Key to that transformation is Mal’s conversation with the Operative following the destruction of Haven. At the moment the Operative expresses his belief in “a better world” his image is on a video monitor, at the right of the frame, while at the left of the frame are Haven’s smoldering remains. The image juxtaposes the Operative’s dream-removed, clean, theoretical-with the reality of his actions-immediate, bloody, real. When the Operative admits, “I’m a monster,” we see his head on several monitors simultaneously. The multiplied image of his disembodied head literalizes his confession, making him indeed look less like a human being than like a technologically enhanced, many-headed monster. Appearing on multiple screens at that moment his face is in front, beside, and behind Mal, literally surrounding him. Mal had eluded the Alliance for much of the series but now here it is boxing him in, choking him, leaving “no ground to go to.” Like young Jesse seeing his mother killed by the railroad in Jesse James, or Luke Skywalker seeing the burning skeleton of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru in Star Wars, Mal’s seeing the remains of Haven, the deaths of those he cared about, shows him that he cannot remain just an observer, that he cannot forever run. Rather than forcing him to surrender, by squeezing tighter, the Alliance awakened the rebel in Mal just as they triggered the warrior in River.
The Operative follows his superiors’ orders, even though he neither sees, understands, nor even wishes to understand their grand plan. He does so because he trusts that, despite the undeniable ugliness of his actions, there is purpose and order and rightness to them. The word we use for trust in what you can’t see is “faith.” And faith, in the eyes of Serenity’s atheist writer/director is a problem. Faith that ignores what is in favor of abstractions of what should be, the faith eschewed by the hero, is what enables the Operative’s crimes. Faith here leads not to compassion and comity but domination and murder.
“Was blind but now I see” is a classic statement of rebirth through faith, but here believing suggests blindness while seeing signifies being freed from the bondage of faith. And rescue from the horrors of faith comes at the hands of Mal, a man who has renounced his own. Shown the truth of his desired “world without sin” the Operative is stripped of the abstract beliefs that blinded him to his actual reality. He sees he is about to murder people for no reason and orders his soldiers to stand down. His faith shattered, the Operative loses his reason to be, ceases to exist, becomes merely a shadow. Having disabused the Operative of his faith, Mal, like Richard Dawkins with a six shooter, aims to disabuse everyone else’s.
Firefly and Serenity’s theme of anti-establishment skepticism toward hierarchy, piety, and hypocrisy is consistent with the deep veins of individualist sentiment that run through the Westerns which were Whedon’s templates. But Serenity’s theme strikes a cord that resonates beyond the confines of Serenity’s story and seems like more than genre nostalgia. I know nothing about Whedon’s politics, but I wonder if the characterization of faith in Serenity might at some level be a reaction to our own time when Jihadists, Theocrats, Neo-Cons, and others who have cast themselves as the protectors of virtue have perverse notions of how to pursue it. Might Serenity be in part a reaction to an era when the certainties of faith have become the enabling ideologies of terrorism, when codes of honor drive deeds of horror?
Perhaps these are unintended associations rather than deliberate parallels, but is it possible that the portrayal of the Alliance is a response to a religious right which has mobilized against gay marriage but has been silent on the issue of American torture? Or Catholic Church officials who shield pedophile priests while arguing that politicians who support reproductive choice should be denied communion, elevating that one issue above a politician’s views on poverty, war, the death penalty, caring for the widow and the orphan, or any number of Catholic religious imperatives? Is a shrill rectitude that insists on Christian superiority and the damnation of non-believers, that would police private morality while ignoring the morality of shredding the safety net, the real target of Whedon’s indignation? Might the Alliance’s intolerance of dissent be a reaction to Islamic supremacists and their Jihadist terror campaigns against “infidels”?
Is Serenity a critique, veiled perhaps even to its creator, of a President who says that Jesus-the teacher of “how you treat the least of these is how you treat me”-is his favorite political philosopher, but then defunds programs for the poor in order to give tax breaks to the wealthy, who professes allegiance to the “Prince of peace” but wages a war of choice, who swears an oath to uphold the Constitution but then eviscerates due process? (In fact, how different is the Alliance Operative, killing innocents in order to serve a government in which he has blind faith and to fulfill a vision of a better world to come, from those at Abu Girhab, Haditha, and Guantanamo who, through torture and murder, violate American legal and ethical values in the name of serving their country?)
Going further, is “terraforming” in Serenity just fancy science fiction lingo for “nation-building”? Is transforming a planet’s atmosphere to make it hospitable for colonization and trying to pacify a planet’s population with experimental drugs akin to the hubristic act of trying to remake the Middle East in our image? When the film takes us to Miranda and we learn of the pacification plot gone horribly wrong, of the unwitting creation of the brutal Reavers, the specter of Iraq seems to lurk in the background. As the holographic image of the Alliance scientist on Miranda insists, “We meant it for the best, to make people safer,” and the Reavers attack her, I cannot help thinking about the sectarian militias tearing apart Baghdad. When I hear the Operative earnestly proclaim, “We’re making a better world,” as the smoke rises from the ashes of Haven, I hear echoes of Donald Rumsfeld’s facile defense in the midst of post-invasion chaos that “freedom is not tidy” and George W. Bush’s boast of “mission accomplished.”
Were these intentional allusions? I can’t say. But it’s tempting to think at least some of them might have been when Whedon says on the Serenity commentary that “the film is about the right to be wrong. You can’t impose your way of thinking even if your way of thinking is more enlightened and better than theirs. It’s just simply not how human beings are.” When Whedon says that the outer planets’ message to the Alliance was, “You don’t belong here, you don’t belong on our soil . . . we have a right to be ourselves,” it’s hard not to think of the overreaching of our own exceptionalist super power, convinced it has a divine, perhaps messianic, role to play in the world. And young River’s statement at the beginning of Serenity that the Alliance is objectionable because it “meddle [s]. People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think,” clarifies the problem of the Alliance, specifies it in a way it had not been specified in the pre-Iraq war TV series and in a way that seems consistent with a post-war critique. The galactic superpower now seems more explicitly like our global superpower.
Whedon maintains on the Serenity commentary track that “a leader is by nature something of a monster.” That distrust of authority, so very characteristic of American Westerns, helps explain why for Whedon true virtue-responding to the human need in front of you rather than to abstract principles, forming community based on mutual respect and aid rather than conventional titles or status-had to be vindicated by unlikely candidates: fugitives, prostitutes, mercenaries, and outlaws.
After September 11, the neo-con fiasco in Iraq, and a host of tragedies past and present, at home and abroad, we might all be rightfully skeptical of grandiose theories and messianic agendas. After all, for the September 11 hijackers “God” was their co-pilot. Point taken. At the same time dreaming big should not easily be abandoned. Cautious as we may be of arrogant presumption and over-ambitious agendas, we should not recoil so far as to eschew big ideas entirely. The Four Freedoms, liberty and justice for all, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights-abstractions all, but abstractions that could be truly liberating.
On the Serenity commentary Whedon sensibly argues that we can’t control
others, but adds the claim that “sin is just how people are . . . all of those things we take as faults are also the source of pleasure and decency.” But while those convinced of their own ideological purity, be they named Stalin or Bin Laden, are indeed a threat to all, is Whedon’s summation regarding sin really satisfactory, or does it just sound enlightened and sophisticated? I’m sure Whedon would never look someone in the eye who had just been raped, someone trapped in a sweatshop or subsisting in slum housing, and blithely say that “sin is just how people are.” These people could probably all testify to something true about sin. Not sin as an abstraction, but sin as real. Sin as experienced, sin as lived, sin as cruelty. Other people’s sin as the source of their suffering. Might seeking to overcome sin, to secure justice and promote mercy also, maybe even more so, make us human? We celebrate people like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, certainly not sinless people, for their efforts to end at least particular sins. Is the problem really seeking to end sin, or is the problem trying to do so through control and domination rather than through reason and persuasion? Is the problem those who strive to be righteous or those content to be self-righteous?
Whedon states on the Serenity commentary that “the person who believes . . . is capable of terrible things,” and indeed, that conviction runs throughout both the series and the film. Repeatedly in Firefly, Mal faced adversaries whose professed belief in principle licensed brutality and repression. The Alliance captain in “Bushwacked” believed he was serving civilization, Atherton Wing clung to aristocratic pretensions and rules of honor in “Shindig,” and the superstitious villagers in “Safe” used scripture to justify killing River. Referring to Burgess in “Heart of Gold,” Mal says there is “nothing worse than a monster who thinks he’s right with God.” And even Jubal Early in “Objects in Space” claimed to live by “a code.” The Operative is the latest villain in the Firefly ’verse who is used to switch the traditional moral valuation of believer and non-believer. It is precisely the Operative’s status as a “believer” that makes him so dangerous in the film’s terms. Book tells Mal that the “sort of man they’re like to send believes hard. Kills and never asks why,” and Inara maintains that “we have every reason to be afraid because he is a believer.” In the Whedonverse those who believe are typically pathological, reliably dangerous.
But might there be something a bit too sweeping in Whedon’s condemnation? Should we not distinguish between the absolute faith of the Operative and the more humble devotion of the Shepherd? Throughout Firefly, Serenity, and his Serenity commentary Whedon seems to suggest that the very act of faith is inherently dangerous. Given the intimations of Book’s Alliance past, he and the Operative seem linked, as if the capacity to murder is dependant on the capacity for faith, as if the Operative is merely a sociopathic version of Book, as if the Operative is where Book was inevitably headed had he not left the Alliance and become a Shepherd. The suggestion that Book did leave the Alliance holds out the possibility that faith need not become fanaticism but nevertheless, by the end of the film Whedon denies both Book and the Operative a place in Serenity’s community.
Did eliminating Book, and the more benign, compassionate type of faith he represented, reflect an under-appreciation of what he brought to that community, an under-appreciation of the good that can come from those committed to abstractions: Evangelicals in comfortable suburbs who nevertheless advocate aid to Darfur, Rabbis who organize to raise the minimum wage, white-collar religious activists who believe serving God means fighting for the rights of blue-collar garment and hotel workers, clergy committed to the separation of faith and state and to the dignity of other religious groups? Book would have made common cause with all of them. But eliminating Book seems to deny a place in the Whedonverse to the type of faith Book practiced, the kind of commitment to principle he represented. Doing so was Whedon’s prerogative, of course, but since, in so doing, something worthy was lost, I say of Book, again, I wish they hadn’t killed you in Serenity.
ERIC GREENE is a graduate of the Religious Studies department at Wesleyan University and of Stanford Law School. Hailed as “groundbreaking,” his first book was the critically acclaimed Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics and Popular Culture. Eric recently examined Star Trek and Cold War politics in BenBella’s Boarding the Enterprise and wrote about Battlestar Galactica’s treatment of September 11/Iraq War anxieties in BenBella’s So Say We All. Greene works as a civil rights activist in Los Angeles where his professional hats have also included actor and commentator on politics and the arts.
When something is wrong with, say, our lunch, we probably like it less. But characters are not like our lunch. Often, the things that make us like a character, that make us identify with a character, are his flaws. This is especially true about a hero, because without flaws a hero can be truly insufferable. Bledsoe gives us a good look here at some of Mal’s more charming/violent moments of human weakness, and points toward the progress the character eventually makes toward a purer flavor of heroism.
Mal Contents
Captain Reynolds Grows Up
ALEX BLEDSOE
See how I’m not punching him? I think I’ve grown.
-MAL, “Shindig”
In the first scene of “Serenity,” the pilot episode of the series Firefly, Malcolm Reynolds was introduced as a loser. His cause had been lost, the specific battle he was fighting had been lost, and his personal command was lost. He stared up in despair and wonder at the victors as they descended in all their might and glory, an overpowering visual image of just how badly he’d lost.
Flash forward to the climactic moments of the film Serenity. By exposing the treachery behind the Alliance government’s benevolent front, Mal finally wins the battle he’d lost so long before. As with all worthy victories the cost has been high, and there is no sense of righteous triumph, only the hope that this victory will be the first of many. But it is a true victory.
The path from one “Serenity” to the other is marked by Mal’s gradual maturing from the inherently adolescent impulse that led to his rebellion to the adult sense of responsibility that causes him to fight to send the transmission from Miranda. He has finally learned (and fully accepted) that he owes as much to the people who don’t follow him as to those that do, and that their lack of appreciation for him does not absolve him of this obligation. Mal has, at last, grown up.
May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one.
-MAL, “Bushwhacked”
To start with the obvious, Malcolm Reynolds is a rebel. Not, and this is an important distinction, a revolutionary. Revolution seeks change; rebellion seeks separation.
Rebellion is a standard aspect of adolescence, whether within a family or a community. Defining yourself by what you’re against, rather than by what you approve, is the first step toward differentiating yourself from your parents. In Malcolm’s case, this phase never fully ended, although since little of his childhood is ever explored we have no idea why. Like many men his age (mid-thirties), the transition to adulthood in a world that still admires childish traits is harder and slower than it might be otherwise. The men who survive the transition in this environment tend to be men of singular courage, able to face the darkness in both the outer world and their own hearts. Mal becomes such a man by the final scene of Serenity.
Mal volunteered to fight against the Alliance when it tried to incorporate all the system’s planets whether they wanted it or not. We are never told how widespread the resistance was, how many planets fought the Alliance, or how long the war lasted. The parallels with the romantic version of the American Civil War are clear, and Mal is a noble loser in that grand tradition (trust me on this, I’m from Tennessee). He even wears a brown coat, the symbol of revolution, much as the Confederate battle flag remains a visible presence in my home town. He picks fights with Alliance supporters, just as good ole boys do with Yankee tourists. And most importan
tly, he remains convinced of the rightness of his cause. This faith in his ideals, and by extension himself, drives him to the only place where those ideals can still function, the outer planets. Each brush with the Alliance reinforces his certainty about the revolution, and fuels the rebellion that keeps him isolated.
Mal grew up on a ranch, pop culture shorthand for the kind of free-spirited anarchist who bristles at the notion of being told what to do. This implies that Mal fought the Alliance not only because he disagreed with its principles, but also because he could not bear the idea of living under anyone’s authority. The war against the Alliance can be seen as a true revolution, wherein one system of ideas fights for supremacy over another, and intellectually Mal probably agrees with the principles involved. But for Mal emotionally, it is a rebellion. As any parent of a teenager will recognize, he was saying (with guns and death instead of whines and slammed doors), “You’re not the boss of me!” He hides this immature defiance behind bluster, stubbornness, and a pretty malleable (no pun intended) code of behavior, but it informs his every major decision. And if the Alliance had lost, eventually he would have run afoul of whatever organization took its place in the outer worlds (see Inara’s comments below on his relationship with other criminals). Revolutions end; rebellion tends to be a lifestyle choice.
After the loss, Mal heads to the farthest edge of the system to ply an iffy trade with his nondescript spaceship, fixed up and tweaked like a teenager’s first car. And Serenity the ship may very well be Mal’s first car, with all the emotions and male attachment that come with that. He speaks often of how he loves his ship, apparently the only form of that emotion with which he feels comfortable. How many young men are the same way, able to say they “love” their car, boat, or favorite team, yet unable to express it to wives, children, or friends? This has its root in an immature ego’s fear of rejection and loss, something to which Mal is clearly sensitive. Friends and lovers may prove inconstant, but Serenity the ship will never say she doesn’t love him, or that she’s met another captain but still wants to be friends.
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