Serenity

...which I re-watched with two doubting friends last night. I had subjected both to the film before, and they remain unconvinced a second time around. Which is confusing and frustrating. Am I the only one thinking this film is perfect? What flaws do others see in it that I can't? Am I just very delusional?

Very probably.

This is important for me to establish, because my working theory is that Joss Whedon is a genius and that no right thinking person could think otherwise after watching his work. The only reason he's not a millionaire is that people haven't watched his work, because it looked rubbish (Buffy, Angel), or because it wasn't given a chance (Firefly). Obv, this theory has failed too many tests for it to really 'work' anymore (Serenity, Dollhouse). Whedon may not actively put people off, but he's certainly not impressive enough. Others just don't find him as impressive as I do.

Why?

Easy enough to answer: I share Whedon's politics and taste. I like his b-movie sensibilities, his language, his humour. I agree with what he says. Very broadly: Buffy's emphasis was on friendship and family, Angel on religion and virtue, Firefly / Serenity on politics and society, Dollhouse on feminism and oppression, although the amount of overlap makes the above summary almost meaningless. I'm a pretty fervent believer in all the propositions of 'Whedonism'. I stress that this is not so much a conversion as Whedon voicing the thoughts already in my head. The fact that he does so with superheroes, monsters and kung-fu just completes the What Mercer Loves Most Equation.

On Serenity in particular, the doubting friends suggested two fails, one minor, one major. The minor was Wash's death, which was sudden, random and not paid off adequately. The thing is, Anya's death served exactly the same purpose in Buffy's finale, was paid off even less, and yet it worked for the Whedon fiend among my two friends. I can only speculate (he'll be reading this, so he'll let me know) that he had grown very fond of Wash's character in Firefly, and so the quick, unglamourous end he met felt almost disrespectful. The few moments of Zoe's reaction were not enough to pay proper tribute. In Firefly, Wash was a complex character. In Serenity, he's reduced to being comic relief and cannon fodder. It's callous.

You cannot argue against such feelings. I can only suggest that this discomfort only underlines the point of the death -- that it's random, shocking, unheroic, unfair. That it hurts. And yet we don't have time to process that hurt. Like Zoe, we are angry, and yet there's business we have to attend to. It's a shoddy defence, but it's the only one I have. Personally, I remain impressed by how much the death is paid off in a film that has seven or eight other characters to wrap up. Every Zoe scene after Wash's death is about Wash. We don't see her break down, but I didn't expect her to. She is a soldier first. The cold fact is, she can survive pretty well without Wash, and I fully expected their relationship to disintegrate if Firefly ran forever. Whether Zoe can survive without Mal is another, more interesting, matter...

The major problem is more complex. Whedon's anti-authoritarian stance was admired, but the doubting friends didn't see it as a particularly novel theme. Star Wars or Avatar make exactly the same point, so why is Serenity better? Well, (GRAAH!) a LOT of films make the same point, but some do it better than others. The villains in Star Wars are villains because they dress like Nazis. They are cartoons. Avatar is no better. You don't find a character as rich as Chiwetel Ejiofor's Operative in either film. Serenity's evil empire is rather more nuanced. You can tell because the villain is self-aware, even sympathetic. He isn't killed physically, but spiritually. This is a film about ideas: about ends and means, about the distortions of ideology, about religion (note the references to sin). Ultimately (as with all Whedon products) it's about family -- the communal and equal triumphing over the individual and authoritarian. Not novel themes, sure. But they are expressed with an intelligence and a force rare to find in space opera b-movies. That makes Serenity pretty special in my book.

It really does look like most people need something more than that, and that my standards are pretty low. A lot of friends, after I've gone on about how amazing Serenity is, have expresses astonishment at how adequate it turned out to be. Cool yr jets, man, it's not THAT good! So maybe it's about expectations, and me creating the wrong ones. Maybe I should stop acting like Joss Whedon is the new Orson Welles. It seems to be doing his work a disservice.