Spn 15x10 First Watch (BI DEAN, HAYES CODE, LAMP META)
For context, I knew about why lamp before watching, but in the context of the show its kind of even more telling.
This is a bit of a long one, but scroll down to the conclusion to see my thoughts.
Dean's secret love of dancing and ballet is shown in 7x16 with the cursed ballet shoes, and comes back again in this episode. In 7x16, he was ashamed of being a ballet fan, the cursed shoes put him in danger for loving ballet, and even are a beacon of danger for him personally (which is some homophobic queer coding).
After his dream in this episode, Dean says that he always thought he could be a good dancer if he wanted to be.
So, he has a dream sequence after which he admits something to himself that he doesn't want to admit in previous seasons, notably in the last season where he is noticeably homophobic... I am not a Dean knows truther, but I do think that the dream means something subconscious, and the lamp being his partner, as well as the song is significant.
This sequence was very much giving hayes code queer coding. Dean's whole character honestly has a lot of it. I would say that his fear of femininity and secret appreciation of it, combined with all his queer movie references do queer code him in a somewhat outdated way.
Dean gains the confidence to dance on his own, but chooses to dance with a lamp. Given that the dance invokes imagery of a time where censorship of queerness was really damn high, with the song being by a queer man about misbehaving, while Dean is doing something that he saw as "misbehaving" when it comes to his image, I think that this is trying to invoke that previous queer coding and show how it ties into Dean's journey.
At the end of the sequence, after dancing with the lamp (Castiel represents light often in the show), Dean climbs up the stairs, showing the progress that he has made. IN AN EPISODE CALLED HEROS JOURNEY.
To me, this seems like showing his character development from 7x16 where he was afraid of showing his love for ballet (and was homophobic lowkey), to this episode, where he is no longer homophobic, and is open to having a partner in his life, even a male.
Also, given the episode prior having him forgive Cas in purgatory in a very romantic moment (and almost tell Cas he loves him (probably in a misguided "platonic" way) in my opinion), this demonstrates his subconscious thoughts to me. He wants Cas to be his partner, whether consciously or obviously in a romantic way, or just in a coded way.
CONCLUSION: This is a dream, so it is subconscious on some level, but to me, this is giving subliminal messaging for his own thoughts that he might repress. He wants Cas to be his partner but not in a way he knows. This also shows how his own mind is full of repression and coding that means a lot that he simply does not have time to unpack, which ties into the rest of his queer coding the audience sees a lot. His internal repression written like the Hayes Code, like how he is written, and the media he consumes.
Still, he has made a lot of progress in his own hero's journey. He is still repressed, but he is not homophobic anymore. He is more open to the possibility of seeing men in a romantic way
Chuck might be controlling him, but he is growing beyond the mold that he has been written into in his own mind. Which also ties into Cas and him rewriting Chuck's plans. He is repressed to the outward world (though we saw his inner thoughts) earlier but is growing to make it less internal now (7x16) because of his own queer love (and identity). He is inching towards queerness in a way that gets past Chuck and the CW.
This is not only a beacon for the audience to refer back to past queer coding, but also a look into Dean's mind.
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