The Browncoats Shall Rise Again: Why Firefly is Insidious and You Should Feel Bad for Liking It

Okay, so, I’m going to skewer another beloved Joss Whedon sacred cow. For those of you who really can’t stand having your favorite shows put under the microscope to illustrate their inherent flaws, I suggest you stop reading now. Seriously, I’d prefer you not read the article to you making vitriolic comments/e-mails when you’re done with it. Constructive criticism/debate is, however, welcome as always.

Now that that’s out of the way: Firefly. Given that San Diego Comic Con hosted the ten-year reunion of the show’s cast this year, and the huge number of fans who self-identify as “Browncoats” at events like this, it seems like a good time to point out why that self-identification is so troubling. It all stems from the basic premise of the show – the concept of the “Space Western”. As indicated on the show’s Wikipedia page, and widely acknowledged on the internet (including an article on spacewesterns.com), Firefly identifies as a Space Western. In fact, Whedon, himself, comments in the Firefly Companion that he wanted the show to be “a Stagecoach kind of drama” (pg. 6), which, in and of itself, isn't necessarily a bad thing. Genre-mixing can have some cool results; see: Star Trek or 28 Days Later.

Stagecoach wasn’t Whedon’s only inspiration, however (but is still problematic, as will be discussed presently). He also cites Michael Shaara’s novel on the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, as the initial impetus for the show’s genesis (Serenity: The Official Visual Companion, pg. 8). Hmm. Okay. So, even before looking at Hollywood Westerns, Whedon was creating the idea for Firefly based on the American Civil War.

Wait, what?

Let’s stop and think about this little revelation for a moment. In the show, there is the Alliance, which has unified much of the known galaxy after a bitter war, and the Serenity’s crew are the outliers and members of the losing side of that conflict. Okay, got it. The Alliance is clearly an analogue for the Union which won the American Civil War. But if that’s the case, does that make the Browncoats... ?

Yup. That’s right. The Browncoats are the Confederates.

The protagonists and heroes of the show, to whom legions of fans have pledged allegiance, are the Southern slave-owners in this version of the conflict. This is analogous to Edgar Rice Burroughs using a Confederate soldier as the hero for a science-fiction series. Oh, wait, he did just that. The only major difference is that Burroughs did nothing to disguise the fact of his racism (seriously, try reading the original Tarzan of the Apes; Tarzan asserts dominance over the other peoples and ape tribes in his region via his innate European-born superiority.), whereas Whedon asserts himself as a progressive feminist (which is questionable, and a notion that deserves an article all to itself), and still does not make up for the troubling undertones he's sown into the show.

That’s pretty bad, but it’s not the only aspect of Firefly that is troubling (and racist), however. Let’s go back to Whedon’s other inspiration for the show: Stagecoach. More specifically, let’s have a look at how John Ford portrayed Native Americans in Stagecoach, courtesy of Joseph Kispal-Kovacs:

Ford establishes the natives as being part of the landscape, invisible at first and always inscrutable to the colonizers. In most Westerns, the natives are not shown to be individual characters comparable to the Europeans but completely other. “In Stagecoach, the Indians are remote, alien figures, projections of white fears of the ‘savage land’ they seek to settle” (Dagle 2001, 102)… They are part of the setting, not characters in their own right.

The Western in this sense is not about the conflict between European colonizers and the natives of North America, but a conflict between the various tendencies exhibited by the colonizers over this process. (Kispal-Kovacs, Film, Television and American Society: Lectures on the Media and on Empire, pg. 72)

Now to apply that concept to Whedon’s Space Western. Okay, let’s see; which faction in the Firefly universe is treated as inscrutable, alien, part of the setting, and are the result of colonizers and colonizer-anxiety? Hmm…

I’ll give you a hint: they even wear a form of face-paint.

That’s right, the Reavers are the Native Americans of the Firefly universe. In fact, Whedon goes so far as to say, in discussing the Reavers in 2005, that “every story needs a monster. In the stories of the Old West, it was the Apaches”. You might also recognize this structure from another science-fiction pop culture staple: James Cameron’s Aliens. In that case, a group of colonists is attacked by the (literal) alien natives of the planet they’re colonizing, and the Colonial Marines (read: Cavalry) are sent in to pacify the natives. Notice how the 'colonizing' aspect of the narrative is almost impossible to avoid.

Whedon, however, seems to think that by not making the Reavers a literal alien other, he has removed the racialized element of using this stereotype. If one stops to think about it, though, it actually makes the racism worse. The implication that the Reavers embody, by Whedon’s decisions to both keep them human (more specifically, former Alliance citizens) and to use an Old-Style Hollywood Western version of native representation, whatsoever, is that the natives are/were just like the European colonists deep down and literally became insane monsters, or savages, on their own rather than being cast in that role by the colonizers. Using that logic, therefore, the Reavers are simply in need of “re-civilizing”. This notion doesn’t negate the racist stereotype of the “savage Indian” which he’s co-opting; it enforces it, as this idea of “civilizing the savages” is what gave rise to things like the horrors of residential schools. Keep in mind, also, that the Reavers weren’t even initially given this much backstory; the details were only offered years later, with the release of Serenity.

There are certainly aspects of the show which deserve credit. When the show veers from the main-storyline 'mythology' episodes (to use X-Files terminology), and focuses more on the characters and character interaction, it definitely works. I also loved the Firefly reference made in the Season 2 Halloween episode of Castle. The problem is that even then, Firefly can't escape from the unfortunate parts of a formula which was abandoned by straight-up Westerns during World War II.