God, the Devil, and John Winchester: Failures of Patriarchy in Supernatural

Abstract

By the finale of Supernatural ’s fifth season, God is gone, Lucifer briefly escapes Hell and is revealed to be the instigator of the series’ narrative arc, and two brothers fight to save the world and their small family by repeatedly defying powerful patriarchs’ plans. In its ninth season at the time of this writing, Supernatural continues to push at the powerful and interlocked metanarratives 1 of Christianity and patriarchy, but it is in its first five seasons and their concomitant apocalyptic narrative that the show’s structure, story lines, and characters represent its most trenchant challenge to the patriarchal concept of God-the-Father. It does so by presenting various iterations of literal fathers—and, notably, bloodline-begetting fathers, leaving out fathers of choice like Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver)—at terrestrial, infernal, and celestial levels and then deconstructing the figures’ claims to power. The human father dies and is usurped by a demon, Azazel (Fredric Lehne), who is acting for his father, Lucifer (Mark Pellegrino), to end the world. Throughout the seasons, humanistic fraternity is upheld as father figures come and go and the Devil is revealed to be the best example of the God-the-Father power structure. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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