Unplugging Popular Culture

Reconsidering Analog Technology, Materiality, and the "Digital Native"

K. Shannon Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429960529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Unplugging Popular Culture showcases youth and young adult characters from film and television who defy the stereotype of the "digital native" who acts as an unquestioning devotee to screened technologies like the smartphone. In this study, unplugged tools, or non-digital tools, do not necessitate a ban on technology or a refusal to acknowledge its affordances but work instead to highlight the ability of fictional characters to move from high tech settings to low tech ones. By repurposing everyday materials, characters model the process of reusing and upcycling existing materials in innovative ways. In studying examples such as Pitch Perfect, Supernatural, Stranger Things, and Get Out, the book aims to make theories surrounding materiality apparent within popular culture and to help today's readers reconsider stereotypes of the young people they encounter on a daily basis.

1
“My Charade Is the Event of the Season”

Celebrating Supernatural With Materiality, Music, and Generations X to Z

The Winchester Mystery House sits on a corner in San Jose, California, offering tours of its twisting turrets and narrow staircases every day except Christmas. As the brochure describes, features of this “mystery house” include “a window built into the floor, staircases leading to ceilings, a chimney that rises four floors to stop just 1 ½ feet from the mansion’s ceiling, and doors that open onto blank walls.” It includes a Winchester Firearms Museum so that visitors may learn about the rifle that was known as “The Gun that Won the West,” and its rooms total 160 in all. The world’s “most unusual and sprawling mansion” is also considered one of the most haunted locations in America. As Colin Dickey explains, lore surrounds and infects it; stories tell of ghosts, séances, fear of death, and symbols always in numbers of thirteen.

I begin with a description of the Winchester home because it acts as an appropriate analogy¹ for studying materiality in the sprawling mythology of Supernatural, a show that has been running for fourteen consecutive seasons on the CW (formerly WB) channel. The house itself, according to fans, also inspired the showrunner Eric Kripke to use the last name Winchester for his two male protagonists. Like the Mystery House, Supernatural (2005–present) contains countless metaphorical corridors and rooms in its mythos, some of which lead to architectural insight and some of which simply end in unfinished staircases and doors to nowhere. If we even begin to talk about how the material world of objects, places, and powers influence this narrative, we certainly will, figuratively speaking, travel farther than just 160 rooms. The show extends into multiple dimensions of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory as Judeo-Christian descriptions of the cosmos and its devils and angels permeate the narrative’s trajectory (see Brown).

Supernatural has dealt specifically in images of materiality since its pilot. A story of two brothers who hunt supernatural creatures, it features a material horror in the mysterious death of their mother Mary and, twenty years later, one brother’s girlfriend at Stanford University (“Pilot”). In this material death, the body, stabbed and bleeding, becomes stuck to the ceiling, with flames shooting out around her and burning her corpse. The search for the thing or man responsible for this act (later identified as a demon named Azazel) drives both brothers out into the towns and forests of rural America, where similar supernatural events occur and jeopardize the lives of innocent civilians. Dean Winchester, the older brother at twenty-six years old, has already devoted years of his early adult life to “hunting” evil, and he comes to recruit younger brother Sam to join him, mainly because his father, a fellow hunter and mentor to Dean, has gone missing. While Dean’s purpose is linked to a family crisis, the reunion seems grounded in something else: the desire for Dean to find a hunting partner in Sam despite Sam acting as a foil to him with an academic career and plans for law school.

Figure 1.1 Winchester Boulevard near the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, CA

Source: Author photo

Although Sam’s future stands in contrast to Dean’s rootless existence, the sudden tragedy of Sam’s girlfriend’s demise (and its similarity to his mother’s fiery death) drives Sam out on the road to locate the murderer, whom the brothers find and kill at the end of the second season (“All Hell Breaks Loose, Part 2”). However, the death comes with a price: Dean must be willing to sell his soul to a demon so that Sam may live. When an angel finally rescues Dean from Hell in Season Four (“Lazarus Rising”), the mythos expands to include both angels from Heaven and demons from Hell, all warring for Sam and Dean’s attention. After years sleeping in the car and using fake credit for food and gas, the two brothers realize that, despite their tireless work and frequent encounters with death, they make a rather dysfunctional but effective hunting team. However, the angels and demons in their midst use them repeatedly to serve a different agenda as a final apocalypse approaches in Season Five.

This chapter’s main focus is an analysis of a tenth season episode titled “Fan Fiction” (2014), which also happens to be the show’s 200th episode and what showrunner Jeremy Carver has called “a love letter to fans” (Herbig and Herrmann 754). Written by Eric Kripke and Robbie Thompson, “Fan Fiction” contains frequent references to earlier seasons, some of which are only recognized by loyal viewers. Although more than 200 episodes exist currently, “Fan Fiction” does constrain its references to the first five seasons of the show since those are viewed as being part of Chuck Shurley’s fictional book series Supernatural. Chuck, known by the pen name Carver Edlund, is a character in the show itself, and his encounters with Dean and Sam allow for a level of meta-commentary on fan behavior, convention culture, and fan fiction.²

Most of the examples that follow, therefore, come from the first five seasons, although references to Season Six and beyond will occasionally be pertinent to the analysis of “Fan Fiction.” However, before using the 200th episode as a case study for Supernatural’s emphasis on materiality as it relates to Generation Z—since “Fan Fiction” centers on the creative efforts of high school girls as they launch their own musical—I review some moments in the show when materials act as co-participants to the brothers who hunt monsters. This chapter will first examine materiality as it works at large in this particular television narrative, and then it will narrow its focus to one particular object’s agency in the Supernatural mythos: the 1967 Chevrolet Impala. Finally, it will conclude with a close analysis of “Fan Fiction,” the episode featuring high school students whose efforts prove that Generation Z is capable of moving between high and low tech environments in order to create a musical version of two brothers’ lives on the road.

Supernatural and Materiality

One simple but representative example in Supernatural of how nonhuman materials come to possess power equal to that of humans occurs in Season Four’s “After School Special,” where the two brothers, Dean and Sam, must solve a case of murder at an Indiana high school. After interviewing the different citizens of the town, they discover that several children have died and that one of the parents, a school bus driver, is keeping a lock of his deceased son’s hair in his Bible. Sam and Dean burn the cursed lock of hair and, therefore, set the school community free from the homicidal evil spirit that is possessing both students and adults alike. This focus on a material good, the hair, as the key through which spirits may gain their energy is just one moment during which the brothers must acknowledge that larger forces and even smaller ones often thwart the efforts of well-intentioned human beings. References to cursed objects abound, and such curses often render something inanimate animate. Still, the lock of hair acts as more than a cursed object from a horror story. It becomes the source of comfort and security that the grieving boy’s father needs after losing his son. The lock also empowers other humans to murder others in grotesque ways, so its power extends beyond the father’s grief and into the world at large.

One need only consult the Supernatural wiki (supernaturalwiki.com) to review the number of references that pertain to weapons, talismans, and more mundane objects in the show’s mythology. For example, a particular gun, the Colt, receives as much background information as the characters do on this encyclopedic website. In Supernatural the Colt is a special weapon that John Winchester uses to bargain with the demon Azazel for Dean’s life (“In My Time of Dying”). The gun continues to change hands throughout the entirety of the series, with characters desperate to use it because it has the power to kill some of the worst monsters in the series. On the wiki page, information about this one weapon includes 6,133 words (the length of an average academic article in a scholarly journal). Additionally, the section on weapons and mystical artifacts includes eighty separate pages of encyclopedic notes on objects as diverse as salt, a rabbit’s foot, a hyperbolic pulse generator, cat’s eyes, horcruxes, and the Staff of Moses. Even Dean and Sam’s last name, Winchester, brings attention to their armory since relatives of the historical Winchester family (the same family responsible for the Winchester Mystery House) are responsible for inventing one of the nation’s most famous rifles (Dickey).

Likewise, the otherworldly creatures in this show are neither fully embodied nor completely ephemeral, which makes for a fascinating study of how the material world intersects and influences humans. The title of the Supernatural-themed volume of the Journal of Transformative Works in 2010 may have been titled “Saving People, Hunting Things” (which also serves as a line from a song in “Fan Fiction”), but the two actions listed there are rarely that neatly divided. For example, the Season Four episode “Family Remains” proves just how frustrating a case becomes when two children haunting a home are actually live human beings who have been sealed off from the world. On the other hand, another Season Three Supernatural episode named “Ghostfacers” showcases the characters entering a haunted location called the Morton House where they search for the Leap Year Ghost, an entity who surfaces once every four years. Sam and Dean’s search for such entities includes measuring the air quality for traces of electromagnetic energy and, in other episodes (such as the aforementioned story about possession), collecting traces of ectoplasm that, as in Season Two’s “No Exit,” serve as material manifestations that guide the hunters to their prey. In “Ghostfacers,” some ghosts are caught in a loop via a “Death Echo,” which places them directly between the spirit and material realms.

World building in any narrative may often contain an astonishing catalog of detail from those willing to author it, but Supernatural’s own databases seem particularly rife with things that possess screen time and agency in ways that other stories fail to accomplish. This will become especially important in “Fan Fiction” because the girls attend to these details carefully, bringing their narrative to life through carefully selected props that the actors use to tell Supernatural’s story. All in all, the analog world of weapons and artifacts in Supernatural far outnumbers the digital resources the boys use to solve their cases. In most episodes the best way to defeat evil is to retrieve a certain object and use it sparingly and respectfully (e.g., the Colt can hold only thirteen rounds to kill demons). Objects may sometimes stand directly between the protagonist and his or her security and/or safety from harm, and humans are not exempt from becoming such objects: Sam is told in Season Five that he is the bodily vessel for Lucifer (“Free to Be You and Me”), and Dean is informed that he is the vessel for the archangel Michael’s sword (“Sympathy for the Devil”).

This malleable border among humans, objects, and spirits may be why the characters often refer to human bodies as merely “vessels” or “meat suits.” Human forms are often subject to manipulation by larger forces.³ Likewise, objects play a significant role in honoring the dead in episodes like “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things:” Sam buries his father’s military dog tags at his mother’s grave after John Winchester dies. Such actions foreshadow the eventual return of the parents in different spiritual and bodily forms. John the father returns as a ghost to help the boys defeat Azazel in Season Two, and Mary, the mother, is brought back to life at the end of Season Eleven when Dean pleases an unstoppable force called the Darkness.

An emphasis on materiality in Supernatural cannot be divorced from the characters’ own heroic actions and persistence as they locate, use, protect, and even become artifacts; yet the message, one articulated by Castiel, an angel who rescues Dean from Hell, is always that “there is a bigger picture here” (“Are You There God? It’s Me, Dean Winchester”). Indeed, angels both good and corrupt must consistently remind Dean and Sam that their human vision is “limited” (“Dark Side of the Moon”). Although such an idea seems pessimistic, part of celebrating the materiality of the physical world includes acknowledging macro and micro matter that influences events on a global scale. A primary example that Timothy Morton uses to describe this phenomenon is climate change, which he refers to as a hyperobject. In layperson’s terms, a hyperobject is an agent/object of such size that humans are unable to control, contain, or even fully grasp it: the result of its impact is to “humiliate the human, decisively decentering us from a place of pampered privilege in the scheme of things” (47). It may then be fair to say that hyperobjects, or macrostructures in Supernatural, include God, the Darkness, angels, demons, Leviathan, Hell, and Heaven. (We might go even farther and argue that the fandom itself is a hyperobject, rarely contained and controlled.)⁴ Likewise, on a micro-level the viewer sees that something as mundane as a magical coin (“Wishful Thinking”) has the ability to change reality for the humans in the narrative, and its use may also affect the macrostructures that continue to dwarf and reduce human power. In his research Sidney Nagel shares his fascination with the macro and micro orderings of the material world when he says, “I am struck by the observation of Victor Hugo: ‘Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision? You may choose.’ I am seduced by the shape of objects on a small scale. The forces that govern their forms are the same as those that are responsible for structures at ever increasing sizes…” (29). This reality in which small and large forces have equal footing with human efforts is one that is best described as a supernatural realm, making the show’s title quite fitting. Still, not all objects that help defeat evil spirits are made of ghost ectoplasm or a cursed lock of human hair. Some initially appear to blend in with the background rather than stand out as agents capable of saving the world. One of these objects is the 1967 Chevy Impala.

The Impala as Material Agent

As both Winchesters attempt to destroy the supernatural creatures they encounter on the road, multiple camera shots zoom in on the material contents of Dean’s Impala, where knives, guns, crossbows, salt, fake FBI badges, and pistols are stored beneath and above the floor of his trunk. These weapons and objects sometimes catch the eye more quickly than the vehicle that holds them. It is harder to understand the car as a weapon or a tool because it exists as a container for the Winchesters’ belongings. However, the Impala becomes agential in the fight against evil and often gets just as immersed in ghostlike and supernatural activity as the brothers do. In the very first episode, Dean’s Impala actually chases and attempts to run down both him and Sam because it is haunted by a woman in white who lures unfaithful men to their deaths (“Pilot”).

This does not mean that life on the road is always dangerous; sometimes it is mundane and tedious. In Season Four Dean admit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: “It Forces You to Play Differently”
• 1 “My Charade Is the Event of the Season:” Celebrating Supernatural With Materiality, Music, and Generations X to Z
• 2 Beca as Bricoleur: How Pitch Perfect Characters Embrace Materiality and Music
• 3 Analog Dinosaurs and Abandoned Kids in Jurassic World
• 4 “Don’t Adjust Whatever Device You’re Hearing This On:” (Dis)Embodiment and Analog Technology in 13 Reasons Why
• 5 Complicating Materiality and Generational Labels: Get Out and the Role of the Collector
• 6 Solving Z for X: Extending Generational Paradigms in Stranger Things
• Conclusion: Blooming (and Burning) Where You Are Planted: The Optimism of Generation Z
• Index