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September 24, 2005

~There's no place I can be since I found Serenity.~

I wrote this for a composition class ("Explain your attraction to a TV show or movie"), and with Serenity opening next week, I figured I might as well put it up on the web. It contains no spoilers, so I hope it functions well as an intro to Firefly for newbies.

When I was a teen, I scorned television. The only flashing cube I sat in front of was my computer. All those years without the shadow box broke down my defenses. Now, TV enraptures me. Of course, I do not watch everything. I am rather discriminating in my choices. However, when I do choose a program, I dive into it with abandon. I watch every episode, I buy every DVD, and I read every commentary. Despite this, there is but one TV show I take with me everywhere. There is only one program to which I feel a true emotional bond: Firefly, Joss Whedon's late, lamented sci-fi western. Firefly's unconventionality and warm family life draw me to the show, while its cinematography and brilliant writing engage me as a viewer.

When I say the program is unconventional, I mean that Firefly turns science fiction on its head. One might even (and were this a longer paper, I would) argue that it deconstructs the genre, much as Joss Whedon's earlier series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, subverted genre horror. I respond to television that is smart enough to analyze other television shows. Firefly takes place five hundred years in the future, but unlike Babylon 5, there are no aliens. Because this means no rubber masks on actors' faces, I find Firefly less jarring to my eyes. It takes place on a space ship, but unlike Star Trek, the ship is unarmed and not government commissioned. The increased risk this causes heightens the sense of danger, and in doing so, my interest.

Firefly even reverses the sci-fi stereotype of the leader who can do no wrong: Captain Malcolm Reynolds makes bad decisions as often as Captain Picard orders "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." There is no tea on Reynold's craft, Serenity. There are few creature comforts at all. This is a key difference between Firefly and the rest of science fiction on television, and a major factor in my attraction to the show. In every other series, the government is your friend. The government funds all the exciting adventures. In clutch moments, the government saves the day. The Enterprise answers to the Federation. Battlestar Galactica answers to the Colonial President. Stargate Command answers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Serenity answers to no one, and in return, no one helps Serenity. The crew have to find their own money, food, parts, and gas. They even have to find their own jobs. To me, this makes Firefly's fantasy far more realistic than those of its competitors, because the characters make their own messes and have to clean them up, too. That sense of independence and self-responsibility increases Firefly's appeal for me by making it a more mature sort of science fiction.

Still, those same angles of Firefly's structure which interest me also would create a lonely, sterile landscape. Those points are balanced by the show's warm sense of community. Firefly exemplifies the idea that people, left alone, will form their own ad hoc communities. On Firefly-class transport ship Serenity, a band of thieves and fugitives sits down for dinner with a priest and a prostitute. A disparate group of people from different economic, political, and religious backgrounds find they have more in common than they think, stuck together in a tin can floating through the empty places between the stars. I am comforted by the simple hope in that message.

Firefly is arguably a meditation on community and what it means for man to be a social animal. I am rather unsocialized, and this leaves me understandably curious about such questions. Is man's nature good or savage? Is there a firm line between the two, or is it dependent on one's situation? Firefly is a sandbox, a crude simulation wherein these problems are acted out. As the crew of Serenity find familial bonds, a mysterious enemy pervades Firefly's universe. Called the Reavers, these villains are men so long in space they have forgotten all civilization. Peering into the blackness, acting as a literal interpretation of a famous Nietzsche quote, they have gone native in the deep reaches of space where the only thing autochthonous is the Abyss. In this sense, Firefly is a celestial shadow play of John Locke duking it out with Thomas Hobbes, and that battle forever fascinates me.

That is enough talk of themes for one essay. A television show is more than highbrow blathering of how it functions as a "meditation on community" or "deconstructs the genre." The main job of television (well, once the advertisements are weeded out) is to entertain. Good television grips you with an immediacy no other media can match. To achieve this, Firefly pulls out nearly every trick in the book. It took me months of careful study to notice them all, and even now it amazes me how a collection of filmic techniques can create an emotional charge.

The most obvious visual trick in Firefly is the predominance of hand-held camera shots. The frame is always in motion. When characters have a group discussion, the camera whips from one person to another. It involves me as a viewer, and creates the illusion that the camera tracks with where my eyes want to go. It also creates a sense of haste or urgency, increasing my pulse rate. Those shots which are not filmed with a hand-held camera tend to be produced with a SteadiCam. It is difficult to put into words what affect a carefully planned and orchestrated SteadiCam shot can have on an audience. Suffice to say that these lengthy takes instill a feeling of peace, focus, and unity of purpose.

A common television term for this method is "found footage." This is when film conjures the illusion of being archive material, rather than scripted entertainment. The style was used to great effect in the series NYPD Blue and to lesser effect in the movie The Blair Witch Project. I was not a fan of either, and it took Firefly to make me realize the style's worth. Beyond a reliance on hand-held cameras and elaborate, choreographed SteadiCam operations, Firefly also evoked the technique through one simple, yet often overlooked bit of cunning. The production team actually ordered the director of photography to return his lenses because they were too good, too new, and too fresh. In their stead, Firefly would use dirty, scratched lenses from the 1970s. Through this, the series gained a unique, distorted "look". My rebellious side enjoys the very concept of an executive producer ordering his cinematographer to include more—not fewer—lens flares. Firefly took found footage somewhere it had never been before: visual effects. The program's computer-generated graphics look as if they were filmed by a human camera operator.

I am a dedicated proponent of technological progress, so here I must make an aside. The quality of visual effects depends on computational power. In my opinion, one of the reasons early computer graphics appeared so fake (or at least unreal) is that it was too expensive to render moving shots. The virtual camera would remain still on a perfectly composed frame, or perhaps engage in a slow zoom, but it certainly would not move around wildly. By 2002, when Firefly aired, technology had progressed. Now it was possible to make special effects look messy. Besides simple things like emulating the lens flares from the program's live-action material, Firefly employed other tricks for its CGI. Footage of space appears to be taken from cameras on the wings of spacecraft. There are lightning-fast zooms, quick pans, and jostled images. Sometimes, after a zoom, the virtual camera will "miss" its target and be forced to whip around in a frantic search. Just as with the use of hand-held cameras, this augments the series' presence. One might think that obviously artificial affectations like these would distance the viewer. Instead, I find them entrancing. They add to the show's ambience. I feel they thin the wall between fantasy and reality.

Speaking of fantasy, as a youth I had delusions of being a writer. While nothing ever came of it, that dream left me with a lifelong appreciation of the written word. Firefly does not disappoint. Joss Whedon has always been known for his playful writing. On Buffy and Angel, creative back-formations abounded ("I'm a liaison. I liase.") and any word could be turned into an adjective by adding a "-y" to the end. Firefly, with its Western provenance, took this wordplay further. A dead body may be described in Firefly as "all corpsified and gross." I have had a special place in my heart for words ending in "-ified" ever since I encountered the Transmogrifier in Calvin & Hobbes comic strips as a child. Instead of "swell" or "cool," the all-purpose positive word of Firefly is "shiny." Shiny things and bright flashing lights attract my attention like that of a ferret, so using "shiny" in that manner seems natural to me. Perhaps the most creative use of language in Firefly is swearing. In the Firefly universe, humanity is ruled by an alliance of what were the American and Chinese governments. This means everyone speaks both English and Chinese. In order to avoid studio censorship, Joss Whedon came up with the most ribald curses he could imagine and then translated them into Chinese. Watching the show, I never know what the characters are actually muttering, but the emotion the words carry always comes through.

Still, all of that is on the surface. Was Shakespeare nothing more than his puns? Of course not. Similarly, the word games in Firefly are just a top-level expression of the writers' creativity, which was also expressed in deeper ways. Many of the program's story lines were introspective in nature. Characters muse over what violence is necessary in order to truly meet another person. To me, this recalls the Zen warning that "If you meet the Buddha on the road, slay him." A bounty hunter idly wonders whether a room can truly belong to someone who is not in it, or whether the room is imbued with the meaning of its occupant. I view that as a quite probing question for a television show on the Fox network to be asking. A young girl with a shattered mind tries to delineate a minor but important semantic difference between synonyms: "She understands. She doesn't comprehend." That might not make sense to everyone, but to me it is close to the division in French between apprendre, "to learn," and comprendre, "to comprehend." Other story lines in Firefly deal with subjects like atheism and the nature of independence as both freedom and responsibility. One episode functions as an existentialist demonstration of the aphorism "Everyone dies alone." All of these are handled in an entertaining and artistic manner, and are a tribute to the talent of Firefly's creative staff. When I watch the show, these intellectual issues never overwhelm me or distract me from the characters. Rather, they provide another level on which I can enjoy the show, and allow me to savor repeat viewings in a way one cannot with most mainstream television.

I have waxed too long on Firefly's greatness; yet, I could elaborate further. Mere words cannot encompass my obsession with the show. A wise man once said "Come, family! Sit in the snow with daddy and let us all bask in television's warm, glowing, warming glow." The only light that engenders such warmth in my soul is the glow of Firefly.

Posted by Jon Rubin at September 24, 2005 11:20 AM

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Posted by: colin at October 10, 2005 01:55 AM

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