In this KosmosOnline podcast, Jeanne Hoffman talks with Amy Sturgis about themes of liberty on the TV show Firefly and its big screen sequel, Serenity. Dr. Sturgis is an author, editor, scholar, educator, speaker, and podcaster with specialties in the field of science fiction fantasy and Native American studies. For more information on Dr. Sturgis and her work, visit amyhsturgis.com .
JH. Welcome to this Kosmos Online podcast. I’m Jeanne Hoffman. Today’s episode is part of our series on liberty and science fiction. I’m talking about themes of liberty on the TV show Firefly and its big screen sequel, Serenity, with my guest Amy Sturgis. Dr. Sturgis is an author, editor, scholar, educator, speaker, and podcaster with specialties in the field of science fiction fantasy and Native American studies. Welcome back, Dr. Sturgis, thanks for joining us!
AS. Thanks so much for having me, its great to be here!
JH. It’s always great having you! So I was wondering first, could you give us a brief summary of Firefly and Serenity for those who might not be familiar with the series?
AS. Firefly was a television series on the Fox network in the United States from 2002-2003, and then it’s big screen follow-up, Serenity, came out in 2005, and it continues on with new content from creator, Joss Whedon to this day, most recently in 2011, in the world of comics. So the back-story on Firefly and Serenity, obviously they inhabit the same universe, its set in the 26th century which humans have spread out to various planets outside of Earth, in fact they refer to Earth as Earth “was”, so Earth really isn’t a player anymore, and its set after a civil war that has involved all of these planets. Basically the civil war was the Unificationists, those who wanted to draw all of these human-inhabited planets under the direction and control of the central alliance, that was one side, the other side were the Independents, also known as the Browncoats because they wore brown coats, who were against this unification, who wanted the outside planets, the border worlds, to have their own independence and exercise their own sovereignty. Things went badly for the independents, and in fact the alliance does have control over all these human inhabited planets. Both Firefly and Serenity follows a group of really different people, all of whom have various reasons why they’re seeking a life of personal liberty outside of the alliance’s control.
So they all find themselves out on the border of space, on this little ship, a Firefly class ship, named Serenity, hence the titles Firefly and Serenity, trying to make their way as independent business people when it’s possible, and when it’s not possible, as thieves on the wrong side of the law. In a way, you can draw a parallel with some of the great Westerns. One of the earliest Western films, Stagecoach, one of the earliest classics, essentially takes a group from various different social backgrounds and economic classes and political persuasions, throws them all in a stagecoach going across the west in danger, in peril, kind of thrown together, and you get to see the West and the frontier from their different perspectives. And really, Firefly and Serenity are a futuristic equivalent to that because you have these 9 different characters all looking out at space and seeing essentially 9 different things. But, they are united by the fact that they want to be out from what they call the long arm of the alliance.
JH. Now about the alliance, Joss Whedon stated that the alliance is not some evil empire really but just a large, benevolent government, the problem being most people really didn’t want to be governed. So what do you think about that comment?
AS. I think that’s part of the genius of Whedon and his creation, and I should also say his co-creators. I know Tim Minear, for example, who was the co-producer and one of the writers for Firefly, was very conscious of what he was doing as he crafted his scripts. It would be very easy for the alliance to be some sort of Nazi Germany, where it’s very clear they’re doing the wrong things, obviously exterminating people and evil, not very difficult to grasp that, so obviously the Browncoats are the good guys. But what I think the genius of Firefly and Serenity is that the alliance, in many ways, has very good intentions. What is proved over and over again through the scripts is that you can really help people to death, that in fact good intentions are not an excuse for the kind of intrusion the alliance practices.
So you see over and over again things that, if you just heard the talking points for a policy, it would make good sense. Of course we want people to be peaceful, of course we want people to be educated, of course we want these things. But then we see how this plays out in practice. As these policies are imposed on people, and as a small, elite group get to decide what the priorities are, what the values are, for people they’ve never met, never seen, in fact with whose planet they never had contact, you can really see how the most benevolent of states can go very, very badly wrong.
JH. You have an essay in the forthcoming book, The Philosophy of Joss Whedon, on Isaiah Berlin’s concept of negative rights. How does Firefly and Serenity tie into the concept of negative rights?
AS. Isaiah Berlin kind of coined the phrase and got the best and earliest handle on the concept of positive and negative rights and positive and negative freedom. Basically, what he meant by that was positive liberty, the idea of “freedom to”, for example, the concept of creating a level playing field so that everyone starts out from the same point, a kind of withdrawing of things that might distinguish one person from another so that all people are free to go do X, Y, or Z. Negative freedom ,or negative liberty, is considered to be “freedom from”, in other words, the state not going and putting obstacles in the way of people doing their own thing.
I argue that Whedon and Minear and the other people involved with Firefly and Serenity have set up the story in this beautiful dichotomy so you have the alliance of being this example of positive liberty and the crew of Serenity who are basically the characters seeking negative liberty. Well, for example, take Serenity. The operative for the alliance says he wants a world without sin, which sounds really great, that would be nice if people didn’t do bad things. It seems like a very worthy goal. But, we find out through the story that what the alliance has done is have good intentions gone devastatingly wrong. The alliance gets to decide, as any state would get to decide when imposing this notion of positive liberty, what the values are that people get, and how they’re going to be imposed. So the way this plays out in the movie, the alliance tries to free a population of an entire planet from aggression without their knowledge by introducing this gas into the planet and the desired effect would have been a case study in positive liberty. The people would have been freed from aggression and free to realize their more peaceful and harmonious selves. But instead, the unintended effect was absolutely horrible, and I won’t give all of that away in case you want to go see the movie, which I hope you do.
But Mal doesn’t criticize the means, Malcolm, the captain of Serenity, he doesn’t criticize the means the alliance uses, because the moral of the story isn’t just avoid this particular gas on this particular planet. He criticizes the ends of the alliance, and there’s this great point where he says, and I’m quoting because I’m a geek, “They will try again, maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean a year from now or 10, they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people better, and I do not hold that.” And I think it’s important that he’s not condemning an individual’s personal choice to try to make himself or herself better. What he’s condemning is the decision of one group to impose their vision of better on others. I think the way the series plays out, over and over again it’s putting up the alliance’s conception of positive liberty against the Browncoats, against the crew of Serenity’s conception of negative liberty. Malcolm calls them as “them who wants to be free” who are trying to get away from this benevolent bully.
JH. What I think is interesting about the character of Mal you mentioned, the captain, is you had said before that the alliance has benevolent intentions, whereas Mal has certain ends that he wants to get to, but in a way he is a criminal, right?
AS. Exactly. He doesn’t wish to be a criminal, all he wants to do is make his own way. But he’s found himself marginalized to such an extent that he doesn’t have the opportunities to essentially provide for himself and take care of himself by legal means, and so he is sort of a classic anti-hero in that he does what is necessary and doesn’t really apologize for it. It’s interesting that he does have a very strong sense of ethics, a code of ethics and sense of morals. There are things he will and won’t do. He will steal from people he thinks are bad, but if he finds out what he stole is medicine, he goes and takes it back. He has a line that he’s drawn of things he will and won’t do, they just don’t happen to correspond with the law as to what you should or shouldn’t do. But that makes him a very, very interesting character. And I should point out that not all the people that work with him or live with him and are part of his crew, agree with him, and that also brings up some very interesting questions as to where you get a social order, and how communities of consent can develop, where people can kind of come to a consensus on what right and wrong behavior would be.
JH. What are some other themes that come up in this series that relate to liberty?
AS. Well something else that I used in my essay, something that I’m very interested in, I use Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. Turner was a very important historian, and he basically put forth this notion of American exceptionalism, suggesting that the US had certain values that were unique because they experienced the frontier, and a lot of those have to do with questions of independence and how Americans relate to liberty and questions of freedom and how they value freedom. And since he wrote that, a lot of science fiction authors have sort of stepped back and projected what an end to the frontier would mean for these sort of independent people who simply want to go their own way. And over and over again, authors including Robert Heinlein, one of the great leaders of science fiction’s golden age, have suggested that you can only find real opportunities for meaningful liberties when you’re on the frontier.
So, in Heinlein’s classic work, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, just as the moon, which represents the US colonies in a way, has gotten independent from the Earth, which represents Great Britain, the leader of the insurgence realizes that he’s going to have to leave and go out even further if he wants the kind of place that he can be free, even though they have just become independent, this too is going to become a state-run, centralized place, and so he needs to get out farther. And so that is a theme that I think runs through Firefly and Serenity over and over again, that it’s only on the boundary, only on the border, physically outside the reach of the state that the most interesting experiments in and the most ardent defense of liberty is going to lie. So I look at that and the way that Firefly and Serenity are essentially frontier narratives and are essentially Westerns that happen to be set in space. But there are other issues such as centralization versus decentralization and of personal responsibility, the creation of voluntary communities and what’s necessary to make your own life, and how different voluntary communities self-police, so you see all sorts of different black markets, you see groups of people sort of randomly thrown together that end up cooperating for mutual defense, for trade, all sorts of interesting social experiments going on in these border worlds in Firefly and Serenity that I think are great fodder for libertarian thinkers.
Also social institutions, from the church to the guild that runs and trains essentially a prostitution ring, it’s the companions guild where prostitution is legalized, and what that means for the people who work in that industry, which is also a very interesting model, then, for privatization for industries that currently, today are prohibited. And the ongoing theme of innovation and entrepreneurship, the little business person, the little person who is just trying to make his or her way is a heroic figure in this series, and I think that’s very interesting as well.
JH. Does Joss Wheden tend to have these types of themes in his works, or is it just because Firefly was a frontier-based TV show, it lent itself to those types of themes?
AS. I think I would have to say yes, and yes. He does not self-identify as a libertarian, but a lot of his work is of tremendous interest to libertarians and a person’s control over his or her life and how, in a variety of ways, individual choice is limited, taken away, by groups that mean to be as benevolent as possible. This is a recurring theme in his work, and his series that came after this, Dollhouse, most definitely looked into this. I would also say the subject matter, by being this kind of Western in space, lends itself to asking these questions and also the historical precedence for it. He very consciously looked at the floor model when he was building his universe, the idea of what the Confederacy would have been, which was a far more decentralized state, than what the United States was, and he kind of built that in as well. He said he was basically trying to get the confederacy without slavery, in terms of what was going on there, so I think the Firefly and Serenity universe is particularly well suited, and I think that’s why it drew people like Tim Minear, who are even more closely identified with libertarianism than Joss Whedon is, to write for it, because this was the natural canvas on which to explore these ideas.
JH. Well thank you very much for joining us once again to talk about Firefly!
AS. Thank you very much for having me, I do appreciate it! And I do hope people will watch the DVDs and buy the comic books and explore these universes and let them be a springboard for more thought about the issues of liberty!
JH. And for more information on Dr. Sturgis and her work, visit amyhsturgis.com. and for more interviews with leading scholars, visit kosmosonline.org, connecting the network of liberty advancing academics, and this is Jeanne Hoffman signing off.