Zeroth’s Notes on Supernatural S1 E1 (Part 1): When Your Brother Breaks Into Your House and Ruins Your Life

Zeroth has added some insightful notes on the use of light and shadow in Supernatural’s pilot episode. I’ve updated our inaugural post to include his remarks, but for those who already read it through and just want to get straight to the new stuff, here you go:

Image is a screenshot showing Dean's face. He's mostly in shadow, and the scene around him is dark. To the right is a decorate metal-scroll screen, through which the only light is coming. It casts curley-que shadows on his face.

Zeroth’s Note:

I’ve been thinking about the use of light and shadow in these scenes. Sometimes one can get a little… introspective and add meaning where there isn’t any. There’s a whole discussion on Death of the Author that’s somewhat relevant here, but what I think is that they’re using light and shadow to send a message about crossing a line and revelations. These scenes between Dean and Sam are constantly half shadowed. Consistency of aesthetic is a strong clue here. This kind of light and shadow process is used here to depict Sam’s crossing a line. He’s being encouraged across by Dean, back to the Hunter life. Sam brings up the intensely FUCKED up things about how he was raised, he’s struggling back across that line, away from Dean.

My problem here is they’re using light and shadow for multiple purposes in this episode. They use shadow to indicate a red herring(when they’re told by the young woman about the grisly murder) and light when Sam and Dean show up to solve a mystery. And then we have the journal(see part 2) being spotlighted.
Now multiple ambiguous uses of symbology isn’t necessarily bad, but when done wrong, it can muddle your message. At the same time, strict consistency can also undermine your message by making it blatant and obvious(see Green Lantern and the word/theme ‘fear’ or Terminator 4, and the word ‘heart’). It is clunky, hitting the viewer over the head with your meaning. But I think what happened here was Exposition Tax. There’s so many things they need to go through and explain that several different plots were merged into one for this pilot episode. It’s also indicative of a team that doesn’t quite have their “sea legs” for the show yet. Supernatural gets both more consistent and more sophisticated with its aesthetic language in later episodes(which I cannot wait to break down for you guys).

Sam's face from the same scene. His light source is through the screen to the left. He is in more darkness, and the screen is casting straighter shadows on his face.

 

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Zeroth’s Notes on Supernatural S1 E1 (Part 1): When Your Brother Breaks Into Your House and Ruins Your Life
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