There is a notion abroad that Serenity, Joss Whedon’s impossibly hip space-opera, is a poke-in-the-eye for Rupert Murdoch masquerading as a splendid sci-fi entertainment. The good ship Serenity of the title first went boldly forth on the Fox Network as the centrepiece of the short-lived TV star-western Firefly. After some decidedly shabby treatment – ever-changing time-slots, episodes shown out of sequence – Firefly was cancelled after only half a series. But it would find extraordinary popularity in the DVD afterlife, shifting some 500,000 units to diehard fans (or Browncoats as they’re known to their terminals).
Having once resurrected his incomparable creation Buffy The Vampire Slayer from the movie graveyard, Mr. Whedon managed the reverse trick with Firefly, taking the project across to Universal and cunningly fashioning a storyline for Serenity that mirrors the plight of the television auteur. The film’s merry band of outsiders attempt to save the universe from the encroaching mediocrity of the Alliance, a immense corporate entity, which, it transpires, makes violent zombies of us all. Their mission? To broadcast a message with the aid of a futuristic computer nerd. “Can’t Stop The Signal,” trumpets Serenity’s tagline.
“I really wasn’t aware of it when I wrote the screenplay,” smiles Mr. Whedon. “But I can’t be held responsible for my subconscious. There are certainly parallels and it’d be disingenuous not to acknowledge them. The Serenity crew have just lost a war and need to get back on the air. To be fair, when Fox said we were cancelled, I asked if I could take it somewhere else and they made that not only possible but very easy. But I was still in shock when I wrote Serenity. If it had been done a couple of months later, I suspect it would have been a much more bitter film.”
There is, however, considerably more to Serenity than its merits as a situationist prank. Drawing on a multiplicity of sources, the film functions as Americana, sci-fi, comedy, intergalactic western and pop reference riot.
“I guess there were three strands to it,” explains the director. “I was really inspired by the classic westerns. Stagecoach was my main inspiration for the Firefly series, but also The Searchers, or more specifically, (John Wayne’s) Ethan Edwards. That was the first thing I made Nathan (Fillion) watch when he auditioned for the main role.
But The Searchers also contains what really fascinates me about the western the beginnings of the immigrant experience and the extraordinary bleak brutality of that lifestyle. It’s what led me into the seventies revisionist westerns like McCabe And Mrs Miller and Heaven’s Gate. That’s when you see the western as being populated by displaced Europeans. It’s how the lived, what their lives were live, what music they listened to, and who built their churches and whore-houses. I’m really into actual frontier stories. I have a couple of books compiled from letters written in 1849 by women who were crossing to the west. The writing is so dry and matter of fact about these incredible life and death situations in this vast savage wilderness. Everyone is slaughtered, but they need more back-bacon for the trip. So that’s what got me. I love the danger, but also the idea of personal freedom and responsibility out in wide open spaces. It’s not dissimilar to what gets me about sci-fi. I like how tactile it is. This is what the world would feel like if… What kind of table would these guys sit at? It’s a bit more interesting than the report from the alien senate.”
While Serenity marks Mr. Whedon’s debut as the writer and director of a feature film, few can be untouched by his particular signal to date. A third generation TV writer (his father wrote for The Golden Girls, his grandfather for The Dick Van Dyke Show), after graduating from Wesleyan College alongside classmate Michael Bay, Joss found work on Roseanne, an experience he relates as being akin to doing time with “Kathy Bates’ character in Misery”. A pop-culture junkie raised devout feminist by his mother, Whedon’s snarky patter would soon earn him an Oscar nomination for the writing of Toy Story and a reputation as the guy to call in a screenplay crisis, chalking up Hail Mary 11th hour rewrites on Speed, Twister and X-Men.
Watching Serenity’s Captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), a brilliantly humorous riff on Hans Solo, can only make one wonder why a certain Mr. Lucas did not avail of Whedon’s salving services.
“Oh, let me tell you something,” sighs Joss. “When George Lucas first announced that he was going to make nine Star Wars films, I was younger then and I sat down and did the math based on when The Empire Strikes Back had come out. I figured that I would be 46 by the time the ninth movie came out and would, by then, be respectable enough to direct it. And I had the other fantasy where George, who I know slightly – he’s actually a very cool, very sweet guy – would just call me up and say “Wanna come ‘round and write a script with me?” and I’d say “Sure, George, if I’ve got time.” If I’m the only fan-geek in the world who used to dream about that, I’d be real surprised. But I got it out of my system with Serenity.”
Despite these credits and a neat sideline in comic books for Cross Gen, Mr. Whedon remains best known for the girl-empowering vampire saga Buffy. Fans of the Slayer will be cheered to know that the Buffyverse is nicely echoed by Serenity’s ragbag crew, and happily, River (Summer Glau), another all-conquering teenage girl, emerges to smite her enemies with axes.
“I’m not a feminist because I want to score chicks or anything,” he grins. “I have a chick. I’m good. Ultimately, my work is about feminism, but it has both identification and objectification going on in it. I don’t quite know how to explain it myself. It’s everything I loved as a child. What if Frances Hodgson Burnett has written a zombie flick? I like combining everything. It can be messy, but sometimes, somehow it’ll work. I’m like Californian cuisine. I’ll do the Cajun sushi.”