Serenity Found
Page 24
After River’s freakout in the Maidenhead, the crew peels its own onion, so to speak, being led down the rabbit hole into the genesis of the Reavers, and a new calling: “This is what they feared she knew. And they were right to fear. Because there’s a whole universe of folk who are gonna know it, too. They’re gonna see it. Somebody has to speak for these people.” This is the moment the signal is first picked up for transmission; this is the moment that River’s sickness reverses itself and becomes the key to redemption for every person on Serenity’s crew. Led by Mal, the crew returns to Mr. Universe’s base to transmit the truth they’ve found, only to encounter both the Operative and Reavers-both sides of the Pax equation, the sleeping and the raging wakeful-blocking the way.
As a newly empowered and uncrazy River fights off her Reaver brothers to save what’s left of Serenity’s crew, Mal is able to transmit the signal to a most unlikely receiver: the Operative, a man described earlier by Inara as “. . . A believer: intelligent, methodical, and devout in his belief that killing River is the right thing to do.” He is defined by this belief, and by this mission: his name marks him only as a tool of the establishment, with no signal inside the noise. Compare the Operative to Mal, for a moment: He is a hollow man, a believer, a swallower of the message. No amount of intelligence or method can balance the damage of unthinking consumption; intelligence only increases that consumption’s potential impact.
We are shown the Operative’s dedication to duty and the rules that Mal regularly flouts during his introduction in the film’s opening roller-coaster ride: he’s a man of honor, like Mal, but one who fully supports the Alliance and its aims, in the belief that he is cleaving to the right. When Mal forces him to watch the Miranda tape-“your greatest wish, a world without sin”-he is taking the Operative’s innocence, just as our own was taken, with River’s, in the Maidenhead. Deprived of the noise on which he’s built his life, confronted with a signal whose clarity is nearly blinding, the Operative seems to lose all spirit: to lie down like the people of Miranda, and give up. But the battered crew of Serenity, the survivors and the newly sane, have gained the strength and power of a true calling: the transmission of the signal, the awakening of the known ’verse to freedom.
Whereas the truth about Miranda-the Pax video-is what ceased River’s suffering, here it is the thing that causes the Operative to lose all sense of self: the Operative is opposed to River not only in method and perceptual paradigm, but finally in his placement within the system. Asked by the facts to consider the larger picture, and his place in it, he finds that he has been too long complacent, a carrier of the noise, and he is destroyed. The purification which was River’s redemption has an equal but opposite effect on the Operative. The removal of the Alliance’s influence left her with the universe as it truly is, whereas left without the infallible Alliance’s help to comprehend the system, the Operative finds he has nothing left.
It’s no coincidence that “River” takes over the pilot’s console from “Wash” after his death, nor that their final flight in the film is through rain and into the sun. By taking on this alchemical work after Mr. Universe passes on, the crew of the Serenity become alchemists in their own right, breaking down destructive patterns (Mal and Inara) and unnecessary barriers (Simon and Kaylee) in order to attain a higher degree of functionality as a working group. We see again this idea of the signal, of that clarity that can’t be stopped by adversity, or authority, or even death, in Zoe’s and the crew’s strength and determination to carry on after so much is lost.
River, once the living embodiment of the system’s noise, now the signal’s avatar, pilots the Firefly in tandem with Mal, his faith in himself and his mission reborn; Mal has a clear war and a clear goal, for the first time since the Battle of Serenity. “Independent,” a word and concept which nearly laid down and died after the war ended, is itself reborn, in holy disobedience: framed in light, Mal heads into the future he himself declared, before Miranda: “I aim to misbehave.”
If Serenity is a polemical parable, it’s also a didactic one, and a cautionary tale. As media proliferate and recombine, as the lines are blurred between our computers and telephones and television-even our science fiction blockbusters-it becomes easier for us all to sit still: for our people, like those of Miranda, to lie down and never get up again. There’s an incentive for both the political and industrial quarters to accomplish this kind of unthinking consumption on all levels; in a ’verse of governmental and sociological systems held accountable by no one other than the people whose lives they structure and vice versa, which is to say an amoral universe in which things happen according to laws and algorithms, supply and demand, the market cannot be indicted on the merits. It’s not enough to rail against capitalism, or government spending, for doing what they do best, which is to grow and to consume, in their turn. Politics and commerce both have as their unit of measure the human head, per capita; every minute that passes marks the creation of a new way to co-opt consumption, to lead the public mind to the next programmed step, to create an environment better and better suited to consumption. Even education has its place within these twinned systems, as any Academy-trained youngster can tell you. Best to be skeptical from start to finish.
The only solution is for us, as individuals, to think carefully and analytically about our entertainment, our news and media, without resting in the moral vindication that identifying these systems and decrying them can provide. It is not enough to simply swallow the highest level of entertainment, to sternly force ourselves to listen to NPR and watch PBS, and think that in so doing we can somehow change the world. That’s just another kind of spectacle in which we’re invited to take part. It’s not the media that need changing, it’s not the entertainment that has the power to change things: it’s the viewers.
The burden remains on the individual to challenge and interrogate these data, in order to keep from falling under the Blue Sun’s spell-but stories like Serenity, taking place in the area of media itself, are a necessary way of waking us up to these possibilities, and to our personal responsibilities. The mission of Serenity, its call to awareness and discernment, is ultimately a signal meant for us all, and in paying attention to its warnings and exhortations, we join in its mission ourselves. By taking the step beyond simply enjoying the story as entertainment, as we are urged, by taking its message more deeply into our lives, by doubting and questioning and “misbehaving,” by keeping and spreading vigilance and awareness of our entertainment and its meanings, by preserving just a single moment of doubt before giving in to what we’re hearing, if that’s all it takes. By keeping our eyes open to propaganda and manipulation in all its forms, by taking in the transmission and retelling it anew, we perform our part of the alchemy: we join in the signal, and ensure it never stops.
JACOB CLIFTON is a staff writer for the Web site Television Without Pity, writing weekly columns about television topics and series of interest (currently: The Apprentice, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, and American Idol). Excerpts of his writing have been used as readings for graduate and undergraduate classes in women’s studies, media studies, and psychology. Other media credits include appearances on E! True Hollywood Story, commentary on media topics for MTV News, and several national newspapers and radio shows. Jacob lives and writes in Austin, Texas, and is currently editing his novels Red Settlement and Serious Vanity for publication.
Acknowledgments
The publisher would like to thank Jason Paterson of Firefly Browncoats (http://www.firefly-browncoats.com), Sheilah O’Connor of Canadian Browncoats (http://www.canadianbrowncoats.com), and Renee Balmert for their assistance with this manuscript.
1 I find no evidence in his biography to support such a background, even on Wikipedia.
2 Disclosure time. Years back, I wrote a horror novel called Dawn Song. In it, the demon Belial crafts a succubus, whom he sends from Hell to our world as part of his eons-long war for supremacy of Hell with his enemy Leviathan. I created a story in w
hich a woman is crafted to be a weapon. Just bringing this up, in case anyone thinks I’m pulling a “kettle calling the pot black” on Whedon.
3 Aren’t you glad I used “converge” into River, instead of “flow”?
4 It’s sort of interesting that, given the vengeful legacies of female demons like the Furies, the male D’Hoffryn is head of this particular branch of infernal affairs.
5 True, one can see in Firefly subtle references to other time periods and historical events. The Alliance can occasionally be interpreted as a cipher for the United Kingdom prior to the American War for Independence, or the Soviet Union after 1917, their arbitrary rules and ham-fisted actions leading to more disasters, resentment, and resistance with each passing year. Whedon also made the Alliance banner an amalgamation of the Chinese and U.S. flags, a clear warning about the unification of large governments. But the core of the Alliance/Independent conflict in which Mal is thrust is a metaphorical derivative of the Federalist/Anti-Federalist battle that began in the late eighteenth century, and yielded as its most violent legacy the War Between the States.
6 It’s a little like prominent 1960’s activist-firebrand-turned-businessman Jerry Rubin, who was killed in 1994 while brazenly violating the law . . . against jaywalking.
7 “Heart of Gold” may be the exception to this pattern: Mal’s first instinct after seeing what he was up against was the practical desire to run. By changing his mind, however, he seemed to put himself and his crew in danger unnecessarily. But, like Simon’s determination to defy the Alliance and protect his sister, the women of the Heart of Gold appealed to his respect for those fighting for self-determination. Maybe it was a way of re-fighting the War for Independence on a more manageable scale.
8 See Leigh Adams Wright’s thoughtful “Asian Objects in Space” in BenBella’s Finding Serenity.
9 Perhaps a call back to Dashiell Hammett’s fictional Pinkerton Agent “The Continental Op”?
10 This is also the Malcolm Reynolds we meet at the beginning of the film Serenity, which-when taken as part of the canon-implies quite a bit of personal backsliding by Mal. The dramatic necessity of giving the character an “arc” in the film is most likely the real explanation, but it does make Mal more interesting when taken in context of the Firefly universe as a whole. What caused his nascent maturity to fail to take? Inara’s departure? Hm. . . .
11 The idea that a real punch to the jaw can just be shrugged off is such a fallacy, it must be created by people who’ve never really been punched in the jaw. In “Objects in Space,” Early slammed a metal handgun into Inara’s face, and she got nothing more than a delicately split lip. To borrow Early’s rationale from that episode, a writer should only be allowed to put moments like that in a script after finding out what it’s like to be hit in the face with a three-pound piece of jagged metal wielded by a strong, pissed-off criminal.
12 I suspect that the character of Book pays homage to the presence of religion in the great Westerns of John Ford (i.e., My Darling Clementine and The Searchers), but since creator Joss Whedon is an avowed atheist (see his October 9, 2002, comments in The Onion), it seems no one understood exactly what to do with him. Luckily Ron Glass had charisma to spare in fleshing out the part.
13 Of course, without this microcosm we’d have no show to discuss.
14 A similar change comes over that other great space rogue, Han Solo, in Return of the Jedi. After spending two films resolutely refusing to officially join the Rebellion, Solo changes his mind after his friends rescue him from Jabba the Hut. Typically, Lucas relegates this major shift in the character to a brief voice-over, but in Solo’s next scene he’s “General Solo” and is preparing to lead a team of Rebels to knock out the shield generator on Endor.
15 The ellipsis is Fraction’s.
16 At the time of this writing only six episodes of season three of Lost have aired. The one exception to the sentence above is in the season two finale, in which we see, for a moment, Desmond’s love, Penelope, communicating with a ship in an icy landscape.
17 Gernsback’s original term, oddly enough, did not catch on with the general public, so he later changed it to “science fiction.” That name stuck.
18 Tell that to Michael Crichton or Margaret Atwood.
19 Strangely enough, while we have plenty of examples of the former, history does not record one single example of Campbell rejecting an Arthur C. Clarke story because it was “just another locked-room mystery set in space” or of his rejecting an Isaac Asimov robot story because it was “just another rewrite of ‘The Golem of Prague’.”
20 Irish and Chinese excluded, of course.
21 Being a somewhat experienced writer, Joss Whedon was ineligible for the Campbell Award.
THIS PUBLICATION HAS NOT BEEN PREPARED, APPROVED, OR LICENSED BY ANY ENTITY THAT CREATED OR PRODUCED THE WELL-KNOWN TV PROGRAM FIREFLY.
“Catching Up with the Future” © 2007 by Orson Scott Card
“Mars Needs Women” © 2007 by Maggie Burns
“Girls, Guns, Gags” © 2007 by Natalie Haynes
“River Tam and the Weaponized Women of the Whedonverse” © 2007 by Michael Marano
“I, Malcolm” © 2007 by Nathan Fillion
“Freedom in an Unfree World” © 2007 by P. Gardner Goldsmith
“A Tale of Two Heroes” © 2007 by Shanna Swendson
“The Good Book” © 2007 by Eric Greene
“Mal Contents” © 2007 by Alex Bledsoe
“Curse Your Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal” © 2007 by Lani Diane Rich
“Mutant Enemy U” © 2007 by Loni Peristere
“Geeks of the World, Unite!” © 2007 by Natasha Giardina
“The Alliance’s War on Science” © 2007 by Ken Wharton
“The Virtual ’Verse” © 2007 by Corey Bridges
“Firefly and Story Structure, Advanced” © 2007 by Geoff Klock
“Cut ’Em Off at the Horsehead Nebula!” © 2007 by Bruce Bethke
“The Bonnie Brown Flag” © 2007 by Yvonne Jocks
“Signal to Noise” © 2007 by Jacob Clifton
Additional Materials © Jane Espenson
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