And while Kaylee couldn’t shoot to kill, even in a crisis, nor could Simon, as Shepherd Book rather unchristianly pointed out. Mal would ride in to rescue the best little whorehouse in the ’verse, but it was Inara who had to teach him to fence overnight so that he wasn’t killed in a duel. The power of the men in Firefly was matched exactly by that of the women-Simon may have been a brilliant doctor, but Kaylee had the same flair for mechanics as he had for anatomy. And though the crew got into plenty of scrapes where Simon’s medical help was invaluable, before they took him and River onboard they had been flying quite successfully without a doctor. They couldn’t even take off until Kaylee fixed up Serenity. Also, did I mention that River could kill you using just her brain?
It is undoubtedly the case that the women in Firefly were beautiful, and that you would have to be tied to a tree not to follow most of them home. But it’s worth bearing in mind that this is television, so the men were pretty cute too. You show me a woman who wouldn’t crawl across broken glass to kiss Nathan Fillion chastely on the mouth, and I’ll show you Helen Keller. Inara was a vision of loveliness, but she was also the only one who could out-smart Saffron, the anti-Inara. And River was the one who out-smarted Jubal Early-she was psychic, she was a genius, and she convinced the universe’s creepiest bounty-hunter that she’d turned into a ship. That is, indisputably, a good day at the office.
But the real gender-leveler in Firefly wasn’t guns, or even brains, it was jokes. The show was, just as Buffy was, a comedy and a drama, and it had girls in it, saying funny things. In case you were wondering, this happens almost never. Think about the celebrated comedies of the past few years, and then think about the roles women played in them. There’s Something About Mary starred Cameron Diaz, but did she get to make jokes? Nope, she got to be a joke-she’s beautiful and sweet, so she gets to put spunk in her hair unknowingly. Feel free to insert your own Hitchcockian misogynist subtext about despoiling perfect blondes-I don’t have the energy. Diaz gets to do something less grimy but essentially similar in the Charlie’s Angels movies-she’s now a beautiful, sweet genius who can kick-box, but luckily she’s still a klutz, and answers the door in her knickers, because she hasn’t realized the postman is perving over her. Sandra Bullock is always described as a comic actress, which she is in the action-movie Speed where she gets to say smart, funny things. But put her in a comedy, Miss Congeniality (yes, just a comedy for the purposes of this essay, I know, I know), and she immediately gets to say nothing funny at all. On the plus side, she does fall over a lot, and sometimes she gets to do it with gusto.
Girls do occasionally get to be both pretty and funny in all-girl films (Lindsey Lohan gets the odd joke in Mean Girls and Freaky Friday), but not too often. Hollywood tends to be happier when there is someone beautiful being pretty and ditzy, and someone less beautiful (in their rather asinine interpretation of beauty) to play funny. Case in point-The Truth About Cats and Dogs, a re-working of Cyrano De Bergerac where Uma Thurman is the dumb beauty and the funny is provided by Janeane Garofalo, beautiful by any sensible measure but here playing the smart-mouthed plain chick. (Having said that, of course, most people standing next to Uma Thurman would look like they were having a bad hair day.)
When Buffy first began, people were rightly blown away by how smart it was, how neatly the narratives played out, how high the emotional stakes were, how cool the fighting looked, how great the effects were. They were also witnessing something extraordinary-a heroine who was beautiful, smart, tough, and, above all, funny. Instead of standing in the corner while boys did the fighting, Buffy was the warrior girl. And instead of watching boys make jokes, she did that bit too. Actually, everyone in Buffy was funny. Willow was geek funny, Xander was skater funny, Cordelia was bitchy funny, Giles was Brit funny, and Buffy was a mix: sometimes she was dumb funny, because she hadn’t done her homework and didn’t know enough; sometimes she was smart-mouth funny, because she was about to slay a vampire and she was cocky; sometimes she was grown-up funny, because Dawn was driving her nuts; and sometimes she was bitchy funny, too-who could forget her famous comeback to Darla, when asked if she knew what the saddest thing in the world was: “That hair on top of that outfit?” (BtVS, “Angel” 1-7).
Buffy blazed an important trail here-the Scream franchise has been so wide-reaching, it’s easy to forget that horror used to be utterly pofaced (obviously, I am omitting the seemingly unintentional humor of such delights as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, where Michael Gough manages to humiliate and terrorize Christopher Lee using only his amputated hand and a chimpanzee who paints. Or indeed From Hell It Came, where an evil tree stump, hell-bent on revenge, persecutes innocent islanders with death on its mind, or at least its grain). But when the Buffy movie came out in 1992, several years before Drew Barrymore gave it everything in her fifteen minutes of Scream, the rules were changed, because there were jokes. People finally realized that horror was more horrifying if you liked the characters you were watching, so that you cared if they died. It was much easier to like characters who made you laugh than ones who screamed a bit, and cried. And when the Buffy TV series began, things became all the scarier and the stakes grew higher, because the characters were now in your home, every week. They were also consistently funny, which is why we grew to love characters we didn’t initially even like-Cordelia, Anya, Spike, Andrew.
So it came as no surprise when Firefly followed the same rules-it was a Western, it was sci-fi, but the characters were clever and smart-mouthed. Again, this is pretty rare-with the exception of the radiantly funny Douglas Adams, there aren’t many jokes in the future. It’s usually a post-apocalyptic universe, there have often been wars, everyone has a spaceship, some people have tentacles, but people rarely say anything funny. I’ve made my living from jokes for a long time, so I probably like ‘em more than most, but they seem to me to fulfill a basic sociological need. Look in the Lonely Hearts section of any newspaper, gloat for a moment, then look again-everyone wants a good sense of humor. If we want it from our sexual partners, it stands to reason that we want it from our culture. This goes across the board-we want to sleep with someone beautiful, so film stars are usually pretty cute. (This thesis probably doesn’t work if you belong to a fetish subgroup, though. If you want to have sex with someone who has a glass eye, for example, then culturally you’re pretty much limited to perving over Columbo.)
A real weakness of sci-fi, for me, has been that much as I love spaceships, laser guns, and doors that slide upwards, I find it difficult to retain interest in characters with little emotional range beyond angry, frightened, or triumphant. If they don’t say anything funny, how am I supposed to know if I’d like them? And if I don’t know if I’d like them, why would I care if they live to fight another day, or die a lonely carbonized space-death (Tim Robbins, Mission to Mars)? I have the same problem with Westerns. There’s some great dialogue in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but it’s an exception. Have you ever heard John Wayne laugh? Engage in some witty badinage? His shooting is indisputably sharp, but his wit seems kind of blunt (in the interests of balance, I should point out here that I am useless with a lasso). I acknowledge that Lee Marvin raises the game in Cat Ballou, as does Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, but a metal-nosed villain or shaky-handed sharp-shooter is a rare comic turn in a genre filled with worthy two-dimensional goodies, nasty two-dimensional baddies, and some only reasonably pretty cows.
Firefly was a real eye-opener-the characters spoke quickly and often acerbically, finally laying to rest the inexplicable theory that anyone in the future (or in Middle Earth, now I come to think of it) must speak at roughly the same pace as someone who has had to re-learn language after a particularly virulent stroke. Like anyone else who’d first seen Nathan Fillion as the frankly terrifying Caleb in season seven of Buffy, I was blown away by the casual way he smashed one-liners out of the park. And as soon as Wash appeared in a Hawaiian shirt, I felt I’d found out what happened to Xander when he grew up.
F
irefly’s was a much more difficult setting than Buffy’s-a high school offers endless opportunities to subvert stereotypes that we all already know: the bitchy fashion queen, the geeky girl genius, the not-so-academic boy with a skateboard. But Firefly dropped us straight into a world we didn’t know at all-it was the future, we were in space, and the last time we saw the captain (in countries other than the U.S. and Canada, Firefly didn’t show on television at all, but was available only on belated DVD), he was a mean, mean preacher with big scary eyes, who channelled evil and hit girls.
The Firefly crew weren’t people we already knew: a tomboy girl mechanic who hankered for a beautiful dress; an uptight doctor who gave up everything to save his sister; a crazy, damaged teenager; an ex-soldier; an eerily beautiful courtesan. The way in to the characters, and thus the program, was through the funny. Simon could so easily have been sanctimonious-he gave up his promising future to rescue his sister from a vicious regime, he was highly educated, often disapproving, and from a different social class from the others. Yet his dry wit, even when faced with the horrors of Jubal Early, threatening to rape Kaylee unless Simon gave up his sister, sold him to us completely. “Come on out, River, the nice man wants to kidnap you,” he observed as Early held a gun to his head (“Objects in Space”).
Jayne had only the shakiest grasp of morality, but we never lost faith in him as a man, because his blunt jokes kept us on his side, often in the face of all the other evidence. “You got a wife? All I got’s that dumb-ass stick, sounds like it’s raining. How come you got a wife?” he demanded in “Our Mrs. Reynolds.” And it was hard not to like a man who refused to help strangers until told they’re hookers: “Don’t know these folks, don’t much care to,” he stated. “They’re whores,” said Mal, striding past. “I’m in,” Jayne concluded, without missing a beat (“Heart of Gold”).
River was probably the toughest sell of all-a crazy chick is never that much fun, not even in Hamlet. Only River was fun, firstly because she could sharp shoot using maths and a gun, and secondly because she made the occasional perfectly timed crack. In “Trash,” Simon explained to Jayne that in spite of Jayne’s betrayal of them in the hospital on Ariel, which nearly cost them their freedom and their lives, he would nonetheless honor the doctor-patient relationship, and Jayne would always be safe in the infirmary. “I don’t know what you’ve done, I don’t know what you’re planning on doing, but I’m trusting you just the same. Because I don’t see this working any other way.” It was hard for us not to feel there was something left unsaid. Whereupon River put her head around the door and delivered the killer punch: “Also, I can kill you with my brain.” It’s the use of the word “also” that makes that joke great. And who could have failed to love her terror at Shepherd Book’s untamed hair? She hid and refused to come out, even after Zoe (with an admirably straight face) promised her that the hair was gone. “It will still be there,” she stated, unmoving. “Waiting” (“Jaynestown”).
As for Mal Reynolds, the captain we had to love for the show to succeed, he was another character who could easily have been tricky for an audience to reach-a former soldier, battle-weary and disenchanted with the Alliance regime. Like most cynics, he was a broken romantic: a man who fought for what he believed in, but who believed in the losing side. He was a man who faced pretty much every situation with a world-weary sardonic crack; it’s hard (for many reasons) not to think about him in the opening scenes of “Trash,” sitting in the desert, naked and stranded, saying, “Yeah, that went well.” And once again, this was our way into a character who may rob and occasionally kill, but whose ethics were completely humane, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his lawless existence.
Perhaps the most extraordinary episode of Firefly was the genuinely horrifying “War Stories.” As Mal and Wash were tortured surely beyond reason, Mal was still, inevitably, making jokes. And Wash realized immediately on leaving the torture chamber exactly what Mal had been doing: “He’s crazy. He wouldn’t break, Zoe. He kept me from . . . I wouldn’t have made it. . . .” The real Mal Reynolds was the one who was still looking out for his crew, even while he was in agony, and that’s why we love him. But we also like him, because he looked out for Wash by making cheap gags about his wife.
So, the jokes made Firefly. We were taken into a world we didn’t know, with unfamiliar characters speaking a combination of old-fashioned slang and sporadic Chinese. We never questioned why we should be following them, because we were on their side from the very beginning, and that’s because we liked them and would have bought them a drink. Finally, there was payback for all those times when someone with a stick-on nose, often green, was talking gibberish, with subtitles like an art-house movie, only not in a village in northern Spain but on a moon in some solar system I couldn’t have cared about less.
The even-handed distribution of jokes also made all but the most willfully dense of us realize that we were hanging out in a feminist universe-just like in Buffy, everyone got to be funny, and the smart women usually got the best gags. Look at Zoe: a beautiful warrior, fiercely professional, utterly deadpan. Buffy herself couldn’t have done a better job of taking out the ranting doctor on Ariel, who was just about to report Mal to the authorities and blow their cover. She came up behind him, placed the CPR paddles on his back, and blasted him with electricity, then watched him slump to the floor, and said, calmly, “Clear” (“Ariel”).
Also, the jokes weren’t at the expense of gender (see sitcoms, passim, for gags on why men are useless and women are uptight. Then watch Arrested Development, and see how it should be done, with jokes about individuals, instead of about stereotypes. Then write to an appropriate TV executive, and threaten to kill their pets for canceling it). Making someone laugh is an exercise of power-for just a second, you have total control over someone else’s emotional state. Giving that power to female characters is a much greater emancipation than physical strength or bigger guns.
I wonder if Buffy is, in many ways, a sociological millstone around the neck of her creator. We’d become so used to girls being victims of vampires, right from when Dracula was first published, and then suddenly here was a chick who didn’t scream and run away. Hell, she could take ‘em in a fight. It was hard not to stand up and cheer at the fact that finally girls were being offered a role model who didn’t swoon and wait for a boy to sort things out for her, but took the fight right to her enemies. The only trouble with this is that then, when you go on to create something less overtly feminist, with a male lead rather than a female one and with no superpowers for girls, then some of your audience, if they’re not paying attention, can feel like you’ve betrayed them. But here’s the thing-equality means equality of everything. It doesn’t mean being the same as each other, but it does mean having the same opportunities as each other. If a girl always has to be in charge, all the time, then she isn’t equal at all-she’s superior. That’s why we needed to see that Buffy couldn’t win every fight, couldn’t save her mother, couldn’t beat Glory without sacrificing herself.
In Buffy the alpha character was female, and in Firefly he was male-that seems pretty much equal to me. They’re both ensemble pieces, so that’s what we should be considering. Jayne was the brawn of Firefly (he does have a girl’s name, though, so make of that what you will. I like to see it as a nod to Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue,” but then, I can see nods to that anywhere), but Zoe was the brains. When Mal and Wash were taken prisoner in “War Stories,” she didn’t hesitate, she came up with a plan and carried it out to perfection. She tried negotiation, and got half of what she wanted, so then she returned, using force-she is both a consummate soldier and diplomat. In many ways, she is a greater feminist icon than Buffy: it’s easy to wish to be a girl with super strength, but it’s harder to achieve. Zoe is what Condoleezza Rice would be, if she were in the future and had a better boss-smart, brave, and compassionate, with really nice outfits.
Wash flew the ship like a dream, but without Kaylee, he would have had nothin
g to fly. It’s worth bearing in mind that most people can drive, but very few of us can fix a car. In “Shindig,” Kaylee was made conscious of the fact that her beautiful, longed-for dress was not the height of fashion-she was belittled by bitchy women, who were threatened by the presence of an outsider. In a matter of minutes, however, she was the center of attention for all the men in the room, not because she had the minxiest dress or the sluttiest habits, but because she knew loads of cool stuff about engines, which was far more interesting than stuff about frocks.
The way I feel about Zoe and Kaylee is exactly the same as the way I feel about Hermione in Harry Potter-at last, a girl in popular culture who worries about more than the occasional broken nail. And Harry Potter too has been taken to task for shoddy feminism: Harry and Ron have adventures, Hermione sits reading books. This kind of thing makes me feel like crying-just because Hermione isn’t good at Quidditch doesn’t mean she’s less of a person. It just means she’s less of a Quidditch player. Ah, says the meta-feminist, but Quidditch is important, and she can’t play because she’s just a girl. Gah, say I, punching the meta-feminist in the head, and thus proving that violence is, in fact, the answer. Ginny can play Quidditch, and she is also just a girl. She’s way better at it than Ron, who gets all nervous, and Hermione is better than both of them at other stuff, like spells, which are pretty key, this being a world of magic and all.
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