Serenity

Joss Whedon evocatively conveys the mourning he still experiences when his short-lived series Firefly was cancelled by network executives in 2003. The demise of this program created a special moment in popular culture when something unexpected emerged from the crisis. What was created activated a transformative dialogue between the postcolonial and the popular that generated space for questioning and representing processes of power that normally remain unseen. Serenity operates in unclear spaces of meaning as it was conceived as a brokered attempt to extend the life of a severely curtailed plot envisioned for Firefly.

Through the series, Whedon would have been able to map out the complexities of characters and plot trajectories to provide challenging televisual terrain for a new generation of TV fans post-Buffy and -Angel. Instead, Whedon had to make do with the temporal compressions of cinematic viewing to do justice both to the narrative and to the characters who provided the paradoxes and paradigms of story motivation. As a result, Serenity was composed of half-truths and conflicted contexts where the spaces for unconventional and unruly meanings were able to emerge from the diegesis. These meanings offer insight into the political trajectories of colonization and the creation of Empire that are difficult to control.

Serenity is a hybrid film straddling the ambiguous worlds of viewerships that were incorporated and invested in the film. For the fans of Firefly, their viewership held different requirements than individuals unfamiliar with the text. In order to gather up a wholly unfamiliar audience of cinema viewers with little knowledge of the Firefly universe and its key actors, Whedon had to provide a filmic structure to reveal the characters’ motivation and reasoning. As a result, Serenity is an odd film that sits uncomfortably in terrain in between Firefly fans and newer audiences with competing and contrasting story needs. The postcolonial potential of the plot provided tremulous terrain through which this matrix of meaning could be knitted together in a playful and perverse representation of a future universe where power asserts itself and is re-encoded and reinscribed by individuals and communities from within and on the border of this system.

Insecurities in the relationships between the textual versions of the Whedonesque universes of Firefly and Serenity is revealed in plotting inconsistencies that would be known to fans of Firefly, but not necessarily identified by viewers with no knowledge of the series. For example, Serenity is structured as a continuation of the Firefly narrative, but never fully embodies a temporal continuity with the series.

Important time markers include dialogue indicating Simon and River Tam’s tenure on Serenity as eight months, and that Inara—the captain’s love interest who is a “companion” (a high-class prostitute not unlike a geisha)—has left the ship and now resides as an instructor at a companion training house. In the last two episodes of Firefly Inara decides to leave Serenity and it is clear that the plot of the film identifies with this narrative development in the series. Shepherd Book has also—between the end of the television series and the start of the film—elected to leave the ship and now lives on the planet of Haven. However, in the series Simon Tam and the crew of Serenity only become fully aware of River’s true abilities in the final few episodes. In the film it is revealed that Simon had this knowledge all along. If this was the case, the series is very ambiguous on this point. In “Safe” (1.5) for example, Simon states that his sister is highly intuitive as if he suspects there may be something more to her ability to discern what people are thinking and feeling, but it is never made clear to the viewers that he knows with full consciousness that she is psychic.

These uneven moments of continuity and discontinuity with the Firefly series make Serenity a hybrid text moving between worlds and readerships in a complex dance of the familiar and unfamiliar. The history of Firefly combined with the need to make Serenity a commercial success—to gather up viewers who may not have seen the series—creates a carnivalesque text that resists easy categorization and generates hybrid viewing strategies by audiences. These thematics are encoded and deployed within the narrative strategies of Serenity as a postcolonial text that embellishes and emboldens the experiences of the colonial and the imperial, to create a narrative perversion of sense making in the post-Firefly Whedon universe.

Serenity is postcolonial science fiction. It is a text that embodies in its structure and intention an engagement and dialogue with imperial themes involving the colonization of other worlds. Many science fiction films possess these tropes. Indeed, “The history of space representation is full of versions of settler colonization” (Redfield, p. 799). Colonial and imperial themes punctuate the science fiction oeuvre. The archetype of late 20th century science fiction cinematic success, Star Wars, has its evil Empire of colonialists constructing death stars and using “the dark side” to annihilate rebellions on multiple conquered and unconquered worlds. This is just one of many science fiction films relying on and deploying the colonial context as setting for conflict, climax, and resolution. The relationships between science fiction and the colonial trope are intimate. They have been intertwined with popular imaginings of the rationalized project of “western” enlightenment. Indeed, the thematics of “SF” [science fiction] came into being as a popular genre during a specific period in European history, the high age of empire” (Alessio, p. 11). The ideas and ideologies of science fiction are exceptionally reliant on the conditions that stimulated the global and local shifts embedded in empire formation and maintenance. More recently, Avatar has explored the consequences of imperial greed and hyper-capitalist rationales that motivate the conquering of land and indigenous peoples for profit. The postcolonial potential in science fiction resonates in contemporary texts conveying conflict between disempowered communities and a significant state or corporate entity seeking control over land, resources, solar systems, and people.

Serenity offers punctuation to the postcolonial diegesis in that the colonialists are not represented taking land from indigenes, but rather terraforming unpopulated planets for human settlement. These populations are left with few supplies and are expected to craft their own livelihoods from the land or raw materials native to the landscape. These populations are inflicted by all sorts of difficulties ranging from illness created by side effects resulting from the terraforming process to unlawfulness and poverty due to their geographical distance from the centralized “core” planets of the Alliance that are technologically advanced and “civilized”. For Malcolm Reynolds and his crew, being nomads drifting through the outer planets on the border and keeping distance from the centralized and colonial power of the Alliance, is a key motivation for their life choices.

Malcolm Reynolds and his first mate Zoë were soldiers in the war for independence fought by the populations of the border planets against the imperial rule of the Alliance. The independents lost and Malcolm and Zoë now make their living in a way that resists the imposition of imperial “civilization” and subjugation by the core planets through these ideologies. This inside rebellion is what makes Serenity and its predecessor Firefly so volatile. These are not unruly natives opposing the civilizing force of the empire; they are themselves subjects of the empire, those who from the inside are resisting the ideals of technological advancement and enlightenment that coerce populations to the will of the Alliance. They prefer to live at and on the “border” rather than be manipulated to the will and power of Alliance interests. It is a tense and conflicted relationship that River Tam keenly observes in Serenity:

Teacher: With so many social and medical advances, why would the independents fight so hard against us?

Young River: We meddle.

Teacher: River?

Young River: People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think. Don’t run. Don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.

Teacher: River, we’re not telling people what to think, we’re just trying to show them how.

The Alliance seeks to control and contain opposing and difficult ideas in order to align populations under their authority.

The Alliance seeks to control and contain opposing and difficult ideas in order to align populations under their authority. In both Firefly and Serenity the processes by which they achieve this assertion is represented as multifaceted involving both military force and the manipulation of information via news media or “the puppet theatre” as it is referred to in Serenity.

These structures are embedded and potent, making the oppressive power structures implicit and conventional instead of strange and perverse. The parallels by which the social media, military force, government, and corporate interests are aligned in Serenity offer a sinister insight into the world of rule and regulation as well as the irreverent practices of resistance to them. It is a double vision—a way of seeing into the fictionalized and nonfictionalized methods by which control and power are asserted and inserted into everyday lives. Serenity operates as a “looking glass”—a way to look back on ourselves and examine the meanings by which we live our own lives and the systems through which we make sense of power, authority and resistance. The two-way mirror offered in Serenity operates in the space left vacant by Firefly, but its image is less acute and slightly blurred. It is an incomplete vision and a limited glimpse into the scenes and situations that seduce citizens, offering a space for the reimagining of rebellion that is contained and controlled, but also messy and mesmerising.

These ideas are unruly, and they filter through Serenity in ways that are subtle and seductive, implanted in the narrative context as simultaneously normative and deviant. They slice through the facades of meaning-making offering a troublesome text that re-imagines the everyday through future tropes that connect and cauterize senses of the self via the (post)colonial. This makes Firefly dangerous and Serenity seductive. The film and series peeled open spaces of critique through a perverse potlatch of plotting that knitted together desire and deviance, consumption and colonization, the lawful and unlawful.

Whedon managed to translate many of the ideas at the core of Firefly into Serenity, by maintaining the key relationships between the Alliance and the border planets as well as depicting the hedonistic and uncompromising values of thievery among the Serenity crew. Audiences are left with an unruly and fragmented text that walks the lines between the popular and the unpopular. The glimpses of insightful dialogue that slice through the clichés of meaning embedded in the imperial intention sit uncomfortably beside the action sequences designed for spectacle and easy consumption, and character traits circumscribing narrative conventions. Serenity embodies postcolonial politics because it revels in the fractures of meaning systems where there are unclear meetings between imperial ideals, ordinary citizens, and their everyday lives. It is not postcolonial science fiction only because it deals with the themes of colonization and resistance in the future, but rather because it provides a mechanism by which the diegesis as well as the conditions which created Serenity as a cultural text coincide and are embedded in the tensions between authority and rebellion, the inside and the outside, the popular and the unpopular.

Both the content and means of production of Serenity interface with postcolonial meanings and moments. These moments are insightful and challenging as they convey the complexities of the ambiguous and what it means to walk between contradictions—in meanings, identities, and representations. Malcolm Reynolds is the key contradictory character in the film, giving voice to the unconventional, whereas in the series the ensemble cast creates a volatile network of contradictory characterization to provide a nexus through which these unpredictable meanings manifest. As Mal explains:

“I look out for me and mine. That don’t include you unless I conjure it does. Now, you stuck a thorn in the Alliance’s paw. That tickles me up here. But it also means that I gotta step twice as fast and that means turning down plenty of jobs, even honest ones. Put this crew together with the promise of work which the Alliance makes harder every year. Come a day there won’t be room for naughty men like us to sneak about at all. This job goes south, there may not be any. So here’s us. On the raggedy edge.”

Malcolm Reynolds and his crew are unruly. They desire the untamed frontier of the outer-world planets and the space in-between where they can operate outside of the imperial gaze of the Alliance. They are nomads who are always just passing through, and they, like consumers of the film (and series) are playing in the spaces between the sanctioned and the unsanctioned.

The border planets are depicted as lawless, savage, and barbaric. At the very fringes of this space exist the mythologized (for those on the central planets) Reavers—beings outside the power and imposition of the Alliance. While Reynolds and his crew are part of the empire and resist from within—by stealing, smuggling, and harbouring fugitives—the Reavers are banished to the imaginary excesses for core planet populations. They are only real to those on the border where the excessive and the grotesque can exist. Reavers rape, tear the flesh from live humans, and disfigure themselves in their madness. The Reavers are the extremes of resistance. They cannot be colonized and are beyond the meanings of imperialism. Moving from the irrational to the rational is a colonial trope subverted by the Reavers. In Serenity, reason, enlightenment, and the civilized development of humanity, economically, politically, and culturally through colonization is corrupted by these creatures. They are irrational and cannot be brought to the rational—advanced and civilized—ideals of the colonizers. The Reavers are the embodiment of madness—of the colonial project gone wrong and perversions that result from imperialism. In Serenity it is discovered that the Reavers were created by the Alliance as a result of a population experiment gone wrong on the planet of Miranda.

Miranda is referenced to The Tempest by William Shakespeare. She was a girl of intense emotion, loved by her father and raised on an isolated island. This analogy is used in Serenity when River’s knowledge of Miranda draws the crew to the planet and its secret. The experiment was to use an air-born medication known as “the Pax” to subdue the population and weed out aggressive attitudes and intentions—to colonize hearts and minds and force compliance. The experiment failed, causing many of the citizens of Miranda simply to lie down and die, lacking the motivation to rise, eat, wash or even breathe. The remaining population experienced an opposing effect where their aggression was heightened, creating the Reavers.

The desire to keep Miranda a secret motivates the Alliance to pursue River Tam and the crew of Serenity. River is also mad but not irrational like the Reavers and therefore able to access knowledge and information that is “outside” the Alliance’s approved archive. Her tenuous position within these spaces of knowledge means she must be silenced as she is able to translate between the irrationalities of imperialism and reveal the embedded structures of resistance. In Firefly the relationships between River, Serenity’s crew, and the Alliance are more complexly depicted as the Blue Sun Corporation is also configured as key actors in River’s abduction, pursuit, and torture. In the series, the pursuers are not simply the Alliance, but a sinister sector of this complex driven by greed and pathology. As the narrative shifts into Serenity, the potency of the pathological is unravelled as the unintended consequences of the colonial project are revealed.

In Serenity the emphasis of empire is shifted to the Parliament—the faceless ruling body of the Alliance—as the key entity pursuing the Tams and that which sends a nameless Operative as opposed to the psychotic but named bounty hunter Jubal Early in the “Objects in Space” episode of Firefly. This nameless Operative embodies the unknowable cortex of imperialism and the interface of ruthless and institutional ideologies that motivate the meanings created in this center. As these ideas about power, governance, and greed move toward the fringe, the meanings become unstuck and are able to be rewritten by Reynolds and the crew. Malcolm defeats but does not kill the Operative and this individual even allows Serenity to be repaired at facilities he has authority over—demonstrating the unravelling of meanings that spiral out from the centers of authority to the edges of empire and back into the core. At his defeat and the revelation of government secrets, the Operative no longer can fulfil his function—he is stripped of his power and imperialism is emptied. The ideologies of the Alliance have been exposed, re-encoding the Operative and nullifying his monstrousness. It is the unintended consequences of Empire that are ultimately dangerous.

It is the unintended consequences of Empire that are ultimately dangerous, and not the cultivated contexts of power maintenance and monitoring at the heart of the colonies. The Operative admits to his monstrousness in the narrative, but is ultimately neutralized as the spaces of postcoloniality extend. The Reavers are the real monsters as their creation and containment are unpredictable—an unintended consequence of the corrupt colonial project. They exist at the edges of meaning and are therefore the most dangerous threat to Empire. The crew of Serenity operate between these spheres—the controlled and cultivated monsters of the Alliance and the spontaneous and sinister monsters at the border always threatening to undo the codes and contexts of reality. They harness these entities to further their own agenda to declaw the Alliance and visualise the in-between spaces of sense making that are functional, measured and sensible.

These subtle shifts streamline the narrative, making the bad guys easily cohered and constructed within the imposing power bloc of the Alliance and assisting with the audience’s attraction to the irreverent resistance of the Serenity crew. Key paradigms are being drawn between the power of the Alliance, the resistive thievery of Malcolm Reynolds and the oppositional barbaric savagery of the Reavers. The crew of Serenity are unknowingly part of a much larger political and social conspiracy involving ideologies at the core of the rhetoric of Empire. This trinity of power blocs creates a moving vortex of meanings that provide space for multiple strategies of understanding resistance. River is an imperial aberrance, simultaneously inside and outside of empire—able to reveal Reavers and (re)encode the resistance of Serenity and her crew as essential and ethical instead of deviant or unlawful. Through her knowledge of Miranda, their actions are not simply rebellious or criminal, but part of an ethical project of reinscription, reconstruction, and rewriting of imperial histories.

It is the Reavers that provide the ultimate uncontrollable variable within the narrative and it is also Malcolm Reynolds’s ability to move between the convoluted meaning systems that enable him to harness their unruliness for his purposes. In Firefly, the power structures were conveyed as an intricate network with local warlords on outer rim planets holding sway, along with petty thieves, corrupt Alliance officials, and lawmen, and brutal organized crime bosses. Reavers only make one appearance in the series in the first episode. They are allowed a much greater role in Serenity to provide a counterbalance to the Alliance and construct the provocative postcolonial potential of the film. They are the monster in the closet—the warning about the consequences of perverting populations. This lesson is encoded into the ideologies of empire and activated in the manipulations of people genetically and politically, not in some abstract scientific leap or morally corrupt future context, but in the conditions of imperialism that were and are used to motivate the discoverer ideals of “adventure,” “exploration,” and “discovery.”

These are not future ideas, but those of our immediate colonial past and present. These are concepts with us in the contemporary where “advocates of space exploration constitute perhaps the last unabashed enthusiasts of imperialism, cheerfully describing conquest, settlement and expansion, and hesitating not a whit before employing the term ‘colony’” (Redfield, p. 797). The implicit and expected imperial ideologies that are embedded within the language we use to speak about space and even think about an off-world future are revealed in the subtleties of Serenity. This also represents our failure to adequately understand the impacts and tragedies of colonization in our historical proximity. The pasts of colonial exploitation are encoded in the power structures of indoctrination, resistance, and rebellion within the filmic narrative. Serenity walks these lines where the conventions of the colonial are spotlighted and questioned. The spaces between the colonial and the postcolonial are presented as dangerous and playful—where new languages and grammars are revealed. The potential for perversion is always simmering just below the surface in Serenity. Mal tells his crew:

“This report is maybe 12 years old. Parliament buried it and it stayed buried until River dug it up. This is what they feared she knew and they were right to fear, coz 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. You all got on this boat for different reasons. But you’ve all come to the same place. So now I’m asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything I know this. They will try again. Maybe on another world. Maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now—ten—they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I don’t hold to that. So no more running. I aim to misbehave.

The motivations of empire—to civilize other peoples, to bring enlightenment where little exists, to develop culturally, politically, technologically and socially, and to extend geographical boundaries, are all encoded as corruptions within Serenity. The power of the Alliance does not hold sway—it is unsteady and poisonous. There are other spaces for resistance activated and visualized. The importance and significance of the fringe expanding the roles and rules of colonization are embodied in the crew of Serenity and in the Reavers that haunt the edges of empire.

The potential for the finely crafted colonial context to come tumbling down is ever present in these spaces. The postcolonial potential is present not in a cosmopolitan togetherness as outlined by Lindy Orthia in her argument involving Doctor Who where the future is composed of “a multi-racial cosmopolitanism” (Orthia, p. 208) there are no aliens in Serenity—but instead a tenuous and savage interface between the ideologies of colonization, human evolution and mutation, war, civilization, and lawlessness.

In Serenity the future is unstable—in the process of being made and constantly being torn down. The postcolonial problematic of the fringe always and implicitly influencing the core is represented by the Alliance’s relentless pursuit of the Tams, and in their desire to control information, emotions, and embodiment. Simon Gikandi’s argument about the “incomplete project of colonization” (Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, p. 9) [No problem here at all. This is how I’d like the other quotes to be, citing the specific page the quotes are taken from] is realized when we can visualize through Serenity the spaces for rebellion against imperial ideas and their influence on the shifting meanings of our present, as well as the fundamental corruption of the project embodied by Reavers.

Serenity plays in the spaces offered by the tropes and tones of the Firefly template, but it cannot capture the depth of Whedon’s Firefly vision. Instead, it is a half-life for the story—a moment of survival for an idea beyond realization. But, perhaps it is this tenuousness that makes Serenity inherently and powerfully postcolonial. In Serenity, we find the archetypal postcolonial moment—the grief for what could have been—for who we could be if the colonizers had never come.

The postcolonial landscape of the “verse” is palpable as the begrudging submission of the Outer World Independents to the Central Alliance frames the narrative arc of Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his Firefly crew. Serenity is postcolonial science fiction through which Whedon is activating a space for the engagement of rebellious and resistive ideas about government, crime, sexuality, and belonging that struggle for popular articulation in an era highlighted by compliant consumer consciousness and rigorous retail sales. Yet the strength of these ideas—their subtleties and subversions—has seen them survive network cancellations and mismanagement, to re-emerge in Serenity. This struggle between power and resistance in the metamorphosis of Firefly into Serenity paralleling the diegetic intentions of the story arc creates an engaging and insightful exposition on postcoloniality and its manifestations in popular culture.