realised. dean is the perfect viewer avatar for a horror show. he gets to be both the action hero and the quippy, self-aware wiseguy who knows he's in a horror show. he provides a safe point; a comfortable power fantasy for you to experience a story through. he's ash in the evil dead. he's a gunslinging tough guy, and you get to see those moments where heroism sits on his shoulders like an ill-fitting leather jacket. and even when he gets his turn at being captured and victimised by the narrative, it's filtered through this mythic lens first. he's the tormented hero; tortured by villains, tortured by the constraints of his role. yeah he gets bruised, beaten bloody to a pulp, torn to shreds and killed, but his perception of reality never gets thrown into serious doubt (unless it's played out as a gag). the narrative valorises his sense of right and wrong, because that's what heroic stories do. their heroes provide moral center, regardless of how we might judge them. the lines dividing hero, anti-hero, and villian are paper thin, and dean isn't truly ever allowed to be ambiguous. and the hero always wins in the end, even when he dies.

meanwhile sam is the abject object of the horror show, a character who gets trussed up, chased, tied up, ripped apart, cut into, possessed, exploited, manipulated and psychologically hounded. he's carrie covered in pig's blood. he's the marginal person people are cheering on either to die - or to live past it all. he gets his turn at playing both movie monster and victim, always occupying the liminal space between both. abject horror lives within him. he's violated with demon blood, he consumes demon blood. he hates halloween because he vomited his guts up in front of a room of normal children. he will never get to be normal, he's designated the freak on multiple levels, but most significantly, by the way his narrative frames him. he's living inside a world that is at its core, fundamentally frightening and horrifying - full control over himself and his surroundings is always slipping away, just beyond his reach. his grip on reality and the world around him gets thrown into question by the story consistently. what's right? what's wrong? what's real? what isnt? the narrative punishes him - because that's what happens to you when you're living in a horror. he can never run away from his nightmare reality, it catches up to him like a curse nipping at his heels. the only way out for him is through the punishing fire. in order to survive, he's required to be pushed to the absolute brink of instability; emotionally, physically and mentally. he emerges out the other end, barely holding it together but somehow alive - like the bloody final girl, changed irrevocably by what she's experienced.

ALEX Jones has the FORMULA

On your favorite radio show, you may tune in to get updates on your favorite sport teams, listen to your favorite political analyst or listen to a comedy jockey. While browsing the airwaves, you may also come across another show, one unlike the others. You just might encounter the Alex Jones show. This show doesn’t deal in sports or intentional comedy, this show deals in emergencies. When one thinks of political discourse and the presentation of the news, one thinks of the logical appeal, one based in numbers, fact checked and cited. All through news history, we remember the news anchors with the “Golden voice” as they read of the headlines monotonously, avoiding personal flair. Throughout the era of radio that continues into the television era, countless voices and faces from the television have come and gone, leaving their sanitized spirits floating on the airwaves but disappearing nonetheless. Except for a few exceptions, we consume our news from whichever interchangeable voice was scheduled for that day. This system continued until the 1960’s when some opportunistic young journalists decided to throw a wrench in the whole system. The emergence of shock journalism captured the emotion of the population where the old radio gods had failed before. The whole idea of shock was to play off the emotions and fears of the population. In this new world, logic took a backseat to the extraordinary. We all remember Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone’s tomb on national television, just to find it empty, or Jerry Springer airing brutally trashy love escapades. While you may not remember the nightly CNN segments, you sure do remember the odd and the outrageous. While some of these more provocative figures became hacks, many of them became accepted as almost mainstream, if quirky. While all this happened before the time of Alex Jones, he was able to repackage it, gaining his place in the blurry, convoluted limelight of tabloidism. No one had heard the name Alex Jones before the late 1990’s. It seemed that he came out of nowhere, but suddenly he was making a huge impact on the public discourse. While it’s true that Alex formed his own path, he sure didn’t have to forge that path. Through his fiery, emotional appeal, Jones has been able to influence the public discord while still remaining underground, shielding his most unpalatable positions, while presenting the ‘concerned patriot’ persona to the mainstream. While many see Jones’s rhetoric as a bad joke, he has leveled his show to shift the public conversation from the purely logical to the fantastical. Through the years, Jones has built a loyal following of millions who tune into his daily four hour show. By using powerful language and emotion, Alex intertwines supernatural language with mainstream narratives through long monologues where the energy increasingly escalates until there are screams and sweat After obtaining freak out nirvana. Jones refocuses the conversation back to a less heated level, ready to start the process again. For the last 20 years, Jones has been able to successfully stay in the spotlight by using carefully crafted exclamations designed to provoke. He has also been at the forefront of the conspiracy world, where he provides the antithesis to the official narrative. He has been able to do this with an amazing effect. By using events such as 9/11, Alex has been able to propel himself to the front of the conversation. In the early 2000’s during a time of uncertainty, Alex was able to offer an alternative to people who were confused and lost. Alex gained his prominence during 9/11 when he developed the inside job theory. While everyone has heard and laughed at the “Jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams” and “Bush did 9/11” Few know where these sentiments came from. While these claims sound fantastic, Jones was able to bring these things to the surface where now over half of the country believes the inside job theory; over 150 million people. While it may be easy to blow these conspiracy theories off as silly, it is also just as easy to underestimate how effective they can be at shifting the conversation. As Americans, we are relatively speaking, a fiercely independent culture that distrusts authority and wants to be left alone. Combine that with a government that operates in the dark, in a mysterious cloak of secrecy and you get the perfect situation for a cold war between citizen and ruler. Americans have always been conspiracy minded, but until recently, it’s been hard for conspiracists to organize. As technology progressed rapidly thorough the 90’s and into the 2000’s, new ways of communication and projection were now possible. While it may be easy to assume that the most rich and powerful would be the most effective at leveraging and utilizing this revolutionary new tech, it actually was the opposite. The media old guard, who had monopolized airwaves responded poorly to the media revolution of the 90’s. Instead of reworking the way they communicated with the American public, they slid into the mindset of “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it”. With the rise of the internet and the mainstream media’s indifference, it gave room for small independent outfits like Alex Jones to carve out a space in the wild west WORLD WIDE WEB, and become a king of his own metaphorical internet island. Soon, the small independent outlets were leading the game in innovation and market outreach, many of the new media giants such as Vice and Slate started out as small independent niche publications. This trend continues today with major newspapers still printing paper and having to hide their website behind a paywall just to make ends meet, while the new media giants are fully geared up to utilize the internet, usually making their content free. Alex did exactly this, running his 4 hour daily show on the internet and radio simultaneously. To supplement his income, he sold vitamin supplements on his show, such as the popular “Super Male Vitality”. As the Alex Jones show grew, so did Alex and his style. As he carved out a name for himself, he also developed his unique style, giving maybe not the most factual take, but by far the most unique. One aspect of Alex’s style is his weaving of conversational first person and breaking down the fourth wall, where the conversation seems to be between Alex and his audience. He uses phrases such as “you folks” and he will tell the listeners that “we’re the chosen ones” and “You guys get it”. One of the draws to the Alex Jones show is the fact that it’s exclusionary. It takes a certain type of person to get really into Jones’ message and buy into it fully, so Alex tactfully awards the audience by essentially telling them that they’re the only ones who get the message and that everybody else is either evil or uninformed. This strategy is seen perfectly in this quote from Alex Jones:  

“I just get flippant and angry but it's because deep down folks, I can see what they're doing and I have we have a responsibility to stop these globalists. Where are the men in this country? Where are the men in this world? What the hell have we become? We just offer our children up to the system with the fluoride in the water and the GMO hurting em. And we let fat perverts grab them at the airport to train them for the pedophile government. And we've just got such a sick society.”

In this quote, you can see where Alex is shifting the conversation from himself back to the audience and personalizing it with first person questions. He presents himself as the selfless patriot who sees what’s going on and has the duty to stop it. I believe this gives the message an aura of genuine belief, which also gives Alex more liberty in spewing otherwise ludicrous statements. The whole appeal of Alex’s message is the mystery and adventure of it. The viewpoints that Alex shares come from a realm quite different from the academic world that we know. Instead of standard debate, Alex brings on “experts” that reinforce his arguments and are relegated to a proverbial leash that Alex uses to drag the conversation to wherever he pleases. When you listen to the Alex Jones show, there’s a sense of entertainment and danger, every segment is more extreme than the last and you begin to get into it. Another thing that drives Alex’s show and keeps him in the spotlight is his ability to interweave fantastical statements with somewhat factual news. In the quote above, Alex refers to the government as a “pedophile government”. While it is a shocking statement, these are commonplace on the show. One thing Alex does to captivate the audience and lend credibility to his message is using a provocative statement and then directly afterwards providing a factual event or argument that could potentially be skewed as supporting evidence. While the event or “evidence” could be seen as unrelated or as a strawman, it simply doesn’t matter. Just hearing the statement “...We let fat perverts grab them at the airport to train them for the pedophile government”, will set you the edge of your seat, and it has, for millions and millions of people.