Things I Love About SPN Season 1: Skin (Part 3)
Part 3: The Subtext
A. K. A. “He’s sure got issues with you”.
Supernatural, Season 1
Episode 6, “Skin”
Written by John Shiban
Directed by Robert Duncan McNeill.
WARNING: This is a very dark and confronting episode. It contains images of sexualized violence and assault, and deals with overt themes of misogyny and violence against women.
ADDITIONAL WARNING FOR THIS PART: It also implicitly raises issues of internalized homophobia, effeminophobia and possible repressed fratricidal and incest longings.
My review does the same.
In part one of this re-watch, I talked about the Jungian shadow in film and literature, and how the dark doppelganger trope can be used to express aspects that a character would normally conceal about themselves. And, in part two, we saw how the shape shifter’s identity with Dean was used overtly to reveal his abandonment issues and his feelings of jealousy and resentment of Sam. We noted that the shifter felt a particular affinity for Dean, and that the text repeatedly insisted on their sameness: “I am your brother”, the shifter tells Sam, “He’s like me” he tells Rebecca; and this is reiterated by Sam: “he didn’t just look like you, he was you!” he explains to his brother. This invites us to question how far that similitude might extend. To what extent is the shifter’s acknowledged self-hatred echoed by Dean’s own? Can an analogous ambivalence toward women be found, to any degree, in Dean’s worser nature? And what harsh light might the shifter’s behaviour shed on the darker undercurrents of Sam and Dean’s relationship?
In “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” when Harry confides to his godfather, Sirius Black, that he is experiencing feelings of rage, and worries that he might be turning bad, Sirius shares this helpful insight:
I want you to listen to me very carefully, Harry. You're not a bad person. You're a very good person
who bad things have happened to. You understand?
Besides, the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters. We've all got both light and dark inside of us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.
https://transcripts.fandom.com/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Order_of_the_Phoenix
In the earlier parts of this rewatch, I suggested that the shifter may be seen as a device for suggesting what a soulless Dean might look like; for exploring, implicitly, dark unconscious impulses that his conscious self, restrained by his soul (or, more prosaically, his conscience) chooses not to act on. It’s these subtextual implications I’d now like to examine.
With that in mind, let’s return to the teaser scene at the beginning of the episode and take another look at images we were shown in that opening sequence. You’ll recall that the anguished woman we now know to be Sam’s friend Rebecca was tied to a chair, showing plentiful signs of having been beaten bloody, and with evidence of a violent struggle all around. This, in particular, was a deeply disturbing image:
As we’ve discussed before, knives are a Freudian phallic symbol that filmmakers like to employ whenever they get the opportunity.
But the most disturbing image of all, which I’ve reserved for examination until now, is this one:
This is truly horrible: surgical forceps with their somewhat gynecological connotations, rope and handcuffs evoking ideas of nonconsensual bondage and sadism, and all spattered with blood. As I indicated before, the images in this opening scene aren’t just violent, they’re specifically suggestive of sexual violence and assault. The bondage trappings are important because they persist throughout the episode and are not confined to the shifter’s dealings with his female victims. We’ll come back to that.
After the opening sequence, you’ll recall that we cut to the brothers in the car where Dean is laying out the road plan: “All right, I figure we’d hit Tucumcari by lunch, then head south, hit Bisbee by midnight . . . Sam wears women’s underwear”. By itself, the jibe seems like an innocuous throwaway; he’s just trying to get Sam’s attention. But it’s the start of a recurring theme that persists through the early seasons where Dean repeatedly makes comments that feminize Sam, for example, when he compares him to “the blonde chick in The Munsters” (Bugs), or this exchange from “Hell House”:
Dean: I thought the legend said that Mordeki only goes after chicks.
Sam: He does.
Dean: Right, well that explains why he went after you, but why me?
Sam: Hilarious.
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.17_Hell_House_(transcript)
Or this one from “Born Under a Bad Sign”:
SAM No way! That's my Division Championship soccer trophy. I can't believe he kept this.
DEAN Yeah... It was probably about the closest you ever came to being a boy.
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/2.14_Born_Under_a_Bad_Sign_(transcript)
Now, maybe it’s just a running gag, just a typical jerk big brother trying to get a rise out of his little brother . . . or maybe it’s a symptom of something much less harmless. There’s a psychological symptom called “projection”, which can be defined thus:
Psychological projection is a defense mechanism people subconsciously employ in order to cope with difficult feelings or emotions. Psychological projection involves projecting undesirable feelings or emotions onto someone else, rather than admitting to or dealing with the unwanted feelings. https://www.everydayhealth.com/emotional-health/psychological-projection-dealing-with-undesirable-emotions/
We’ve already observed that projection is one of the foregrounded themes of this episode, so this is probably important. Is it possible that Dean projects onto Sam his own repressed insecurities about his masculinity? It’s notable that Sam himself rarely rises to Dean’s baiting; he is clearly unfazed by attempted slights on his manhood.
The next scene I’d like to draw attention to is the one where the brothers are watching the security tape with Rebecca. When Sam asks for beers then presses his luck and requests sandwiches as well, Rebecca jokingly asks him if he thinks this is Hooters. “I wish,” Dean responds when she’s out of earshot, perhaps implying that he’d like to see little Becky in Hooters’ trademark revealing uniform - a thought that, if true, may be seen as somewhat demeaning to Rebecca. Indeed, the text may be making a conscious reference to topical criticism of the chain’s aesthetic and its female exploitation:
The only company-sanctioned description available dates back to 2005, when the Smoking Gun website published an official Hooters employee manual. Its contents ruffled some feathers; employees had to sign a statement in it that they “hereby acknowledge ... the work environment is one in which joking and innuendo based on female sex appeal is commonplace.”
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/4/17911936/hooters-uniform-breastaurant-decline
Again. in an episode that is so focused on the abuse of women, Dean’s offhand remark seems less harmless than it normally would.
Bright and early the next day, Dean and Sam are found searching the street outside Zach’s apartment, or rather Sam is. Dean is nursing a coffee and bitching about it being 5.30am. It isn’t the first time Dean’s complained about Sam’s early rising habits, but it seems more significant in the context of this episode. Dean is being emphasized as a creature of the night. Night owls are traditionally associated with darkness and the demonic and monstrous. Later in the first season, vampires are specifically referred to as night owls (Dead Man’s Blood).
[A. N: Fellow night owls may have experienced these old associations as a lingering prejudice from the early-to-bed brigade who still seem to attribute a tendency to late retiring and rising as evidence of some form of moral turpitude rather than, for example, a simple body-clock issue.]
But while Dean’s morning aversion clearly marks him as a moral degenerate, Sam, being an early riser, is being aligned with the light and all things good and righteous. This is in keeping with the show’s continued yin/yang symbolism. However, it is the nature of the yin and yang dynamic to be subject to constant reversal. Although in the early seasons Dean is associated with darkness - the bad boy, black sheep - by the third season and the introduction of the demon blood plot, we see the beginning of a status reversal. When Dean returns from Hell in season 4, he starts being referred to as the Righteous Man, while Sam is the one accused of being an abomination and having “Darkness in him” (S5 “Two Minutes to Midnight”). It is for the viewer to decide if these accusations are justly applied either to Dean formerly or, latterly, to Sam.
Presently, however, we witness something that, in the context of this episode’s themes, is rather troubling. After his argument with Rebecca, when Sam is beginning to concede that Dean may be right that the hunting life necessitates distancing himself from his old friends, Dean offers him the consolation that “this whole gig-it ain’t without perks,” illustrating the comment by handing over a gun:
Recalling the conversation in “Wendigo” where he intimated he found consolation in “killing as many evil sons of bitches as I possibly can”, we begin to see a pattern that suggests Dean enjoys the trappings of weapons and killing that hunting involves, not merely as means to an end but as ends in themselves.
Next, I’d like to move to the scene after Sam is knocked unconscious by shifter!Dean then wakes to discover himself tied up in the shifter’s lair.
There is more than a suggestion of the sado-masochistic imagery from the opening scene here. Note the chains that are visible behind Sam. We’ve seen that the props the shifter likes to employ in his torture sessions include both ropes and chains. Up until this scene, of course, all his victims have been female, but perhaps it might be pertinent at this point to recall Dean’s feminization of Sam in the earlier scene at the gas station.
When the shifter appears, his first act is to backhand Sam in the face. This is completely unnecessary since he already has Sam incapacitated, so we must assume he does it just for the pleasure of it. We soon learn that he is channeling a good deal of repressed anger from Dean: “He sure has issues with you,” he reveals and then, as we’ve seen, goes on to expound on some of the reasons for Dean’s jealousy and resentment. But there may be more going on at a subtextual level; given the implicit sexual connotations of Sam’s imprisonment, and the shifter’s threats, one has to wonder if Dean may have other issues with Sam that are not being explicitly stated, a subtext that is explored more fully in the later scenes.
In this conversation we also learn about Dean’s abandonment issues. He specifically mentions Sam leaving, and his father ditching him. But would those incidents have been the source of his sense of abandonment? Or did they just reinforce it? Surely the first loved one that Dean lost was his mother. Now, it’s reasonable to assume that the rational, conscious, adult Dean wouldn’t blame his mother for that loss. But at four years old he would have been too young to properly understand the concept of death. The child would have felt the loss as abandonment. We’ve talked before about Dean’s Madonna/Magdalene complex, and this is likely the source of it. Perhaps the angry inner child that Dean represses, the monstrous Id that the shifter represents, divides his mother (and, by extension, all women) into two separate ideas: the Madonna figure that he idolizes and wishes to save, and the demonized Magdalene who can become the vessel for his anger at her desertion, and whom he wishes to punish.
Then shifter!Dean says something that disturbingly echoes Dean’s earlier remark to Sam: “still, this life? It’s not without its perks. I meet the nicest people.,” he says, then adds “like little Becky”.
Dean's earlier comment about perks was in the context of guns and weaponry; now the shifter repeats it to reveal his designs on Rebecca, it emphasizes the intrinsic link between sex and violence that exists in the shifter’s mind. Even the euphemism “bang” is well chosen for its violent connotations, both in its association with guns, and also with the possibility of a blow, with a fist for example. The question is, in a scene that is explicitly concerned with revealing Dean’s deepest darkest secrets, does this covertly suggest that, at some deeply repressed level, Dean shares the shifter’s penchant for sexual violence?
When Dean learns that the shifter has gone to visit Rebecca wearing his face, he quips “well, he’s not stupid. He picked the handsome one” - an unintentionally ironic remark since, as we know, Rebecca has shown no interest in Dean whatsoever. That raises questions that were insightfully expressed by Dragonardhill in a comment to my last post:
The shifter feeling a special connection with Dean is also supported by the shifter’s decision to stay with Dean’s face when he goes to see Rebecca. The shifter’s M.O. had previously been using the face of someone the victim trusts i.e. the victim’s loving husband or boyfriend in order to inflict the most awful psychological as well as physical torment. In this case, the person most trusted (between Sam and Dean) for Rebecca would be Sam but the shifter stayed as Dean? Maybe the shifter wasn’t aware that she was closer to Sam? In any event it’s a departure from the shifter’s typical pattern.
My response is that I believe it indicates the shifter has already chosen his victim, and it isn't Rebecca. If he gets to “bang” her then that’s just a bonus but, first and foremost, this is all about Sam. As he channels all Dean's jealousy and resentment about Sam having friends and a life, the pleasure he would derive from killing Rebecca would have more to do with taking those things away from Sam, and the psychological torment it would cause Sam to know that his friend had been tortured and killed, especially since he would probably hold himself responsible for having put her in harm’s way.
Now I’d like to revisit the scene at Rebecca’s place where shifter!Dean explains“Evolution is about mutation, right?” he says. “So, maybe this thing was born human but was different. Hideous and hated. Until he learned to become someone else.”
As I said before, there’s more than one way of interpreting this conversation, but the most obvious is that the shifter sees parallels between himself and Dean. If we accept the premise that the shifter and Dean are the same on some level, it does beg the question: did Dean also consider himself to be hideous and hated? Why? And by whom? And in what way might he have learned to become someone else?
Often the show raises questions that can only be answered in hindsight. Much of the evidence that might supply answers is yet to come. We are discovering that Dean sees himself as a freak, not only in relation to society but even within his own family. He expects to be continually rejected and abandoned. In time we will learn that he sees himself as the least favoured son, whose welfare is deemed less important than Sam’s. This may not actually be true, but he believes it, doubtless because he has continually been told to “watch out for Sammy” while seeing little evidence of a similar concern for his own welfare.
What justification might the young Dean have sought for this apparent inequity, and how might he have tried to rectify it? Perhaps he found a possible explanation in the ways he seemed to fall short of the perceived ideal as it was personified for him by his father, the beloved husband of his idolized mother. In time we learn that he has modeled his entire image on his rugged, heroic, rock-loving father. But, deep down, that is not who he truly believes he is. We have already begun to see clues in earlier episodes that Dean is not entirely the fearless warrior he appears, and that he puts on a brave face because he believes that’s what his mother would have expected from him. Perhaps he also feared that John perceived him as weak, so he sought to toughen up to gain favour. And perhaps he felt insufficiently masculine in comparison to his father. Earlier I noted that Dean’s feminization of Sam was an early example of a repeating pattern of behaviour that might be symptomatic of projected insecurities about his own masculinity. Perhaps his macho, womanizing image is also a skin that he wears in an attempt to emulate and thus seek approval from his emotionally distant father. And is it possible that it runs even deeper than that? Consider the infamous scene in season 2, “Playthings” when he demands to know why people think he and Sam are gay, and Sam suggests that Dean’s butch image might be seen as over-compensation. Dean’s uncomfortable response to that suggestion seems very telling. If we allow ourselves to hypothesize that Dean’s insecurities might extend not just to his masculinity but also his sexuality, it is certainly possible that he might fear his father would consider any signs of homosexual tendencies to be hideous and hate worthy, and if those repressed tendencies were at all directed toward his brother (and later scenes strongly suggest that possibility) Dean might consider the imagined contempt to be justified.
Granted, at this stage, this hypothesis is very speculative, but over the course of the series there is growing evidence to support it, of which Sam’s comment in “Playthings” is just one example. And perhaps it is worth noting that one of the ways in which repressed internalized effeminophobia and homophobia can manifest is in misogyny and hostility toward women.
Which brings us back to shifter!Dean’s attempt to seduce Rebecca.
“It’s funny. I kind of understand him.” He says. “He’s all alone, close to no one. All he wants is for someone to love him. He’s like me. You know, everybody needs a little human touch now and then. It’s so hard to be different.” He then fingers the hair around her ear, which makes her very uncomfortable. “You should go,” she tells him, but he persists, leaning close to whisper something in her ear.
What he says is left to our imagination, but it is clearly something very shocking. Rebecca jumps up in horror. “You are disgusting!” she cries. “What is wrong with you?” Shifter!Dean responds by projecting her disgust back onto her: “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you?” he demands, as if she is the one with the problem. Notably, it is her rejection of him that precipitates his violence toward her. As she attempts to call the police, he grabs her, throws her down on the ground and binds her with the telephone wire. As she screams, he yells at her to shut up and raises his fist, but we are spared the sight of the actual blow as the scene quickly cuts to him throwing down a chain.
And, once again we see the motif of rope and chains that we last saw in the scene where he confronted Sam.
Earlier I mentioned that this mirror image points up the reversal of the opening where the attacker appeared to be Dean, whereas now we know it isn’t really:
Except mirrors can also be used to emphasize the presence of literary doubling and, given the repeated insistence on the identity between Dean and his dark reflection, we are forced to consider whether the shifter’s violence toward women at all reflects the presence of similar urges in the darker depths of Dean’s psyche.
Again, the question can only be truly considered with hindsight but, in retrospect, I can’t help recalling the scene toward the end of the first season when he hits Meg, and she implies he finds the act of hitting a girl a turn on (“Devil’sTrap”). He uncomfortably excuses himself by responding “you’re no girl” but Bobby entreats him not to hurt her because the victim is a human possessed by a demon.
Even more disturbing is the sexualized killing of the demon in season 3, “Malleus Mallificarum”. In this scene Dean shows absolutely no mercy to the body of the demon’s helpless and possibly conscious host. The demon knife, being a magical weapon, should require no more than one blow to do its work and, indeed, when Sam uses it he typically dispatches demons with a single, efficient kill stroke to the heart or to the throat and up through the brain. Dean, on the other hand, seems to revel in this killing, stabbing the woman repeatedly with a brutal and unnecessary fucking action. And this is before he goes to Hell.
But if show is hinting at dark potential in Dean’s character and, perhaps, foreshadowing his later fall from grace, it also doesn’t hesitate to make the viewer examine their own dark impulses by making them complicit in its blurring of sex and violence. With the anticipated appearance of the S.W.A.T. team, shifter!Dean flees the scene and escapes to his sewer lair where he begins to strip off his clothes. In an episode that has a recurring motif involving cameras and lenses, the viewer is deliberately drawn into the eroticism of the camera’s gaze and invited to indulge in a voyeuristic appreciation of the exposed flesh it frames:
Shirtless shifter!Dean, thank you!
But lust soon turns to revulsion as the striptease goes altogether too far:
It should be acknowledged though that, even if this scene falls a little short of the full John Landis, it has some effects that are pretty cool for a TV show of its time . . .
Cool in a horribly revolting way, that is.
The last scene that I’d like to examine in more detail is the final confrontation and fight between shifter!Dean and Sam. As the scene begins, the kind of image that would normally be used to imply sexy times are afoot quickly devolves into the more sinister evidence of the shifter’s shedding. (And it shouldn't be overlooked that these images are implicitly invasive of Rebecca's privacy).
But the shifter has now discarded the Rebecca persona it used to trap Sam and is back in Dean’s skin.
As we watch him tying Sam’s hands with rope, Sam asks “what are you going to do to me?” and, lest we forget to see the identification between Dean and shifter in this scene, he replies “Oh, I’m not gonna do anything. Dean will, though.” He reveals he plans to kill Sam, and we watch him making his preparations.
Now, if Sam’s death were simply a matter of expedience, the shifter could just kill him already - a quick bullet to the head would get the job done - but no. He’s taking his time, making a meal of it, preparing the same sado-masochistic trappings we’ve seen him using for his female victims, including that ubiquitous Freudian phallic symbol: the knife . . .
And he’s got a big one for Sam.
And so, repressed fratricidal longings and incestuous desire are implied in one psycho-sexually loaded image.
But, as we’ve seen, Sam uses the knife to cut his ropes and break free, and a fight ensues. Now, back in the first season, when the showmakers didn’t resort to fisticuffs for drama in every single episode, this fight really meant something. All of the unresolved sexual tension between the brothers has been building to this moment and - consciously or unconsciously - the audience is ready to see them really go to it. We are curious to see who will prevail in what is, essentially, a physical contest between the brothers, and perhaps we’re not the only ones. It’s been revealed that Dean used to “kick Sam’s ass” when they were young, but now Sam is no longer a kid, and he has an opportunity to measure up to his brother - or the next best thing - as an adult. Even if this isn’t the real Dean, we can assume he possesses equivalent strength and ability, and viewers are eager to see who will come out on top (if you’ll pardon the expression).
You may recall in my rewatch post on the pilot I talked about the intimate relationship between sex and violence on film, and how fights between conflicted characters can be used as a sublimation for sex. In an episode that is all about the relationship between these ideas, I assume it’s no accident when certain frames in this scene actively invite the association:
Still, as I noted in my previous post, the question of who will prevail is left hanging since the real Dean interrupts at this point, just as shifter!Dean is attempting to choke the life (and soul) out of Sam.
The answer is in fact deferred until season four when this scene, itself a reflection of the original fight from the pilot, is mirrored and reversed once more in “When the Levee Breaks” when Sam finally defeats Dean:
But, for now, all’s well that ends well. The real Dean rushes in to save the day (and Sam); Ding dong, shifter!Dean is dead and all the dark impulses he represented are put to rest. and we’re assured in the end that it’s all right now, baby, it’s all right now.
For now . . .
But as we now know, the excesses, confessions, and revelations of seasons 3, 4, 5 and beyond are yet to come . . .
I hope you’ve found this journey into the darkside interesting and not too disturbing! As always, I look forward to hearing your responses and reflections 😊
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