“Night of the Living Dead Demons and A Life Worth Living” (SUPERNATURAL TV Series) (original) (raw)
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SUPERNATURAL IS LEADING TO SO MANY THINGS
In wat university does that professor work that cannot produce a decent book on the Book of Revelation that deserves better than a half digested piece of writing. Luckily Steinbeck seems to use his Bible a little bit better and when he quotes he gives the version of the Bible he uses. Maybe after all Ms Pagels used the one we can find in a drawer in any hotel or motel room in the USA. Is it Gideon’s and is that one standard for academic quoting? It is pathetic and she does not even know about Robert Eisenman and pretends James was stoned by a Jewish mob in Jerusalem. That must be some kind of humor, very black indeed. Or the book was written by some student of hers and she just put her signature on it, but then she should tell us who the sloppy student is.
Spirit hunter: the haunting of American culture by myths of violence: speculations on Jeremy Blake's Winchester trilogy, 2005
... Oh, god said to Abraham, "Kill me a son" Abe said, "Man you must be puttin' me on!" God said, "No," Abe said "What?" God said, "You can do what you want Abe but The next time you see me comin' you better run" Well, Abe said "Where do you want this killin' done" God said ...
Love/Hate: Supernatural THEN and NOW.
Monstrum ‘Supernatural—The End of the Road: A Reflection’ ed. Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown, 2020
Monstrum 3.1 September 2020, special edition ‘Supernatural—The End of the Road: A Reflection’ ed. Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown: 71-77.
Breaking the Mirror. Metafictional Strategies in 'Supernatural' (2011)
One of the most singular narrative strategies in Supernatural –especially from the second season onwards– is the rupture of the illusionistic mirror that characterizes traditional fiction. Such a rupture, encapsulated by the term “metafiction”, conforms to an aesthetic mode that, at different levels and purposes, reflects the functioning of the very same fictitious discourse: the author’s identity, critical issues at the reception and production process, or the narrative at the moment of realization. Grounded in the work of metafiction theorists such as Waugh, Dallenbach or Stam, this article attempts to explain how several episodes of Supernatural fracture the illusionistic glass and reveal the conventions that characterize artistic realism. In order to achieve this, we will sketch an exhaustive cartography of the reflexive strategies that the creators of the series employ: the juxtaposition of diegetical worlds, playful narration, televised narcissism, the self-consciousness of the story, and the breaking down of the fourth wall. We will start by analyzing the apposition of fiction and reality within Supernatural: narratives that still maintain their formal illusionistic skeleton while implicitly questioning the boundaries of a fantasy world in confrontation with diegetical “reality”. Dean’s daydream in “What is, and What Should Never Be” or Sam’s in “When the Levee Breaks” are examples of this type of narrative. Afterwards, we will examine another kind of formula, still underdeveloped, which involves breaking the illusionistic mirror in order to make clear that the spectator is being confronted by a constructed story, and narrators that twist the plot, as occurs with the recounting and focalization games in “Tall Tales”. Next, keeping in mind the narrative exhaustion described by Barth, we will see how the television device turns back on itself in a search for originality via stories that employ the world behind the screen as the thematic seed for innovative story-telling. Thus, “Hollywood Babylon” unveils how the shooting of a horror movie works, “Monster Movie” explicitly recycles the referents of the genre, and “Changing Channels” satirizes other TV-series competitors. Following the metafictional gradation, the illusionistic glass definitely distorts its own reflection when self-consciousness is brought into play. The capacity that an artistic work has for recognizing its own existence as a fabricated artifice offers the most fruitful and important metafictional ramifications in Supernatural. Consequently, we will detail the semantic overload provided by the intertextual relations (the presence of the cylon Tricia Helfer in “Roadkill”, the allusions to Gilmore Girls, the multiple re-readings of horror movies), the ludicrous cameos (Linda Blair, Paris Hilton), and, lastly, the mise en abyme of the self-same Winchester stories in the borgesian “The Monster at the End of this Book” and the self-parody of “The Real Ghostbusters”. Finally, we will analyze the breaking down of the fourth wall, the highest degree of metafiction that Supernatural has afforded itself, yet nothing like the aggressive reflexivity described by Wollen. Supernatural uses two strategies to achieve this effect: leeching the format in “Ghostfacers”, where an enunciative device (televised fiction itself) feigns to be something different (a reality show); and the direct appeal to the audience in the extratextual coda in “Yellow Fever”, in which Jensen Ackles parodies his own fictional character.