“This Isn’t Wall Street, This Is Hell!”: Corporate America as the Biggest Supernatural Bad of All

Abstract

Across Supernatural’s first six seasons, brothers Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam (Jared Padalecki) Winchester have faced threats from Heaven and Hell, ancient gods, and primal beasts. They have lost friends, enemies, and all of their immediate family. Both brothers have died and been resurrected. They did, however, have each other, their beloved ’67 Chevy Impala, and a father figure in the person of Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver). Season seven, however, offers villains—the Leviathans—released from Purgatory and capable of passing as human, against whom most of the Winchester’s usual weapons do not work. What is more dangerous, however, is that the leader of the Leviathans, Dick Roman (James Patrick Stewart), situates himself as the head of a powerful corporation. This positioning allows the season’s villains to wreak far more damage on the Winchesters, on both a practical and emotional level, by separating them from home (Bobby’s house, the Impala), their identities (both real and assumed), their income, their remaining friends and associates, and finally, one another. Despite the other-worldly context of the threat, the loss of home, money, and family mirrors the real-world contemporary economic situation of recession, foreclosures, and job losses caused by corporate and Wall Street malfeasance.

Although Leviathan is correct for both the single and plural of the word, and they are used interchangeably in Supernatural, when discussing the Leviathan as a group, for clarity, Leviathans is used in this chapter.