February 1, 2006

A column tackling gay issues, gay themes, and just general gayness in television.

Out-takes
Un-, Sub-, or Supernatural Forces
Butch-femme dynamics in the series of brotherly love
by Whitney Cox

I know what you're thinking. You looked under the heading for That Gay Column, saw that it was about Supernatural, and thought, oh, no, she's not going there. Let me assure you that I am, indeed, going there, so if the idea of pointing out sexual tension between two male characters who are also brothers squicks you, uh, you might want to hit the 'back' button on your browser (but man, the show does it for me¹, so you can't blame me entirely).

Still here? Great.

My first awareness of Supernatural came when I saw the print ads — two attractive young men, dimly lit by a car's headlights, carrying with them the accoutrements of itinerant exorcists — and thought immediately, wow, this looks like John Dies at the End, only gayer and for adolescent girls! I confess to being subtly disappointed to learn that the two strapping young lads were not the John Cheese and Dave Wong of the WB, but brothers, and my interest took yet another hit when I actually started watching the show and found its acting, writing, and special effects to range largely from the profoundly mediocre to the downright abysmal. I know good television, and this is not, by any definition, good television.

In fact, much like the early X-Files, the show is fueled past its failings almost entirely by the chemistry between the two principals, the boys who, like Mulder and Scully, generate enough sexual tension to power a small city (or at least one craptacular ex-Walkman ghost detector).

Yet the show has the strange charm of the first season of the X-Files (no surprise, really, considering how many people involved with the latter are in some way involved with the former), from its lame monster-of-the-week plots to its half-assed attempts at an overarching mythos to its racking up frequent flyer miles from repeated trips to Expositionland. In fact, much like the early X-Files, the show is fueled past its failings almost entirely by the chemistry between the two principals, the boys who, like Mulder and Scully, generate enough sexual tension to power a small city (or at least one craptacular ex-Walkman ghost detector). Part of that tension arises from how the two actively fall into a butch-femme dynamic, with Dean in the more protective 'masculine' role, whose answer to everything is either to shoot it in the head or summon his inner twelve-year-old to pretend he's a policeman, and Sam as the more intuitive 'feminine' partner, voted Most Likely To Be Grabbed By The Monster by his graduating class.

What makes the pair so charged is the gulf of difference between Sam and Dean; the characters may be brothers, but their roles are so unequal that the great deal of angst and longing that charges their shared past makes them seem not so much long-estranged siblings as ex-lovers. The problem with a show that perpetuates classic horror-movie gender stereotypes — e.g., the woman will sense where danger is and protect her children, the man will charge headlong into danger and get his disbelieving ass killed — is that two typically masculine characters, even if both are Mulderesque believers, will together serve to do little more than burn the house down and/or get the car stuck in a ditch. One of the pair, then, has to be the intuitive foil, the Shining refugee who can see past the other's fool-headedness while still being enough of a dolt himself to make life interesting every time he gets kidnapped by that week's demon.

Poor, poor Sam — the kid brother has to be the woman. He not only started out significantly less butch than his brother, but the moment they pointed out his precognitive abilities, his masculinity sprung a leak that, as far as I have seen, has yet to be patched. I gaped at the screen when 'Bloody Mary' actually forced Sam into the role of a mirror-summoning dumb teenage girl. My girlfriend and I have agreed that we are mostly all right about the random damsel in distress that seems to crop up every episode because, regardless of her presence, on a long enough timescale, Sam will always become the damsel. Though he is much like Buffy's Willow, in that you can't actually harm him because he's a delicate waifish mountain flower, Sam's contract states that he must be imperiled once an episode, just for tension's sake.

Meanwhile, as the older brother, Dean has the job of saving the day by charging in after his brother and dragging him out of the hole/unwrapping the extension cord from his neck/shooting the ghost who's giving him a handjob through his chest/whatever the wacky perilous situation requires to keep Sam from kicking the bucket. (In RPG terms, Sam is the mysterious magical girl whose powers will emerge in time to save the world, while Dean is the spiky-haired hero with the big-ass sword who has sworn to protect her from all evil. Seriously, just meditate on that one for a minute.) Not coincidentally, Dean's possessive attitude toward Sam, while likely a reflection of their father's possessiveness toward his sons, still smacks of the jealous ex, particularly when pitted against anyone from Sam's quasi-normal (as normal as pre-law at Stanford can get) hiatus from the family. Of course he wants to take care of his little brother — he just wants the job to be exclusively his.

As far as the women on the show go, I can't tell if they're consistently uninteresting because the show has a bizarrely sexist overarching ethic, the WB is legally barred from hiring more than two actresses with talent per season, or both. The fact remains, however, that the two brothers are far more interested in each other than the ever are in the random girls. Dean's got that weird kind of sexuality where he tries so very, very hard to be the mack daddy, which might work except for the part where his heart just isn't in it, while Sam's busy pining for his late girlfriend (whom we last saw stuck to the ceiling a la Mena Suvari in American Beauty, only deader and also on fire). They operate in a kind of emotional isolation where though it initially seems Dean needs Sam much more than Sam needs Dean, the more time they spend away from anything approaching normal, chasing down invisible hook-men through churches with shotguns, the more remote everything but their world of two becomes.

What's powering Supernatural is its ambiguously gay siblings, whose weirdly intense dynamic has at least kept me at it long past the point where good sense would have me changing the channel.

Is this too much thought for a lame television show? You bet your sweet bippy it is! However, where Supernatural fails in execution, it succeeds in concept, meaning that it's almost more fun to write about the show than actually watch it. Personally, I'm hoping that what I'm seeing here is, in fact, much like the X-Files in its infancy, ready to bloom forth with mythology and clever writing and fabulous recurring characters — though perhaps without the eventual decline into unwatchability that comes with not euthanising a show when the relationship that powered it is no longer. What's powering Supernatural is its ambiguously gay siblings, whose weirdly intense dynamic has at least kept me at it long past the point where good sense would have me changing the channel. Together, they've got the saving grace that may just push this well-meaning headcase of a show past its natal gasps into actual watchable television.

And at the end of the day, the boys ride off into the sunset with each other, the radio blaring triumphant hair metal, off to be the variables in countless horror movies in forty-minute miniature, an unstoppable evil-fighting duo for the (teen)ages. If only someone could tell them that though they're ostensibly on a quest for their dad, all they really need in life is a good golden retriever.²

NEXT TIME, ON OUT-TAKES: The amazing true love story of two convicted felons, seriously, this time, I mean it; or Over The Rainbow.

¹Such as every time the home salespersons in 'Bugs' mistook the brothers for a gay couple, and I had to pick myself up off the floor.

²That's a John Dies at the End reference, in case you missed it. Now get off your lazy tuckus and go read it.

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