Nov. 27th, 2010

shadowkat: (Default)
[Catching up on my reviews. I'd promised to do one on Supernatural, but time got away from me.]

The last three episodes of Supernatural focused on what it is to be without a soul. A topic that I first saw dealt with by Fritz Leiber -in the novella Conjurer Wife. That novel has a refrain that continues to haunt me...the wife in the novel has her soul taken and she is constantly saying ..."I want my soul". Here's Lieber's description of the wife with her soul gone:

Tansy sat stiffly, wearing Norman's bathrobe and fleece-lined slippers, with a blanket over her knees and a bath towel wrapped around her head. They should have made her look childlike and perhaps even artlessly attractive. They did not. If you were to unwind the towel you would find the top of the skull sawed off and the brains removed, an empty bowl - that the illusion Norman experienced every time he made the mistake of looking into her eyes.

The lips parted. "I know nothing. I only speak. They have taken away my soul. But my voice is a function of my body."

You could not say the voice was patiently explanatory. It was too empty and colorless even for that. The words, clearly enunciated and evenly spaced, all sounded alike. They were like the noise of a machine.

"But Tansy, if you can talk about the present situation, you must be aware of it. You're here in this room with me!"

The toweled head shook once, like that of a mechanical doll. "Nothing is here with you but a body. 'I' is not here."

His mind automatically corrected "is" to "am" before he realized that there had been no grammatical error. He trembled. "You mean," he asked, "that you can see or hear nothing? That there is just blackness?"

Again that simple mechanical headshake, which carried more absolute conviction than the most heated protestations. "My body sees and hears perfectly. It has suffered no injury. It can function in all particulars. But there is nothing inside. There is not even a blackness. "


It's worth noting that Lieber was fascinated by Jungian psychology and highly influenced by HP Lovecraft as well as Campbell, much as many of the modern Hollywood tv horror writers appear to be.
Except in modern takes on souls...the writers seem to be struggling to determine what a soul actually is. Whedon didn't know. His examination of what a soul meant both literally and metaphorically in both Angel and Buffy...covered a vast amount of territory and rarely was consistent. A professed atheist - the whole concept of "soul" went counter to his own philosophical or religious views...yet, like many of us, he did not know and he wrote with partners who did believe. So what we see in Whedon's horror verse tends towards psychological, but is also to a degree metaphysical, albeit less so than Leiber's.

Kripke, Gamble and notably Ben Edlund's take on what a soul is in Supernatural ...is closer in some respect's to Whedon's yet also has quite a bit in common with Lieber. Like Lieber, Gamble and Kripke are clearly influenced by Lovecraft, but equally by the urban legends and American Christian mythos of the Midwest. Supernatural delves deep into the urban legends and folklore of the Modern American working class culture. At times red-neck and heavily male, it bares a great deal in common with another genre - the Western, and the B-Horror flicks, notably by the late great Roger Corman.

Supernatural...spoilers for the last three episodes )

Profile

shadowkat: (Default)
shadowkat

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Oct. 16th, 2025 07:42 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios