Supernatural and the Underclass- 2
Part 2
Several commentors mentioned a line in my starter piece about the underclass being dangerous even without monsters.
Allow me to edify:
I'm a poor white girl from a poor white community in upper Northeastern, rural America. There is shit that happens there that makes me shudder every. Single. Time I think about it.
But instead of going into any weird chick flick moments, I'll use examples directly from the show and clarify them.
Since I'm a poor white girl (now with a brand, spanking new college education that is as useful as tits on a bull), I'm going to start with Jo. As little fondness as I have for Jo, I find her situation in the show to be interesting. Poorly understood by Alona Tal, but whatever, let's roll with it.
We all know she's a twenty-something girl who's got most of a college education under her belt, and she works in a bar with her mother.
Wait a sec, hold the phone. Let me restate that, see if anyone caught it.
She's a twenty-something girl who's working in a bar, with her mother.
That right there is ten kinds of scary and fucked up.
Even without the semi-skeevy hunters swanning through (not all of them as morally intact as the Winchesters), that's a lot of trouble way out in the middle of nowhere. The fact is, yeah, Ellen and Jo really have no choice. Partly it's because of the crippling family loss of their husband and father, but because they are poor white women with little education.
Now don't get me wrong, Ellen is a pretty amazing goddamn woman. She manages to run a bar, provide a home for her child, help others, and be a decent mother. But the fact is, none of that matters when you have 160+ lbs of hammered man-bulk thinking it's their god given right to get a piece of ass along with their dozen brews. For a girl of Jo's age, she's probably an old hat at fending off unwated advances, but there's always the ones that go too far, and there is literally one other person she can consistently count on to help her.
And that's another woman about twice her age with a shotgun.
No cops. No guarantee of a person who's physically matched (namely another man) to pitch in and help. If things get too messy, there is less of a chance that things will get diffused before they get ugly than if it were a guy in the same situation.
Women in our society are preyed on, and in particular those in the lower classes. I took a criminology course in college, and what it did for me was provide words for what was going on around me. In America, 1 in every 4 women will be raped. Not molested, not mugged, not fondled. Raped. Violated. I can say with a sinking amount of faith that that statistic is not bullshit. While middle class and upper class women do get raped, the majority of rape victims are in the lower classes. I am in no way trying to discount the experience rape victims by class, just pointing out that women in lower classes have way more avenues in which to get taken advantage of, and far fewer courses of action to avoid or prevent them. Jo and Ellen are walking a very different road than John and his boys.
Let's look at John, Sam, and Dean.
I'm going to haul out my criminology courses again, and point out that according to my schooling, somewhere around 90% criminals and victims of crime in the United States will be men. Most of these men are in the lower classes, between the ages of 18 and 35. Why? Because in the lower classes, we can see how much everybody above us has. And it hurts. It seems so goddamn unfair, seeing all this shit on TV, all of these people in their SUVs, tooling around drinking their iced half-caf vanilla lattes.
And it makes us angry.
Since we haven't had jobs that consume our daily lives from sunrise to sundown since the agricultural heyday, when we're not working whatever job we have, we get all that time to see how much everybody else has, and how little we have. There are a lot of safeguards against feeling all that disparity, like church, family, friends, but by and large there are a lot of angry, hurt people out there who don't understand why everybody else has something they can only ever dream of. Having things, resources, opportunities. Things that are "normal", because a proper American life is the one that has been sanctified by the middle and upper class.
Hell. Look at Sam. He's exactly the kind of kid I'm talking about. Of course, being 6-foot-something and raised by John Winchester pretty much assures that he's neither going to be in the criminal or victim aspect, unless it's to help out a hunt. Even still, Sam acutely feels the relative disparity between himself and the “normal” middle class lives that provide a kind of safety and security that he can only dream of. He recognizes the differences between his own experiences and the majority of people he encounters, and he’s ashamed of them.
You can see the same in Dean to some extent in 4.09 with the After School Special. The normal, middle class girl points out Dean’s weird situation: no parental figure present, no curfew or bedtime, no real home, no rules. And for a second, Dean who is normally outwardly secure in his pride of his situation, falters. Yes, he wants a father who he can see. He wants a normal family and all of the stupid banal crap that comes with it. But he can’t, because even if they weren’t chasing monsters clear across the country, there would still be no way they could afford the same kind of “normal” luxuries she has.
And we get preyed on. The people that no one cares about, the people that the cops are too far away from, or who won't answer to, are the ones that get fucked up the most, for who all kinds of shit happens. Think of Bobby in his junkyard. Why do you think he has a huge goddamn dog and a lot of guns? It's not just for chasing off demons. It's because scavengers find all kinds of goldmines in junkyards, and they will hurt you and even kill you if you threaten them or call the cops on them. All the way out there in the middle of nowhere, who's going to come help out this solitary, middle aged guy from bottom feeders who're looking to make some easy cash by stealing car parts or stripping copper? Bobby's another example of the underclass; nobody's gonna care if the junkyard man is found dead at some point. Just another loner who got scragged by some other losers.
Now take all of that testosterone, anger, and resentment, and stick it all in one place. Let's say a bar. Let's say Dean and John are working the bar to get some cash for gas. Let's take one of those poor unwitting fuckers who's using some of his paycheck on a few beers, and have him scammed out of some of his cash. He's not only being fucked over by his boss, and the classes above him, now he's getting preyed on by a couple of shady fuckers in a bar. Dudes exactly like him. What the hell, right? They should know what he feels like, why they hell would they be doing this? This makes him angry. He lashes out, and starts a fight. John and/or Dean get hurt. The criminals become victims. This kind of cycle is totally normal, and yet, if you take it outside of the context of the show, and try to imagine that in real life, it’s actually fairly horrifying. Sometimes, a fight isn't where it stops- sometimes it escalates into a frenzy.
The underclass is not a good place to be. It is a sad and desperate place, and there aren't enough people who care about you to outnumber the people who are just angry and looking to fuck things up.
Here is something that is very telling, and very depressing. It's called "the Law of Inverse Value", a little something cooked up by the medical field after having witnessed countless instances of it and decided to put a name to it. The law goes like this: "the less you contribute to society, the greater the trauma you can sustain with minimal to no physical sequelae, including falls from 3 stories, stabbings (chest, neck, head, slashings to the face), gunshot wounds (chest, neck, pelvis, leg, traumatic arrest), and high speed MVC's, unrestrained, where multiple people in the other vehicle are killed.
Likewise, if you are a generally good person - gainfully employed, a parent, wears a seatbelt - the more you do for society, the less or more minor the trauma that will incapacitate or kill you."
If that doesn't remind you of every single encounter the boys have ever had, I'm not sure what show you've been watching. In fact, pretty much any of the hunters you care to think about are like this, too.
Terrible things happen to us. Things normal, decent folk literally do indeed curl up and die from. I'm not sure what reasoning the medical field puts behind it, but I would hazard to guess that we're just too goddamn angry to give up and die. There's already been a lot taken from us; we can't lose our lives, too. Nobody should be able to take that from us.
Several commentors mentioned a line in my starter piece about the underclass being dangerous even without monsters.
Allow me to edify:
I'm a poor white girl from a poor white community in upper Northeastern, rural America. There is shit that happens there that makes me shudder every. Single. Time I think about it.
But instead of going into any weird chick flick moments, I'll use examples directly from the show and clarify them.
Since I'm a poor white girl (now with a brand, spanking new college education that is as useful as tits on a bull), I'm going to start with Jo. As little fondness as I have for Jo, I find her situation in the show to be interesting. Poorly understood by Alona Tal, but whatever, let's roll with it.
We all know she's a twenty-something girl who's got most of a college education under her belt, and she works in a bar with her mother.
Wait a sec, hold the phone. Let me restate that, see if anyone caught it.
She's a twenty-something girl who's working in a bar, with her mother.
That right there is ten kinds of scary and fucked up.
Even without the semi-skeevy hunters swanning through (not all of them as morally intact as the Winchesters), that's a lot of trouble way out in the middle of nowhere. The fact is, yeah, Ellen and Jo really have no choice. Partly it's because of the crippling family loss of their husband and father, but because they are poor white women with little education.
Now don't get me wrong, Ellen is a pretty amazing goddamn woman. She manages to run a bar, provide a home for her child, help others, and be a decent mother. But the fact is, none of that matters when you have 160+ lbs of hammered man-bulk thinking it's their god given right to get a piece of ass along with their dozen brews. For a girl of Jo's age, she's probably an old hat at fending off unwated advances, but there's always the ones that go too far, and there is literally one other person she can consistently count on to help her.
And that's another woman about twice her age with a shotgun.
No cops. No guarantee of a person who's physically matched (namely another man) to pitch in and help. If things get too messy, there is less of a chance that things will get diffused before they get ugly than if it were a guy in the same situation.
Women in our society are preyed on, and in particular those in the lower classes. I took a criminology course in college, and what it did for me was provide words for what was going on around me. In America, 1 in every 4 women will be raped. Not molested, not mugged, not fondled. Raped. Violated. I can say with a sinking amount of faith that that statistic is not bullshit. While middle class and upper class women do get raped, the majority of rape victims are in the lower classes. I am in no way trying to discount the experience rape victims by class, just pointing out that women in lower classes have way more avenues in which to get taken advantage of, and far fewer courses of action to avoid or prevent them. Jo and Ellen are walking a very different road than John and his boys.
Let's look at John, Sam, and Dean.
I'm going to haul out my criminology courses again, and point out that according to my schooling, somewhere around 90% criminals and victims of crime in the United States will be men. Most of these men are in the lower classes, between the ages of 18 and 35. Why? Because in the lower classes, we can see how much everybody above us has. And it hurts. It seems so goddamn unfair, seeing all this shit on TV, all of these people in their SUVs, tooling around drinking their iced half-caf vanilla lattes.
And it makes us angry.
Since we haven't had jobs that consume our daily lives from sunrise to sundown since the agricultural heyday, when we're not working whatever job we have, we get all that time to see how much everybody else has, and how little we have. There are a lot of safeguards against feeling all that disparity, like church, family, friends, but by and large there are a lot of angry, hurt people out there who don't understand why everybody else has something they can only ever dream of. Having things, resources, opportunities. Things that are "normal", because a proper American life is the one that has been sanctified by the middle and upper class.
Hell. Look at Sam. He's exactly the kind of kid I'm talking about. Of course, being 6-foot-something and raised by John Winchester pretty much assures that he's neither going to be in the criminal or victim aspect, unless it's to help out a hunt. Even still, Sam acutely feels the relative disparity between himself and the “normal” middle class lives that provide a kind of safety and security that he can only dream of. He recognizes the differences between his own experiences and the majority of people he encounters, and he’s ashamed of them.
You can see the same in Dean to some extent in 4.09 with the After School Special. The normal, middle class girl points out Dean’s weird situation: no parental figure present, no curfew or bedtime, no real home, no rules. And for a second, Dean who is normally outwardly secure in his pride of his situation, falters. Yes, he wants a father who he can see. He wants a normal family and all of the stupid banal crap that comes with it. But he can’t, because even if they weren’t chasing monsters clear across the country, there would still be no way they could afford the same kind of “normal” luxuries she has.
And we get preyed on. The people that no one cares about, the people that the cops are too far away from, or who won't answer to, are the ones that get fucked up the most, for who all kinds of shit happens. Think of Bobby in his junkyard. Why do you think he has a huge goddamn dog and a lot of guns? It's not just for chasing off demons. It's because scavengers find all kinds of goldmines in junkyards, and they will hurt you and even kill you if you threaten them or call the cops on them. All the way out there in the middle of nowhere, who's going to come help out this solitary, middle aged guy from bottom feeders who're looking to make some easy cash by stealing car parts or stripping copper? Bobby's another example of the underclass; nobody's gonna care if the junkyard man is found dead at some point. Just another loner who got scragged by some other losers.
Now take all of that testosterone, anger, and resentment, and stick it all in one place. Let's say a bar. Let's say Dean and John are working the bar to get some cash for gas. Let's take one of those poor unwitting fuckers who's using some of his paycheck on a few beers, and have him scammed out of some of his cash. He's not only being fucked over by his boss, and the classes above him, now he's getting preyed on by a couple of shady fuckers in a bar. Dudes exactly like him. What the hell, right? They should know what he feels like, why they hell would they be doing this? This makes him angry. He lashes out, and starts a fight. John and/or Dean get hurt. The criminals become victims. This kind of cycle is totally normal, and yet, if you take it outside of the context of the show, and try to imagine that in real life, it’s actually fairly horrifying. Sometimes, a fight isn't where it stops- sometimes it escalates into a frenzy.
The underclass is not a good place to be. It is a sad and desperate place, and there aren't enough people who care about you to outnumber the people who are just angry and looking to fuck things up.
Here is something that is very telling, and very depressing. It's called "the Law of Inverse Value", a little something cooked up by the medical field after having witnessed countless instances of it and decided to put a name to it. The law goes like this: "the less you contribute to society, the greater the trauma you can sustain with minimal to no physical sequelae, including falls from 3 stories, stabbings (chest, neck, head, slashings to the face), gunshot wounds (chest, neck, pelvis, leg, traumatic arrest), and high speed MVC's, unrestrained, where multiple people in the other vehicle are killed.
Likewise, if you are a generally good person - gainfully employed, a parent, wears a seatbelt - the more you do for society, the less or more minor the trauma that will incapacitate or kill you."
If that doesn't remind you of every single encounter the boys have ever had, I'm not sure what show you've been watching. In fact, pretty much any of the hunters you care to think about are like this, too.
Terrible things happen to us. Things normal, decent folk literally do indeed curl up and die from. I'm not sure what reasoning the medical field puts behind it, but I would hazard to guess that we're just too goddamn angry to give up and die. There's already been a lot taken from us; we can't lose our lives, too. Nobody should be able to take that from us.