Latchkey Hero: Masculinity, Class and the Gothic in Eric Kripke's Supernatural
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Redneck Aliens Take Over Trailer Park. --Weekly World News (2006) [1] The gothic, a pan-media mode that migrated from novels drama and poetry and then film and television, has a long history of engaging the binary construction of gender and race as well as class (see, for instance, Palmer, Thiele, and Wright 186-94). The television series Supernatural (2005-), created by Eric Kripke, not only exhibits the superficial features of the gothic--gloomy settings, suspense, supernatural threats--but also participates in this larger gothic tradition, particularly in its depiction of white, masculinity. The first two seasons, widely available on DVD, are my focus here because they trace a larger narrative arc; the third season is, at time of writing, airing on the CW network (formed in 2006 by CBS and Warner Brothers). In the series, Sam Winchester (Jared Padalecki) and Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) follow their father, John, in what is euphemistically called hunting: they scour local media for news that indicate supernatural phenomenon, road-trip the locale, and end the supernatural threat, putting ghosts and vengeful spirits to rest, exorcising demons, and killing various creatures from vampires werewolves. [2] The series was conceptualized, according Kripke's Commentary, as a way of exploring urban legends and American folklore through a narrative that combines some elements of Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) in its use of the quest motif and its characterization of the two blue-collar tough guys, Sam and Dean. In his Commentary and numerous interviews, Kripke highlights the series' engagement with a wide, multi-media array of cultural materials, and on terms that suggest not only the semiotics of bricolage (Hebdige 103-06) but also overt cultural referencing, akin literary allusion. Indeed, Padalecki has indicated in interviews that, for Supernatural, preparation unusually includes extra reading: There's so much literary value the show, so I wanted know the deeper sides the stories (Celebrity); for a third-season episode, he read Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's original stories for the first time (Rudolph 36). At the same time, Kripke's well-documented awareness of cinematic and television genres, as well as the very conventionality of the interrelated gothic and horror modes in general, make it easy identify typical features that link the series other television and literary works in popular culture: a bevy of supernatural series begin airing around the same time, including Medium (2005-) and Lost (2004-); American fantasy filmed in and around Vancouver, Canada, from X-Files (1993-2002) Smallville (2001-), Battlestar Galactica (2004-) and The 4400 (2004-2007); the 66 tradition in literature and film after Kerouac (overtly invoked in the Supernatural episode, Route 666); the law-and-order programs that emerged post-9/11 indicate that danger is everywhere but that various agencies are working protect Americans (for instance, NCIS [2003-] and Criminal Minds [2005-]); and a very long tradition in the gothic of addressing national fears as a kind of haunting or possession by the Other (see, for instance, Hogle, Malchow, Savoy, and Sedgwick). [3] The first two seasons of the series, along with Kripke's slightly earlier work, the film Boogeyman (2005), also participate in what recent critics have framed as a post-Clinton interest in masculinity and an alienated white underclass (see Ducat, Glass and particularly Malin), an interest now emerging in interesting ways on mainstream television. While they do not seem have been much discussed (if at all) in connection with each other, the similarities between Supernatural and the comedy series My Name is Earl are striking: both air on Thursday nights, premiered just one week apart in 2005, were renewed for a third season, foreground rebuilt classic cars (a 1967 Impala in Supernatural and a 1973 El Camino in Earl), and are recognized for their retro music choices. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".