pishtaco of angst

Feb. 6, 2013 at 6:31pm with 71 notes

“In the Beginning He Was Really Splendid”–Castiel as Toy (1/3)

There was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid.

–Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real

After “Torn and Frayed” (8.10), I started thinking about what Castiel’s bleeding eye could signify. This post began to explore it as a reflection of Castiel’s uncanny transformation from an inanimate being immobilized by God’s will to a character animated by his own free will, but there’s a more specific way in which we can view Castiel’s transformation since his debut in Season 4, and that is by viewing him as a toy–more specifically, a doll.

“Fine Eyes, Fine Eyes!”–Castiel and the Threat of Enucleation

“He’s a wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so they jump out of their heads all bleeding.”

–“The Sand-Man,” E.T.A. Hoffmann

In his essay on the uncanny, Freud analyzes a story in which a boy lives in terror of the Sand-Man, a monster that supposedly comes to children in the night and rips out their eyes. The obvious fear here is one of blindness; the child is frightened of losing his sight. This does not apply to Castiel; he seems capable of seeing Dean and Sam as blood trickles from his eye in 8.10. However, being able to see is different from being able to see accurately. A prominent facet of the uncanny is doubts about one’ s own perception, as explored through both the concept of the doppelganger, or double, and doubts about whether “an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.”

Let’s break this down a bit. Being unable to trust one’s own perceptions of reality has been a strong theme this season, beginning with Dean’s memory of how he lost Castiel in Purgatory. He remembers his own, guilt-tainted version of how it happened, rather than the reality. His perception, his eyes, are suspect. Then, of course, we have Fred Jones, who views life as he wishes to see it, through a cartoon-based paradigm. And then there’s Castiel, whose perception has a huge blind spot: He is unaware of the fact that most of his actions are being controlled by Naomi, who orders him not to remember that he has spoken with her. So far as he knows, he is animate, an individual acting under his own agency; the reality is that he is inanimate, a puppet-object bound to Naomi’s control.

We can also connect this idea to the doppelganger. Naomi’s manipulations of Cas make him not unlike a split personality, with one personality unaware of the other. The Castiel who speaks with Naomi in her office is aware of all that he has done, but the Castiel who hunts with the Winchesters and kills Samandriel is aware of only what Naomi allows him to know. Thus we have a set of doubles, with the contrast between them asking us which one is the true Cas. The murder of Samandriel, especially, asks whether we can, or should, blame Castiel for his death; does that sin still belong to him if he committed it while under Naomi’s control? I think Castiel would say yes–one can only imagine his guilt when his “aware self” finds out what he has done. He will still take ownership of the sin. But I know I, and probably many of you, would say that it was not really Cas who committed the murder, considering that he was under Naomi’s control. This dichotomy shows us that there is a question of what one’s real self encompasses, of what criteria we should use to separate what is someone (or thing’s) real self and what is not. Castiel’s inability to know (“see”) what is real removes his agency.

Let’s return to the Sand-Man story. I’m simplifying it greatly for my purposes (you can read Freud’s summary of it in the essay linked above), but within it, Nathaniel, the young boy who grew up fearing the Sand-Man, grows up nervous and tortured, and one day spies through his neighbor’s window his “beautiful, but strangely silent and motionless daughter, Olympia.” He immediately falls in love with her.

There’s just one slight problem. Olympia’s not actually alive. She’s just a clockwork wooden doll so well-made that she looks real. Nathaniel’s inability to tell the difference is an indication of his psychological breakdown, of madness.

We encounter a madman in Supernatural, of course. Several, in fact, but the one I want to focus on is post “Born-Again Identity” Castiel, who shows up naked on Dean’s car and “counts the bees.” What I find intriguing here is that Freud mentions a connection between automatons (like Olympia) and insanity. He points out that fits of madness or epilepsy “excite in the spectator the impression of automatic, mechanical processes at work behind the ‘ordinary appearance of mental activity’.” While in “The Sand-Man,” it is Nathaniel’s reaction to an automaton that incites his madness, Freud relates (the appearance of) the person who is mad to the automaton, which, in our reading, makes Castiel not the equivalent of Nathaniel, driven mad, but of the automaton, the inhuman creature mistaken as “real.”

“Real Isn’t How You Are Made”–Castiel as Toy

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse.“It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

– The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams

I think we can all agree that when we first meet Castiel in Season 4, he is not at all what we would call “human.” His voice lays more weight on his introduction of himself as “an angel of the Lord” than on his individual name, “Castiel,” which he says quickly and maybe even dismissively, as he looks at one of Bobby’s books in the infamous, sigil-covered barn in “Lazarus Rising” (4.01). This contrast emphasizes both his role and his perception of himself as an extension of his Father, rather than as an individual. On top of that, Crowley's discovery of an “Angel OS” in Samandriel in 8.10 positions the angels more as robots or automatons than living creatures, and even before that, we knew that they were not living beings so much as beings of matter: multidimensional wavelengths of intent (6.03). Angels do not live; they exist; and that distinction places them outside of what we conceive of as “real”–i.e., human.

But Seasons 4 and 5, for all that they focus on Dean and Sam fighting their destiny, are also all about Castiel becoming human. It happens quickly. By “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester” (4.07), Castiel is admitting to Dean that he has doubts and questions, he is not a mindless hammer of God. The farther he gets from God, the closer he gets to becoming “Real”–to becoming human. By the last episodes of Season 5, when we see him in the hospital bed and then riding in Bobby’s van, this transformation is all but complete. He has become Real.

Comparisons of Castiel to Pinocchio have been made by many fan writers, but I want to go into a little more detail. Castiel’s progression into humanity greatly resembles what scholar Lois R. Kuznets calls a “toy narrative.” Pixar’s Toy Story films are probably one of the best-known examples of this narrative, with The Velveteen Rabbit being another. In both of these works, we see toys struggling with being left behind by their owners, with being rejected because of their status as something artificial and disposable. As Kuznets writes in When Toys Come Alive: Narrative of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development, “[t]oys, when they are shown as inanimate objects developing into live beings, embody human anxiety about what it means to be 'real’–an independent subject or self rather than an object submitting to the gaze of more powerfully real and potentially rejecting live beings” (2). Similarly, Castiel’s development (or devolvement) into a human in Seasons 4 and 5 reflects his anxiety about his own status. His determination to find God reflects his desperation to believe that God has not rejected him and the other angels (and even humans), while his eventual discovery that God has, in fact, abandoned them all, is internalized as a dismissal of his own worth: God did not love him, or the other angels, enough to stay with them. Here, Castiel is to Buzz and Woody as God is to Andy; Cas is the toy and God the child-owner.

Or is he? In The Velveteen Rabbit, the toy rabbit is made “Real” by the love of the child, or so the Skin Horse tells us in the passage quoted above. Who makes Castiel Real in the show’s narrative? Who catalyzes his transformation into a human? God–or Dean?

After all, ostensibly it is only once Castiel meets Dean that he begins to question God, which is the first step toward his Fall. If there is evidence that he was rebellious even before he met Dean, I would love to hear it; I myself didn’t find any. We could extrapolate that if he were, he would have Fallen with Anna when she tore out her Grace, or even joined with Uriel in killing angels. Even after he’s met Dean, he still appears to be a loyal angel, willing to throw Dean back into hell and to deal with Sam if he and Dean don’t fall into line with the angels’ plan. Thus, if we equate humanity with “Real”-ness–and in turn equate humanity with the capacity for free will–Dean is the one who begins to make Castiel “real.” As we see, by Season 6, Cas has his own preferences and desires: In “Caged Heat” (6.10), he tells Sam and Dean that “[m]uch of the time, I’d rather be here” on Earth than in Heaven, while “The Man Who Would Be King” (6.20) reveals that Cas enjoys spending time in the eternal Tuesday afternoon of an autistic man who died years ago.

We could, of course, quibble over whether it is Dean’s love that turns Castiel real, or whether it is an emotion closer to affection, or a sense of comradeships or even debt. But regardless of the exact motivations, it is undeniably through Dean that Castiel is inspired to disobey the other angels to think for himself–about whether the Apocalypse could truly be what his Father wants–and do what he, not his brothers, believes is right. Furthermore, it is not until Season 5, when Castiel fully allies himself with Dean, that we begin to see him becoming human in earnest: i.e., physically, by losing his powers. By this point, the writers present his relationship with Dean far more strongly as genuine friendship than mere, forced-together-in-the-trenches comradeship: One has only to look at their interactions in “Free to Be You and Me” and “The End” (5.03, 5.04) to see that, especially the scene at the end of the latter, in which Dean clasps Castiel’s shoulder and tells him, “Never change.” Dean’s platonic love for Castiel is undeniably canonical at this point, and as such, we can extend our Velveteen Rabbit parallels to explore Cas as the rabbit and Dean as the boy who loves him.

In The Velveteen Rabbit, and in many other toy narratives, the child’s love for his toy is inextricably intertwined with the toy’s consequent deterioration. As the Skin Horse tells the Rabbit, “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.” Likewise, Castiel’s progression into a (Real) human is accompanied by a deterioration in his physical state. This includes not only the loss of his Grace but even the numerous injuries he suffers in his actions to support and love his child (Dean): the angel sigils cut into his chest in Van Nuys (5.18), the injuries he sustains when he lands “on a shrimping boat off Delacroix” afterwards(5.21), the insanity Castiel acquires as a result of taking Sam’s Lucifer hallucinations into himself (7.17), and, let’s not forget, the numerous instances of explosive trauma his body has sustained thanks to protecting Dean (and Sam) from various archangels. (We could even include the Leviathan in this category, since he also dies at their hands, and since it can be argued that he takes them into his body for love of Dean: to have enough power to defeat Raphael so that the free will Dean sacrificed everything for will not be ruined.)

Fanonically, of course, the deterioration parallel is even more pronounced. Fandom has explored the ways in which Castiel’s feathers may have been irreparably damaged in his trips to Hell to save both Dean and Sam and how he may have parted pieces of Grace from himself to give them to Dean (and possibly Sam) to put them back together after Hell. Looked at from this perspective, it is easy to see how the episode title “Torn and Frayed” could refer not only to Dean and Sam’s relationship but also to Castiel and how he has been torn and frayed, like a well-loved doll, through and for the love of his owner (Dean). If we look at Castiel’s sacrifices in 4.22, 5.22 and even 7.02 as being a result of his and Dean’s love for each other, Dean has, quite literally, loved Cas to pieces.

(Bloody, spattered pieces.)

Next: Castiel the Action Figure

Note: For more on Supernatural and the uncanny, see outpastthemoat’s awesome post here.