Is It Still Okay to Watch Firefly?

Nathan Fillion as Captain Malcolm Reynolds

I don’t ask the title question flippantly. A trusted friend, a credentialed historian who also first got me interested in this series, recently admitted he has difficulty stomaching the show now. He specifically has problems with its historical parallels: in the DVD commentary, series creator Joss Whedon has admitted patterning the series after the kind of Old West outlaws, like Jesse James and the Younger brothers, who never reintegrated into post-Civil War life.

My friend’s concerns come from a firm foundation. The valorization of outlaws like Frank and Jesse James, who are sometimes misrepresented as folk heroes, serves a definite political purpose. As part of the Lost Cause narrative, people who rehabilitate violent Confederates want to legitimize the Confederate government. This means pretending the Confederate rebellion was about anything other than slavery, the one goal all Confederate leaders agreed the war was about.

Yet I have two reasons why I’m willing to extend Firefly more leeway: one reason from literary criticism, one from history. The lit-crit reason comes in two words: Unreliable Narrator. Like Holden Caulfield or Humbert Humbert, our principal source for understanding the Unification War, Captain Malcolm Reynolds, proves himself untrustworthy, spinning events to preserve his fragile self-image. This probably happens because he knows he’s a common criminal.

>Repeatedly throughout the series, events encourage us to question whether Captain Mal’s explanation of the Unification War make sense. We witness flashbacks to battle in the first and twelfth episodes, but we only get the narrative of causes and motivations delivered verbally. Captain Mal spins an elaborate yarn of independence, self-reliance, and honor, and admittedly, it sounds good. But other times, he lies so flagrantly, it’s hard to say if he even realizes he’s lying.

This reflects Whedon’s love for antiheroes. In his stories, he frequently foregrounds characters who perform good actions for awful reasons, and monstrous opponents whose motivations are nevertheless worthy. Just consider how, in his version of the Avengers, “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes” band together basically on the grounds that “the enemy of my enemy is my ally.” Whedon butters his bread with tales of doubt and moral ambiguity.

But, even taking Whedon’s claims of historical parallelism seriously, that moral ambiguity continues to apply, because historically, the Union victory wasn’t an unalloyed triumph. Though the Union victory resulted in slavery’s abolition, any history reader knows that aboliton was strictly pro forma. As Dr. Ibram Kendi writes, both major political parties were equally racist between about 1870 and 1965, and even today, such bigotry has merely gone underground.

Promotional cast photo of Firefly

Please don’t misunderstand me: I believe America has vast moral potential to do tremendous good in this world. But we frequently haven’t lived up to that potential. As Yale historian Greg Grandin writes, American forces flew General Lee’s flag beside the Stars and Stripes while invading Cuba and the Philippines in 1898. Those invasions transitioned into the Banana Wars, where America invaded its southern neighbors almost continuously for nearly two generations.

So the Union victory gave America the moral grandeur of boasting it abolished slavery. But it also gave America the military might and physical capital to conduct major invasions of non-hostile countries, a pattern that continues to this day. And, let’s be honest, the Civil War provided a brief respite from America’s nearly-continuous fighting against indigenous peoples along its western frontiers, a fight begun under President Washington and ended under… well…

We’ll come back to that.

If Firefly really reflects American post-Civil War history, then the struggle between a lying idealist and a tyrannical state-capitalist government really holds up well. We could draw parallels between the “Hands of Blue” and COINTELPRO, or between the Reavers (as revealed in the sequel film Serenity) and… um, I dunno, MK-Ultra? The bombing of MOVE house? As any lit-crit undergraduate eventually realizes, symbolism is always approximate.

Yes, world history has indubitably benefitted from the Confederacy’s defeat and the abolition of chattel slavery. I’m glad the Union won the Civil War. But reducing that conflict and its aftermath to a Manichean division between a clearly heroic Union and obviously villainous Confederacy, diminishes history’s vibrant complexity. History doesn’t unfold like a medieval morality play, despite the politically circumscribed narrative I learned in high school.

My friend’s squeamishness about enjoying Firefly makes perfect sense. I feel likewise while singing along with “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” But I still sing along, because although I believe the right side won the Civil War, I also believe history steadfastly refuses to play into anybody’s neat, unequivocal moral categories.