Serenity Found

by Jane Espenson

  Serenity is a story about media, about the abuses of media that are possible, and more than probable in the current day, and the way that those media can be used to subvert and question the very ways in which they are used to control the population, both within the story and without. For more about media use and subversion, press “Dada and Detournement,” “Marshall McLuhan,” or “FOX News.” It’s a polemical film with a clear message and a hearty liberal (or Libertarian) bent, but its politics take place on a level above today’s partisan complaints about “media manipulation.” For more information on media manipulation in Hollywood, choose “The Gay Agenda,” “The Jewish Mafia,” “Other Crackpot Conspiracy Theories,” “Air America,” “Rush Limbaugh,” or “The Age of the Punditocracy.” The film looks instead at the properties and possibilities for media use by both the governing body and the individual, and the critique it offers favors self-determination and awareness over passivity and unthinking consumption: ideals that transcend political divisions.

  In other words, Serenity is a movie that doesn’t concern itself with political motives so much as it does with political procedure and the uneasy bedfellows it often makes with seemingly soft entertainment, seemingly unbiased journalism. The world described above is the same as that which the film’s audience sees around them: a clean, happy, safe world in which everyone feels safeguarded and complacent. There’s no reason to look closer, there’s no sign or gap into which one might fall that would lead to closer interrogation. Serenity doesn’t point fingers at the politically unaware any more than it does at the machinations of politics and industry for doing what they do best. It takes place in a primarily amoral universe, in which personal choice is the only sturdy ethic, and for which there are no objective bases for comparison: heroes and champions do what they must, because of what they’ve seen. The people of the Core Planets aren’t to be decried for their ignorance, but that ignorance must be acknowledged . . . before it is destroyed. The only binary division with which the show Firefly, or the film Serenity, busy themselves is that between innocence and experience, ignorance and knowledge, secrecy and transparency: and it unequivocally privileges the latter, in each case. For more about innocence and paradise lost, see “The Myth of Eve,” also named “Zoë.”

  More knowledge is always better, innocence is unsustainable without infantilization (or worse), and transparency is the key to the film’s political ideals. Anything beyond the facts, and the right to make decisions based upon them, is noise in the system, meant to obscure and control. In an anarchic or nihilist story-setting, we’d see government itself as the noise in the system; here the only true signal-the truth inside the noise, the motivation for the crew’s political action-exists to shore up a failing, “noisy” political structure, righting its course in the name of freedom.

  But the story of Serenity hasn’t started yet; we are still in the prologue. A short conversation among schoolchildren, questioning the basis of these assumptions, becomes River Tam’s fever dream during her abuse in the Academy-and we are again asked to look at the world of the film as a media construct, as this sequence too is betrayed. Her rescue by her brother Simon, and thus everything previous to the moment of their escape, is revealed to be a surveillance video being watched by the Operative. For more information on self-created belief systems like the Operative’s, or Malcolm Reynolds’s, choose “Bushido,” “Stockholm Syndrome,” “Atheistic Sour Grapes,” “Existential Black Marketing,” or “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” We learn the truth that we, as viewers, have been seeking since the show’s first episode: why the Alliance is so interested in recapturing River. Her secret is the secret of the Alliance itself, gained by telepathy-a kind of interpersonal media exchange-which we learn later is the Pax experiments on Miranda that created the Reavers.

  Again we see this idea of secrets as sickness, in the comparison of River’s severe mental illness to the Alliance’s hidden rot; both River’s true, magnificent intellect and the beauty of what the Alliance has accomplished are obscured by layers of lies and (it’s said) psychosis. Her secret is most plainly illustrated as a blockage to normal functioning, and as above, so below: the same secret, and the human error behind it, has created the Reavers, every bit as wild and uncomprehending as River in her worse moments. (The linguistic difference, it’s been noted, between “River” and “Reaver” is negligible at best: they are siblings, children of the Alliance, connected every bit as closely as Simon and River herself, by blood and by the Alliance’s paternalistic meddling.) In this way, as another weapon of the Alliance gone wrong, we see that River is her own secret: the information poisoning her, for which she is being chased, indicts both Miranda and the Academy itself. River herself describes the shape of a feedback loop-no wonder she’s so hard to understand! In acting as both the transmitter and the message, both the truth and the lie hiding the truth, she confuses the signal even further. Not even the government that created her can be sure what she’ll do next. For more information on telepathy and psionics as specialized media and/or political hot potatoes, please press “Joan Vinge,” “Psi-Corps,” “Dark Phoenix,” or “The Dead Zone.”

  The fact that we finally learn the nature of River’s secret during the most complex and graceful jumps from context to context of the opening is not unimportant: River’s journey, and her cathartic release of this secret’s burden (“buried beneath layers of psychosis,” it’s said), are accomplished in a similar movement through layers of lies and media, like peeling an onion. For more on the cathartic release of denied and/or repressed secrets, please press “Wilhelm Reich,” or “Carl Jung.” For more on psychotic onions as a therapeutic model, please press “Inanna’s Descent Into the Underworld,” “The Myth of Orpheus,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: ‘Spiral’,” “Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles,” “Wonderfalls,” “Good Will Hunting,” or even “The Prince of Tides.” If you’d like to learn about other incidents of cathartic release, population awakening, and political empowerment, and if you would like to cry some tears of joy, please press “V for Vendetta,” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: ‘Chosen’.”

  We are presented at first with baseline River, weird and uncanny, familiar from the show. At the Maidenhead, thanks to the Alliance’s subliminally coded advertisement, we will be given a new level of violence-and a new level of understanding, as the first clue in the story’s unraveling is presented: River’s violence itself, and Miranda. On Miranda, through another recording, we’ll learn the secret of the Reavers, and River will cough out the virus that’s plagued her since the moment recorded at the beginning of the film, returning to sanity. (She’ll still be weird, but she was weird well before the Alliance found her.) Finally, Mal and the Serenity will take this information to the skies in order to bring down the existing system and create a new world, without all the Pax and lies and secrets that caused the disease in the first place.

  Also note the way that the story begins by moving from monologue to seminar discussion to dream to rescue to recorded account, in a way that would be impossible if we were not watching a movie, a media product: parts of what we’ve just seen would have been hidden from the Operative. That was a story constructed just for us, in order to sell us on the film’s central conflict: before the politics, before the media theory, there’s a violent man looking for a girl, and there’s her brother that saved her. This is the first emotional hook we’re given, as viewers new to the Firefly ’verse.

  Free of the competing layers of propaganda and storytelling devices (for now), we are given our reintroduction to Serenity’s crew (in a continuous, luxurious tracking-shot, itself self-conscious as a well-known filmic technique, further twisted by the single concealed break halfway through). For more about continuous tracking shots, please press “Hitchcock,” “Altman,” or “Welles.” A typical mission reacquaints viewers with the crew of Serenity and their means and philosophy-and provides the audience with their first close Reaver encounter, as well as a re-acknowledgment of Riv
er’s stranger behaviors and physical feats-and soon enough we’re on our way to Beaumonde, to meet Fanty and Mingo in a bar called the Maidenhead. Given that we’ve already established the importance of one maiden’s head in particular, and what it contains, the significance is apparent; the word’s obvious primary meaning, that of the hymen, a symbol of innocence, also comes into play throughout.

  In a story about the revelation of information and the loss of innocence, which itself privileges the experience of its world-weary crew over the stupor and complacency of the Core Planets, the bar’s name is a multilayered sign that the revelations have begun. The word “virgin” is derived from Latin virgo, virginis; the roots of this word lie in vir, meaning man or husband, and genere, meaning “created (for).” For more about the virginal literary character Miranda, including information on her father Prospero, who controlled the thoughts and minds of everyone on his island until finally being shown the error of his ways, please press “The Tempest.” In the Maidenhead, the world changes: not just for River, who is able to access the word “Miranda” along with her most violent tendencies; not just for Simon, who premieres River’s “safeword”; not just for the crew, who are forced once more to reevaluate Simon and River’s place among them; but for the audience itself: no more secrets. This movie will, at the least, explain what all the River fuss was about!

  For all practical purposes, the vid screen in the Maidenhead is our first real look at media in the ’verse: repetitive, kawaii, sing-song, and uncomfortably close to our own present-day advertisements and disguised-advertisements. Across the whole Firefly series, media entertainment was rare, to the point of being almost nonexistent. “Cortexes” were presented as primarily communication devices, and mentioned most often in connection with Simon and River’s schooling: more innocence, more received information. Of course, this media entertainment contains a coded message for River, designed to send her berserk and drive her out of hiding, which is what it does, alerting both the watching Alliance-and those that watch the watchers-to her position. It’s only the Alliance’s safeword, uttered by Simon, that blocks the threat River becomes: “Eto kuram na smekh!” means “enough to make the hens laugh.” Colloquially, it implies the kind of accusation and ridicule that brought everyone’s attention to the Emperor’s New Clothes, or rather the lack of them-and as we’ll see, that moment of doubt, the kind of strength required to laugh in the face of power, is an unimaginably strong weapon. For more about this quaint tale from Earth-That-Was, please press “Hans Christian Andersen.”

  In all River’s nightmares, in her suicidal requests to Simon that he never use the safeword again, we see a continuing image: that of people, children, lying down, to go to sleep. This is an internal image of a real, tangible physical event: River’s secret itself. As a metaphor for both the people of Miranda and the people of the Core Planets, it’s incredibly useful, but in terms of the developing media story here, it’s also important to note that River is only “put to sleep” with the safeword once, and that it terrifies her. With her secret buried so deep, her fate tied so strongly to the Miranda victims (both the sleepers and the Reavers; she’s an index of both), it’s no wonder that she fears lying down and sleeping against her will so strongly. We would do well to emulate her.

  The incident in the Maidenhead brings us to the character in the film most intimately tied to media and its use and abuses: Mr. Universe. Mr. Universe introduces the central media theme of the film for the first time explicitly: “There is no news. There’s the truth of the signal: what I see. And there’s the puppet theater the Parliament jesters foist on the somnambulant public.” It doesn’t get any clearer than that: Mr. Universe takes the noise and signal of the entire system, and condenses it into truth. “Can’t stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere, and I go everywhere.”

  (To step sideways for a moment, to a slightly different but no less political ’verse, consider Buffy’s Faith, and her reflex self-declaration: “Five by five,” a reference to signal quality. It’s the measure of a given signal’s strength [from one to five] and clarity [from one to five]: a way of stating the ratio of signal to noise in the system. Optimal strength, optimal quality, are not possible unless steps are taken to eradicate the noise from the system. There are psychological, political, philosophical-even theological-antecedents; from classic analysis to revolution, to deconstruction and Gnosticism: only in this space-cowboy ’verse could the technological be so closely tied to Faith’s emotional ideal.)

  Names are, as usual in a Whedon story, central: Mr. Universe takes the “five-by-five,” “everything goes somewhere” concept to the highest possible level. He is open, though his media technology, to all the received wisdom and media that the Alliance can provide. Only by maintaining an internal state of simultaneous awareness and discernment can he possibly filter out the noise and perceive the signal. It’s this self-aware and self-empowering state toward which the rest of the movie-and the characters, most obviously River-will work itself, and which is most profoundly a state of political awareness. Mr. Universe is able to acknowledge the entirety of the system-both signal and noise-in order to discern a higher clarity: he sees meanings in the patterns, spikes, blips, and anomalies that a more casual (or complacent) viewer would disregard. The lesson that we, and the crew of the Serenity, learn from Mr. Universe is to listen to the universe herself-the signal and the noise-and how to tell the difference.

  By discerning the clarity within the signal itself, and questioning-or flouting, or exposing, or disrupting-the noise of the Alliance’s propaganda, Serenity becomes a beacon of reconstruction: a transmitter of the true signal, of freedom and clarity. In fact, what Mal, River, and Mr. Universe design-chaotically, to be sure, and without ever agreeing on it aloud-is a feedback system: by reintroducing the clarified signal to the system, louder than everything else, the complacency and openness to control that defines most denizens of the post-war ’verse becomes in itself a political weapon. Just as the Operative requires only a sit-down viewing of the Miranda tape to lose his complacence, we’re left with the feeling that Serenity’s crew can change the world simply by putting the right truth in the right place. If the Core Planets are Muzak, and Miranda the sound of tombs and beasts, Serenity’s pure rock and roll. With Serenity’s help, the Alliance and Rim can begin to readjust for their political and scientific excesses, rebuild in the wake of their violence, and return to Mr. Universe’s natural five-by-five state.

  On Miranda, the sequence of events involving media in the first half of the film-the nested scenes that introduce us to the characters, the subliminal commercial in the Maidenhead-are one by one reversed, each time through the power of transparency and open secrets; peace is restored and innocence is destroyed, in equal measure, by the sharing of secrets. Evidence of the results of the Pax experiments-or to my mind, the experience of sharing in this proof with her new family-releases River from her burden.

  Pax is revealed as a new prototype form of population control, a chemical pumped into the air processors on Miranda that caused almost everyone exposed to “just lay down.” As it’s described, first for the Serenity’s crew and later for the Operative: “The G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate . . . was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Well, it works. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work, they stopped breeding, talking, eating. There’s a million people here, and they all just let themselves die.”

  The remaining tenth of a percent reacted less passively: “Their aggressor response increased beyond madness,” we’re told, and they became Reavers, butchering and abusing the survivors before taking to the skies. Certainly a population under the sedation described could conceivably do one or the other, perhaps to exclusion: either to rage or to lie down and die, but certainly not to live, at least as fully as we might desire.

  As a metaphor for the unquestioning consumption of media, it’s not entirely off-base. The comparisons to our own med
ia culture, sci-fi luminous though they may be, are clear: setting aside high- and low-culture boundaries, the truth remains that any media product, consumed unthinkingly, leads toward either stupor or mob thinking. The repression of societal elements such as violence or sexuality forces those elements to find their way into the expressions of culture, creating a warped mirror effect in which the difference between life onscreen and life out here is either dissonant or frighteningly isometric. We are defined by the stories we tell, and by the stories we hear: stories are the way a culture defines itself. A media culture under the grip of industry, government, or any other paternalistic influence designs its own downfall, expressed in the lives of its constituency. Citizens of a culture that doesn’t change, or move, don’t fall down together. They fall apart.

  If Pax is censorship or simply journalistic bias, nine-tenths of us will sleep and one-tenth will rage . . . unless somebody speaks up, reminds us that the culture is us, and we are the culture. That the Emperor wears no clothes, and that we are, in turn, the Emperor: if consumption is “voting with dollars,” then media culture is the true representative government, and it’s in our best interest to vote well, and alertly. In the Firefly ’verse, it’s River who provides the way out: by expressing and sharing the secret, by clearing the signal of its noise, she’s in effect reduced its deleterious effects to a minimum, leaving only strength and psychic power. Five by five.