by Sherry Ginn
Nor were siege and artillery engines the only weapons historically to receive female names. David Crockett tended to name his rifles after his sister, Betsy. Over the course of his life, Crockett named three different rifles for his sibling, the most famous being “Old Betsy,” but he also owned a “Pretty Betsy” and a “Fancy Betsy” (Cox). During the twentieth century, U.S. Marine recruits were often required to equate their rifles with women, demonstrating that Kubrick and Uris were spinning fiction from hard fact. Folklorist Richard Allen Burns quotes veterans as noting, “‘We had to give our rifle a girl’s name. My ex-fiancée said she was flattered that I named my weapon after her’” (2). Another respondent to Burns’ survey recalled that, in boot camp in San Diego, California,
our drill instructor explained how the M-16 was like a woman:
front sight assembly—teat
magazine well—vagina
trigger—clitoris
We were to love our rifle for it was the friend that would keep us alive ... I particularly liked his admonition to learn to stroke her rear (charging handle) with authority [2].
Inherent in these rifle rituals is a paradoxical vision of women as objects which needed care, but which, when treated right (i.e., kept clean, well maintained, and battle ready), were singularly capable of not only saving a Marine’s life, but also that of the nation. Although his rank of Commander was apparently granted by IASA rather than any military organization, the viewer is introduced to Crichton’s “Winona” as he is carefully cleaning and repairing her, thus linking him with this military tradition.
Although the exact circumstances behind the choice to name Crichton’s pulse-pistol “Winona” remain unconfirmed, Ben Browder has stated that the pistol is named after Winona Ryder, and that “all important inanimate objects should be named after beautiful women. My biggest regret is that I never seized on the opportunity to name the Farscape module ... but in my soul, I call her ‘Betty’” (Browder). It appears that, whatever the motive, the act of naming weapons, tools, and vehicles is a global, and very human, phenomenon. Stranded umpteen million light-years from Earth, and surrounded by aliens who even when they may appear human, are not, Winona helps give Crichton a connection to his home and to his all too human identity.
Notes
1. Although the traditional Luxan “Qualta Blade” is mentioned frequently in Farscape, the name refers to a class of weapon, rather than a particular example, rather like “Winchester” refers to rifles made by that company rather than any specific firearm.
Works Cited
Browder, Ben. “Ask Ben Browder.” Farscape World (Dani Moure). N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Oct. 2012.
Burns, Richard Allen. “‘This is my rifle, This is my gun...’: Gunlore in the Military.” New Directions in Folklore 7 (2003): n. pag. IU Scholar Works Repository. Web. 22 Oct. 2012.
The Colbert Report. Creator/E.P. Steven Colbert. Perf. Steven Colbert. Comedy Central, New York. 26 June 2008. Television.
Cox, Bob. “A Tale of Four Rifles: All Proudly Owned by David Crockett.” Bob Cox’s Yesteryear. N.p., 16 Apr. 2012. Web. 22 Oct. 2012.
Firefly: The Complete Series. Creator/E.P. Joss Whedon. Perf. Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk. Twentieth Century–Fox, 2003. DVD.
Full Metal Jacket. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio. 1987. Warner Home Video, 2007. DVD.
“I Was a Teenage Werewolf.” Dir. Kevin Murphy. Mystery Science Theater 3000. The Sci Fi Channel, New York. 5 April 1997. Television.
“M65 Atomic Cannon.” GlobalSecurity.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Oct. 2012.
Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945. New York: Metropolitan, 2006. Print.
“Our Drunk Friend.” Dir. Michael McDonald. Scrubs: The Complete Ninth and Final Season. ABC Studios Inc., 2010. DVD.
Rembrella Ltd. “German ‘Big Bertha’ gun bombards Ypres.” A Guide to the WW1 Battlefields and Home to the Poppy Umbrella. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Oct. 2012.
Stilley, Rick. “World’s Largest Gun.” 5th Armored Division Online. N.p., 8 June 2000. Web. 22 Oct. 2012.
The United States of Tara: the First Season. Creator/E.P. Diablo Cody. Perf. Toni Collete, John Corbett, Rosmarie Dewitt. Showtime, 2009. DVD.
Uris, Leon. Battle Cry. New York: Putnam, 1953. Print.
Wilton, Dave. “gun.” Wordorigins.org. N.p., 28 June 2006. Web. 22 Oct. 2012.
“The Zeppo.” Dir. James Whitmore, Jr. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Chosen Collection. Twentieth Century–Fox, 1999. DVD.
A Legendary Tale
Scapers and the Myth of Fan Power
Tanya R. Cochran
“There are legendary tales,” writes reporter Peter Haran, “of shows that have been saved by grassroots campaigns waged by devoted fans” (T35). Perhaps none, though, are as legendary as the tale of Scapers, or Farscape (1999–2003) fans. Upon having the rumors of Farscape’s imminent cancellation confirmed by Executive Producers David Kemper and Ricky Manning and lead actor Ben Browder during an online chat session on 6 September 2002 (Cosmic Theorist; Crew; Laskin 54; Melloy 20; Morey 83), Scapers formulated and implemented a strategy they did not invent but one for which they would become renowned, a strategy meant to keep their beloved television series on the air. Upon first glance, the outcome of their efforts—primarily organized through the Internet—seems substantial: the two-part, feature-length Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars (2004). The extended episode or telemovie attempted to resolve dangling storylines and, thus, provide some closure for the series’ viewers. While The Peacekeeper Wars certainly counts as a significant outcome and was appreciated by many audience members, it was not the specific result fans desired. Rather, they wanted more seasons of the narrative—more time with characters, more fleshing out of the narrative arc. They simply wanted more. More of any television series, of course, assumes a complex system of interrelated factors, including funding, production, casting, advertising, and broadcasting, among others. In the absence of alternative models for the television industry, this complex system remains quite indomitable for enthusiasts who aim to influence the direction and duration of their preferred televisual texts. As a result, scholars of audience studies in general and fandom studies in particular may benefit more from the case of Farscape and Scapers by understanding not the community’s activist efforts to save their show but the community’s contribution to the grand narrative of fan power. Drawing on literature that considers the meaning and purpose of myth, I propose that Scapers play a major role in composing the myth of fan power, a metanarrative that says much about who we are as human beings and why we feel compelled to tell the stories we tell. To support this claim, I begin by defining and discussing myth, follow by considering Farscape fandom, and conclude by addressing significance.
The Meaning and Purpose of Myth
Rather than beginning with what myth is, it may be instructive to understand what myth is not. As Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty asserts, “Myths are not lies, or false statements to be contrasted with truth or reality.... Picasso called art a lie that tells the truth, and the same might be said of myths” (25). Unfortunately, when most of us hear the term used or use it ourselves, we typically assume myth means just that: falsehood. We equate myth with urban legends, fibs, and fantasies. Too often, fantasy itself is castigated as escapist, a word that carries the connotation of being disengaged from reality. Karen Armstrong explains, though, that “like science and technology, mythology ... is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.... [M]yth is not a story told
for its own sake. It shows us how we should behave” (3–4). In other words, if we choose to understand myth as falsehood rather than metaphor, “a lie that tells the truth,” we miss the importance of our own storytelling, the grand narratives that, as we will see below, serve many essential and productive purposes for us human beings, including a guide to “how we should behave.” Therefore, it is important as we explore myth, particularly the myth of fan power, that we remember, as David Leeming advises, “we are journeying not through a maze of falsehood but through a marvelous world of metaphor that breathes life into the essential human story” (8, emphasis added). If grand tales are not lies or falsehoods, though, what exactly are they and how do they behave?
According to scholars from many different disciplines, myths are the large-scale narratives we tell ourselves about where we came from, who we are, and where we are going. In other words, myths are bound up with our identities and our relationship to the past, present, and future (Armstrong 6; Stock 240). As David Carney describes, a myth is an “interpretive model, framework, paradigm or hypothesis” we use over time to understand a variety of experiences. Or more simply, says Carney, it can be explained as a story or group of stories that comprise “the collective wisdom or lessons derived from the experiences of a people or community” (16). This record gives edges to our reality, allows us to understand our experiences “in ways that convey particular or general truths, assert dogmas, beliefs, impressions or desires” (16; see also Nimmo and Combs). Always already, these codes and creeds are rhetorically situated. In other words, they reflect particular societies at particular points in time in particular socio-political climates (Cochran and Edwards 149; see also Rushing and Frentz). “In the highest sense,” argues Max Müller, mythology is “the power exercised by language on thought in every possible sphere of mental activity” (qtd. in Cassirer 5). In sum, myths are grand narratives through and by which we think and act. They consequently serve some very important purposes.
We use these grand tales, for instance, to explain our origins. Developing a belief, establishing a truth regarding where we have come from gives us a foothold in life. Whether cosmologically we understand ourselves as the result of intelligent design or natural selection or geographically we declare ourselves indigenous or immigrant, origin narratives provide us with a sense of who we are both as individuals and as groups. Furthermore, this sense of identity and identification allows us to be productive in our presents and to plan for our futures. We accomplish these feats because our myths give us a sense of order, something humans especially seek in the face of extreme disorder or chaos (Armstrong 6–7; Leeming 8). From an individual being diagnosed with cancer to a nation experiencing an act of domestic terrorism, from a person being fired from a job to a community being hit by a tornado—these are the times during which myths are born or invoked because they give us guidance and, therefore, comfort. They allow us to heal and move on with our lives. Basically, they help us cope (Armstrong 6). Coping, of course, assumes a response, and a response is usually accompanied by renewed purpose. For people in a community or nation, purpose often binds them together more tightly than they have ever been bound before—even to people who were strangers or enemies previously. This particular function of myth is what Dan D. Nimmo and James E. Combs refer to as “social glue” or unity within diversity (13). In essence, these important stories serve to explain, justify, validate, describe, heal, renew, and inspire (“Myth”).
From the various purposes that myths serve, one expects that there are distinct types of myths, including myths of origins, of eschatology or “end times,” of time and eternity, of providence and destiny, of gods and celestial beings, of rebirth, and of transformation, among others (“Myth”). While different in many ways, these grand narratives can also touch each other’s edges and even overlap. For example, one of if not the most ubiquitous myths ever told and lived—the hero’s journey—exhibits elements of several types. Mention of heroes and journeys, of course, requires reference to the scholarship of late comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell.
Among the general public, the long-time Sarah Lawrence College professor is probably best known for his work with American journalist and public commentator Bill D. Moyers. Together, Campbell and Moyers hosted The Power of Myth, a series of episodes that first aired in 1988 in the United States on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Among scholars and other myth enthusiasts, on the other hand, Campbell is more likely known for his foundational work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). In Hero, Campbell outlines in great detail the hero’s journey, one marked by three major rites of passage—separation, initiation, and return—and summarizes it this way:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man [30].1
According to Campbell, the pattern emerges across cultures and time periods, suggesting it is the very fabric of human existence. As a result, he called this story the monomyth2—in Tolkienian parlance, one story to rule them all.
This narrative structure should be familiar to any one of us. As David Leemings’ ambitious, though not exhaustive, anthology The World of Myth illustrates, the Indian Krishna, the Greek Theseus, the French Joan of Arc, the Celtic King Arthur, the Hebrew Moses, the Roman Aeneas, the Native American Hiawatha, the African Wanjiru, the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, the Blackfoot Kutoyis, and the Jewish Jesus—all of these figures, both fictional and historical, follow a similar path. Therefore, while some scholars may elect another myth as “the essential human story” (Leeming 8, emphasis added), the hero’s journey will play the lead role in my argument and consideration of Farscape fandom. It, more than any other narrative, helps us understand something about who Scapers are and what Farscape fandom means.
Even from the briefest review of literature on the subject, it is clear that mythologies are extremely important to and for humans. They help us chronicle and recall details about our past and present. They aid us in our desire to shape our future. They give us a sense of identity and purpose. They provide us order in the midst of chaos and crisis. They bind us together. They justify our actions and social structures (Rowland 103). In other words, myths represent one of many examples of humans engaged in rhetoric. As Krista Ratcliffe defines it, rhetoric is “how we use language and how language uses us.” If grand narratives are considered from a rhetorical perspective, understanding myth does just as much to illuminate the nature and significance of fan efforts to save favored television series as understanding fandom does to illuminate the nature and significance of myth. Thus, exploring the relationship between the myth of fan power and Scapers should prove a most enlightening endeavor.
Farscape Fandom
From its very beginning, Farscape attracted a loyal and disparate fan base. Both regular viewers and entertainment critics raved about the series’ innovative use of animatronic aliens as main characters (Prescott T02) as well as the creators’ choice to the make the starship Moya a “biomechanoid” or living vessel. Eventually, scholars began to notice and comment on its refreshing approach to gender and sexuality (see especially Battis, Investigating Farscape). As Jes Battis explains, the series also boasts a narrative arc that spans “galaxies, with a deeply critical undercurrent of discussion around issues of racism, xenophobia, miscegenation, and sexual freedom” (“Farscape” 104–105). (With a focus on such issues, it might be said that Farscape was the Star Trek [1966–1969] of its time.) Simply put, there are a plethora of reasons to appreciate and enjoy Farscape. As many viewers, journalists, critics, and scholars have noted, though, it was a series destined to either fail miserably or become a fan favorite, an instant cult classic. It quickly achieved the status of the latter, and most people—especially fans—know what that means, states Alex Strachan: “‘Cult classic’ is another way of saying small audience” (D9). Paul Sheehan red
uces “small audience” to an even smaller one, calling Scapers a “micro-cult” (3). Thus while there was a large enough fan following to “[generate] a considerable demand for DVDs, soundtracks, computer games, books, apparel, action figures and every imaginable tchotchke—even Halloween costumes” (Belenky A13), the fandom was never able “to grow beyond its core fan base” (qtd. in Petrozzello 72). Unfortunately, no matter how brilliant a television series may be, attracting merely a micro-cult means certain death.
In “The Nitty Gritty of How Farscape Got Cancelled,” Scaper Cosmic Theorist notes that Syfy,3 network home of the series in the United States (U.S.), offered the press the usual reasons for its choice to cancel: high production costs and low ratings (Petrozzello 72). A year before the cancellation, however, on 1 October 2001, then Syfy president Bonnie Hammer, had praised the series and announced a two-year contract for renewal, a move Comic Theorist calls “unprecedented.” Hammer had declared, “We are excited to renew our commitment to this smart, sexy, intelligent, and fun series that rewrites the book on sci-fi entertainment. Farscape is not only the most ambitious original series on basic cable, we think it’s one of the best-written shows on television, period. It’s no wonder that it’s the top-rated series on [Syfy] for three years running” (qtd. in Cosmic Theorist). This statement, made eleven months prior to announcing the show’s demise, led fans to question the reasons offered for the cancellation. Scapers wanted to know: “What the frell happened?” Farscape Executive Producer David Kemper attempted an answer, explaining that there is always “an out clause” for businesses and that Syfy had merely exercised its right to pass on a fifth season. Expressing the entire crew’s disappointment, Kemper said, “We are all hugely sad. We all cried on the set ... [but] we are as helpless as anyone” (qtd. in Melloy 20). Helpless is not a word that usually appears in fan activist vocabulary. Rather, actions speak louder than such words. Like Athena, fully grown and already armed, springing from the forehead of Zeus, the “Save Farscape” campaign (later renamed “Watch Farscape”) was instantaneously born. Within moments of Kemper, Manning, and Browder confirming Syfy’s decision, Scapers began to organize in not only typical but also original ways (Laskin 54; Morey 83).