Things I Love About SPN Season 1: The Pilot (Part 1).
A Rewatch Meditation and Celebration
NB: Depending on how this post goes down, it may be the first in a series.
Warnings: Image heavy post. Also, contains brief discussion of mental health, incest and familial abuse themes.
While we’re all waiting for the final episodes of Supernatural to return to our TV screens, I’ve been biding the time by rewatching season 1.
Again.
I think I may be in a minority in listing season 1 as my favourite season. I know many fans feel the show didn’t hit its stride until the following year, and I acknowledge that season 2 contains some of my all-time favourite episodes and also re-awakened the muse I thought had long since deserted me. Yet, when it comes to watching old episodes, I find I can re-watch the first season over and over and never tire of it in a way that can’t be said to same degree of successive seasons. So, what is it about the show, in its infancy, that I love so much?
Yeah, well. Apart from that.
I think there were a lot of things about the first season that made it special. The intriguing Kolchak: The Night Stalker meets Route 66 premise was a good start. The fact that the plots were set in small-town America, rooted in the daily lives of ordinary, relatable people gave the show a basis of realism despite its supernatural subject matter. It helped that it contained a cast of talented actors who sold the realism with emotionally authentic performances. And, yes, it didn’t hurt that a couple of them were exceptionally attractive ;)
But, for me, what made the show special was that it was smart. Each episode contained a mystery that couldn’t be solved by simply resorting to fisticuffs. Sam and Dean were just ordinary young men opposing powerful forces, and they had to rely on their knowledge and experience and, most importantly, their wits to defeat their adversaries. Each story was carefully crafted, each building on character and revealing new elements of back story that, along with the performances from the leads, sucked you in and ensured your investment in the heroes’ journey.
The show embraced a number of genres including gothic horror, magical realism, detective mystery, and epic quest narrative, and it was created by a team of exceptionally talented, well-read writers and directors who were versed in the cultural history of their genres; and they were supported by a crew that executed their vision with a painstaking eye for detail. Together they executed the show with a rich, allusive approach that employed symbolism and metaphor to create a multiplicity of meaning that, imho, elevated it to the level of art.
The Craft of Art
As an amateur writer myself, I came to Supernatural with a particular bias; I’m fascinated with the art and craft of writing - the way authors structure a story, build character, their use of imagery, symbolism, allegory etc, and the way they can build different layers of meaning into the material. I love unpacking all that stuff, to the extent that I spent 15 years at college studying literature and, latterly, film studies. Now, I’m aware not everyone enjoys analyzing everything to death the way I do. Some prefer to accept the story and characters at face value and not go looking for symbolism or alternate meanings or what have you. They just want to be immersed in the created world and they don’t want to notice scenery and the sets, nor glimpse the hand of the puppeteer pulling the strings. But, for me, it’s an automatic process. I operate a habitual double-think: a part of me, probably my right brain, absolutely does accept the characters and their journey at face value and, within the context of the story, they are absolutely real to me; but my left brain always has an eye on the craft of the writer, and is continually trying to second guess the storyteller and understand his/her creative intentions.
My late husband, bless him, didn’t always appreciate me analyzing everything we watched to death but, all the same, he put up with me babbling on, and I miss having someone to babble to. Hence this review. If you’re like my husband, then what follows may not be your cup of tea, but I’m hoping a few of my flisties might have a left brain like mine that enjoys unpacking the creative layers of a work of art, because what I really loved about the early seasons of SPN was that there was a lot to unpack! One measure of a work of art is the many ways in which it may proliferate meaning, and the early seasons of Supernatural offered us an abundance of interpretive possibilities. Not all of these were consistently followed through, and some were actually contradictory, but that’s OK. It’s in the nature of art to be suggestive, not exhaustive.
Interpretive possibilities
It appears that more fanfiction has been written about Supernatural than any other single TV show, at least if the browsing sections of A03 and fanfiction.net are anything to go by. So, what is it about “the little show that could” that has inspired so much creativity?
Yes, but apart from that.
I think it’s a couple of things. First of all, as Eric Kripke has acknowledged in interviews, the show was heavily inspired by Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey. As Campbell demonstrated, the hero myth is a powerful narrative that has been ubiquitous in numerous cultures around the world from the dawn of storytelling. We have all absorbed its formula from childhood to the point that it is embedded in the collective unconscious. Even if we’re not consciously aware of its influence, it nevertheless moves us and excites our imagination. Secondly, the early show was a dense, richly layered text susceptible of multiple interpretations. For example, it can be read as a model of family dynamics - writ large, or as psychodrama, or as socio-political allegory (to name just a few). All of this provides a wealth of material that can be, and has been, explored in fanfiction.
And, also, it’s an angsty story about attractive young men.
The Devil’s in the Detail
So, I’ve broadly outlined some of the things that I really enjoyed about the early seasons, and season 1 in particular. But, as the man said, the devil’s in the detail. What follows is a hotch-potch rumination on a few details that I love about The Pilot. Sometimes I explore what certain shots suggest to me symbolically but, I want to be clear up front that I’m not suggesting that any of these interpretations constitute “the real meaning of Supernatural”; they’re just alternative possibilities that seem to me to be available to us for consideration.
I’m also not claiming that any of my observations are unique. Doubtless others have made similar points elsewhere (and, if so, please point me their way because I’d love to discuss their insights with them.) For those familiar with Joseph Campbell, especially, much of this will be old news, but hopefully along the way people might find the odd tidbit they hadn’t noticed or considered before. At the very least, I hope you’ll enjoy being reminded of some of the good bits in the pilot episode, and maybe even feel the urge to watch it again with me :)
Supernatural, Season 1
Episode 1, “The Pilot”
Written by Eric Kripke
Directed by David Nutter.
“The Cage Already There Around the Bird”
(From “Where Do We Draw the Line” by Poets of the Fall)
I think it’s significant that, in our first view of Sam, we see him as if through the bars of a cage. I’m not suggesting that, from the outset, the show’s creators foresaw his eventual fate in Lucifer’s cage but I do think this shot is a conscious visual sign that, even from infancy, Sam is somehow trapped/imprisoned in his destiny by the circumstances of his birth.
These are the last words spoken to Sam before everything goes pear-shaped. It’s ironic, of course. As we know, what follows is anything but sweet. But these words signal that we ‘re about to enter a different reality from that of normal waking life. In its inception, Supernatural was conceived as a gothic horror story, a genre that exploits the language and landscape of dream and nightmare - the subconscious underworld of imagery and symbolism, vision, perhaps even psychosis. We later discover that Sam has visionary powers and, in time, I’d like to explore the metaphorical possibilities they represent but, for now, I’d just like to speculate on what the scope of Sam’s powers might originally have been conceived to be.
Were Sam’s powers innate?
In the later seasons of the show, Sam’s powers are pretty consistently described as evil, a product of the demon blood. But was that true? Or, at least, was it the original intention? I suspect there are moments in the pilot, and perhaps later in season 1, that reveal the later direction of the storyline had not yet been nailed down. This may be one of them. After John leaves the nursery in the opening scene, we see a shot of Sam in his crib, looking up at the mobile above his head. It begins to move. Then we see his attention turn to the clock on the wall, which also springs into action.
Now, it’s ambiguous. This could just be a signal that the demon is coming - the light on the wall also fizzles, often the sign of a demonic presence - but the camera work seems to imply that Sam himself is the motivating force behind these occurrences. That’s certainly how I read it when I watched the scene for the very first time. Also, by the time we see the demon standing over Sam’s crib some time has passed, enough time for Mary to have gone to bed, slept and woken up again, and for John to have fallen asleep in front of the TV. All of this seems to suggest the telekinetic events in the nursery took place before the demon’s arrival. So, were Sam’s powers always demonic? Or did the demon just hijack and take credit for them?
The original woman in white?
There are a couple more shots in this opening sequence I think may have more significance than is immediately apparent. This is the first:
Throughout the opening sequence, Mary is seen wearing a white nightdress. Given the first ghost hunt of the series involves a woman in white, that may not be incidental and this image of her at the top of the stairs may become important to a point I’d like to develop later.
Here’s another shot I keep puzzling over. When John re-enters the burning room after handing off Sam to Dean, we get a brief glimpse of Mary still pinned to the ceiling amid the flame. But, here there appears to be something hanging down from the ceiling in the middle of the room. Is that Mary’s bloody nightdress? Is she now hanging from the ceiling rather than pinned to it? If so, that may be important, too.
The Photograph Motif
After the title caption it’s 22 years later and we’re in Sam’s room at Stanford. We will soon find out that he’s estranged from his family and hasn’t seen them in years, yet he still keeps a photograph of his mother and father on the top of a chest of drawers. (Incidentally, we also get a quick glimpse of something that may be a rosary hanging from a drawer, an example of the show’s minute attention to detail.) Interestingly, what we don’t see are any photographs of Dean. Sam keeps a picture of his parents, but not his brother.
This is the first of a number of photographs we’re shown in the episode and I’ll be comparing some of these later.
The theme of disguise
This scene also introduces one of the show’s major recurring themes: that of costume/mask/disguise. Throughout the first season we see Sam and Dean wearing various costumes in the course of their investigations; they use aliases and fake badges, role play reporters, students, detectives etc. to get information. The theme pervades the show in ways both overt and subtle. Here we see Jessica scolding Sam for not wearing a Halloween costume:
The point is emphasized in a deleted scene where Sam’s friend also berates him. But the joke’s on them (and us at this point) because Sam is wearing his costume. Throughout his time at Stanford he has been wearing a mask of normality.
Dressed for the party: the zombie, the slutty nurse and the everyman.
The Shadow and the Divided Self
In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell explains that the hero’s journey begins when a herald arrives to call the hero to the quest. Often a dark and mysterious character, sometimes “judged evil by the world”, it is the role of the herald to guide and protect the hero in his journey through the underworld.
There’s a dramatic device called “literary doubling” where a marked parallel is drawn between the hero and another character. Often they are twins or brothers, or the ‘double’ bears a strong resemblance either physically or in general circumstance to the hero. The double, often referred to as ‘the shadow’ represents an unexpressed aspect of the hero. Jungian psychology uses the term ‘shadow’ to refer to a part of the subconscious that the subject wishes to deny about himself.
In the hero myth and quest literature the landscape and all the other characters are understood to be reflections of the hero and his state of mind. The Pilgrim’s Progress is an obvious example, where the hero meets a succession of characters who are named after character traits, and he visits places that match his mood, such as the Slough of Despond.
Both in fiction and in psychotherapy, a confrontation with the shadow challenges the hero to acknowledge the part of himself he wants to suppress, to accept it as necessary, and a source of positive value once embraced and re-integrated back into the Self. The hero’s journey is toward that self-expression and reconciliation of the fractured psyche.
Writers and filmmakers use stock imagery, such as the use of mirrors or other reflective surfaces, to alert readers or viewers to the presence of doubling. One recurring trope is the use of shadow to introduce a character, as in Dean’s dramatic entrance. When he first appears in Sam’s apartment, the first part of him we see is his shadow, followed by his silhouette crossing the doorway:
(That’s his shadow on the door in the first frame. Sorry I couldn’t get a better cap of it, but it flits past really quickly!)
In the next shot of him - as if to underscore the point - a door opens, and we are shown Dean’s silhouette actually emerging out of Sam’s:
From this point, there’s a level on which we may regard Sam and Dean as representing two halves of a single psyche. Sam’s LSAT score and legal ambitions establish him as representing the mental/moral half while Dean is soon shown to present the physical/instinctual/emotional half. Or, to put it another way, Dean=body+heart, while Sam=mind+soul. These two diametrically opposed yet, dynamically interlinked halves have provided the stock characters for heroic and popular literature in our culture from its earliest works. The Greek myth of Castor and Pollux provides an early example, while more modern examples include Frodo and Sam from Lord of the Rings, Leia and Han from Star Wars, Hermione and Ron from Harry Potter etc. But these two paired but opposed characters are very familiar to us from popular culture where they turn up ubiquitously in movies and TV shows: Butch and Sundance, Starsky and Hutch, David and Maddie, Sam and Dianne, Xena and Gabrielle, Bones and Temperance etc.
In the hero myth, the narrative moves toward a climax where the two halves are reconciled in time to defeat the central villain (who also represents an aspect of the hero, a dark potential he must reject and overcome). That done, the conclusion dramatizes the resolution of the divided self:
Traditionally, that resolution is symbolized either through marriage:
Or through the death of one or both characters:
Perhaps one of the reasons this narrative has been so popular for centuries is because it’s needed as a corrective to a culture that has historically tended to elevate mind over body, conceiving the intellect as partaking of the nature of the divine, while the body with its sensual demands has been associated with the demonic. (Interestingly, this same cultural bias has also tended to associate mind with the male, and body with the female). The object of the hero’s journey, however, is to demonstrate that he needs both halves of his nature working in harmony in order to complete the quest:
But, to return to The Pilot, when Sam confronts the shadow in his apartment, a fight ensues. This is also a stock motif found early in the hero’s journey where he is challenged to a fight by the herald, who often turns out to be a brother or a friend, or subsequently becomes a friend (for example, Robin Hood’s dual with Little John). The hero must win this fight, or at least acquit himself adequately, to prove himself worthy of the quest. It’s interesting that Sam doesn’t win the challenge against Dean:
At least, not initially . . .
Incidentally, I’ve heard that the first Wincest fanfiction was posted to the internet within 15 minutes of the pilot episode airing on the WB. I’m guessing this scene had something to do with that :P
What I love about this next frame is that there’s so much non-verbal dialogue. Sam’s body language here is stiff and reticent, while Dean’s is more affable. Grabbing Sam’s arms is an affectionate and perhaps claiming gesture; he’s clearly pleased to see Sam even if he doesn’t want to say so directly.
Also, the way he claps Sam’s shoulders and looks him up and down seems to suggest an unspoken “wow! Look at you!” I get the feeling Sam’s grown a few inches since Dean last saw him.
The Call to the Quest:
The search for the father is a perrenial heroic narrative, from Aeneas quest to find his father in the underworld in The Aeneid, to Cain’s search for his father in the 70s TV series, Kung Fu. Often the quest is undertaken by two brothers. For example, Joseph Campbell cites the Navaho myth of the twin war gods and their adventures as they travel to their father’s house.
(Say goodbye to well groomed hair, Sam. You won’t get another decent haircut for years!)
Its a nice touch that we're shown Sam’s quest into the underworld beginning with a physical descent as we see him following Dean down spiralling flights of stairs, like the spiralling path into Hell in Dante’s Inferno. A descent down spiralling staircases is a common movie trope, and becomes a recurring motif in the show's first season.
The Apple Pie Theme
The next scene introduces a theme that will persist throughout the series. It’s a reminder that apple pie is a symbol for normal life, the American dream. I think that’s important because Dean’s persitent longing for pie, and the trope in the early seasons that he’s always denied it, is a signal that Dean secretly longs for that apple-pie life, even though he tries to deny it. I also think the choice of Sam’s name, and it’s association with ‘Uncle Sam’ isn’t accidental. At the beginning of the episode, Sam appears as an average American young man, an everyman, and his name identifies him with America as a nation. In time, this will develop into a subtextual political commentary.
Supernatual as psychodrama and/or literary metaphor
I also think it’s significant that Sam emphasizes that he has chosen this life not because it’s normal, but because it’s safe. There are other ways in which a legal career might be considered a safe option, and I believe this highlights what may be a possible alternative, ‘natural’ reading of the Supernatural story.
We learn shortly that Sam has an interview on Monday . . .
That’s a lot of pressure! That point is later emphasized by Jessica (in some lines of dialogue that are cut from the Stan/Netflix/Amazon versions btw; it’s worth buying the DVD, folks!):
JESS: It's just...you won't even talk about your family. And now you're taking off in the middle of the
night to spend a weekend with them? And with Monday coming up, which is kind of a huge deal.
What if it was too huge a deal for Sam? In one of Kripke’s commentaries, he reveals that one of his favourite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was “Normal Again”, which explores the possibility that Buffy’s entire life as the slayer is the psychotic delusion of a young woman who is a patient in a mental hospital in L.A. In season 5 of Supernatural, “Sam, Interrupted”, explores a similar premise. So, here’s an alt.: what if Sam never truly wanted to be a lawyer?
Throughout season one we’re presented with ‘clues’ that Sam has an artistic/creative side. For example, when we see him drawing in “Home” then, in “Shadow”, it’s revealed he was involved with a production of “Our Town” in High School. Later, in Season 4 “After School Special”, we learn that a high school teacher tried to encourage Sam’s writing talent after he wrote about a werewolf hunt with his family. The teacher assumed it was a work of fiction and described Dean as “quite a character.
So, what if in ‘real life’ Sam was just the son of a mechanic who wanted him to join the ‘family business’ in the brake shop, so he ran away to college to prove to his father (who never seemed to think anything he did was good enough) that he could make a success of himself. But he only chose the path of law as a safe option, rather than pursue the far riskier course of a career in the arts (which perhaps would never constitute ‘success’ in the eyes of his practical father). However, on the eve (ish) of this big interview that will seal his fate in a lifelong career for which he is intellectually qualified, but temperamentally unsuited, he freaks out! What if the entire plot of Supernatural was simply the resultant delusion of Sam’s psychotic breakdown. What if the reason there were no pictures of Dean in Sam’s room was because he doesn’t really exist! Sam never had a brother outside of his own imagination!
Or, more positively, perhaps the real challenge that his imaginary brother presents to him is to have the courage to be true to his artistic vision; to drop out of college and begin work on his own heroic epic. Thus, Supernatural becomes the story of how the story is written.
Just sayin’ :D
The dysfunctional family
Before I move on from this opening sequence, I’d like to examine an exchange that is sometimes interpreted as an act of emotional abuse on Dean’s part. Familial dysfunction and abuse are recurring themes of the show, even in the early seasons, and there are certainly strong aspects of both in Sam and Dean’s relationship. However, I don’t believe it was Kripke’s original intention for the relationship to become as abusive as it did in some of the later seasons. Nevertheless, reading back through the lens of those seasons, some fans have suggested that Dean is attempting to emotionally blackmail Sam in the following exchange by implying that his life will be at risk if Sam doesn’t join him:
.
It doesn’t seem to me that’s what’s being suggested here. In the first place, Dean is not referring here to hunting, but specifically to the search for John which, so far as the brothers know at this stage, doesn’t necessarily involve danger to life and limb. And Sam clearly doesn’t interpret it as a reference to Dean’s safety. He is confident that his brother can handle the search by himself and, when he says so, Dean’s response makes it clear that he simply wants Sam’s company.
Furthermore, in the following exchange, when Sam expresses surprise that John left Dean to hunt by himself, Dean is offended by any implication that he might be, in any way, not up to it:
This doesn’t suggest to me that Dean has, or wants Sam to have, any fears for his safety.
Incidentally, this is a scene that establishes Dean as the physical/sensual part of the partnership as we see him with his car and handling the tools in the trunk. As the symbolic representation of the body, it’s significant that he’s the one who possesses the means of motion.
The Woman in White
Next the action moves to a young man picking up a hitch-hiker who turns out to be a ghost. I don’t plan to go into great detail about the Constance Welch plot, but I would like to draw attention to our first glimpse of the Welch house on Breckenridge Road and compare it to the shot we got of the Winchester home in the opening sequence.
The two houses aren’t identical, but there are some marked similarities. This may be important later.
Continue to part 2
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