these clips in particular because they’re both moments where Dean, you know, is visibly pretty wrecked, and from his perspective has experienced violence by someone close to him, but neither Sam nor Cas were the ones actually choosing to deliver the beatdown in the way Dean does to Sam frequently.
You woke up this morning
The world turned upside down,
Things ain’t been the same
Since the blues walked into town.
So in this case, a metaphoric wake-up call about the behavior represented in the previous stanza, which Dean promptly sets to ignoring by way of fixating on the angels and then slipping into dwelling on his history with them.
But you’re one in a million
You’ve got that shotgun shine.
(shame about it)
Born under a bad sign,
With a blue moon in your eyes.
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
(So sad, goddamn, a goddamn shame about it)
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
Woke up this morning
yeah I know it
Just can't help yourself
I don’t know, can he help himself? I think so. I don’t think he wants to think so.
When you woke up this morning everything was gone.
By half past ten your head was going ding-dong.
Ringing like a bell from your head down to your toes,
like a voice telling you there was something you should know.
Last night you were flying but today you’re so low
- ain’t it times like these that make you wonder if you’ll ever know
the meaning of things as they appear to the others;
wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers.
Don’t you wish you didn’t function, don’t you wish you didn’t think
beyond the next paycheck and the next little drink?
Well you do so make up your mind to go on, ‘cause
when you woke up this morning everything you had was gone.
So the second person narrator was something that I used again in this stanza - Dean is thinking that there’s something Sam should know, but it’s also about Dean trying to ignore the voice of his conscience - but I think it gets really ambiguous at the end, to a point that I didn’t realize. Like, am I the narrator yelling at Dean to get his shit together? Is this Dean POV, and the “you” is him depersonalizing? And it’s not until I put in that clip from the finale, one of the last ones I did, I started wondering, is Crowley the narrator, and all of this is actually, “here’s why you should party with me, demon!Dean”? I still don’t know.
Woke up this morning
Got yourself a gun (x3)
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/333380.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
Password: thechosenone
Woke Up This Morning (Supernatural vid) from Ella Pea on Vimeo.
You woke up this morning
Got yourself a gun
Mama always said you’d be
The Chosen One.
She said: You’re one in a million
You’ve got to burn to shine
But you were born under a bad sign
With a blue moon in your eyes.
You woke up this morning
All the love has gone
Your Papa never told you
About right and wrong.
But you’re looking good, baby,
I believe you’re feeling fine,(show nobody),
Born under a bad sign
With a blue moon in your eyes.
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
(So sad Goddamn,Goddamn shame about it)
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
You woke up this morning
The world turned upside down,
Thing’s ain’t been the same
Since the Blues walked into town.
But you’re one in a million
You’ve got that shotgun shine.
Born under a bad sign, shame about it
With a blue moon in your eyes.
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
(So sad Goddamn,Goddamn shame about it)
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
Just can't help yourself
When you woke up this morning everything you had was
gone. By half past ten your head was going ding-dong.
Ringing like a bell from your head down to your toes,
like a voice telling you there was something you should
know. Last night you were flying but today you’re so low
- ain’t it times like these that make you wonder if
you’ll ever know the meaning of things as they appear to
the others; wives, mothers, fathers, sisters and
brothers. Don’t you wish you didn’t function, wish you
didn’t think beyond the next paycheck and the next little
drink? Well you do so make up your mind to go on, ‘cos
when you woke up this morning everything you had was gone.
Woke up this morning,
Got yourself a gun
Got yourself a gun
Got yourself a gun
This is, of course, the song that plays over the opening credits of The Sopranos. It’s a little bizarre to compare - well, any character to Tony Soprano, DA KING, who made television antiheroes happen, but especially a character attached to a network fantasy show about love, and heartbreak, and….love (IT WILL ALWAYS BE FUNNY). Even if you do accept that Dean deserves to be mentioned alongside the prestige grimdark antiheros of this era of television (and you should!) there are closer matches in disposition and genre.
AND YET.
On top of the fact that the song itself is perfect for Dean on its own, I do actually think Dean owes a great deal to Tony. Like T, he’s the dutiful son in the very high-risk family business, proud of his ability to take over for and even surpass his father, but also repressing a lot of sadness and fear that he’s only doing it because he can’t do anything else. The tendency toward supernatural weirdness as occurs through the vessel carrier lines is, among other things, a great metaphor for more mundane heritable vulnerabilities, like the streaks of mental instability that run through both Johnny Boy’s and Livia’s families, and it sets up a similar feedback loop where the carriers are more likely than average to get sucked into abnormal and unhealthy situations, which have more of an impact on a person with their inherited issues than on the average bear, and nature and nurture start snowballing into a whole ball of awful until you can’t really pick them apart. They’re slick charmers, experts at getting everyone to underestimate them* and then swooping in for the kill. (Not always literally, but, you know.) &c, &c.
*There’s a scene in The Sopranos which just painfully nails how people react to this personality type IRL and how people respond to Dean specifically. Carmela (Tony’s wife) says to Janice (Tony’s sister) that oh, my husband blows his stack but he doesn’t really mean it, underneath his temper and outside of the job he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Like, she has convinced herself that because he acts like a child throwing a tantrum, he must also have childlike guilelessness underneath. And Janice says, no, *I* blow my stack and then let things go, Tony lashes out but he can also make nice and lie in wait until you give him a chance to knife you in the back. And then within ten or twenty minutes the episode shows you an interaction between Tony and an underling which shows that Janice is totally right.
Which, once you see it, you can’t un-see it. (Like, I hear my guido-est uncle in the cadence of Ackles’ voice, and friends, it is deeply unsettling.) Really, once I shake out the foul poison of genre snobbery, and a few very specific ethnic markers, the main difference between my reaction to Dean and my reaction to Tony is that I’m pretty comfortable with my reaction to Tony: I get that he’s not an admirable guy, but I understand him and have a lot of sympathy for him. I am not comfortable feeling that way about Dean. This project, I think, is about my taking a crack at him from that perspective.
Because here is my deep dark Dean-related secret: I want to love this character. SO FUCKING BADLY. This is why I get pissed off! Because I want to think “okay I understand you I feel your pain” and instead I think “OH MY GOD I WANT TO SHAKE YOU UNTIL YOU CRACK A MOLAR!!”
You woke up this morning
Got yourself a gun
your mama always said you’d be
The Chosen One.
She said: You’re one in a million
You got to burn to shine
I use the ambiguity of the second person throughout the vid. The line sounds like the narrator telling the subject he has to burn himself to shine. Dean literally burns someone else in these clips, but he is burning too.
But you were born under a bad sign
With a blue moon in your eyes.
Whatever else he is or isn’t, he was born under a bad sign with a blue moon in those pretty green eyes, and I tried to honor that throughout here. I’m not going to say I tried to be fair to him - I always try to be fair to him, it’s just that a fair judgment on Dean at this point is pretty damning IMO - so much as I tried to err on the side of being charitable. And sometimes I had myself! I’d get through one or two clips and remember why I used to like him, and then the next one on my list would make me even more furious at him. “Poor guyyyyyI WANNA PUNCH HIM IN HIS DICK FACE!!” is a thing I have thought a lot over the past few days. Which would not be a very nice attitude to have about a real person, but I think it’s quite a tribute to the strength of the character.
You woke up this morning
All the love had gone
You look at him come back to life in S4 and it’s like GOD, CAS, YOU COULD PULL HIM OUT OF HELL BUT YOU LEFT HIM IN THE GROUND? RUDE. And then when Cas pushes him out of Purgatory…he obviously feels abandoned, in a way he didn’t when he didn’t know Cas, but at the same time, GOD, DEAN, DOES HIS ATONEMENT HAVE TO BE ALL ABOUT YOU? RUDE.
Your Papa never told you
About right and wrong.
THESE LYRICS ARE APT AS FUCK, right? And I specifically wanted to intercut John with Henry and Alistair as sort-of father figures, who wave John in his face in different ways (Henry completely unknowingly, Alistair 100% for manipulation purposes) and push that button of John’s failure to teach him right and wrong.
But you’re looking good, baby,
I believe that you’re feeling fine,
(show nobody)
This is a pattern with him: he has a self-contained sense of purpose, then he glomps onto Sam and becomes Superdouche. And he thinks he shows nobody, and you will occasionally see viewers claim that Dean ~bottles up his feelings, but it’s actually more like, he refuses to admit his feelings, but he’s still showing them by lashing out damned near constantly.
This is a place where Dean really does remind me of Tony. During an early S1 session with Melfi, Tony says that he has to hide all of his pain, he feels like the sad clown, starts idolizing the “strong, silent” model of masculinity, and Melfi rolls with it. Then during a later session, he says the same thing, and she calls bullshit, says no, you’re not hiding your feelings, I look at you and I can tell you’re angry, just because you won’t admit your emotions doesn’t mean you’re actually suppressing or even hiding them.
But I do think it took Melfi some time to cotton on to him. Melfi, along with other characters in-universe, she sees that he has big, seemingly ill-considered outbursts, but he’s not always violent and awful, so she decides that means he’s foundationally soft and squishy. At times she compares him both to a little boy and a puppy dog (his idealization of the innocence of children and animals is proof of his sociopathy, but it’s okay for her to put a grown man into those same boxes in order to allow herself to like him). This rings totally true to me, that this intelligent, mature, perceptive professional therapist would take a long time and a lot of dashes of cold water to the face to see through the whole woobie goombah act.
I’m saying all that on this post to make the roundabout point that a naif like Garth, bless his big soft heart and his simple little head, doesn’t stand a chance against a similarly skilled player.
Born under a bad sign
With a blue moon in your eyes.
So sing it now
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
(So sad Goddamn,Goddamn shame about it)
Dean tries to suppress by drinking, and he tries to force his suffering down others’ throats. Literally, in the case of Alistair, though that’s a visual representation of a major pattern with him. I’m loath to define Dean’s drinking as a problem in and of itself, because it strikes me as symptomatic of all the other issues here, but it’s a worrisome pattern with him. But oh, Sam’s the addict who needs to be locked up and tortured.
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
Dean’s externalization of his own substance problem is of a piece with his use of violence in his relationship with Sam. I chose these clips in particular because they’re both moments where Dean, you know, is visibly pretty wrecked, and from his perspective has experienced violence by someone close to him, but neither Sam nor Cas were the ones actually choosing to deliver the beatdown in the way Dean does to Sam frequently.
You woke up this morning
The world turned upside down,
Things ain’t been the same
Since the blues walked into town.
So in this case, a metaphoric wake-up call about the behavior represented in the previous stanza, which Dean promptly sets to ignoring by way of fixating on the angels and then slipping into dwelling on his history with them.
But you’re one in a million
You’ve got that shotgun shine.
(shame about it)
Born under a bad sign,
With a blue moon in your eyes.
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
(So sad, goddamn, a goddamn shame about it)
Woke up this morning
Got a blue moon in your eyes
Woke up this morning
yeah I know it
Just can't help yourself
I don’t know, can he help himself? I think so. I don’t think he wants to think so.
When you woke up this morning everything was gone.
By half past ten your head was going ding-dong.
Ringing like a bell from your head down to your toes,
like a voice telling you there was something you should know.
Last night you were flying but today you’re so low
- ain’t it times like these that make you wonder if you’ll ever know
the meaning of things as they appear to the others;
wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers.
Don’t you wish you didn’t function, don’t you wish you didn’t think
beyond the next paycheck and the next little drink?
Well you do so make up your mind to go on, ‘cause
when you woke up this morning everything you had was gone.
So the second person narrator was something that I used again in this stanza - Dean is thinking that there’s something Sam should know, but it’s also about Dean trying to ignore the voice of his conscience - but I think it gets really ambiguous at the end, to a point that I didn’t realize. Like, am I the narrator yelling at Dean to get his shit together? Is this Dean POV, and the “you” is him depersonalizing? And it’s not until I put in that clip from the finale, one of the last ones I did, I started wondering, is Crowley the narrator, and all of this is actually, “here’s why you should party with me, demon!Dean”? I still don’t know.
Woke up this morning
Got yourself a gun (x3)
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/333380.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.