Finding Serenity
It seems appropriate to make my first article here about the TV show Firefly, which I recently watched for the first time (yes, I know). In a way, I’ve had the unusual opportunity to experience it with not only fresh eyes as an adult rather than a teenager, but in an era far removed from the early 2000s.
There’s a lot that could be said about the show, but I want to focus specifically on Captain Reynolds, the main character who owns the firefly-class ship Serenity.
Like the beloved anime show Cowboy Bebop, Firefly concerns a group of rootless people with an Old West style and attitude, flying around the universe in search of financial opportunities.
More importantly, it starts off the first episode with disappointment. For Bebop’s Spike Spiegel it’s lost love; for Reynolds, it’s a lost war. Both pivotal events represent the destruction of a future they had hoped to live.
But as I’ve discussed on my podcast, difference in how they respond to that disappointment is what makes them wholly separate stories in terms of tone and plot.
In Firefly, we see Reynolds initially as a rebel sergeant during a critical battle in a war for planetary independence. However, after a brief introduction at the Battle of Serenity Valley (hence, the ship’s name), the show rarely if ever looks back at it. There are few if any references to Reynold’s past, and the failed conflict plays little to no role in Reynolds’ decisions once he purchases the Firefly, brings on a crew to man it, and then sets off for adventure in the galaxy.
“What else was he supposed to do?” some of you might ask.
Well, he could have ended up a depressed drunken war veteran perpetually occupying the same barstool in a dive bar, forever lamenting the loss of that fateful battle the same way a high school football player regrets not catching or throwing that game-winning pass.
Or, in true keeping with all Lost Cause movements, Reynolds could have dedicated the rest of his life preaching the gospel of “we were right and therefore should have won if the enemy hadn’t been so dastardly,” as if right has ever made might in a violent conflict.
Instead, he simply remarks at one point “we were on the side that lost, but I’m not sure if we were on the wrong side.” He gives it little thought, because he accepted what was and charted a new course, despite still wearing his rebel “Browncoat.”
Which brings me to my main point.
The show’s theme song features the lyrics:
There's no place, I can be,
Since I've found Serenity.
What does it mean to have “found Serenity?”
In the show at one point Reynolds says he named the firefly ship “Serenity” because you never leave it, you just figure out how to live in it. I won’t overanalyze his remark or read too deeply into it. Instead, look at what he does, which is far less fatalistic that what his comment implies.
The war’s outcome left a bitter taste in his mouth and disillusioned him to some extent, but it didn’t stop him from moving on with his life. He came to the painful realization that the hope he had had for the future was dead. His “new hope” to fly a ship around the universe living as a smuggler wasn’t perhaps as ideal or noble, but far better than remaining stuck in stasis mode the rest of his life.
A worst-case example of that in fiction is the jilted, aging bride in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, who refuses to leave her house or stop wearing her wedding gown since the day she was meant to marry decades ago.
What’s more, Reynolds walked away from the shattered pieces of his former life without fully abandoning his personal code. He’s fiercely loyal to his crew and has a core morality that, while flexible, isn’t chucked aside when convenient. At the conclusion of the TV show and film Serenity, Reynolds is still captaining his ship because, from a writer’s perspective, it makes no sense to kill off a character like him when he has no death wish.
It is in this sense he is a stark contrast to Spike Spiegel, a far more cynical character who throughout Cowboy Bebop keeps his friends at an arm’s length as he repeatedly encounters people from his past as if there’s unfinished business there. The final episode’s bloody climax is ultimately brought about by his inability to move past his life’s bitter disappointments, no matter how understandable. He lets his past define him.
Reynolds reminds me a lot of Dell Kyros, the protagonist in my sci-fi noir novel The Aridian. He too has fought in a failed war of independence, but unlike Reynolds much of the story concerns his struggle to write a new chapter in his life, to “find Serenity,” due to a combination of unresolved matters and external circumstances preventing him from doing so.
But the idea of “finding Serenity” is a concept that applies well beyond fictional TV shows or novels.
In a way, many today are, unwittingly or not, living amid a time where the futures so many had anticipated and hoped for, collectively and individually, are dead beyond questioning. To quote an unsettling meme depicting the World Trade Centers “the world you grew up in no longer exists.”
Some people choose to perpetually wallow in despair upon surveying the social and cultural detritus, while others act as useless idiots attempting to reassure us that nothing is wrong, nothing good’s been lost, and anyone discontent with the Current Year has been brainwashed into thinking so.
Yet, there are those searching for answers about what to do now.
Forgive me for quoting the godfather of Cultural Marxism Antonio Gramsci, but his statement “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born” could well summarize our current times.
In short, many want to find Serenity.
The challenge is, Serenity is not an object or even an objective achievement. Frankly, that’s one of many points of confusion among discussions I encounter. Finding Serenity for one person will undoubtedly mean something entirely different in a practical sense than it will for someone else.
It’s ultimately a peaceful state of mind that leads to meaningful action. It is accepting the future that was meant to be will never be, while writing new narratives for a life that results in progress, without destroying or discarding the good things from the past.
That, in short, is what this blog and newsletter intends to explore - unfortunately for now without the cool space ship, sci-fi revolvers, or sexy geek redhead mechanic.