Firefly is the only sci-fi show ever to feature the kind of people I went to high school with, the people who aren’t usually represented in fiction except as cannon fodder. Take Jayne, the mercenary muscle on the ship. I went to high school with approximately one thousand Jaynes, wearing that same green coat, so Jayne embodies truth to me. He wasn’t great at school, was deeply loyal to his friends and family, liked trucks and guns and beer and women he could understand. Anything else was suspicious. When you see someone so completely true on screen, how can you react with anything but pleasure, no matter what kind of untrustworthy horndog bonehead he is? The truth in the character of Jayne says to me that people matter, as they are, with all of their flaws and idiocies. We’re all in this together.
Take Kaylee, a genius mechanic from a podunk moon, the sweetest person you’ll ever meet. I went to high school with a thousand Kaylees, too, though they were busy fighting for survival, because the lives of the rural poor are scary and harsh, with narrow boundaries and a limited choice of futures. But they had Kaylee’s heart, that fragile fear that people were looking down on them, that they weren’t good enough or pretty enough or smart enough. I recognized Kaylee. Kaylee is true. Follow the truth of that character logically and you understand the heart of the show.
Kaylee can fix nearly anything, sees the good in everyone, can’t handle a gun. (Though I bet she’d be able to field strip one in no time flat, plus fix that sticky chambering mechanism that always jams when the humidity is high.) Kaylee was the beating heart of the show as she tended the beating heart of Serenity. When have you ever seen anyone like her on a spaceship before? You see capable and tough women, women who are essentially men, and not just regular men like you and I know, but a Navy SEAL in a D-cup woman suit, with twelve advanced degrees and not one single trait that we would recognize as belonging to a female human. Fantasy women. Projections of idiotic ideals.
Is anyone surprised that sci-fi appeals to relatively few women, when these are the characters out there to identify with? I adore the admirable Samantha Carter of Stargate SG-1, for instance, but she is just not representative of most women I’ve ever met-at least outside of Caltech. Which leads back to the original problem. Yes, Samantha Carter is pretty much the image of my brilliant sister, who got her Ph.D. at Caltech-but that’s still not a way into the fiction for the rest of us. I admire Samantha Carter, I even know people exactly like her, but she’s not me, and in her world, there’s no place for me. She’s a militarized superhero. There’s no place for librarians or liberal arts types or your mom or the woman who works in the bakery down the street in almost any sci-fi universe. That omission commits two crimes: it makes the created world not true, and it alienates a vast segment of the audience. So much of sci-fi is guilty of these crimes.
Except for Firefly. Firefly has Kaylee, who in “Shindig” saw that big frilly pink and white ruffly dress in the window of a shop and fell in love with it. Kaylee breaks your heart, because Mal made a rude comment about her and the dress-how she would have been like a sheep walking on its hind legs-and Kaylee, who loves everyone, wouldn’t speak to Mal again until he showed up with the dress for her. It was a powerful, human moment. Mal needed Kaylee dressed up and on his arm to go to a fancy party. And our Kaylee was beside herself with delight. This is someone we know.
Kaylee breaks your heart again because a gaggle of mean girls mocked her dress. Looking at them, you have to agree, their dresses are gorgeous and subtle, especially that gold one with the sort of cutaway jacket worn by the queen bitch. Wait, do you realize what just happened? We’re talking about dresses in sci-fi. We’re talking about mean girls at a party. We’re talking about girl stuff. Which is an essential part of life for half of the human race.
I’ve never actually had front row seats for a supernova, been involved in a spaceship dogfight, used warp drive, had dinner with a Cylon (that I know of), or watched a planet explode from orbit. But I do know a thing or two about mean girls at parties, and how terrible you feel when they are horrible to you. And how great was it when the nice man with the sash came over and told off the mean girls? And how fun was it when all the boys wanted to talk to Kaylee because she knew all about spaceship engines? Vindication!
It’s not real-it’s not truth-unless you include the mean girls at the party as well as the part about how the singularity is about to explode, weapons at maximum, fire! You’re not telling the truth if you leave out Kaylee, or Zoe, or Inara, or crazy barefoot River tearing labels off all the cans or rubbing soup in people’s hair. It’s not true, if they’re not there. It can’t be. No matter what story you’re trying to tell about humanity and its problems, your fiction will never ring true without the people and things that tie it to a reality we recognize and feel on a visceral level.
In “Out of Gas,” Kaylee baked a cake for Simon for his birthday. Like the dress, it’s far more than just an object out of Planet Stereotypical Femininity, stuck in frame to give texture to the world. That would be a cheat. We’ve all seen that in sci-fi. Colonel Caltech shows a slightly feminine side and then gets defensive about it to the rest of the crew, all men, who snicker at her (“Look, she’s wearing a dress!”) in a deeply ugly way that plays into the fallacy that women can’t be strong and effective in traditionally male milieus without giving up everything that we associate with the feminine. Everyone on Firefly completely disproved that idiotic fallacy-like real people, who disprove it daily.
Who would you rather stare down at the end of a barrel, Mal or Zoe? Mal, obviously, because he’d blink, and then bash you in the head and leave you there to come back and bite him in the ass another day. But Zoe would blow your head off without thinking twice or breathing hard. Yet Zoe also has a wonderfully true traditionally feminine side. She wants a dress with some slink. She was married to a kind and gentle man. The closest Firefly comes to a superhero is Zoe, who is saved from becoming a knee-jerk feminist cliché by her genuine layers and depth.
The birthday cake Kaylee baked in “Out of Gas” is much more than a simple realistic touch. To begin with, Kaylee had a crush on Simon and everyone knew it, except maybe Simon, which lends a deliciously true texture to the proceedings. The scene in the kitchen played out in such a lovely way, everyone gathered at the table together. We didn’t get to see that very often on Firefly, so every time it happened was precious. The crew had come together from the most disparate walks of life, from all classes, a man of the cloth and a prostitute, fighters and professed wimps, a couple of geniuses and a mercenary lunkhead. The family gathered over dinner and settled down to birthday cake together, though later in the episode everyone but Mal abandoned the ship, only to return at the end, united again.
Would it mean as much without the cake? There’s a mess hall scene in Alien that I think of, whenever food shows up in sci-fi. Goop for dinner, blue milk, everyone acting like a bunch of guys, even the women. The food is deliberately alienating, not your mother’s macaroni and cheese or anything we recognize, a choice which further equates the abandoned normal world of grass and air with women, family, home, playing into the feminine equivalent of emasculation that I object to so strongly. Food can still be food as we know it, in space. Woman can still be women as we know them. Sci-fi seems to be the last bastion of the absurdly archaic idea that a woman must give up all of the traditional trappings of femininity to be strong. That the politically correct representation of a woman must absolutely not include any of those traditional trappings or it somehow belittles women. That food can’t be apples and chicken or we won’t believe that we’re on an alien planet. That women can’t be recognizably women or we won’t know we’re in space. That it’s not the future unless we eradicate the messy realities of life.
Why does sci-fi cling to this so strongly? We know perfectly well it’s not true. We all know dozens of fierce, strong women who enjoy the whole range of human endeavors without losing one molecule of their strength. To propose otherwise, as so much sci-fi does incessantly, is to deny the ri
chness and texture of humanity, to set a story in a shallow world populated by cardboard heroes. Is my sister less of a brilliant scientist because she knits booties for her co-workers when they have babies? That sounds completely insane, yet it’s exactly what most sci-fi tries to force you to believe. Were all those heroes really hatched out of incubation chambers? Who changed their space diapers? Who grew the cotton and wove the cloth? You look closely and it all falls apart. Worse, removing the whole range of women and all of the messy realities of life impoverishes the landscape so badly that it’s nearly impossible to tell a decent story. It takes almost all of the colors out of the paintbox and leaves you with a muddy olive drab.
Consider Jayne’s mother, who sent him a wonderfully goofy knitted wool hat in “The Message.” Orange and yellow bulky wool, with rust-colored earflaps and a big pompom on top. If you weren’t in love with Jayne already, for being 100 percent himself, then watching him open up his mother’s present and immediately put it on would have made you fall in love. Wash made fun of him instantly: “Man walks down the street wearing that hat, people know he’s not afraid of anything.” To which our Jayne replied, “Damn straight,” because he didn’t quite get the meaning and took it as a compliment to himself instead of an insult to the hat. (Luckily for Wash, I’m thinking.) That was a gorgeous scene.
Jayne’s hat played all throughout “The Message.” He took it off as a sign of respect for the dead, when the crew was listening to Tracey’s message asking Mal and Zoe to take him back home to his folks on St. Albans. Womack, the Fed who chased them down, told Jayne that the hat made him look like an idiot. Jayne took it off again in respect for the dead when Mal and Zoe carried Tracey’s body down Serenity’s ramp to the waiting family.
Jayne’s hat didn’t really even mean anything in “The Message.” It was just a hat, doing hat things. But like the cake and the frilly dress, Jayne’s hat signifies an entire wealth of background to this universe, where mothers still knit hats for their grown sons, where sons unconditionally love the hats their mothers send them. Where a mechanical genius can fall in love with an unfashionable ruffled dress and wear it to a party, so that you’re just dying with embarrassment for her in front of the mean rich girls in their expensive, tailored gowns. Where the same genius mechanic can take a break from fixing a spaceship engine and bake a cake for the cute doctor she has a crush on. Each of these things grounds the fiction in a vital, recognizable, complex, dirty universe. Each of these things is far more than just a thing.
Firefly does some lovely work with people and objects, playing with the shifting boundaries between them. Villains like Adelai Niska and Rance Burgess and Jubal Early turn people into things, treat people as objects. But when the transformation goes the other direction, as with the dress, the hat, and the cake, it’s exactly what we do in our lives every day in order to belong to a world in which physical objects are our interface: we imbue objects with meaning. A dress means something-it’s never just a dress. In fiction, a cigar is never just a cigar. Nothing in sci-fi is ever free of valence, weight, meaning.
A gun is a tree branch is a gun. River became Serenity itself, in the addled mind of Early, the bounty hunter in “Objects in Space” who, more than anyone in the series, read things as people and people as things. “Ain’t nothing more than a body to me,” he said to Kaylee, as he calmly threatened her with rape, turning our beloved Kaylee into an object and his own body into a weapon. Turning people into objects is the worst crime you can commit; its obverse, making objects take on the hearts and meanings of the people around you, that’s quintessentially human, one of our highest accomplishments. Objects are what we use to read the world and how we make the world reflect ourselves back to us. Objects are where we put our hearts outside of us, in gifts, in memories, in meaning. The biggest object of all, Serenity, is far more than a ship: it’s a home, a family, a place to belong.
The crew of Serenity lived in space, yes, but it was space that was familiar. It’s home, just somewhere else. Firefly is people we know, with relationships and objects we can understand. In the pilot episode alone we saw easily a couple dozen things we’d never seen in space before: the spaceship’s captain peeing then washing his hands; a recognizable Christian preacher with a Bible; a pretty girl with a dirty face and no education running the engine room; veterans of a lost war who had to live with that loss and that mockery every day; the painful daily effects of class differences; a realistic gunshot wound, with blood and pain and someone going into shock; men and women who cared about each other as friends, without any sexual overtones; horses and cowboy hats; people who were barely scraping by and needed every bit of cash they could get their hands on, just to survive. Didn’t you always wonder about the bathrooms on the Enterprise? Serenity herself felt so much more real than any spaceship we’ve seen. There were dirty dishes and mended clothes, comfortable couches and weird art, birthday cake and strawberries. People ate apples. It’s the present, in the future. Imaginative fiction about the future makes no sense to us at all unless we can imagine ourselves in it.
What’s wrong with science fiction? Try to get someone who doesn’t like science fiction to watch Firefly. If they won’t, it’s because they’ve seen too many shows along the lines of the various Star Treks, where women and men are interchangeable, or Stargate SG-1, a show which I love dearly despite all of its flaws. These types of shows push people away with military uniforms and guns and firefights, with aliens who are ever so slightly-but ever so importantly-different from us. Maybe they cannot use contractions; maybe they have glowy eyes or a little prosthetic on their foreheads, or slightly strange ears. These signals tell us that we’re dealing with an easy world, familiar tropes, a sanitized, polarized reality: the usual. And because of this constant use of the easy way out in sci-fi television, people who would love Firefly if they watched it will flinch when you suggest they try some. That’s a loss, both to them and to the genre, because sci-fi is consistently poorer for the lack of a more varied audience and a more varied range of experiences among its creators. It doesn’t have to be like this. Science fiction can be infinitely better. It can be more.
The cure for science fiction can be found in Firefly, where realistic men and women rise above the kinds of nightmare realities we’ve all faced, in order to solve their small problems, and from there, the big ones. Antiseptic rumbling spaceship troop carriers full of space Nazis are not going anywhere, and that’s perfectly fine, as long as there’s someone in the picture, somewhere, who feels like someone you know. Someone wearing a goofy knitted hat from his mom, or someone proudly presenting a lopsided birthday cake, or someone who falls in love with a great big frilly confection of a dress.
MAGGIE BURNS is an aspiring television writer and novelist living in Los Angeles. Educated at Oberlin College and Penn State University, she very nearly completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature, in the course of which she learned an awful lot of ancient, medieval, and modern languages, as well as how to write for television. She has taught literature and writing at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Willamette University. A lifelong musician and omnivorous reader, she writes incessantly, knits, quilts, repairs engines, watches a lot of quality television, works at a major studio, and climbs Mt. Hollywood as often as possible.
Haynes here gives Firefly its due as a feminist work. Along the way she exposes a truth about Joss’s writing that is sometimes, astonishingly, missed. Joss writes people, not just women. (In fact, everyone gets to be people, even if they’re not human.) Sometimes in all the emphasis on the new and exciting way he writes women as people, we forget that he writes men as people too. In a Joss story, everyone gets to be funny, real, human, damaged, good and bad, loving-or-not, and satisfyingly complex.
Girls, Guns, Gags
Why the Future Belongs to the Funny
NATALIE HAYNES
Earlier this year, I read an essay on Firefly which suggested that the show was a feminist step down from Buffy the Va
mpire Slayer, because it inhabited the more misogynistic world of gun-fights at the Last Chance Saloon-because women weren’t physically as strong as men, so they could only really beat them by using feminine wiles, and occasionally, heaven forbid, their beauty and guile.
This simply goes to prove that no matter how much time, money, and effort you throw into an education system, stupidity, arrogance, and a total failure to grasp the basic tenets of feminism will nonetheless thrive like rats in a fetid storm drain. So, let me explain: the power structure in Buffy was pyramidal-at the bottom were innocent people, above them was a race of fewer but physically much stronger vampires, and above them was one (or were two) slayers, strongest and fewest of all. The power structure in Firefly was quite different, because everyone was human. No pointy ears, no stick-on proboscides, no extra arms. Some of the men were stronger than some of the women, but by no means all: as Wash told Saffron, Zoe could kill him with her little finger.
To even things up, though, most of the fighting wasn’t hand-to-hand combat, as this was the future, not medieval times. It involved guns, and sometimes spaceships, which seemed to show little interest in the chromosomal arrangement of the person handling them. We are left in no doubt that Zoe totes her weaponry exactly as well as Mal-she was, after all, the first person he chose to take on a job. And we saw exactly why in “War Stories” when she walked fearlessly into her enemy’s ship and didn’t blanch as he hacked off her captain’s left ear and handed it to her. A squeamish shriek would have been a perfectly reasonable reaction, but she merely thanked him, wrapped it in cloth, and as soon as she could, told Simon to pack it in ice. If someone were to feel the need to separate me from my left ear, or even my right, Zoe is precisely the person I’d want taking care of it. Sure, she called Mal “Sir” (and really, who wouldn’t?), but that wasn’t to do with gender, it was because he was her sergeant in the army and then became her boss. She still ignored his orders when she thought them ill-advised, and he acknowledged that he owed his life to her independence in “Out of Gas.”
Serenity Found Page 3
