The Tragedy of the Rewatch: Joss Whedon, Toxic Ideology, and the Destruction (and Resilience) of Nostalgia

This week I'm wrong about a cult-classic sci-fi show, plus my favorite coffee place.

Imagine having Gina Torres on your show and not giving her as many interesting and challenging storylines as possible. Couldn’t be me.

Recently, in search of something comforting and familiar after a long night at work, I decided to start a rewatch of Firefly, the cult-classic Joss Whedon sci-fi/western/space opera show that lasted for 14 episodes and one movie in the early 2000s. It follows the crew of a spaceship called Serenity, led by Malcolm Reynolds (played by Nathan Fillion, among a cast with several actors who have become fairly successful, such as Adam Baldwin, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Summer Glau, and Morena Baccarin) that smuggles and does odd jobs throughout space to avoid the totalitarian overreach of a powerful central government. Every world in the show happens to have the topography of southern California, everyone not in a spaceship rides a horse, guns are everywhere, and the show has a charming steampunk-western-expansion aesthetic.

I first watched Firefly in high school and loved it. It felt witty and fresh, and the low-budget visuals felt balanced by the scope of the show’s vision and creative writing and filming choices. I immediately rewatched with my family, who universally loved it, especially the characters, who felt real and charming and whose dynamics made the show funny even when it was dramatic and tense. In college, I convinced my fellow novice rowers to watch it with me as a group, and some of my best memories of that year are us watching and reacting to the best moments in the show in my dorm’s common room. I watched it again in my first year out of college, introducing it to my new friends in Connecticut.

In short, the show meant a lot to me.

Now, I was prepared to feel differently this time. The biggest reason is that over the past 10 years, it’s become more and more clear that Joss Whedon is a shitty person. I won’t get into the details here—if you’re interested, this article from Vulture goes through the extensive list of bad to gross to worse things Whedon has done, with the bonus of extensive quotes where he reveals his complete lack of contrition or genuine understanding of what he did wrong—but suffice it to say he abused his power, especially his power over women, for sex and cheap laughs and cruel gratification of childhood fantasies with real and harmful consequences to many, many people. Whedon once had a reputation as a feminist writer. Whatever was sincere in his feminism was certainly not practiced in his life and work, and what before was a fringe critique that his feminist ideals were mostly applied based on the male-determined sex appeal of the women in question is now fairly obviously correct.

That’s been a tough pill for me to swallow—in addition to Firefly, I adore Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I was obsessed with his MCU films when they came out, and I enjoyed his adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing (which I’ve written about before).

With time and reflection, I’ve decided to continue loving Buffy because it also represents the work of many talented, non-shitty people beyond Whedon, although I have been able to recognize how some of his worldview unfortunately permeated the show. I’ve cooled on his other work but can recognize why I liked it and why it’s been influential—and it has been influential. As a culture we are only now, 13 years later, seemingly tired of his quippy style of superhero moviemaking popularized by The Avengers, but perfected through his work on TV.

But since accepting that Whedon sucks, I’ve mostly avoided thinking or talking about Firefly. I had loved the show for so long, in so many different phases of my life, and I didn’t want my memory of perfection to be tainted by time and awareness of Whedon’s hypocrisy.

My rewatch experience has been interesting and informative. The show is certainly not perfect—I notice the production value in a way I didn’t before, and many of the assumptions and unquestioned values of the show feel dated in a very early-2000s way—but much of the charm, especially the clear chemistry of the fantastic cast, remains. The show takes its time in building out a world in a way most shows don’t anymore, which is also a reflection of Firefly being a network TV show produced well before the current streaming model existed. It also has a theme song where we get portraits of all the characters, which is something that should absolutely come back into style. I’m enjoying myself.

But because of the aforementioned time and context and awareness, I’m also evaluating the failures and missed opportunities of the show, and questioning the moral messaging in many moments in a way I hadn’t before. And they all make me cringe.

Some of those moments are so obvious I’m wondering how I ever didn’t see them as a problem. The lead characters all fought in a rebellion against the Alliance, or central government, which is a perfectly fine conceit for any sci-fi property (see Star Wars)—but it was CERTAINLY a choice to have much of the rebel iconography and costumes evoke the Confederacy, and even more to have Mal open an early episode by saying “I’m thinking we’ll rise again.” Yikes.

The show also operates on the assumption the Alliance is the descendant of a unification between China and the United States, and is filled with direct allusions to Chinese culture, including repeated use of Mandarin (mostly for swearing) from all the characters. Despite that repeated motif, there are literally no characters played by Chinese actors in the entire run of the show, as far as I can tell. Yikes again.

Others are more (or at least relatively) subtle, mostly in establishing (through what is and what isn’t there) an upsetting moral argument for some kind of benevolent patriarchy (thank you bell hooks for priming me to notice it).

The female characters are all written as some spin on “sexy ____”—as the Honest Trailer astutely pointed out, which now that I’m rewatching it beat me to a lot of these critiques—and the fact they all feel somewhat realized as human beings is entirely a testament to how good the actors are.

The characters of Inara and Zoe (played by Baccarin and Torres) are especially slighted. Inara is a Companion, which in the show’s universe is a high-class, ritual-focused escort with significant social cachet. Almost every single one of her stories is about her sleeping with a man to solve his problems, or pining after Mal, who repeatedly calls her a whore (more on that later). Baccarin communicates a character with intelligence and depth, but never gets the opportunity to grow the character on her own terms.

Zoe is treated even worse—Mal’s sidekick through the war and on the ship, this rewatch I realized just how few lines she is given, how little agency she’s allowed to show beyond the occasional reprimand of Mal (while still doing whatever he says), and how she’s never given the chance to truly develop a relationship with a character other than Mal or her husband Wash. Torres is an incredibly charismatic actor, and her performance makes Zoe compelling, but her existence in the show is entirely to balance and react to men or to shoot people (which she does very well, to be fair). There is not one storyline that revolves around her and her decisions in the entire show. Literally not a single one.

There is a better version of Firefly in some alternate universe where these characters were written to be as dynamic and interesting as they were made by their actors. I’d love to watch that show.

The neglect of the women compounds and emphasizes Firefly’s insistence on patriarchal values. We see this in minor characters like Tudyk’s Wash, Zoe’s husband, who more than once spends an episode complaining his wife doesn’t respect him enough and is rewarded for it by Zoe doing something “wifely” like cooking him dinner (Tudyk is such a charming actor that these strange bouts of misogyny somehow feel even grosser).

But the show’s values are made clearest by Mal. He is clearly a man capable of humor, warmth, and affection. He has been harmed by war and does care deeply about his crew and their happiness. But throughout the show and sequel movie, he universally responds to crisis and conflict by bullying those closest to him, refusing to explain himself or his reasoning, and threatening to exile and abandon anyone who doesn’t follow his orders. And those moments are always portrayed as justified and correct. He cares about his crew and “respects” women, but not enough to listen to them in a critical moment or seek to build meaningful consensus or to solicit help and support. He calls Inara a whore multiple times an episode and never apologizes for it. He is emblematic of the delusion of benevolent patriarchy, of a ruler whose autocratic power protects his family rather than alienating them. Fillion creates a character whose pain can be seen in these moments of tyranny, but again, the writing of the show refuses to let that depth be explored or the value of his dominating behavior be questioned. Fillion may see that Mal is harming himself and others unnecessarily, but the show doesn’t.

And clearly, all of these failures spring, in one way or another, from the toxic and abusive misogyny of Whedon. They provide a picture of his deluded worldview.

So what does it mean to still enjoy Firefly? Like Buffy, I can point to the great work from other artists and writers on the show. I can focus on the fun and frightening and well-executed sequences and storylines and characters in the show that don’t reveal toxic ideologies bubbling below the surface, which there are plenty of. I can acknowledge that like creating art, experiencing it is a creative process that allows me to bring meaning and value to a work on some level through my interpretation. I can enjoy the fun and whimsical aspects of the show while interrogating its values as I do here. I can acknowledge the pleasure of nostalgia in remembering and fleetingly feeling what I loved about the show when I first saw it. I can imagine a better-written version of the show where its best qualities were allowed to shine—and there are truly great moments where we can see that possibility! I can choose to only think about the scene where Wash plays with dinosaurs. I can try to do all of those things at the same time.

Maybe this is what it means to be an adult—to recognize how limited and simplistic and naive your view of something was before, to be unable to reclaim that vision, and to feel strange about your inability to fully love or fully hate the flawed product in front of you.

I’m going to watch the last few episodes tonight. And for better or worse, I’ve decided that’s shiny.

My Life is in Shambles

Kos Kaffe, the coffee bar on Fifth Avenue where I go write almost every day and where all the baristas know my order, is closed this entire week. It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.

I love Kos because it’s always crowded and you’re only allowed to use a laptop at specific tables you have to share with other people and the furnace is always leaking water and it’s noisy and half the chairs feel like they’re about to crumble beneath you and when it’s cold outside and they have to close the door, the kitchen smoke fills up the whole space. It’s perfect. I work best when I am tuning out chaos all around me (or more accurately, when I can let myself get distracted whenever I want by the chaos all around me), and I have yet to find a more chaotic coffee spot.

But today, I was forced to go to Ninth Street Coffee, which operates in the same space as Threes Brewing in Gowanus. You’d think a brewery/coffee shop would be chaotic. You’d be wrong. Everyone in there is quiet, the space is serene and well-decorated, and all the seating is comfortable. I couldn’t work there at all (the coffee is good, though).

I ended up writing most of this post at The Hollow Nickel on Atlantic Avenue, which is an amazing bar with the best popcorn chicken I’ve ever eaten in my entire life, where I was perfectly distracted by the TV playing Legally Blonde (a perfect movie) and good conversation with the lovely bartender and some other patrons.

Where do you work best? What’s your ideal public environment? Am I crazy? I’d love to hear from you.