About words and language in 13×18 (plus Sam and duty)

postmodernmulticoloredcloak:

– High and low registers: Lucifer, Gabriel and the farcical

I want to start this post about words in 13×18 not from the obvious theme (speak! and use the correct words!) but from a different perspective. In particular I want to compare two moments: the exorcism scene and the mentions of the porn stars.

Let’s start with the exorcism scene – it was farcical in a jarring and disgusting way because it was supposed to be; all the Lucifer scenes in the episode (in every episode?) are creepy and obnoxious because that’s what he is. The priest invokes the “Most glorious Prince of the Heavenly armies, Saint Michael the Archangel” and gets Lucifer… which introduces us to an aspect I found very interesting about the scene.

The thing is, there is a deliberate gap in registers in the scene: the priests use the high register of religious formulas, but the demon and Lucifer talk at a much lower level, and the clash in registers gives the scene the character of a farce. Think Don Quixote speaking like (his idea of) a noble medieval knight versus… well, the unrefined register of vulgar people: there is an effect of pathetic that is born from the fact that a high register is completely out of place in the rest of the situation.

In general, all of Lucifer’s scene have a farcical nature: he pretends to be the grand ruler of heaven on the throne of heaven, but the throne is just a chair in a repurposed office, and he does nothing to actually rule… he’s basically an evil Don Quixote that thinks of himself as a noble knight but is actually a useless, violent dude.

I’d say that the clash in registers in the exorcism scene parallels the clash in registers in the scene about the porn stars: a high register (the whole “Enochian writings on the wall” that give a solemn angelic vibe, Sam’s speech about making the world a better place and Gabriel being needed) is juxtaposed to the low registers of the mentions of the porn stars in Monte Carlo.

This parallel juxtaposes Lucifer and Gabriel to show their difference – Gabriel has always used farcical humor as his modus operandi, it’s part of how he normally acts, and it does not chip away to his dignity at all. He used porn to help stop the apocalypse! He weaponizes the farcical and the low, he draws power out of it. On the other hand, dignity is exactly what Lucifer pretends to have but doesn’t. He’s no better or more dignified than the lowly demon that he calls a “total nobody”, he just likes to think he is.

In short, the feeling I get is that Gabriel – even in a traumatized state, barely holding it together, because that’s what he’s doing, even when he appears to be better – controls the registers (of course his farewell to Asmodeus is a mocking one-liner about his suit*), with Lucifer the thing just happens around him, until he pretty much loses control and destroys the priests out of annoyance.

*There’s also a parallel between the two mentions of suits in the episode: Lucifer is annoyed because the priests threw holy water at his suit (“It’s a new suit, thank you very much”), Gabriel says the line about Asmodeus’ dumbass suit. Again, it highlights the difference between the two – Gabriel is in control even if he’s barely holding it together, Lucifer isn’t in control even when he technically holds all the power.

– Use words, use the correct ones

I am not going to spend too many words on the theme that has been discussed to Mars and back over the season so far – we know what’s going on, the show is setting a narrative about the fact that you need to say things and you need to say them correctly. The Gabriel arc so far has been a blatant mirror for the whole narrative: first his mouth is sewn, then he chooses not to talk due to his trauma (hello, 1×03) but writes everything down (I also found interesting that Sam is like, why isn’t he talking to us, when Gabriel just filled the entire room walls with communication – he’s being nonverbal but he’s communicating, Sam dumbass, no offense) and eventually starts talking again… by immediately correcting Sam’s language. Sam uses the wrong word to refer to Gabriel’s sexual companions in Monte Carlo: Gabriel wrote about porn stars, Sam referred to them as hookers, and, well, the difference is substantial. Again, words are not interchangeable (especially, I might add, when we’re talking about sexual or romantic partners, or potential partners, right?).

Now, going back to the previous part of this post – many people have talked about the usage of the “we need you, I need you” line in the scene ever since the sneak peek was released, but the sneak peek didn’t show a fundamental part of the scene: the fact that the “noble” speech is sandwiched between mentions of the porn stars in Monte Carlo. That gives a sort of farcical aspect to Sam’s speech, purposely ‘lowering’ it from the ‘high’ register of the 8×17 quote. There is a dramatic irony in play there – Sam is moving in a high register (both on an intradiegetic level, i.e. what Sam is doing, and on an extradiegetic level, i.e. the 8×17 parallel the audience sees), but other elements in the situation make that register appear inappropriate and ridiculous. So it’s not a “copy” of the Destiel scene – it’s a sort of semi-dark parody of it.

Now, I am not going to dwell much on Gabriel as a parallel for Dean’s and Sam’s issues with talking about sensitive things, because we get it (interesting that Dean had no issues communicating about sensitive things with Ketch and Charlie, right? I wonder what that could mean), so let me digress a bit from the actual topic of the post to add a thing that fits in the picture.

– And while we’re talking about distinctions…

The episode does not only tackle the usual topic of using the right words. It also subtly reminds us of an old little theme, the distinction between familial love (in particular between siblings) and romantic love. (Do you think there’s a bit of making fun of the fandom panic that occurs when a female character is cast and people assume it’s a love interest for Dean, like it happened before Charlie’s first episode aired? Probably not, but I like to think there’s a little dig at the fandom panic thing here, lol.)

As Dean expresses strong feelings about Charlie, Ketch hypothesizes that she was a girlfriend of Dean’s. Later, Charlie basically has a moment of alarm when Dean tells her that they were “very” friends and she suspects that might mean a relationship. In both cases, Dean specifies that it wasn’t the case – he explains to Ketch that Charlie was like a sister to him, and reassures Charlie her alternate version wasn’t straight. But we know that Charlie’s sexuality matters relatively to the nature of her and Dean’s relationship, because even if she had been bisexual or straight, Dean saw her a sister, not someone he couldn’t have sexually or romantically because of her sexuality. So we’re reminded again of the distinct line between sibling love and romantic/sexual love. I wonder what that could mean…

– Sam and Gabriel and duty

Let’s return to Gabriel’s initial inability to speak (first physical, then psychological). Of course, it’s not just a parallel to Dean, but to Sam too. Ho ho, Sam. As usual, Sam explicits the “parallels” he sees between himself and the person he’s interacting with (there are some interesting posts out there about Sam’s way of sympathizing with others by drawing a comparison between his own experiences and the other person’s, or, at least, what he understands of the other person’s experiences though the lenses of his own), and he projects on Gabriel what he needs to believe about his own situation. Eventually… he doesn’t work. Sure, we know that Gabriel will change his mind about the situation and join the team, but we can reasonably expect that he’ll need more motivation (a different kind of motivation?) than Sam’s speech about himself and their supposed parallels. Sam also only mentions the “safe” old story of his retirement from hunting, and doesn’t touch his own inability to speak about his trauma (yes he did it with Rowena but he explicitly said he can’t do it with the people who really matter, i.e. Dean).

While we’re talking about this scene – the speech about making the world a better place, what he was “put here” to do, doesn’t work, and is in fact a little terrifying by looking at Sam through the lens of it. “What I was put here to do” empties his entire life of choice, and it’s an extremely meaningful piece of insight into Sam’s mind – he does not really conceive his life if not in terms of accepting or refusing a course of action. There doesn’t seem to be a concept of building his own course, but to accept the one that he’s supposed to follow or to reject it. He tells Gabriel that he chose it out of duty, basically – “rubbish”, Ketch calls duty shortly later. This season also has a theme about duty, about the fact that making life choices based on duty (duty alone) is bad. And this scene with Sam talking to Gabriel seems to tell us that Sam’s entire life course is only based on a sense of duty, because he conceives things as embracing the role written for him or reject it altogether, and duty obviously calls for the first.

We’re going to keep a close eye on Sam and Gabriel and how the progressions of their stories parallel each other. At the end of the day, it’s the same old issue: Sam doesn’t like his life, but he considers it a burden he has to shoulder…