INTRODUCTION | resurrection

The Trivialities and Anxieties of Death's Impermanence

At nine seasons and counting, Supernatural has cut out a large spot for itself within a broad monster-hunter/paranormal investigation genre. Including monsters, spirits, gods, and a variety of assorted creatures from a wide swath of cultures and time periods, Supernatural follows the brothers Sam and Dean Winchester as they encounter everything from monster-of-the-week situations (one notably including a stoner teddy bear coming to life) to primarily Christian myth-arcs such as a Revelation-inspired apocalypse.

Despite this relative diversity of subject matter, however, Supernatural has remained distinctly and staunchly an American story by drawing from classic road-trip and Western-style tropes. In thinly veiled homage to the American antiheroes Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Sam and Dean frequent cheap motels and seedy biker bars as they pursue monsters across the United States in a 1967 Chevrolet Impala. Throughout the series, it is established that Dean and Sam hail from ancient bloodlines leading back to Cain and Abel, and when trying to evade the apocalypse, it is revealed that Sam and Dean are to serve as the chosen vessels for Lucifer and the Archangel Michael respectively in a final battle deemed inevitable by angels and demons alike. It is perhaps only in a characteristically narcissistic and pioneer-like reimagining of Manifest Destiny that the Christian apocalypse could be scheduled to begin in a small American town, with two corn-fed Kansas boys as its most integral actors.

Keeping in mind the primarily American nature of Supernatural, I decided to investigate instances of resurrection in the show for insight into the treatment of a particular breed of “undead.” Throughout their adventures, Sam, Dean, and their fallen-angel friend Castiel die upwards of one hundred times collectively, in what might seem a trivializing obscuring of the boundary between life and death. I found that though often portraying death and resurrection in humorous and nonchalant ways which betray a contemporary immortality complex, Supernatural resurrections also expose deep and persistent anxieties about the idea of immortality through a transcendence of the competing concerns of “death of the self” and “death of the other” into the “death of death,” and a focus on “incomplete” resurrections (something is mangled, “left behind,” etc.)

Analyzing and presenting the instances and contexts of resurrection in Supernatural through screen captures, videos, infographics, and text on this Wix site allowed me to effectively distill the most prevalent themes deployed in these particular narratives throughout the show. I was able to create a website which incorporates both visual and textual evidence in the construction of my argument.

If given more time, and perhaps greater access to costly tools, I would probably improve my infographic or perhaps create my own without templates in a program such as Photoshop in order to provide better visuals. In terms of the analysis itself, I would have liked to investigate the interplays of religion within the show's depiction of resurrection more deeply, and with regard to previous class discussions of Puritan thought and practice. Despite the religious nature of resurrection in general and the particular Christian myth-arcs of Supernatural, the media here deploys a re-imagined story that is distinctly contemporary and is “by no means faithfully selling Christianity” (Petersen 1). Though neither the ideas of a secular Western culture or the thrust of Christianity are as simple or as totalizing as they are often portrayed, I have allied myself mostly with the former for the sake of my analysis of resurrection in Supernatural and its revelations about contemporary American views of the undead.