"If you're generic enough, you'll do" : on Lisa as Dean's fantasy of an "apple pie life"
(xposted from my tumblr)
Inspired by this framing of the Dean/Lisa relationship:
IMO, the Lisa/Dean dream sequence in “Dream a little dream of me” and I’ll go as far as to say, their relationship in S6, is basically “What is and should never be” with Dean having a fantasy about a model he saw in a magazine, but that has escalated to him using real women to live off his fantasy of an apple pie life.
Basically, he’s not really interested in the person, not really. If you’re generic enough, you will do.
We all of us have fantasies about how we want to live our lives, we all have desires.
Many (if not most) relationships start off as mutual fantasy to some extent, that’s what we call “falling in love.” Many relationships end when the realities rub up against the fantasies. Does this mean we weren’t ever “interested in the person” as an individual in the first place? I’d argue no. I’d argue that’s a flat and uncharitable way of looking at relationships. But I’d also argue this friction of reality against fantasy had nothing to do with why and how Dean and Lisa’s relationship ended.
I find it interesting that this idea of fantasy and desire is often twisted in SPN fandom when it comes to Dean’s dream of a “normal” life: Dean’s fantasies are read as shallow and empty and something he has no willingness to back up or follow through with in reality. Or they’re put down as unattainable, or a distraction from his “real” life, or all of the above.
I think there’s often a certain distain for “normal” life involved in this mindset, as if it’s something below Dean Winchester. I also think this undercurrent of distain for “normal” life or dismissal of Dean’s desire for one as mere empty fantasy can come from a place of privilege when you’re talking about a character who hasn’t had a stable life, let alone a “home,” since he was four years old. These are the things in the back of my mind whenever I read commentary dismissing Dean/Lisa as Dean’s fantasy wish fulfillment.
The author of this meta claims that:
When the female character has her own agenda, like Jo or Bella, then of course the writers have to make Dean completely against it and therefore turned off by them. **
And yet when the audience is first introduced to Lisa in 3.02, it’s in the context of her displaying an agenda - parenting her kid - in direct opposition to Dean’s desire to interfere:
LISA: What are you even still doing here? We had one weekend together a million years ago. You don’t know me. You have no business with my son.
If the claim above about Dean being turned off by women with their own agendas has any truth, if Dean’s only attracted to empty fantasies of an “apple pie life” with a woman and her kid, being confronted by Lisa in this scene should have driven him away.
It didn’t.
Instead, Lisa herself invites Dean to stay, flirting openly with him. And yes, at this point Lisa knows nothing more about Dean than Dean knows about her - he is, in fact, a fantasy to her. And the only real reason Dean doesn’t take her up on it is he knows he’s living on borrowed time, and when the clock runs out he’s gonna die bloody.
Arguably up to the point of 5.17, Lisa did represent Dean’s fantasy of a stable life with someone he could love who loved him. Setting aside the fact that as I said, most of us harbor some kind of fantasy of our ideal life and I find it curious that Dean’s falling into this pretty universal pattern is used to discount the legitimacy of his desire for a relationship with Lisa, this theory is blown apart in season 6.
If Lisa was only a fantasy to Dean - if he couldn’t see the real woman behind that fantasy, if he wasn’t interested in her as a person - I think the relationship would have fallen apart in a very different way than it did, much quicker than it did.
The first time Lisa challenged him about his actions, he would have been gone. We see Lisa challenge him several times in 6.01 and 6.02, especially after he’s moved the household out of fear in 6.02 - and at this point they’ve been together a year. We see her challenge him on how he interacts with Ben. We see her challenge him on how he’s dealing (or not) with his own problems. We see her challenge him even after they’ve separated.
Here’s the explanation Dean gives as the relationship starts falling apart, after he’s been vamped in 6.05:
DEAN: Lisa, I can’t bring this crap home to you.
LISA: You’re talking about your work?
DEAN: I’m talking about my LIFE. It’s ugly…and it’s violent…and I’m gonna die - SOON.
Guess what? The reason he gives Ben for why he’s left? Has nothing to do with being unable to live with a reality that challenges his fantasy of a “normal life.”
Instead, this is what he tells Ben, and this is the root of why his relationship with Lisa fell apart:
DEAN Okay, fine. It’s like this, then. Just ‘cause you love someone doesn’t mean you should stick around and screw up their life. So I can’t be here.
BEN You think something will follow you home?
DEAN No. No, I don’t, but I think my job turns me into somebody that can’t sit at your dinner table. And if I stayed, you’d end up just like me.
BEN Why do you say it like you’re so…bad?
DEAN Well, trust me, I’m not someone you want to aim to be.
I wrote about this in greater length on LJ.
The gist of it is, Dean’s “failure” to live the normal life with Lisa and Ben had nothing to do with them being real people that he couldn’t fit into his fantasy. To argue such ignores everything that happens in season 6. Ignores the fact that he lived with Lisa and Ben for a year, continued to live with them after Sam’s return, and it all only fell apart directly as a result of Dean’s getting turned into a vampire and feeling like that’s what he is - a monster. That he was going to hurt them.
I’m just going to quote my own post here:
Dean knows what he wants from them; he said it very plainly in 6.02 - I can’t just lose you and Ben. But now he’s given up hope that he can have it, that he deserves to have it, that he won’t harm them by virtue of who he is.
So his inability to let this view of himself as a monster go, to forgive himself for what he did in hell, for how his childhood as a soldier affected him, for being turned into a vampire against his will, for the mistakes he’s made while traumatized and under pressure, causes him to fall back into old behavior of not communicating with the people he loves, sabotaging a relationship he very much wants.
I do think one could make a convincing argument that Lisa Braeden was an underwritten character, that she could have used more attention in the narrative. However I don’t think she was “generic” at all, and I don’t think using the critique that she could have used more fleshing out as a character is valid support for an argument that Dean (or the narrative) saw her only as a generic fulfillment of his fantasy for the “apple pie life.” I think that erases a whole hell of a lot about Dean’s characterization in season 6, Dean’s ongoing struggle with his own issues, and does Lisa herself a disservice.
In another post, the author claims of the Dean/Lisa relationship:
And it’s kind of a case of having your cake and eating it too (some sort of peek-a-boo romance where it looks like it’s there but it’s actually not ).
IMO this potentially says more about the author’s perspective on what relationships in fiction are supposed to look like to be valid than it does the narrative, or Dean, to be quite honest. I think it says a lot about how relationships are looked at - if they’re not framed by the narrative as storybook, as falling madly in love, they aren’t legitimate. They’re the narrative trying to have its cake and eat it too, or as the author says:
I will go out on a limb here and say that the writers do this kind of thing with the best of intentions so that things are left open to interpretation. The ones who want to see real romance actually get the oportunity to have some, for a change, while the portion of the audience that is not that interested in it has an intelectual explanation to fall back on that explains why the character is doing what he’s doing, which has very, very little to do with romance.
I think that’s giving the narrative and the characters no credit. I think that erases all the complexity of messy human relationships, where two people might love one another and be important to one another and form a relationship, but not be “in love” in the traditional romantic sense.
I’d argue that what’s actually happening with the Dean/Lisa relationship arc has nothing to do with “real romance” at all. I’d also argue that it has nothing to do with handing the romance-adverse portion of SPN’s audience a convenient out. Instead, I think it’s a vital part of Dean’s ongoing characterization, and dismissing it as either of these two options is to miss the entire point.
** there's a whole other essay that could be written disputing the idea that Dean isn't interested in and is turned off by women with their own agendas. In fact, most of the women we've seen Dean show interest in are precisely that: women with their own agendas, who often (usually) turn him down or challenge him in some way. Which typically makes him more attracted to them. You can trace this back to the second episode of the series and his chemistry with Haley in Wendigo. See Jaimie in Monster Movie, for example. See Jo herself, because... what? Jo having her own agenda and challenging Dean did not, in fact, make Dean run the other way. And Bela is a completely out of context example. I think Bela nearly getting Sam killed by stealing the cursed rabbit's foot, and, you know, shooting him, probably had more to do with Dean's reaction to her than Bela having her own agenda. Dean doesn't typically have a positive reaction to people who cause harm to his brother.
there's also a whole essay that could be written disputing the author's take on Carmen in 2.20 as "just a face from a beer commercial" to Dean.
There are many essays, and not very much time :D
Inspired by this framing of the Dean/Lisa relationship:
IMO, the Lisa/Dean dream sequence in “Dream a little dream of me” and I’ll go as far as to say, their relationship in S6, is basically “What is and should never be” with Dean having a fantasy about a model he saw in a magazine, but that has escalated to him using real women to live off his fantasy of an apple pie life.
Basically, he’s not really interested in the person, not really. If you’re generic enough, you will do.
We all of us have fantasies about how we want to live our lives, we all have desires.
Many (if not most) relationships start off as mutual fantasy to some extent, that’s what we call “falling in love.” Many relationships end when the realities rub up against the fantasies. Does this mean we weren’t ever “interested in the person” as an individual in the first place? I’d argue no. I’d argue that’s a flat and uncharitable way of looking at relationships. But I’d also argue this friction of reality against fantasy had nothing to do with why and how Dean and Lisa’s relationship ended.
I find it interesting that this idea of fantasy and desire is often twisted in SPN fandom when it comes to Dean’s dream of a “normal” life: Dean’s fantasies are read as shallow and empty and something he has no willingness to back up or follow through with in reality. Or they’re put down as unattainable, or a distraction from his “real” life, or all of the above.
I think there’s often a certain distain for “normal” life involved in this mindset, as if it’s something below Dean Winchester. I also think this undercurrent of distain for “normal” life or dismissal of Dean’s desire for one as mere empty fantasy can come from a place of privilege when you’re talking about a character who hasn’t had a stable life, let alone a “home,” since he was four years old. These are the things in the back of my mind whenever I read commentary dismissing Dean/Lisa as Dean’s fantasy wish fulfillment.
The author of this meta claims that:
When the female character has her own agenda, like Jo or Bella, then of course the writers have to make Dean completely against it and therefore turned off by them. **
And yet when the audience is first introduced to Lisa in 3.02, it’s in the context of her displaying an agenda - parenting her kid - in direct opposition to Dean’s desire to interfere:
LISA: What are you even still doing here? We had one weekend together a million years ago. You don’t know me. You have no business with my son.
If the claim above about Dean being turned off by women with their own agendas has any truth, if Dean’s only attracted to empty fantasies of an “apple pie life” with a woman and her kid, being confronted by Lisa in this scene should have driven him away.
It didn’t.
Instead, Lisa herself invites Dean to stay, flirting openly with him. And yes, at this point Lisa knows nothing more about Dean than Dean knows about her - he is, in fact, a fantasy to her. And the only real reason Dean doesn’t take her up on it is he knows he’s living on borrowed time, and when the clock runs out he’s gonna die bloody.
Arguably up to the point of 5.17, Lisa did represent Dean’s fantasy of a stable life with someone he could love who loved him. Setting aside the fact that as I said, most of us harbor some kind of fantasy of our ideal life and I find it curious that Dean’s falling into this pretty universal pattern is used to discount the legitimacy of his desire for a relationship with Lisa, this theory is blown apart in season 6.
If Lisa was only a fantasy to Dean - if he couldn’t see the real woman behind that fantasy, if he wasn’t interested in her as a person - I think the relationship would have fallen apart in a very different way than it did, much quicker than it did.
The first time Lisa challenged him about his actions, he would have been gone. We see Lisa challenge him several times in 6.01 and 6.02, especially after he’s moved the household out of fear in 6.02 - and at this point they’ve been together a year. We see her challenge him on how he interacts with Ben. We see her challenge him on how he’s dealing (or not) with his own problems. We see her challenge him even after they’ve separated.
Here’s the explanation Dean gives as the relationship starts falling apart, after he’s been vamped in 6.05:
DEAN: Lisa, I can’t bring this crap home to you.
LISA: You’re talking about your work?
DEAN: I’m talking about my LIFE. It’s ugly…and it’s violent…and I’m gonna die - SOON.
Guess what? The reason he gives Ben for why he’s left? Has nothing to do with being unable to live with a reality that challenges his fantasy of a “normal life.”
Instead, this is what he tells Ben, and this is the root of why his relationship with Lisa fell apart:
DEAN Okay, fine. It’s like this, then. Just ‘cause you love someone doesn’t mean you should stick around and screw up their life. So I can’t be here.
BEN You think something will follow you home?
DEAN No. No, I don’t, but I think my job turns me into somebody that can’t sit at your dinner table. And if I stayed, you’d end up just like me.
BEN Why do you say it like you’re so…bad?
DEAN Well, trust me, I’m not someone you want to aim to be.
I wrote about this in greater length on LJ.
The gist of it is, Dean’s “failure” to live the normal life with Lisa and Ben had nothing to do with them being real people that he couldn’t fit into his fantasy. To argue such ignores everything that happens in season 6. Ignores the fact that he lived with Lisa and Ben for a year, continued to live with them after Sam’s return, and it all only fell apart directly as a result of Dean’s getting turned into a vampire and feeling like that’s what he is - a monster. That he was going to hurt them.
I’m just going to quote my own post here:
Dean knows what he wants from them; he said it very plainly in 6.02 - I can’t just lose you and Ben. But now he’s given up hope that he can have it, that he deserves to have it, that he won’t harm them by virtue of who he is.
So his inability to let this view of himself as a monster go, to forgive himself for what he did in hell, for how his childhood as a soldier affected him, for being turned into a vampire against his will, for the mistakes he’s made while traumatized and under pressure, causes him to fall back into old behavior of not communicating with the people he loves, sabotaging a relationship he very much wants.
I do think one could make a convincing argument that Lisa Braeden was an underwritten character, that she could have used more attention in the narrative. However I don’t think she was “generic” at all, and I don’t think using the critique that she could have used more fleshing out as a character is valid support for an argument that Dean (or the narrative) saw her only as a generic fulfillment of his fantasy for the “apple pie life.” I think that erases a whole hell of a lot about Dean’s characterization in season 6, Dean’s ongoing struggle with his own issues, and does Lisa herself a disservice.
In another post, the author claims of the Dean/Lisa relationship:
And it’s kind of a case of having your cake and eating it too (some sort of peek-a-boo romance where it looks like it’s there but it’s actually not ).
IMO this potentially says more about the author’s perspective on what relationships in fiction are supposed to look like to be valid than it does the narrative, or Dean, to be quite honest. I think it says a lot about how relationships are looked at - if they’re not framed by the narrative as storybook, as falling madly in love, they aren’t legitimate. They’re the narrative trying to have its cake and eat it too, or as the author says:
I will go out on a limb here and say that the writers do this kind of thing with the best of intentions so that things are left open to interpretation. The ones who want to see real romance actually get the oportunity to have some, for a change, while the portion of the audience that is not that interested in it has an intelectual explanation to fall back on that explains why the character is doing what he’s doing, which has very, very little to do with romance.
I think that’s giving the narrative and the characters no credit. I think that erases all the complexity of messy human relationships, where two people might love one another and be important to one another and form a relationship, but not be “in love” in the traditional romantic sense.
I’d argue that what’s actually happening with the Dean/Lisa relationship arc has nothing to do with “real romance” at all. I’d also argue that it has nothing to do with handing the romance-adverse portion of SPN’s audience a convenient out. Instead, I think it’s a vital part of Dean’s ongoing characterization, and dismissing it as either of these two options is to miss the entire point.
** there's a whole other essay that could be written disputing the idea that Dean isn't interested in and is turned off by women with their own agendas. In fact, most of the women we've seen Dean show interest in are precisely that: women with their own agendas, who often (usually) turn him down or challenge him in some way. Which typically makes him more attracted to them. You can trace this back to the second episode of the series and his chemistry with Haley in Wendigo. See Jaimie in Monster Movie, for example. See Jo herself, because... what? Jo having her own agenda and challenging Dean did not, in fact, make Dean run the other way. And Bela is a completely out of context example. I think Bela nearly getting Sam killed by stealing the cursed rabbit's foot, and, you know, shooting him, probably had more to do with Dean's reaction to her than Bela having her own agenda. Dean doesn't typically have a positive reaction to people who cause harm to his brother.
there's also a whole essay that could be written disputing the author's take on Carmen in 2.20 as "just a face from a beer commercial" to Dean.
There are many essays, and not very much time :D