In the fall of 2002, the Fox network premiered Firefly, a new one-hour drama from writer, director and producer Joss Whedon, who had created and written the original screenplay for (but later disassociated himself from) the postmodern b-movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer and created the one hour WB/UPN drama of the same name, which was critically acclaimed for its feminist explorations of the horror genre’s metaphorical relationships to the spatiality of high school and suburbia, and the emotional and affective politics of adolescence and beyond. Whedon, who also spun off from Buffy in the fall of 1999 the pseudo-noirish Angel, which, according to audiocommentaries by Whedon and cocreator David Greenwalt, attempted to explore the experience of urban 20something aporia, again through genre horror conventions, is the son and grandson of television writers, and has been depicted as a pop auteur by film critics – the New York Times called him “the king of Geek T.V.”[1] Buffy aired for seven seasons and remains in syndication multiple times a day on the FX network. Angel was canceled in 2004 after five seasons, the last of them without Buffy to inflate its ratings, and is syndicated twice a day on TNT. Only 11 episodes of Firefly ever aired in the show’s (original network) run. Three more episodes made it onto the series’ posthumous DVD collection. Last year it was made into a $39 million dollar sequel of sorts, the Universal Studios film Serenity, and the series is now prominently featured as a digital download on Apple’s iTunes and Amazon.com’s Unbox. That a television show canceled after half a season, its episodes often shown out of order and haphazardly, interrupted by multi-week or month hiatuses, was ever issued on DVD, let alone made into a wide-release feature film demonstrates starkly the power of DVD and new technologies of viewing, consuming, and participating in visual culture.
Firefly is a sci-fi/western drama centered on a group of rogue smugglers navigating the poor, anarchic, underdeveloped fringes of a galactic empire in a syncretic, postwar moment of inequality and repression. The captain and first mate of the ship Serenity are veteran ex-soldiers on the losing side of a rebellion against the Anglo-Sino Alliance in the far future, in which humanity, having long since exhausted earth’s natural resources, has colonized and terraformed the galaxy, with the rich and powerful living in an corporate utopia of technology and abundance on the core planets, and the destitute and downtrodden unceremoniously deposited on the barely terraformed fringes of the system, left with next to nothing and forced to survive however they can, and menaced by the spectre of the unnasimilable Other, the crazed, psychotic, maniacal reavers – people who have been driven inexplicably and homicidally insane on the edges of space. (We learn in the film that this “something” which has produced the reavers is in effect the horror of modernization, of modernity itself.) The series often employs tropes of the frontier, and genre conventions of both science fiction and the Western, to explore themes of imperialism, colonialism, globalization, and terror. (The first episode aired just over a week after the one year anniversary of September 11, 2001, and the construction of the reaver as the enemy of civilization driven mad by its violence and haunting its edges seems particularly potent when read in such a context – the reaver as an iteration of the monster-terrorist-fag invoked recently by Jasbir Puar and Amit S. Rai[2], a “screen for otherness” through which a “multiform power operates”.)
Those Firefly episodes Fox did air in 2002-2003 were presented out of order. The two-hour series premiere, which introduced the characters and world of the series, was jettisoned in favor of the second episode, which had to then be reworked as an auxiliary pilot. This left viewers and critics like the Times’ Caryn James thoroughly perplexed.[3] The pilot was only aired after the series had been dropped, five days before Christmas and while the rest of the network schedule was on hiatus. Nevertheless, the series was cancelled despite outcry from loyal fans, who found something compelling in the show’s characters, dialogue (peppered with idiosyncratic witticisms and mandarin expletives,) and dystopian vision of a sci-fi future in which the enemy is not some alien menace or mystical force, but rather injustices and inequities which are very much human and very familiar to twenty-first century viewers (as Whedon has pointed out on DVD audiocommentaries.)
As with fans of Buffy, Firefly aficionados were disproportionately women in a genre often understood as a masculinist space in which relationships to texts, themes, and characters have been (problematically) understood as hypermasculine, and infused with “testosterone” – specifically the pleasure of watching characters engage in activities suffused with antifeminine gravitas, often in the form of fantastic or hyperreal violence.[4] Perhaps this is because of the (arguably postmodern) rejection within the series and film of salvific and progressive grand narratives more common in standard genre fare. In the Star Trek franchise, the Intergalactic Federation’s explorations of terra incognita form a heroic liberal narrative of discovery and encounter. In Firefly and Serenity, the Federation’s analogue is a sometimes tragic and sometimes malevolent agent of empire, suffering, and catastrophe. Conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg has hailed the film as an exemplar of Randian objectivism,[5] but if Malcolm Reynolds is a “capitalist,” where is the surplus value? The crew of Serenity is constantly flying by the seat of its pants, barely scraping together enough fuel and parts to stay afloat on the long routes of interplanetary travel, and kept in the air largely because of the ingenuity of its pilot, engineer, and captain. While often trying to acquire capital, such money is almost always spent on ship maintenance and food, and the crew often works pro bono or gives what it has earned to the needy, existing on a criminalized continuum between “independent contractor” and migrant worker, frequently inhabiting a “robin hood” identity, which, if libertarian and anti-state, is also profoundly anti-capitalist. The film is more productively read through the lenses of postcolonial theory, autonomous Marxist historiography (a la Linebaugh and Rediker, -- the western outlaw as insurgent pirate,) and perhaps radical anarchist political theory, as a chronicle of a hybrid, syncretic, motley crew of rogues and misfits struggling against not only the state, but the sinister Blue Sun corporation, (which performs hideous experiments on one of the main characters in order to transform her into a living bioweapon,) and “progress” itself, embracing an anti-utopian, immanent praxis of permanent rebellion.[6]
The series was released as a four-DVD boxed set less than a year after the pilot finally aired, in part because of, and in order to capitalize upon the demand from fans. To date, half a million copies of the DVD have been sold, and the series is ranked #29 in the amazon.com dvd store.[7] The robust sales convinced Universal that the show might be worth resurrecting as a feature film, and Whedon prefaced special preview screenings of the film for activist fans with an emotional “thank you” later included on the DVD release of the film. But lest we rush to attribute these sales and this activist relation to televisual culture to Whedon’s authorial virtuousity and exceptionalism, we would do well to remember that this sequence of events occurred in the context of a booming business in Television on DVD[8] – and not only Kompare’s nostalgia-saturated “old” shows from previous decades. It is now commonplace for seasons of current series – like The O.C., Grey’s Anatomy, and Veronica Mars to be released on DVD only three or four months after they finish airing. Similarly, there has been a steady demand for TV shows which were critically lauded or cult successes but canceled by their network – Firefly is exemplary, but so are Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, and Wonderfalls. Fan mobilizations, mostly internet-based, to prolong or resurrect series like Family Guy, Veronica Mars, and Arrested Development have been widely chronicled in industry press and major newspapers. This activist relationship between fans and networks/studios evinces a new dimension of the increasing importance of home viewing and an aggressive fandom centered not on the theatre, but on practices of viewing centered in domestic spaces which Barbara Klinger explores in the first two chapters of Beyond The Multiplex. The success of Family Guy in DVD and reruns led to the production of new episodes after a several-year hiatus. But the story of Firefly and Serenity is in part the story of a repackaging so successful and powerful that it invaded the multiplex, imagining and enacting a reversal of the usual trajectory of cinema release to home video and possible TV spinoff (as was, after all, the case with Buffy.) Fans of the series and film are now clamoring for either a sequel film or new TV episodes, possibly distributed over the internet or via a netflix-like mailing system.[9]
One final point that must be raised in relation to the DVD reissues of series like Firefly is how the interpretive schema of the DVD boxed set as a repackaging of history and attempted legitimization of the cultural product at hand as artistic masterpiece or cultural treasure must be reconfigured given the circumstances of their reception – many, if not most viewers of the DVDs encountered the show for the first time in their rerelease, particularly before the Sci-Fi Channel began re-airing the entire series (in the correct order) in July, 2005. The popularity of the DVDs may have less to do with the fetishization of television “heritage” as national past-ness than with a desire to instead resist the foreclosure of possible futures for television and employ complex practices of meaning-making (fan sites, fan fiction, and the fan-produced scripts for “Buffy: Season 8”[10] floating around on the internet) and activist tactics to extend the lives of favorite characters and series on and off screen. I don’t mean to be utopian here – (whatever would the crew of Serenity think?) – but instead to suggest, or rather confirm Klinger’s suggestion, that the Networks have either sufficiently colonized fan cultures or been sufficiently colonized by them that these processes are anything but alternative, and instead very much a part of how TV studios measure and produce success.
[1] “The King of Geek T.V. Gets Big Screen Comeback,” NYT, September 25, 2005
[2] Puar and Rai, “Monster, Terrorist. Fag: The War on Terror and the Production of Docile Patriots,” Social Text 72, Vol. 20, No. 3, Fall 2002.
[3] Caryn James, “TV Weekend: Fantasy of Future and the Here and Now,” NYT, 9/20/2002, and http://imdb.com/title/tt0303461/episodes
[4] See Klinger, Beyond The Multiplex, 148-149
[6] An anarchist reading of Whedon’s work is suggested both by scholars like David Graeber, (“Rebel Without a God,” In These Times 12/27/1998)and by dialogue in Buffy itself, when a military colonel refers to the slayer and her friends as “anarchists,” and Buffy’s boyfriend Riley does the same, reclaiming the term in a positive light. (This is in the Season 4 Episode “New Moon Rising, which aired in 2000.)
[7] “Firefly alights on big screen as Serenity”
[8] As evinced and supported by websites like tvshowsondvd.com
[9] i.e., http://www.browncoatsriseagain.com/ and http://www.fireflyseason2.com/index.asp
[10] See Buffyworld.com. The show ended after the conclusion of the 7th season.
oh my god, i can't believe that anyone writes sentences as long as my own. looks like a good paper.
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