I really really don't go out of the way to learn about bts stuff in supernatural so I have no idea if this is actually a thing, but I guarantee, GUARANTEE, that in the episode Sex & Violence, season 4 episode 14, when they were originally writing the episode the monster of the week was a succubus but once they got to the whole Sam and Dean drama of the episode they were like "hmm maybe it doesn't really fit to have this whole thing happen with a Sex demon... Oh I Know!" and they just changed the name of the monster to siren and changed exactly Nothing else in the script
Sex, Bugs and Drugs - Insect Aliens and The Winchesters
The Winchesters of course is a relatively PG show, we’d probably label it (thus far) “mild drug references” (to weed), “light kissing”, and “some horror”.
However, the fact it is inhabited by insect aliens (the Akrida) invites musing on other insect-alien narratives and their resonances within the show.
“This is Mugwump, he specialises in sexual ambivalence” (Cronenberg, Naked Lunch, 1991):
“We are all insects, groping towards something terrible or divine”
Phillip K. Dick The Man in the High Castle.
The prominent reference to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five in 1x01 Pilot, alerts us to the qualities of that narrative which may be relevant here; aliens (in Slaughterhouse Five, the Tralfamadorians), the impermanence of death (Tralfamadorians see space/time with non-linearity, in four dimensions, so just because you are dead at one point in time isn’t an “end of the road” moment for them) non-linear narrative, an unreliable narrator, the presence of the author/narrator in the story). All interesting resonances, regarding Narrator-Dean.
The aliens in The Winchesters, the “cricket” Akrida, are able to possess human bodies, seemingly shapeshifting to look like humans in doing so, and they mind-control humans by pushing a stinger into their brain-stem. This kind of insect mind-control/ body-horror/ body-penetration, really made me think about Cronenberg’s film Naked Lunch (1991).
Naked Lunch is based on William Burrough’s (1959) novel of that name (which is already semi-autobiographical) mixed in with events in Burrough’s own life. Burroughs of course, was a Beat Generation author, as well as being queer and a drug addict. His novel is very much not PG.
Cronenberg’s film captures Burrough’s atmosphere of queer desire mixed with self-loathing/ internalised homophobia, very well. Remember, Burroughs was writing in 1959; everyone queer had internalised homophobia, that’s why we needed to develop a Pride narrative for ourselves.
This queer desire/ queer horror is evident in the giant bug with a talking asshole on its back. It asks Bill, the main character (Burroughs’ avatar) to rub some of the yellow bug podwer on its “lips” (the rim of the asshole) and makes obscene noises of pleasure when Bill obliges:
What the heck does that have to do with The Winchesters, you ask?
Well, in a much more PG way, we have the Ostium, which means, literally, “orifice in the human body”, the Men of Letters’ mystical box/ trans-dimensional portal which can blast the Akrida back to their alien home-world, and Carlos specifically joke-compares it to a sexual body “hole” in 1x07 Reflections:
Lata: “They call it the Ostium.”
Carlos: “Oh. Latin for an opening in the body. What, didn't any of you guys ever go to Sunday School? So is that thing organic? Is it a mouth or...( chuckles ) any other kind of hole?”
Lata: Let's just stick with a mouth, please.
https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/viewtopic.php?f=1550&t=58479
In Naked Lunch, the bug reappears, as a talking typewriter, and asks Bill to type the words “Homosexuality is the best all-around cover an agent ever had...” into it, and again, it makes obscene erotic noises of pleasure as he does so.
Bill reveals his own self-loathing/ ambivalence, telling another character he has a family “curse... I am a homosexual... impossible I am one of those simpering things... a wise old queen... told me I had a duty to live and bear witness..”
Later, as Bill makes out with a woman, a giant centipede alien with a long fleshy appendage (cock) and a human-looking butt slithers out of another typewriter and appears to join their love-making.
The Naked Lunch is a subterranean allusion in The Winchesters’ subtext. It’s not name-checked in the way Slaughterhouse -Five has been, which provides a clearer indication of authorial inter-textuality.
However, there are some interesting resonances; insect to human body-horror penetration (Akrida stinger into the brain-stem) a talking asshole/ a mystical “body hole” portal (the Ostium).
One more, being that in Burrough’s novel, and in Cronenberg’s film, much of the story takes place in “The Interzone”, which is partly an imaginary Morocco and partly Bill’s drug-fulled hallucinatory dream-world, but is, above all, a liminal space, which is symbolically representative of the space queer people in the 1950s inhabited, as “outlawed” subjects.
Narrator-Dean currently inhabits such liminal space himself, also in two senses:
1) We saw him die in 15x20, so he is, apparently, narrating from Heaven, or from the liminal space between dying and rebirth, as Holy Ghost Narrator Dean/ Dean’s soul in the Bardo (the space, as set out in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, between dying and reincarnation).
2) Dean continues to inhabit a liminal space with regard to his queerness in the SPN/ Winchesters narrative. He may be bisexual in a thousand ways in the narrative subtext, and in its (romantic) narrative architecture, but a heterosexual interpretation (they were best friends/ brothers) remains possible.
one of my favorite things of reading almost exclusively au fanfic, is finding out the many different creative ways writers kill off john winchester just so that dean can be gay at peace lmao
1x06 Skin is very much a Deancentric episode, and to those in the know, the cold open is a chilling insight into his psyche. The opening sequence of course is effective without knowledge of what it is a reference to, as it shows ‛Dean’ has been torturing somebody and is about to get shot by a SWAT team. This is a shock to any viewer on first viewing as it seems completely opposed to the Dean we know and love, yet here he is.
However, the choice of music for this scene is almost certainly not just because Kripke or Shiban like it, and the entire construction of the opening is likely an intentional homage to the 1986 horror film Manhunter, the first dramatisation of the Hannibal Lecter novel Red Dragon. In the film, the song In a Gadda da Vida by Iron Butterfly plays over the sequence of Francis Dolarhyde about to murder a woman whilst Will Graham smashes through the window and – after a short but brutal gun fight – kills him.
Francis Dolarhyde – the titular Red Dragon – is a serial killer suffering serious mental damage and trauma. Born with a cleft lip – hare lip – in 1938, his mother rejected him, leading to his adoption by his grandmother, which is where his trauma started. She physically and emotionally abused him as a child, including squeezing his penis between a pair of scissors and threatening to emasculate him if he wets the bed again. This mistreatment leads to him torturing and killing animals as a child, and the trauma is what likely led to his developing a fractured psyche, possibly dissociative identity disorder. One of the fractures or identities manifested itself in his mind as a figure called The Great Red Dragon, at whose request he murders so that he can one day become the dragon.
This backstory from the novel is inexplicably omitted from Manhunter, though it is present in Red Dragon (2002) and Hannibal (2015). This omission, however, is irrelevant, as the cold open of 1x06 Skin evokes this character and therewith his traumatic, abusive backstory, and associates him with Dean. Whether or not this exact comparison was intentional is also irrelevant: The Show draws a direct line between Dean and Francis Dolarhyde.
Of course, the directness of the line is debatable, as the Dean in the cold open is in sooth not the true Dean, but a shapeshifter taking his form. One can very much be of the belief that the shapeshifter is not Dean, but the end result of that is that the shapeshifter is just a shapeshifter. For reasons I’ll discuss below, I interpret the shapeshifter as a version of Dean and a narrative tool to reveal more of his character to us. As such, the line drawn between Dolarhyde and Dean is valid, and even the episode itself goes to great efforts to blur the line between the two on various occasions.
Let’s first take the scene where Shifter!Dean confronts Sam in the sewer whilst downloading Dean’s memories and thoughts. He reveals a lot of Dean, and the manner in which he accosts Sam for having left to go to university whilst Dean had to remain behind is not cold and detached. Rather, Shifter!Dean speaks as though he is Dean without the filter and the betrayal, loneliness and anger are his own, and not simply memories he downloaded from a victim which are entirely separate from his own.
We can interpret what he says and does as just ‘monster mind-frakking’, but that would be lazy writing and a lazy analysis. Shifter!Dean has Dean’s memories. Quite how this happens is uncertain: the shifter presents itself as a genetic mutant rather than a being of thaumogenesis, so in Supernatural’s universe, memories must be stored in the DNA rather than being electronic impulses in the brain. … Okay, I’ll go with it. If we can have wendigo in Colorado, then why not memories in DNA? Perhaps it’s psychic.
Whatever the case, it has Dean’s memories, and uses them to gain access to and hurt others. But why would the writers choose to have the monster do this? Why reveal so much of Dean’s internal conflict and resentment of Sam, if it is only MOTW mind-games? And why have a MOTW give the lines about being a freak, if it’s not truly related to Dean? It is, after all, very much Jensen Ackles delivering the lines.
To back this up, we have Shifter!Dean repeating Dean’s line almost word for word:
DEAN: Hey, man, like it or not, we are not like other people. But I’ll tell you one thing. This whole gig—it ain’t without perks. (He holds up a gun. SAM takes it and puts it in the back of his jeans. They walk away.)
‘SHAPESHIFTER: You left. Hell, I did everything Dad asked me to, and he ditched me, too. No explanation, nothin’, just poof. Left me with your sorry ass. But, still, this life? It’s not without its perks. (He laughs.) I meet the nicest people. Like little Becky. You know, Dean would bang her if he had the chance. Let’s see what happens. (He smiles and covers SAM with a sheet.)’
Is this not the script telling us that Shifter!Dean really is Dean in a different guise? If you’re not convinced, bear in mind that even Shifter!Dean says to Sam: “I am your brother.”
I hope you can understand why I see Shifter!Dean as an aspect of Dean, though John Shiban might not have intended this to be the case when he wrote the episode. Shifter!Dean is an opportunity to show what Dean might have become if his situation were different, whilst also speaking volumes about the horrors of Dean’s upbringing. Shifter!Dean’s father tried to kill him with a shovel when he was a child, but that’s apparently nothing compared to what Dean endured.
And remember, if you will, the connection to Francis Dolarhyde and his abusive grandmother. What exactly does this link tell us about what John did to Dean? Let’s take the bed-wetting: it is very likely Dean wet the bed as a child, especially considering his trauma and selective mutism as revealed in 1x03 Dead in the Water. Episode 1x15 Nightmare makes it rather clear to the hawk-eyed that John at the very least beat Dean, and Dean’s sexualisation of himself in front of authority figures to escape punishment comes up in 1x01 Pilot, 2x07 The Usual Suspects and 2x19 Folsom Prison Blues. Dean suffered, and it’s a miracle he didn’t turn into the Supernaturalverse’s Francis Dolarhyde.
But before leaving the subject of Dolarhyde behind for a moment, might we perhaps see an echo of The Great Red Dragon in Shifter!Dean? Dean and Shifter!Dean are opposite sides of a coin, sharing memories and a voice. The Great Red Dragon is a part of Dolarhyde, and it is to appease him that Dolarhyde murders. Shifter!Dean would then be The Great Red Dragon, the part of Deans mind telling him to kill, while Dean is Dolarhyde.
Viewed in this context, the MOTW’s lines about being born human but being made something else have much more impact than simply a monster’s whining. It is Dean talking to us through someone else’s mouth (a mouth that, oddly enough, is still his own).
Having established this, we can now view the rest of the episode with the understanding that Shifter!Dean is simply a vessel for Dean’s shadow self. But aside from this, class also plays a significant role, with Dean and Sam representing working class men from the periphery of society intruding upon suburbia.
As a side note for Americans wondering why I’ve left race for last, having grown up in Britain I generally don’t notice when a community is majority or exclusively white-skinned Europeans because that’s the environment most British people grow up and live in. In the 1990s and 2000s, black people only comprised around 2-3% of the entire population of Britain, compared with perhaps 4-6% brown and around 5% other European. ‛Race’ here is very different (even more so in Finland where I live, where even being white-skinned doesn’t save a person from Finns’ xenophobia and racism). However, this programme takes place in America where everything is racialised in a way that’s utterly absurd to a quaint Old Worlder like me, but having been force-fed American media and culture like a goose being fattened for Christmas for the last two decades, I’m aware that such a set up is regarded as very middle class and WASPish in the Colonies.
A discussion of suburbia and fear of the other is therefore appropriate. An early Lovecraft tale comes to mind about a pleasant New England street whose character is slowly changed and degraded by a long, steady influx of immigrants over the course of years. These immigrants are described in such a way that they seem like eastern or southeastern Europeans, possibly Turks, possibly Finns (who were regarded as ‛Mongoloid’ and ‛not truly white’ during the times of the great emigrations to North America), and their mere presence distorts and bastardises the wonderful New England ideal.
This fear of the unknown and the other is the basis of much of Lovecraft’s mythos, reflecting his own sheltered New England upbringing. This same fear of things we don’t understand or which doesn’t quite fit in properly with out lives likewise forms the basis of much horror fiction. Think, if you will, of the sheer ubiquitousness of horror set in stable, middle class homes and communities, such as Paranormal Activity, Scream, Nightmare on Elm Street, Buffy (technically horror, though hardly horrifying), or in wealthy British or New England manor houses and mansions such as Woman in Black. Homogeneity is also a staple trope, such as the mining community in My Bloody Valentine. A stable equilibrium is presented, often an affluent one, and the stability is threatened by the presence of somebody from the outside, or by somebody on the inside who doesn’t quite fit in.
Dean and Sam embody this in various ways, especially Dean. Sam managed to win his way into Stanford University on a scholarship. He is not from the middle class culture his peers are, not was he initially privy to their weird ways, but he managed to fake it until he made it, almost earning himself a place at law school before the proverbial manure made contact with the metaphorical air ventilation unit. As such, he is able to worm his way back into that culture in this episode by way of his affluent connections. Whether or not they know he is one of them or just New Money is uncertain, but they appear to embrace him as mostly belonging.
Dean, on the other hand, does not, and he much more than Sam represents the WASPish horror of inner city people encroaching on their territory. In spite of the fact that Jensen Ackles has incredibly straight, white teeth which must cost a lot of money, that he is clearly very well fed and takes very good care of his body, that he has very fluffy hair and nice looking clothing (except for that nasty, smelly-looking leather jacket he got from John) which make Dean look financially comfortable at the very least, Dean is very much a very poor man from a very working class background. He is not part of the refined world of American universities that get called colleges for some reason, or big wooden houses with ridiculous windows that would provide no protection from the zombie apocalypse: he grew up in dingy, stinky roadside motels and never had a home of his own since 1983. He has been killing monsters and ghoulies for approximately 14 years at this point, if not more, and is very, very violent if need be.
Shifter!Dean is what the WASPs are afraid Dean will do to their community. Because he’s the other and they don’t understand him properly, they fear him and what he will do to them if they allow him into their midst.
Apropos class, one thing I find difficult to believe in American television shows is how characters who are supposed to be working class always have fantastic teeth, so fantastic that they almost look fake and plasticy. Yanks will mock Brits for having bad teeth, but teeth are supposed to be faintly yellowish and we only straighten them if absolutely necessary because it’s expensive. I don’t think I’d be anywhere near as enthusiastic about the show to write these reviews nobody reads if if weren’t for Jensen as Dean, but he looks far too healthy and cared-for. Compare the British Shameless to the American Shameless, or the American and British Queer as Folk, and it’ll be apparent that American television is intensely uncomfortable with depicting normal, average people, much less the working class and poor. Everybody has fantastic make up, magnificent teeth, fancy hair and flawless skin, it’s so unrealistic. It took me reading other people’s reviews of this episode and the show in general for me to truly understand Dean and Sam are supposed to be working class, because they sure as hell don’t look it.
Returning to the plot, discussing the affluent’s fear of the poor leads me on to Dean’s own perception of himself. Shifter!Dean says he was born different, and that he was made into a freak. When we apply this to the shapeshifter, he is most likely talking about the fact he is a shapeshifter and that it pushed him to the margins of society. However, since Shifter!Dean is a vessel for revealing Dean’s shadow self, I must also believe that when the shapeshifter is giving Becca his sympathy for devil talk, he is speaking for both himself and Dean. What is it about Dean, then, that makes him a freak? What circumstances of his birth caused him to think that way of himself?
A few things come to mind. The first one is that he blames himself for the abuse he suffered at John’s hands, and perhaps for Mary’s death. This is unfortunately one of the effects of abuse: the victims blames himself for what his abuser has done to him. As with the discussion of survivor’s guilt in 1x05 Bloody Mary, this could be a way of attempting to feel in control of something in a situation that otherwise leaves the abuser feeling completely helpless and out of control. But what precisely is it about himself that he believes is to blame?
That he was not a good enough son, that he could never live up John’s expectations and demands to prove his value and worth. Probably. That he was a failure, a social outcast incapable of forming lasting, meaningful bonds with anybody even in his own family.
And one of the big things is Dean’s bisexuality. Some people bristle at the mere notion of Dean being anything other than straight, but I have yet to be presented with any evidence to prove Dean’s straight while having plenty of textual evidence strongly indicating he likes both women and the fairer sex. Dean being bisexual would of course be a major contributing factor in his perception of himself as a freak, especially considering he grew up in the 1980s and 1990s when the image of a gay man was as a corpse-like horror dying of AIDS or a mincing queer who was the butt of everybody’s jokes. Bisexual men, on the other hand, were sinister, untrustworthy, lying, cheating creeps responsible for infecting innocent straight women with HIV.
These were the images burnt into Dean’s mind growing up, and indeed it is this very idea of the existence of such horrific things as men who love men and men who love men and women that has been the driving force behind much horror since Victorian Gothic classics such as The Vampyre or Dracula. For a more in-depth discussion, do please watch Verily Bitchie’s video on the subject 'A Bisexual History of Dracula’...
...as well as her videos ‛Why we Hate Bi Men’...
...and 'Why We Hate Bi Women'...
James Somerton also discusses at length the influence of mainstream society’s anxieties about gay, bi and trans people on horror films in his documentaries ’Monsters in the Closet’ and ’Society and Queer Horror’.
His ‛Society and Queer Horror’ is particularly salient here, and the one forefront in my mind as I analyse 1x06 Skin. As horror in the 1990s often depicted affluent suburban fears of the Lovecraftian inner city gays and blacks infiltrating their lives and changing their neighbourhoods in the shape of e.g. the very homosexual murderers in Scream killing all their children, so too does Shifter!Dean enter the lives of the St. Louis middle class and makes people bleed.
Bisexuality and bisexual people seem to threaten the heterosexual social order in a way that homosexual simply doesn’t. Homosexuality is no threat to a heterosexual identity and vice versa: a heterosexual can prove s/he is not homosexual with ease by simply being attracted to the opposite sex. One cannot, however, prove one is not interested in the same sex, which brings a lack of surety into the assumption that everybody one meets is heterosexual unless proven otherwise. A woman’s husband might be very attracted to women, but she can never be absolutely certain that he is not attracted to men as well. She can be confident he is not homosexual, but the spectre of the bisexual will always be hanging over their relationship is she allows herself to acknowledge the bisexual’s existence. Men tend not to be bothered by bisexual women, but heterosexual women are frequently very uncomfortable with the idea of dating a bisexual man.
Interestingly enough, Shifter!Dean mainly focuses on couples, brutalising or murdering the woman and framing the husband/boyfriend for the crime. If we take into account society’s general unease with bisexuality, especially heterosexual women’s discomfort with bisexual men, the fact that the shifter in the form of an undoubtedly bisexual man brutalises and almost kills women in heterosexual relationships fits very nicely into the gay/bi men as monsters theme James Somerton discusses in the videos linked above. It is not that gay or bi men are monstrous solely by virtue of their sexuality, but rather that horror represents the mainstream’s fears of the niche, the outsider and the unknown.
Dean, therefore, is horrific in two ways: he challenges the assumption of heterosexuality and threatens the comfortable middle class suburban ideal.
Ultimately, however, Dean is not a monster. He is just different and wants somebody to love him rather than what he can do for them.
Forgive me another slight sidetrack, but Paula R. Stiles calls the shapeshifter misogynistic in her revierw of the episode, but killing a woman is not the same as killing a woman because she’s a woman. Somebody might murder me because I think the American dub and translation of Thomas the Tank Engine is a disgusting sacrilege and Shining Time Station is a ridiulous pandering and dumbing down of the original material, but that person would be killing a gay man. Would his murder be classified as a homophobic murder? Were the women chosen the the shifter because they were women, or because they were home alone and therefore easy targets?
Most of the people to be brutalised and murdered on Supernatural are men, and I never see anybody raising accusations of androphobia at characters or the show. Why is that? Up to 1x06, 8 men have been killed compared to 3 women (4 if we count Becca’s brother’s girlfriend murdered off screen before the episode even started).
Whilst we’re on the subject of the shows vastly different treatment of men vs women, this episode stands out in that it actually shows brutalised women on screen. This is so that the audience can see that Shifter!Dean is truly evil. An antagonist can brutalise a man and most readers or viewers won’t care overmuch, but if the same antagonist so much as slaps a woman, he’s an evil, irredeemable villain.
Having watch this entire show several times, this is a trope Supernatural plays into over and over again ad nauseum. I commented on this as early as in 1x01 Pilot, but please, Dear Reader, pay attention to the amount of times a man will be killed by the MOTW, often brutally and often on screen. The first one that comes to mind is the father pushed onto a circular saw in the cold open of 3x02 The Kids are Alright and whose entire chest is destroyed on screen for about 10 seconds whilst we have to listen to the saw slicing through his bones and organs and blood pours out of his mouth. We can take a look at 1x03 Dead in the Water, where the young woman is discretely dragged beneath the water in the cold open, dying off screen, whereas we have to watch her brother dying on screen.
Another that comes to mind is 13x11 Breakdown. Somebody is kidnapping people and auctioning their body parts on the internet. The victims are cut apart live on camera for the bidders. A young Mexican man is cut up, his body blocked by the ‛surgeon’, but we hear the saw, see his legs thrashing, hear him screaming… The young woman who’s kidnapped gets rescued just in time, though, so at least it ended well -_-
One commentator’s reaction to Shifter!Dean hitting and tying up Becca in this episode was than she was glad the scene finished before any real damage was done to Becca. The scene made her feel very uncomfortable. People are incredibly comfortable with seeing graphic, bloody violence committed against men, but violence against women is deeply unsettling.
That about does it for the main talking points surrounding my interpretation of this episode. Minor points are the sheer stupidity of Becca. If somebody like Dean turned up at my door in the middle of the night, I’d sure as hell be inviting him in for tea and chill, but not if his brother had lied to me about his being a policeman and having – in my limited, self-centred understanding of things – ruined my brother’s legal case. I don’t understand why she allowed him into her home, and it is equally as strange that she does not react in fear when Dean finds her in the sewers. How did she know he was Dean and not Shifter!Dean?
Worse still is the apparent blitheness with which she allows Dean to take the blame for Shifter!Dean’s actions at the end. Her brother might have been going to prison, but the price of his acquittal is Dean’s unjust scapegoating. She’s rich, he’s poor, she’s straight (probably), he’s bi (if you’re paying attention), so he’s the one that has to take the fall so she can continue living her blessed suburban ideal.
This will dog him for years to come, and effectively cuts off any possibility of Dean leaving hunting and having a normal life, whilst not affecting Sam in the slightest. All of this, of course, is Sam’s fault and doing. Sure Dean went along with the lie that he was a policeman, but he could not have gainsaid Sam in front of Becca because their cover would be completely blown. Certainly Sam eventually gets in trouble with the law, too, but the police are willing to give him leniency or even acquittal if he betrays Dean to them. And what does Sam do at the end of the episode? Smiles the smug smile of an entitled douche who couldn’t care less.
This is a very strong episode that shows what Supernatural can be when its writers are on point. I’m aware it’s a cliché, but this was heavily reminiscent of The X-Files and I greatly appreciated its dark, grim tone. Supernatural was originally conceived of as a mini horror film every week, and 1x06 Skin is a perfect example of that. The next episode, however, is less so, and is one I might indeed skip or treat very briefly. It, too, is a mini horror film, but a shallow one with little to hold my interest.
And whatever Shifter!Dean whispered into Becca’s ear that made her call him disgusting; I’m game for it. Whatever it is, count me in.
