Someone probably ought to discuss Mannequin 3: The Reckoning as the third installation of the Mannequin film franchise, as the only thing the films Mannequin and Mannequin 2: On the Move had in addition to mannequins was the queer character Hollywood Montrose.
The original Mannequin film came out in the late 80s, and the character is a huge, flaming stereotype – but also kind of awesome. Rantasmo discusses the fact that it’s not the stereotype that is the problem as the nature of stereotypes is that they have some kind of basis in reality, but that as stereotypes present an incomplete picture, the problem at the time was (and often still is, especially when it comes to bisexual characters), that it was the only kind of visibility there was. But Hollywood Montrose, whose love for his car Bad Girl rivals that of Dean for Baby, was a prominent and recognizable queer character. And while the Mannequin films aren’t exactly LGBT films, there is a queer element to both of them.
And Eric Charmelo and Nicole Snyder attached their episode to the franchise via its title. It is the third Mannequin story.
But there was something else about the episode I wanted to discuss today. The background of Dean’s phone. The background image in his phone is a picture of his own feet on a motel bed, and the first time I saw it, I thought it was the saddest thing I had seen on the show. Obviously, the picture isn’t really of his feet but of the motel room wall, which is either a photograph or an extremely life-like painting of a forest. It’s likely that Dean thought it was cool.
Only, he thought it was cool months ago in Clap Your Hands If You Believe, when he seems to have taken the picture. The timing of the picture must be while Sam was in the library and Dean was alone in the motel room, because from Dean’s facial expression when he almost sits on the bed on which Sam had sex with a woman earlier indicates that the bed that sex happened on had been his bed, and he took over the other bed from which the picture was taken subsequently.
What’s interesting is that the wall of trees is not the only thing these episodes have in common. We also see the El Sol sign in both episodes, and in the former episode it is in the diner just before Dean is left alone by himself in the motel room. The brands are semiotic signals that carry the subtextual narrative, and the diner scene in Clap Your Hands was one of two episodes in which the presence of the sign made no sense to me. The episode Clap Your Hands in its entirety was one – is one to this day – that is so filled to the brim with subtext, symbolism, and different undercurrents that it escapes full analysis.
But what we can conclude on the basis of Dean having had the forest from the motel as his phone background for several weeks is that he must have spent some time morosely staring at the wall in the motel, and even more importantly – that it meant something to him. It meant something to him, and that same feeling was being recalled in this episode in which Dean finally breaks up with Lisa. So what is it about this forest?
I want to take a detour in the two times we see an angel visit the dreams of Dean Winchester to communicate with him: The Rapture and The Song Remains the Same. I haven’t seen these scenes compared, and yet they are crying out to be compared and contrasted, just as Anna and Castiel were. In both scenes, an angel visits Dean Winchester’s dream to speak with him: Anna intrudes on a sexy dream featuring the strip tease of an angel and a demon, and Castiel visits a dream of Dean fishing by himself.
The difference between the scenes is that Anna was trying to reach Dean whom he was unable to find due to the sigils in his ribs at the behest of her superiors, whereas Castiel was attempting to communicate with Dean while knowing that he was being observed by his superiors, fearing that even this communication was not private enough to keep them from being overheard. Anna, that is, visited a surface dream, whereas Castiel visited a dream that was buried much deeper in Dean’s subconscious. Castiel has incentive to find the most private part in Dean’s subconscious for his communication, and it was this pier on which he was seated alone. Anna even lampshades this by her question “This is what you dream about?“
The scene is iconic, and people usually don’t spend a lot of time musing on the fact that Castiel is not a part of the dreamscape. Castiel intrudes on the dream and changes it, but he is not a part of the dream that I would argue was a frequent, recurring dream to Dean following the episode Born Under a Bad Sign, which was placed in the region of the Twin Lakes area in Michigan, an episode which featured a lot fishing symbolism, and which followed Dean and Sam having taken separate vacations – of having spent time apart from each other. The recurring nature of this dream is perhaps hinted by the presence of piers in the visual narrative to this day.
So, did Dean spend time fishing all by himself he then later dreamed about? When you look at the scene in The Rapture, the camera is driven forward, slowly edging toward him from behind, as though someone is approaching. As though Dean is expecting someone.
Not Castiel, who suddenly appears beside him, but someone else. Who? We don’t know. But there he is, on a pier by a forest and likely a cabin in the woods, expecting someone, dreaming a dream that may be based on a memory of something that happened in Twin Lakes, Michigan.
Lisa lived somewhere in Michigan during the sixth season after having moved from Indiana, as it happened. But the person Dean was waiting for wasn’t Lisa, obviously. They were estranged at the time. Lisa was always the rebound. But she did live in Michigan. And we see this forest in the background of his phone in the episode in which they break up that he had carried with him for months. Possibly because it reminded him of a cabin in the woods. And someone that walked toward him on the pier that we never got to see.
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