spn is incoherent on all fronts except for the fact that it’s fundamentally libertarian. it will flip flop on its positions on free will, family, the cycle of abuse, love, and trauma, but it does not budge ideologically
Heaven is not a universal kingdom that everyone shares but an infinite series of rooms that every individual builds for themselves. Heaven, the most happiest place in all of creation, is entirely of your own individual making and based on the idea that private property is literal sacred ground. It is the logical endpoint of the American Dream
Hunters exist outside of the state and outside the demands of capitalism, but are still breadwinners in the market. Poverty is an absent (or trivial) facet of the existence of a Hunter - the excuse of Dean running credit card scams to pay for motels and food is extremely flimsy but never challenged in a meaningful way. Many the well established and older hunters (notably Bobby and Ellen) are property owners and small business managers
Hunters do not sell their labour to a market (they don’t work for The Man!) but still have more than enough income that their basic needs are never threatened. This is the ideal libertarian fantasy - you are simultaneously above the coercive forces of any market but still win in those markets when you happen to participate in them. Capitalism, according to this, is a voluntary system that you can choose at any point to participate in, but there are no real drawbacks to taking a leave of absence from it. Hunters are also not “workers” in this sense - they aren’t contracted out by corporations or private individuals, their labour is not sold but rather given freely and voluntarily where they decide its productive, but HUNTERS themselves are the ultimate authority on where their labour moves and what they do with it
This dichotomy is also present in the brothers’ interactions with cops. They pretend to be state agents in order to gain access to crime scenes and police documentation but they don’t answer to any authority. They don’t serve the state when acting as FBI agents (because having a boss means you’re under the thumb of an authority, and the state is THE authority), they just use state infrastructure to making hunting easier
Hunting itself is not collective. People work either alone or (sometimes, more rarely) in pairs. There are no Hunter guilds or associations, there is no infrastructure to support Hunters, there are just individual resources (again, like Bobby) that people can go to for occasional help. These networks are informal and fluid, partially because Hunters hide the work they do from society, and the more formal associations like the Men Of Letters are both A) long gone and B) despise Hunters and think they’re simple brutes
This gets into like, the very specific form of white American masculinity that has the aesthetics of the traditional working class (American made car, boots and jeans and plaid and jean jackets, rough and tumble men who don’t go to sjw college, etc), but are still, again, not under the economic pressure imposed on the working class
Poverty is only a part of the brothers’ lives when they are children. It’s used as a point of trauma for them, but it’s something they easily escape as adults - Sam gets a full ride to Stanford and Dean is really good at using fake credit cards and scamming money out of people from pool and cars games. The implication here (combined with the point above) is that poverty is voluntary and only traumatic or undeserving when it’s imposed on literal children
There’s probably more shit I’m not remembering but I’ve probably made my point
areudirty
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tangentwithtanner
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2087
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