Serenity 9780231544115

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1. FINDING SERENITY
2. PUTTING THE CULT BEFORE THE HORSE
3. MEDIA FRONTIER MYTHS
4. TEXTUAL MARKERS OF SERENITY’S CULTDOM
5. THE CULT OF WHEDON
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

CULTOGRAPHIES

CULTOGRAPHIES is a list of individual studies devoted to the analysis of cult film. The series provides a comprehensive introduction to those films which have attained the coveted status of a cult classic, focusing on their particular appeal, the ways in which they have been conceived, constructed and received, and their place in the broader popular cultural landscape.

OTHER PUBLISHED TITLES IN THE CULTOGRAPHIES SERIES:

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW Jeffrey Weinstock

DONNIE DARKO

BAD TASTE Jim Barratt

QUADROPHENIA Stephen Glynn

Geoff King

THIS IS SPINAL TAP Ethan de Seife

SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY

FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! Dean DeFino

FRANKENSTEIN Robert Horton

Glyn Davis

THEY LIVE

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

D. Harlan Wilson

Ian Cooper

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

MS. 45

THE EVIL DEAD

DEEP RED

Kate Egan

Alexia Kannas

BLADE RUNNER

STRANGER THAN PARADISE

Matt Hills

Jamie Sexton

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN

DANGER: DIABOLIK

Alessandra Santos

Leon Hunt

SERENITY Frederick Blichert

WALLFLOWER PRESS LONDON & NEW YORK

A Wallflower Book Published by Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York • Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved. Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press. Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-231-18233-1 (pbk: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-54411-5 (e-book)

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Series and cover design by Elsa Mathern

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

vii

1

Finding Serenity

1

2

Putting the Cult Before the Horse

13

3

Media Frontier Myths

33

4

Textual Markers of Serenity’s Cultdom

72

5

The Cult of Whedon

107

Notes

112

Bibliography

114

Index

122

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, I would like to thank Ernest Mathijs, who encouraged me to take this project on, championed it, and offered invaluable guidance along the way. And thank you to Jamie Sexton and Yoram Allon, Commissioning Editor at Wallflower Press, who both worked hard to bring it to life and give it a home in the Cultographies series. Marc Furstenau, Malini Guha, André Loiselle, Brian Greenspan, Erika Balsom and Charles O’Brien all helped shape and define many of the ideas presented here. I am equally grateful to Murray Leeder and Sylvie Jasen who allowed me to give guest lectures in their undergraduate classes where I workshopped a lot of my ideas on seriality, transmediation and Serenity. And also to Marie-Claude Bennett and Kevin Chabot who read drafts and offered helpful feedback. Steven Brust and Keith DeCandido helped me understand the strange and fascinating world of tie-in novel publishing and the politics of Serenity novels in particular. Agnes B. Curry offered context for my own interventions into existing ‘Whedon Studies’ debates surrounding Reavers and colonial imagery. Kiba Rika was kind enough to help me in my futile attempt to interview Joss Whedon. Annie Burnaman at Can’t vii

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Stop the Serenity took time out of a very busy schedule to help me secure artwork rights from Don McMillan, who generously let me use his original event poster herein. And a huge thank you to my ever-supportive friends and family, and in particular to Max Ferguson, one of the few people I know who has watched Firefly and Serenity more times than I have, who has read more versions and drafts of this book than I can count, who supports me in every sense of the word, and who makes me feel like no power in the ’verse can stop me.

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1 FINDING SERENITY

In Serenity’s (2005) opening scene, Simon Tam (Sean Maher) infiltrates the high-tech lab where the government has been experimenting on his sister, River (Summer Glau). Just as they are about to make it out of the facility, a man offscreen yells ‘stop!’ The image freezes and the speaker, the Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor), walks directly through Simon and River, revealing the escape’s mediation. What we have seen thus far is a holographic video screened within the film’s diegetic world. The Operative rewinds and replays the footage, analysing details: moments that, after one screening, seemed insignificant. The Operative has been tasked with reacquiring the Tams. His ability to do that will depend in part on what he can glean from the escape footage. It is a powerful opening scene, destabilising us, robbing us of our faith in the reality (or immediacy) of the images before us. This destabilisation is compounded by the fact that it is the third sleight of hand in only a few minutes. The film’s first shots provide a history of the colonised galaxy after the evacuation of ‘Earth That Was’. A narrator (voiced by Tamara Taylor) describes the terraforming of newly discovered planets and the war to unify and ‘civilise’ the colonies. Suddenly 1

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we lose her omniscient Voice of God as the camera pulls back to reveal a digital blackboard and schoolteacher; the flashback was a literal lesson within the film, complete with all the colonial, revisionist history of many a contemporary classroom. But this is also no ordinary flashback. We soon learn that we are viewing from River’s perspective, experiencing a memory – perhaps a hallucination – that she is forced to relive in the government facility, a memory from which she is (and we are) violently ripped out of. It is itself also just one part of the layered and slyly re-mediated escape. The scene is equally powerful in aligning us with the Operative at the outset of a film that is very much about spectatorship. With a cult film like Serenity, the form of that spectatorship is significant, and it is significantly reflected back to us. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik posit that the consumption of cult cinema relies on continuous, intense participation and persistence, on the commitment of an active audience that celebrates films they see as standing out from the mainstream of ‘normal and dull’ cinema. (2008: 4) Certainly indirectly this description applies to the Operative, whose active engagement with moving images is one of intense participation and persistence. His role in hunting down the Tams forbids him from consuming the video passively, and this aligns him with the rewatching and analysing that takes place amongst cult film enthusiasts. He literally immerses himself in the projected image when he walks through it. And he conspicuously distances himself from the mainstream, represented here by a government scientist, Dr. Mathias (Michael Hitchcock). When asked for his rank and name, the Operative responds, with an air of pride and exclusivity, that he has neither. He lectures Mathias about honour 2

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before killing him, demonstrating his own knowledge of ancient cultures, a kind of intellectual capital shared only with a select few. A corporate stooge, Mathias is not a member of the cult. The film invites us to replay this scene. To watch it closely and pick it apart. We may look for ways in which it conforms to or departs from the narrative of Firefly (2002–3), the FOX TV series from which Serenity was born. We may certainly revisit and reconsider the scene’s mediation, perhaps questioning the teacher’s words and her ensuing disagreement with River. Why was a war fought? Why, as one student asks, would anyone refuse to be ‘civilised’? Why would the winning side feel the need to indoctrinate its children so? Serenity stands out for its thematic engagement with spectatorship(s) in ways that allow for a layered reading of its narrative/industrial project and indeed its cult status. As with most film cults, it is difficult to group all of Serenity’s fans into a single, coherent category. Tanya R. Cochran admits to the difficulties of even defining Firefly and Serenity’s fans, the ‘Browncoats’, so named after Firefly’s resistance army: ‘Rather than coming to a tidy conclusion about Browncoat-ness, I am increasingly intrigued and challenged by it, especially in light of broader theories about fans, fan culture, and consumption’ (2010: 239). Cult cinema is itself difficult to define – ‘essentially eclectic’, say the editors of Understanding Cult Movies (Jankovich et al. 2003: 1). Similarly, despite the frequency of communal viewing, the cult of a single film does not always cohere into an easily manageable social group.

JOINING THE CREW My own place within the Serenity cult is not entirely stable, nor indicative of the norm, if such a thing exists. It is slightly 3

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embarrassing to admit that my first response to Serenity was mostly one of disinterest. An adaptation of a sci-fi-western series from a few years back? I had not seen the show and so was not particularly drawn to the film. Serenity’s trailer did catch my eye on one front though. Its director, Joss Whedon, was also the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). I had watched most of Buffy during its initial run. As with Serenity, I had been a bit late to the party, having lived in a country home with only a handful of TV channels for most of my youth. I had the chance to get caught up with the DVDs years later, watching all seven seasons in quick succession, later replaying favourite episodes and entire seasons and sharing the experience with friends. Whedon’s series was hard to resist. It was full of witty banter, strong female characters, engaging and progressive storylines masked as schlocky horror and teen drama, and a killer musical episode, the first of its kind. Learning the words to the musical numbers of ‘Once More, with Feeling’ and singing along with friends was one of my first ritualised cult experiences, one invitingly encouraged by Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) herself, looking directly at (or through) the camera, and singing the line, ‘you can sing along’. Buffy follows a teen girl navigating the horrors of high school while living a double life as the Chosen One, the latest in a long line of young women and girls anointed with the power to slay vampires and demons. Like Serenity, Buffy blends genres liberally and rather self-reflexively. This, along with progressive storylines, in-your-face girl power and radical (for prime-time TV) politics had already, not surprisingly, attracted a cult following of its own. At the time of Serenity’s release, Whedon certainly had some pop cultural capital to spare, but I let it slip by for one reason or another. A few years later, looking for a new TV show to binge during a dull summer, I came across Firefly at a video store. 4

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My Buffy fandom had been ballooning – I was following the monthly ‘Season 8’ comics, picking up where the show had left off, along with Fray, an earlier comic about a slayer from the distant future. Serenity had stuck around in my memory, but the link between this show and the film was still not entirely clear to me, despite obviously shared characters and setting. Tim the video store clerk was helpful. He was excited to be renting the series to a newbie, and so he filled me in quickly enough. This would be my first communal experience of the show, bonding over the object of our soon-to-be shared cult. According to Tim, Firefly had not quite had the viewership it deserved and did not live through its first and only season. Because of vocal fans and some successful DVD sales, Whedon and the crew had been given the opportunity to wrap up the story on the big screen in the feature film Serenity. By now I was very curious, and excited to find out that this rather slim box set was not all I had available to me – this sounded like a show that I might like. This brief description of Serenity’s genesis is, in fact, quite accurate. FOX cancelled Firefly after only eleven episodes had aired, and indeed, after petitioning first FOX and then Universal Studios, Whedon was given the green light to make Serenity, which would be his feature directorial debut after years of screenwriting and television direction. Much like the comic book ‘seasons’ of Buffy, this was a kind of cinematic Season 2 (or extended series finale) of Firefly. I will return to Firefly’s cancellation in the following chapter to explore both the reasons for its cancellation and the fan activities that would lead to Serenity, but for now, suffice it to say that, within the realm of cultdom, the fans’ investment and direct participation is noteworthy. I loved Firefly immediately. The basic premise worked for me. It was familiar, but still clever and original. A recontextual5

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ising of American Civil War westerns with strong links to John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), it followed Malcolm ‘Mal’ Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and his ship’s crew, and took place years after the war to unify inhabited planets under the rule of a central government, the Alliance. Seeking independence, and having fought on the losing side with the Browncoats, Mal takes odd jobs, sometimes legal, sometimes not, mostly transporting cargo from A to B aboard the ship Serenity, named for the final battle of the war at Serenity Valley. The main series plotline concerns human cargo brought onboard in the series pilot, ‘Serenity’. When a young doctor is found to have brought his sister (the above-mentioned Simon and River Tam), cryo-frozen, onto Serenity, the crew discovers that the Tams are on the run from the Alliance. Taken from her family under the pretense of being offered an advanced education for gifted children, River was experimented on, her brain vivisected. While left with an eerie clairvoyance and clear signs of PTSD, the exact nature and degree of the damage inflicted on River’s psyche is not immediately clear. Offered protection by Mal, the Tams become members of the crew of Serenity, and, with the help of the others, work throughout the series towards uncovering the mysteries surrounding River’s imprisonment. The clever dialogue of Buffy was in full force here, and Firefly wore a familiar, playful engagement with genre on its sleeve. An obvious western, with six-shooters, dusters, a southern yokel vernacular and a twang-filled score, Firefly takes the trope of the space cowboy to a literal, almost absurd level. Whedon has described Firefly as ‘a Stagecoach kind of drama’ (2006: 6). Beyond the show’s aesthetic debt to westerns, it also borrows most of the character types collected in Ford’s film. In Firefly, we had compelling, complex characters (many of them women), and somehow the underdog story, attached to 6

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it post-mortem, gave it an extra edge, a kind of tragic sense of foreboding that made every episode all the more precious and rare. Outside of Firefly’s fandom, the series exhibits clear features of the cult text. The Fordian archetypes mentioned above fit well with Umberto Eco’s notion that cult texts are intertextual and that they thrive on archetypal representation, where ‘each actor repeats a part played on other occasions … because human beings live not “real” life but life as stereotypically portrayed in previous films’ (2008: 73, 74). The series’ intertextuality is closely linked to its engagement with genre. As Eco notes regarding Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), it ‘became a cult movie because it is not one movie. It is “movies”’ [emphasis in original] (2008: 74). Cult films thus draw on the audience’s knowledge of and appreciation for their many referents. Similarly, it is quite impossible to read Firefly’s western motifs, tied to its sci-fi setting, without reference to the two genres and their independent and shared histories. To borrow from Eco, Firefly is not a television series, it is all television series – and movies – belonging to either generic tradition. And it is more. It is also tied to Whedon’s other cult works in equally intertextual ways. Certainly, Firefly and Serenity are different texts, but their intertextual relationship to one another is not the same as that with either Stagecoach or Buffy. Additionally, Serenity enjoys a kind of de facto second-hand cult, inherited from its televised predecessor. Serenity, in many ways, is the product of the Firefly cult’s unwillingness to let the story end. It is not only a cult object, but a monument to cultdom.

THE SCHOOL OF SERENITY Initially, I watched Serenity on the heels of Firefly, returning the last discs of the series only to rent the film immediately. 7

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In Serenity, we discover that the Alliance had been working to weaponise River. They had trained and conditioned her to be an expert fighter and had exploited (and enhanced) an innate psychic ability. When she is triggered early on by a television commercial for ‘Fruity Oaty Bars’, her programming is rather brutally laid bare. Not only does she beat up a bar full of people (quite literally, almost no patron is left unscathed), she also suddenly remembers the word ‘Miranda’. Culled from an unwitting government official’s mind by the imprisoned River, Miranda is a former Alliance colony. The Serenity crew discovers that the blood-thirsty Reavers first introduced in Firefly were accidently created on Miranda as part of a project to drug the populace into submission. Instead, the Alliance created a hoard of roaming monsters – raping, pillaging space zombies. With their new mission to make public the Alliance’s crime, Mal and the crew work to disseminate a video file, proof of the cover-up, to the entire universe (or the ’verse), striking a blow to the government’s reputation while simultaneously ensuring the Tams’ freedom. As promised, Serenity provided narrative closure to a series that had left many avenues open. It also raised the stakes, bringing Mal into very direct conflict with the Alliance, willfully taking on the government for the first time since losing the war. The film also killed central characters from the series, making the sense of finality all the more palpable. First Shepherd Book (Ron Glass) is killed on his new home planet of Haven when the Operative wipes out all possible sanctuaries for the crew, hoping to smoke Mal out. And during the film’s climax, Serenity’s pilot Wash (Alan Tudyk) is killed by an enormous harpoon, shot into the ship’s cockpit by the Reavers, after he miraculously pulls off an impossible landing. Over the years, I returned to Serenity many times. It was not quite the same as Firefly, more than just a series finale or an extended episode. There were the obvious differences, 8

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like the widescreen format, or the minor inconsistencies with story content that had to be retold for the benefit of new audiences. There was also the strange sense of watching something self-contained, capable of speaking for itself without really needing Firefly to introduce it. But none of these features really mark a major break between the two texts. TV series contradict themselves all the time, and part of the art of televised storytelling is the ability to make each episode engaging on its own terms. And the cinematic quality of widescreen is, for me, quite frankly superficial. Something else stood out. Serenity’s narrative itself is more cinematic than Firefly in a number of ways. It very self-consciously situates itself alongside cinematic referents like Forbidden Planet (Fred McLeod Wilcox, 1956), Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), and it conveys a major narrative in a condensed running time. More than anything though, Serenity stands out because it was released as a feature film. It was marketed as such, and it first played on the big screen. Quite simply, it had a different media status than that of Firefly. This was something that I kept coming back to, over and over again. At some point, I discovered the Serenity comic books, by then limited to Those Left Behind. These three comics, much like Buffy’s Season 8, functioned as a continuation of the series, but also as a lead-in to the film. Later, there came more comics: prequels, sequels and the miniseries Leaves on the Wind and No Power in the ’Verse that functioned perhaps most straightforwardly as further seasons of Firefly – or serialised sequels to Serenity. As with Serenity, these comics transported the Firefly narrative into new media. I fixated on that idea. I looked outside of Firefly and Serenity as well, remembering how The Matrix (Lana and Lilly 9

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Wachowski, 1999) had similarly continued its story outside of a strictly filmic franchise: in video games, comics and The Animatrix (Various, 2003), which initially appeared as a series of animated web shorts. During the height of my Firefly and Serenity fandom, I began graduate studies. Seeking a Master’s degree in film studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, I was becoming increasingly invested in the idea that cinema was not limited to 35mm film or even digital features. The exchanges that take place between film, television, print and web content were too many and too fluid for my liking. And neither could I accept the strict demarcations between official media texts and the various forms of viewer participation and fan writing that interacts with films like Serenity. In short, the thought that film studies could somehow insulate itself from such a permeable media environment seemed dubious – at the time, I thought that was a novel idea, so I was pleased to find a wealth of resources on new media, digital cinema and transmedia storytelling with which to frame my research. My case study was an obvious choice. Transmediation became the basis for my Master’s thesis looking at how Serenity – along with the series, comics and other ancillary texts surrounding it – was a single, ongoing story, a serial told across media. It is difficult to separate my academic pursuits from my role as fan, or my membership to film cults on a personal level. As with many film scholars, my interest in such questions is closely tied to my personal history of engaging with cult texts. Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) were early initiators for me, inviting repeat viewings and a shared passion with friends, as was The Matrix, which Whedon once cited as an influence on his later series Dollhouse (2009–10), also cancelled by FOX: ‘I do have that entire movie tattooed on my brain’, Whedon says (qtd. in Schneider 10

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2007). Indeed, Serenity echoes The Matrix repeatedly in its use of kinetic violence, pop-philosophy and transmediation. Transmediation is certainly not just a sidenote. The fact that Serenity was released as part of a larger, ongoing narrative started on television is important to my reading of the film. As a cult film, the role of Firefly’s small but dedicated fanbase was a crucial ingredient in bringing Serenity to life. But that struggle (of the underdogs triumphing over the supposedly all-knowing FOX executives who cancelled Firefly in the first place) is also allegorised within the film in a number of fascinating ways, as is the act of spectatorship, of bottomup media practices, of fandom and cultdom. Similarly, the permeability of different media – their ability to share content, to work together, to clash – is at the heart of the crew’s struggle in Serenity. I opened this book by pointing to Serenity’s self-relflexivity, and indeed I will return to this topic frequently. It is a throughline of both the film’s narrative and its cult status. One major advantage of reading Serenity through the lens of cultdom is that the film is one of many interlocking texts that inform one another to varying degrees but, more importantly, offer the fan or cult audience a plethora of points of access. Because a film’s cult is active not only in consuming its object of cultdom but also in developing ritualistic or communal spaces of reading and writing, this feature of Serenity reveals overlapping objects of study and cult consumption. The film represents a convergence of texts and media and, yes, cults. Its narrative is informed not only by the texts that precede and surround it (the series, the comics, the web videos, the official novel, the unofficial novels and fan fiction, etc) but by the cult that revived its original object of fandom: Firefly. It is thus impossible to consider Serenity, especially as a cult film, without reference to such a socio-industrial framework. 11

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Serenity is also an important text within Joss Whedon’s greater body of work. Whedon has operated within the realm of cultdom throughout much of his career. He is a compelling figure in his own right and has received a great deal of scholarly attention as a cult figure and a major voice in pop culture. Serenity builds on many of the themes that Whedon had begun to explore in Buffy as well as early film screenplays, and, in many ways, it prefigures the director’s later involvement with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, tying together various superhero films in the cross-over The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012). Thus, Serenity occupies an important place within Whedon’s career and indeed can productively inform our understanding of cult cinema and spectatorship more broadly.

12

2 PUTTING THE CULT BEFORE THE HORSE

Unlike most other cult films, Serenity’s very conception and production cannot be theorised without reference to its fandom, or more precisely without reference to the pre-established fandom of Firefly. This fandom operates on several levels. Certainly Firefly, despite its cancellation, needed fans for Universal to agree to its cinematisation – how could a follow-up to a cancelled series possibly work without some carry-over audience? Before that, the series needed enough of a following to justify the release of the DVD box set that I, and the many other fans who boosted the show’s posthumous ‘ratings’, rented or bought, increasing the series’ profitability and overall fanbase. Beyond this, the direct action taken by fans to revive Firefly is at least in part responsible for the film’s genesis. Here the text and its spectators intersect very directly, so that the series’ cult followers become, as a group, an unofficial, collective co-producer. This kind of direct involvement of fans was certainly not new with Serenity, but it does appear to have enjoyed a 13

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mainstream evolution following the film’s release. One rather groundbreaking example is Veronica Mars (Rob Thomas, 2014), another cinematic follow-up to a cancelled series: UPN and the CW’s Veronica Mars (2004–7).1 In 2013, Veronica Mars creator, Rob Thomas, started a campaign on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, hoping to raise his minimum budget of $2 million. By the end of the first day, the project had not only surpassed its goal, but it had also broken the records for the fastest campaign to ever reach both $1 million and $2 million on the platform (see Dickey 2013). Fans could (and did) become financial backers of the project, but they were also offered incentives that included regular exclusive production updates, reserved seating at San Diego Comic Con events in support of the film, personalised messages from the director and cast, walk-on roles in the film, sometimes with recorded dialogue, as well as the privilege of naming characters that would appear in the final film (see Thomas 2013). While some of the direct involvement offered to fans may seem superficial, this example highlights some of the ways in which fandoms bridge the gap between shared viewership and official participation in the creation of their favourite texts. A more directly relevant example is Con Man (2015), a series also fully funded within a day, this time on Indiegogo. Con Man is a web series, created by Alan Tudyk, the actor playing Wash in both Firefly and Serenity. With Serenity actors co-starring in the series about cult idols at conventions, Tudyk very much plays on the real-life dynamics between Nathan Fillion (Firefly and Serenity’s Mal) and himself, and specifically on the fandom of the series and film. Con Man is a comedy about an actor, Wray Nerely (Tudyk), who, years ago, starred in the cancelled ‘cult classic’ sci-fi series Spectrum. The series (Con Man, not Spectrum) explores his relationship with his now more famous Spectrum co-star 14

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Jack Moore (Fillion, in a nod to his post-Serenity fame on the NBC series Castle [2009–16]). The fans contributing money are very much treated as co-creators; ‘produced by YOU!’, the Indiegogo page proclaims. Season 1 of Con Man was released on the online video platform Vimeo on 30 September 2015. Tudyk quickly announced his interest in producing more episodes: ‘If someone wants us to make more, I think we’d like to’, he says (qtd. in Moraski 2015). Such an interest undoubtedly existed, as Con Man’s second season premiered in 2016, this time on Comic-Con HQ, Comic-Con’s subscription video on demand service. The original video pitch for the project features Tudyk and Fillion as they banter about the very direct links between the web series and their experiences on Firefly and Serenity, while also inviting fans to ‘partner’ with them to become ‘producers’, thus circumventing networks like FOX where the series might be cancelled ‘too soon’. The cancellation of Firefly and the willingness of fans to participate are explicitly and cleverly worked into the show’s appeal for funding. The web series, much like Serenity and Veronica Mars before it, requires a pre-existing cult of devoted followers willing to become funders before a final product even exists. The cult following becomes a creative and industrial feature of production. The development of Serenity before Veronica Mars or Con Man is an ideal access point for unpacking these intersections of spectatorship and production. But before laying out the roles and status of fans and the basic progression from Firefly to Serenity, it is important to define the cultdom at the heart of this project. Who are the casual fans, the avid fans, the formal fan communities, the cult followers, the Browncoats? What differences, if any, exist between fandom and cultdom? And importantly, when and how do all of these categories intersect? 15

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FANS, CULTS AND BROWNCOATS Thus far, I have used the terms ‘fan’ and ‘cult’ not quite interchangeably, but with the understanding that those people who make up Serenity’s cult following are also its fans. This permeability of terms is intentional. Matt Hills, for example, defines ‘cult media’ texts through the fact that they ‘attract passionate, enduring, and socially organized fan audiences’ (2008: 134). By this definition, it would seem, cult viewers are always fans, though fans may not always be cult viewers. The distinction is still vague, however. Elsewhere, Hills notes that defining groups like followers, enthusiasts, admirers, fans and cultists in opposition to each other belies their many points of overlap (2002: x). Fandom is generally seen as passionate and enduring, and it is most certainly organised, as with fan clubs and conventions, fan fiction communities, online message boards, letter writing campaigns, the list goes on. But do these kinds of fan activities necessarily equate to cultdom? Mark Jancovich comments on the subcultural quality of the cult audience, though again this is applied to fans as well: he suggests that subcultural ideologies are essential to fan cultures as a mark of distinction from ‘normal’ popular audiences, while simultaneously arguing that cult film’s subcultural status, its opposition to the mainstream, is its defining feature (2008: 150–1). This kind of subcultural mentality was the backbone of midnight movies in America as well as internationally. J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum describe the range of midnight offerings thus: ‘mainly diverse kinds of marginal exploitation fare, ideal for Halloween spook-athons or rowdy New Year’s Eve bacchanals, but also suitable for certain minority tastes on ordinary weekend and weekday nights’ (1983: 1). Such a marginal cinema would include the 16

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horrors of Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932) and Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968), along with the celebratory queerness of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) and the films of John Waters. Joe Dante also focuses on the oppositional stance of cult cinema, pointing to ‘movies that certain niche followers love but that remain obscure or unappreciated by the culture at large’ (2011: vii). He concedes that obscurity is not wholly necessary but that ‘it helps’ (ibid.). Firefly and Serenity are certainly steeped in counter-cultural rhetoric, of resistance to dominant institutions of power, so it is easy to see how the texts themselves appeal to this kind of subcultural positioning. Mal and his crew spend much of their time avoiding an oppressive, repressive government, while Simon and River are fugitives at large. And we root for all of these marginal characters. The nature of this counter-cultural message is never spelled out though. While it is tempting to read Serenity with an eye to Whedon’s outspoken allegiance to feminism and left-wing causes, the film’s politics oscillate.2 The Browncoats are stand-ins for the Civil War’s Confederate Army, after all. And Serenity has been consistently claimed by right-wing groups as their own: the Libertarian Futurist Society gave it a special award, while Bureaucrash, the Cato Institute, and the Institute for Humane Studies were notably well represented at advance screenings (see Howe 2015: 140). ‘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’, a young River says of the Alliance in Serenity, summing up a basic desire for freedom from large governments that often accompanies conservative ideologies. Her statement could apply to Libertarianism as much as to the civil rights of various marginalised groups – River could be alluding to gun rights or high 17

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taxes as much as to same-sex marriage or the disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans. One of Serenity’s great successes is its ability to function, politically, as more of a Rorschach test than the reflection of a single ideology. ‘The political critique is such that the series serves as a prism reflecting the ideas, fears, and desires of those who watch’, says Andrew Howe (2015: 140). Whedon celebrates a sense of counterculture, giving his characters a heroically oppositional stance that can stand in for any perceived position of resistance. Firefly and Serenity are, in short, relatable to various self-identified underdogs, enabling a sense of solidarity within the industrially marginalised cult. Certainly the origins of both words, ‘cult’ and ‘fan’, suggest a subcultural status, a distinction from the ‘normal’ audience. The cult’s religious roots brand it as radical – it exists to subvert mainstream culture. As Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton remind us, the cult is a ‘heretical’ alternative to the Church (2011: 2). The pathological fanatic, shortened to ‘fan’, is likewise ‘deranged’ and ‘excessive’ in his or her enthusiasm (Jenson 1992: 9). Neither, in short, behaves according to the societal ideal. When fans dress as their favourite characters for the Avengers premiere or congregate to meet their favourite authors and artists at comic conventions, are they ‘elevated’ to the level of cult, or does cult itself have a further layer of subcultural elitism? A case could surely be made for the counter-cultural value of texts like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, 1965), with their implicit as well as explicit challenges to polite, middleclass respectability. It may be harder to attribute such countercultural values to Spider-man (Sam Raimi, 2002), Dr. Who (1963–) or The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003), though each text, like Serenity, does tend to pit its heroes against a dominant power structure. 18

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This oppositional or subcultural position occupied by fandom or cultdom is itself problematised by the ambiguousness of its other, the so-called legitimate or mainstream. When the mainstream is defined as academia and the more literary or high arts, Jankovich reminds us that cult audiences often ‘attempt to raise the value of their own tastes by demonstrating their comparability with it’ (2008: 156). Whedon certainly does so in much of his work, with literary allusions, academic references, and sometimes outright adaptations, whether of Frankenstein and Dracula in Buffy, or Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing (2012) and indeed Serenity, as will be discussed in a later chapter. Further, the highbrow, upper-class art cinema scene of the 1950s was known for offering foreign and independent films with content too controversial for Hollywood, aligning it with the counterculture in its own way (see Jankovich 2008: 158). Joli Jenson also highlights the elitist assumptions attached to the pathologised fan, whose passions – whether comics, sci-fi, anime, etc – are relegated to the fringe despite their overall similarities to literature, opera or even gardening. We ascribe none of the supposed deviance and social inadequacy of fandom to these pursuits despite organised communities and specialised knowledge and appreciation that are not unlike the film societies and conventions surrounding fan or cult texts. At the very least, it is safe to say that a certain permeability has always existed between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘subcultures’ of fandom and/or cultdom. It is still not entirely clear, though, what differentiates fan groups from the cults. Another way to frame this question is to look at the cult and fan texts themselves, to ask what similarities or differences exist within on the level of form and style. Already mentioned is Umberto Eco and the question of intertextuality, which is tied quite directly to viewership. 19

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The distinction between viewing protocols and textual material may not be so strict though. The importance of this intertextuality is, after all, predicated on the viewer’s recognition of it. Blade Runner’s cult status, for example, stems at least in part from the audience’s appreciation of its blending of science fiction and film noir, much as Serenity blends scifi, westerns and zombie films. Again, the fans and cults blur here. The sci-fi fan bases their fandom on a genre and on inherently intertextual generic conventions. And the comic book fan, watching Marvel’s Daredevil (2015–), is engaging with a remediated character, intertextually tied to other Marvel Cinematic Universe properties, as well as to the source comics and to the earlier film adaptation of said comics, Daredevil (Mark Steven Johnson, 2003). Are sci-fi fan favourites and comic book films not also cult texts? Returning to Hills, it would seem that passion, endurance and social engagement are at the heart of cult viewership, which sometimes extends to fandom. The main distinction is, then, one of degree. Hills’ reference to religion, to cult fandom as ‘neoreligiosity’, offers a sense of the intensity and organisation of such fandom, which may not necessarily apply to the more casual fan. Thus, a text becomes a cult object via its particular fandom. So, again, not all fans will necessarily belong to the cult. On a textual level, Serenity does more than overtly reference other texts and genres. It is equally invested in subcultural and countercultural narrative themes, with its band of misfit protagonists operating outside the law and social legitimacy in various ways and for various reasons. And with regards to reception, the film certainly has a dedicated following of Browncoats who organise around shared causes as well as around the film itself, with the two generally overlapping, as is explored below. The cult of fans is also an integral part of the film’s background. The cult failed to produce 20

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numbers that would keep Firefly on the air and, noting the series’ low Nielson ratings early on, went as far as to raise money to buy a full-page ad in Variety, imploring readers to watch the show and demanding that FOX keep it running. ‘You Keep Flying, We’ll Keep Watching,’ read the ad’s headline (see Pascale 2014: 218). After Firefly’s cancellation, the cult expanded, regrouped, and demanded the production of a follow-up.

“YOU CAN’T TAKE THE SKY FROM ME”: THE CANCELLATION OF FIREFLY In ‘Who Killed Firefly?’, Ginjer Buchanan looks to explain the circumstances of Firefly’s cancellation and points to the villain most popularly cited amongst fans: ‘FOX Executives in the Boardroom with Bad Decisions ... Clearly they didn’t understand the show, and further aggravated the situation by some amazingly dumb scheduling choices’ (2004: 47). Indeed, the episodes aired out of order, with the original pilot unaired until after the series’ cancellation. Additionally, FOX simultaneously hosted the Major League Baseball post-season, periodically interrupting Firefly’s already irregular schedule (see DeCandido 2004: 56). But for Buchanan, a more nuanced explanation demands that we also examine audience expectations. FOX, looking to fill the notoriously difficult Friday night 8pm slot, had been aiming to re-create the earlier success of The X-Files (1993– 2002). Not quite knowing what had made The X-Files click with audiences, the network had trialled and cancelled numerous other series before trying out Firefly. What seemed clear was that an unclassifiable genre series would be best (see Buchanan 2004: 47). Decades earlier, in 1965, Gene Roddenberry had sold Star Trek (1966–69) to NBC by describing it as ‘Wagon Train to the stars’, tying sci-fi and the western to go on to create a long-lasting cult favourite – despite a shaky beginning and underwhelming initial ratings (2004: 50). 21

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FOX’s marketing campaign was also frankly perplexing. Reducing the show to the status of a wacky, genre-bending comedy, the network used taglines like ‘Out there? Oh, it’s out there!’ and built strange and misleading promos around the characters, with Wash and Mal billed as a ‘flighty pilot’ and a ‘space cowboy’ respectively, and Inara (Morena Baccarin) as a ‘cosmic hooker’, crassly referring to her role as a Companion, which actually offered a rather nuanced take on sex work in the future. The goofiest of these profiles, however, was reserved for River, labelled the ‘girl in a box’, despite the fact that the box in question appeared only in the unaired pilot (see Pascale 2014: 215). Combining these elements, Buchanan suggests that a mix of poorly predicted audience expectations and the network’s bad decisions doomed Firefly from the start. The western had been a non-starter on television since as early as the original Star Trek’s cancellation in 1969, so banking on such a genre bender had little chance of appealing to audiences (2004: 53).3 Perhaps more than this, though, Rodenberry’s legacy had created certain expectations for televised sci-fi: Buchanan notes that the absence of aliens in Firefly would have been odd and unpalatable for casual viewers using Star Trek as a baseline (2004: 52). Combining these genre markers with the 8pm Friday slot’s reputation as television’s ‘black hole’, she has little doubt that Firefly simply had no built-in audience (2004: 53). Its cult had to be built from the ground up, which it clearly was – just not fast enough for the ratings to satisfy FOX. For Keith R. A. DeCandido (author of Serenity’s official novelisation), Firefly was cancelled because it failed to attract audiences with its first episode. He blames FOX for this, as it was the network that rejected ‘Serenity’, the original series pilot, and asked for a trimmed down, formulaic series intro with over-the-top bad guys (2004: 58). Writing the episode over a weekend, Whedon and co-producer Tim Minear were 22

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rushed to deliver something workable by Monday morning (see Whedon and Minear 2013). They needed something lighter and more expository without contradicting or repeating too much from ‘Serenity’, which would eventually air (though no one knew its day would arrive only after the series’ cancellation). The outcome was ‘The Train Job’, an episode that fails to properly introduce the characters and eschews the nuance of much of the series in favour of a straightforward heist. John Wills cleverly links the episode’s last-minute production to that of the century-old, hastily-written western dime novels that provide much of Firefly and Serenity’s generic referents (2015: 4).4 What strikes me about these explanations is that they both point to the series’ cult appeal (or early lack thereof), as well as FOX’s mismanagement of their misunderstood product. FOX was looking for a cult hit without appealing either to an existing cult or to the tastes of cult audiences. Where Serenity had, by 2005, an established Firefly cult to draw from, Firefly did not emerge as something initially appealing. Its new pilot was a commercial dumbing down of the basic premise while carrying the weighty responsibility of coaxing viewers, slowly cultivating a cult following distinct from that of Star Trek or the long-forgotten westerns of the 1950s. One of Firefly’s great ironies is that the subcultural, oppositional nature of its cult following would not have taken the form that it did were it not for the show’s cancellation and FOX’s rather obvious lack of investment in the show. Finding common ground with the fictional Browncoats, real-world Browncoats framed themselves as an army fighting the good fight. FOX, the mainstream face of corporate television, had created its own fringe adversary. It had succeeded in cult building, if only through neglect. I do not wish to paint FOX simply as a villain, but rather to illustrate the conflicting nature of the relationship between the media giant and its customer 23

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base, a relationship that would develop and function as a peculiarly constructive partnership, directly responsible for the production of Serenity.

“NO POWER IN THE ’VERSE CAN STOP ME”: MAKING SERENITY On 6 December 2002, the ninth episode of Firefly, ‘War Stories’, aired on FOX, followed by the two-part intended pilot ‘Serenity’ two weeks later, concluding the series’ original broadcast. Four unaired episodes remained, to be released later on DVD and in syndication. Despite their eventual availability, these episodes did not function as a conclusion to the series’ main narrative threads. Serenity thus provided closure, finishing up the narrative begun years earlier on television. After the show ended, fans – many of them identifying as Browncoats – participated in letter writing campaigns, signed petitions to other networks and film studios, and used ‘guerrilla marketing’ to advertise a revived series and/or film that did not yet exist (see Hadlock et al. 2006). There is no definitive marker of how big of a role these fans played in swaying Universal to produce Serenity, but the appeal of a ready-made audience and ‘army’ of unpaid advertisers surely did not go unnoticed. Outside of fan efforts, the Firefly DVD box set did at one time have the number one ranking in Amazon sales (see Wilcox and Cochran 2010: 2). Coupled with the willingness of the cast and crew to return to the series, Universal may well have been predisposed to say yes. Whedon himself certainly credited his audience with the resurrection of Firefly in a video speech he made to accompany preview screenings of Serenity. Addressing the die-hard fans who presumably could not wait any longer, he suggests a shared struggle along with shared rewards: ‘They tried to kill us. They did kill us. And here we are. We’ve done the impos24

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sible, and that makes us mighty’ (qtd. in Abbott 2010: 227). While this is a highly romantic narrative, one in which Whedon’s ‘us’ implicitly includes those in the audience – those who fought hard and won – it belies some of the implications of statements he made in an interview with Abbie Bernstein, as when he points to the ease of talking Universal into the project: I called Barry Mendel, who I have known from before, who had a deal at Universal [and] flat-out asked him, ‘Barry, what would you do in my shoes? I want to make a movie – it could be a TV movie, it could be a lowbudget movie, it could by anything’. Barry mentioned it to [Universal executive] Mary [Parent], Mary saw the [Firefly episodes] and just signed on. Before I even had a story to tell, Mary said, ‘I believe in this’ and gave me all her support. (Qtd. in Whedon 2005: 17; emphasis in original) When asked about the role that DVD sales played in getting support from Universal, Whedon adds that, ‘it definitely helped them just be comfortable with the decisions they were making, but they really had been supporting us for quite some time already’ (2005: 17). Despite all of this, it is clear that the fans were always on Whedon’s and Universal’s minds throughout the production and marketing of Serenity. Says Whedon, the incredible amount of [fan] support and the intensity of it has always informed not just the studio’s enthusiasm, but their strategies and how they want to handle marketing and they’re very respectful of what the fans bring to the party and they’re very anxious to make sure that the fans don’t get lost in the very legitimate effort 25

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to bring this movie to people who’ve never heard of the show. (2005: 39) While the fans fought, worked and got what they wanted (or at least a rather hefty consolation prize), it is almost impossible to quantify their role in Universal’s decision-making process. Whedon’s public statements on the matter do little to clear things up for us. Once the decision was made to greenlight the film, the interactions between the studio and the fans became easier to track. Universal certainly recognised the advantages of harnessing the fans’ fierce sense of investment. As Tanya R. Cochran points out, In the months leading up to Serenity’s release, Universal Pictures capitalized on fan enthusiasm by constructing a members-only online community that awarded points and eventually products (t-shirts, hats, movie tickets, etc) to those able to recruit more members. (2010: 240) Serenity’s online presence was conceived as a space where fans could and should participate. Universal did, however, seek to control just how much fans could define their involvement, and issues of copyright became a point of contention quite quickly. Some of the legal obstacles that Firefly and Serenity fans have faced are quite common in the world of fandom, or fan creation more specifically. Cochran and Henry Jenkins both discuss the treatment of the fans by Universal and the official fan site. Cochran points to the company hired to design this word-of-mouth campaign, Affinitive, which claims to ‘democratize its clients’, in this case Universal Pictures (2010: 247). If this democratising effect can be said to occur, and I am not 26

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convinced that it does, then Universal’s next steps certainly undermine its position. As Jenkins notes, when the dust settled, the studio – Universal Pictures – sent cease-and-desist letters to some of the more enterprising amateur publicists, demanding retroactive licensing fees for the reproduction of series images on T-shirts and posters. […] The fans regrouped, counting all of the time and labor (not to mention their own money) put into supporting the film’s release. They eventually sent Universal an ‘invoice’ for more than $2 million as represented by their 28,000 ‘billable hours’, an attempt to translate their fan activities into the industry’s language. (n.d.) So fans could participate in advertising the film, but only on the studio’s terms. The fans perhaps had no legal right to demand compensation, but their gesture was clearly meant to highlight that these fan activities and the studio’s encouragement should all be part of a symbiotic process: fans are given a voice and outlet for their own creativity, while Universal gets free publicity. Narratively, the leap from TV to big screen was fairly straightforward. As a viewer, fan, cultist or otherwise, it is easy to fall back into the story taken up in the film years later regardless of its coherence for new viewers. The film has a necessarily more condensed plot that does away with many of the series’ secondary narratives, and River’s rescue in the opening scene serves to redirect our attention to the narrower focus of the film. Other texts certainly worked in tandem with the feature to tie up Firefly’s loose ends, as I have mentioned already. Between the series and film came the three-part comic Those Left Behind, and the web shorts The R. Tam Sessions. Both 27

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of these were released before Serenity and provide material functioning, in very different ways, as a bridge between the series and film. But many other texts exist between Firefly and Serenity. These range from official trailers, websites and merchandise, to unofficial message boards and fan fiction. While these do not all strictly contribute to the ongoing story that Serenity is but one part of, they certainly belong to its greater context and challenge some of the distinctions between official, Whedon-approved canonical texts and other unauthorised, ancillary material that makes up the Serenity corpus. It is important that Serenity is not merely an adaptation or a spinoff, but a narrative continuation. For the most part, it does not re-interpret characters, settings or storylines, but rather keeps things moving along in a linear way, bringing back cast members and familiar sets. With a text like Serenity, it is difficult to imagine the outrage of a perceived mis-casting or re-writing of a popular storyline that comes up so often with comic book adaptations like Spider-man or Whedon’s own The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Despite its transmedia status and its movement from one medium to another (and another, and another…), the Serenity corpus never loses its linear narrative momentum. But the narrative implications of Serenity’s transmediation are more closely looked at in the following chapter. When Serenity finally hit theatres, it was certainly not a roaring success, but neither did it fail at the box office. Released on 30 September 2005, it grossed over $10 million domestically in its opening weekend, working its way up to a total just under $40 million internationally (see Anon. 2005). According to Universal’s head of distribution, Nikki Rocco, the numbers were predictable, with the expectation that wordof-mouth and ancillary products (the film’s DVD in particular) would compensate and be more impressive: ‘I think over $10 million is a lot of business for a niche appeal picture’ (qtd. in 28

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Gray 2005). Serenity’s cult appeal made it a sure win with fans, who, Rocco says, made up about 40 per cent of the opening weekend audience. They could be relied on by the studio to both spread the word and keep pumping money into the property outside of theatres. Serenity’s rollout was not entirely smooth though. Originally slated for an April release, weeks ahead of George Lucas’s final Star Wars prequel, Revenge of the Sith (2005), Universal opted to delay the release, relying instead on wordof-mouth from preview screenings throughout the summer (see Hark 2010: 132). While, predictably, fans of Firefly turned up in droves, singing the film’s praises online, this also had the adverse effect of allowing spoilers to filter out, with audiences vocally lamenting the deaths of their favourite characters, Wash and Shepherd Book, and blaming Whedon for an upsetting conclusion and heartbreaking sense of finality (2010: 132–3). It is hard to make the case that Serenity’s appeal reached much further than the series’ estimated original fanbase. Ina Rae Hark points to the ‘countable’ nature of box-office admissions, allowing a more precise audience count than ratings estimates: ‘the 4 million or so viewers Nielsen credited as Firefly’s 2002 viewership looked to be just about the same number of people who bought tickets to Serenity’ (2010: 134), potentially countering the frequent claim that Nielsen had failed to take cult viewing practices into account, underestimating the show’s actual viewership. Critically, Serenity was received positively if somewhat unevenly, winning Hugo, Saturn and Nebula awards, among others. Roger Ebert liked it, his review pointing to the film’s success at tapping into its niche market’s needs: I’m not sure the movie would have much appeal for non-sci-fi fans, but it has the rough edges and brawny 29

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energy of a good yarn, and it was made by and for people who can’t get enough of this stuff. You know who you are. (2005) Christopher Orr at The Atlantic similarly praised Serenity for its ties to sci-fi history, calling it ‘closer in spirit to Star Wars than anything George Lucas has produced in a quarter century’ (2005). Sorry, George. But the praise was far from unanimous. In his Variety review, Derek Elley describes the film as ‘an interesting idea that largely lies undeveloped’, that ‘bounces around to sometimes memorable effect but rarely soars’ (2005). Since its release, fans have kept Serenity alive, most notably through public, organised charity screenings. Can’t Stop the Serenity is a yearly event started in Portland in 2006 by a fan known as The One True b!x (see ‘The History of Can’t Stop the Serenity’ 2015). CSTS celebrates the film and its community while raising money for one of Whedon’s favourite charities, Equality Now, which advocates for the human rights of women and girls internationally.5 The annual screenings are now hosted in cities around the world by various theatres and volunteer groups. The first event was hosted on Whedon’s birthday, 23 June, and similar screenings now take place from June to September. While 75 per cent of proceeds must go to Equality Now at official CSTS events, remaining funds go to various other charities selected by individual organisers (see Anderson 2012: 258). Fans also stay connected and keep their passion for Serenity alive via online communities. Whedonesque is an active weblog created in 2002 by Caroline van Oosten de Boer and Milo Vermeulen. The site provides links to news and criticism related to the work of Joss Whedon. Updates on Serenity (whether sequel rumours or comic updates) appear alongside all manner of content related to Whedon’s career, however 30

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Figure 1: 2009 poster art for Can’t Stop the Serenity, by Don McMillan

tenuously; submission guidelines are quite inclusive, with administrators stating that ‘posts about cast members, writers or other crew on the TV series are also encouraged’ (‘About Whedonesque’). Plenty of other examples exist, from professionally curated websites to amateur personal blogs: Whedonverse.net and JossWhedonFanClub.com provide Whedon updates similar to Whedonesque, while BrownCoats.com, fireflyfans.net and still-flying.net are all dedicated to Firefly and Serenity more specifically. As for a sequel or television continuation, it is unclear whether the fans will ever get more. With the exception of Alan Tudyk and Ron Glass, the entire main cast of Firefly signed multi-feature deals with Universal as part of their Serenity contracts (see Pascale 2014: 248). Nothing has come up regarding a sequel yet, which is not entirely surprising, 31

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from Universal’s perspective. Serenity was not a smash hit, and a sequel must seem far from being a sure bet compared with the revenue they might secure with a higher profile title. Every April Fool’s Day seems to come with at least one prank website announcing a new season of Firefly – a slightly cruel joke predicated on the series’ and film’s fierce cult following. The prank also plays, no doubt, on the relative plausibility of more to come outside of comics or novel tie-ins. Firefly producer Tim Minear has teased that it is not inconceivable that the show could return in limited release form, as a miniseries or something along those lines (see Stack et al. 2014). Alan Tudyk aligns himself with the fans wanting a sequel or series reboot. In an interview with CBS News, Tudyk suggests that a reunion is possible, mostly predicated on the participation of Joss Whedon and Nathan Fillion (see Moraski 2015). So far, it seems the most fans can reasonably expect is more limited comic book series and graphic novels from Whedon and Dark Horse.

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3 MEDIA FRONTIER MYTHS

Just as Serenity’s cult following does not exist in isolation from Firefly’s pre-existing fandom, the film itself does not fully stand alone. While I believe that it is important to judge Serenity in its own right and explore its functions as a selfcontained filmic text, it does continue a narrative begun earlier – in the series and elsewhere. The texts surrounding Serenity are thus instructive, providing narrative context and backstory for the diegetic story world. They also operate within the broader industrial landscape of sequels, fan participation and transmediation. The histories of seriality and the film sequel offer entry points into these discussions, but it is also important, particularly when looking at a cult text like Serenity, to factor in narrative continuations outside of the industrially sanctioned group of texts produced by Whedon, FOX and Universal. Fan fiction – stories within the narrative universe of an existing text, written by the fans – opens up Serenity further, allowing us to challenge certain hierarchies of authorship while neither abandoning the source texts nor legitimising or denying the official status claimed by original creators and copyright hold33

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ers. Fan fiction is also a perfect example of cult behaviour, with fans so engrossed in the film that they wish not only to prolong the experience but to actively participate and intervene in its design. I have always been fascinated by Serenity’s own narrative engagement with questions of transmedia continuation and fandom, where its leap to the big screen and other media is reflected in various ways throughout the film, aligning it with a tradition of self-reflexivity in science fiction and on new media platforms. This chapter catalogues some of the fluid categories that make Serenity such a compelling object of study and a rich site for cult audiences to interact with it and experiment creatively, to draw out their enjoyment of the text.

SERIALISING SERENITY Serenity’s narrative links to Firefly as well as to the comics and other ancillary texts already discussed are particularly strong. Together, they tell a single, remarkably coherent story. Specifically, they are a transmedia story, what Henry Jenkins describes as a story that ‘unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole’ (2008: 97–8). Whedon had similarly transmediated Buffy the Vampire Slayer when he produced a televised continuation. The 1992 feature, however, did not flow all that smoothly into the follow-up series, which takes place soon after the film’s events. The series, which premiered on The WB in 1997, sees Buffy relocating to the fictional Sunnydale, California, having been suspended from her LA high school after a brutal showdown with vampires at her senior dance. With a new cast and major narrative inconsistencies, the show is technically a narrative continuation, but the links are often tenuous. The film’s 34

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Buffy (Kristy Swanson) is already a senior, while the series’ Buffy still has years of high school ahead of her. The film’s ‘Watcher’, Merrick (Donald Sutherland), inherits the skills and memories necessary to mentor the young slayer, unlike the series’ Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), a member of the Watcher’s Council that trains and appoints watchers for each successive slayer. Even the series’ explicit flashbacks to events already depicted in the film present blatant contradictions. Whedon was unhappy with the film and later disowned it, wishing it to be discarded from the Buffy canon (see Berger 2012: 429). The Buffy series allowed him to revisit his creation with more authorial control, which he had earlier given up when he sold the film’s screenplay. The series attracted a far stronger cult following and led to a spinoff, Angel (1999– 2004). Fans maintained their loyalty to the ‘Buffyverse’ and ‘Whedonverse’, many becoming active in Firefly and Serenity fandom as Browncoats or more casual viewers. The process of narrative continuation is far more direct with Firefly and Serenity than with Buffy. Telling a single, ongoing story (not always the case with transmedia texts that simply share a story world), the texts within the broader Serenity corpus function as a serial, complete with the same cast, a continuation of the same narrative, and an overall stylistic and thematic consistency. Serenity is in good company as a transmedia serial. The Matrix series, which incorporated comics, animated shorts and a videogame into an ongoing story, is one example I have already touched on. The more recent and more analogous Veronica Mars film is another. The field of such serials is plentiful. Star Trek famously leapt to the big screen a decade after its cancellation with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979), followed by several follow-up features along with film installments of its sequel series Star Trek: The Next 35

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Generation (1987–94). The X-Files made the transition to film between its fifth and sixth seasons with The X-Files: Fight the Future (Rob Bowman, 1998), and would later return with The X-Files: I Want to Believe (Chris Carter, 2008). More recently, The X-Files returned to its televised roots with a 2016 ‘event series’ of six episodes, effectively a tenth mini-season. Streaming-only revivals of cancelled or long-finished series are also a booming offshoot of the television industry, with Yahoo’s fifth season of Community (2009–15), and Netflix’s rich assortment of revived titles like Arrested Development (2003–), The Killing (2011–14), Fuller House (2016–), and a Gilmore Girls (2000–7) follow-up miniseries, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (2016), made up of extended, 90-minute episodes. Firefly, having begun as a serial narrative on television, predisposed later texts to a serial form, with Serenity acting as something of a filmic sequel. The difficulty inherent in categorising the film’s relationship to the series is astutely summed up by Ina Rae Hark, who asks: How do follow-ups to cancelled television shows relate to the concept of sequels at all because television series are just that, serial narratives expected optimally to provide sequels every week for one season and several seasons after that. (2010: 121) Sequels certainly offer a useful framework though. Carolyn Jess-Cooke points to some of the problems that come up when trying to define the film sequel specifically. She situates the cinematic sequel within a broader category that stresses ‘repetition and continuation’ (2012: 1). Her definition for the sequel is quite brief and gets to the heart of sequential storytelling across texts: ‘a sequel usually performs a linear narrative extension, designating the text from which 36

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it derives as an “original” rooted in “beforeness”’ (2012: 3). To some extent, this definition suggests that Hark’s conflation of the seriality of television and film sequels should be ignored, as her alliance between series episodes and sequels does not necessarily leave room for ‘original’ status amongst episodes – in other words, series episodes are necessarily individual parts of a whole and do not imply an original and its derivatives per se. Interestingly, Jess-Cooke’s aim is largely to rescue the sequel from its low cultural and academic status, and she does so in part by pointing to its historical resonance in literature, with examples like William Shakespeare’s sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost, and in part by connecting sequels to other lines of academic enquiry (2012: 2). This is pointed out in recognition of cult cinema’s frequent paradoxical appeals to a mainstream legitimacy even as it draws much of its value from its supposed subcultural status, as mentioned in the previous chapter. Jess-Cooke goes as far as suggesting that the sequel is, in and of itself, a paratext, functioning as an ancillary narrative that comments upon its original (2012: 6). Gérard Genette’s theory of ‘paratextuality’ sees the paratext as a filter of sorts and as the first step in the reader’s (or viewer’s) experience of the text; it is a ‘threshold’ or ‘vestibule’, offering the reader a chance to enter or turn back (2001: 3). Jonathan Gray adds that paratexts like posters, trailers or websites are not merely extensions of the text but that they inform the meanings that we attach to it (2010: 117): they are ‘our first and formative encounters with the text’ (2010: 3). Jess-Cooke’s notion of the paratextual sequel reverses this order but to roughly the same effect, adding a retroactive lens through which to revisit an original. Even if we collapse the taste hierarchies and textual distinctions between text and paratext, it might still be difficult 37

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to argue that a series episode exists as a paratext in relation to each previous episode, since the ‘original’ itself is actively providing a lens through which to view all forthcoming episodes. Here, we also have to contend with the continuous feedback loop between text and paratext, complicating matters more. If a sequel offers a lens through which to view its predecessor, it is itself obviously also viewed through the lens of said predecessor. Paratextuality, in this sense, is just a matter of perspective, making Serenity’s status all the more difficult to pin down – are the episodes of Firefly paratexts, offering a threshold into Serenity? Or is Serenity the paratext, reframing the events of Firefly by offering new, contextualising material? It seems obvious that both are true. We can quibble over precise definitions and taxonomies, but in the end, what matters most here is the close narrative relationship between texts and their consumption by ‘readers’ in all their forms. Sequential storytelling certainly is not straightforward even within the confines of television. Unlike some more episodic shows, like sitcoms and police procedurals, Firefly made full narrative use of the serial format of broadcast television. Simon and River’s storyline, one of the main narrative throughlines of the series, which was developed to varying degrees in almost every single episode, was introduced in the pilot, an episode already split into two consecutive parts.6 Individual episodes also connect in other, less directly explicit ways, with minor characters returning in later episodes to continue secondary storylines, such as Saffron (Christina Hendricks), introduced in the episode ‘Our Mrs. Reynolds’, where she attempted to seduce the entire crew and steal Serenity. Saffron is reintroduced – and her duplicitous character is further explored and developed – in the later episode ‘Trash’. On an intertextual level, and entirely unofficially, I would argue that Saffron returns yet again in the music video for Broken Bells’ 2009 song ‘The Ghost Inside’, directed by 38

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Figure 2: Serenity: Those Left Behind, Dark Horse Comics

Jacob Gentry. While the link may be entirely unintentional, it is tempting to imagine that Hendricks, who stars in the video as a lone space traveler looking for a faraway paradise and literally sells her body parts to afford space travel, is in fact reprising her Firefly role. Hendricks’ career was on the rise at this point due to her work in Mad Men (2007–15), but Saffron remained one of her most recognisable roles. In Those Left Behind, the first series of Serenity comic books, Whedon makes direct reference to narrative threads left open in the TV series. He also uses the comic to lead into Serenity with a cliffhanger that introduces the Operative for the first time. The Operative indeed replaces the mysterious 39

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blue-gloved Alliance agents who had previously been hunting River and Simon in Firefly but make no appearance in Serenity. Here, Whedon kills them off, providing some degree of closure and an explanation for their later absence. Additionally, the character Lawrence Dobson (Carlos Jacott), presumed dead since the pilot, returns in the comic, having vowed to kill Mal, who had shot him and left him for dead. His character’s sudden reintroduction and the lack of any background information generally make Those Left Behind quite difficult to understand for a new audience. Whedon et al. seem to take for granted the fact that readers familiar with the show (and looking forward to the film) will make up the vast majority of those reading the print series, something that is presumably not the case with the film, made to appeal to hardcore fans and new audiences alike. Serenity goes over some familiar ground even as it functions as an extended episode of Firefly. Significantly, we meet the main characters as though for the first time, as well as (re)learning the history of ‘Earth that Was’ and the war that led to unification under the Alliance. As Whedon notes, I found myself in the unenviable position of having to reintroduce all of the characters, to be true to everything that had happened before without repeating it or contradicting it, and making it palatable to an audience who has never seen the show. (2005: 18) Unlike his attitude with the comics, Whedon made an effort with the film to bring new audiences on board, to avoid alienating viewers with no point of reference for River’s condition, the relationships between the Tams and the crew, the history of the war, etc. Whedon’s retelling of past events in Serenity in fact has a strong precedent in television and early cinema. Silent serials 40

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were known to tell a story across multiple episodes, usually planned out in advance to run for about fifteen episodes in the early 1910s (see Singer 1990: 125). ‘Cliffhanger overlap’ in some of these silent serials actually meant that portions of a previous episode would reappear in its follow-up to ease the viewer back into the ongoing story (see Singer 2001: 264). The classic example and origin of the term involves the common trope of one film ending with a character hanging from a cliff, while the next film replays the events that put them in peril. This narrative overlap also appears later, on television, in the form of ‘previously on’ or ‘last week on’ segments that jog the viewer’s memory (or fill in new or lapsed audiences) with a condensed edit of one or more previous episodes relevant to the ongoing story. Sometimes series shape entire episodes, often called ‘clip shows’, ‘compilation shows’ or ‘bottle episodes’, around previously seen material, either to quickly and cheaply recycle content or else to fill in audiences before a finale or major narrative turning point. Firefly includes both pre-episode recaps and a brief introduction of the plot and story world, repeated before each episode by Mal, neither of which accompanies the DVD versions of the episodes. Mal’s narration is characteristically anti-Alliance, and is mirrored, albeit from the Alliance’s perspective, in Serenity – the opening scene’s narration, already discussed, is strikingly similar in content to the series openings, describing the depletion of Earth’s resources, the colonisation of planets and the war. Outside of daytime soap operas though – which are themselves built around narrative redundancy – television, for the bulk of its existence, has tended towards limited narrative continuity across episodes. Jason Mittell attributes this to the economics of syndication, the industry’s ‘cash cow’, where series continue to profit after their initial run in reruns that 41

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Figures 3.1 and 3.2: River in The R. Tam Sessions

often hinder chronological viewing (2010: 79). The advent of time-shifting technologies, from the VCR and DVR to DVD box sets to streaming services, have likely opened the door for television producers to explore more serialised storytelling, relying on greater access to past episodes. Fans have also expanded on recaps with online synopses and discussions, making information ever more accessible to confused viewers. This seems to me the likeliest explanation for narratively complex, continuous storylines in series like Lost (2004–10), Heroes (2006–10), and Game of Thrones (2011–). The R. Tam Sessions web shorts, like many of the Serenity comics, jettison any narrative overlap or excess exposition in 42

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favour of a very clear objective: to present glimpses of River’s psychological transformation at the hands of the Alliance. We see her interviewed by an Alliance psychologist when she first arrives at their facility, and again at various stages in her programming. The shorts rely on fans to be familiar with the relevant premises from Firefly. Barring a flashback to a very young River in the Firefly episode ‘Safe’, this is also the only instance in which we see her before the Alliance experiments on her brain, leaving her emotionally scarred throughout the series and film. The importance of seeing River in this state should not be underestimated. During an audio commentary on the Firefly episode ‘Shindig’, series writer/producer Jane Espenson and actress Morena Baccarin note how striking it is to see River so coherent when she manipulates the character Badger (Mark A. Sheppard), mimicking his cockney speech and unnervingly recounting events from his past (see Espenson et al. 2003). The R. Tam Sessions go further and depict River acting entirely herself, unscarred and unaltered by the Alliance’s abuses, genuinely excited at the prospect of attending a top Alliance school. She is at her most coherent here by far, and we witness the changes in her character from one interview to the next. River’s mental state and its outward appearance are important to the Serenity universe and overall plot progression, so these exceptions are meaningful. Conventional textual analysis tells us that ancillary works like The R. Tam Sessions should not interfere with a reading of Serenity as self-contained text, but instead the shorts illustrate the narrative importance of extratextual transmedia content. They reward the savvy viewer looking for more by filling in blanks with substantial content available nowhere else. For fan communities and cult viewers, socially trained to seek out these resources, they are a custom-made treat. For anyone else, they invite 43

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curiosity and provide an access point for deeper engagement with cult viewing protocols. The later comics continue this trend, building on the existing story while pointing back to past events. Interestingly, some of the comics function as flashbacks rather than propelling the story forward. These have a precedent within the series in the episode ‘Out of Gas’. While they stand out as interrupting the narrative continuity of the transmedia web, at least in terms of chronology, they are not alone in doing so. In ‘Out of Gas’, a small but crucial engine part fails and leaves the crew of Serenity stranded in space with a limited supply of oxygen. Mal, having stayed with the ship while the others took an escape vessel to find help, thinks back to the assembly of his crew over the years. As he fights to survive on limited air, the episode jumps back and forth between the present and various moments in the past. The closest analogy for this in the comics and other texts can be found in the one-shot comic book Float Out, where the action oscillates between the present and past. Entirely new characters, some of Wash’s old colleagues, remember the pilot’s exploits as they mourn his death. In the graphic novel The Shepherd’s Tale, Shepherd Book’s death in Serenity is the narrative starting point for a story told in reverse-chronological order. In it, we finally learn about Book’s mysterious past and his connection to the Alliance. These different texts all achieve an overall sense of unity and coherence within a broader story, fitting into the original serial format established by Firefly. This seriality that ties series and film together does not, however, guarantee absolute consistency. Contradictions exist in and between Firefly and Serenity. These may range from unexplained regressions in character arcs to more major plot holes. It would be difficult – and perhaps not very useful – to chart all of these inconsistencies, but one in particular 44

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Figures 4.1 and 4.2: Simon describes River’s rescue in Firefly. In Serenity, he actively removes her from the Alliance facility.

stands out, and that is the treatment of River’s rescue. This book opened with a description of the rescue as seen in Serenity, but a comparison to the series’ treatment of the event is illuminating. In Part 2 of Firefly’s pilot, Simon explains his predicament to Mal and the crew after they have discovered River, smuggled aboard the ship. He describes to them how he came to rescue her from the Alliance: I was contacted by some men, some underground movement. They said that she was in danger, that the government was playing with her brain. If I funded them, they could sneak her out in cryo, get her to Persephone, and from there I would take her wherever. Simon’s account does not fit with Serenity’s treatment of the rescue. It is clear from his monologue that he was not physically present for the rescue, yet in the film’s more direct depiction of events, Simon is the only individual seen not 45

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only present but actively removing her from the government facility. This blip in the series-to-film continuity is perhaps negligible, but if we assume that Simon’s initial account is truthful – which, strictly speaking, we are not obliged to – then this does pose a challenge to the notion of transmedia seriality. It is, however, important that such inconsistencies occur within the series as well as between parts of the transmedia metatext. It seems inevitable that any series, as well as many films, would contain such errors in continuity. Whedon acknowledges that, due to the order in which the final three episodes of Firefly were filmed, characters betray some writerly ‘snafus’ by revealing elements of River’s condition that only emerge later in ‘Objects in Space’, the series finale – and again much later in Serenity (2007: 12). Rather than dismiss these instances, forgive the writers for understandable mistakes or snafus, I see greater value in engaging more productively with their potential for opening up the text. In the case of River’s escape especially, where a frankly inescapable and rather glaring discontinuity occurs, Whedon implicitly affords agency to his audience in an act of permission giving. The cult is invited to participate in an active process of deciphering. Fans of the series and film, prone to watching and rewatching the contradictory scenes in question, would no doubt notice the discrepancy. But this need not be a problem. Any successful exercise in world building leaves narrative gaps, in-between spaces to be filled in – or not – at the discretion of the viewer (or user, or consumer). To the extent that Whedon controls these in-between spaces, this kind of wanton disregard for a clearly coherent narrative transition from series to film indicates a recognition of viewer agency. He implies that there is no single reading of his texts and that, to some extent, we are free to choose our favourite versions 46

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of Firefly and Serenity, whether they be televised, filmed, written or transmediated in any other way. We can also simply enjoy the process of catching errors, using our cultish expertise to be not necessarily arbiters of such conflicting versions but rather informed witnesses. This is not to say that Whedon can open and close the text for interpretation, or that this is necessarily a purposeful process, but rather that it presents us with a convenient, ready-made space for creative cult reading protocols. These versions and in-between spaces are not limited to Whedon’s corpus though. The realm of official texts, whether part of the original series or later follow-ups, does not dictate the definitive scope of what Firefly or Serenity is. For that, we must look, at least in part, to spectatorship, to the reading and writing strategies of the fans. But even within the realm of official Serenity products, of ancillary texts not necessarily written or supervised by Whedon, there is room for expansion and contradiction, room for the cult to interpret, decipher and participate.

SERENITY, OR SERENITIES It is hard to imagine a more immersive fan experience than the act of actually manipulating the existing text, authoring stories taking place within a film’s narrative universe. Fans and cult members are quick to appropriate texts as their own, and they are often invited to do so. Whedon’s own war cry, ‘they tried to kill us’, is a prime example of a shared understanding of the cult owning at least a piece of the text, being complicit in its authorship through a bond with its literal author. This can easily be attributed to the sub-cultural status of cults. A film is ‘ours’ because ‘we’ as a group have a right to it. ‘We’ share identities, politics, beliefs, fetishes or any other subcultural positionality with cult films and their makers. 47

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The in-between spaces of Serenity’s story are thus all the more inviting to its fan storytellers who not only want more but also see themselves as stewards of the text, responsible for it and entitled to take Mal and the crew on new adventures. Sometimes, fan participation and creativity take place in largely non-narrative, prescribed spaces, as with a number of card and board games, like the Firefly-inspired game Tall Card from Toy Vault or the Firefly edition of Hasbro’s Monopoly. Some of these games do incorporate narratives and a great deal of creative player agency, like the Firefly and Serenity role-playing games by Margaret Weis Productions, or Firefly: A Fistful of Credits from Toy Vault and Firefly: The Game from Gale Force Nine. Some particularly ambitious fan fiction projects aim for a format faithful to either the series or film, like Still Flying, written by a team under headwriter George W. Krubski. Still Flying takes the form of series episode scripts, finishing Firefly’s first season with seven new episodes that incorporate elements of the Those Left Behind comics. A second, 22-episode season builds up to the events of Serenity and reinterpret the film, adapting it back to its original medium and stretching it out into a standard television season. Other texts operate well outside the safety of the established narrative, building complex story worlds past the events of Serenity. Wish I Was Somebody Else, a novel by nauticalgal (2006), offers a narrative continuation of Serenity in which Wash actually survived the film’s events; nauticalgal treads into new territory while overwriting Whedon’s perceived intentions of killing off Wash. Fan fiction, like fan activism, tends to take on nearly mythic status, blurring the lines between official and unofficial parts of the Serenity whole. One notable example is Steven Brust’s novel My Own Kind of Freedom, which functions narratively much like an episode of the series. Online, fans of 48

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Figures 5.1 and 5.2: Tall Card and the Serenity roleplaying game

the series seem generally happy with My Own Kind of Freedom, commending its faithfulness to the series and situating it within the episode chronology (likely somewhere between ‘War Stories’ and ‘Objects in Space’) (see Anon. 2008). Completed in 2007, the novel is a retroactive addition to the series timeline, or a prequel to Serenity. The fan response seems 49

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to lament Brust’s exclusion from the official franchise as yet another instance of gatekeepers missing the point. Brust wrote the novel on spec hoping that there may be interest in official tie-ins from FOX or Universal (personal communication, 6 February 2016). He eventually submitted the novel to an editor at Pocket Books who had shown interest in his manuscript and never heard back (personal communication, 4 March 2016). He eventually went on to publish My Own Kind of Freedom for free on his own website under a Creative Commons license. Pocket Books did in fact explore the possibility of Serenity tie-in stories and had a contract with Universal to publish two original novels, alongside an official novelisation written by Keith R. A. DeCandido. The novelised Serenity was approved and published alongside the film in 2005, and Pocket Books reached out to several science fiction and fantasy authors, including DeCandido, to submit proposals for the original novels. None made it to publication, which DeCandido attributes to Joss Whedon, who had oversight of the project but did not move forward on any of the proposals (see Lilly 2007). DeCandido suggests that Pocket cancelled that portion of the contract some time after the film’s release, the window of opportunity for direct tie-ins having closed (personal communication, 4 March 2016). It seems reasonable to assume that novels less directly cross-marketed with the film would still do well considering the seemingly unstoppable passion of the fans, but without Whedon’s necessary support, this may simply be unrealistic. One blip in this history is Firefly – Still Flying: A Celebration of Joss Whedon’s Acclaimed TV Series.7 The book is the third official companion to the series from Titan Books. It features set photos, costume designs, behind-the-scenes facts and anecdotes and, most importantly, all-new original short stories set in the Firefly universe from different writers of the 50

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show. The short stories are the closest thing to official novel tie-ins currently in existence. While Brust attempted to go through Pocket Books, his novel is entirely unofficial, released online like countless other fanauthored works. The website BrownCoats.com aims to compile and link to the many existing sites hosting fan creations and other active participation. With so many avenues open to fans, BrownCoats.com is an attempt to provide a comprehensive introduction to those many fans likely to be overwhelmed, while also keeping the momentum up in the hopes of eliciting more official content, as described on its welcome page: Another of the main reasons for creating this site is to join in with the other groups active in maintaining the fandom. There are many ways internet (and other) fandom has achieved this in the absence of new episodes. Some good examples of this are the creation of new and original Firefly based media including fan-fiction, filk (fan music), artwork, role-playing games, journals, fanzines, etc. By providing links to as much of these as possible we intend to provide Browncoats with new and interesting things to keep them excited about the show. Another attraction is the fandom itself and the community feeling it creates. The various message boards, Shindigs (fan meet-ups), etc. are ways that fans meet, make new friends and keep in touch. We believe that campaigns organized this way have led not only to the release of the DVDs and helped persuade Universal to produce the Big Damn Movie, but have also helped several charities out by raising funds. (Anon. n.d.) Indeed, the site points to countless other sites, catering to all different fandoms, illustrating not only the different ways in which fans can participate, but also the seemingly great 51

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demand for such spaces. It also reminds us that the film Serenity – the ‘Big Damn Movie’ – was itself produced (perhaps more or less) in response to the active demands of fans. Certainly anything produced by Whedon or any officially sanctioned media company could contradict the narratives written beforehand by Brust and others. No doubt countless fans of Firefly had already written stories about Wash and Book growing old before Serenity had ever been greenlit. The film’s narrative officially overwrites any such texts with the characters’ deaths. But the boundaries between official and unofficial are quite fragile on numerous levels. While contradictions between official and unofficial texts are inevitable, particularly with something like Firefly and Serenity, which continue narratively in ongoing comics series and miniseries that can introduce new and unexpected content at any time, it would be difficult to argue that contradictions alone disqualify texts from canon. The Star Wars media franchise includes, officially, far more texts in various media than the Serenity ’verse does. And unlike Serenity, these novels, comics, games, etc do not always serve as serial continuations of a single story. Multiple authors work separately with Lucasfilm to produce content for an expansive narrative universe. If these Star Wars authors operate within offialdom, their voices cannot be subjected to canonical hierarchies without threatening the validity of all of their contributions or even the official texts situated ‘above’ them. This does not keep Lucasfilm from exerting control. The company does reserve the right to periodically wipe certain texts out of the official continuity of the narrative universe to make room for new official texts. When Disney bought Lucasfilm and the rights to Star Wars, the entertainment behemoth officially overwrote existing stories in the ‘Expanded Universe’, rebranding official novel continuations of the saga as ‘Star Wars Legends’. At the same time, the new Lucasfilm formed a ‘story group’ meant 52

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to ‘oversee and coordinate all Star Wars creative development’ (Anon. 2014), and avoid going off-brand narratively. This strategy allows future Star Wars films to ignore past stories and avoid incoherence. Alternately, less strict, more intuitive notions of canonicity do exist. Will Brooker describes the very fluid hierarchies adopted by fans of Star Wars for considering texts other than the original film and trilogy. He points to the more or less universally accepted notion, as espoused in the Star Wars Encyclopaedia, that the three original films are unambiguously canonical, while officially authorised adaptations are ‘a close second’, and ‘after that, almost everything falls into a category of quasi-canon’ (qtd. in Brooker 2002: 101). Broadly speaking, the more a text departs from canonical texts, the less canonical it becomes. Serenity is perhaps more straightforward. Whedon seems to have a hand in every authorised text, so, from an authorial standpoint, he offers some level of consistency across texts and media. Alternately, one could challenge some texts and their canonicity according to their distance from Whedon. Float Out is written by Patton Oswalt and illustrated by Patric Reynolds, neither of whom has a direct affiliation with either Firefly or Serenity. Even the story is largely detached from that of the series and film. Wash is the only familiar character, and he becomes a kind of immortalised legend by characters we have zero attachment to. Is the comic subordinate to Firefly, Serenity or the other comics actually written by Whedon? This line of thought also leads back to the show itself, the urtext that precedes and informs all of the others. If authorship plays a hand in canonicity, one might claim that a number of episodes have questionable canonical standing. As early as the third episode, ‘Bushwacked’, Whedon left both the writing and directing to his co-executive producer Tim Minear. 53

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Restricting this discussion to authorship presents a great many obstacles. With a variety of writers, directors and artists, the Serenity corpus can be said to transcend its authorship at least in the strictest sense of having a sole creator who maintains consistent authority over the text(s). We generally understand fan authors as subordinate to the original authors and rights holders, but I think that there is room for some grey here. In ‘The Death of the Author’, Roland Barthes describes ‘The Author’ as ‘always conceived of as the past of his own book’ and ‘is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child’ (1997: 145). The ‘book’ or text is thus liberated from its author at the time it is written. Michel Foucault similarly points to the largely symbolic nature of the author, whose name imbues the text with a sense of authenticity. Naming a text’s author implies ‘relationships of homogeneity, filiation, reciprocal explanation, authentification, or of common utilization’ (1992: 123). For Foucault, the regulation of status and reception within a culture of circulation defines the work of a named author. Here, Foucault is stressing the importance of a culture of readers in defining work through the figure of the known, named author, so that, while the author frames the text, it is the reader who constructs meaning out of this relationship (ibid.). Foucault grants the reader agency in the defining of works. The reader is already, to some extent, a co-author: the naming process can be seen as a precursor to fan participation in the creation of canons. Canons only exist because they are acknowledged as such. Foucault also describes ‘transdiscursive’ authorship, where authors function as ‘initiators of discursive practices’ (1992: 132). This transdiscursive mechanism entails modifications and revisions to source works (1992: 135). The implication for fan fiction is that new meanings can be read into original texts based on material found in fan-authored trans54

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discursive texts. Under this model, the fan author has the same authority as the original author in contributing to multiple discourses. Serenity’s official novelisation is a great bridge between the official Serenity canon and the unauthorised texts that make up the film’s expanded narrative universe. Adapted from the film’s original screenplay (rather than the finished film itself), it remediates Serenity but includes content that is not strictly part of the film. The novel delves into the characters’ minds, often telling the story from their alternating perspectives. DeCandido sometimes repeats content from the series, and he elaborates on the narrative content that we have seen in the film. The novel is not, strictly speaking, part of the serialised story. It can function, narratively, as a replacement for the film, but more realistically it is a bonus for fans who want to luxuriate in the story a bit longer, experience it from new perspectives and through a new voice. Beyond this, though, the novel does in fact add narrative content to Serenity here and there.8 This additional content, unlike that found in fan fiction, has a distinct claim to officialdom. The final work had to be approved by Whedon, and DeCandido was in contact with the director to determine the parameters in which he could operate (personal communication, 4 March 2016). One important albeit subtle feature of Firefly is not only Mal’s lack of faith in God and outright hostility towards religion, but, more importantly, his loss of faith. In the opening scene of the pilot, ‘Serenity’, Mal kisses a cross around his neck before the crushing defeat that would mark the end of the war and the resistance movement. This scene provides context for his aggressive atheism throughout the series, context that is absent from the film. But it is not absent from the novel. In fact, Mal’s prior devotion to Christianity is expanded dramatically in DeCandido’s adaptation. 55

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For starters, the battle of Serenity Valley plays out in full in a prelude to the novel. Not only is this absent from the film altogether, but DeCandido actually goes much further with the scene than what the series pilot had made explicit. We learn some of the history of the resistance, get to know members of Mal’s platoon, and witness some of the aftermath, when the soldiers wait for rescue. The scene opens with Mal not only kissing his cross, but also whispering a quick ‘Our Father’ and inwardly comparing the Browncoats to Christ’s defiance of the Romans, and later with Mal thinking back to a Bible verse of apocalypse (see DeCandido 2005: 8, 13). We also get some degree of foreshadowing in Mal’s memories of taking advice from a Shepherd (2005: 9), a relationship that we know will be replaced by his camaraderie with Book and a kind of secular faith in the older man’s wisdom. Additionally, we witness the precise moment when Mal’s faith is lost, a fact implied by the series but never revealed outright in either Firefly or Serenity. Running out of provisions after the battle and nearing death, the crew finds hope in approaching ships, but when Zoe (Mal’s first mate in Firefly and Serenity, played by Gina Torres) offhandedly thanks God, Mal responds with a bitter ‘God? … whose colors he flyin’?’ (2005: 17; emphasis in original). DeCandido goes further still, preserving some of Mal’s faith – a trait that we could ascribe to the captain by interpreting his anger as directed at a God he still believes in, though we are not given any explicit evidence of this in the series or film. During the pivotal scene when Mal decides to stand up, once and for all, to the Alliance, we know that, to some extent, he is following Book’s dying wish that he simply ‘believe in something’, but DeCandido pushes this further, reawakening a dormant religiosity in Mal. Remembering the final battle of the war, the novel’s Mal makes an important realisation absent from the film: ‘Prior to that five-week battle and its 56

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two-week aftermath, he had been a God-lovin’, God-fearin’ man. … But, though he’d not cottoned to it till now, Mal still had some faith’ (2005: 214). Other bits of narrative information are parceled out throughout the novel, expanding on the film. We learn that the Alliance had noted an increase in River’s imbalance after her meeting with parliament (2005: 86), suggesting not only that they felt threatened by the possibility that she had found out about Miranda, but that they operated on the outright assumption that she had. By the end of the novel, we also hear from the Operative that the Miranda broadcast had very real effects: ‘Do you know what an uproar you’ve caused? Protests, riots, cries for a recall of the entire parliament’, he says to Mal (2005: 253). We may assume as much at the film’s end, but to hear it confirmed does have a certain impact, even if Mal reflects the film’s more cynical tone: ‘’Verse wakes up a spell. Won’t be long ‘fore she rolls right over and falls back asleep. T’aint my worry’ (ibid.). Some of these changes and additions are superficial or remove some of the nuance of the film, as when the markings on Reaver ships are explicitly linked to Native American war paint (2005: 197), a rather blunt elucidation of one of the series’ and film’s already fairly obvious metaphors. But the novel also presents us with inconsistencies. Similar to the contradictions between Firefly and Serenity, a knowing reader would recognise that DeCandido’s adaptation of the screenplay departs from some of Whedon’s eventual choices in the final film. The novel’s Operative is described throughout as wearing glasses, a conspicuous detail to anyone familiar with the film’s unbespectacled character. Flashbacks to conversations between Simon and his parents as he tries to secure River’s release also repeat content from the series, depicted as Simon’s memories in the episode ‘Safe’. But much of the dialogue and timing is off, adding or 57

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subtracting content and directly contradicting the episode’s version of events. In the novel, Simon is trying to convince his parents that the letters they have received from River are written in code, a cry for help: ‘They’re hurting us. Get me out’ (DeCandido 2005: 25). In the episode, Simon clearly has not cracked the code yet and will decipher the message later on. Here, the novel echoes the television-to-film incongruities surrounding River’s rescue, providing a conspicuous but most likely unintentional consistency in Simon’s unreliable memories. The novel also displays, to DeCandido’s credit, a clever ability to reconcile some of the contradictions between series and film. When Mal dismisses Simon and River at the start of the film, he suggests that the siblings are not in fact his crew members, undoing much of the character development seen in Firefly when he explicitly calls them his crew. With access to Mal’s inner thoughts and insecurities, DeCandido can allow the captain to refer to the Tams as ‘guests’ while recognising his own act of betrayal: after rescuing Simon and River in the episode ‘Safe’, ‘Simon had asked why they came back. Mal told him that they were part of his crew. He meant it then, so why was he calling him a guest now?’ (2005: 50). Again, we can treat the inconsistencies that do exist and the moments of official but ancillary narrative expansion as irrelevant or flawed, or we can accept them as signs of textual openness. As invitations or, at the very least, acknowledgments of a text that may be read and expanded upon in a multitude of ways or else overwritten outright. Many examples exist outside of Firefly and Serenity of self-contradictory story worlds, though attempts are often made to rein in media franchises, as when Marvel and DC Comics reboot series or entire crossover universes, whether by restarting continuity or writing in explanations via parallel universes. Lucasfilm’s official rewriting and rebranding of the 58

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Star Wars canon serves a similar function. Admittedly though, the ‘canonical’ films from the original two trilogies did not always agree with other texts within the Expanded Universe, nor were they themselves internally consistent in a number of ways – just as Serenity strays from the path laid out by Firefly.

TRANSMEDIATION OF (AND IN) SERENITY While the transmediation of Serenity is, in some ways, a symptom of fan engagement, it also features prominently within the film itself. That is to say that Serenity self-reflexively explores questions of technology, mediation and transmediation within its narrative, and it does so far more concertedly than do any of the other texts surrounding it. If, as Charles Acland suggests, viewers increasingly exercise ‘platform consciousness’ (2010), a deep awareness of the formats through which they consume narratives, it is perhaps no surprise that media formats should be reflected within science fiction, known historically to project familiar contemporary realities into unfamiliar futures. J. P. Telotte argues that Serenity features the kind of technological self-reflexivity that appears more often in cinematic science fiction than on television. He suggests that the two platforms, television and film, have different and perhaps platform-specific foci, so that Whedon updates the series’ themes to allow the story to thrive on the big screen. As Telotte frames it, What is arguably most interesting about the film version is something that hardly surfaces in Firefly’s relatively brief existence. For Serenity seems pointedly mindful of its medium, after a fashion that we do not typically see in most television series, but that has always marked some of the best cinematic sf. (2008: 68) 59

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Serenity is full of allusions to technologies of audiovisual representation, the central plot dealing with the proliferation of a video/media file. Telotte situates Serenity within a tradition of sci-fi that, through ‘omnipresent video screens, holograms and other media images’, reflect ‘the mechanics of apparition that permit these films in … the first place’ (ibid.). He concludes that such a move towards a more cinematic model of science fiction is likely the reason for Serenity’s success as an ‘adaptation’ – concluding the series on the big screen required a specifically cinematic transformation of Firefly, achieved through this recognisable self-reflexivity (2008: 68–9). We have already considered Serenity’s opening scene, in which the audience is tricked into believing a series of mediated screen images, from the school lesson to the three-dimensional holographic image of Simon and River, paused and replayed, manipulated to be examined at the viewer’s leisure. Later, River’s fixation on the Fruity Oaty Bars commercial alludes to the power of visual culture to affect us. Finally, when the crew finds the video/hologram, in which an Alliance officer is brutally killed by Reavers, we get not only a powerful video file, potentially capable of toppling the government, but also a reminder of the power of images as the crew turns away, unable to watch the gruesome content. The importance of the character Mr. Universe (David Krumholtz) within the narrative probably stands out most obviously as an illustration of Telotte’s self-reflexivity. The all-seeing Mr. Universe sits before a wall of screens, and it is he who is capable of engaging with the media landscape most meaningfully to enable Mal and the crew’s mission to transmit their message. Mr. Universe ultimately discovers River’s trigger within the programming of the Fruity Oaty Bars commercial and facilitates the broadcast of the Miranda recording. But Serenity achieves far more in its reflection not only of mediation, but of the transmediation that led to its pro60

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Figure 6: Mr. Universe as media fan

duction. The film narrativises not only media screens but the process of transmediation itself, reflecting, quite cheekily at times, the narrative role of many of the texts already described – the serialised precursors and follow-ups to Serenity. Many examples of this kind of thematised transmediation exist elsewhere. Steven Shaviro (2010) has explored the relationship between the narrative of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006) and its own hypermediation. He points to fascinating transmedia elements within the film’s diegesis, many of which are prefigured in Serenity. In Southland Tales, everyone is surveiled, captured onscreen even as they participate in the mass consumption of other mediated images. The year is 2008 (two years after the film’s actual release). America has been rocked by a terrorist attack, a nuclear explosion in Abilene, Texas, which has led to a collective state of fear hyperbolising the state of the nation post-9/11. The film’s plot is complex and often convoluted. It is no coincidence that the story unfolds across different media, and much of the confusion within the film plot is made clear (or at least clearer) when the viewer reads the Southland Tales comic book ‘Prequel Saga’. ‘Southland Tales is an ironically cinematic remediation of the post-cinematic mediasphere that we actually live in’, 61

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says Shaviro (2010: 65). He describes the film’s extra-diegetic marketing, which includes Myspace profiles for its fictional characters and a website for the fictional Treer Corporation (2010: 69). He also points to the song ‘Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime’, performed within the film by porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) but made available on the film soundtrack and iTunes as a song by Gellar, the actress. As Shaviro notes, the film’s intertexts and tools of multimedia distribution are reflected within the narrative, as Krysta Now ‘seeks to leverage her semi-celebrity as a porn starlet not only by recording songs and making a music video, but also by starring in her own talk-show-cum-reality-television series, and by selling her own energy drink’ (2010: 70). The interplay between Now and Gellar, along with the other actors, their respective characters, and the fictional personas that pretend to exist in the real world only reinforces this thematisation, hinting that such leveraging extends even beyond the film’s diegesis. Similarly, Serenity goes well beyond the representation of audiovisual culture by reflecting transmediation and paratextuality throughout. Mr. Universe is not just a consumer of audiovisual material, he is an active fan, and he manipulates media content. He is the film’s most direct stand-in for the Browncoats. And he not only symbolises the Browncoats, but also articulates the very essence of transmediation multiple times within the film in his championing of ‘the signal’, shorthand for content that is not bound to any single medium. When Mal and the crew discover the fate of the inhabitants of Miranda, they turn to Mr. Universe to help them broadcast the holographic video exposing the Alliance’s crimes. He is an ideal ally because he answers to no one, functioning as a kind of pirate broadcaster and information aggregator who filters through the ‘news’ to find truth in ‘the signal’. Mr. Universe represents an alternative form of spec62

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tatorship, one that refuses top-down broadcasting in favour of transmedia participation. The signal can be anywhere and anything, and Mr. Universe goes everywhere. As he puts it, ‘There is no news, there’s the truth of the signal, what I see. And there’s the puppet theatre, the parliament jester’s voice, the somnambulic public.’ This last point about the somnambulic public points to the active participation of Browncoats in reviving Firefly as Serenity in opposition to a somewhat imaginary somnambulic public that consumes passively. But it also points to the literal somnambulism of the Alliance’s victims on Miranda. The resistance offered by fans of Firefly is a response to what may be seen as FOX’s reliance on complacency. If Mr. Universe is a diegetic surrogate for the Browncoats, the Alliance, aiming to limit his control of ‘the signal’, is that of FOX. The Alliance’s wish for complete control of its citizens through an airborn population pacifier, ‘the Pax’, is very much in line with the notion of a passive audience. The Serenity crew’s discovery of Miranda is punctuated by their viewing of the last message recorded before their arrival, a document of the creation of the Reavers. In it, one of the first responders to Miranda, the now long-dead Dr. Caron (Sarah Paulson), describes the effects of the Alliance-manufactured drug responsible for the near-complete eradication of the planet’s population: It was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Well, it works. The people here stopped fighting, and then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work, they stopped breathing, talking, eating. There’s thirty million people here, and they all just let themselves die. The ideal civilisation, according to the Alliance, is one in which the population is ‘calm’ and non-resistant. The asser63

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tion that ‘it works’ is significant in that the goal is indeed control through inertia. The Alliance aims at curbing a specific active impulse, aggression, we are told, but the effect is to force passivity, to ensure a productive but also compliant populace. What Mal and his crew resist, with the help of Mr. Universe, is this attempt to co-opt human agency. Their first step is to make the crimes of the Alliance known. As Mal says, ‘There’s a whole universe of folk who are gonna know too. They’re gonna see it. Somebody has to speak for these people.’ Indeed, these people have lost the ability to speak for themselves, as communication and control have been made entirely one-directional. It is not enough to be outraged; Mal intends to forcibly right the wrongs of the oppressive government. Similarly, Firefly was not allowed to die silently. Its fans cried foul, exposing the world (or at least non-viewers) to their favourite show, resisting cancellation and the supremacy of the network until the series was given a second life. Stacey Abbott links Mr. Universe to the film’s, and presumably Whedon’s, sense of fighting a monolithic power, the television industry: Here Serenity is unusual in its depiction of a future in which television remains a primary form of communication among the masses and appears to exist in part beyond the control of the government; instead it is in the hands of a media ‘fan’. The relevance of this message, however, applies to not only the film’s narrative but also the meta-narrative of the film’s production and in particular the role played by fans in resurrecting Serenity. [...] What is particularly interesting is, therefore, how the film seems to engage directly with this position of the fans within the text of the film by recasting the war between the Alliance and the Browncoats 64

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as an attempt on the part of the Serenity crew to share a hidden truth withheld from the public by the Alliance. (2010: 236–7) Abbott here touches on Mr. Universe’s role as ‘fan’ as well as his role in re-activating content that might otherwise die in its original form. Just as Whedon and Firefly’s most dedicated fans took it upon themselves to transmediate the series and wrest control of its fate from television executives and the realm of television itself, Mr. Universe rejects the Alliance’s control over the signal and grants himself the authority to keep broadcasting it, finding new screens for it. Serenity makes no definitive claims about a single, overarching form of spectatorship, active or passive, participatory or purely receptive. Rather, it represents a spectrum of spectator activity, acknowledging the importance of spectators unsatisfied by network politics and control over their viewing choices. What is more, the film glorifies such efforts. For Abbott, ‘The tagline “Can’t Stop the Signal” refers both to the truth about the Alliance and the truth about Firefly, and also serves to vindicate the Browncoats – on and off screen – for their persistence in fighting a seemingly “unwinnable” war’ (2010: 237–8). The transmediation of such a second life is similarly represented within the film. Mr. Universe’s notion that you can’t stop the signal suggests malleability within a transmedia network; once the signal is sent out, it is unstoppable, taking many forms, and it is always accessible to someone. Beyond keeping the signal alive, Mr. Universe transforms the signal by making it available on new platforms. The ‘news’ becomes something else when it is displaced from its original platform, ‘news’ functioning as a category of exhibition rather than an objective signifier of content. The core signal is the only constant, transferred potentially endlessly through transmediation. Serenity’s function as part of a single serialised narra65

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tive importantly aligns it with this idea, suggesting that ‘the signal’, in this case a complex web of interrelated narrative content, continues to circulate in new forms: as a comic, a film, a series of web shorts, etc. We may not be able to call it television or even an episode anymore, but ‘the signal’ remains intact, projected onto a cinema screen in the case of Serenity instead of being broadcast on network television. The malleability of the signal is cleverly manifested in Mr. Universe’s robot bride, Lenore (Nectar Rose). When Mal goes to Mr. Universe’s home-cum-broadcasting station, he finds his friend and ally dead, murdered by the Operative and curled up in Lenore’s arms. Thinking himself defeated, Mal prepares to leave, but Lenore speaks to him, repeating Mr. Universe’s final words, instructions on how to get the signal out. This is not an audio recording. She speaks Mr. Universe’s words in her own voice, transforming his original message, appropriating it in transmission, and later transforming its purpose when it is accidentally recited again to the Operative, who uses it to intercept Mal. Lenore not only allows the recording to be broadcast, but also functions as a mediated broadcast herself, keeping the message safe from destruction. Lenore functions much as Serenity itself does; when Mr. Universe dies, Lenore allows him to live on in a new body – or media format – completing his task of broadcasting ‘the signal’. The role of the paratext is similarly present both within the film’s diegesis and in its online marketing campaigns. The R. Tam Sessions provide important narrative content within the Serenity corpus, as I have already established. River’s engagement with the Fruity Oaty Bars commercial, again, is not an act of passive spectatorship. Instead, it is a comment on the importance of paratexts in defining the texts that they surround, mirroring the narrative function of The R. Tam Sessions – also useful and meaningful content masquerading as advertising. River’s memory of Miranda and of read66

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ing the minds of ‘key members of parliament’ is activated by the subliminal message embedded in the Fruity Oaty Bars commercial. This memory, revealed early on in the film, is the catalyst for virtually everything that happens thereafter. It is this memory that the Alliance and the Operative are intent on controlling, and it is this memory that leads the crew of Serenity to Miranda to discover the Alliance’s dirty secret which they then seek to reveal to the ’verse. Mr. Universe proves his significance again in this scene. When Mal and the crew review the footage of the bar, they look for clues as to what set River off. Mr. Universe finds the video feed and replays it for them. When Mal asks him if he sees anyone speaking to River before the violence breaks out, Mr. Universe puts the pieces together: ‘Oh, Mal, you’re very smart. Someone is talking to her’, he says, zeroing in on

Figures 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3: River, activated by the Fruity Oaty Bars commercial 67

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River’s focused gaze. ‘The Oaty Bar?’, Wash asks in disbelief. No one thinks to look closely at the advertisement until Mr. Universe looks beyond what is presented on its surface. It is only fitting that a character so closely tied to transmediation should recognise the importance of paratexts unquestioningly. Just as we need advertisements, here The R. Tam Sessions, for a complete picture of the Firefly/Serenity storyline, Serenity itself needs a diegetically integrated commercial to activate its central plotline. As a closing chapter for Firefly, Serenity also thematises its own sense of finality and closure. This is most obvious in the group funeral near the end of the film, when the remaining crew of Serenity gathers to bury and mourn Wash, Book and Mr. Universe, all killed by the Alliance. This use of literal funerals is not entirely new within the Serenity universe, or even Whedon’s oeuvre more broadly. As Ina Rae Hark points out, Mourning rituals have always figured prominently in [Whedon’s] works, the most notable example being ‘The Body’, the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that dealt with the death and burial of Buffy’s mother Joyce. Two of the last Firefly episodes, ‘Heart of Gold’ and ‘The Message’, shot as the inevitability of cancellation loomed, conclude with funerals. (2010: 131) These latter two examples are mirrored in Serenity. Just as they wrap up the series, the group funeral in Serenity wraps up the film. This sense of closure is also marked by a sense of loss, but also of deep injustice. None of the characters commemorated have grown old or gone peacefully. They are all killed violently before their time. The funerals allow fans a shared moment, within the diegesis of both series and film, to take stock and celebrate the passing of something cher68

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Figures 8.1 and 8.2: A funeral for Firefly

ished. The ritual on screen is a proxy for the audience’s experience of mourning. Serenity in particular makes this an emotional farewell. While the series’ funerals celebrated characters we had little attachment to, the film bids farewell to two main characters: Wash and Book. While the latter is relegated to a supporting part in the film, he appears in every episode of the series as an integral part of the crew. His own stand-alone graphic novel is a testament to his importance and popularity with the fans. Most significantly though, as the camera moves through the tombstones, displaying each holographic face that takes the place of an inscription, it stops on a last unmarked stone. This last grave is reserved for Serenity itself, killed in battle like the others, marked with a small rocket sitting atop the stone where it waits to be lit and launched into the sky by River. Figuratively, the ship stands for everything lost, from loved ones, to the freedom of mobility, to the series through which the film was made possible. This is a funeral for the titular Firefly-class ship of the series, Serenity, and for Firefly itself. But the funeral – and Serenity as funeral – also functions as a shared ritual of defiance, of coming together in strength 69

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in order to move on, to continue fighting in the face of oppression. Because Serenity is not only a conclusion to Firefly or a monument to its memory; it is a testament to its survival. Hark’s discussion of mourning rituals does not miss this: ‘Within its diegetic world, Serenity offers both decent burials and miraculous resurrections’ (2010: 131). If the ship is memorialised with its own headstone, we have to acknowledge that it is also resurrected only moments later, rebuilt and relaunched into space to continue its adventures with the remaining crew aboard. The layers of symbolism in this conclusion are quite impressive. Zoe, who has lost more than most with the death of her husband, Wash, must also pick herself back up, and here Whedon aligns her with the repaired and reborn ship. Standing with her in the loading bay of Serenity, Mal asks, ostensibly of the ship, ‘Think she’ll hold together?’ Zoe responds that ‘she’s tore up plenty, but she’ll fly true’, describing both the ship and herself – and perhaps the fans who have been through the emotional ringer and must now move on. Serenity is thus a bittersweet celebration. A resurrection and affirmation of continuity as well as an acknowledgement of death and the mourning that comes with it. As Hark puts it, As a sequel, Serenity … wraps up most of the major hanging plot threads from the television series, giving viewers a sense of closure after the show’s abrupt midseason demise. It also clears the way for further stories featuring the surviving crew, a possibility because Whedon and the cast had all signed options for a three-picture deal if box-office revenues dictate. (2010: 132) Resurrections appear elsewhere throughout Serenity. Like the ship, River is pushed to the breaking point, endangering the crew (as well as a bar full of people and anyone else she 70

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might come into contact with) while barely holding onto her sanity. As Mal is on the cusp of revealing the origin of the Reavers to the ’verse and she is about to lose Simon, who is injured and separated from his medical bag, River suddenly snaps out of the debilitating state she has endured throughout the series and film. The film’s final scene sees River as Serenity’s new pilot. She is the final step in resurrecting the ship. Having been restored to her earlier state, while holding on to a few Alliance enhancements, she can replace Wash and make the ship whole again. The film ends with River taking the reigns of Serenity and breaking through rain clouds into a sunny future. If the symbolism feels a touch on the nose, this may well be the point.

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4 TEXTUAL MARKERS OF SERENITY’S CULTDOM

Identifying viewers is no doubt important in discussing cult cinema, and the cult itself is probably the defining characteristic of a film’s cult status. But the study of cult cinema also relies on those formal and stylistic features that recur among canonical texts – however difficult or problematic it may be to identify a cult film canon. We have already pointed to some of these features of cult films, which include intertextual references, overt genre affinities or genre mixing, camp or trash qualities and social transgression – and there are many more. Serenity benefits from this kind of analysis, particularly on the level of genre-mixing. As a western/science fiction hybrid, with strong elements of horror, Serenity (and certainly also Firefly) tests the boundaries of these genres, self-reflexively engaging its audience, playing with ingrained expectations subversively. It similarly blends high and low art, referencing both Shakespeare and schlocky 1950s B-movies to gently challenge taste hierarchies. Along with its subversion of strict genre rules, Serenity plays with our expectations regarding gender norms. With elements of camp, queerness and gender-bending, the film 72

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invites us to consider accepted social mores and alternatives to the status quo. It certainly does not violently disrupt the dominant culture, but looks to the future to ask that we question how we live today. Through the lens of genre, gender and intertextuality more broadly, we can identify the many cult traits present in Serenity’s DNA. This kind of intertextuality and social commentary predisposes Serenity to a fandom defined by an almost excessive sense of attachment. The film demands that we watch closely, rewatch, analyse, seek out connections and references, identify incongruities. In short, Serenity is designed to invite us to engage deeply with its text(s). These are only a few ways to approach Serenity’s cult status on a textual level, but they are rich and rewarding points of entry. I am compelled in this chapter to spend some time exploring some of the characterisations established in Firefly. While Serenity is its own text, Firefly provides its narrative backbone and is the primary site where members of the Serenity cult can access more content – in many cases it is where they accessed it in the first place and acquired a familiarity with the ’verse that informed how they approached Serenity upon its release.

COWBOY CAMP It would be hard to claim that Serenity is campy without a strong caveat. Few of its fans would call it so-bad-it’s-good, or sleazy, kitschy or in bad taste. The excessive badness of films like The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2003) or the cinema of Ed Wood is absent here. Likewise, the raunch and excess of Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995) or John Waters exists in sharp contrast to the TV-friendly world of Whedon. Susan Sontag calls camp ‘a love – of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration’ (2008: 42). There is little of either in Firefly and 73

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Serenity, though maybe we could allow that science fiction is by its very nature always unnatural – and intentionally so. Serenity does straddle the line between high and low art in its intertextual references, a common feature of cult cinema that also ties it to camp (see Sontag 2008: 49). References to both Shakespeare and the schlocky-Shakespearean Forbidden Planet hold perhaps the strongest claim to this facet of camp, but we shall delve further into this later in the chapter. One of the most compelling uses of camp in both series and film, for me, is their engagement with queerness. In using a framework of queer theory, I wish to highlight the very fluid boundaries between categories (namely sexual orientation and gender presentation) rather than suggest particularly strict or even consistently literal depictions of LGBTQ identities in Serenity. As Annamarie Jagose puts it, the term ‘queer’’s ‘non-specificity guarantees it against recent criticisms made of exclusionist tendencies of “lesbian” and “gay” as identity categories’ (1996: 76). Indeed, the examples of queerness that arise in Firefly and Serenity are not readily apparent, nor do they tend to lead one to any clearcut conclusions. Mal’s performance of femininity and Zoe’s performance of masculinity are not proven markers of transgender identities – though neither should we automatically ascribe gender identities according to a cisnormative lens. Likewise, Inara is never overtly positioned as straight, lesbian or bisexual, but an open-ended engagement with these concepts helps us to understand her. Queer theory offers tools to trouble a status quo of presumptive character identities and delve more deeply in these texts. Sontag notes the strong links that exist between camp and homosexuality (2008: 51), reflected, to some extent, in Firefly/Serenity. One might argue that westerns are inherently at least a little bit queer, featuring men in the wilderness who engage in subtextually romantic camaraderie. This sub74

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text sometimes even rises to the surface, reaching its logical conclusion in Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2004). This directness is indeed reflected in Firefly. In the episode ‘War Stories’, Inara has a female client, a government councilor. As a Companion, Inara’s role is, as far as we can see, similar to that of a sex worker. With a great deal of freedom in selecting clients, she only works with women because she wishes to and without any great financial pressures to do so, as she states quite clearly. Her work is even a release, and spending time with a woman, romantically, is particularly appealing to her. In one of Serenity’s deleted scenes, we also see Inara training Companion apprentices, young women who practice their trade by physically seducing her. While obviously framed in a professional context, the scene is certainly suggestive. Less overtly represented in the series is Serenity’s mechanic Kaylee’s (Jewel Staite) unspoken crush on Inara. The level of romance involved is never explicit, but Kaylee fawns over Inara several times, most noticeably in the pilot when Inara is first introduced, returning from an engagement. Kaylee greets Inara with a subtly intimate ‘Hey, you’, which Inara warmly returns. In the following ‘War Stories’, Inara tells Kaylee that they can ‘experiment’, talking about styling Kaylee’s hair. The line barely merits mention, except that later, when Mal walks into Inara’s shuttle, where she is doing Kaylee’s hair, he facetiously questions her motives: ‘You’re servicing crew now?’ And again in the episode ‘War Stories’, Kaylee and Jayne (Adam Baldwin), the crew’s brutish mercenary, both spy from a corner when Inara’s female client arrives. Both are excited to see Inara with the councilor, and Jayne even excuses himself with the suggestive line, ‘I’ll be in my bunk’. While Kaylee does not announce her own intention to masturbate at the thought of Inara and another woman, she is quite clearly aligned with Jayne’s lustful gaze. Her shyness and infatuation are also in fact quite similar to those which she 75

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directs towards Simon, with whom she does become romantically involved in Serenity. While it is never clear how reciprocal Kaylee’s affections are, there is a connection between the two women that at the very least borders on the romantic. In short, both women are coded as bisexual, or somewhere unspecified on the spectrum of sexual orientation. Another type of queerness takes the form of gender presentation, this time very clearly tied to camp. Sontag suggests: Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one’s sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. (2008: 44) Allied with the campiness of androgyny is the hypermasculine or hyperfeminine traits of many Hollywood movie stars, or ‘a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms’ (ibid.). It is hard not to chuckle at the machismo of Burt Reynolds, Bruce Willis or Kurt Russell, all of whom have played on their manly-man personas with a wink to the audience throughout their careers. Or think of Jane Fonda in Barbarella (Roger Vadim, 1968) or Pamela Anderson in Barb Wire (David Hogan, 1996), whose feminine sexualities are exaggerated to the point of absurdity in two cleverly excessive camp texts. Gender-bending and its inverse of extreme gender conformity are well represented in Firefly and Serenity. Mal is frequently portrayed as effeminate, taking on the nickname ‘Captain Tightpants’ in the episode ‘Shindig’. He also dresses as a woman in the episode ‘Our Mrs. Reynolds’ to apprehend 76

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a group of thieves. The scene is played largely for laughs; Mal wryly acknowledges the absurdity of his costume with the line, ‘if your hand touches metal, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you’. But it also demonstrates Mal’s comfort deviating from strict gender roles. More prominent, though, is Mal’s rugged masculinity. He is a stoic war hero, and he is not afraid to throw his weight around, demanding respect and subservience from his crew. As Samira Nadkarni suggests, ‘the implicit premise is that white, heterosexual male Mal should … be the leader of the crew, occupying a higher socioeconomic position than the rest’ (2015: 72). In concluding his call to arms on Miranda in Serenity, Mal’s quippy delivery of the line, ‘I aim to misbehave’, sums up his privileged position as someone who willfully breaks the rules while demanding obedience from his own crew. We see chinks in his armour at times, but these cleverly reinforce the prominence of his masculinity. When Jayne tests his patience in Serenity, Mal asks him, rhetorically, ‘You want to run this ship?’ When Jayne answers with a resounding ‘Yes!’, Mal is caught off guard and awkwardly spits out, ‘Well … you can’t’. Mal takes his own patriarchal authority so much for granted that he has not even considered the possibility of such a basic challenge to it. It is a hilarious line, delivered quite perfectly by Fillion, that sums up the film’s playful engagement with hypermasculine character tropes. Throughout Firefly and Serenity, the meaning of masculinity is investigated and challenged by virtually every character. David Magill suggests that ‘through their various claims to masculinity’s attributes and roles, the supporting characters of Firefly and Serenity demonstrate that gender is not naturally biological but socially constructed’ (2010: 78). While each character certainly engages with masculine traits, hypermasculinity – and hypermasculine femininity – do not appear across the board. 77

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Mal is backed up by his first mate Zoe and muscle-forhire Jayne, two characters who exemplify the extremes of gender presentation much more than any of the others. Zoe is a strong, silent and stoic warrior, even more so than Mal. While her traditionally feminine beauty is commented on within the series and the film, it is juxtaposed with those traits generally ascribed to the male hero. She is perhaps most strongly coded in male terms when Wash dies near the climax of Serenity. Like the many male action heroes before her, Zoe shuts down her emotions, focusing on her need to avenge her lover’s death with guns and bravado. She follows in the well-trod footsteps of characters like Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) in Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974), William Wallace (Mel Gibson) in Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995), and even John Wick (Keanu Reeves) in John Wick (Chad Stahelski, 2014), who avenges his murdered puppy, a playfully cutesy stand-in for his deceased wife. Jayne is similarly stereotypically masculine, without the gender-bending of Zoe. He gives his weapons women’s names and loves a good fight. He is crude, unsentimental, painfully literal and pragmatic, and he is the most muscle-bound character on the ship. More than just campy though, these features of Firefly/Serenity belong to a long and important tradition in science fiction. As a speculative genre, sci-fi allows us to break through social constructs, to imagine a world where the limitations imposed on us by such things as gender identities can very self-consciously be dissolved. While science fiction is about as difficult to define as cult cinema itself, Christine Cornea offers one of my favourite surveys of the genre’s history, building on the work of Tzvetan Todorov on ‘the fantastic’. She borrows his combination of the marvellous and the uncanny, applying it to science fiction: ‘The reader of science fiction is caught between that which exists outside of the laws of a 78

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known world and that which might be read as a logical extension of the known world’ (2007: 4). Different forms of queerness and of exaggerated gender presentations lend themselves to this kind of genre fiction. We know that Whedon writes from a context in which heteronormativity and fairly clearly delineated gender roles dominate, but this is also a context that includes feminist responses to patriarchy and a rich spectrum of LGBTQ identities becoming ever more visible in mainstream society. The co-editors of Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction would likely agree with this theoretical model, seeing the scifi genre as particularly well-suited to queer theory: In thinking about the application of queer theory to science fiction, what is apparent is sf’s ability to think outside mimetic reproductions of contemporary reality, but also its capacity to fulfil at least part of Michel Foucault’s call to ‘free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently’. (Pearson et al. 2008: 3) And likewise, sci-fi lends itself to breaking the boundaries around race. Films like Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) offer literal transracial embodiment, allowing characters to traverse racial lines using new technologies. We obviously never get away from our own realities as viewers, and so we tend to read these transgressions as metaphorical – how can we not in the case of Avatar, a film that so obviously comments on (and frankly reinforces) colonialism through a Pocahontasinspired story of ‘going native’ in the digital age? The socially constructed lines of race and gender can be presented more subtly than this though. The Matrix offers one such example in its casting of Keanu Reeves as the hero Neo. Joshua Clover discusses Reeves’s ‘unassignable looks (often 79

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attributed to his genetic heritage of Chinese, Caucasian and Hawaiian)’ as a tool for stripping his character of clear racial markers, and calls him a ‘post-national, post-modern poster boy’ (2004: 21). Clover also points to the actor’s androgynous qualities, qualities ‘so often marked next-gen, futuristic’, and he remarks that Reeves’ ambiguous (if very mildly so) gender is underscored by the casting of Carrie-Anne Moss as his romantic opposite, Trinity, ‘who seems to have been styled (if not indeed cast) for her resemblance to him’ (2004: 22). Likewise, Serenity blends a subtle engagement with gender norms, representations of transgression, and the presence of literal queerness in some of its central characters and themes. It imagines a future not entirely divorced from our own, but one in which sex and gender do not necessarily predispose individuals to a particular set of social roles.

WOMEN OF THE WHEDONVERSE It would be all too easy to apply a rubric of camp overly broadly to gender presentations in Firefly and Serenity. Sometimes masculine men and feminine women are just what they seem. River, for instance, is not hyperfeminine by any stretch, but she certainly fits several stereotypes of womanhood or girlhood. She relies on her big brother, is intuitive and emotional, and feels a strong connection to nature, frequently walking barefooted outdoors – and while she is young, she is constantly infantilised well beyond her youth. And Inara, whose sexuality is quite obviously foregrounded, is gendered in a rather familiar, historically situated way. Overall, Serenity lacks the naïveté that tends to make camp most satisfying (see Sontag 2008: 46). Indeed, Whedon is quite deliberate in challenging gender norms, so his playfulness really only flirts with the concept of camp as accidental subversion. His sincerity and intent are decidedly un-campy. 80

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Some of the minor examples of gender-bending in Firefly and Serenity are worth exploring in greater depth outside of camp. Kaylee in particular comes to mind. Her stereotypical femininity is by no means erased by those traits that align her with male roles. In both Firefly and Serenity, she is often infantilised, likes pretty dresses, has stuffed animals, and is shy and docile. But two exceptions are particularly meaningful in giving her character a sense of three-dimensionality and challenging simply gendered, binary characterisations. Most obviously, as the ship’s mechanic and engineer, Kaylee has a job typically associated with men. In the Firefly episode ‘Out of Gas’, we learn that she was actually the ship’s second mechanic. The first, Bester (Dax Griffin), is self-assured to the point of cockiness, but he is ultimately unimpressive and possibly outright incompetent. When Mal finds out that Kaylee can fix his engines in a fraction of the time estimated by Bester, he hires her on the spot. Kaylee is not only good at a ‘man’s job’, she is better than the man already doing it. Kaylee’s impromptu ‘audition’ for the job is significant in another way. Mal walks in on Bester and Kaylee having sex in the engine room. She is a local girl from the planet they are stuck on, having a casual quickie with the soon-to-be ex-mechanic. The scene is presented without judgement, allowing Kaylee a degree of ownership of her sexuality that is rarely afforded in such a way to women on television. When Mal initially walks in on them, he calls her Bester’s ‘prairie harpy’. While ‘harpy’ is clearly gendered and derogatory, it is an interesting choice given the circumstances. It is a term generally devoid of sexual connotations, though we can easily align it with Mal’s casual – and sometimes rather overt – sexism. For all of the times Mal calls Inara a ‘whore’ throughout the series, we might expect a crudely dismissive, slut-shaming epithet to accompany this encounter. But Kaylee’s sexuality does not count against her or strip her of any of her dignity. 81

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We get another glimpse of this early in Serenity, in the Maidenhead bar where River’s abilities are unlocked by the Fruity Oaty Bars commercial. Just after Mal has abandoned Simon and River on the planet Beaumonde, Kaylee protests, appealing to the captain on the grounds of her attraction to Simon. ‘I carried such a torch,’ she says, ‘goin’ on a year now I ain’t had nothin’ twixt my nethers weren’t run on batteries!’ It is a wonderful line, delivered with such confidence. Kaylee is righteously angry that the captain has taken away her chance at sex with the doctor, and she gladly says so with an overt reference to masturbation. While Jayne’s earlier ‘I’ll be in my bunk’ line is expected from a crude, indelicate man, its echo comes as a subversive surprise from a well-mannered young woman like Kaylee. Zoe’s ‘manly’ qualities also merit closer inspection. While she is a strong, silent warrior, she is very explicitly discussed in terms of her role as a woman and indeed a wife. Her marriage to Wash is one of the most grounding elements of the series and film. The sense of family onboard Serenity is much stronger for it. She is clearly the dominant member of the couple, and Wash seems attracted to this: he talks about how great it is to be with a ‘warrior woman’ in the episode ‘Bushwacked’. Zoe also acts as the stereotypical man in bed, wanting to go to sleep after sex, fully satisfied, when Wash wants her to stay up with him in the episode ‘Shindig’. I have discussed the importance of her reaction to Wash’s death in Serenity on both the level of gender and its broader narrative symbolism, but I would add here that she mourns rather realistically. Losing her husband is devastating, but as with most grieving spouses, we realise that she will move on, as she must. Her strength is refreshing, and as realistically feminine as it is stereotypically male. Whedon does not mince words when discussing another of the women of Firefly and Serenity: 82

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Inara’s character originally was a whore, something very Deadwood. My wife said, ‘Why not do something more in the style of a geisha and make her the most educated person on the ship, instead of just an oppressed pathetic creature?’ (2005: 11) Whedon’s conceit here is fairly straightforward. He flips our expectations on their heads. Where sex work is commonly frowned upon and criminalised, and the women who do it demeaned, Firefly introduces us to the Companion, a professional woman held in high regard, with a social standing so far above that of Mal and his crew as to lend the ship legitimacy. We catch glimpses of what a Companion does for a living throughout the series and film, from giving massages and serving tea, to sexual services the likes of which we are given few details. In Serenity, she has left the ship and works at a Companion training house, working with the next generation of Companions. Deleted scenes offer a vague sense of Inara’s work there, before Mal’s arrival. Whedon has elaborated on some of the politics of Companionship in a history of his fictional universe. Companion houses cannot be run by men, and Companions ‘often rose to political or social prominence when they retired’ (2005: 12). But Whedon’s language is also crass and implies a rather bleak dichotomy. For all of the ways that Inara owns her sexuality and maintains an elevated social status, the notion that existing sex workers, or at least the lower-class ones, are just ‘oppressed pathetic creatures’ is rather offensive to the many women who freely and willfully engage in sex work for any number of reasons. The reference to Deadwood certainly provides context. In that series, a bleak frontier setting and the ruthlessly tyrannical saloon owner Swearengen (Ian McShane) account for the fairly unambiguous oppression onscreen. But the dichotomy remains even within Firefly and 83

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Serenity’s diegetic world. Inara is by far the classiest person around, but Mal is often critical of her profession. He refers to her work as ‘whoring’ more than once, challenging the elevated status of Companions over common sex workers, who we generally do not see at all. We might wonder if non-Companion sex work even exists in this future world (or worlds) until the Firefly episode ‘Heart of Gold’, when the crew visits an especially western-inspired bordello. Here, Whedon does allow for some nuance and implicitly challenges his own dichotomy of Companion and ‘oppressed pathetic creature’. The crew of Serenity responds to a call from an old friend of Inara’s, Nandi (Melinda Clarke). Nandi runs a bordello on a small moon. Inara herself refers to Nandi’s employees as ‘whores’, drawing a sharp line between sex workers registered with the Guild and those working independently – she had previously told Mal, in no uncertain words, that he was never to use that word in reference to her work, as we witness in her ‘Out of Gas’ flashback. In ‘Heart of Gold’, Rance Burgess (Fredric Lane), a local man with a great deal of influence, takes a liking to one of Nandi’s girls, Petaline (Tracy Leah Ryan), and he demands to claim her unborn child as his own against her wishes. Nandi and the women who work for her are understandably upset, and they have very few ways to protect themselves, the laws and class structure on the moon siding firmly with Burgess. The episode is one of Firefly’s strongest links to western themes, drawing on canonical texts like The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960) and Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992). Here we see the other side of the coin: sex workers without the social standing of Companions. Andrew Aberdein identifies parallels between Companions and the ancient Greek hetaera, women with a similar role and status. He takes his cue from Joy Davidson (2004: 118) and draws a distinction similar to that depicted in ‘Heart of Gold’: ‘Although 84

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coercion was a very real part of the working life of most lower-status Greek prostitutes, many of whom were slaves, hetaeras were noted for their independence’ (2010: 65). I take exception to the conflation of sex workers and slaves forced into sexual labour and wish to use more nuanced categories in discussing Companions and the other sex workers in the Serenity universe. An in-depth discussion of the politics of sex work, criminality and oppression is beyond the purview of this book, but consent and human agency should not be taken lightly in our definitions and historical comparisons. An important distinction in Firefly is that Nandi is indeed quite independent, running her bordello as she sees fit, despite overwhelming opposition from Burgess and the patriarchal town. She is in some ways far more independent than the average Companion, and that is no coincidence. She used to be a Companion but left, finding the life of a Companion ‘too constricting’. But she is not a victim or slave to anyone. On the contrary, she is quite overtly aligned with Mal and the Browncoats’ struggle against Alliance control. She sleeps with Mal in the end, before being killed, the two having more in common than either might like to admit. Ironically, it is the actual ‘whore’ who Mal sleeps with first. Her narrative disposability is not such a point in favour of Firefly’s championing of sex work, but then again, in the end, it is the women who worked for Nandi who inherit her bordello, continuing a tradition of independence for sex workers outside of the Companion Guild. The Guild would no doubt pose a problem for many sex workers in the real world. Much scholarly work has focused on Inara’s sex work, but one of the most thorough analyses I have found comes from the blog Whore to Culture, where starletharlot (2009), a sex worker and fan of Whedon’s work, points to some of the director’s blind spots where sex work is concerned. The top-down formal structure of the Guild and 85

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the process of registration in particular draw her eye (and ire), because sex workers are not known for celebrating registration measures, traditionally a patronising tool used to control and surveil. Her discussion of the loss of bodily autonomy that often comes with registration certainly rings true when we consider the yearly health checks that Inara must submit to, as revealed in the Firefly episode ‘Ariel’ – ‘why are clients of the Guild not submitted to the same?’, starletharlot asks. She argues, further, that registration sets up a class system of ‘good whores’ and ‘bad whores’ much as is discussed above. A lot of what makes Inara interesting is the idea that she is other than we expect. Science fiction allows her to be unlike the sex workers we are familiar with from film and television. Most notably, as stressed in the show, she has high social standing, provides services beyond sex, and chooses her own customers. This first characteristic is clearly legitimate, but starletharlot is quick to point out that sex work generally does entail a great deal of companionship, intimacy and services outside of sex. And the myth of sex workers selling their agency is a major barrier to society accepting sex work as work. In short, Firefly is not aware or critical enough of the common social consciousness around sex work to fully deconstruct it; instead it engages with established misperceptions and subtly promotes them. It is not the worst depiction of sex work in media today; but it is far from ideal. Whedon et al. do seem invested in troubling easy associations between sex workers and coercion, abuse or moral bankruptcy. Inara is, perhaps above all else, a deeply likeable and respectable character. This is positive representation in that we are encouraged to identify and sympathise with her. But the science fiction conceit of creating an entirely new vision of sex work’s role in society seems to miss a few subtleties surrounding the current realities of the sex trade. 86

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One constant in Whedon’s work is what Michael Marano calls ‘weaponized women’. As he puts it, ‘the idea of a woman as created by a weapon-maker within Patriarchal contexts is a recurring motif in the worlds imagined by Joss Whedon’ (2007: 37). We see this in Buffy, where the first slayer was forcefully given her powers by the ‘Shadow Men’, shamans who harnessed the essence of a demon and transferred it to the body of a young woman. Later, the Watcher’s Council acts as the patriarchal authority over slayers, until Buffy rebels, making the Watchers answer to her. And this is the other common feature of Whedon’s ‘weaponized women’: they tend to take back control of their dangerous bodies. Alien: Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997) is one of my favourite examples. Directed from Whedon’s screenplay, the film features so many hints of what is to come in Firefly, with Ron Perlman’s Johner as a clear prototype for Jayne. In Resurrection, the military clones Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), last seen – and killed – in Alien3 (David Fincher, 1992). The catch is that they have crossed her DNA with that of one of the Xenomorphs, aliens that seemingly can best be weaponised when crossed with a human; Ripley is an ideal candidate, having died while infected by a Xenomorph parasite, predisposing her to such an interspecies cloning procedure. Like River, Ripley’s agency is an afterthought. She is a tool to be made into whatever weapon is convenient. Also like River, she takes back her agency in the end. River willingly goes to the ‘Academy’ when admitted, but the lie sold to her and the Tams by the government gives us a sense of how little they value her agency. She is experimented on, lobotomised, as we learn in the episode ‘Ariel’, and effectively turned into a weapon. Like Ripley, she seems predisposed to the procedures, having an innate gift as a telepath or ‘seer’. Like Buffy, Ripley and other Whedon heroines including Echo (Eliza Dushku) in the later series Doll87

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house, River uses her new strengths to take on the system that has ‘created’ her, or at the very least created that which makes her a weapon. Her empowerment is reactionary and subversive in that it does not negate patriarchal structures but rather takes what it can from them only to dismantle them with it.

A ZOMBIE BY ANY OTHER NAME Serenity’s engagement with genre is one of its strongest textual markers of cult filmmaking. The film is not only legible to the savvy viewer through its adherence to genre conventions, but it also invites obsessive viewing through its bending and blending of multiple genres. While Serenity is not generally classifiable as horror, it certainly engages with horror themes and motifs, aligning it with a hybrid tradition that includes everything from The Thing from Another World (Howard Hawks, 1951) and The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958) to their respective remakes The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) and The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986), along with Alien, Predator (John McTiernan, 1987), They Live (John Carpenter, 1988), Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997), Event Horizon (Paul W. S. Anderson, 1997) and so many others. The flip-side of our hopeful optimism for a better tomorrow is the very real fear that technology will be used to terrifying effect. Science fiction and horror are thus rather well-suited to one another.9 While it may not be obvious at first, the presence of zombies in Serenity is one of the film’s strongest claims to its western status, albeit via horror. The Reavers stand in for a great many things, but chief among them is the colonialism at the heart of many narratives of Western expansion, with Native Americans traditionally pitted as bogeymen standing guard at the edges of the frontier. Zombies themselves are historically attached to colonisation and particularly slavery in 88

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Haiti. The Reavers reflect this origin, while tying in the aesthetics of later zombie cinema and the racism of the western genre. Purists might balk at the idea that Serenity contains zombies at all. Best known from the Living Dead films of George A. Romero, the classic monsters are the walking dead, after all, and the Reavers never rose from their graves. Nor do they kill their victims to ‘turn’ them. In reality, Romero did not invent the zombie, nor were his various iterations, first called ‘ghouls’ in Night of the Living Dead (1968), entirely consistent from film to film. Zombies are a lot older than their twentiethcentury representatives and have a far more complex history than any strictly focused definition could ever allow. The specific definition of a zombie is never entirely clear or consistent from text to text. Do zombies amble slowly or run in quick bursts? Is one infected through a bite or some other means? Questions like these tend to gloss over or ignore the rich history of zombie lore. More important here are the characteristics that might align Serenity with familiar themes of zombie mindlessness, mob mentality, contagion and human subjectivity. The authors of The Zombie Film: From White Zombie to World War Z do offer an appealingly broad definition: ‘The zombie is usually a creature living purely off instinct that can be driven by a hunger and/or the will of a master … but incapable of complex planning, let alone fulfilling a quest’ (Silver and Ursini 2014: 9). This definition, while not perfect, allows room for both Voodoo zombies and their younger, distant relatives. The science fiction origins of the Reavers as a placated populace, drugged into submission by the government, fits well with the tradition of enslaved Voodoo zombies. In films like White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), the titular undead are quite directly linked to the colonial history of Haiti and function as stand-ins for the dehumanising 89

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of human subjects under French colonial rule. Early talkie horror cinema capitalised on the perceived exoticism of Haiti, combined with ethnographic reports of religious stories and folktales that appealed to established horror tropes. Voodoo priests were said to have the power to kill their enemies and bring them back to life as their servants (see Bishop 2008: 141). The word ‘zombie’ itself finds root in Haitian history. Its first documented use was by Moreau de Saint-Mérie in 1792, who defined it as a ‘Creole word that means spirit, revenant’ (Rhodes 2006: 75). In the 1800s, however, the term ‘zombi’ was commonly used to refer to a voodoo snake god or to Haitian revolutionary Jean Zombi; but it was, by 1912, commonly spelled ‘zombie’ and more firmly associated with the living dead (see Bishop 2008: 143). Narratively, the American zombie films of the early sound period focus on the notion of conversion by a Haitian Voodoo priest or similar figure, as in White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie, where, significantly, the protagonists being turned into undead servants are white. As Kyle Bishop notes, ‘the true horror in these movies lies in the prospect of a westerner becoming dominated, subjugated, and effectively “colonized” by a native pagan’ (2008: 141). Bishop also suggests that the zombie is ‘the first thoroughly postcolonial creature from the New World to appear in popular horror movies’ and that White Zombie ‘ultimately re-presents negative stereotypes of the native by propagating the imperialist paradigms of the West’ (2008: 142). This last note is important. The savagery of the Reavers is particularly threatening when we know that they can pass it on; that those ‘civilised’ citizens of Alliance planets could lose their place in such a hierarchy. The different versions of zombies blend here. The Reavers pass on their affliction to the lone survivor of their attack on a transport ship in the Firefly episode ‘Bushwacked’. Becoming a Reaver acts as 90

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a kind of trauma coping mechanism, mirroring the Romero zombie’s ability to pass on zombieism like a disease when it bites a human. Reavers also look and act much more like the aggressive monsters of films like 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) and Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004). But more importantly, the Reavers’ monstrosity is created in the name of civilisation, by the so-called civilisers themselves. They are, we learn in the end, victims of a controlling, oppressive force. In an attempt to forcefully mould humans into more convenient subjects, the Alliance created its own worst enemy: uncontrollable, animalistic and, perhaps most importantly, unproductive beings. When Mal is incensed at the thought that the Alliance would do such a thing and commits to bringing their actions to light, it is his fear that they will try again that drives him: ‘They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people … better. And I do not hold to that.’ But they have swung back. They have already tried again. River’s weaponisation is quite clearly an extension of the Alliance’s project of dominating human subjectivity. Indeed, River’s name, so very close to the name ‘Reaver’, offers us our first hint that we may find parallels between these figures. Whedon would return to these themes far more directly in his later series Dollhouse, again blending images of slavish passivity with aggression and carnage. Gerry Canavan identifies traces of the two traditions (‘zombis’ and ‘zombies’) coming together in Dollhouse as well as in Firefly and Serenity: The Haitian slave zombi was just as commonly a traumatised living person as a revivified corpse, and its defining characteristic is the submission of its will to the will of a master; the zombie, in contrast, is defined almost exclusively by its unyielding appetite for human flesh. (2011: 178) 91

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While the inhabitants of Miranda exemplify the two extremes – submission and unyielding appetite – River ends up somewhere between them. She is meant to be malleable and submissive, but her primary function, we assume, is to be a ruthless weapon. Whedon’s use of zombies also aligns Serenity with a surprisingly rare subset in horror cinema: the space zombie. Zombies certainly have a strong connection to space, often originating there, but they almost never actually appear in outer space itself. Night of the Living Dead’s ghouls were explained away by the return to Earth of a nuclear space probe – but exactly how the probe made the dead come back to life was a mystery. Plenty more examples exist. Ed Wood’s cult classic Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) features aliens reviving the Earth’s dead as zombie foot soldiers. When alien robots come to Earth to wipe out humanity in The Earth Dies Screaming (Terence Fisher, 1965), their victims rise from the dead as zombies to join in the invasion. In Alien Dead (Fred Olen Ray, 1980), a meteor strikes a houseboat, turning everyone aboard into zombies. Similarly, in Night of the Comet (Thom Eberhardt, 1984), the passage of a comet over Earth infects the humans below. The Astro-Zombies (Ted V. Mikels, 1968), an exploitation B-movie full of sex and violence also appeals to the stars: a mad scientist creates zombies as part of research by the US government to develop telepathic communication technologies for use in space exploration. Stretching the seams of the zombie genre, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (Gene Fowler Jr., 1958) offer alien invaders as drone-like replacements for humans. A close thematic relative of the zombie, these visitors from space represent the threat of assimilation into a hive of automatons, devoid of individuality, in seemingly contradictory nods to both Com92

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munism and McCarthyism. Such lists could go on ad nauseam, with no shortage of variations. But Serenity is part of the much more exclusive group of films that actually situates the zombies in outer space. Examples of space zombie cinema include Star Trek: First Contact (Jonathan Frakes, 1996), Ghosts of Mars (John Carpenter, 2001), The Chronicles of Riddick (David Twohy, 2004), Doom (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2005), Pandorum (Christian Alvart, 2009), Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012) and The Last Days on Mars (Ruairi Robinson, 2013). These films in fact feature the only iterations of cinematic space zombies that I can find – using the most inclusive definition of ‘zombies’ possible, with First Contact’s Borg in particular functioning as a borderline example. Other media do contribute to the mix though. The Borg, zombie-like aliens who assimilate humans, are first introduced in ‘Q Who’, a second-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and they recur throughout the series and in the later Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001). Variations on the space zombie crop up in video games like Mass Effect, Halo and Dead Space, along with the latter’s own prequel animated film Dead Space: Downfall (Chuck Patton, 2008). Even the board game Outbreak: Deep Space resituates the original zombie tabletop game Outbreak in space. Still, the list is rather short.

THE MYTH OF WESTERN ‘CIVILISATION’ Serenity blends its basic science fiction premise with the western far more than any of the other genres we see therein. Whedon has called Firefly ‘a Stagecoach kind of drama with a lot of people trying to figure out their lives in a bleak and pioneer environment’ (2006: 6), and this very much carries over into the film. Some have suggested that Serenity tones down the western flavours of Firefly – most notably J. P. Telotte, who claims that the film is ‘intent on establishing 93

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a primary generic lineage in sf’, supplanting or overshadowing its generic hybridity as a space western in Firefly (2008: 71). But I firmly believe that some of the strongest engagements with the mythology of the western emerge in the film, made all the more clever and compelling by its sci-fi conceit. On the most basic level, Serenity does carry over the western elements of Firefly: the twangy guitar score, the dusters and six-shooters, the southern, old-timey vernacular, etc. It also holds on to its characters, or character archetypes, roughly matching the group of outsiders in Stagecoach. The goofy pilot, Wash, often present for comic relief, is aligned with the stagecoach driver, Buck (Andy Devine). Inara stands in for Dallas (Claire Trevor). Both women function as the ‘prostitute with a heart of gold’ that André Bazin has identified as one of the two types of western heroine, the other being the ‘courageous virgin’ (2005: 164). The other archetypes do not necessarily fit so neatly together, though we find elements of the alcoholic Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell), the roguish gambler (John Carradine), the meek salesman (Donald Meek), the pregnant and defenseless soldier’s wife (Louise Platt) and the stoic, charming outlaw, the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) all stretched across Mal, Zoe, Jayne, Simon and River. And Stagecoach is hardly the final word on western archetypes. The genteel city doctor, the damsel in distress, the warrior woman, the southern belle – these all pop up one way or another in Firefly and Serenity. The blending of science fiction and the western is not new. It has indeed become such a common generic pairing as to almost become a genre in and of itself. Mal clearly borrows elements of the smuggler-scoundrel Han Solo (Harrison Ford) from Star Wars. The character Buck Rogers is another example, appearing in novellas, comics, films and television. The features Mad Max (George Miller, 1979) and its sequels, Outland (Peter Hyams, 1981), Cowboys and Aliens (Jon Fav94

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reau, 2011) and Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973) and its television adaptation on HBO (2016–), not to mention the series Wild Wild West (1965–69) and its film adaptation (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1999), or Battlestar Galactica (1978–79) and its remake (2004–9). Too many more examples exist to list here. By drawing on this rich tradition, Whedon doubles down on the already intertextual qualities of genre cinema. He engages with these genres to a rather extreme degree. He not only references some of the biggest titles of science fiction directly, many of them ‘space westerns’, but also pushes the western tropes to their most extreme. Where Star Trek explicitly made space the ‘final frontier’, Firefly took us to that frontier to reveal cattle ranchers, saloons and gun-slinging outlaws who say things like ‘ain’t’ and ‘I reckon’. Whedon takes the western analogy to its most literal conclusion. Firefly still was hardly the first science fiction text to be so overt with its western imagery. Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation playfully trapped characters in westernthemed simulations in the episodes ‘Spectre of the Gun’ and ‘A Fistful of Datas’ respectively. The later Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–99) was the first in the franchise to abandon the theme of exploring the ‘final frontier’, opting instead to take place on an unmoving space station on the frontier, the titular Deep Space Nine. But rather than toning down the previous series’ western themes, the station served as a kind of frontier settlement, complete with outlaw drifters passing through, a saloon and its crooked owner, and a look at the long-term fallout of colonial relations with alien native peoples and settlers. Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), the commanding officer of Deep Space Nine, is himself seemingly named after the Cisco Kid, depicted in numerous western radio serials, films and television series. His relationship to his son Jake (Cirroc Lofton) also generally mirrors the format of the father and son on the frontier depicted in The Rifleman (1958–63). 95

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Many other films, series and books have played on the relationships between genres in their own equally direct ways, but the degree to which Firefly and Serenity consistently commit to the referent without comment or genuine narrative explanation is quite notable. Serenity thematically goes beyond some of the more aesthetically western features of Firefly, most notably in the figure of the Operative. Like the western anti-heroes before him, the Operative functions as a civilising force. He claims to offer a ‘better world’ when Mal challenges his murderous ways. His victims are simply people who stand in the way of the Alliance’s supposedly rightfully earned evolution. Malcolm presses him: ‘So me and mine gotta lay down and die so you can live in your better world?’ The Operative is surprised by the very question: ‘I’m not going to live there. There’s no place for me there any more than there is for you. Malcolm, I’m a monster. What I do is evil – I have no illusions about it – but it must be done.’ The Alliance’s better world is not one for killers, despite their value in quelling resistance. The Operative’s function is much like that of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) or Wayne’s Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962). These men must tame the wild west, or in the Operative’s case the outer reaches of inhabited space. Wayne’s cowboy characters are liminal figures, champions of civilisation who are too rugged and violent to actually fit into the world they usher in. The iconic final shot of The Searchers is in fact echoed twice in Serenity. In Ford’s film, Edwards is framed in a doorway, standing outside his brother’s home. He has returned his niece to the safety of her family, away from the Comanches who abducted her. With her return, Edwards has restored the safety and order of domestic American life, but he personally does not belong there. He is left to wander as an outsider. 96

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Figures 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3: John Wayne in The Searchers, mirrored twice in Serenity

At the end of Serenity, the Operative stands outside the open cargo-bay door of Serenity, having been defeated by her captain. The important difference here is that the ship represents exactly what the Operative was fighting against. He aimed to usher in a better world by wiping out people like Mal, only to find, in his failure, that the Alliance is treacherous, corrupt and oppressive. The Operative is a dark reflection of the John Wayne-style western hero, highlighting the problematic nature of American settlement narratives by confusing the distinction between the savage and the civilised. When I first watched Serenity, I half-expected Mal to invite the Operative to join his crew. But that would be too easy. In reality, there 97

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is no place for the Operative on Serenity, just as there is no place for Ethan Edwards in his brother’s home. Mal instead warns that he will kill him if they ever cross paths again. To illustrate the point even further, when Mal is delivering his ‘I aim to misbehave speech’, he is also framed through a doorway, aligning him visually much more clearly with The Searchers. But the camera is placed in the liminal space of the ship’s hallway while Mal stands firmly inside the dining room, the ship’s most domestic space. In the wilderness of space, outside of ‘civilisation’, Serenity has carved out that which must truly be defended from Alliance savagery. Just as Ford keeps Edwards outside of the civilised home, Whedon plants Mal firmly within the domestic section of the ship. The so-called savagery outside the core is also troubled by the Reavers. Besides zombies, Serenity’s monsters find their most overt thematic reference in Native Americans, coerced, displaced and killed in the name of civilisation and colonialism. They are also painted as figurative and literal monsters by the very settlers oppressing them. So, in this way, Whedon blends the colonial narratives of voodoo horror with the racist tropes of the western. For J. Douglas Rabb and J. Michael Richardson, ‘There can be no doubt that the Reavers represent “blood-thirsty Savage Redskins” in Joss Whedon’s futuristic Cowboy-and-Indian narratives, Firefly and its movie sequel Serenity’ (2010: 127). The stories told about Reavers are remarkably similar to those traits applied to ‘Indians’ in the old west. In ‘Serenity’ Part 2, Zoe tells Simon about the Reavers, who he has always assumed were a myth, a boogeyman story told to scare children. ‘If they take the ship, they’ll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing’, she tells him. The links to western myths of Native American savagery are unmistakable in this, our first exposure to the Reaver legends of the ’verse. Reavers roam the ‘wilderness’ of space, away 98

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from the central planets (read: cities) and prey upon unwitting parties of travellers, enacting animalistic violence on them, from sexual violence to wearing their skins. In the opening of Serenity, River’s classmates conflate the war’s Independents with the Reavers under the shared category of people who ‘refuse to be civilised’, adding to the colonial undertones of the show. One child claims that they attack ‘settlers from space’, rape them, and wear their skins, in response to another’s disbelief. Again, the parallels to fears of the ‘Indian’ and the creation of a cultural bogeyman are strong, this time overtly framed against the term ‘settler’. Of course, we also later find out that the Reavers’ monstrosity was quite literally created by the Alliance. The colonial roots of Native American violence – and the flat-out lies and rumours surrounding their lifestyles – serve as a mirror for the blame that rests solely on the shoulders of the so-called civilisers of Serenity. It is worth mentioning though, that the Reavers are also aesthetically coded as ‘Indians’ – and strongly so. Their physical appearance in Serenity (they are never really ‘seen’ in Firefly) is clearly racialised. While some are visibly white, even blond haired, Agnes B. Curry notes that the first Reaver that we actually see sneaks up on a mother and son very strongly coded as western settlers, and that ‘he has brown skin and long, straight, black hair. This glimpse is enough to activate the stereotype of the savage Injun’ (2008). Approaching Reaver ships in Firefly are also announced by a suggestive change in music. While the usual score is full of twangy guitar, aligning the tone with our adventuresome western cowboy heroes, we learn that a threat exists when sombre drumbeats are introduced. The links to Native American drums and the threat associated with them is unmistakable. It is worth noting the distinction between the series and film that Curry points out. While the Reavers take a rather different form in both, they are always coded as western ‘Indians’. In 99

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Firefly, they conform to the trope of sneakiness, always present as a hidden threat that could attack at any time, springing forth out of the mysterious wilderness of space. In Serenity, they are the ‘Indian’ as savage warrior. They appear either in attack mode or as a barrier that the heroes must cross by ‘going Native’, dressing their ship up to pass as Reavers themselves. There are certainly problems with this representation of Reavers. While Whedon explicitly seeks to de-politicise and indeed de-recialise the figure of the western ‘Indian’, some have quite rightly pointed to the impossibility of such a project. ‘Why does Whedon claim to have de-racialized the reference? What, precisely, does it even mean to have removed the racial aspect of a racial stereotype?’ asks Curry (ibid.). She points to the drumbeats that accompany the Reaver’s arrival, the war paint on the ‘face’ of their ship, the terms ‘pack’ and ‘raiding party’ to describe groups of Reavers – these all have a strong precedent in western cinema and colonial histories. Rabb and Richardson reject Curry’s argument that Whedon reinforces these stereotypes, claiming that, ‘It is, of course, necessary to present such stereotypes in order to deconstruct them’ (2010: 127). But this line of thought feels rather thin. In fairness to Curry, she is not arguing that stereotypes cannot be invoked at all, but rather that Whedon’s aesthetic choices reinforce such stereotypes and do so before any act of deconstruction can undo the damage: By the time a possibly deconstructive moment takes place – late in the climax of Serenity – previous scenes have inculcated the savage stereotype so effectively at the subliminal level that one possibly revisionary scene could hardly trouble it. (2008) In other words, Whedon merely replays the well-worn stereotypes of westerns in his treatment of the Reavers throughout 100

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Firefly and Serenity, stripping much of the impact from his deconstructive act. I do think that Whedon is aware of this, and that it is neither a slip-up nor a willfully heinous act. The strong colonial undertones of the series and film make it clear that he is taking on Hollywood’s history of racism towards Native Americans, but that does not take away from his harmful methods, which Curry quite convincingly identifies. Nor do these representations exist in a vacuum. Curry points to the general absence of Latino characters in the California-set Buffy, tying the depiction of Reavers to Whedon’s broader lack of inclusion of people of colour in his work. There is also something markedly strange about Firefly and Serenity’s suggestion that the Alliance was born out of an earlier merger between the US and China, creating first a global then a universal superpower. While characters frequently utter phrases in Mandarin, and the ’verse’s clothing and architecture often have a clearly Asian influence, one wonders why we do not see more Chinese characters. Or perhaps Asian characters more broadly. After all, as Leigh Adams Wright points out, the merger ‘seems to be less between American and Chinese than it is between west and east in the broadest possible sense’ (2004: 32). Just in the opening scene of ‘The Train Job’, S. Andrew Granade identifies elements of Arabic, Japanese, French, Chinese, American and German culture and history just in the basic mise-en-scène, along with Arabic, Indian and Sub-Saharan African instruments and musical styles in the original score (2015: 101). The superficiality of this multiculturalism is indeed a problem. Most of the Mandarin spoken stands in for expressions of anger or exasperation. It is a clever way to keep network censors at bay and ensure a PG-13 rating – FOX did forbid the use of actual swearing or overly dirty language in Mandarin in case Firefly were to air overseas for a Mandarin-speaking audience (see Whedon 2007: 8), but I would argue that the 101

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effect on an English-speaking viewer is still very much one of bleeped-out profanity. Regardless, Whedon’s casual appropriation combined with a near-complete lack of genuine representation should give us pause: ‘What’s happening here is that cultural artefacts – organic expressions of a particular people, situated in a particular time and place – are being divorced of their meaning in order to be used as a metaphor for something else’ (Wright 2004: 31). On a side note though, the Chinese lines also invite deeper engagement from fans whose investment may be strong enough to compel them to seek out translations. Online translations were indeed offered by Mandarin-speaking fans after episodes aired, sometimes leading to interpretive debates (see Sullivan 2004: 204). The influence of Asian culture on Firefly and Serenity does feel rather cultish. In it, we can appreciate a recognisable hodge-podge of referents. Inara is never explicitly compared to a geisha diegetically, but we can enjoy identifying the parallels. I also cannot help but think back to Blade Runner’s Deckard (Harrison Ford), eating with chopsticks in what seems like a futuristically global Chinatown. Like the mixing of genres and the references to colonialism, this token multiculturalism is a rather inviting point of entry to potential cult viewers. Similarly, Serenity’s opening narration does not actually tell us that the US and China have come together, only that the Alliance is ruled by an ‘interplanetary parliament’, but contemporary geopolitics inform our reading of different visual and thematic cues. We must look to paratextual material for more definitive confirmation of this merger. The shooting scripts for ‘Serenity’ and ‘The Train Job’ refer to ‘AngloSino’ flags painted on Alliance property (see Whedon 2006: 19, 65). Whedon’s ‘Brief History of the Universe’ also confirms the ‘melding’ of American and Chinese cultures during the colonisation of planets (2005: 12). 102

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HIGH AND LOW Great cult films often flirt with ‘high art’ and more respected artistic traditions. The Rocky Horror Picture Show quotes literary classics, while This is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984) uses documentary aesthetics to tell its story. But both films also subvert the expectations attached to their referents. One is a carnivalesque celebration of difference through excessive sexuality and camp, while the other mocks both heavy metal and documentary cinema – which make up its very own subject and style. Cult cinema seems perfectly suited to flaunt its literacy in the more socially sanctioned arts while simultaneously ‘trashing the academy’, to borrow the language of Jeffrey Sconce (2008). Their viewers celebrate a sense of exclusivity, but this tends to come with a proud affirmation of low-class standing, a badge of alterity. Serenity continues this tradition, quoting everything from Star Wars to Shakespeare. Whedon’s series and films have always featured razor-sharp wit and impressive dialogue. As a writer, he can be downright showy, and that is very much part of his appeal. In Buffy the Vampire Slaper, we generally cheer for Buffy’s uncharacteristically clever witty banter when she is slaying demons. Whedon plays on the expectations laid out by previous horror films and the sexism that tells us cheerleaders are vapid and stupid. Buffy is no typical victim. Despite being the pretty, blonde cheerleader, she is the one that monsters fear. Serenity engages in something similar, situating itself within a history of science fiction, and granting itself permission to stand above it all, at least a bit. Nowhere is this self-appointed high-browness more apparent than in Whedon’s very direct disavowal of Star Wars and George Lucas’s rather blunt and simplistic tale of good versus evil. Until we learn about Miranda, the Alliance’s ma103

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jor crime is its treatment of River. The Tams are members of the privileged higher class, and they know nothing of the Alliance’s crimes, so it stands to reason that factions exist – this is a complex bureaucracy where even the children of those with political clout can be kidnapped as tools of the state. But is this the norm, or an aberration within a more or less realistic government? Even as a symbol of aggressive colonial rule, the Alliance’s actions are tempered by the fact that the ’verse is populated by nothing but colonisers. Everyone left ‘Earth that Was’ together – these are not oppressed native populations, but rather ill-served and under-represented constituents. This is not to downplay the Alliance’s crimes, or to pretend that the government should not be overthrown. But even the harshest critics of police brutality, Guantánamo Bay, drone strikes, government surveillance and American imperialism do not, by default, call for a complete overhaul of the United States government. In contrast, the Empire in Star Wars appears to have literally no redeeming qualities and must be wiped out entirely. The Alliance’s low-key tyranny (and no doubt it is tyranny) functions in contrast to the unbounded evil of the Empire, where literal forces of light and dark must battle for the fate of the universe. We could substitute many other similarly over-the-top forces of evil, like the Dark Lord Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series, or the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. But somehow the Empire seems the best fit. Wellorganised central governments opposed by the films’ protagonists, these entities are clearly aligned. Sharon Sutherland and Sarah Swan point to the ‘fundamentally good intentions’ of the Alliance on Miranda, citing Whedon’s own admission that the Alliance’s morality is not ‘black and white’, that the government is ‘basically benign’ (2010: 97). The Operative himself comments to Mal and Inara that ‘the Alliance isn’t 104

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some evil empire’, stressing the complexity of interplanetary politics and pointing back to Star Wars’ Empire by name.10 I firmly reject the notion that the Alliance is benign or that its intentions really do anything to counter the criminal arrogance of taking away River’s agency or that of Miranda’s settlers, but Whedon certainly does offer a three-dimensional government that is far more recognisable than any found in George Lucas’s films. Whedon cheekily references a film that is at once an important classic and commercially low-brow, borrowing from it only to place his own text above it. Whedon also directly quotes Shakespeare’s The Tempest as well as its adaptation into the kitschy 1950s sci-fi romp Forbidden Planet. Seen in the background on Miranda is a ship with the number ‘C-57D’ printed on it, referencing the name of the central spaceship in Forbidden Planet.11 Forbidden Planet in turn borrows heavily from the plot of The Tempest (presumably where Whedon got the name ‘Miranda’), and provides a point of reference for River’s subconscious conditioning by providing its own ‘monster from the Id’. In short, the humans who came to the planet Altair IV long ago were wiped out by a monster born out of the subconscious mind of Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon). The crew of C-57D, having made contact with the only survivors of the original expedition, Morbius and his daughter (played by Anne Francis), must find a way to control the doctor’s Id to escape. In the end, Morbius dies, taking the monster with him. While more hopeful, a parallel exists at the end of Serenity, when River manages to control her abilities, shedding the Alliance’s trigger and killing the remaining Reavers threatening the crew, effectively mastering the monster within while eliminating the external threat. Links to The Tempest are not quite as clear, outside of the second-hand borrowing from Forbidden Planet and the inclusion of a planet called Miranda, though the planet itself is 105

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certainly evocative. Rabb and Richardson point to the play’s Miranda, the daughter of Prospero (adapted as Morbius in Forbidden Planet). Miranda, along with and under the authority of her father, has oppressed the slave Caliban (2010: 136). Caliban is seen as a monster, and his mother is the witch Sycorax, perhaps only coincidentally rhyming with the ‘Pax’ used to create the Reavers. Rabb and Richardson draw on Laura Donaldson’s feminist theory of patriarchy in The Tempest to frame Whedon’s reference. Donaldson aligns Miranda with Caliban: she may be an oppressor, but she is simultaneously oppressed by the ‘omnipotent Western patriarch’, her father (qtd. in Rabb and Richardson 2010: 137). Read this way, the inhabitants of Miranda are themselves colonisers and agents of the Alliance, but they also fall victim to the Alliance’s oppressive control. The reference to Shakespeare functions to expose the layers of oppression, the complex systems of control that exist within and around the Alliance. Spotting these references can certainly be part of the fun, as with most of the intertextuality of Serenity, but the mixture of high and low is also at play. Whedon raises the likes of Forbidden Planet and sci-fi B-movies while bringing the Bard down to the level of space adventures. It is a playful challenge to taste distinctions that has a distinctly cult flavour.

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Sometimes filmmakers themselves attract a cult following. This is the case with figures like John Waters, Kevin Smith, Roger Corman and so many others. At other times, cult status comes to films in a one-off manner. Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984) and Sid and Nancy (1986) may claim cult status, but Cox’s other films do not enjoy the same intense fandom. Ridley Scott has certainly earned cult followings throughout his career, most notably with films like Alien, Blade Runner and Legend (1985), but is he a cult figure? His filmography includes incredibly popular hits, but titles like White Squall (1996), Gladiator (2000), Hannibal (2001), Matchstick Men (2003) and The Martian (2015) are hardly cult films. These are not strict categories, but the cultdom attached to a filmmaker is not always assured by one or even a few cult hits. Joss Whedon seems to quite unambiguously fall into the category of cult auteur. He is virtually a cult brand, lending an air of geeky legitimacy to any project he is attached to. When he took on directing duties for Marvel’s The Avengers, Variety’s Marc Graser quite accurately referred to him as ‘a favorite among fanboys’ (2010). Admittedly, his résumé is not 107

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exclusively made up of cult successes. He was a writer on Roseanne (1988–97) for years, and was a script doctor for films like Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994), Waterworld (Kevin Reynolds, 1995) and Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996). His film screenplays were a critical mixed bag, including the Buffy feature, Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), Alien: Resurrection and Titan A.E. (Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, 2000). But with the Buffy series and its spinoff Angel, Whedon began to amass the fanbase that would follow him through to Firefly and Serenity, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (2008), Dollhouse, Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012, co-written with Whedon), The Avengers, Much Ado About Nothing, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–) and Avengers: Age of Ultron. Outside of film and television, he wrote popular comics like Fray (a sequel to Buffy set in the distant future), Astonishing X-Men, several Firefly-derived stories, Buffy ‘seasons’, Runaways and more. His work, overall, tends to appeal to the geeks of the world, whether sci-fi fans, comic book nerds or anyone in between. Whedon is also the subject of a great many academic studies, this book being only one with many others. As the introduction to Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion boldly claims, Whedon ‘has been the most intensely studied TV creator in popular culture, with dozens of books and thousands of essays covering and recovering every aspect of his television series, movies, and comics’ (Moore 2012: 11). As early as 2000, Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery, having received over 120 proposals for their book of essays on Buffy, began planning Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies (see Cochran 2014: 380). While initially devoted to Buffy exclusively, Slayage has touched on many aspects of Whedon’s career and has had special issues focused on his other works. Wilcox and Lavery gave the journal a home at the Whedon Studies Association, which also publishes Watcher Junior: The Undergraduate Journal of Whedon Studies, and hosts the yearly Slayage Confer108

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ence on the Whedonverse (SCW). Other books and journal articles are far too many to list here. We can identify several hints of Whedon’s distinct authorial voice early on, leading quite neatly into the transmedia behemoth The Avengers. Some of his engagement with gender in Serenity can be traced back to the original Buffy screenplay that subverted the ‘Final Girl’ trope of slasher horror. Carol J. Clover, in coining the Final Girl, describes the lone survivor of films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), a girl ‘who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified’ (1992: 35). But Buffy is courage personified. Her quippy one-liners replace the Final Girl’s screams, and being cornered generally means she has lured her foes into a trap. She turns the Final Girl on her head. She fits the mould superficially, only to violently challenge our expectations. Similar to the genre blending in Serenity, Angel took vampire fiction into the world of Los Angeles noir detective fiction. Alien: Resurrection sowed the seeds of genetic interference with human bodies and controlling subjectivity, which returns in Serenity as well as Dollhouse. And Dollhouse doubled back to Firefly/Serenity’s Companions, reimagining sex workers in sci-fi settings.12 Cabin in the Woods is likely Whedon’s most self-aware project to date. Here, he revisits many of his career-spanning themes, from unfeeling corporate overseers, to a playfully reflexive engagement with genre, to overt challenges to gender stereotypes, notably the Final Girl again. And while transmediation is such a fascinating part of Serenity specifically, it is very much a constant in Whedon’s career more broadly. Buffy’s television revival and its continuation and spinoffs in comics set the stage, but Firefly and Dollhouse’s own comics marked a continuing trend. When Whedon took on the task of bringing together Marvel’s first 109

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phase of superhero films into a single team-up project, The Avengers, he certainly seemed like a logical choice. Few other filmmakers had as much experience managing different texts and media, crossing over storylines and bringing coherence to dense, complex projects. Whedon’s reflexive engagement with media has been equally constant. Just as Serenity thematises its own media status, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog playfully engages with its low-budget, DIY origins. The project was born out of the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, bypassing traditional broadcast and any network involvement (see Lang 2010: 367). In it, we root for the eponymous villain (played by Neil Patrick Harris) as he schemes to defeat the blundering, universally adored Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion). We also follow Dr. Horrible on his personal video blog, a sharp contrast to the industrial legitimacy and polish of television. The mainstream is quite fully disavowed both on the level of character identification and explicit mode of presentation. Dr. Horrible also fits into Whedon’s role as a frequent creator of superhero fiction. Before directing two Avengers films, Whedon had written comics for Marvel revolving around not only superheroes, but ensembles, namely the XMen and the Runaways, teenaged children of supervillains fighting for good. He was also brought in to write last-minute revisions to Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000), though few of his changes made it into the final film (see Robinson 2001). In 2005, while Serenity was in post-production, Warner Bros. announced that Whedon would write and direct the live-action feature film Wonder Woman (see Craft 2005). In February 2007, after working on a script for two years, Whedon left the project when he and the producers were unable to see eyeto-eye creatively (see Vineyard 2007). With this background, it made perfect sense that he was chosen to take on Marvel’s cinematic universe – though with Serenity as his only feature110

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length directorial credit at the time, he was by no means the likeliest choice. Between his two superhero projects at Marvel, The Avengers and its sequel, Whedon founded his own ‘micro-studio’, Bellwether Pictures, and shot Much Ado About Nothing in secret at his Santa Monica home (see Fleming Jr. 2011). More precisely, Whedon made Much Ado between production and post-production of The Avengers (see Wilcox 2014: 1). He would later write the screenplay for Bellwether’s second feature In Your Eyes (Brin Hill, 2014), another amalgam of genres, bringing together science fiction and romantic melodrama. Having borrowed from The Tempest in Serenity, Whedon returned to Shakespeare with Much Ado About Nothing, setting the Bard’s comedy in the present day and featuring a recognisable cast of actors from many of his past projects. As with the blending of Shakespeare and science fiction in Serenity, Whedon’s oscillation between low-budget, art filmmaking and commercial, summer blockbuster superhero fare is not all that strange. As Rhonda Wilcox notes, ‘For those unfamiliar with Whedon, the step from Marvel Comics movie to Shakespeare may seem incongruous, but to many it seems a natural move, part of a unified body of work’ (2014: 1). Indeed, incongruity is one of Whedon’s calling cards. As is showiness, intertextual and otherwise. From quoting and subverting classic genre tropes, to crafting witty dialogue, to drawing on the most revered texts in art history, Whedon situates himself as an outsider. He is a liminal figure like many of his protagonists, operating between high and low, mainstream and underground, commercial and independent. This makes his films and series highly engaging. They are rich sites of interpretation, offering a great many avenues for engagement from audiences with almost any level of media literacy. As such, they open themselves up to expansive cult followings, and have rewarded Whedon with a remarkably loyal fanbase. 111

NOTES

1 2

3

4

5

Joss Whedon himself was a fan of Veronica Mars and made an appearance in the Season 2 episode ‘Rat Saw God’. Actor Adam Baldwin, who plays Jayne in Firefly and Serenity, is equally vocal in support of the American Republican Party. Since Serenity, Baldwin has become known less for his acting than for his statements, primarily on Twitter, aligning him with controversial (read misogynistic and racist) causes like ‘GamerGate’ and the Obama ‘Birther’ movement. I am not sure that I accept the unviability of the genre, which has had successes of varying degrees before and since Firefly. Examples include Lonesome Dove (1989); Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993–98); Deadwood (2004–6); Hell On Wheels (2011–16); and other borderline westerns and generic hybrids, including later Star Trek series; Kung Fu (1972–75); Walker, Texas Ranger (1993–2001); Carnivale (2003–5); Justified (2010–15); The Red Road (2014–15); Longmire (2012–); and even, if we stretch our definitions, the immensely popular Breaking Bad (2008–13). Interestingly, ‘The Train Job’ opens with a straightforward, low-tech barroom brawl, introducing Firefly to audiences for the first time exclusively through its western iconography, eventually revealing its hybrid status more than three minutes in with a holographic window and the appearance of the titular spaceship. Interestingly, in contrast to the Companion’s Guild of Firefly/Serenity, Equality Now unequivocally condemns sex work. The organisation generally aligns sex workers with trafficked women. In 2016, Equality Now’s global executive director Yasmeen Hassan stated 112

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that, ‘They’re sexual objects. What does that mean for how professional women are seen?’ (qtd. in Bazelon 2016). 6 Discussing ‘Serenity’ as the series’ introduction is not unproblematic, as discussed already. The two-part episode did not even air until after the series’ cancellation, but it was produced as a single pilot, functions as such narratively, and is presented as the first, single, extended episode on the series’ DVD release. 7 Not to be confused with the fan-made, entirely unofficial Firefly ‘seasons’ Still Flying, mentioned earlier. 8 Official blueprints of the ship Serenity released by Universal and Quantum Mechanix also provide adapted content that allows fans to look more closely at the film’s setting, sometimes discovering details either invisible or wholly absent from the film. 9 It seems fitting that Whedon cut his teeth on a screenplay in the Alien series, a film franchise that is virtually synonymous with the blending of science fiction and horror. 10 Even the Operative’s evil tendencies have limits. He delivers this line before learning about Miranda. The creation of the Reavers is in fact what turns him away from his duty and undying faith in the Alliance. 11 I admittedly did not catch this detail on my own. I give full credit to J. P. Telotte for pointing it out (2008: 71). 12 While Whedon presents Dollhouse’s ‘actives’ or ‘dolls’ as willing participants in becoming programmable human slaves, we see once again that his conception of sex work, the most overt reference point for the ‘dolls’, is one that revokes human agency at the point of transaction.

113

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(eds) The Cult Film Reader. New York: Open University Press, 149–62. Jankovich, M., A. Lázaro Reboll, J. Stringer and A. Willis (eds) (2003) Understanding Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jenkins, H. (n.d.) ‘Joss Whedon, The Browncoats, and Dr. Horrible’, in Spreadable Media; http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/jenkins1/#.U7 WOWhyj7gI (accessed 21 March 2016). ____ (2008) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenson, J. (1992) ‘Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization’, in L. A. Lewis (ed.) The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London & New York: Routledge, 9–29. Jess-Cooke, C. (2012) Film Sequels: Theory and Practice from Hollywood to Bollywood. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kelly, R. and W. Brett (2007) Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga. Anaheim, CA: Graphitti Designs. Lang, A. (2010) ‘“The Status is Not Quo!”: Pursuing Resolution in WebDisseminated Serial Narrative’, Narrative, 18, 3, 367–81. Lilly, N. E. (2007) ‘Interview with Keith R. A. DeCandido’, SpaceWesterns. com; http://www.spacewesterns.com/articles/4/ (accessed 4 March 2016). Magill, D. (2010) ‘“I Aim to Misbehave”: Masculinities in the ’Verse’, in R. V. Wilcox and T. R. Cochran (eds) Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier. London: IB Tauris, 76–86. Marano, M. (2007) ‘River Tam and the Weaponized Women of the Whedonverse’, in J. Espenson (ed.). Serenity Found: More Unauthorized Essays on Joss Whedon’s Firefly Universe. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 37–48. Mathijs, E. and X. Mendick (2008) ‘Editorial Introduction: What is Cult Film?’ in E. Mathijs and X. Mendick (eds) The Cult Film Reader. New York: Open University Press, 1–11. Mathijs, E. and J. Sexton (2011) Cult Cinema: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Mittell, J. (2010) ‘Previously On: Prime Time Serials and the Mechanics of Memory’, in M. Grishakova and M.-L. Ryan (eds) Intermediality and Storytelling. Berlin: De Gruyter, 78–98. Moore, R. (2012) ‘Introduction: Why Cast a Spotlight on Joss Whedon?’, in M. A. Money (ed.) Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion: The TV Series, the Movies, the Comic Books and More. London: PopMatters 118

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____ (2010) Firefly – Still Flying: A Celebration of Joss Whedon’s Acclaimed TV Series. London: Titan Books. Whedon, J. and J. Cassaday (2009) Astonishing X-Men. New York: Marvel Comics. Whedon, J. and G. Jeanty (2007) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8 Volume 1: The Long Way Home. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse Comics. ____ (2014) Serenity: Leaves on the Wind, #1–6. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Whedon, J., B. Matthews and W. Conrad (2006) Serenity: Those Left Behind. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse Comics. ____ (2008) Serenity: Better Days, #1–3. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Whedon, J. and T. Minear (2003) ‘“The Train Job”: Episode Commentary’, in Firefly: The Complete Series. 20th Century FOX Home Entertainment. DVD. Whedon, J. K. Moline and A. Owens (2003) Fray. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Whedon, J. and M. Ryan (2009) Runaways: Dead End Kids. New York: Marvel Comics. Whedon, J., Z. Whedon and C. Samnee (2006). Serenity: The Shepherd’s Tale. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Wilcox, R. (2014) ‘Introduction: Much Ado About Whedon’, in R. Wilcox, T. R. Cochran, C. Masson and D. Lavery (eds) Reading Joss Whedon. Syracuse, NJ: Syracuse University Press, 1–14. Wilcox, R. V. and T. R. Cochran (2010) ‘“Good Myth”: Joss Whedon’s Further Worlds’, in R. V. Wilcox and T. R. Cochran (eds) Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier. London & New York: IB Taurus, 1–11. Wills, J. (2015) ‘Firefly and the Space Western: Frontier Fiction on Fast Forward’, in M. Goodrum and P. Smith (eds) Firefly Revisited: Essays on Joss Whedon’s Classic Series. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 1–17. Wright, L. A. (2004) ‘Asian Objects in Space’, in J. Espenson (ed.) Finding Serenity: Anti-heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 29–35.

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INDEX adaptation 4, 19–20, 28, 53, 55, 57, 60, 95, 105 The Alliance 6, 8, 17, 40, 41, 43–5, 56–7, 60, 62–5, 67–8, 71, 85, 90–1, 96–9, 101–6, 113 Alien: Resurrection 87, 108–9 The American Civil War 6, 17 Angel 35, 108–9 authorship 33, 47, 53–4 Avatar 79 The Avengers 12, 18, 28, 107–11 Avengers: Age of Ultron 28, 108

camp 72–4, 76, 78, 80–1, 103 Can’t Stop the Serenity 30–1 China 101–2 cinematisation 13 cliffhanger overlap 39, 41 Cochran, Tanya R. 3, 26 colonialism 79, 88, 98, 102 The Companion Guild 85 Con Man 14–15 counterculture 18–19 crowdfunding 14 cultural capital 4

Barthes, Roland 54 The Battle of Serenity Valley 6, 56 Bellwether Pictures 111 Bishop, Kyle 90 Blade Runner 9, 20, 102, 107 Browncoats 3, 6, 15–17, 20, 23–4, 35, 51, 56, 62–5, 85 Buchanan, Ginjer 21–2 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) 4, 34–5 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997– 2003) 4–7, 9, 12, 19, 68, 87, 101, 103

Dark Horse Comics 32, 39 DeCandido, Keith R. A. 22, 50, 55–8 Dollhouse 10, 87, 91, 108–9, 113 Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog 108, 110 Ebert, Roger 29 Eco, Umberto 7, 19 Equality Now 30, 112 Espenson, Jane 43 fan fiction 11, 16, 28, 33–4, 48, 54 feminism 17 ‘Final Girl’ 109

Cabin in the Woods 108–9 122

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Firefly 3–11, 13–15, 17–18, 21–9, 31–2, 34–6, 38–41, 43–53, 55–60, 63–5, 68–70, 72–8, 80–7, 90–1, 93–6, 98–102, 108–9, 112–13 Firefly: The Game 48 Firefly: A Fistful of Credits 48 Forbidden Planet 9, 74, 105–6 Ford, John 6–7, 96, 98 Foucault, Michel 54, 79 FOX 3, 5, 10–11, 15, 21–4, 33, 50, 63, 101 Fruity Oaty Bars 8, 60, 66–7, 82

The Matrix 9–11, 35, 79 media platforms 34 mediation 1, 3, 59–61 midnight movies 16 Miranda 8, 57, 60, 62–3, 66–7, 77, 92, 103–6, 113 Mr. Universe 60, 62–8 Much Ado About Nothing 19, 108, 111 My Own Kind of Freedom 48–50 Native Americans 88, 98, 101 Netflix 36 Nielsen ratings 29 Night of the Living Dead 17, 89, 92 novelisation 22, 50, 55

gender 72–4, 76–81, 109 genre 4, 6–7, 20–2, 72–3, 78–9, 88–9, 92–6, 102, 109, 111, 112 Gray, Jonathan 37

The Operative 1–2, 8, 39, 57, 66–7, 96–8, 104, 113 ‘Out of Gas’ 44, 81, 84

Hark, Ina Rae 29, 36–7, 68, 70 ‘Heart of Gold’ 68, 84 Hills, Matt 16, 20 horror 4, 72, 88, 90, 92, 98, 103, 109, 112

paratexts 37–8, 66, 68 The Pax 63, 106 Pocket Books 50–1

intertextuality 7, 19–20, 73, 106 In Your Eyes 111

queer theory 74, 79

Jancovich, Mark 16 Jenkins, Henry 26–7, 34 Jess-Cooke, Carolyn 36–37

The R. Tam Sessions 27, 42–3, 66, 68 race 79 Reavers 8–9, 60, 63, 71, 88–91, 98–101, 105–6, 113 religion 20, 55 The Rocky Horror Picture Show 17–18, 103 role-playing games 48, 51 Romero, George A. 17, 89, 91

LGBTQ 74, 79 Lucasfilm 52, 58 Lucas, George 29–30, 103, 105 The Maidenhead bar 82 Mandarin 101–2 Marvel 12, 20, 58, 107, 109–11 Mathijs, Ernest 2, 18

The Searchers 96–8 123

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sequels 9, 33, 36–7, 94 ‘Serenity’ 6, 22–4, 55, 98, 102, 113 Serenity: Those Left Behind 39 seriality 33, 37, 44, 46 sex work 22, 75, 83–86, 109, 112–13 science fiction 20, 34, 50, 59–60, 72, 74, 78–9, 86, 88–9, 93–5, 103, 111, 113 Shakespeare, William 19, 37, 72, 74, 103, 105–6, 111 Sontag, Susan 73–4, 76 Southland Tales 61 Stagecoach 6–7, 93–4 Star Trek 21–3, 35, 93, 95, 104, 112 Star Wars 9–10, 29–30, 52–3, 59, 94, 103–5 Still Flying 48, 50, 113

transmedia storytelling 10–11, 28, 33–5, 43–4, 46, 59–62, 65, 68, 109 The Unification War 40 Veronica Mars 14–15, 35, 113 Voodoo 89–90, 98 Wayne, John 94, 96–7 westerns 4, 6–7, 20–3, 72, 74, 84, 88–90, 93–100, 96, 112 Whedon, Joss 4–7, 10, 12, 17–19, 22–6, 28–32, 33–5, 39–40, 46–8, 50, 52–3, 55, 57, 59, 64–5, 68, 70, 73, 79–80, 82–7, 91–3, 95, 98, 100–6, 107–11, 112–113 The Whedon Studies Association 108 Wish I Was Somebody Else 48

Tall Card 48–9 Telotte, J. P. 59–60, 93, 113 The Tempest 105–6, 111

The X-Files 21, 36 zombies 8, 88–93, 98

124