Joss Whedon

In the Buffyverse, the bad guys are arch-demons and their minions. Their most potent and fearsome weapon is magic. In the Firefly ’verse, the bad guys are Alliance government higher-ups (“key members of parliament”) and their operatives. What is their most powerful and frightening weapon? It’s not military—armed conflict is fairly conventional, the unsuccessful war for independence is over, and the government maintains only an occasional military presence near the border planets. It’s not information technology—Captain Malcolm Reynolds and the crew of Serenity fly beneath the government’s radar and neatly elude detection at every turn. It’s not genetics or cybernetics—Joss’s vision of the future is refreshingly free of aliens, mutants, and robots (all the characters are very recognizably human). Instead, the really scary stuff in the series Firefly and the movie Serenity, the homologue to magic, the most insidious weapon, is neuroscience.

The two central mysteries that drive the larger story arc are the madness of a young girl on the run from Alliance agents (River) and the existence of the savage, demonic “Reavers” on the outskirts of known space. As it turns out, both of these story elements arise from abuse of neuroscience by the government. Neuroscientific manipulation is the most devastating form of personal mutilation (River) and the most destructive source of mass mayhem (Reavers). Like magic, it can also be used for good, but with unpredictable and mixed results, as exemplified by River’s largely unsuccessful treatment by her physician brother Simon, using neuroactive drugs and neuroimaging.

By adopting neuroscience as a superweapon and dramatic engine, Joss follows a long tradition of extrapolating from current scientific frontiers to dystopian extremes. Nuclear physics, genetics, and computer/robotics technology have been mainstay dramatic devices since the 1950s. Joss’s choice of neuroscience is relatively novel and very timely—brain research is on the verge of revolutionizing our world and our understanding of what it is to be human. Firefly and Serenity dramatize this revolution by making neuroscience seem nearly magical, personifying its power and peril in the character of River.

The reality of brain science is, of course, much less mystical and dark—modern neuroscience provides a biological basis for understanding human psychology and leads to unprecedented cures for neurological diseases. But it takes mystery, danger, and strife to construct a gripping story, and in Firefly and Serenity neuroscience provides those ingredients. That’s okay—as in most dystopian fiction, Joss’s dark vision of science still inspires a sense of wonder along with the dread. River makes us marvel at how our very essence depends on the neural mechanisms of the brain—a central truth emerging from current neuroscientific research with ever-increasing clarity (Crick). Most philosophers of mind now believe that human consciousness will be explained at its most fundamental level by neuroscience—that perceptions, beliefs, desires will be precisely identified with specific brain states (Dennett, Chalmers). We will need to reconcile and integrate that scientific revolution with our understanding of what we are, so that neuroscience enlarges rather than diminishes our humanity. In Serenity, River epitomizes this synergy of neuroscience and soul, by taking control of her own explosive neural potential and turning it into something miraculous and powerfully human.1 1. How Joss Makes Neuroscience Seem Like Magic

In Firefly and Serenity, Joss draws on his considerable dramatic powers to make neuroscience seem as dark, mysterious, and potent as magic seems in Buffy and Angel. Throughout Firefly, Joss deftly juxtaposed River’s beauty, grace, and innocence with bouts of violent madness and flashes of preternatural power, the aftereffects of her psychic mutilation in a government research facility. Even in lighter episodes focusing on Mal’s semi-comic heroism, we got troubling hints of the terrible force that River represents. In the beginning of “War Stories,” Kaylee and River chased each other around the ship, fighting over an apple and laughing gaily like the young girls they should have been. Kaylee won the apple away from River and exulted that, “No power in the ’verse can stop me.” Late in the episode, Kaylee was left alone to guard the rear in a gunfight. She looked horrified and lost, unable to do anything but hide behind a barrier. Then River, barefoot and clad in a flimsy shift, walked dreamily into the frame and gently took away Kaylee’s huge revolver. River briefly scanned the scene, muttered some nursery rhyme-like mnemonic, stood up, and calmly shot three men dead in quick succession, with her eyes closed. When she then said to Kaylee, in her little girl voice, “No power in the ’verse can stop me,” the effect was chilling. River is a frail young girl, but neural manipulation had made her into a homicidal monster, and Kaylee stared at her, aghast. As River said (in the episode “Trash”) to the formidable fighter Jayne, after his previous betrayal of her and Simon was revealed: “I can kill you with my brain.”

River’s outbursts in other episodes ranged from the comic and relatively harmless (cutting up Preacher Book’s Bible and trying to rearrange it into something more sensible) to the clearly dangerous and seemingly demonic (suddenly slashing Jayne across the chest with a kitchen knife, declaring that “he looks better in red”). Her genius is not only for violence; in various episodes she showed off hints of an unguessable range of abnormal talents. In “Safe,” she grasped a complex local Maypole dance in just seconds and joined in seamlessly, then elaborated, eventually becoming the center of the dance as everyone else clapped appreciatively. In “Shindig,” she seduced the petty criminal boss Badger by suddenly adopting a brash Cockney persona that convinced him she was a kindred spirit from the same slums. In “Objects in Space,” she outwitted and humiliated a Boba Fett-like bounty hunter named Jubal Early. Like River, Early was psychologically twisted in a way that gave him great power. He quickly and quietly overcame the crew one by one with his spooky ability to assess a person’s weak point and apply the right kind of cruel, irresistible pressure. But River was spookier and more subtle-a spirit who seemed to take possession of the ship itself, and finally to inhabit Early’s own mind.

In fact, River is a psychic. Perhaps this is innate, like much of her other genius, although Simon hinted that this too could be a “gift” from the Alliance—when Mal said, “I think she’s a reader,” Simon replied, “They’ve definitely altered the way she reacts to things, even the way she perceives.” Her demonstrations of psychic ability earned her the label “witch” at several points, especially in “Safe” (where she was nearly burned as one), making the connection to magic explicit. By the beginning of the movie, the rest of the crew is clearly frightened of her and her unpredictable powers.

In the opening to Serenity, Joss treats us to a dizzying first-person taste of River’s psychological dislocation. He steps the audience back through four levels of reality in a sequence that would do credit to Philip K. Dick (the master of layered realities, whose fiction gave rise to the movies Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly). We begin with the familiar Universal logo unfolding to announce the feature. Next is the startling realization that we are already in the movie itself, looking at a computer display of the real planet Earth. We pull back to see River’s childhood classroom lit in saturated nuclear white. That scene briefly establishes her youthful genius and conflict with authority, then subtly sours into a bad dream foreshadowing the holocaust on Miranda. We are violently jerked into the next reality—a densely equipped laboratory in dim blue light, our first glimpse of the scientific nightmare hinted at so darkly throughout Firefly. Here the adolescent River we know is restrained, struggling but still dreaming, with a steel probe inserted into her forehead. We are introduced to her chief tormentor, an Alliance scientist who describes his manipulation of River’s brain with cold-blooded relish and obvious pride. This scene evolves into a thrilling (and deliberately parodic) rescue. At the height of the action, Joss pulls the rug out from under us again (and laughs at his own action sequence starring the more typically inept Simon) by freezing the frame, then rewinding. We are finally in current time, watching a holographic tape with the Operative, a Bond/ninja-like government agent in pursuit of River. As punishment for a serious breach of security, the Operative executes the sniveling scientist in a poetic and brutal fashion calculated to satisfy our thirst for revenge against River’s captors. By the end of this opening sequence, we have an intimate sense of River’s disordered mind, and we are left in no doubt about the movie’s attitude toward neuroscience. It is the government’s most insidious and powerful tool.2

How insidious, and how powerful, we will not fully realize until the neuropharmacological holocaust on Miranda is revealed. Miranda is neuroscientific mind control writ large and gone catastrophically wrong. It is the ultimate in disastrous utopian experimentation. It is the deepest explanation of River’s madness, and her confrontation with the awful reality of it brings about a Freudian release that restores her sanity.3 Most surprisingly, it is also the explanation for the demonic Reavers. They turn out to be the tiny fraction of the Miranda populace with paradoxical reactions to the “Pax,” the neuroactive drug spread by the Alliance government through the water supply to control all hints of violence and rebellion. The Pax made everyone else simply “lie down” (as River’s teacher commands in the dream), becoming so apathetic that they simply wasted away in place. As River says of the Reavers, “They never lie down.” 2. How Joss’s Vision Relates to Neuroscientific Reality

In Firefly and Serenity, Joss has constructed a wonderfully human story, with the kind of emotion, action, and detail that makes us believe in, laugh with, and cry over a family of human characters. Yet this story points up a scientific truth that some find to be disconcertingly inhuman—that we are essentially neural creatures, nothing more and nothing less than our brains. In fact, referring to the brain as something we possess is inappropriate. We do not own brains, we are brains. That fact is vividly dramatized by the profound neural alterations to River’s perception, cognition, behavior, and personality. Yet scientific reality can be even more bizarre. Brain lesions can strike at the heart of what it is to be human.

The one brain structure specifically mentioned in River’s case is the amygdala, an almond-shaped nucleus in each hemisphere near the base of the brain that is involved in emotions and memory formation. Simon explained that repeated “stripping” of River’s amygdalae had made it impossible for her to filter or control her emotions: “she feels everything … she can’t not” (“Ariel”). In reality, selective damage to the amygdalae, which is very rare, has the opposite effect, blunting emotional reactions.4 Wider damage to the amygdala and other structures in the medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus, produces amnesia, the inability to form new long-term memories. This condition (dramatized in the movie Memento) was first clinically described in a patient known as H.M., who underwent bilateral surgical removal of the medial temporal lobes in order to control debilitating epilepsy. As a result, H.M. lost the ability to form new long-term memories (memories that last beyond the point at which we are deliberately holding them in consciousness, over the course of seconds or at most minutes). H.M. lives in an eternal present, unable to extend his own personal narrative beyond what he remembers from before the surgery (Squire and Kandel).

Other brain lesions due to surgeries, mechanical injuries, strokes, or tumors can impact perception, cognition, and selfhood even more dramatically. Perceptual agnosias can be strikingly specific, eliminating a narrow slice of conscious experience and leaving the rest intact. For example, patients with lesions confined to the “fusiform face area” of the brain have perfectly normal vision, but can no longer identify individual human faces. Other specific lesions can selectively eliminate color or general form vision. Lesions of the parietal lobe (one of the four major divisions of each brain hemisphere) affect spatial cognition. Most brain functions are “crossed,” and thus lesions of the right parietal cortex impact perception of the left half of space. Awareness of the left half of objects or even the left half of the body can be wiped out. In a famous series of self-portraits, an artist who suffered a parietal stroke began by drawing only half his face; the other half was added gradually in subsequent portraits as he recovered over a period of months. Parietal patients sometimes fail to groom or dress the affected half of their bodies, feeling that they belong to someone else. It is hard to believe that a thinking, functioning human being could cognitively disown half their body, but this goes to show that everything we experience and believe depends on some kind of neural information processing. When you destroy that neural process, you take away a piece of reality (Rapp).

Even the unity of consciousness can be disrupted by brain lesions. The two hemispheres of the brain, which are largely redundant in function, communicate via a thick bundle of fibers called the corpus callosum. In some cases of intractable epilepsy, the corpus callosum is surgically severed to prevent the spread of seizures between hemispheres. Experiments on these patients have shown beyond doubt that the two hemispheres have separable conscious experiences and behavioral responses. If the two hemispheres are presented with conflicting cues in a visual recognition test, the patient will point to one answer with the right hand (controlled by the left hemisphere) while simultaneously pointing to a different answer with the left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) (Gazzaniga, Ivry, and Mangun).

These scientific observations present us with an inescapable truth: the brain and the self are one and the same. There is nothing about us that does not depend on some kind of neural processing somewhere in the brain. That is the reality dramatized by River’s condition throughout Firefly. How can Joss reconcile this scientific reality with his own moral framework, defined as always by human individuality and self-determination? For the answer, we have to examine the climactic battle in Serenity. 3. River Triumphant

We can see in retrospect how the entire Firefly story was always building toward the final battle in Serenity. This is where Joss weaves together all the longer threads of his story—Mal’s cynicism, Alliance oppression, River’s madness, the nightmarish Reavers. The setup occurs on Miranda, where River exorcises her madness by unearthing her searing memory of the holocaust, and Mal rediscovers his idealism when confronted by an Alliance crime too heinous to ignore. Both characters, internally conflicted throughout the series, are at last themselves again, Mal a hard-bitten freedom fighter, River a delicate teenage girl, though with a difference.

Many of Joss’ final battles in Buffy and Angel take place on two planes, one physical, the other magical.5 In Serenity, Mal fights the straightfor ward physical battle, going one on one with an invincible opponent, using gun, blade, and fists, and calling on every combat trick and ounce of stubborn courage he’s got. River must fight a battle that is physical but also entails another plane of reality, not magical this time but neuropsychological. The Reavers are transformed on this plane, gutted of human personality and inflamed into virtual demons by an accident of Alliance neuropharmacology. River herself has been transformed by Alliance neuroscience, into the ultimate warrior, a murderous automaton triggered by a subliminally broadcast Alliance signal in the bar on Beaumonde, unstoppable until Simon utters a safe word and she collapses. Her transformation into the perfect fighter cost River her sanity. After Miranda, she seems to have recovered her sanity, but as battle commences, she unfortunately seems to have simultaneously lost her will and ability to fight. She weeps over her fallen brother like a child losing a parent, plaintively crying, “You always take care of me.” Then, she straightens, and Joss turns the scene on its head with just two words: “My turn.”

Like any good Whedon apocalypse, this one forces the heroes to face imminent death under hopeless circumstances. Mal is run through with a sword, expiring on the floor, while the Operative dusts his hands off and walks away. River sacrifices herself to protect the rear, sealing the blast door but dragged into a pit of raving demons. On first viewing I believed at one point that Joss had really killed off both characters (okay, I’m gullible). But Mal drags himself up off the floor for one more round of punishment, and he has one more ruse de guerre up his sleeve. And River, miraculously, is dancing in a Reaver inferno, a slim wraith dealing death with balletic martial grace. This is the scene where Joss brings together everything Alliance neuroscience has created: the inhuman ferocity of the Reavers, the supernatural power of River’s transformed mind.6 When the blast door opens again at last, it reveals River standing over a roomful of slain Reavers, eyes smoldering, blade dripping, the apotheosis of girl power. The awesome potential of her neural transformation is unleashed, but it is now hers to command. Her sword hand is retightening, in readiness to mow down the Alliance soldiers who have swarmed behind her, but when they are given the order to stand down, she exchanges a glance with Mal and drops her blade. The epilogue shows her whole again, a naturally curious teenage girl, innocently spying on Simon and Kaylee’s lovemaking. But she is also the genius and the warrior, ready to take her place beside Mal at the helm of Serenity, in full control of herself and her power.

Thus endeth Joss’s neuroscience lesson. Humans are neural creatures; they can be destroyed at the neural level, they can be twisted at the neural level, they can even be enhanced at the neural level. But, as River exemplifies, those neural circuits contain a core of humanity, a kernel of self-determination that can overcome the agony and madness to assert itself as a courageous and loving human being. Science confronts us with the fact that our essential selves are neural—we are brains, nothing more. But that does not make us one bit less human.

1. There is a natural tendency to view scientific explanations of human psychology as somehow incompatible with our status as unique, individual human beings possessed of free will. If we are simply complex neural networks whose characteristics and actions are determined by physical processes, how can we also be loving, suffering souls, free to choose right or wrong, wisdom or folly? I believe this longstanding philosophical dilemma arises from an impoverished conception of what a complete scientific explanation of human psychology would look like. We imagine that the brain works like a desktop computer or a B-movie robot, with simple input/output behavioral patterns and no internal life. But in fact our brains contain on the order of 100 billion neurons, each making on the order of 1,000 to 10,000 connections with other neurons. This makes the human brain by far the most complex sys tem in existence. Thus, our physical embodiment is not a constraint on human freedom, but instead a virtually infinite substrate that supports the ineffably rich and subtle variety of human experience. We should celebrate the brain as a miraculous source of human power, not bemoan it as a physical prison. River’s story explores both the physicality and human power of the brain. She dramatizes how the brain is part of the material world—and thus subject to physical mutilation that can cause madness—but also how it is rich enough to embody love, courage, sacrifice, genius—all the personal qualities that are most essential to our concept of humanity. (Ed.’s Note: See Thomas Flamson’s essay on free will.)

2. It is worth noting that, while neuroscientists are unsavory characters in Firefly and Serenity, in reality they are mostly a decent lot, more interested in curing disease and understanding the mind than in world domination. The technologies employed for evil purposes in Joss Whedon’s fiction are beneficial or promising therapies in the real world. Neuroactive drugs provide our best approach to controlling depression and other debilitating or life-threatening psychological disorders. Brain stimulation is used to ameliorate movement deficits in Parkinson’s disease and to relieve intractable pain (Perlmutter and Mink). Prosthetic sensory implants in deaf patients can support auditory perception up to the level of speech recognition (Wilson, Lawson, Muller, Tyler, and Kiefer). Neural implants in the frontal cortex can be used to read the brain’s movement commands, and are expected to someday give paralyzed patients and amputees precise control over real or prosthetic limbs and hands (Barton). I imagine Joss appreciates much of this himself, and has no more real antipathy toward neuroscience than James Cameron (writer/director of Terminator) does toward computers.

3. Freud’s classic conception of hysteria involved repression of a traumatic event into the subconscious. The psychic energy associated with that trauma manifested itself as the hysterical symptoms afflicting the patient. The cure, according to Freud, was to relive the event, bringing it into the light of consciousness and thus releasing the psychic energy once and for all. River’s experience on Miranda follows this pattern quite explicitly. The mystery that Joss then teases his audience with is whether, in losing her madness, River has also lost her genius and power.

4. Ed.’s Note: See Bradley J. Daniels’s essay, “Stripping’ River Tam’s Amygdala.”

5. In the Buffy season seven finale, for instance, the powerful fighters (Buffy, Spike, Faith) opened the Hellmouth and took on the First Evil’s army of übervamps. Elsewhere, the magically gifted Willow was performing a spell to activate an army of Potentials as full-blown slayers, providing essential support in the physical battle. Willow had previously described this spell as the most powerful magic she had ever attempted and given instructions that she should be destroyed if the spell failed. Everyone fought bravely, but final victory again depended on magic, in the form of an amulet worn by Spike, through which the enemy was destroyed, though at the (temporary) cost of Spike’s own life.

6. Joss professes to choose his character names with great care. The phonetic similarity between “River” and “Reaver” is no accident—the girl and the madmen are two sides of the same coin, both products of Alliance meddling with minds. I think of “River” as a reference to the “stream of consciousness,” psychologist William James’s famous description of the continuous succession of states in one mind that we think of as the self or the soul. A “Reaver” can be one who plunders or pillages (from Middle English reven, to plunder) or one who tears things apart (from Middle English riven and Old Norse rifa, to rend, cleave, split, or break)—both apt descriptions for the savages in Firefly and Serenity.