essay one: the celebration of the Winchester family dysfunction as heroic in "In the Hunt"
Obviously I got a bit passionate about this subject after reading "In the Hunt." I owe missyjack big for this one, it wouldn't exist without her kindness. The essays in this series can stand alone, but will build on one another.
"Don't you see a pattern here?": self sacrifice, family dysfunction, and heroism in SPN
INTRO POST
Part 1: "I didn't deserve what he put on me" : the whitewashing of John Winchester and the celebration of family dysfunction as heroic in "In the Hunt"
Part of being a hero is knowing when you don't need to be one anymore.
--Alan Moore
This essay will analyze three articles from the collection In the Hunt: Unauthorized essays on Supernatural, all of which address to different degrees heroism and the Winchester family. All three essays manage to erase or minimize the influence of John Winchester's choices as a parent on the forms of "heroism" he and his sons undertake and ignore what the show itself has say about the formative years of Sam and Dean Winchester and the influence of their upbringing on the sacrifices they make.
"A Powerful Need : heroism, Winchester style" by Sheryl A. Rakowski
In her article about family and heroism, Sheryl A. Rakowski makes the claim that John Winchester had "a method to his madness" when he sacrificed his life and his soul to the Yellow Eyed Demon (YED) to save his son Dean's life, and then with his last words passed to Dean the burden of either saving or killing his brother Sam. (98)
Regarding the deal John made with YED in episode 2.01, Rakowski speculates: "Did John sense what was transpiring between Dean and the Reaper that had come to collect his soul... Suppose John knew in his heart the choice Dean was about to make... and that it would leave his son trapped in a nightmarish solitary confinement [as an angry spirit] of his own making." (99) Then she argues that therefore "John's only option was to pull him [Dean] back to earth" by trading his own life for Dean's.
The scene between Dean and the reaper is inconclusive about what path Dean would have chosen (the peace of death or the unrest of an angry spirit), but my interpretation leans towards Dean going with Tessa. Either way, there was absolutely no indication that John had any glimmering of what was transpiring between Dean and Tessa the Reaper. Rakowski's interpretation of John's motivations are pure fanon conjecture with no basis in the canon. Worse, it removes the notion that John had any choice over his actions (as we'll see, a constant theme in this essay collection) and it whitewashes the damage John's action did to his son as "worth it," directly opposed to the results we see on the show. She furthers her whitewashing of John's motivations for laying the burden of Sam's life and death on Dean (again) by speculating that John a)knew what his sacrifice would do to Dean and b)that having the responsibility of Sam's life on his head would act as an anchor for Dean, thus "saving" him from the self-destructive spiral that John's sacrifice directly inspired:
"John also had to buy his son some time -- time enough to want to be saved... Dean could be compelled to hold on tight, not because he was concerned about being set adrift himself, but because his kid brother, securing the other end, might be lost if he let go." (100).
Rakowski celebrates this as if this is a good thing, a healthy thing, turning around the damage we see Dean suffer throughout season 2 to be instead his salvation, making John a savior and a hero for laying these burdens on his son. Not only is this interpretation of John's motives in 2.01, again, pure speculation (and a reach at that), but I believe the show goes a long way towards portraying precisely the opposite. In fact, John's choices directly resulted in Dean displaying suicidal behavior throughout the season, and help lead Dean to his own damnation in the season's two part finale.
As dialog from three consecutive episodes from season two suggests, the show understands the effects of these events quite differently from the imaginary scenario Rakowski has set up.
First, in 2.08, Dean expresses his anger at a character who made a deal with the crossroads demon to save his dying wife:
DEAN
You did it to save her?
EVAN
She had cancer, they'd stopped treatment, they were moving her into hospice, they kept saying... a matter of days. So yeah, I made the deal. And I'd do it again. I'd have died for her on the spot.
DEAN
Did you ever think about her in all this?
EVAN
I did this for her.
DEAN
You sure about that? I think you did it for yourself. So you wouldn't have to live without her. But guess what? She's going to have to live without you now. But what if she knew how much it cost? What if she knew it cost your soul? How do you think she'd feel?
And later in the episode Dean more specifically comments on his suspicions about John's own deal:
SAM
He did it for you.
DEAN
Exactly. How am I supposed to live with that? You know, the thought of him... wherever he is right now. I mean, he spent his whole life chasing that... yellow-eyed son of a bitch. He should have gone out fighting. That was supposed to be his legacy. You know? Not bargaining with the damn thing. Not this.
Additionally, rather than saving Dean or "anchoring him to earth," John's sacrifice and the burden of deciding what to do about Sam led to Dean's willingness to kill himself if his brother succumbed to a fatal demonic contagion:
2.09: Croatoan
SAM
No, you can keep going.
DEAN
Who says I want to?
SAM
What?
DEAN crosses to the other wall and pulls a handgun out of his waistband before sitting on the file cabinet.
DEAN
I'm tired, Sam. I'm tired of this job, this life . . . this weight on my shoulders, man. I'm tired of it.
And in the next episode, when he reveals the secret burden John's last words placed on him, Dean is very articulate about his feelings of exhausted desperation and his resentment towards his father:
2.10: Hunted
DEAN
You think I wanted this? Huh? I wish to God he'd never opened his mouth. Then I wouldn't have to walk around with this screaming in my head all day.
Contrary to what Rakowski tries to argue, John's sacrifice of himself and his handing over to Dean the responsibility for saving or killing Sam do not "pull Dean back to earth" -- this is a completely backwards way of reading the events. Instead, John's actions are the direct catalyst of the spiral of despair and suicidal behavior that marks Dean's life in season two, culminating in his sacrifice of his soul to hell to bring Sam back to life.
Rakowski's erasure of what the characters have to say about their circumstances continues when she talks about John's relationship to Dean as a child. "In his final moments," Rakowski writes, "John recalled with loving gratitude how when he'd come home, wrecked from a hunt, Dean would lay a hand on his father's shoulder and tell him everything was okay. John needed Dean to keep the home fires burning, or the campfire, really, that kept the wolves at bay."(103). There's no recognition from Rakowski that the show makes the explicit point that this was incredibly unhealthy and damaging to Dean, and that John himself points this out. She leaves out John's own statement of culpability in the very scene she describes:
2.01: In My Time of Dying
JOHN
You know, when you were a kid, I'd come home from a hunt, and after what I'd seen, I'd be, I'd be wrecked. And you, you'd come up to me and you, you'd put your hand on my shoulder and you'd look me in the eye and you'd... You'd say "It's okay, Dad"
(pauses)
Dean, I'm sorry. You shouldn't have had to say that to me, I should have been saying that to you. You know, I put, I put too much on your shoulders, I made you grow up too fast. You took care of Sammy, you took care of me. You did that, and you didn't complain, not once. I just want you to know that I am so proud of you.
As seems clear from this scene, John Winchester (and so the writers of the series) did what Rakowski could not: admit his culpability for behavior that far from heroic, behavior that was ultimately damaging to his son.
As we'll see, ignoring what the show itself has to say about the so-called heroism of these acts of sacrifice, whether it was John's life for Dean's, or Sam and Dean's childhood for John's vengeance quest, is a common theme throughout these three essays.
"We've Got Work to Do : Sacrifice, heroism, and Sam and Dean Winchester" by Amy Garvey
In her essay, Amy Garvey doesn't go as far as Rakowski in celebrating John Winchester's choices, but by connecting the results of those choices with the "sacrifice" the typical Campbellian hero makes at the outset of his journey she manages to erase John from her narrative of Sam and Dean's upbringing, despite acknowledging that "Sam and Dean's childhood was sacrificed for them."(89) Certainly their childhood was sacrificed at the alter of John's vengeance quest, but even in this statement, John's culpability is not directly addressed. A more honest statement would have been John Winchester sacrificed Sam and Dean's childhood for his own purposes, revenge being first on the list. But like Rakowski, Garvey again and again leaves a John-shaped hole in her analysis.
Writing about "Something Wicked" (1.18) Garvey says "there's Dean's purpose in a nutshell : take care of Sam... Dean's not a saint, or a martyr, especially as a child, but he takes his responsibilities seriously."(90) She goes on to admit "no nine-year-old child should fee obligated to provide for the safety of his own sibling, and Dean's guilt [over the Shtriga's attack on his brother Sam] was likely twofold: not only was he not off getting Sam dinner when the monster attacked, he was playing video games, the way any bored nine-year-old would be tempted to do."(91).
Garvey briefly flirts with the reality of John's flaws when she writes of his sacrificing of his life for Dean's in 2.01: "The cynic in me is also convinced that the act was more reparation than selfless generosity; he [John] knew how much he took from his sons when they were growing up, and trading his life for Dean's was pretty clearly motivated by guilt, at least in part."(94)
However, she then goes on to propose the following: "John knew that he was making a choice, when he took his very young sons on the road, even if he didn't feel good about all of them. Sam, too, is pretty clear about who he is and what he chooses to do... Dean, though, is another matter. And that brings us back to that pesky nature versus nurture debate."(95)
No where does she really dig into or critique John's choices or behavior in this equation, or how John had a hand in Dean's "tak[ing] his responsibilities seriously." Instead, it as if Dean emerged fully formed as a conscientious hero child, developing these traits in a vacuum, which given her unexplored statements about "nature versus nurture" in her analysis regarding the differences between Sam and Dean, carries the rather ugly (not to mention simplistic) implication that yes, Dean was just born this way, noble and self-sacrificing for his family.
In her discussion of "Something Wicked" Garvey does not acknowledge that Dean's "purpose" was explicitly bestowed on him by his father. Or that Dean's "twofold" guilt was enforced by a)John leaving him alone to care for his brother at too young an age when he knew a monster that preyed on children was around and b)John's angry and frightened chastisement of Dean after the Shtriga attack, when Dean was just acting like Garvey admits "any bored nine-year-old would be tempted to do."
And again in Garvey's description of the boys' Christmas, there is little acknowledgment that John Winchester had left his young children alone without any sign that he would be back for the holiday, and that Dean has so little expectation that his father will miraculously return on time that he goes out and steals presents for his brother.
It's this simultaneous erasing of the nature of family dysfunction from the forming of Sam's and more specifically Dean's supposedly "heroic" character that is, to me, incredibly problematic. Both Rakowski and Garvey erase John's (admitted in canon!) culpability from their narratives of the choices Sam and Dean make, and both try to celebrate the resulting self-sacrifice as the very definition of heroic, instead of a result of a deeply dysfunctional and harmful cycle.
Tanya Huff goes on to perpetuate the same reading of John in "We're Not Exactly the Bradys."
"We're Not Exactly the Bradys" by Tanya Huff
On its own, this apologia for John Winchester might have only been a source of minor irritation. But when coupled with the two preceding articles discussed, and the absolute lack of any acknowledgment of the realities of the Winchester Family Dysfunction in any of the other essays in the collection, it becomes part of a pattern of erasing the influence of family dysfunction and John's role in it from the supposed "heroic" nature of Sam and Dean, where the inevitable results of that very dysfunction that is glossed over are held up as heroic.
Huff starts off with a logical fallacy right off the bat: that John "had to have done something right. He must have because his sons... are good men." A few paragraphs later she suggests that "Good men don't just happen, they're made..."(2). Anyone who has ever met a good person raised by monstrous parents knows right away that these statements are ridiculous. And I'm not saying John was a monster -- he clearly wasn't -- but if you look at the ratio of damage versus strength that his parenting bestowed on his sons, this simplistic understanding of what makes a "good man" becomes a big problem.
By critiquing these statements I do not intend to argue that John did not love his sons, or that his sons did not grow up to be "good men" (whatever that means, here it seems to be used as a synonym with "heroic"), or even that John had no influence on their positive qualities -- the opposite, in fact. But by dismissing John's culpability in his choices, as Huff does in this essay, she completely ignores John's abdication of his responsibility to his sons and the impact this had on their formation as "heroes."
Huff argues that John had no choice but to take his young children on the road after Mary's death. She states that after John started acting erratic and his business partner (rather understandably) called CPS (deleted scene from "Home"), John "packs his whole life into a '67 Impala rather than lose his sons. He's not going to stop hunting for whatever it was that killed Mary and he's not going to give up his boys -- he's not left with much choice."(4)
The binary Huff sets up is completely false. John did indeed have a choice.The choice wasn't between, as she later argues, John hunting with or without his children, that "he has to take them with him; it's the only way to keep them safe... he wants a normal, safe life for his boys but they can't have that until this thing is dead."(5)
Due to the trauma of his wife's murder, John may not have felt like he had a choice, but he did. The choice wasn't between leaving his sons unprotected with relatives or other hunters, or taking them with him on his trek across the lower 48 states and raising them to be child soldiers. The choice was between pursuing what he later admits was a revenge quest and doing what was best for his children. Taking them on the road to live an unstable life, putting all of the parenting responsibilities on his pre-teen child, leaving his children alone for extended periods of time and training them to be soldiers? Not in their best interests.
I believe that there was a middle way, a compromise that neither John nor Huff (nor the other two authors) seems to have acknowledged: John could have given up hunting, given up his revenge quest, while Sam and Dean were children. He still could have protected them and taught them to protect themselves. His choice, to take them on the road with him and leave them alone for extended periods (read: unprotected) was in fact putting them in more danger. This alone negates Huff's entire thesis.
When analyzed dispassionately, John's choices weren't driven primarily out of his concern to protect his sons at all. If they were, he would not have thought it wise to leave nine-year-old Dean in charge of his brother with a shotgun while a monster that preys on young children was in the vicinity ("Something Wicked"). What did the Shtriga have to do with Mary's death? What did any of the other monsters and ghosts that John hunted while Sam and Dean were children have to do with protecting his boys and making sure the evil that killed their mother wouldn't harm them? Nothing. No, John's actions were driven by his desire to avenge the death of his wife and to escape from the pain of her loss by throwing himself into the hunting life, and he subsequently neglected his parental responsibility to his sons.
Huff's whitewashing of John continues when she argues that "evidence suggests [the family] didn't live in motels."(5) She goes on to postulate that the flashbacks we see on the show that portray the Winchesters residing in crummy motels rooms are in fact the exception to the rule, that these scenes take place during school holidays. I instead would like to suggest that we go with Occam's Razor here: from every indication the series has given us, John primarily raised his children on the road in motels. In fact, during "After School Special" (4.13 -- which to be fair aired after this essay was written), we are explictly given more evidence that Sam and Dean are living in a motel during the school year, and that Dean is continuing to be sole parent to his brother for weeks at a time:
4.13: After School Special
YOUNG DEAN
My Dad's out of town on a job. It's just me and my brother.
AMANDA
For how long?
YOUNG DEAN
Couple of weeks.
AMANDA
Seriously?
YOUNG DEAN
Yeah, we got a pretty sweet setup at The Pines.
AMANDA
The motel?
In fact, Amanda's compassionate reaction to the knowledge that teen-aged Dean is living in a motel and acting as primary caretaker for his brother emphasizes how unusual this arrangement is for a person his age. Huff's insistence on arguing, against all contrary direct evidence from the show, that John did not raise his sons in an itinerant fashion makes me suspect her motives, makes me suspect her goal is to erase all of the flaws that make John Winchester a great and compelling character, as well as how those flaws contributed to the forms of "heroism" his sons adhere to in the series.
Huff further whitewashes John's neglect of his sons by making a rather privileged, dismissive set of statements about Dean's parental responsibilities that I find not just problematic but horrifying:
"So you're a father and you're raising your sons on your own knowing that something out there is after them and the only person you have to turn to, the only person who knows what it is to lose what you've lost, is your oldest boy. The older sibling raising the younger and being the support to the surviving parent isn't unusual in single parent households -- in allowing Dean to become his support staff, John is doing nothing that's unusual or horrible or abusive. The only thing different here than in a thousand other households is the degree. John doesn't hide things from Dean. He can't. Dean has to know about the dangers in order to protect himself and his younger brother. They are, after all, living in a war zone."(6)
This paragraph contains so many assumptions and apologias for outright neglect that it boggles the mind. Breaking it down is the only way to understand the horror of what she's suggesting and how it plays into whitewashing John's choices. It could also be a dictionary description of what psychologists call "parentification" and "emotional incest."
As with Rakowski's erasure of John's statements in 2.01 about how he should never have relied on Dean for emotional support, Huff ignores the very real dysfunction and abuse inherent in the situation she holds up as nothing unusual.
Dr. Patricia Love, in the book The Emotional Incest Syndrome, describes this behavior as a "violation of intimacy" where a child acts as a surrogate spouse and best friend to a parent, and is used for "emotional support and the release of anger/tension." Two characteristics of this behavior are:
1)The parent uses child to satisfy needs that should be satisfied by other adults.
2)The parent is ignoring many of the child's needs. Instead of the parent meeting the needs of the child, the reverse occurs.
Clearly both are true of John when it comes to Dean: John has repeatedly been shown on the show to have ignored Dean's needs as a child, and explicitly states in dialog that Dean was instead supporting John emotionally, and that this shouldn't have happened, that it made Dean "grow up too soon."
Children who have experienced this behavior say the following:
"My mother's praise and high regard for me was partly an unconscious device to relieve her of the burden of parenting... I was the Hero Child who was asked to come to my own rescue."
"If she kept telling me I was an extraordinary child, and I managed to meet or exceed her expectations, she could look at me and see that she was a good parent."
"My needs aren't being ignored, I just don't have any."
All of which could have been spoken by Dean Winchester.
Parentification is somewhat related (and I've seen the terms used interchangeably, though they are somewhat separate), in that it describes a child taking on the responsibilities of an adult. From the book Lost Childhoods : the plight of the parentified child by Gregory J. Jurkovic:
"In the worst instances, children have excessive caretaking responsibilities that are neither supervised nor shared with other family members. They are also triangulated by and enmeshed with (or perhaps cut off from) undifferentiated parental figures."
"The child inherits the 'weight' of the parent's neediness and deceptive manipulation which then must be pushed up the impossible incline of attempting to parent one's own parent."
Among the effects on the child, Love and Jurkovic list: survivor guilt, difficulty forming extrafamilial relationships, social skill deficits, feeling like expressing anger only makes it worse, chronic low level anxiety, fluctuating self esteem, fear of rejection, anger from siblings, social isolation, feeling inferior, denial of needs, diffuse sense of identity, survival comes first while self expression is second, personal boundary problems, fear of intimacy.
Sound like anyone we know?
So in that light, let's look back at Huff's paragraph again.
John made a choice to isolate himself and his children to the extent that as Huff says of him "the only person you have to turn to, the only person who knows what it is to lose what you've lost, is your oldest boy." Coupled with John's statements in 2.01 about Dean taking care of John emotionally after a hunt as a child, it starts to paint an ugly picture about John's reliance on his child. John is shown in the series to have alienated most other hunters, men like Bobby who could have sympathized with his loss of his wife and acted as more appropriate sources of support. Instead, John relied on his traumatized pre-teen child for both emotional support and to fill in for the parental duties John chose to abdicate.
Huff goes on to state the following without comment: "The older sibling raising the younger and being the support to the surviving parent isn't unusual in single parent households." No, it is not unusual. Not at all, but nowhere in Huff's analysis is the acknowledgment that a)this is not what most parents would choose for their children if given any alternative and b)this is often due to economic circumstances where the parent cannot afford appropriate child care. And as the psychological literature suggests, it is not in fact harmful in and of itself for an older child to have some caretaking responsibilities for younger siblings. Where it becomes a problem is when the child has no support system, when responsibilities are placed on them at too young an age, and when this starts to shade into outright neglect, all three true of Dean Winchester, which Huff does not acknowledge at all.
Instead she makes the argument that "in allowing Dean to become his support staff, John is doing nothing that's unusual or horrible or abusive. The only thing different here than in a thousand other households is the degree." Let's just look at that statement. She calls the child Dean John's support staff. She says that John "allows" Dean to do so, implying that Dean has any agency at all in this decision that is entirely John's. She states that the "only difference" between the Winchester situation and those "normal" single-parent households who can't afford child care is "the degree." And what is the degree she mentions? Well, as far as we know from canon, John left Dean alone with his brother for as long as several days when Dean was nine. Again when he was twelve, John had been gone for days without word. And by the time Dean was in high school, John was gone for "weeks."
This is no where near typical in single-parent households in this country. In most cases, the older sibling is left with caretaking responsibilities for the hours a parent is at work, not for days at a time. However often the Winchesters call hunting "the job," this is not actually the case. John chose to give up regular employment to leave his children alone while he hunted monsters, not out of economic necessity, but because he was obsessed. This is, in fact, neglect. As is stated in this article on child abuse, (http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/child+neglect), "state statutes categorize as child abuse any neglect of a child that places the child at risk, regardless of whether the child is actually injured." Which brings me to Huff's description of what happened in "Something Wicked" -- in which John leaves the children alone and they are attacked by the Shtriga he is hunting.
Huff writes: "When Dean actually acted like a nine-/ten year old and disobeyed, putting Sam in danger, John, in spite of his terror, didn't lash out at Dean. He was angry, yes, but all he said was "I told you not to leave the room. I told you not to let him out of your sight." There was a distinct lack of the sort of accusations that many fathers would have thrown."(6)
This description of the flashback's events frankly horrifies me. Not only does Huff characterize the entire event through a rosy-lensed version of John's point of view that makes him out to be the hero, she puts all of the responsibility for the danger to Sam on the shoulders of 9-year-old Dean, just as John has done in the episode. When, in fact, John was the one responsible for leaving his young children alone. And then Huff goes on to praise John for only accusing Dean of leaving the room (as she rather generously admits, like any other child his age would do).
In the episode, Dean describes the effect John's words had on him, which were far from how Huff characterizes them:
1.18: Something Wicked
DEAN: Dad never spoke about it again. I didn't ask. But he, uh-he looked at me different, you know-which was worse. Not that I blame him. He gave me an order, and I didn’t listen. I almost got you killed.
SAM: You were just a kid.
Not one of these three authors in "In the Hunt" has as much compassion for young Dean as his brother did, right there, and I find that immensely troubling. These authors have bought into John's abusive and neglectful framing of events just as much as Dean did as a child, seeing it as the only choice John could have made, failing to step back and analyze the situation from the outside. Clearly, in "Something Wicked," Dean was so conditioned by John's reliance on him that he didn't need John to give him "the sort of accusations that many fathers would have thrown." Instead he'd internalized the parentification to the extent that he knew his failure without John having to say a word. Indeed, he watches as his dad holds Sam tight and chastises Dean for behaving the way both Huff and Garvey admit any kid his age would.
Lastly, Huff posits that John's behavior as a parent during his sons' childhood can be excused because, "they are, after all, living in a war zone." This is patently false. According to Bobby in 1.22, demonic activity prior to that year (2005-6) was minimal. Given that, and the Campbells' surprise at Dean's mentioning of a demon in the flashback in 4.03 which indicate they have little experience with them, as well as Sam and Dean's ignorance of the truth of demonic possession in 1.22, the creatures John hunted when the boys were young were most likely non-demonic and therefore not remotely involved in Mary's death or the danger to Sam. The war came when Sam and Dean were adults, not while they were children. Prior to the first season of the show, there was no war zone outside of John Winchester's obsessed imagination.
In conclusion:
The series Supernatural does what these three authors cannot: acknowledge the dysfunctional way the Winchester boys were raised, and fully place the responsibility where it should have been all along: with John Winchester. In doing so SPN creates three complex, flawed characters who would be far less compelling were they the versions described in "In the Hunt."
A final example from the series contradicts Rakowski, Garvey and Huff's view of John's parenting. In episode 3.10 "Dream a little Dream of Me", Dean's dream double does what so many of the supernatural creatures do throughout the series, acting as the voice for feelings and truths the brothers want to keep hidden from each other and themselves, and confronts Dean about his feelings regarding his father as a parent:
DREAM DEAN
..all he ever did is train you, boss you around.
But Sam.... Sam he doted on. Sam, he loved.
Dad knew who you really were. A good soldier and nothing else. Daddy's blunt little instrument.
Your own father didn't care whether you lived or died. Why should you?
By that point in the show, Dean is finally acknowledging how wrong his father was to saddle him with that responsibility. He reacts to his dream self, yelling:
DEAN
All that crap he dumped on me, about protecting Sam. That was his crap. He's the one who couldn't protect his family. He-
He's the one who let Mom die.
Who wasn't there for Sam. I always was! He wasn't fair! I didn't deserve what he put on me.
Unlike the series itself, not only do the three essays considered here repeatedly erase John Winchester's responsibilities to his sons and his influence on how their understanding of self-sacrifice was formed, but all three authors uncritically celebrate the results of this family dysfunction by conflating love, self sacrifice, and heroism.
There's a fundamental misunderstanding of the show's portrayal of family here. Rakowski writes "if Sam needs his brother, if Dean can be used to cause Sam harm; he's a liability, a weakness."(105) Rakowski concludes that "If heroism is valued, that which makes a person capable of leading a heroic life should be looked upon as a strength, should it not? For the Winchesters, needing family... is the wellspring for their mission... it is both the weakness and the strength implicit in the clan's loving interdependence that lies at the heart of their heroism."(106).
In my opinion, the entire point the series makes is that it's not the "need" or love for one another that is the Winchesters' weakness, it's the self-sacrificial and obsessively avenging behavior driven by fear for one another that is a liability. This becomes more and more explicit in season 5, when Dean stands up to his fear for his brother and refuses to capitulate to Zachariah as Sam's being tortured in front of him. It's not that Dean loves his brother any less in this moment; it's that he's learned that there are long-term consequences to acting out of short-sighted fear in the moment. This topic will be further explored in the subsequent essays.
The revisionist histories all three authors display show a horrific pattern of conflating family dysfunction and the self-sacrifice that inevitably follows with heroism: Rakowski rearranges the events of season 2 so that John becomes the hero and savior rather than the catalyst to Dean's spiral of self-destruction, Garvey proposes a mythologically "heroic" sacrifice of Sam and Dean's childhoods which conveniently leaves out who did the sacrificing and what was sacrificed to as well as implying Dean's self-sacrificial sense of responsibility as a child (and, it is implied, an adult) is innate, and Huff disturbingly celebrates John's neglect and emotional abuse of his sons as not just "normal" and to be excused but admirable because Sam and Dean grew to be "heroes" and "good men."
Contrary to Rakowski's neat assertion (echoed by Huff and Garvey) that "[Dean] offers comfort and security to John and Sam, who in turn, provide Dean with his purpose and sense of self-worth...[a]nd as it turns out, the Winchester family's need for one another is the stuff heroes are made of, which means I'm simply not prepared to call it a bad thing"(105), I am fully prepared to call this behavior out as a bad thing.
In the next essay, I will investigate the Winchester family's dysfunction further and apply it to their unending cycle of self-sacrifice, a cycle which the characters themselves begin to question outright as the series progresses.
SOURCES:
In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural. Benbella Books, 2009.
Love, Patricia. The emotional incest syndrome : what to do when a parent's love rules your life. Bantam, 1991.
Jurkovic, Gregory J. Lost Childhoods : the plight of the parentified child. Routledge, 1997.
Episode transcripts from the Supernatural Wiki.
"Don't you see a pattern here?": self sacrifice, family dysfunction, and heroism in SPN
INTRO POST
Part 1: "I didn't deserve what he put on me" : the whitewashing of John Winchester and the celebration of family dysfunction as heroic in "In the Hunt"
Part of being a hero is knowing when you don't need to be one anymore.
--Alan Moore
This essay will analyze three articles from the collection In the Hunt: Unauthorized essays on Supernatural, all of which address to different degrees heroism and the Winchester family. All three essays manage to erase or minimize the influence of John Winchester's choices as a parent on the forms of "heroism" he and his sons undertake and ignore what the show itself has say about the formative years of Sam and Dean Winchester and the influence of their upbringing on the sacrifices they make.
"A Powerful Need : heroism, Winchester style" by Sheryl A. Rakowski
In her article about family and heroism, Sheryl A. Rakowski makes the claim that John Winchester had "a method to his madness" when he sacrificed his life and his soul to the Yellow Eyed Demon (YED) to save his son Dean's life, and then with his last words passed to Dean the burden of either saving or killing his brother Sam. (98)
Regarding the deal John made with YED in episode 2.01, Rakowski speculates: "Did John sense what was transpiring between Dean and the Reaper that had come to collect his soul... Suppose John knew in his heart the choice Dean was about to make... and that it would leave his son trapped in a nightmarish solitary confinement [as an angry spirit] of his own making." (99) Then she argues that therefore "John's only option was to pull him [Dean] back to earth" by trading his own life for Dean's.
The scene between Dean and the reaper is inconclusive about what path Dean would have chosen (the peace of death or the unrest of an angry spirit), but my interpretation leans towards Dean going with Tessa. Either way, there was absolutely no indication that John had any glimmering of what was transpiring between Dean and Tessa the Reaper. Rakowski's interpretation of John's motivations are pure fanon conjecture with no basis in the canon. Worse, it removes the notion that John had any choice over his actions (as we'll see, a constant theme in this essay collection) and it whitewashes the damage John's action did to his son as "worth it," directly opposed to the results we see on the show. She furthers her whitewashing of John's motivations for laying the burden of Sam's life and death on Dean (again) by speculating that John a)knew what his sacrifice would do to Dean and b)that having the responsibility of Sam's life on his head would act as an anchor for Dean, thus "saving" him from the self-destructive spiral that John's sacrifice directly inspired:
"John also had to buy his son some time -- time enough to want to be saved... Dean could be compelled to hold on tight, not because he was concerned about being set adrift himself, but because his kid brother, securing the other end, might be lost if he let go." (100).
Rakowski celebrates this as if this is a good thing, a healthy thing, turning around the damage we see Dean suffer throughout season 2 to be instead his salvation, making John a savior and a hero for laying these burdens on his son. Not only is this interpretation of John's motives in 2.01, again, pure speculation (and a reach at that), but I believe the show goes a long way towards portraying precisely the opposite. In fact, John's choices directly resulted in Dean displaying suicidal behavior throughout the season, and help lead Dean to his own damnation in the season's two part finale.
As dialog from three consecutive episodes from season two suggests, the show understands the effects of these events quite differently from the imaginary scenario Rakowski has set up.
First, in 2.08, Dean expresses his anger at a character who made a deal with the crossroads demon to save his dying wife:
DEAN
You did it to save her?
EVAN
She had cancer, they'd stopped treatment, they were moving her into hospice, they kept saying... a matter of days. So yeah, I made the deal. And I'd do it again. I'd have died for her on the spot.
DEAN
Did you ever think about her in all this?
EVAN
I did this for her.
DEAN
You sure about that? I think you did it for yourself. So you wouldn't have to live without her. But guess what? She's going to have to live without you now. But what if she knew how much it cost? What if she knew it cost your soul? How do you think she'd feel?
And later in the episode Dean more specifically comments on his suspicions about John's own deal:
SAM
He did it for you.
DEAN
Exactly. How am I supposed to live with that? You know, the thought of him... wherever he is right now. I mean, he spent his whole life chasing that... yellow-eyed son of a bitch. He should have gone out fighting. That was supposed to be his legacy. You know? Not bargaining with the damn thing. Not this.
Additionally, rather than saving Dean or "anchoring him to earth," John's sacrifice and the burden of deciding what to do about Sam led to Dean's willingness to kill himself if his brother succumbed to a fatal demonic contagion:
2.09: Croatoan
SAM
No, you can keep going.
DEAN
Who says I want to?
SAM
What?
DEAN crosses to the other wall and pulls a handgun out of his waistband before sitting on the file cabinet.
DEAN
I'm tired, Sam. I'm tired of this job, this life . . . this weight on my shoulders, man. I'm tired of it.
And in the next episode, when he reveals the secret burden John's last words placed on him, Dean is very articulate about his feelings of exhausted desperation and his resentment towards his father:
2.10: Hunted
DEAN
You think I wanted this? Huh? I wish to God he'd never opened his mouth. Then I wouldn't have to walk around with this screaming in my head all day.
Contrary to what Rakowski tries to argue, John's sacrifice of himself and his handing over to Dean the responsibility for saving or killing Sam do not "pull Dean back to earth" -- this is a completely backwards way of reading the events. Instead, John's actions are the direct catalyst of the spiral of despair and suicidal behavior that marks Dean's life in season two, culminating in his sacrifice of his soul to hell to bring Sam back to life.
Rakowski's erasure of what the characters have to say about their circumstances continues when she talks about John's relationship to Dean as a child. "In his final moments," Rakowski writes, "John recalled with loving gratitude how when he'd come home, wrecked from a hunt, Dean would lay a hand on his father's shoulder and tell him everything was okay. John needed Dean to keep the home fires burning, or the campfire, really, that kept the wolves at bay."(103). There's no recognition from Rakowski that the show makes the explicit point that this was incredibly unhealthy and damaging to Dean, and that John himself points this out. She leaves out John's own statement of culpability in the very scene she describes:
2.01: In My Time of Dying
JOHN
You know, when you were a kid, I'd come home from a hunt, and after what I'd seen, I'd be, I'd be wrecked. And you, you'd come up to me and you, you'd put your hand on my shoulder and you'd look me in the eye and you'd... You'd say "It's okay, Dad"
(pauses)
Dean, I'm sorry. You shouldn't have had to say that to me, I should have been saying that to you. You know, I put, I put too much on your shoulders, I made you grow up too fast. You took care of Sammy, you took care of me. You did that, and you didn't complain, not once. I just want you to know that I am so proud of you.
As seems clear from this scene, John Winchester (and so the writers of the series) did what Rakowski could not: admit his culpability for behavior that far from heroic, behavior that was ultimately damaging to his son.
As we'll see, ignoring what the show itself has to say about the so-called heroism of these acts of sacrifice, whether it was John's life for Dean's, or Sam and Dean's childhood for John's vengeance quest, is a common theme throughout these three essays.
"We've Got Work to Do : Sacrifice, heroism, and Sam and Dean Winchester" by Amy Garvey
In her essay, Amy Garvey doesn't go as far as Rakowski in celebrating John Winchester's choices, but by connecting the results of those choices with the "sacrifice" the typical Campbellian hero makes at the outset of his journey she manages to erase John from her narrative of Sam and Dean's upbringing, despite acknowledging that "Sam and Dean's childhood was sacrificed for them."(89) Certainly their childhood was sacrificed at the alter of John's vengeance quest, but even in this statement, John's culpability is not directly addressed. A more honest statement would have been John Winchester sacrificed Sam and Dean's childhood for his own purposes, revenge being first on the list. But like Rakowski, Garvey again and again leaves a John-shaped hole in her analysis.
Writing about "Something Wicked" (1.18) Garvey says "there's Dean's purpose in a nutshell : take care of Sam... Dean's not a saint, or a martyr, especially as a child, but he takes his responsibilities seriously."(90) She goes on to admit "no nine-year-old child should fee obligated to provide for the safety of his own sibling, and Dean's guilt [over the Shtriga's attack on his brother Sam] was likely twofold: not only was he not off getting Sam dinner when the monster attacked, he was playing video games, the way any bored nine-year-old would be tempted to do."(91).
Garvey briefly flirts with the reality of John's flaws when she writes of his sacrificing of his life for Dean's in 2.01: "The cynic in me is also convinced that the act was more reparation than selfless generosity; he [John] knew how much he took from his sons when they were growing up, and trading his life for Dean's was pretty clearly motivated by guilt, at least in part."(94)
However, she then goes on to propose the following: "John knew that he was making a choice, when he took his very young sons on the road, even if he didn't feel good about all of them. Sam, too, is pretty clear about who he is and what he chooses to do... Dean, though, is another matter. And that brings us back to that pesky nature versus nurture debate."(95)
No where does she really dig into or critique John's choices or behavior in this equation, or how John had a hand in Dean's "tak[ing] his responsibilities seriously." Instead, it as if Dean emerged fully formed as a conscientious hero child, developing these traits in a vacuum, which given her unexplored statements about "nature versus nurture" in her analysis regarding the differences between Sam and Dean, carries the rather ugly (not to mention simplistic) implication that yes, Dean was just born this way, noble and self-sacrificing for his family.
In her discussion of "Something Wicked" Garvey does not acknowledge that Dean's "purpose" was explicitly bestowed on him by his father. Or that Dean's "twofold" guilt was enforced by a)John leaving him alone to care for his brother at too young an age when he knew a monster that preyed on children was around and b)John's angry and frightened chastisement of Dean after the Shtriga attack, when Dean was just acting like Garvey admits "any bored nine-year-old would be tempted to do."
And again in Garvey's description of the boys' Christmas, there is little acknowledgment that John Winchester had left his young children alone without any sign that he would be back for the holiday, and that Dean has so little expectation that his father will miraculously return on time that he goes out and steals presents for his brother.
It's this simultaneous erasing of the nature of family dysfunction from the forming of Sam's and more specifically Dean's supposedly "heroic" character that is, to me, incredibly problematic. Both Rakowski and Garvey erase John's (admitted in canon!) culpability from their narratives of the choices Sam and Dean make, and both try to celebrate the resulting self-sacrifice as the very definition of heroic, instead of a result of a deeply dysfunctional and harmful cycle.
Tanya Huff goes on to perpetuate the same reading of John in "We're Not Exactly the Bradys."
"We're Not Exactly the Bradys" by Tanya Huff
On its own, this apologia for John Winchester might have only been a source of minor irritation. But when coupled with the two preceding articles discussed, and the absolute lack of any acknowledgment of the realities of the Winchester Family Dysfunction in any of the other essays in the collection, it becomes part of a pattern of erasing the influence of family dysfunction and John's role in it from the supposed "heroic" nature of Sam and Dean, where the inevitable results of that very dysfunction that is glossed over are held up as heroic.
Huff starts off with a logical fallacy right off the bat: that John "had to have done something right. He must have because his sons... are good men." A few paragraphs later she suggests that "Good men don't just happen, they're made..."(2). Anyone who has ever met a good person raised by monstrous parents knows right away that these statements are ridiculous. And I'm not saying John was a monster -- he clearly wasn't -- but if you look at the ratio of damage versus strength that his parenting bestowed on his sons, this simplistic understanding of what makes a "good man" becomes a big problem.
By critiquing these statements I do not intend to argue that John did not love his sons, or that his sons did not grow up to be "good men" (whatever that means, here it seems to be used as a synonym with "heroic"), or even that John had no influence on their positive qualities -- the opposite, in fact. But by dismissing John's culpability in his choices, as Huff does in this essay, she completely ignores John's abdication of his responsibility to his sons and the impact this had on their formation as "heroes."
Huff argues that John had no choice but to take his young children on the road after Mary's death. She states that after John started acting erratic and his business partner (rather understandably) called CPS (deleted scene from "Home"), John "packs his whole life into a '67 Impala rather than lose his sons. He's not going to stop hunting for whatever it was that killed Mary and he's not going to give up his boys -- he's not left with much choice."(4)
The binary Huff sets up is completely false. John did indeed have a choice.The choice wasn't between, as she later argues, John hunting with or without his children, that "he has to take them with him; it's the only way to keep them safe... he wants a normal, safe life for his boys but they can't have that until this thing is dead."(5)
Due to the trauma of his wife's murder, John may not have felt like he had a choice, but he did. The choice wasn't between leaving his sons unprotected with relatives or other hunters, or taking them with him on his trek across the lower 48 states and raising them to be child soldiers. The choice was between pursuing what he later admits was a revenge quest and doing what was best for his children. Taking them on the road to live an unstable life, putting all of the parenting responsibilities on his pre-teen child, leaving his children alone for extended periods of time and training them to be soldiers? Not in their best interests.
I believe that there was a middle way, a compromise that neither John nor Huff (nor the other two authors) seems to have acknowledged: John could have given up hunting, given up his revenge quest, while Sam and Dean were children. He still could have protected them and taught them to protect themselves. His choice, to take them on the road with him and leave them alone for extended periods (read: unprotected) was in fact putting them in more danger. This alone negates Huff's entire thesis.
When analyzed dispassionately, John's choices weren't driven primarily out of his concern to protect his sons at all. If they were, he would not have thought it wise to leave nine-year-old Dean in charge of his brother with a shotgun while a monster that preys on young children was in the vicinity ("Something Wicked"). What did the Shtriga have to do with Mary's death? What did any of the other monsters and ghosts that John hunted while Sam and Dean were children have to do with protecting his boys and making sure the evil that killed their mother wouldn't harm them? Nothing. No, John's actions were driven by his desire to avenge the death of his wife and to escape from the pain of her loss by throwing himself into the hunting life, and he subsequently neglected his parental responsibility to his sons.
Huff's whitewashing of John continues when she argues that "evidence suggests [the family] didn't live in motels."(5) She goes on to postulate that the flashbacks we see on the show that portray the Winchesters residing in crummy motels rooms are in fact the exception to the rule, that these scenes take place during school holidays. I instead would like to suggest that we go with Occam's Razor here: from every indication the series has given us, John primarily raised his children on the road in motels. In fact, during "After School Special" (4.13 -- which to be fair aired after this essay was written), we are explictly given more evidence that Sam and Dean are living in a motel during the school year, and that Dean is continuing to be sole parent to his brother for weeks at a time:
4.13: After School Special
YOUNG DEAN
My Dad's out of town on a job. It's just me and my brother.
AMANDA
For how long?
YOUNG DEAN
Couple of weeks.
AMANDA
Seriously?
YOUNG DEAN
Yeah, we got a pretty sweet setup at The Pines.
AMANDA
The motel?
In fact, Amanda's compassionate reaction to the knowledge that teen-aged Dean is living in a motel and acting as primary caretaker for his brother emphasizes how unusual this arrangement is for a person his age. Huff's insistence on arguing, against all contrary direct evidence from the show, that John did not raise his sons in an itinerant fashion makes me suspect her motives, makes me suspect her goal is to erase all of the flaws that make John Winchester a great and compelling character, as well as how those flaws contributed to the forms of "heroism" his sons adhere to in the series.
Huff further whitewashes John's neglect of his sons by making a rather privileged, dismissive set of statements about Dean's parental responsibilities that I find not just problematic but horrifying:
"So you're a father and you're raising your sons on your own knowing that something out there is after them and the only person you have to turn to, the only person who knows what it is to lose what you've lost, is your oldest boy. The older sibling raising the younger and being the support to the surviving parent isn't unusual in single parent households -- in allowing Dean to become his support staff, John is doing nothing that's unusual or horrible or abusive. The only thing different here than in a thousand other households is the degree. John doesn't hide things from Dean. He can't. Dean has to know about the dangers in order to protect himself and his younger brother. They are, after all, living in a war zone."(6)
This paragraph contains so many assumptions and apologias for outright neglect that it boggles the mind. Breaking it down is the only way to understand the horror of what she's suggesting and how it plays into whitewashing John's choices. It could also be a dictionary description of what psychologists call "parentification" and "emotional incest."
As with Rakowski's erasure of John's statements in 2.01 about how he should never have relied on Dean for emotional support, Huff ignores the very real dysfunction and abuse inherent in the situation she holds up as nothing unusual.
Dr. Patricia Love, in the book The Emotional Incest Syndrome, describes this behavior as a "violation of intimacy" where a child acts as a surrogate spouse and best friend to a parent, and is used for "emotional support and the release of anger/tension." Two characteristics of this behavior are:
1)The parent uses child to satisfy needs that should be satisfied by other adults.
2)The parent is ignoring many of the child's needs. Instead of the parent meeting the needs of the child, the reverse occurs.
Clearly both are true of John when it comes to Dean: John has repeatedly been shown on the show to have ignored Dean's needs as a child, and explicitly states in dialog that Dean was instead supporting John emotionally, and that this shouldn't have happened, that it made Dean "grow up too soon."
Children who have experienced this behavior say the following:
"My mother's praise and high regard for me was partly an unconscious device to relieve her of the burden of parenting... I was the Hero Child who was asked to come to my own rescue."
"If she kept telling me I was an extraordinary child, and I managed to meet or exceed her expectations, she could look at me and see that she was a good parent."
"My needs aren't being ignored, I just don't have any."
All of which could have been spoken by Dean Winchester.
Parentification is somewhat related (and I've seen the terms used interchangeably, though they are somewhat separate), in that it describes a child taking on the responsibilities of an adult. From the book Lost Childhoods : the plight of the parentified child by Gregory J. Jurkovic:
"In the worst instances, children have excessive caretaking responsibilities that are neither supervised nor shared with other family members. They are also triangulated by and enmeshed with (or perhaps cut off from) undifferentiated parental figures."
"The child inherits the 'weight' of the parent's neediness and deceptive manipulation which then must be pushed up the impossible incline of attempting to parent one's own parent."
Among the effects on the child, Love and Jurkovic list: survivor guilt, difficulty forming extrafamilial relationships, social skill deficits, feeling like expressing anger only makes it worse, chronic low level anxiety, fluctuating self esteem, fear of rejection, anger from siblings, social isolation, feeling inferior, denial of needs, diffuse sense of identity, survival comes first while self expression is second, personal boundary problems, fear of intimacy.
Sound like anyone we know?
So in that light, let's look back at Huff's paragraph again.
John made a choice to isolate himself and his children to the extent that as Huff says of him "the only person you have to turn to, the only person who knows what it is to lose what you've lost, is your oldest boy." Coupled with John's statements in 2.01 about Dean taking care of John emotionally after a hunt as a child, it starts to paint an ugly picture about John's reliance on his child. John is shown in the series to have alienated most other hunters, men like Bobby who could have sympathized with his loss of his wife and acted as more appropriate sources of support. Instead, John relied on his traumatized pre-teen child for both emotional support and to fill in for the parental duties John chose to abdicate.
Huff goes on to state the following without comment: "The older sibling raising the younger and being the support to the surviving parent isn't unusual in single parent households." No, it is not unusual. Not at all, but nowhere in Huff's analysis is the acknowledgment that a)this is not what most parents would choose for their children if given any alternative and b)this is often due to economic circumstances where the parent cannot afford appropriate child care. And as the psychological literature suggests, it is not in fact harmful in and of itself for an older child to have some caretaking responsibilities for younger siblings. Where it becomes a problem is when the child has no support system, when responsibilities are placed on them at too young an age, and when this starts to shade into outright neglect, all three true of Dean Winchester, which Huff does not acknowledge at all.
Instead she makes the argument that "in allowing Dean to become his support staff, John is doing nothing that's unusual or horrible or abusive. The only thing different here than in a thousand other households is the degree." Let's just look at that statement. She calls the child Dean John's support staff. She says that John "allows" Dean to do so, implying that Dean has any agency at all in this decision that is entirely John's. She states that the "only difference" between the Winchester situation and those "normal" single-parent households who can't afford child care is "the degree." And what is the degree she mentions? Well, as far as we know from canon, John left Dean alone with his brother for as long as several days when Dean was nine. Again when he was twelve, John had been gone for days without word. And by the time Dean was in high school, John was gone for "weeks."
This is no where near typical in single-parent households in this country. In most cases, the older sibling is left with caretaking responsibilities for the hours a parent is at work, not for days at a time. However often the Winchesters call hunting "the job," this is not actually the case. John chose to give up regular employment to leave his children alone while he hunted monsters, not out of economic necessity, but because he was obsessed. This is, in fact, neglect. As is stated in this article on child abuse, (http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/child+neglect), "state statutes categorize as child abuse any neglect of a child that places the child at risk, regardless of whether the child is actually injured." Which brings me to Huff's description of what happened in "Something Wicked" -- in which John leaves the children alone and they are attacked by the Shtriga he is hunting.
Huff writes: "When Dean actually acted like a nine-/ten year old and disobeyed, putting Sam in danger, John, in spite of his terror, didn't lash out at Dean. He was angry, yes, but all he said was "I told you not to leave the room. I told you not to let him out of your sight." There was a distinct lack of the sort of accusations that many fathers would have thrown."(6)
This description of the flashback's events frankly horrifies me. Not only does Huff characterize the entire event through a rosy-lensed version of John's point of view that makes him out to be the hero, she puts all of the responsibility for the danger to Sam on the shoulders of 9-year-old Dean, just as John has done in the episode. When, in fact, John was the one responsible for leaving his young children alone. And then Huff goes on to praise John for only accusing Dean of leaving the room (as she rather generously admits, like any other child his age would do).
In the episode, Dean describes the effect John's words had on him, which were far from how Huff characterizes them:
1.18: Something Wicked
DEAN: Dad never spoke about it again. I didn't ask. But he, uh-he looked at me different, you know-which was worse. Not that I blame him. He gave me an order, and I didn’t listen. I almost got you killed.
SAM: You were just a kid.
Not one of these three authors in "In the Hunt" has as much compassion for young Dean as his brother did, right there, and I find that immensely troubling. These authors have bought into John's abusive and neglectful framing of events just as much as Dean did as a child, seeing it as the only choice John could have made, failing to step back and analyze the situation from the outside. Clearly, in "Something Wicked," Dean was so conditioned by John's reliance on him that he didn't need John to give him "the sort of accusations that many fathers would have thrown." Instead he'd internalized the parentification to the extent that he knew his failure without John having to say a word. Indeed, he watches as his dad holds Sam tight and chastises Dean for behaving the way both Huff and Garvey admit any kid his age would.
Lastly, Huff posits that John's behavior as a parent during his sons' childhood can be excused because, "they are, after all, living in a war zone." This is patently false. According to Bobby in 1.22, demonic activity prior to that year (2005-6) was minimal. Given that, and the Campbells' surprise at Dean's mentioning of a demon in the flashback in 4.03 which indicate they have little experience with them, as well as Sam and Dean's ignorance of the truth of demonic possession in 1.22, the creatures John hunted when the boys were young were most likely non-demonic and therefore not remotely involved in Mary's death or the danger to Sam. The war came when Sam and Dean were adults, not while they were children. Prior to the first season of the show, there was no war zone outside of John Winchester's obsessed imagination.
In conclusion:
The series Supernatural does what these three authors cannot: acknowledge the dysfunctional way the Winchester boys were raised, and fully place the responsibility where it should have been all along: with John Winchester. In doing so SPN creates three complex, flawed characters who would be far less compelling were they the versions described in "In the Hunt."
A final example from the series contradicts Rakowski, Garvey and Huff's view of John's parenting. In episode 3.10 "Dream a little Dream of Me", Dean's dream double does what so many of the supernatural creatures do throughout the series, acting as the voice for feelings and truths the brothers want to keep hidden from each other and themselves, and confronts Dean about his feelings regarding his father as a parent:
DREAM DEAN
..all he ever did is train you, boss you around.
But Sam.... Sam he doted on. Sam, he loved.
Dad knew who you really were. A good soldier and nothing else. Daddy's blunt little instrument.
Your own father didn't care whether you lived or died. Why should you?
By that point in the show, Dean is finally acknowledging how wrong his father was to saddle him with that responsibility. He reacts to his dream self, yelling:
DEAN
All that crap he dumped on me, about protecting Sam. That was his crap. He's the one who couldn't protect his family. He-
He's the one who let Mom die.
Who wasn't there for Sam. I always was! He wasn't fair! I didn't deserve what he put on me.
Unlike the series itself, not only do the three essays considered here repeatedly erase John Winchester's responsibilities to his sons and his influence on how their understanding of self-sacrifice was formed, but all three authors uncritically celebrate the results of this family dysfunction by conflating love, self sacrifice, and heroism.
There's a fundamental misunderstanding of the show's portrayal of family here. Rakowski writes "if Sam needs his brother, if Dean can be used to cause Sam harm; he's a liability, a weakness."(105) Rakowski concludes that "If heroism is valued, that which makes a person capable of leading a heroic life should be looked upon as a strength, should it not? For the Winchesters, needing family... is the wellspring for their mission... it is both the weakness and the strength implicit in the clan's loving interdependence that lies at the heart of their heroism."(106).
In my opinion, the entire point the series makes is that it's not the "need" or love for one another that is the Winchesters' weakness, it's the self-sacrificial and obsessively avenging behavior driven by fear for one another that is a liability. This becomes more and more explicit in season 5, when Dean stands up to his fear for his brother and refuses to capitulate to Zachariah as Sam's being tortured in front of him. It's not that Dean loves his brother any less in this moment; it's that he's learned that there are long-term consequences to acting out of short-sighted fear in the moment. This topic will be further explored in the subsequent essays.
The revisionist histories all three authors display show a horrific pattern of conflating family dysfunction and the self-sacrifice that inevitably follows with heroism: Rakowski rearranges the events of season 2 so that John becomes the hero and savior rather than the catalyst to Dean's spiral of self-destruction, Garvey proposes a mythologically "heroic" sacrifice of Sam and Dean's childhoods which conveniently leaves out who did the sacrificing and what was sacrificed to as well as implying Dean's self-sacrificial sense of responsibility as a child (and, it is implied, an adult) is innate, and Huff disturbingly celebrates John's neglect and emotional abuse of his sons as not just "normal" and to be excused but admirable because Sam and Dean grew to be "heroes" and "good men."
Contrary to Rakowski's neat assertion (echoed by Huff and Garvey) that "[Dean] offers comfort and security to John and Sam, who in turn, provide Dean with his purpose and sense of self-worth...[a]nd as it turns out, the Winchester family's need for one another is the stuff heroes are made of, which means I'm simply not prepared to call it a bad thing"(105), I am fully prepared to call this behavior out as a bad thing.
In the next essay, I will investigate the Winchester family's dysfunction further and apply it to their unending cycle of self-sacrifice, a cycle which the characters themselves begin to question outright as the series progresses.
SOURCES:
In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural. Benbella Books, 2009.
Love, Patricia. The emotional incest syndrome : what to do when a parent's love rules your life. Bantam, 1991.
Jurkovic, Gregory J. Lost Childhoods : the plight of the parentified child. Routledge, 1997.
Episode transcripts from the Supernatural Wiki.