Serenity Found

by Jane Espenson

  From the start Joss insisted that this play be different and singular: he always wanted the viewer to be in the room, to be present in the way he told the story visually. This verite approach persisted whether we were creating close-ups or wide matte paintings. The camera was looking for the story, following the emotion. In CG this meant setting up rules which were new to the field-camera rules that seem to be everywhere now. We put documentary photographic language into the animation we created. We used zoom lenses, soft focus, lens flares, and faulty cameramen. We wanted human imperfection to be a part of our work in finding the story, the way it was on the set. Our animators were told to set up the action, and then find what was interesting within it without discovering it right away; and upon discovery, they were told, they were to only “look” at it until the viewer understood what they needed to.

  In the pilot we used this technique as punctuation. The crew knew the Reavers were on their tail. We put a camera there, on Serenity’s tail, and the Reavers were nowhere to be found. In deep background, there was a tiny line of black against the blue sky. The camera focused on this line, zoomed in, and refocused, revealing the very formidable ship gaining on them. As the camera adjusted focus, so did we, the viewers. We were focusing on this very dangerous and very ugly thing chasing after us.

  In “Objects in Space,” Jubal Early snuck up on Serenity from behind. He put his ship in pace with ours. He got out and snuck onboard. He wreaked havoc on the ship. Mal and River confronted him in space. Jubal was left floating in space for all time. There was a lot more to the story on the inside, but these scenes were significant and important. Jubal was an invader and River is an empath. How did we introduce Jubal to the ship? He crept in through her pipes and air ducts like a thief in the night, startling the vulnerable young River from her sound sleep. The shot design told the story of invasion and danger. As we found River, the camera shifted focus from the vents we had been slinking our way through to the sleeping girl. She opened her eyes. She felt our intrusion. We knew, by design, that Jubal had penetrated the ship.

  Every computer-generated shot in the series had meaning, like these did. As we worked with the computer-and working with a computer takes time-we took the time to be meticulous. Perhaps the greatest proof of the influence of shots like these in the field is that other folks took on their aesthetic as a new standard. Battlestar Galactica uses these rules, the Star Wars prequels picked them up, and now John Favereau promises the motion picture Iron Man will as well. It’s a storytelling aesthetic that focuses on story over spectacle.

  The movie Serenity again would provide another pinnacle: the space battle. We have all dreamed of fighting heroically in an epic war for good, using laser beams and photons. We have all dreamed of saving the day and destroying the Death Star in order to defeat an evil empire, but Joss took this dream and rewrote it for value and point. In less capable hands the battle scene in Serenity would have been an effects extravaganza without meaning, but instead it was handled with the uttermost care and design. And again Joss used his singular invented documentary camera aesthetic to do it. He used his camera and action to build his Shakespearean tragic finale.

  It plays out in an operatic ballet, as Wash flies Serenity for a final time “like a leaf on the wind” through the giant space battle. The camera fights the mayhem around it just to stay with our heroic ship and her pilot. As it all unfolds, we never leave Serenity. Keeping up with her and Wash is harrowing, as all hell unfolds around us. The crew, and their message, is at the center. The battle itself is almost an afterthought. In design we had many more epic scenes laid out, but they were dropped on the cutting room floor in exchange for a focus on Wash and his mission to get us through. Joss designed each shot to build an atonal drama. The scene plays against our instincts, spending very little time in the pinch of pursuit by the Reavers and assault by the Alliance, and by doing so he makes Wash a bigger hero than ever before. Wash almost floats through this Trojan encounter. Joss builds his hero up as the very best pilot our Serenity family could ever have, knowing full well that all of us would be patting him on the back agreeing with him as he congratulated himself on being “a leaf on the wind” . . . and then takes him from us. He builds our emotion and our courage, flying through the battle above, and then rips it away. And here again we must rise up.

  Making Firefly in partnership was thrilling and revolutionary. The passion to be unique and yet absolutely familiar is paramount. We wanted characters, places, and things we all knew, in extraordinary places doing extraordinary things. We did this week after week and we did it well. Perhaps it was the ever-looming threat of network cancellation that pushed us, but I’d like to think that it was just one of those singular situations where all of the right people are doing all of the rights things, creating a perfect space to be creative. We all fought hard all the time to be the best.

  The movie was much different. The movie was Joss’s entirely. Making a movie is a personal battle. When it is over you are wounded and tired. Joss was exacting and focused, and he led us tirelessly. Great movies are great battles won by heroes in art. That thing you feel when you leave great art, that thing that stays with you, that makes you think, that inspires and thrills, is what happens when you win a battle in art. We won the battle of Serenity because we went into the battle with a solid plan. Our script, our story, our plan is what you see in the finished film. It was our directions. It was our plan and Joss fought tirelessly to make sure we followed through.

  In the beginning of this essay I called making the movie Serenity earning my doctorate at Whedon University. This is why. When Joss managed to bring Serenity back from the dead and to the big screen we were given a gift, an opportunity to continue with something that meant so much to so many, to give more, to say more, of what Joss wanted to say. I knew that every story beat I would be involved in needed to resolve to Malcolm Reynolds’s final speech on the bridge to River. That was what I focused on throughout the process. The final shot became the summation of everything. It was meticulously fashioned to underline the word love: Serenity’s turn, her punch through the clouds, her breach against the sun, and her burst into space came from love. And what made the shot even better was Joss’s end to it, the panel that breaks and falls right into camera. That broken panel sums up the final lesson: love is frail, and frailty makes us mighty because we must overcome it. Joss gave me a great deal over the last ten years but his most important gifts were the very same gifts we have all been given. His stories, populated with emotional hills and valleys, which never end. Sisyphus pushes the stone up the mountain and it rolls back down and he must push it up again. Joss helped me understand that there is greatness in every part of Sisyphus’s task, and knowing this I will always look for greatness in all things. I can laugh and expect that the rock will always fall down when I reach the top of the hill, just as Serenity breaks after giving the world truth. And this makes us mighty.

  LONI PERISTERE was born in Natick, Massachusetts. He graduated from UMASS Boston then went to work for Joss Whedon as Visual Effects Supervisor on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Serenity. Loni co-founded the multi-award winning visual effects company Zoic Studios. He has won an Emmy, two VES awards, a Clio, a London International Advertising Award, and a Gold Pencil. Loni recently turned his focus back to writing and is currently developing several projects.

  Television shows and movies tend to be written neither by muscle-bound hunks nor by high-bosomed hunkes. We may or may not be tech-savvy (I know of one high-level writer who has an assistant stay at hand during late-night writing sessions to perform the tricky “save as” operation at the end of the night), but we certainly execute our work in front of monitors, our fingers on keyboards. Most of us, I would venture, self-identify as nerds or geeks of some variety. So how do we depict our brother geeks? Giardina looks at the question of geeks in Serenity, in sci-fi, and in the real world.

  (Note: My first real paying gig as a television staff writer was for a sho
w called Monty. The younger son on that show was played by a brilliantly talented teen actor named David Krumholtz, who has gone on to great things, including starring in the CBS series Numb3ers, and playing a certain geek called Mr. Universe.)

  Geeks of the World, Unite!

  You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Lovebots!

  NATASHA GIARDINA

  Mr. Universe? Mr. Who?

  I bet you didn’t even notice him when you first watched Serenity. Admittedly, he only has a few lines and doesn’t really get involved in the blood-and-guts action of the story, except, ultimately, in a rather terminal way. He isn’t what you’d call a hero, and while you could say he is necessary to the plot, you’d have to think twice to remember what he personally did to make the world a better place.

  And yet, on reflection, I think you probably can remember him. In fact, I can practically see your brain ticking over: “Mr. Universe, Mr. Universe. . . . Hey-wasn’t he that geek with the lovebot?”

  Sigh. Yep, that’s right. Mr. Universe-not only a person of great knowledge, skill, and intelligence, but also a being of immense potential in terms of social and political power-is best remembered for the fact that he married the futuristic equivalent of a blow-up doll. He’s a nerd, a geek, a dork, a dweeb even. He has all the social cachet of a fungal infection. But why is it so? Why, in our technology-dependent era, is the geek marginalized and effaced in our stories and our society, an object of amusement and derision when s/he appears at all, while the action hero is king?

  Let’s face it, in a film exploring the nature of right and wrong, the crimes perpetrated in the name of a “greater good,” and the triggers that turn human beings into monsters, Mr. Universe provides some welcome comic relief. We first meet him in his fortress of solitude: a scrappy-looking young guy in a rumpled shirt and old trainers, with the complexion of something that lives under a rock. His repartee is nails-down-a-blackboard cringe-worthy, and the knowledge that he’s so lacking in social skills and experience that he’s sating his lusts upon his lovebot is . . . just ick. Just really, really ick. You get the feeling that if you cut him in half, the word “dork” would be written all the way through.

  Of course these things are funny-all humor is based on someone else’s misfortune-but I suspect that much of the laughter has that odd, nervous quality that comes from barbs striking slightly too close to home. Specifically, while Serenity may be set in an interstellar future age, Mr. Universe looks awfully early twenty-first century: he looks like someone who was the butt of jokes in your high school. In fact, if you’re the kind of person who takes your science fiction seriously (which you probably are if you love Firefly and Serenity), it’s just possible he may look a teensy bit like you. I’ll be honest here: apart from, like, the stubble and the Adam’s apple and associated stuff, he looks quite a lot like me. So I laughed at him, perhaps like you, because I remembered the feeling of being ostracized for geekiness, and I was laughing at myself, really (sure I was); I don’t have a chip on my shoulder about it at all (yes, that’s right, this three-pound chunk of hardwood I’m sporting here is for decorative purposes only, I swear!). In short, I laughed because it’s nice to be the laugher and not the laughee and because, deep down, there was a small voice that said, “You know, geeks aren’t cool.”

  Sometimes it seems like no one wants to be a geek. I mean, taking Mr. Universe as an example, if there’s going to be a quest to spread truth and justice throughout human civilization, to right wrongs and cream the bad guys, who wants to be relegated to background scenery, with a lovebot, a few amusing lines, and a half-sad, half-creepy death scene? No, I suspect that the vast majority of us would rather be Zoe or Mal, because we all know that action heroes rock. It’s as if we’ve got a little voice in our heads that says, “Action heroes! How cool are they?!”

  It’s not surprising; after all, action heroes have been around for at least 4,000 years. Gilgamesh was one of the earliest action heroes, and the stories of him and his manifold literary descendents-Hercules, Beowulf, Arthur, Robin Hood, Tarzan, and Aragorn, to name a few famous ones-have become part of the mythos of Western civilization, framing the ways we think about life. The hero story just seems right to us: a young man (and yes, most of them are still guys) leaves his home, goes out into the world, learns things, acquires power and strength, fulfils a quest, and returns home triumphant, usually making that home a better place in the process. It’s arguably the reason why we idolize explorers and elite athletes over scientists and philosophers. (For proof on this point, consider how many philosophers have major sponsorship deals. Advertisers know where the money is.)

  We are so attuned to action heroes that we rarely stop to think about them critically, but we know that they’re cool in the same way we know that geeks aren’t. Again, a lot of it comes down to image. For example, action heroes are usually buff like you don’t get from sitting at a computer for fourteen hours a day. Nor can the blue glow from a screen (or in Mr. Universe’s case, many screens) create the kind of muscle-defining tan the action hero often sports. Unlike geeks, action heroes look good in whatever they’re wearing, be it animal skins, loincloths, chain mail, cowboy gear, or the blood of their vanquished foes. And they look far, far better in celluloid, backed by multimillion-dollar budgets and the very latest in stunts, costumes, and special effects. Even Serenity, which admittedly did not have the budget of, say, Blade 3 or Terminator 2, featured a couple of pretty hot action heroes in Mal and Zoe. They had the look down pat: tall, young, fit, well-tailored clothes, bad-ass guns, and a keen sense of justice. They talk the talk too: like great action heroes they’re laconic, but witty-they “aim to misbehave” but never cry “like a baby. A hungry, angry baby.”

  And yet geek heroes, too, have had moments in the pop culture sun, especially in science fiction: think of Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869); the scientist in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895); Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series scientist-hero Hari Seldon (1942-1950); Robert Heinlein’s young astrogators, spaceship captains, and explorers in Starman Jones (1953), Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), and Space Family Stone (1969); and the engineer Vannevar Morgan in Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise (1978). Scientists, engineers, and other tech-savvy heroes also made their presence felt in early television science fiction including Doctor Who (1963+) and Lost in Space (1965-1968).

  But it was a later subgenre of science fiction-cyberpunk-that really put geeks like Mr. Universe on the map. This was the first kind of fiction to explore the potential effect of computers and cyberspace on interpersonal relations, politics, the economy, and society generally. Suddenly, we realized that the new frontier was not “out there” but all around us-it was electronic. Hackers emerged onto this stage as the new tech-savvy heroes; skilled at surfing the cyberseas, they were freedom fighters battling the corporate giants. Case, the hero of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), is widely considered the quintessential hacker hero, but an earlier example is Nick Haflinger, the talented hacker who breaks his government’s control over information in John Brunner’s 1975 classic The Shockwave Rider.

  If the seventies and eighties were the era when hackers became heroes, then the nineties were when these geeks became cool. An early forerunner here is Hiro Protagonist from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992). Hiro is one of an elite cadre of hackers who created the Metaverse, a 3-D Internet analog. Yet this guy is far from a pocket-protector nerd: he wears a black leather kimono, drives a very mean street machine, and carries a matched set of samurai swords. He has all the accoutrements of cool, but he most definitely uses his brains and not his brawn to save the day.

  It was in the late nineties, though, that the hacker hero reached its apogee. And significantly, the greatest hacker hero of science fiction film was also the most popular with the mainstream (that is, non-geek) audience: Thomas A. Anderson-office johnny by day, hacker extraordinaire by night, and eventual freedom fighter against the dominance of machines over the hum
an race. The fact that most know him by his hacker handle rather than his real name is evidence of his street cred. And, like his ancestor Hiro before him, this hacker is cool. He may be an unappealing, hairless gray blob in real life, but plug him in, and his virtual self kicks butt in black leather and PVC, leaping from tall buildings, fighting hand-to-hand battles with evil computer agents, and brandishing some pretty hardcore weaponry.

  The main problem with Neo is that we remember his black leather and martial arts and too readily forget his geek origins, because the action-hero meme is pervasive and resilient and out-guns the geek-hero meme every time.

  The action hero responds to our deepest desires: we look at this hero with a thousand faces and we dream that one of those faces could be ours. It is the ultimate consolatory fantasy, evoking some mythical time when life was simpler, quests involved scaling mountains (not commuting to work), and problems could be solved at the point of a sword or a gun. The trouble with this consolatory fantasy is that it has no useful translation into the real, contemporary world. This problem occurs even in the fictional universe of Serenity: the really cool things about the crew of Serenity are their retro Wild West accents, outfits, manners, and sensibilities, but in the world of the film, the high-tech world of tomorrow, this only serves to mark them as creatures of the past, and in the bigger scheme of things, not all that successful. They may be the heroes of their own story, but they’re eking out a rather precarious existence in the margins of human civilization in the future.

  Beyond the silver screen, the consolatory fantasy of the action hero is both more seductive and more dangerous. It affects us on personal levels: got a dead-end desk job, a mortgage, and three kids to support? Well, that truly blows, but in another universe, you could have been a hero with a sword to wield and a dragon to slay. You could’ve been a contender. You could’ve gone up to all the people who made you feel small and said, “You looking at me?” before resorting to your fists or a gun and teaching them some respect. The same principle afflicts our politics and national identity-just take out the fists and guns and substitute missiles, armies, and coalitions of the willing. Because that’s been such a successful conflict resolution strategy . . . hasn’t it?