the politics of space

At the urging of many of my most trusted nerdfriends, I sat down to watch a DVD of the cancelled Joss Whedon series firefly. Woah. That is some heavy-duty right-wing stuff there. As science fiction, I must admit that this series is really quite remarkable. There are a whole bunch of great hooks on offer: technology that is believably janky and used-looking, the persistence of sociology (ie people still behave like people), and beautiful, soundless and time-consuming space travel. The characters are all individually interesting, and the dialog, as would be expected, is clever and crisp. However, the entire framework of the show is a bizarre masculine-libertarian fantasy, even worse than the original Star Wars trilogy.

There has been a long discussion in film criticism about the similarities between some science fiction plots and the traditional Western. Firefly famously takes that connection to a forced extreme that produces both its best and worst elements. Set 500 years in the future, the show follows a crew of outlaws operating on the fringes of a trans-galactic civilization. However, the entire set-up is contrived to mimic the 18^th century American West. Planets along the “outer rim” (by now a pretty tired scifi trope) are being terraformed and populated by poorly equipped and poorly funded pioneers left to fend for themselves. This means horses and cattle ranching and pick axes and dusty clothes and small towns. Space is infested with wild savages, humans who have gone feral, cannibalizing, raping and pillaging the beleaguered pioneers. This means harrowing battles with wild injuns, complete with “tribal” drum music whenever they are approaching. For some reason, people in the firefly universe can travel near the speed of light, but still have to use old-fashioned bullet-shooting guns. This means cool shoot-outs and cool low-slinging holsters.

Most central to the analogy however is the fact that the show’s characters are veterans of a recently ended civil war. Just as the events of the Old West were driven by the expansion of the United States and the flight of routed Confederates to the uncivilized territories, so the world of firefly is built around a dynamic of federal growth and defeated localist bitterness. What is creepy, intensely so, is that the heroes are Confederates. The fact that they are multi-racial and defiantly speak Chinese in an English-Only world plays into the often-heard revisionism around the Southern Cause. In the revisionist worldview, the US Civil War wasn’t about slavery- it was about autonomy and freedom. After all, a handful of slaves even fought for their masters. Firefly is revisionism writ large, an entire future created around the new white fantasy of a deracialized American politics. Whatever the philosophical or political differences between a Confederate constitutionalism and a Northern one, the fight over slavery was the focal point. To retell that story without race, even as futurism, is seriously disturbing.

Imagine a science fiction film in which the protagonists are clearly allegorical ex-Nazis. Would it make it better if one of them was named Cohen? This problem is to leave aside the already annoying hyper individualism which pervades the show.

And then there is the Indian thing. In order to complete the Old West picture, they had to have Indians. Because this is not a race thing (see previous posts on Touchy White People) they made the Indians insane people-eating pirates. Lest you forget that they are Indians, however there is the drum music and phrases like “they’ll chase after you if you try to run, that is their way.” Christ.

The characters, while intriguing on some levels, are textbook stereotypes. You have the exotic whore-with-the-heart-of-gold, the brazen, masculinized black woman who’s white husband loves her big butt, the precocious nerdy virgin, the frat boy, the desexualized older black man, the intellectual wimp and the crazy, asexual girl. Presiding over them is the ultimate alpha male, a straight-talking silent type who is driven to honorable criminality by the oppressive federal government. He hates their rules. He just wants to be left alone. Leave him alone. You’ll take his spaceship out of his cold, dead hands.

So, you add it all together- a romantic vision of the old west and the evilness of bureaucratic northern federalism, a recasting of the Native American “threat” as an attack by insane, murderous barbarians, and you have a nice sanitized right-wing allegory. I have to ask my friends who are huge fans of Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: what the hell is up with this guy?

Watching firefly made me miss Star Trek all the more. It depressed me how much better as narrative and entertainment firefly is than the latest Star Trek offerings. In Star Trek, we are treated to a vision of a positive future, one in which politics focuses on an expansive defense of peace and justice, rather than individual glorification. I have nothing against gritty distopias like firefly, but it’s sad that the heroes it offers are all but dressed in the Confederate Flag.

To say that the show has a dedicated following would be a gross understatement. Their commitment to the series has apparently led to the greenlighting of a feature film. Their websites are interesting to scan, if only for the ongoing discussion about the political and philosophical significance of the show. Somehow liberals seem to be blind to the quite obvious messages at play here, perhaps because of the superficially “diverse” cast. At least one libertarian caught on, however, and his review is pretty telling.

Admittedly, I only watched the first four episodes, and would be happy to be proven wrong about my assessment by some sort of massive plot shift later on. The show is entertaining enough that I’m tempted to watch the rest of the available episodes, but boy howdy, I’ll do it laughing and clenching my teeth.