morgandawn | Label That Vid (God Says Nothing Back)

It's been 24 hrs since I asked you all to categorize my vid God Says Nothing Back , so now that more votes have trickled in, I thought I’d share my thoughts:

The vid was made with the intent of being a character study of Sam. I wanted to look into Sam's relationships to the people around him, and I wanted to go far beyond the sexual/physical and focus more on the spiritual/emotional (keeping in mind that at least 2 of the people he is 'talking' to are dead, this should not be a surprise).

Short version: it was not intended to be a slash or even a het vid.

I come from the school of thought that my intent only matters so far as you see it - if you (the reader/viewer) see something that I did not intent (or don’t see something I intended) that only makes the dialogue between you and me that much richer and interesting.

To start off I have vid notes here: http://morgandawn.livejournal.com/403757.html

To these notes I will add: I had always intended that each chapter of the song to be a dialogue between Sam and the universe. Each time the universe is using another person in Sam's life to give him an answer (or in this case - no answer as in "xxxxxx says nothing back') about what is happening to him and where his life is going.

The first two stanzas were easier for me - God says nothing back = Sam’s mother Mary. Her death reverberates throughout his entire life and Sam has to wonder - given the horrific nature of her death, is there any God?

The second stanza says: "…..and Time says nothing back." John is the stand-in for Time. All the missed opportunities, all the choices John made in turning their family life into a hunting life, in focusing on finding and destroying evil. Again, Sam has to wonder what his life would be like without those choices. And what his relationship with his father would have been like.

The last two stanzas were harder for me: Love says nothing back, Death says nothing back.

I was originally planning on using Jess for Love and Dean almost dying at the hands of the YED for Death. But I was worried that if I used Jess for Love I would shift the focus away from these larger questions of 'is there any chance for love and connection to the people in my life?' towards a more narrower question of 'is there any change for *romantic* love and connection to *one special person* in my life.?' I wanted Sam's yearning for love to go much more beyond the romantic - and given the most intense and long standing relationship we see on screen is with Dean, I felt Dean would be a less obvious and more appropriate choice to embody the concept of a broader love.

I knew that it could (and would) be read as erotic/romantic love with Dean - but that is (and was) fine with me. (And yes the irony of this interpretation does not escape me given my intent. And again, I am Ok with that).

By using Jess for the stand in "Death says nothing back" - I circled the vid back to the two great losses in Sam's life (Mary and Jess): the loss of the first (deaths of loved ones) leads us to his questioning of the other (is there a God?). And the silence that we hear from the universe when we ask these questions ('xxx says nothing back’) means that our questions will always go unanswered. So we are like Sam - poised forever between hope and horror, trying to find our own path.