Beer Burgers Reviews Awesome Things!
Just a quick thing for you here. Watch Firefly. In case you don’t know about it, it was a show that lasted one season about space cowboys in space. It has some of the funniest, awesomest, and creepiest moments I’ve ever seen on television. It is completely awesome, and at a price of thirty dollars for fourteen episodes, if you ever buy DVD’s, you should buy these.
Also, if you don’t love a show where characters curse profusely in Mandarin Chinese for no apparent reason (typical translation: “Fuck everyone in the universe to death,”) then you HAVE NO SOUL.
October 26th, 2005 at 10:21 am
Sorry Sam,
My comment about seeing Serenity in theaters was for your American readers.
And I mostly agree with your opinions regarding the Civil War stuff. However, there is slavery in Firefly. It’s just that Mal & Co. are pretty much against it. But then, so was the Man With No Name.
Indeed, the vast majority of actual Westerns whitewash the whole slavery thing (and portray Indians with about as many human characteristics as Reavers), so Joss is just staying true to his genre. The nice thing about space future stories is that writers get to forget certain troubling things without as much hypocrisy.
October 26th, 2005 at 11:05 pm
I agree, it is pretty archetypal for Westerns to whitewash the issue of slavery, just as they seem to conveniently forget the disproportionate percentage of Black and Latino cowboys when they cast their films. (They’ve done a bit better with the whole Chinese laborer thing.) It is also true that a large number of the people who went West during Reconstruction were ex-Rebs looking to seek their fortune out of the meddlesome reach of the U.S. government.
[beard]
IIRC slavery played the biggest role in Firefly in that episode where they go to a fancy cocktail party on some planet and Mal gets into a duel with Inara’s client… the planet they were on seemed like “Gone With the Wind” in space.
[/beard]
I guess what bothers me about Firefly isn’t so much its recasting of traditional genre archetypes, or even its valorization of Confederates as romantic refugees from a more chivalrous era. Those have been done before. What bothers me is the context in which Firefly and Serenity were released: a time when our national discourse has recontextualized the Civil War as a prefiguration of our current Culture War, with the North on the wrong side and the South claiming the moral high ground, even on the issue of slavery (however disingenuous it may be, it’s nonetheless common for anti-choice activists to compare themselves with the abolitionists of yesteryear)! To portray the Confederates as sympathetic heroes who just want to be left alone, while portraying the Union as expansionist and Fascist (Sam, you need to see the movie to experience the full brunt of this… sorry) in such a context does more than simply romanticize a bygone era, it plays into a trope being promulgated by the enemies of America who seek to abolish our Federal government today.
In case the analogy isn’t strong enough, the movie downplays the Chinese slang, while significantly playing up the 19th-century Southern slang, for those audience members who can’t quite grasp blatancy. What’s more, it turns out the actor who plays Malcolm Reynolds has an ancestor who was a Confederate general. His name? You guessed it: Jubal Early. And where did he suffer his humiliating defeat at the hands of the United States? The Shenandoah Valley.
For comparison, this would be like making a film about a future race of perfect-looking Aryans who band together in a strict, orderly fashion to defend their civilization from an onslaught by large-brained, parasitic insects… oh wait, that’s what “Starship Troopers” is about. I loved that movie, too.
October 27th, 2005 at 9:01 am
Raph - it seems to me that, if your problem is with context, you need to take into account the actual audience of the show, which is very dedicated, but, let’s face it, small and nerdy. It seems to me that you’re going out of your way to have a problem with something relatively inocuous in a time and place where things that are genuinely harmful are all around you. Compare the Firefly subtext to the far more blatant and influential hate-mongering that you see on every TV news station. It’s like comparing apples and giant robot apples with teeth.
October 27th, 2005 at 10:05 am
Also - They don’t like it when you shoot at them! I figured that out myself.
October 27th, 2005 at 9:49 pm
Fair enough, Sam. I concede that Firefly is a symptom, not a cause.
Still, I would feel much better had the United States actually won the Civil War.
Re: shooting at them — who don’t like it? The fans? Or the giant robot apples with teeth?
October 28th, 2005 at 6:55 am
Also, while we’re on the subject, what do you make of the fact that the Jubal Early in the show is a black, existentialist bounty hunter? Sounds like almost the opposite of a confederate general to me.
October 28th, 2005 at 8:43 am
Dear Lt.
This is not Firefly related as Nigeria has not yet got wind of this show and therefore I have not been able to pick up a pirated copy of it with lots of guns and pictures of Sean Connery superimposed on all the characters. (our copy of Dodgeball is awesome) I was listening to the BBC and I just heard that your base is being moved. I was curious to know if there is truth to the rumor.
Anna (E. Coli) Grafton