SPN month: thoughts about John?
It occurs to me that my Mary post may have seemed a little hard on John? Which I really didn't mean to be. An overly suspicious mind could possibly misconstrue my heart full of Sam and ~thing about Lucifer as implying or even causing a concomitant uncharitableness toward Big Daddy. But, like with Michael, the more I think about him, the more decidedly ambivalent I become.
John is an archetype that really annoys me, natch. Stupid MAN PAIN rampage of revenge getting reframed as some heroic quest? Almost literal sanctification because of said rampage of revenge? Emotionally abusive father figure who gets let off the hook and even glorified because apparently most of fandom is convinced he possesses the heroic magnanimity it takes to refrain from beating on kids? The huge, dramatic gestures expected to make up for all the neglect and abuse? Physical violence equated with "righteousness?"
The fact that I don't have a Bill Adama-grade hate-on for this prick is astounding to me.
But I...kinda don't?
A lot of that's down to young John. I was all set to roll my eyes and brush him off. But he came on screen and I couldn't. He's this sweet kid, more than holding it together over what must have been some awful baggage from Vietnam, really and truly happy to be building his own life in Lawrence. Smart and stubborn but not arrogant, even in the face of horrors he couldn't have begun to imagine. The way he knows how wrong the type of treatment his future self would dish out to Sam and Dean is makes the fact that he went ahead and did it anyway that much more appalling and tragic. (This actor might be one of my favorites on the show, that I can have such complicated reactions to two different characters he played in as many episodes.)
Then I think the best-handled story of S1 is the relationship between John and Dean. We got the whole thing filtered through Dean's perspective, rather than John's, and it ended up being a really interesting examination of how and why Dean idealized his father, which turned into a direct commentary on why we shouldn't. Dean's complex relationship with the memory of his father remains one of the most dynamic and compelling aspects of his characterization, but it has its strongest focus in S1. Specifically, I have so much love for the way John's distance isn't stoic, reserved masculinity, it's a huge character flaw. One that I definitely share, no less, and I really love when stories can make me relate on that level to someone so very different from myself.
But once he's with them in real time, he loses me completely. That character type that I hate with my whole soul up there is so prevalent and recognizable, and therefore so readily privileged within narratives, it's just so easy for him to become the center of gravity and the POV character. But, because that archetype is junk to me, he's not as important to me as he is to the narrative, and so I end up unimpressed with his Big! Emotional! Moments!
Like, that scene where he's HAD IT! He's NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANY MORE! He's ENDING IT!? Just comes across to me like this:
Click to viewHe ain't no freakin' monument to justice!
and idk but I'm pretty sure full-on belly laughs are not what the script is going for here. But like...MAN PAIN is hilarious at best to me.
And from there on out, it kind of goes downhill. It's probably not even worth rehashing my issues with the "righteous man" crap, which I ultimately choose to believe was just Alastair fucking with Dean's head but which I think we are supposed to take at face value. But from a John-arc perspective, I think it drops the ball in a big way, because what works about John's story is the deconstructive aspect to it, and turning those traits into some shit where they make him a biblical-grade badass undermines the deconstruction in a big way.
Then Sam and John, unlike John and Dean, ends up being unsatisfying and a little bit uncomfortable for me. Can we handle how much the "butting heads" because they're "too much alike" perspective the show seems to take on the John and Sam relationship annoys me? I'm all about acknowledging and humanizing imperfect and even downright bad parenting. I am. But that means being intellectually honest about it, which in turn means NOT excusing it with bullshit false equivalencies. Dude, when a grown-ass man and a teenager/child are so remarkably, uncannily, intolerably similar? It's more than plausible to that ONLY ONE OF THEM IS THE PROBLEM. Sam is enough of a reprehensible fuck-up on his own, tyvm. No need to go around muddying the waters trying to blame him for his terrible childhood too. CAS HAVE MERCY.
So, I'm not sure to make of what S5 sets up about him. I like that Dark Side of the Moon complicates his marriage to Mary considerably, and has Dean explicitly comment about the way John pedesteled Mary after she was gone, rather than tried to make things work when he was around. That's another big deflation to the MAN PAIN, particularly given the way both Dean and especially Sam are prone to turn around and do that same idealization of John himself.
All of which is even further complicated by the reveal of My Bloody Valentine, where we found out that Mary and John didn't even like each other. I wonder if that wasn't what happened to John Winchester, if he didn't have an adverse reaction to the angel-roofies and just snap when her death yanked it all out from under him and just left him with the fear and pain and trauma of the life the angels pulled him away from after Vietnam.
Truly tragic, and sympathetic, but none of it excuses what he did to his kids. That's the sticking point for me, and not solely because it was awful, although it was. I feel like there's this false dichotomy postulated, where the option to John doing the crap he did to them was the only alternative to not doing ANYTHING about the supernatural. And that's crap - he could've handled it the way parents handle every other danger in the world, that is, to teach them how best to protect themselves and equip them to live their lives anyway. And if he really did have to go fight the monsters - well, he didn't have to take the kids with him. If he "would've gone crazy," if he couldn't be a parent, then he should've just not been a parent. If nothing else, he'd have had to come across the Campbells while he was investigating the supernatural in Kansas, and whatever else they might have been, they were a strong support network that could have provided both stability and protection. Dragging them along on his magical mystery tour was a choice, not a necessity, and a horribly selfish one at that.
So, I don't know. If that's intended to be a false dichotomy, but one that neither of the boys can bring themselves to recognize enough to say out loud, then the show is doing something very subtle and sophisticated. But "subtle" is not the first place my mind goes when I think about this show? And if that's not happening, then it's ultimately this very conventional, boring WiR/MAN PAIN thing? I DON'T KNOW THOUGHTS?