Continuing the stream of random posts: a Farscape/Supernatural comparison

[rusty_halo]

I’ve been thinking about Supernatural in relation to Farscape. Farscape is a better show, but SPN pings my fannish radar more intensely. I’m wondering why.

One of the aspects I love most about Farscape is that it captures how complicated, messy, and conflicted human beings are. For a show about aliens, it’s probably the most accurate portrayal of humanity that I’ve ever seen in a TV show.

I read an article recently (now I can’t find it–I think it was in the New York Times Magazine) about how humans don’t have single personalities or single motivations, but we actually contain multiple, competing, and conflicting selves and desires, and our consciousness is what sorts these out and decides which ones we’re actually going to go with and which we’re going to reject/repress/ignore.

Farscape just kind of instinctively got this. It was messy. Its characters' journeys didn't always make logical sense, but they rang emotionally true. It surprised and shocked me and made me exclaim out loud, frequently, because it defied the narrative paradigms of television and went places that I didn't expect it to go. (Stuff like the attraction/repulsion between John and Scorpius, the sexualized yet almost brother/sister relationship between John and Chianna, Aeryn's immense resistance to and fear of her own emotional wakening, the entire kinky dream world of "Won't Get Fooled Again", the tangible exhausting agony of Aeryn's grief in "The Choice," the Scorpius/Braca and Scorpius/Sikozu relationships--actually, pretty much everything about Scorpius...)

It was also visceral. Touch was so important--the best John/Aeryn scenes are often wordless, foreheads or hands or lips, bodies saying more than words can. It was, again, messy--I'm pretty sure Farscape has more piss and vomit and brains and guts than any other show I've watched. It was bloody, in a way that mattered--when a character on Farscape gets injured, the injury is narratively significant. Physical injuries last and take time to heal, and even more importantly, emotional wounds endure and they change the people who suffer from them.

Supernatural is neater, cleaner, more conventional. Its violence is a narrative convenience, there to provide drama and action, but its consequences aren't consistent and so it's pointless to invest in the reality of it. No matter what they go through, the boys are always fine the next time a scene calls for them to do something physical. (Take Dean driving at the end of 2x14, drugged up on painkillers after having the crap kicked out of him and a bullet taken out of his shoulder, or Dean and Anna fucking in the back of the Impala in various uncomfortable positions about a day after Dean's shoulder was dislocated.)

This just bothers me--it tells me that I'm watching a TV show and that violence is for show instead of something real and difficult and horrible. It undercuts the story, which asks us to take violence seriously. Farscape was so much more effective because it didn't just go to high-minded philosophical places about the nature and consequences of violence--it made you feel them in your gut. It showed violence as something that really hurt the characters in lasting and difficult ways and that wasn't easily dismissed for the sake of narrative convenience.

That said, Supernatural does impress me in some ways. Like, putting shows I've watched recently on a continuum, I'd go from White Collar (a shiny fantasy world with very little realistic, enduring emotional truth) to Supernatural (somewhere in the middle) to Farscape (messy and dirty and honest and true).

In SPN, I like that:

* The characters start out very young, but they don't stay young. They're not stuck in that narrative paradigm the way, say, Buffy was, where it really couldn't keep its momentum after leaving high school and had to go back to its high school origins in its final season to (attempt to) have a fulfilling emotional resolution. Supernatural starts as a coming-of-age story but it pretty seamlessly morphs into a story about adults trying to make meaningful moral choices in the context of a dark and unforgiving world.

* Both main characters are complicated, conflicted, and allowed to be dark. SPN doesn't flinch from its characters' dark sides--it pretty much revels in them. I still don't think it's done as well as Farscape--John Crichton changed so much and was so mind-blowingly messed up by the end of that show. But SPN comes close, especially with Dean, who is portrayed as deeply moral and heroic and yet also utterly fucked up and kind of ridiculous.

Of all the characters, Dean's the only one who's had moments that have reminded me of what I liked in Farscape, the real complicated and contradictory and weird character stuff. I'm thinking of stuff like his incredible ability to lie to himself and to live in denial of his own emotions at the same time as he is totally driven by them, his odd combination of arrogant asshole and first-to-apologize peacemaker, his deeply loving and deeply twisted relationship with his borderline-abusive father, his codependent relationship with Sam, his inability to build enduring emotional connections with anyone outside his immediate family and Bobby, his ability to wring joy out of the stupidest shit (the magic fingers, heh), his self-destructiveness and self-doubt, just random stuff like his cross-dressing fetish or that time he did an impersonation of Brad Pitt in Seven in the middle of a big angsty scene about the apocalypse.

And Dean just hits my OTC-character kinks in a way that neither John nor Aeryn fully do, much as I love them. Which is probably why I'm going more fannishly crazy over SPN than I did over Farscape, even though Farscape's a better show that offends me far less.

* The way that Sam and Dean love each other is powerful because we also see all the ways they resent each other and drive each other crazy and sometimes even hate each other. Their love isn't sappy, it isn't false, it is absolutely real--love in all its contradictions and complexities, both destructive and redemptive.

* The show's world view is deeply unsentimental. Bad things happen to good people. God (if he is god/if there is a god) sits on the sidelines. Children lose their parents, romances and families fall apart, all the brotherly love in the world can't stop an inevitable violent death, and the angels who pull you out of hell probably only do it because they want to use you to destroy the world. It reminds me of Angel in its best moments, though--if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. Dean doesn't believe in anything, but he still fights for what's right because every life matters.

* Although I'm bothered by its shallow narrative treatment of violence, one of the things I really love about Supernatural is the way season four illustrates that the "ends justify the means," "for the greater good" philosophy is actually very often a justification for evil, a self-serving rationalization couched in a veneer of moral superiority. To not choose "the greater good" is to act with humility, to recognize that you don't have the right to decide what the greater good is, that you don't have the knowledge to predict the future. It takes courage to act for what you know is good now.

(Of course it's more complicated than that--sometimes people really are in positions where they have to decide between terrible choices--but often they're not and it's their own arrogance that makes them think it's okay to behave as if they are.)

This is illustrated by both Sam's fall and by the angels' plan to bring on the apocalypse--they all really believe they're doing the right thing, and they're all wrong and lying to themselves.

The angels - ends ("peace"/"paradise") justify means (destroying most of humanity, manipulating people & being total dicks)

Sam - ends (killing Lilith/stopping apocalypse) justify means (drinking demon blood, beating the hell out of his brother, torturing that possessed nurse). I love how well-written this is because Sam really does have every reason to believe that killing Lilith is right, but there's so much he doesn't know and misses because he doesn't want to see it. (Ruby's darkness, for one.) It's a great illustration that no matter how much you think you know about how justified you are, you don't necessarily have the whole story and it's arrogant to think you do, and to make people suffer for your arrogance.

Dean - ends (using Sam's powers to stop the apocalypse) DO NOT justify means (letting Sam destroy his soul) ... Dean stands alone and stands up for what's right when even Bobby disagrees with him. (And then Dean talks Castiel into rebelling against heaven! ♥Dean/Castiel♥)

Anyway, this is long and convoluted and I kind of got bored of writing it halfway through, sorry!

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.