14 April 2005
Dangerous visions
Dangerous visions If you’re wondering what happened to the America we knew, you can find a lot of answers in the TV science-fiction series Firefly.
Much SF is thinly-disguised westerns set in space, John F. Kennedy’s “high frontier”. Firefly drops the disguise, setting most of its action on lightly-settled “border planets” where dress and manners evoke the Wild West of the Reconstruction. It’s cowboys plus spaceships.
American Civil War references play a large part. The central character, Mal Reynolds, is a former sergeant in the Independent army recently defeated by the victorious Alliance. His striped cavalry breeches are still held up by suspenders, and his right leg has an antique Navy Colt sidearm strapped to it.
Embattled and embittered, he’s The Outlaw Josey Wales reincarnated; addicted to understatement, and trained in the Clint Eastwood school of haiku. Space cowboys, it turns out, whistle Dixie.
Reynolds and his crew dodge the law, doing the best they can in a world that allows them neither peace nor place. The Anglo-Sino Alliance that hounds them represents the fusion of Earth’s two superpowers. Alliance officials act like the Feds and dress in a futuristic pastiche of Eastern European military style. The theme song has it all:
Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me.
Science fiction is never about the future, of course, nor would it be interesting if it were. Fantasy offers the present a distorting mirror in which we see ourselves as Lilliputians, Yahoos, hobbits or Winston Smith.
It’s only a TV series, of course, and a cancelled one at that; a harmless confection whipped up by the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Thanks to Ray Cannon for recommending it.) But the life of man is lived largely in the imagination. We live in a web of stories which we dub Reality. Talking recently to movie producer Martha Chang in LA, I heard that Hollywood is obsessed with finding ‘Red State’ movies. Firefly is made for this.
Joss Whedon’s Firefly offers a vision acutely attuned to the dominant mood in America: beaten but defiant, resentful and suspicious of any kind of authority. It is a dangerous vision for the most powerful state on the planet. The poor are always with us, and so are the Hitlers, awaiting their opportunity to scare us into murder and oppression.
See also
» SUVs and turkey friers 22 Jan 2005
» War on anxiety 17 Feb 2005
» Mark Fiore’s Minister of Fear
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