Like any good
Joss Whedon fanboy, I am off to New York City tomorrow to catch an opening night screening of
Serenity. In case you've been living in a closet for the last three years, it's the feature film followup to the fantastic
Firefly series which was cancelled by Fox.
Some summaries of politics and political reactions to the film below the fold.
Whedon's politics are liberal; off the screen, he did some fundraisers for Kerry. On screen, his work on Buffy, Angel and Firefly was shot through with liberal -- and anti-establishment -- themes. Corrupt governments and authority figures feature throughout his shows, although Whedon avoids the black and white and characters fall and can sometimes be redeemed. If Jefferson didn't own slaves, you might call Whedon a Jeffersonian liberal.
Perhaps the main draw to his shows -- apart from the fantastic and intelligent dialogue, and his skill with ensemble casts -- is the deep imperfections of his characters. In contrast to the thousands of "superhero" shows, moral goodness accrues to people not by birthright or sudden magic, but by a slow process of self-examination and internal struggle.
While some might consider Star Trek to be a kind of space version of FDR's New Deal, I perfer Whedon's distorted, tragic universes. A famous line from Whedon is that Buffy (and by implication, his later shows) is a show written "by losers, for losers." It's the geeks and dorks, the ex-criminals, the college dropouts, the outcasts (whether because of sex, race, sexuality, class -- Whedon covered all the bases in his shows without it ever feeling like box-checking), who save the world.
The oddball way Serenity was made is notable -- a bit like the Deaniac or indeed the Draft Clark movement, the only reason it's on the big screen tomorrow is that Whedon harnessed the power of Firefly fans (many of whom never saw the show on Fox before it was cancelled, and most of whom bought copies of the DVD from amazon.)
So go and see Serenity (and rent the Firefly DVDs from Netflix, they are some of the best television in decades.) To whet your appetite, here's the Village Voice reading between the lines and declaring that the film, right down to the tagline ("You can't stop the signal"), is one big middle finger to Fox TV executives. Of course, everyone wants a piece of Whedon, so bring your airplane bags and shudder through the National Review's spin (remember, the UN endorses child slavery.)