Supernatural Talk

Tarts talk about Sex and Violence

By Suzette Chan
March 16, 2009

Welcome to Supernatural Talk, where Tarts talk about Supernatural, their favourite show about demon-hunting brothers. This week: episode 4.14, "Sex and Violence."

Men without histories of violence are killing their wives and mothers in small town Iowa. Sam and Dean figure that they're being victimized by a siren luring men to an area strip club. ("Strippers, Sammy, strippers!") The boys investigate, but become victims themselves when the siren takes on the guise of the person they want most in the world: the perfect brother. Sam and Dean are in a pitched battle to the death until Bobby saves the day — but not before the brothers have both said and done things that they can't take back.

Supernatural writers are fond of saying that they take a known myth or legend and give it a Supernatural twist. In this episode, they did it to sirens. Was their use of the siren successful in terms of the series' main themes?

Patti Martinson, Staff Writer: I think the use of the siren functioned as a way of getting the boys to really fight each other. It could be viewed that the siren represents Dean/Sam being manipulated by others (Ruby/Castiel).

Suzette Chan, Assistant Copy Editrix and Staff Writer: They stuck to the sirens' ability to lure and seduce men with promises of their heart's desire. The Supernatural siren even appropriates the names of Disney princesses, underlining the fairy tale Never Never Land that they offer. It was interesting that the strip club is called the Honey Wagon. In classical Greek lore, honey was synonymous with knowledge and wisdom. Of course, the siren peddles false wisdom.

Sirens didn't shape-shift, but the legend morphed over the years, going from being described as women with bird heads to human-formed women of exceptional beauty to mermaids. So Supernatural takes advantage of those metanarrative twists and gives their siren the ability to morph. And if their siren can look like whatever height, ethnicity or figure will appeal most to a victim, why not also take on the shape of men? (Inquiring minds want to know: Do sirens take male form to seduce gay men? Do they ever victimize women?)

Like the hapless victims in this episode, Supernatural is besotted with shape-shifters. Shape-shifters push the Winchester brothers into territory where they're dealing with unstable identities, people who are not who they say they are, veiled worlds, etc. That becomes overt in the climactic fight scene of this episode, as the brothers call each other out for their lies and deceptions.

The use of the sirens allowed the show to equate jealous Dean with jealous wives. When he overhears Sam's conversation with Ruby, Dean is in bed. Given that he expects his brother to be asleep in the matching bed half an arm's length away, the scene's composition connotes a conjugal situation. And the look in Dean's eyes as he's figuring out what's going on is one of pure jealousy.

Meanwhile, Sam is positioned as the cheating husband. When he's with Dr. Roberts, he's sold on her line that "people change," and end up wanting different things. Sam's body responds to hers, but you know that his mind is making the parallel to his strained relationship with Dean.

Katherine Keller, Culture Vultures Editrix: Well, we've been told early on in the series that most of what's made it into folklore is just plain wrong.

I also like the idea that as the humans have grown smarter and more capable, so have the monsters.

So, did the inland, "assumes a shape pleasing to your eye" siren work for me? Yes.

Wolfen Moondaughter, Assistant Reviews Editrix and Den Mother: Well, it was certainly a Supernatural sort of story, but the myth was twisted so far as to be beyond recognition, so why bother using it? This seemed more like a succubus to me than a siren — although without the dreams, that's not quite right either. It could have just been a demon with a funky quirk. Well, at least they didn't call the siren a mermaid — that drives me nuts! Still, I liked the story, despite the use of the myth not being very effective to me — if I'm going to watch a story about a siren, I'd rather it be about women who sing men to their doom, as in off a roof or something, perhaps as assassins-for-hire (since the originals made a living wrecking boats by luring sailors into the shore).

The siren changed its modus operandi to get to the boys. Why wouldn't a female form have worked, and why did the siren target Dean?

Patti: The boys (and the viewers) would suspect any woman, so there would be little suspense in that regard. And there was already a red herring in the form of Cara, so another female would be sort of obvious.

I don't think a female siren would have worked on Dean, since women were immediately suspect anyways, and Dean even more so, given how quickly he targeted Cara. A male siren completely slipped under both the boys' radar.

Suzette: Dean long ago gave up the notion of having a regular relationship, and he has no problems with casual hook-ups, so appearing to Dean as a woman would not have given Dean anything he didn't already have. What Dean is missing most keenly now is his little brother.

We already know that Sam's ideal significant other is a brother: instead of its usual guise as the ideal woman, the Crossroads Demon appeared as a hip, older brother when Sam tried to make a deal to get Dean out of Hell ("I Know What You Did Last Summer," 4.09).

When Nick confronts Sam, the siren says it all: "I gave him what he needed. And it wasn't some bitch in a G-string. It was you. A little brother who looked up to him. Who he could trust. And now he loves me. He'd do anything for me."

That's the attitude Dean used to have for Sam. Sam has been the reason Dean has pushed aside every other possibility in life. Sam is everything to Dean: his family, his hunting partner, his mission. The brothers were always different, but with the siren's goading, Dean gives in to his feeling that it would be so much easier if Sam weren't drifting away and cheating on him, at least as far as demon-fighting goes.

I really felt sad for Dean in this episode. His life has been entirely about following his father's orders and protecting Sam. Now Dean has nothing and no one else in his life. Sam at least had the education and a stable relationship, so he knows he what he's capable of in the normal world. But Dean will never be part of that. His two meaningful romances were brief due to his life as a hunter. (I'm thinking of the crusading journalist Cassie ("Route 666," 1.13) and the angel Anna; Lisa, the "gumby girl" was a fling back in the day, and only in hindsight that Dean idealize her.) Even when the djinn allowed him to "live" his dream in "What Is and What Should Never Be" (2.20), Dean's fantasy career was to run his father's mechanic business, and his fantasy wife was based on a model in a beer ad.

Katherine: Because the siren's a sneaky creature and realized (somehow) that Sam and Dean were in town and hunting it. So, it knew that they were looking to have a hot stripper come on to them. In fact, it knew they were looking to have a woman come on to them, so that's how it used misdirection as a part of laying its trap.

Why did it target Dean? Because of the two of them, Dean's always been the needier. Sam's the one who struck out on his own and went off to college. Sam's the one who went hunting alone after Dean's death. Sam has a sense of himself as a man alone that Dean does not.

After his return from Hell, the relationship between Sam and Dean has been strained to the breaking point and Dean misses the relationship he used to have with Sam. He misses the jokes, the music, the things in common. Also, even before then, Sam and Dean were very different people and Dean has always wanted a brother who liked to drink beer, talk about cars, listen to hard rock, and go to titty bars.

The siren, of course, was on to all of that like white on rice.

Suzette: That's a great point about Dean being needier. Eric Kripke has said that Dean is the show's protagonist, but his entire story rides on Sam's destiny. Without Sam, Dean would not have much of a story. He'd be like any number of those sad-sack loner hunters that he himself said lead lives that end "bloody or sad." Sam on his own? Well, we saw in "Mystery Spot" (3.11) what would have happened: he would have turned into an even scarier version of his pathologically obsessed, vengeful father.

Wolfie: Actually, I think a female form would have worked, in the sense that, if Cara had turned out to be the siren — and she could have been — then Sam would have been in serious trouble, having effectively already been captured. The siren is supposed to give you want you want, and Sam obviously wants a smart woman, so he fell for Cara pretty quickly and easily; by the terms of the show's own explanation of the myth, the siren could have become a woman just like Cara. So from a perspective that has nothing to do with storytelling, the need for tension and twists, etc, there was no reason really that a woman wouldn't have worked — it just wouldn't have been as satisfying for the siren. And, like my sister Tarts have said, knowing that the Winchesters were looking for it, being a man while they were hunting for a woman was a very effective disguise.

I suspect the siren knew that Dean was the weaker link/the lonelier brother with a greater sense of dependency than Sam, and therefore the easier target. Dean also fit better with what it typically wanted in a victim, someone who sacrifices their life in some way, on an ongoing basis, for the person they love. The siren said that it wanted to fall in love over and over, but I think it would be more accurate to say that it got its kicks out of making the victim turn on the one they love for the siren's own sake, that it got something out of that kind of power trip. Otherwise, why does it do it? Why would the victim need to actually kill the person they really love? If it were just about falling in love over and over, they could just leave after sleeping with the person, so there had to be more to it.

Not that Sam doesn't love Dean, but Sam's the one who looks outward more, wearing Dean like a protective cloak — he doesn't live for protecting (or avenging) Dean anymore, now that Dean isn't Hell-bound and therefore isn't in peril the way he was before. In a nutshell, his world doesn't revolve around Dean quite so much as Dean's world revolves around Sam, so Dean is the better meal. And I agree that, since Dean's the man of one-night-stands, a woman wouldn't be effective in getting him to kill Sam for her, that a girl wouldn't fill Sam's place in his life.

And, well, having it turn out to be a guy was a great twist!

Suzette: But Dean would know that she was the siren, and would have come prepared. I can see him baiting Enchanted Sam into attacking him so that he (Dean) could stick a knife into him and toss the knife into the siren, whom he would have trapped or restrained or eventually found.

The advantage for the siren to take on a man's form is that both Sam and Dean are caught off-guard.

Wolfie: Only because he actually noticed the hyacinths at Cara's office. Without that red herring planted by Nick, if Cara had actually been the siren, Dean would have had far less of a chance of figuring it out, particularly since Sam didn't and Dean wouldn't have had Nick's "help". Dean probably would have been at the titty-bar, looking for the siren on his own; neither of them thought outside the box enough to reckon that the siren was anything other than a stripper without the flower clue.

I do agree that Nick was a better choice no matter what! I'm just saying that it having been Cara could have worked (it just wouldn't have been as entertaining).

In classical Greek lore, hyacinths aren't associated with sirens, but with a lad that Apollo was in love with. From a Supernatural point of view, what's up with that?!

Patti: To probably give Greek geeks a giggle over the meaning. If they knew the true meaning of the hyacinths, then they would know the other agent was the siren.

Suzette: Writers of Wincest (fan fiction with the premise that Sam and Dean are lovers) are going to have a field day with this episode!

The hyacinth "evidence" that Nick produced was clearly a red herring to separate the brothers. There are umpteen flowers associated with Greek myths (narcissus, anemone, heliotrope, etc.), so the specific choice of the hyacinth is significant. Hyacinth in classical lore was a young male lover of Apollo's, whom Apollo accidentally killed in a sporting accident. In tribute, Apollo arranged it so that when Hyacinth's blood hit the soil, the hyacinth flower sprang forth.

So the character of Nick pushes the homoeroticism of the brothers' relationship into the foreground. Siren Nick reads either gay, or female in a male guise, when he sets the brothers on each other and sits back to watch. (I couldn't help but think of Nick as allegorical for slash fiction writers who have taken the homoerotic subtext of the show and made it their own text.) "Nick" holds the hyacinth in a feminine way when Dean has a knife to Sam's neck. He tells Dean: "Why don't you cut him. Just a little. On his neck, right there." The main purpose of this scene is to show how much Dean is in Nick's thrall, but in terms of Freudian symbolism, the scene is all about sexual violation: Dean's knife is phallic and Sam's wound is yonic.

Sam understands the siren's vocabulary. He asks the siren why he's "slutting all over town."

Nick says: "I wanted to fall in love again. And again. And again." His answer mashes up the concepts of brotherly love, bromance infatuation and sexual obsession into one huge, obscene sentiment. He's hinting very broadly that the boys' attachment to each other is unnatural: they should be done with each other, and the winner gets to be with Nick. Then he punctuates his point by infecting Sammy's mouth with ejaculatory spit!

Katherine: Ah, subtext ... it makes my slashy heart go pitter pat.

We even had a cum-shot — into Sam's mouth!

I haven't seen subtext like that since the "spiral quickening" in S5 of Highlander: The Series.

(In the spiral quickening, Duncan and Methos simultaneously behead two very ancient and very powerful immortals. The energy of the quickening spirals out of MacLeod and drills into Methos, who gives a great moan. The symbolism of penetration and orgasm is hard to deny. Peter Wingfield, who played Methos, has made several comments about the spiral quickening. In Highlander: The Complete Watcher's Guide he remarks, "I thought the homoerotic overtones of that scene were undeniable. I laughed hysterically for several hours." (When his interviewer asked in follow-up to that comment "I wondered if you noticed ...." He responded, "Did I notice? Why do you think I'm on all fours at the end? Yes. I was fully aware of it. I was a consenting adult.")

Wolfie: I think Suzette's already hit the nail on the head with this one, hard enough to embed it, especially with the comment about the phallic knife and the yonic wound! I am definitely a "Wincester". I didn't know about the connotations of the hyacinth before you mentioned it, Suzette, but I was already finding the overall slashy-ness of the episode delicious!

I also found it baffling, though. When our own Mary Borsellino interviewed story editor Sera Gamble the first time, and Gamble confessed she sometimes calls the show "the epic love story of Sam and Dean," she also added the caveat that she only says that to tease Kripke. When one teases someone, it's typically with something the one being teased doesn't like, so if Kripke doesn't like Wincest, why make it so very, very blatant in this ep?

Granted, the boys' relationship can be read as simply an unusually strong brotherly bond, but given that the siren's other relationships are all sexual, that the boys have been mistaken for a gay couple before, that they have reacted to the loss of the other in a way that fits very well with/is on the same level of grief as heroes losing their heroines ("Mystery Spot", my fave ep, is an excellent example), and that, as Suzette pointed out, Dean's reaction to Sam's talking to Ruby behind his back and lying about it can be likened (easily!) to that of a jealous wife, it's actually kind of hard not to see slashy subtext! Which is why I love that line from Cara about loving someone yet wanting to bash their heads in, since it's obvious he's thinking of Dean at that point, while she's talking about her former significant other.

Which makes me a very happy fangirl, of course. So while the ep on the whole was maybe a 7, that twist is a 10!

Also, I think it's interesting to note that in Greek mythology (well, most pagan mythos, really), gods are always sleeping around with their own family.

The boys are saved by another character, as has happened not infrequently over the course of the series. What kind of heroes does this make them?

Patti: Heroes who are fallible.

Suzette: The brothers are becoming so estranged, they can't work with each other. Even setting aside the angel and demon stuff, as Dean points out, they don't trust each other. They've been evasive when they're not butting heads. (At one point, Dr. Roberts asks Sam, "Haven't you ever been in a relationship where you really love somebody, and still kind of wanted to bash their head in?") In this episode, their confrontation becomes physical.

The brothers both lose perspective to the point that they forget their responsibilities as hunters, including neglecting Bobby. They call him when they need something and they rely on him to bail them out when their fake IDs are doubted. But the boys get so wrapped up in the case and their personal obsessions that they don't even pick up Bobby's calls. This is not heroic behaviour!

So they need someone who is living outside of their heads to come up with the solutions. But Bobby ex machina just delays the inevitable: Sam and Dean have to face each other, even if that means an apocalyptic smack-down.

Katherine: Bobby so needs to have a hat that says "Deus Ex Machina" at this point.

What kind of heroes does that make Sam and Dean? Very flawed and human ones as opposed to marble models.

Wolfie: Not very effective ones! But I guess if this is a tragedy, they're not supposed to be. *sigh* I hate tragedy ....

There is one up side to them being saved by an outside source, and that is the fact that it leaves them on even footing. Of course, I would have preferred that they somehow saved each other, but it's better than either one of them winning over the other, since they were in competition at that point.

And I do like that it reinforces the sense of Bobby being a surrogate father/mentor to them (a point nicely reinforced by him giving them the root beer, implying they are just children). In fact, that helps me accept their loss/need to be saved — they're still learning under their mentor.

Oooh, wait, that doesn't bode well for Bobby! Mentors often die so that the students can become Masters themselves ....

Are the brothers really good with each at the end? What's the evidence you see?

Patti: Nope. They just didn't want to deal with it and just blew each other off about it. It was the fact that it was so quick that I felt that it wasn't sincere on either of their parts.

Suzette: They're not good. In fact, their relationship has never been worse, worse than when they weren't speaking on speaking terms. Then, at least, they weren't lying to each other or hurting each other.

Dean becomes convinced the Sam has replaced him with Ruby. And Sam, in his cutting, siren-spit-tinged accusations, makes it known that he's ready to replace Dean himself. Heck, right at the beginning of the episode, Sam is calling Dean "kiddo" and talking about people getting "ganked." Those are Dean's words. "Kiddo" must particularly sting: Sam is growing up as a man and as a warrior, but Dean's growth is stunted.

Dean later tries to reassert his position by trying to put the moves on Dr. Roberts, even though Sam met her first. Dean fails miserably and accuses his little brother of cock-blocking him. (Actually, Dean said "c-blocking," presumably the writers' concession to prime time realities; it sounded awkward.) That comment raised the spectre of sexual competition between the brothers, something that would be played out later through the brothers' fight over Nick's affections.

I thought it was significant that, as the boys try to Band-Aid their relationship at the end of the show, Sam's neck wound is still visible. It's obviously minimally treated and left undressed, so it lays open, like the un-ignorable, but un-discussable rift between him and Dean.

Katherine: As I said in my LJ, I haven't seen a fight between brothers so vicious and real since the fight between Tim and Billy Riggins in S1 of Friday Night Lights. But unlike that beautiful scene of love and forgiveness that ended that episode? No, there hasn't been the equivalent of a bag of frozen peas and the shared grilled cheese and beer between Sam and Dean. They've papered over the holes punched in the walls, and they're going through the motions of making nice, but there's not the substance of love and trust behind it.

Wolfie: No, not at all — but this isn't exactly a new state, either. The cards were already there, they're just laid out on the table now. They haven't really seemed in sync since Dean came back — their paths diverged again (as the angels and demons seem to want it). Actually, this is a good follow-up to how we saw their lives diverge when they were younger, in the previous ep ("After School Special," 4.13). But their lives re-converged with Jessie's death, so maybe they can again. Let's just hope it doesn't take as long, nor require a similar tragedy.

In the meantime, at least with each ep they take another step on the path of facing that there is a problem, and what that problem is. So maybe there's a step soon which will tell them how to get back on track/fix things.

Other comments or observations?

Patti: I initially disliked this episode at the beginning, because I saw a strong misogynistic tint to it early on with a number of females being killed and the guys blaming a beautiful (and obviously evil) woman for their behavior. However, it immensely improved when it became clear the other FBI agent was the siren. I liked that twist.

I also liked Bobby saving the day as well as that bank of phones with the different labels on it. A nice touch that made me laugh.

Suzette: I like that the show has given orderly Sam has a "type": posh, older brunettes. Meanwhile, they broke another pattern of Sam's, that of his love interests ending up dead and/or monsters. It was getting predictable. Even Dean made a crack about that! Now if they could only do something about Sam's inability to fight back after he's knocked flat on his back. Now it's happened three episodes in a row! "Criss Angel is a Douche Bag": Sam on magician's table; "After School Special": Sam on roadside; "Sex and Violence": Sam on broken door in sleazy hotel. Wait, maybe he's still traumatized by the time he was flat on his back and looking up to see his fiancée who was cut open and burning on the ceiling, as well as the knowledge that he was in the same position when he mother died. Hm! Other stuff:

- Not that I'm complaining about Sam shirtlessness, but I guess we only get the frontal view when Sam's with someone he truly loves, like Madison in "Heart" (2.17), or Dean (!) in "Hell House" (1.17). Or maybe it only happens in the 17th episode of the season. There was no bare-chested Sam in season three — but there were only 16 episodes because of the writers' strike, so the theory holds!

- It took me a while to recognize Jim Parrack, who played Nick. On True Blood, he plays Hoyt, a sweet, lovable dough-head. It was fun to see him as a sharper tool, and an actual villain, on Supernatural.

- Do they have actor factories in Texas? All the principal actors in this episode are from the lone star state: Jared Padalecki, Jensen Ackles, Jim Beaver, Jim Parrack, Maite Schwartz (Dr. Roberts).

- One of the greatest Sam lines ever: "Boo hoo."

- Best laugh of the show: Bobby's phones! I spotted ones labeled for the FBI, the federal marshals, the CDC (Center for Disease Control), the police and the health department. I loved the fact that far from being a toss-off joke, the scene explained a lot about the hunters' methods. Not only was the fact that Bobby was making breakfast at the time hysterically funny, it shows how routine it was for him to impersonate federal officials to bail out his reckless "nephews."

Katherine: I was kind of hoping to see Ruby show up. What would she have thought about the siren? And also, it's been a little while since we've seen Castiel and Uriel.

Wolfie: I love, love, love that they have that phone system set up with Bobby, so he knows who to pretend to be at any given time. I am puzzled by his line about how they should have called him, though — am I misremembering Dean calling him?

I also loved the "Dude, you c-blocked me!" line. Of course I immediately told the screen, "Hey, Sam was there first!" I love that Dean seems incapable of realizing/believing that a woman would be into Sam before him. If he didn't see Sam as a rival for their father's affection, he certainly sees him as a rival for all other relationships — even if it's male, like Nick!

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