what I wanted to say about the episode is that both no homo moments were deliberately shown as something pathetic while on the other side the intimacy between dean and cas was presented not only as something serious but also as the most natural and casual thing in the world and man, considering how the dynamic was treated recently, this is a lot
That’s a positive, optimistic, and perfectly valid reading.
I think there are several audiences which the conglomeration of forces which produce an ep of SPN have in mind.
The “Dean checks out a chick in an alley” and the “Dean still likes fetishised Asian women in his (straight) porn” lest we forget moments in 11×03 are, at the most obvious, surface level of reception, made (in my view) for the following audiences:
1) Members of the crew/ writers’ team who find them funny make them for themselves, fully imagining/ assuming themselves in the place of their imagined audience (this often results in a failure to conceptualize their impact on the female audience, given that the crew/ writers’ team is majority male)
2) Members of the producers’ team include them, periodically, because the CW wants to hold/ increase its 18-35 male audience share, it considers SPN skews male relative to some of its other shows, and the received wisdom is that this is how you speak to that audience
3) Members of the crew/ writers add them in order to satisfy edicts from the Standards and Practices folks at the Network/ A.N.Other suits who have requested a dial back on homo-eroticism in the show (someone, somewhere, clearly did request that, going from S8 to S9)
Dean Winchester has, textually, not had a meaningful sexual relationship with a woman since Lisa Braeden back in S6. He has, textually, been grief-stricken to the extent of hallucination over losing Cas to Purgatory in S8 and b®omanced the King of Hell in S10. Someone – writers, directors, show-runners, actors (who knows?!) feels the need to ice that cake of homo-erotic subtext with a frosty layer of hetero-normative icing every now and again.
Do other creative elements on the show attempt to subvert that broad “icing” script? Yes, I think they do. The subtext in a Berens or Edlund episode, for example, feels qualitatively different to that in a Buckner and Ross-Leming episode, because far more of it is in the actual writing, rather (as in this episode) than in the acting/ directing.
But yes, the moments here are self-subverted to some extent. Alley woman tells Dean to “get a life”, Cas looks at the “Asian Nookie” porn with absolute puzzlement rather than any kind of arousal. But, they are still there…11×03 to me, falls into a well-established SPN holding pattern, hetero on the surface, homo-romantic in the subtext. Personally, I am always disappointed when lashings of homo-erotic subtext come wrapped in a bow of (gratuitous) female objectification, however knowing the text is about that gratuitousness.
The show has been using pornography to signal subtext since pretty early on, and there’s always more to it than what the surface reading reveals. The Asian pornography has been shown in specific scenes, and since the new Carver era, the Casa Erotica has likewise been used to signal subtextual content.
You indicate that Buckner and Ross-Lemming don’t write in subtext, that in their episodes the subtext is more in direction and set design? I felt that was always the case with Adam Glass, not with the terrible duo. They write subtext. They write anvilicious, sometimes pretty offensive queer subtext, but they write it.
And Fortune Nookie is a great example of this. They wrote in Castiel finding a pornographic film and uttering the words, “What’s a Fortune Nookie?“ It’s a film title of both a straight porn film and a gay porn film, both pretty high profile. I’d say the gay porn film is the better know of the two. The set design then further aided the ambiguity, because the fact that the title is in Dean’s “last search results“ is dealer’s choice on how you interpret its being there.
Yes, I saw the collective detective work post earlier, which used 11×03 episode stills to arrive at the conclusion that the “Fortune Nookie” website came up on-screen as a result of Dean’s last search results, meaning that he might therefore have been watching the gay porn version.
That kind of screen-stills detective-work is one that I enjoy as much as the next unusually text-obsessed fan. It involves an appreciation for image-based subtext, which must, in this case, be supplemented by sleuthing, definitely not accessible to the GA (general audience).
What I dislike here, is that the subtext is packaged in a surface, easily accessible, wrapping which objectifies the female body and fetishizes the female Asian body, for shits and giggles.
I see that as qualitatively different from the subtext in (in my view much better written) episodes like Edlund’s 7 x15 Repo Man or 8×13 Everybody Hates Hitler where the dialogue and the visuals work together (”the love of my life, actually”, “he was my gay thing”).
As @deanirae says, there is a certain hollowing-out of these “no homo” moments within 11×03, BUT they remain, at the most accessible surface level of the text, hetero-enforcing, moreover in a way which reduces women to the status of sexual cyphers, passing sexual objects.
That leaves a nasty taste in my mouth when it comes to subtext appreciation here – because of the packaging it comes wrapped in.
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