Now, I haven’t been around much these last couple of days because of health stuff, so forgive me if I say something that’s been said a million times already.
I wanted to throw down a thought about the nature of Dean’s show of anger, or better, about the way the scene in Mia Vallens’ studio is a play on reality.
It’s nothing new that the theme of the Dabb era is reality, and this episode has gone all out with it. Shapeshifters by definition are a monster that allows a play on appearances and lies and deception. In the first episode of the show featuring a shapeshifter, Skin, we got to explore the folds of the truth of Dean’s character. Nightshifter, Monster Movie, Ask Jeeves… all explore the themes of truths and lies and identity. But I don’t want to digress 🙂 So, this episode explores heavily the theme of deception, from the obvious element of the shapeshifter pretending to be someone else, to the visual metaphors like the ridiculously highly symbolic moment where “Dean” literally tears his face off like a mask.
And then there’s the crucial scene where Dean, Sam and Jack visit Mia Vallens’ studio and put up a performance to pretend they’re interested in her counseling service. The status of reality of the entire scene is ambiguous, and the anger shown by Dean is, let’s put it like this, ambiguously real.
I am not saying that there is no anger in Dean because that would be silly. He’s angry at God for dumping too-big responsibilities on them and disregarding their needs; he’s angry at Jack for the events in North Cove; he’s angry at Sam for ignoring the boundaries he’s trying to set regarding his role in dealing with Jack. But I think that we also have to consider that there is a level of performance to that anger shown in the counselor’s studio.
The crucial scene for the interpretation of Dean as aiming anger at his family is purposely a performance, where the line between reality and deception is ambiguous. I’d say that Dean draws from reality and uses that reality to craft a lie. That scene in Mia’s office is primarily a lie. Sam has to storm out of the room to go investigate the room (although he does take a moment to collect himself when he gets the cup of water, because the lie wasn’t a complete lie, of course), Dean has to keep the counselor busy.
Look at Jensen’s and Jared’s acting – for most of the scene, it’s the ‘pretend’ attitude. Only one thing, in my opinion, Sam brought up that Dean wasn’t expecting and made his controlled expression slip, i.e. the part where Sam talks about him not having the connection with Mary that Dean had.
Look at this bit for instance
Most of the scene is more or less like that – they’re blatantly acting with streaks of actual feelings intertwined with that. Only at this moment Jensen does a kind of face that signals that Dean is taken aback in a hurt-y way, the blink-and-retract:
It’s not about anger at all. He slips when Sam clearly goes out from the track they had been planning the scene to go, because Dean is obviously taken aback for a moment there. (Sam is also making it harder for himself, digging actual troubles of his, and he has to collect himself with the cup of water later).
When the scene is about Dean’s feelings, he is putting on a show for the counselor. And, while he does use actual feelings to make the show (of course, otherwise there’s no point to the entire episode if everything is a lie lol), Dean seems fairly in control of the persona he’s playing – let’s call it a John persona if we want. Anger, making Sam storm out of the door (sounds familiar?), blatantly drinking hard liquor, making the kid terrified of him – there is a truth to these things Dean is showing. He does hold some anger, he does mean what he’s told Sam to some degree, he has been drinking alcohol (but mostly beer), he has been acting aggressively at Jack (who, I might add, isn’t terrified of Dean, but terrified of himself – when he tells Sam that Dean said he’d kill him, he doesn’t it because he’s scared of Dean, but because he’s scared of why Dean thinks that about him).
But at the same time, Dean and Sam are playing a part. Dean makes a show of acting angry and aggressively oppositional to Sam, Sam leaves the room and go investigate (it doesn’t really matter if they’d planned it to go exactly like that – either way, they had to explore the counselor, they were there with a purpose). No matter how much truth there is behind it – Dean is still putting up a performance for Mia. He makes a show of drinking alcohol from his flask, something so blatantly “I am not taking this loss well lol” that is sure to capture the counselor’s attention on him.
I think that his anger is real (of course it can’t all be an act otherwise the emotional weight of the episode disappears and nothing makes sense), but the John persona he puts on is something he purposely play with for a specific goal.
I think that the scene suggests that he is emotionally mature enough that he play with the anger he feels. That he can use John as a performance on purpose. Maybe it’s not a coincidence he doesn’t seem to have particular reactions to Sam’s accusations that he’s acting like John – because he’s not in a position where he’s terrified of being like John, of his emotions escaping him, of being unable to control himself. It seems to me that he’s in control of his anger towards Sam and Jack, it’s not like Lisa and Ben when he felt his emotional reactions were escaping his control and was terrified. When Sam accuses him of acting like John, Dean simply reiterates his refusal to act as mother to Jack, which is the boundary he has been trying to set and Sam has been ignoring.
This actually makes so much sense a little ping went off in my brain and I let my dinner burn in my eagerness to discuss it. Because when Sam said, “You’re acting like Dad,” Dean’s said, “That’s a bad thing?” without any emotion what so ever. He actually shrugged.
Dean Winchester, the dude who almost started crying when he realised he was acting like John with Ben:
It scared him to think of himself as John when it came to Ben because he chose Ben–he chose that emotional labor of being someone’s father. But when Sam says he’s acting like John when it comes to Jack, he shrugs? Why? Because he knows exactly what he’s doing. And it’s not about cruelty or anger. After he nonchalantly asks if that’s a bad thing to be John right now, he follows it up with “I’m not going to hold his hand or tuck him in at night. I’m not going to be his mother.”
Because he’s not going to be, to Jack, what he was to Sam (i.e.: holding his hand and tucking him in at night, doing all the emotional labor that John wasn’t willing to do when raising a child) and instead he is going to be, to Jack, what John was to Sam; the rough, hardened, drill sergeant who left it up to Dean to worry about Sam’s feelings. He is leaving the emotional labor up to Sam. This is a conscious choice Dean is making. It is not irrational or fueled by rage. It is quite simply Dean drawing a line in the sand, creating an emotional boundary between Jack and himself. A boundary which he has every right to make. I am actually so proud of Dean for doing this for himself. For saying no and making something about his own needs for once. This is good.
Exactly! Sorry for your dinner. There’s also the fact that Dean… isn’t really acting like John acted towards him. He’s acting more like John apparently acted towards Sam. From what Sam has said about John over the course of the show, John was a drill sergeant type that barked orders and didn’t listen and had zero patience and sure became scary when he drank, but wasn’t nearly as bad as, say, Max Miller’s father, right? Dean’s experience of John… doesn’t seem to be exactly the same. Dean was terrified about acting like John not because he barked orders at Lisa and Ben, but because… well, slippery slope, right? Being snappy in case of danger is not bad, especially if you’re the competent one and you’re dealing with fairly unexperienced civilians. It’s the idea that the attitude could be a symptom for something deeper, for a stronger resemblance. Sam accusing him of acting like John possibly falls a little flat because, duh. If only John had had Dean stay sit in the car or get food from the kiosk. The John Sam experienced was a drill sergeant, the John Dean experienced was something darker and scarier.
*slides into the end of this post to add the reminder that, as the original post said, it wasn’t just about maintaining the emotional continuity of the episode, or making it lose all sense, their “act” HAD to contain an element of real feelings, because they went in to Mia’s office believing that she was a PSYCHIC. They believed that, if she were a true psychic, she would KNOW if they were being dishonest with her, which is why Dean wasn’t thrilled with Sam’s plan. Luckily for them, Mia was just good at her job– and a shapeshifter and not a psychic…*
But also, Dean’s entire cooperation in bringing Jack along with them on this hunt boiled down to Sam’s puppydog eyes and his plea to do it “for me.” Dean capitulated, but then at every turn Sam was pulling faces at Dean’s reticence to deal with Jack at all… because Dean was upfront about not wanting to, and he’d made his feelings about being forced to not only share space in his home but now emotional labor in dealing with Jack abundantly clear.
In some ways, Dean’s attitude with Sam about his reluctance to “get over” what happened to Mary strikes me as a retaliation against Sam’s repeatedly pushing Dean to “just get over” losing Cas, and the fact that Dean has flat-out yelled it in Sam’s face why he isn’t going to help him with Jack. And yet, Sam keeps pushing him. Even at the end of the episode Sam assumed that Dean was just ready to be okay with everything. I hope that brings the reality of Dean’s grief home to Sam, because he just hasn’t seemed to get it yet. Maybe this is what prompts Sam to suggest their hunt in the promo for 13.05… just the two of them hunting together like old times… (and what looks like some eerie callbacks to 1.10, which I am eagerly awaiting)
Reblogging this because I feel like it might help people understand Dean a bit better right now.
God thoughts in these posts.
And I was left wondering, if the “therapy session” was mostly an act (which I find pretty convincing) why is it that Dean should feel compelled to sincerely apologize to Sam for “being a dick” but not Sam to Dean for being a pushy jerk?
And the answer is, of course, because Dean is just that kind of considerate, compassionate person (being a “dick” notwithstanding). And Sam just isn’t.
Because Sam doesn’t see his behavior as wrong, he sees Dean’s attitude as unreasonable. Sam apologizes when his actions have consequences he didn’t expect/want (and the apology is about how he feels about it, because in his eyes making that mistake means he’s a terrible person and it becomes all about Sam’s feelings). When something he does turns out to be a mistake, he’s heartbroken about it and apologizes for the mistake; but he doesn’t apologize for being a dick, because what we see as being a dick Sam sees as being rational and reasonable. Dean will apologize for acting like a dick even if he was right. Dean is the one who carries the responsibility for the emotional integrity of the family, a role that was dropped onto him as he became the ‘housewife’ of the Winchester household after Mary’s death. If a member of the family does something wrong, Dean will apologize for not having acted better to prevent the other from making the wrong thing. I am not an expert, but I’m pretty sure it’s a thing commonly found in victims of abuse, especially parental abuse – they blame themselves, they shoulder the fault. With all the talk about Sam’s experience with demon blood lately, I feel authorized in digging this thing back – at some point, the blame ambiguously hovered over Dean for leaving Sam alone because of his damnation to hell. Heck, it started before Dean went to hell, before Sam started drinking Ruby’s blood – Ruby just had to suggest it, and the big thing stopped being Dean going to hell, the big thing became that Dean was leaving Sam alone. But it’s not just that. Dean has always been apologizing for doing something wrong when he was raising Sam, but the fact that he was a struggling kid himself doesn’t touch the radar. Only Dean seems to have realized that – his speech at Mary in Mary’s head is about that – but it doesn’t seem to have reached Sam’s radar yet.
(Doesn’t seem to have reached some fans’ radar either, because for some it’s all about poor Sam who didn’t get enough vegetables growing up.)
The scene in 13×04 is about Dean apologizing for being mean to Sam, and Sam saying something that requires Dean to provide him emotional support. Eh, in-character for both. Sorry if this came off as very critical of Sam but sometimes you just gotta be.
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