June 27: Firefly (2002 -- Joss Whedon) & Serenity (2005 -- Joss Whedon)

★★★

Joss Whedon’s  been busy with two Marvel Avengers movies lately, and it’s easy to see why they’re a good fit for him.  The Avengers movies concern a disparate group of individuals who must learn to work as a team in order to succeed,  the same theme that Whedon’s earliest work focusses on in Firefly and its movie spin-off, Serenity.  The idea of building a community or team couldn’t be clearer in both his earliest and latest work.

In Firefly, this role of community-builder falls to Capt. Mal, who commands the Serenity.  Through all 14 TV episodes and the feature film, the one constant is the Captain’s focus on the importance of loyalty to the team and support of other team members.  The members of the crew take risks for the others, and betrayal of one another gets dire sanction. It’s not a big thematic shift from this to The Avengers having to learn to act as a single, cohesive unit despite their varied personalities and abilities.

But Firefly is a first effort, and there are drawbackss.  The acting recalls the deadpan declamation common in low-budget cable TV, and there are many problems with the script, from the too-frequently-painful dialog to the lack of character depth or arc.  A lot of the CGI and its design is good for its time, but the interiors recall those of Lost in Space or Star Trek some 40 years before.

An interesting aspect of Firefly is its overt drawing on the Western genre.  At the center of the narrative are two veterans of an interplanetary Civil War, having fought on the side that lost and then headed for the frontier.  And there are other Western characters like the dance hall girl, the tomboy, the hands and the preacher – all with a sci-fi twist here.  More obvious are many superficial references to Westerns, from the ¾-overcoat to the wood table and tin cups in the ship’s galley. The planets in Firefly are often sparse and dry, and horses and Conestoga wagons make appearances on this frontier.

It’s tempting to see these references as gratuitous, but Firefly/Serenity gets at some interesting intertextuality.  From watching Firefly, we recognize that the sheriff and his deputy isn’t far from the space captain and his sidekick, and a gruff Capt. Mal falls into a line of Western heroes that John Wayne so ably inhabits.  Evil, pretension, greed and ruthlessness drive both sci- fi adventure and the Western, and both genres can also be used as a search for knowledge and truth.  And if, like me, you like the way a Stagecoach deals with democracy and inclusion, you’ll get a pleasure out of watching how the crew of the Serenity grasp for the same despite their many differences. 

These early works by Joss Whedon have technical shortcomings, but the pleasure of watching the inter-genre play and of enjoying the theme of community in both make them worthwhile views.