Serenity Found

by Jane Espenson

  Upper-class society, in “Shindig,” also reflects remnants of the antebellum South. Consider the opening title card from the movie version of Gone with the Wind, which states that once:There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.

  Apparently, we can also look for this world, with its pretense at honor and its underbelly of entitlement, on the planet Persephone. Here is where Kaylee found the hoop-skirted layer cake of a dress that she believed to be so beautiful. Here is where we saw a duel over a clearly corrupted version of “honor.” Here we have a glistening chandelier and pillars worthy of Tara’s front porch. And here we have slaves. When Kaylee attended a glittering party in her layer-cake dress, she was treated exactly like the space equivalent of poor white trash by a clique of pampered society “ladies,” at which point an older gentleman came to her rescue, targeting the ringleader of the group:Why, Banning Miller. What a vision you are in your fine dress. It must have taken a dozen slaves a dozen days to get you into that getup. Of course, your daddy tells me it takes the space of a schoolboy’s wink to get you out of it again.

  In case you couldn’t tell by the kindly gentleman’s comment, Banning Miller wasn’t presented as any more of a role model than the pool-playing slave trader we met before. This establishes two important points. One is that in the world of Firefly slavery is still a bad thing, for the same reasons it has always been a bad thing despite the rationalizations of every society that ever embraced it. But the second and more important point?

  Slavery still remains legal in the world where the Alliance won the war.

  Clearly, the Independents were in no way fighting a pro-slavery war. Nor, considering that Mal doesn’t make any blatant Alliance = slavery comments, does it seem that they were fighting an anti-slavery war. The issue of slavery remains peripheral to the independence (or lack thereof) of the outer planets.

  SAFE IN SPACE

  In other words, Joss Whedon has given us a world in which we can explore the tragedies of the Civil War, or a war very similar to it, without the cloud of slavery hanging over our protagonists.

  We are able to see tragedy in the characters of Mal and Zoe, forever colored by their experience in the war, largely because our own culture’s experience with the war affects our viewing. From the way they eat apples by cutting them first (in case they hide grenades) to their hard-won cynicism, Mal and Zoe have been changed by giving everything they had to a side that, no matter how valiant their cause, lost. Their story is that of the southern Confederates, but because of Firefly’s alternate Civil War setting, the purity of their story is no longer, as it is in Margaret Mitchell’s portrayal of the South in Gone with the Wind, naïve. We are safe to see the vulnerability behind their resulting hardness:ZOE: It’s just . . . in a time of war, we woulda never left a man stranded.

  MAL: Maybe that’s why we lost. (Serenity)

  Like Confederates, Mal and Zoe have had to re-integrate with people who do not share their experiences, or even were on the other side. Consider it: Inara, Simon, and River are shown to have supported unification. Shepherd Book, while his past remains a mystery, has an identcard that got him VIP treatment at an Alliance base in “Safe”-treatment similar to that which the top-secret operative gets in Serenity. Jayne stated flat out that he wasn’t in the war (“The Train Job”), and Wash’s resentment of Mal and Zoe’s anecdotes (in “War Stories”) seemed to indicate that he, too, was on the outside of the conflict. So our protagonists, as combatants in a losing campaign, are also very much alone with their history and their lingering resentment:THE OPERATIVE: Our Mr. Reynolds was a sergeant, 57th Overlanders. Volunteer. Fought at Serenity ‘til the very last. This man is an issue. This man hates us.

  This is a fairly universal experience for soldiers, and a huge one for soldiers in the American Civil War-and for the entire country, afterward.

  I repeat: For the entire country. As with slavery, our minds often veer away from the absolute devastation of this terrible war. 970,000 Americans died, more than in all other American wars combined. Half the country-the South-was left ruined, economically damaged in a way that would not begin to heal until the mid-1900s. Lives were lost on both sides. Limbs were lost (usually amputated without anesthesia) on both sides. “Brother fought against brother” is not just a phrase from history books-think about it!

  But many of us don’t. We can’t. It’s just too big and awful, and for sheer safety, our minds veer away. Instead, we dismiss it. Those who suffered the most, adding lost fortunes and Radical Reconstruction to the mix, were the Confederates, after all, the pro-slavery bad guys. To feel sympathetically about them is akin to feeling pro-slavery yourself. And so even southerners, those of us who are willing to pack the Stars and Bars flag away in museums and to look to the future, sometimes repress our thoughts on the most world-changing event of its century.

  But do you know what happens when people repress things? Especially experiences that, repressed or not, continue to echo through our culture like a post-hypnotic suggestion planted in River Tam’s brain?

  Pop psychology would tell us that, like said post-hypnotic suggestions, repressed knowledge and emotions just show up elsewhere, often in self-destructive ways. And self-destructive ways, for half of our huge American culture, could be majorly problematic.

  But wait! This isn’t yet another way in which Confederates make apt bad guys. It is, instead, another piece of the brilliance that is Firefly and Serenity.

  By showing the pain suffered by the Confederacy, through the characters of Mal and Zoe-and by removing the issue of slavery from the mix-Whedon makes it safe to see our lost soldiers as fallen heroes. Something like the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, is so huge that to stand, silent, at the historic site is overwhelming. We cannot fit our minds around the reality of it-three days of fighting, almost 10,000 men killed, almost 30,000 men wounded. But to fictionalize it?

  THE OPERATIVE: Serenity Valley. Bloodiest battle of the entire war. The Independents held the valley for seven weeks, two of them after their high command had surrendered. Sixty-eight percent casualty rate. (Serenity)

  To fictionalize it somehow makes it more real, because it’s safe enough to be real.

  And what’s truly fascinating is, because of Firefly’s obvious parallel to the Civil War, not all of that reality comes from the mind of Joss Whedon, either.

  INTERACTIVE LITERATURE

  There’s a theory of literary criticism which became popular around the 1970s called Reader Response Analysis. The basic idea is that literature doesn’t exist in a vacuum-it is modified by its audience, each and every time a reader (or viewer) experiences it. At the risk of sounding way too lit-professorish: Each time a new reader comes to a text, a new version of that text is created.

  The same can be-and is-said of works of drama. An easy way to test this theory is to find your favorite TV series from childhood, one that you haven’t seen for at least a decade. Rent the DVDs or, if it’s not out yet, catch some episodes on TV Land. I dare you! H. R. Pufnstuf. Land of the Lost. ThunderCats. Watch a few episodes and then ask yourself: Is this as good as I remember?

  The answer? Probably not. But did the television series itself change? Again: probably not. So what did change? YOU! Your reader (viewer) response changed because you’re a different person than you were as a child.

  So what the heck does this have to do with Firefly? Everything! Once you recognize the interactive nature of literature, you can also start noticing the creators who use that interactivity to their advantage. Any writers who’ve ever used archetypes to give their characters an extra, subconscious punch, or who’ve ever turned a stock character on her head (like Whedon’s Buffy) get the power of this.

  In using
a world similar to that of the American Civil War, Firefly and Serenity become the mutual creation of any viewer with even a passing understanding of that war.

  History gives us a familiarity with Mal, Inara, Simon, and the others that makes us co-creators and so amplifies our experience of them.

  On one level, we know what to expect-that’s what we bring to the “reading.” But then . . . then, because of that deeper starting point of recognition, the show’s characterization is able to take us farther than we ever expected.

  We know Mal is a Confederate cowboy, complete with the gun on his hip and the rugged individualism in his attitude. He even admitted to “Saffron,” in the episode “Our Mrs. Reynolds,” that his mother owned a cattle ranch. Mal’s also an outlaw-consider “The Train Job,” the cattle rustling in “Shindig” and “Safe,” and the bank robbery in Serenity. All this, the writers bring to us. But what do we bring to the story?

  We bring the fact that we’ve known Mal in other incarnations before now. Our knowledge of the standard Western protagonist keeps us aware, without having to be told, that Mal is indeed a decent, stand-up guy, as surely as Shane (from Shane), the Ringo Kid (from Stagecoach), or even Kid Curry and Hannibal Heyes of Alias Smith and Jones-any number of “heroes” that are also outlaws, current or former. Lines like “I don’t murder children” (Serenity) or “I never back down from a fight” (“Shindig”) just validate what we already trust, deep in our heart, because we already know Mal just that well . . . even if they’re often followed by a twist, such as Inara protesting that Mal backs down from fights all the time, and Mal admitting, “Well, yeah. But I’m not backing down from this one.”

  We get all that because Firefly is a space Western. But what we bring to the story from our knowledge of real history is even more powerful. As famous as all those film and television outlaws are, they don’t carry the same weight as Jesse and Frank James, Doc Holliday, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Because while the James brothers in particular were fictionalized in movies from My Darling Clementine (1946) to Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966) to The Long Riders (1980), these outlaws were not fictional. They were real bank robbers, real train robbers . . . real innovators in both areas, in fact. We know that none of them were cold-hearted killers, and generally targeted government or big businesses (like Mr. E. Harriman, of the Union Pacific Railroad). We know they were often protected by the townspeople with whom they traded and lived because of their Robin Hood tendencies. With this knowledge, we’re not surprised when our Western outlaws have fun with their crime:FRANK JAMES: I just need a distraction.

  JESSE JAMES: A distraction? Well, why the hell didn’t you just say so?

  BOB YOUNGER: He’s smiling!

  COLE YOUNGER: That’s never a good thing. (American Outlaws, 2001)

  And we need no explanation at all for why Mal, too, has fun with his crime:MAL: Hell, this job I would pull for free.

  ZOE: Can I have your share?

  MAL: No.

  ZOE: If you die, can I have your share? (“The Train Job”)

  We also knew that Mal would return the stolen medicine to the ailing townsfolk of Paradiso, on “The Train Job,” even before he did (or, if the “trivia” on TV.com is correct, before Joss Whedon knew it-did FOX really make him add that part in?). We knew he’d help the troubled prostitutes in “Heart of Gold” and his old army buddy in “The Message.” And it’s not just because he’s a “white hat,” but because he’s a man who fought a war, who sacrificed everything, for an ideal-an ideal that, unlike that of the young James brothers before their life of crime, had nothing to do with slavery.

  Thus we can be wholly involved in statements like, “I aim to misbehave” (Serenity)-both the surface truth of it and all the self-awareness it implies about how he often misbehaves but how this time it’s serious misbehavior. Why? Because with the knowledge we bring to the show, we are equally aware. And because we can come to that self-awareness guilt-free.

  We can do the same thing with Inara. We bring to her character not only an existing knowledge of the standard whitewashed, fictionalized Western prostitute-like Amanda Blake’s Miss Kitty of Gunsmoke or Joanne Dru’s Tess Millay in Red River or Claire Trevor’s Dallas in Stagecoach, prostitutes that always have a heart of gold. But we also bring to her our awareness of just what a civilizing force women-even prostitutes-were on the post-Civil-War frontier. We bring as well a remembrance of what true ladies, steel magnolias, the Confederate belles once were (does anyone else see a resemblance to Vivien Leigh’s Scarlet O’Hara in Morena Baccarin’s Inara?). All of that audience involvement gives Joss Whedon an even stronger foundation from which to provide his Whedonesque twists, in this case the fact that a “Companion”-like a southern belle-is in fact a more respectable position than that of anyone on the ship except perhaps the Shepherd. But the echoes of southern belle in Inara are, like the rest of the series, completely separate from the stain of slavery.

  Other characters tap into the strength and familiarity of this alternate universe Reconstruction, letting us contribute to their reality-some more directly than others. Shepherd Book is the necessary reverend . . . one who, in as many movies as not, turned out to be a good-natured troublemaker in disguise (which made hints of Book’s darker past seem downright appropriate) but who, in real life, did as much as women to bring civility to the frontier. Simon is the fish-out-of-water educated Yankee, but in this case, one without the moral superiority of having fought to free the slaves. Jayne is the double-crossing bad guy and yet, thanks in part to Whedon’s writing and in part to Adam Baldwin’s acting, he too surpasses his basic “Western” traits to transcend Firefly/Serenity’s root genre and become someone both wholly original and familiar enough to emotionally engage his audience.

  In the end, transcendence is the perfect word for what Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity manages by presenting a similar world to the post-Civil War South but removing the issue of slavery. Just as the Reavers allow the show to give us the barbarism that settlers believed of Native Americans without the messy history of reservations and broken treaties, so does the War for Independence give the world of Firefly/Serenity added power. We viewers can bring a great deal of understanding-from both fictional and historical sources-to the stories. And at last, we can face the tragedy of the Confederate soldier without the accompanying vilification.

  As Mal himself puts it, in Serenity: “Half of writing history is hiding the truth.” But for this essay’s purpose, he’s only half right. Instead of hiding the truth, the world of Firefly gives us an alternative truth, less weighed down by the horror of slavery. It gives us a way to enjoy everything that is archetypal about the classic Western without having to repress our awareness of its historical shadow side.

  That strengthens the world and characters of Firefly/Serenity. And it strengthens us.

  No villains necessary.

  Rita award-winning author EVELYN VAUGHN (who writes her Western historical romances as Yvonne Jocks) has published seventeen novels and a dozen fantasy short stories. She also teaches Literature and Creative Writing for Tarrant County College, in Texas. When neither writing nor teaching . . . oh, who are we kidding? She’s almost always writing and teaching. And watching TV (being an addict). It helps her rest up from the writing. And the teaching.

  She loves to talk about her writing (and TV), whether that’s attractive or not. Check out her Web site at www.evelyn-vaughn.com

  REFERENCES

  Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York: Warner Books, 1993.

  As a movie, Serenity is a part of the media. It is also, to a large degree, about the media. Clifton makes an eloquent, and elegant, case for Serenity as a call to arms, where the arms in question are critical thinking and healthy skepticism. Two of my favorites.

  Signal to Noise

  Media and Subversion in Serenity

  JACOB CLIFTON

  The first moment of the film Serenity contains a powerful clue to the film
’s contents and themes: the logo for Universal Pictures, familiar to any filmgoer as a mainstay stretching back more than fifty years, being subtly drawn into the film itself. For more about NBC-Universal and its subsidiaries, press “Universal.” For more about its parent company, General Electric, press “GE.” For a list of Universal Pictures releases, press “Movies.” For information on Universal’s competitors, press “Other Studios.” The logo’s starry background becomes the Black, putting the Universal globe itself in the context of the show and film’s ’verse itself. You could almost see it as a sly dig at the necessary use of Hollywood money in a venture that ultimately interrogates the Hollywood system itself; more cynically the studio’s complacence about the film could be compared to Phillip Morris’s sponsorship of thetruth.com. Earth’s iconic blue and green surface becomes Earth-That-Was in the monologue that follows, explaining the history of the show’s world in terms of the Alliance’s propaganda: “Ruled by an interplanetary parliament, the Alliance was a beacon of civilization. The savage outer planets were not so enlightened, and refused Alliance control. The war was devastating. But the Alliance’s victory over the Independents ensured a safer universe.” For more about the Battle of Serenity, press “Alliance Victories.” For information on the Browncoats and their most prominent at-large ex-members, press “Marauders of the Outer Rim.” For more about the Alliance, and ways you can join the mission to bring civilization to the known ’verse, press “Academy.” For information on opportunities within the Alliance Ministry of Truth, press “Blue Sun.”

  It is no accident that the Alliance refers to itself as a “beacon”; its first duty, to itself and its culture, is transmission: of the rules, of “civilization,” and-if the Alliance scientists had their way on Miranda-of true mind control. For information on lost and non-terraformable planets, press “Outer Rim Non-Inhabitables.” For more on the Reavers, press “Mythology and Legends of the Outer Rim.” By equating the studio with Earth-That-Was, and combining it with what we, as viewers, know to be a biased account, the film begins with a statement and admission of self-consciousness: an acknowledgement of itself as media output, echoed in everything that follows.