CONCLUSION

The treatment of resurrection in Supernatural underlies some interesting trends in contemporary American views of death and undeath. Indeed, addressing and exaggerating the nonchalance and triviality with which a mostly-silent death is treated, Supernatural is at once able to imitate and ridicule a crippling loss of communication about death. Supernatural serves to highlight further anxieties in which the incapacitating concern over the death of the other gives way to the death of death, a worrying trend that manifests in contemporary society as an urge to play God with the lives of others.

While much material which deals with the undead explores the anxiety of being immortal forever and watching everyone you have loved die, Supernatural addresses further discomforts accompanying even immortality that is not solitary. The escalation of eradication of death in Supernatural is never taken lightly, and as such it gives way to further anxieties about incomplete resurrections. Dealing with humans primarily, rather than undead monsters, Supernatural addresses questions of immortality more directly than works with characters such as vampires and zombies. The distinct cultural fear that the self might not be a bounded, authentic, unfragmented entity is addressed in every instance in which resurrection renders Sam, Dean, or Castiel anything less than fully recognizable as they were before death. As previously addressed, these concerns intersect nicely with more societal concerns about elongation of life and medical improvements and replacements in the body.

In a way, the treatment of resurrection in Supernatural does something close to the cultural work of death in the colonial period of American history by addressing individual and societal fears about immortality. Sam and Dean are subject only to indefinite prolongations of life; they continue to age and it is clear that someday, when their business is finally finished or all of their friends in high places are gone, they will die definitively. Due to the relative instability of religion here compared to colonial New England, however, Sam and Dean do not fret over the predetermined states of their immortal souls, because that stability is not offered in their universe. The question still remains of where they will end up though, and what those places might look like when they are finally there to stay (at the most recent episode Heaven is locked following an angelic overthrow and Hell is an endless line at the DMV.)

In the end, Supernatural might suggest that despite all cultural complexes, anxieties, and warnings, contemporary society is unable to reconcile with the idea of a complete death. Whereas colonial people might have toiled endlessly embracing the hope of eternal life in Christ, modern (secular) Americans might not be able to imagine anything greater than what exists right now. After all, Sam, Dean, and Castiel have been to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, but in the end, despite their knowledge, anxieties, desires, and conviction that "what's dead should stay dead," (2.04, Children Shouldn't Play With Death Things) they would still rather remain together on earth.