I watched Joss Whedon’s Serenity last night, for about the fourth time, and loved it just as much as ever. It is in so many ways such an excellent movie, and like the TV show, Firefly, that it is based on deserves many more plaudits (and much more popularity) than it gets.
Watching Serenity, it really is impossible for me to shake the feeling that Joss Whedon is really latching onto a confederate lost cause symbolism in his story, and risking importing a very racist and particular political subtext to his movies. I’m not American and I don’t know how Americans think but it seems to me that this is a pretty hot-button issue over there, and the implicit connection of confederate lost cause ideology with libertarianism must surely be controversial.
It’s not as if it’s hard to see in the movie or the TV show, and Serenity particularly has a very strong libertarian message. There’s no direct racism, of course, with some good strong black characters, no evidence of racial ideology or consciousness in anyone’s interactions, and an episode where it is made clear that Mal is opposed to slavery, while the Alliance (at least tacitly) approves. So it could even, I suppose, be imagined as an allegory for a world where the confederacy won and the “browncoats” are actually a Unionist rump. But I don’t think anyone sees it that way, because the genre conventions and the imagery of the story are too strong to allow it.
I did a bit of fossicking online for opinion on this, and I noticed that libertarian reviews of Serenity seem to completely miss the confederacy issue altogether. This William H Stoppard review, for example, is quite thoughtful but seems to miss the obvious symbolism of the browncoats. This review on Stockerblog seems to give a sympathetic overview of Whedon’s libertarianism and the central messages of the movie, but glosses over the relevance of the civil war imagery, which seems a little untenable. I would observe that the Guardian’s review also doesn’t mention it, which is a surprise from a generally anti-libertarian newspaper giving a not particularly positive review[1]. Fraggmented mentions it, and probably isn’t alone in being suspicious of Joss Whedon’s attitude towards race.
I think it’s probably possible to see the civil war in the Firefly universe as reflective of a kind of combined American War of Independence / Civil War mixture, with the Alliance at least partially based on the British, as well as the Union. You could also probably argue that Whedon has done enough work in the series to neutralize the toxic politics of modern Confederate Lost Cause-ism, through the additional material he puts into the setting and through the actors themselves, so that he’s reconfiguring classic Wild West stories to pull out their racist overtones, but retaining their frontier/libertarian message. I think this is probably what he’s done, and it’s a testament to his powers as a script writer, and the skills of the actors, that he can present an otherwise quite misanthropic man – Mal – and a strongly libertarian political message, wrapped in suspiciously pro-confederate imagery, in such a way that those of us who aren’t misanthropic, libertarian or racist can enjoy and sympathize with.
—
fn1: but then it’s worth noting that the reviewer knows nothing about science fiction – he claims that the original star wars is “now reconfigured as Episode IV: A New Hope, ” so I think we can reject the conclusion that the reviewer knows anything about film, science fiction, or indeed even the reviewing process.
Compromise and Conceit 
January 16, 2011 at 11:45 pm
I think you’re reading too much into this.
a) I don’t think Whedon is a libertarian. All his political statements I can find seem to be standard Hollywood left Democrat
b) I think the process probably went something like this.
1) I want to make a Western… In Spaaaaaaaace. Just like Star Trek, but literal.
2) Let’s look at American history. The post-Civil War period is fun!
3) I like plucky losers but the Confederates had icky politics. So why don’t I take the stuff I like from that (ie. plucky losers) and jettison the stuff I don’t like (dodgy race stuff) replacing it with things I do like (anti-corporate heroes fighting monsters with a sense of humour).
4) Sweet – great idea for a show!
So while the Confederate Lost Cause is toxic, I don’t know if SF lost causes with vague real world echoes are any more icky than (say) LotR monarchy promotion. That is to say, yeah the politics are a bit dumb if you look at them from a certain vantage but lets take them too seriously or give them weight they don’t deserve.
January 16, 2011 at 11:53 pm
Thanks for the opinion Nick. This post was just thinking aloud really, and I’m inclined to agree with you.
January 17, 2011 at 1:13 pm
I second that~ I think, as you note toward the end, that the attraction is to the underdog, and the focus is mostly on loss of local control over affairs to a distant, monolithic and oppressive leadership intent on regulating things regardless of the opinions of those locals, and the needs, or specific features of life in specific locales.
To my eyes, the only thing the browncoats seem to have in common with the confederacy is losing.
Thanks, as always, for an interesting post~
January 20, 2011 at 10:33 am
“in such a way that those of us who aren’t misanthropic, libertarian or racist can enjoy and sympathize with.”
And those who are misanthropic libertarian racists can enjoy even more.
I generally agree with what your saying here, but I think we need to confront the core Compromise and Conceit blog question of whether the racist overtones in original Westerns have forever spoiled all Western based stories, in the same way that Lord of the Rings has poisoned fantasy.
Personally I think that’s a silly idea, so I’ll leave Faustus to defend the concept of Original Sin in literature.
;P
January 20, 2011 at 10:36 am
Also, thanks for te link to the Guardian review. It’s a laugh a minute.
Based on comments such as “It may not be particularly dark or challenging”, I suspect that the reviewer would regard Serenity as a vastly better film if Mal had been molested as a child and there were omni-present fashbacks.
What a clown.
January 20, 2011 at 5:37 pm
Notice I used an “or” in my post above, not “and” – and I’m not suggesting that westerns or confederate lost causes (or steampunk, for that matter) are inevitably unenjoyable, but I think if presented in a completely mindless way they carry the risk of being quite odious. This is probably true of every genre in different ways but I imagine for a lot of Americans, an unthinking reproduction of confederate-longing makes them itchy in all sorts of hard-to-reach places. It’s a good thing Joss Whedon is a thoughtful producer.
And yes, that Guardian review was brilliant wasn’t it? Only Polly Toynbee can pack more wrongness into the same space (though I heard recently that Germaine Greer did a good try at toppling her from pole position).
January 22, 2011 at 8:17 am
You don’t have to be pro-slavery to sympathize with the Confederacy, because the war between the states was about more than slavery. Duh.
Picking out one cause which the aggressor had on his side (ending slavery) does not obviate the superior causes the defender had on his (freedom, self-determination). Tyranny and oppression are not justified by an anti-slavery position.
January 22, 2011 at 12:52 pm
Not to mention, Slavery was never really an issue until well after the Northern states had made their money off of transporting slaves from Africa. Then it suddenly became “bad.” It was just as much about crushing the south as a power within the union as any other cause.
January 22, 2011 at 4:10 pm
Random passer-by, thanks for randomly passing by. I don’t think you can be acting in favour of the cause of “freedom” and “self-determination” if you own slaves. That’s an ideological conflict that cannot be reconciled. Similarly, unless the purpose of your tyranny and oppression is the actual enslavement of those who previously owned slaves, any form of tyranny and oppression is likely to be an improvement on slave-owning. I don’t know much about American history, but I’m willing to bet you a groat that whatever “tyranny” and “oppression” the North had in mind for the south, it was better than slavery. Now we have 200 years of history to watch, and we can see that there is no slavery in the South, and no more tyranny and oppression than there is in the north – and a lot less tyranny and oppression than there was at the time of the slave-owners.
Grey, I’ve heard the civil war characterized as a war by the North to stop the South being economically competitive through the use of slaves, but this doesn’t seem to make sense to me. Largely because a) the North was becoming an industrial rather than an agricultural economy, so the economic competition doesn’t seem relevant, and b) if the North were worried about Southern competitiveness through slavery, but didn’t care about slavery itself, why didn’t they just adopt slavery as well? After all, war is never as economically rewarding as peace.
I think you can make a case that the North was hypocritical for only deciding to be anti-slavery when slavery was of no use to it anymore; but this doesn’t mean they weren’t genuinely opposed to the practice or that it wasn’t central to the war – I think this would take a very idiosyncratic reading of the opinions and rhetoric of the people of the time. Sure there were practical, more “realpolitik” issues underlying the war but these were strongly related to slavery as well. Even the power of the South within the union was partly related to slavery, since they had the three-fifths cause. And the primary other issue – “state’s rights” – was all about the right to own slaves.
This is partly why i wonder if the confederate imagery in Firefly might make a lot of Americans uncomfortable[1] – the “freedom and individualism” that is alluded to in the show is never described clearly, but we know that the real confederacy wanted to retain its “freedom and individualism” in order to be able to own slaves. So, e.g. when River says at the beginning of Serenity that the alliance were bad because they “meddled” the implication (by analogy with the positions of the two sides) is that being opposed to slavery is “meddling.” By leaving out a clear story about what was going on before the war, but drawing on the confederate imagery, Whedon leaves us with the uncertain possibility that the analogy can be drawn all the way, and opens the possibility that the rebels wanted to own slaves[2].
As others have said, I don’t think we are left with that feeling because Whedon presents the characters in such a way that we don’t believe they are supportive of (or come from a culture based on) slavery.
—
fn1: and could this be related to why it didn’t make it past one season?
fn2: which is an interesting artistic project – to get your reader/viewer to sympathize with the bad guys, as we clearly do when we watch this show. But when the bad guys are doing something whose legacy is not exactly uncontroversial in the culture of the viewer, this seems like something of a risk to take with your audience.
January 23, 2011 at 3:26 am
See, the freedom and independence arguement dosen’t work if you look at slaves as people. They weren’t viewed that way at the time, they were merely property. So you’re looking at local control versus federal control, hence randoms statement to freedom and self determination. (of people, of which the view that slaves were not.) It makes sense, you just need a different prism to look through. Mind you, I don’t agree to that particular prism but the war really had nothing to do with slaves, it was a byproduct that is looked at today and says “Look at how good we are for! Rah Rah! Lincoln was going to preserve the union, period. Freeing the slaves was a useful tool in that regard, but if he could’ve done it without it.. thats what would’ve happened.
The competetiveness was just as much about wealth and political power as it was competing within a particular product (in this case, industrial.) Essentially that was deciding the way the nation was going to head. Would it be controlled federally or locally? The south was either going to be crushed through the force of federal government just by the difference in population densities (The north outvoting them) or through the act of warfare.
January 23, 2011 at 8:18 pm
I think you’re reaching a bit there, Grey. Just because Americans used Africans as slaves doesn’t mean they didn’t see them as people. There’s a long historical precedent for using people you view as people as slaves – the native Americans and the Arabs also did it for many years. Also, there was another group of people in confederate America who had almost no rights or freedom – couldn’t own property, couldn’t travel freely, couldn’t choose who they had sex with or where to work (or even if they could work at all), and they were definitely seen as people (I mean women, of course). Slaves were people-as-property. They weren’t not-people-as-property. For more evidence of same, consider the fact that there was hot debate in the US at the time about how to treat slaves, with people like Miriam Beecher Stowe using the inherent humanity of slaves in their literary work to stir opinion in their favour.
Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union, but the reason that this was an issue was secession – and secession was specifically over slavery. Is there any other issue cited by the secessionist southerners except slavery? And you may say “states rights” here, but what were they trying to preserve the right to do? It’s not as if their rights were being trampled by the North because they wanted to use their state legislatures to establish equal rights for gay whales, is it? There was a long period of Northern encroachment on their turf, and all of that encroachment concerned the one topic. Even describing it as “being crushed by the North” is a bit of a misnomer, given they were all part of the same union. And yes, they were going to be crushed by Northern economic power because they had chosen the path of wealth-through-slavery rather than wealth-through-development. A good example of why it is not always wise to achieve “productivity” gains by forcing down wages.
January 24, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Even if you are viewing them as people, you have to be viewing them as an entirely different caste of existance altogether in order to rationalize something like slavery. Even if the basis of my argument is totally wrong on the case of property, it’s still correct in that they fall into a different classification than white landowners. If the justification for war was slavery, it would’ve went considerably further than just the south.
Regarding the issue of secession, I believe tariffs and governmental control were of a greater importance then simply slavery. Lincoln for instance didn’t even need to be on the ballet in the south to win the election at the time due to population shifts due to immigration. The tax burden was likewise crushing due to tarrifs.. the particular union was never a suicide pact to an overarching federal government. So the south thought anyways.
You are right though, the cultural divide was caused by slavery even if the latter wasn’t the primary issue of the civil war in itself.
Rockwell has a few interesting articles on it although it’s looking at it from a liberitarian slant.
http://lewrockwell.com/rockwell/civilwar.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/pearlston1.html
If nothing else, the Civil war remains a very, very dark era of american history and the public education system is all to happy to keep the actual reasoning for it listed as “slavery” simply because its much easier to understand.
January 24, 2011 at 10:40 pm
Now I think you’re being tautological – southerners enslaved africans because they didn’t think they were people, and we know they didn’t think they were people because they enslaved them. But we actually have a lot of evidence that people can enslave other people, and they can even claim they’re doing it for the good of the enslaved -this is the so-called “Positive Good” theory of slavery. It was the main justification used in the 19th century by Southern slave apologists. You could claim that it was all just an elaborate smokescreen around a more fundamental belief, but there’s thousands of years of evidence that men can treat women very badly – passing laws that dehumanize them and strip them of all property rights – and genuinely believe they’re doing it for the good of the women.
In light of that, I don’t think you can say that the southern slavers weren’t being hypocrites in talking about freedom and individualism. Rather, they believed that only some people deserved the right to freedom and individualism, they believed this was a god-given social order, and they were willing to go to war to defend that order.
The tariff issue was itself related to slavery. Lincoln himself said so in debate at the time. I think claiming tariffs as the central cause of the war is a classic libertarian bait-and-switch, to avoid the rather unpleasant ideological problem of lauding the “freedom and individualism” of a society built on the negation of the freedom and individualism of others.
That lew rockwell site is a fruitcake farm, btw. It’s articles on vaccination are disturbing, and whatever they’re saying about the public education system can probably comfortably go in the bin right alongside the anti-vax rants…
January 28, 2011 at 2:39 pm
As I said, regarding other “humans” being enslaved then you’re looking at a caste system and can attempt to rationalize nearly anything. Regarding social order in that case, it’s exactly as you described. Their caste deserved that freedom and individual rights as the others weren’t capable of conducting themselves appropriately with it in their eyes.
I still aim to follow the path of money and power in this case as is natural to warfare and aggression. If we’re going to claim removing slavery as a method of removing their power through derailing the souths production, farming and method of wealth then I’ll agree. In that case though, it’s hardly altrusitic and removing slavery was merely a means to an end.
I agree on Rockwell being out there at times, he is a capitol L liberaterian but if nothing else provides some interesting points for discussion.
April 14, 2013 at 10:43 pm
uh. sorry to bring it back to topic, but firefly created the most realistic future on tv or film yet. star trek, star wars, stargate, etc. are all too easy. only on serenity does the captain get knocked out every other episode. the ship is always falling apart. not to mention the technology. brown coat is some sort of code, much of it seems to be modern war/city commentary with Civil War undertones. the reevers, for example, where exactly does that fit in? Ben Washburne and Jubal Early are real life Civil War era personalities. there’s a variety of contexts here, and it’s not exactly clear what’s being said politically, if anything more than survival. imho, anyhoo
April 15, 2013 at 5:58 pm
Thanks for commenting, MikeD. I’m not sure how the realism of the film is relevant to its confederate undertones…
May 25, 2013 at 4:18 pm
I think there is some mileage in this reading. People have already pointed out the dearth of Asian characters in a story supposedly set in a fused culture. The Preacher character could be read as straight up Uncle Tom – and there are two quite terrifyingly psychotic black male figures. The slaves in the show are all WHITE. Zoe is the only exception to this rule. Its annoying because I loved this show but this whole subtext not being addressed makes me uncomfortable when I rewatch it (speaking as a white middle class guy): maybe Whedon can be forgiven for not getting around to all this straight away…there’s just a touch of the 1970s unironic Dukes of Hazzard good-ole-boy culture which just seems to be straight-up celebrated here. And then he made dollshouse. hmmm.
May 26, 2013 at 5:16 pm
Thanks for commenting, DrZango. I think Joss Whedon is weak on race issues, and could quite easily have not noticed the obvious symbolism in what he’s doing with this show. Which is a shame, because even if you think this kind of thing shouldn’t unsettle your viewers, or that they should get over it, it should be pretty clear that it will unsettle some people, and that avoiding the worst of it would get you out of a few needless controversies. I suspect, though, that Joss Whedon has swallowed his own propaganda about being the ultimate feminist, and thinks he can’t do any wrong, and doesn’t need to critically appraise his own work.
What’s the issue with dollshouse? I haven’t seen it.
March 24, 2015 at 5:18 am
Your entire article is based on the very flawed assumption that, in general, a confederacy = racism. On this point, I think that you’ve been very well trained. Without this assumption, your article has no content. Thus, you may as well just keep it succinct and write “C’mon guys, confederacy or anything anti-globalist equals racism! Amirite? So, Serenity is a movie that absolutely has us empathizing with racists.”
It’s either one or the other. Either confederacy implies racism or it does not. If it does, just come out with it and stop tap dancing around the issue even though your support for your thesis might be objectively weak. If it does not, then acknowledge that this article is pointless.
March 24, 2015 at 8:14 am
Thanks for commenting Daniel. The confederacy I think whedon is implicitly referencing was racist, this point is not in dispute. If I am tip tapping around this point it is because it is such an accepted fact that it doesn’t need to be stated.
November 12, 2021 at 7:50 am
I am here 10 years later to point out that the reviewer who claimed that “the original star wars is ‘now reconfigured as Episode IV: A New Hope'” was completely right. “Episode IV: A New Hope” was an early Lucas revision. The movie originally came out as only “Star Wars” with no “Episode IV: A New Hope” on the crawl. That addition was made to a post-Empire re-release.