I've had weird upswings of hope and downswings of despair about Dean. I find the Gadreel possession very, very hard to get past, and partly I'm aware that that's because it affects me on emotional levels (and even physical levels; it literally gave me tracts of insomnia and queasiness last year) that aren't strictly about ethical evaluation. Dean's hardly the only person on the show who has done terrible things -- I mean, Castiel is a mass murderer, Sam has killed and manipulated and forced a demon back into its host to kill it and has acquiesced and participated in the more general darkening of the hunting ethos (I think one of the most telling moments in the increasing bleakness of the show may have been none of the main three, but Bobby, who reminded Sam and Dean and the audience that Meg Masters was an innocent, suffering person, becoming as ready as anyone to torture demons in their hosts).
I think what bothers me more about Dean is that when he thinks about his own actions, even when he's aware that he's crossed a line and convinced himself that he "had" to do it (and every one of the characters has availed themselves of that plea of necessity at some point), what bothers me with Dean more than with the others is that he often comes across as thinking primarily, or even only, about how his actions affect himself. He's often spoken of as selfless, and I think it's true that he has a very decentered self, but he's so strongly absorbed in his own subjective world that it's like he can't come to the simple point of "I damaged you and I'm sorry." He hardly seems to be aware of how others exist outside the image of them he's clinging to or betrayed by or whatever. So many of his "you" moments are accusations (not just towards Sam; he often follows a similar pattern with Cas), and so many moments that should be "you" moments are "I" moments.
Like, I think there were some serious problems with Sam's speech to Dean in Trial and Error, in that the worth he was trying to convince Dean he had was so bound up with being a hunter, and feeling that his worth depends on being a hunter (which at the same time he's aware is something soul-killing) is a big part of Dean's problems, but, for all that Sam's understanding of what Dean might need was incomplete and maybe even unintentionally damaging, he was still trying to convince Dean that he had worth as Dean. Whereas Dean's speech at the end of 8.23 was to me in a way even more disastrous than the catalogue of Sam's sins, because it was a list of what Dean had done and would do for Sam, with no "you" in it, no affirmation that Sam's value came from his own experiences and actions and qualities. And in all of season 9, which literalized that tendency to treat Sam as an object and banish his subjectivity, Dean didn't seem to come to any awareness. It's not the magnitude of a character's flaws that has the capacity to lose me, its a kind of obliviousness to them.
I haven't actually watched Paper Moon yet (it's a bit ominous that I became reluctant to watch as soon as the show was set to embark on a repair process, because I'm SO nervous about whether they'll be able to do construction as well as they did destruction), but there's something weirdly hopeful to me about the fact that a lot of what Dean seems to be feeling right now is sheer embarrassment. I like that partly because Dean ended up where he ended up not as a direct consequence of his choices in the first half of s9, but through a series of evasions, so I feel like Dean's road back can't be a direct one, and he may need to work from the outer layer of shame inward before he gets at a more real ethical questioning. And I also feel a bit hopeful about it because guilt is such a comfortable state to Dean at this point, and has become a refuge from responsibility rather than a spur to it, that shame/embarrassment, even if it seems like an evasion of foundation work, is such an uncomfortable state that he's going to have to go somewhere from it, he's maybe at least got a sense of restlessness that will create some kind of movement. Like it might shake him out of that kind of self-absorption I was talking about above, even if the sense of outside reality that manifests in embarrassment isn't the most healthy thing.
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Date: 2014-11-07 02:12 am (UTC)I think what bothers me more about Dean is that when he thinks about his own actions, even when he's aware that he's crossed a line and convinced himself that he "had" to do it (and every one of the characters has availed themselves of that plea of necessity at some point), what bothers me with Dean more than with the others is that he often comes across as thinking primarily, or even only, about how his actions affect himself. He's often spoken of as selfless, and I think it's true that he has a very decentered self, but he's so strongly absorbed in his own subjective world that it's like he can't come to the simple point of "I damaged you and I'm sorry." He hardly seems to be aware of how others exist outside the image of them he's clinging to or betrayed by or whatever. So many of his "you" moments are accusations (not just towards Sam; he often follows a similar pattern with Cas), and so many moments that should be "you" moments are "I" moments.
Like, I think there were some serious problems with Sam's speech to Dean in Trial and Error, in that the worth he was trying to convince Dean he had was so bound up with being a hunter, and feeling that his worth depends on being a hunter (which at the same time he's aware is something soul-killing) is a big part of Dean's problems, but, for all that Sam's understanding of what Dean might need was incomplete and maybe even unintentionally damaging, he was still trying to convince Dean that he had worth as Dean. Whereas Dean's speech at the end of 8.23 was to me in a way even more disastrous than the catalogue of Sam's sins, because it was a list of what Dean had done and would do for Sam, with no "you" in it, no affirmation that Sam's value came from his own experiences and actions and qualities. And in all of season 9, which literalized that tendency to treat Sam as an object and banish his subjectivity, Dean didn't seem to come to any awareness. It's not the magnitude of a character's flaws that has the capacity to lose me, its a kind of obliviousness to them.
I haven't actually watched Paper Moon yet (it's a bit ominous that I became reluctant to watch as soon as the show was set to embark on a repair process, because I'm SO nervous about whether they'll be able to do construction as well as they did destruction), but there's something weirdly hopeful to me about the fact that a lot of what Dean seems to be feeling right now is sheer embarrassment. I like that partly because Dean ended up where he ended up not as a direct consequence of his choices in the first half of s9, but through a series of evasions, so I feel like Dean's road back can't be a direct one, and he may need to work from the outer layer of shame inward before he gets at a more real ethical questioning. And I also feel a bit hopeful about it because guilt is such a comfortable state to Dean at this point, and has become a refuge from responsibility rather than a spur to it, that shame/embarrassment, even if it seems like an evasion of foundation work, is such an uncomfortable state that he's going to have to go somewhere from it, he's maybe at least got a sense of restlessness that will create some kind of movement. Like it might shake him out of that kind of self-absorption I was talking about above, even if the sense of outside reality that manifests in embarrassment isn't the most healthy thing.