On Fandom, Heartbreak, and Joss Whedon

One night at the dinner table my kids asked which I like better: Star Wars or Star Trek. I demurred; they insisted; I insisted I couldn’t possibly; “no, Mom, it’s a desert island, you have to-”

“Oh, well then,” I said. “Firefly.”

When Firefly premiered in 2002, I was busy. I have a vague memory of being dimly aware of it, thinking I might like it, then dimly realizing it was gone. I didn’t catch up until 2011, and — well. Here I am. Massive poster above my desk, action figures scattered across it, the entire post-series run of graphic novels within arm’s reach, Serenity-the-ship’s schematics saved to my hard drive, the DVD box-set where I left it during a recent re-watch, Serenity-the-DVD one shelf down from the box-set, and a giant hole through my heart.

Recent revelations about Firefly creator Joss Whedon’s abusive behavior on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer— a kind of “casual cruelty” since confirmed by Firefly writer Jose Molina — did not surprise me, per se. I knew that Whedon’s ex-wife had levelled nasty accusations against him, had noted the general murmuring of support and assent that followed those accusations, and honestly, in a post-MeToo world, it’s hard to surprise me with news of an abusive man anymore.

But there’s a difference between knowing, and knowing. I told myself (actively, consciously, fully aware of what I was doing) that lots of people are jerks to their spouses, that Joss Whedon’s infidelities were not actually my business, and that I couldn’t know anyone else’s heart — but that I could know what Firefly meant to me. And what Firefly meant to me — means to me — is the world.

I am aware of the faults of the series and subsequent feature film. I am aware of the heinous opinions and personality of actor Adam Baldwin (Jayne)*. I am aware that the entire show indulges in what’s been called techno-orientalism, seen also in Blade Runner, The Matrix , Ghost in The Shell— the fetishization, appropriation, and bastardization of Asian influences as a signifier of “the future,” without writing Asian roles or casting Asian actors (“costumes, not culture,” as it’s sometimes put). I am aware of the creepy focus on River Tam’s feet, the unfortunate (though I think unintentional) parallels to violent rebel movements in America’s actual past, and also (an issue I’ve never heard any one but me raise) the fact that Inara is a Companion, a role, we’re told, that’s highly respected throughout the ‘verse, but somehow Mal — who loves her — can’t stop calling her a whore.

And yet.

There is no cultural artifact that exists free of cultural limitations; no imagined future free of the present’s defects; and, for all those issues and unavoidable truths, no televised world that has filled me like the world of Firefly.

I have been and always shall be a fan of Star Trek and -Wars, but for all their years and budgets, sincerity and explosions, neither franchise** instantly inhabited a world as fully and consistently as the ‘verse we got to see in a single, short season of Firefly. Not the characters, not the dialogue, not the backstory, not the plot; neither the sweeping vision nor the tiny details.

Lucas Film’s penchant for the weird and knobby-headed, for instance, has never, not once, introduced us to a single lived-in culture beyond that at the story’s center (unless you count the Ewoks, and somehow, nobody ever does); Firefly, on the other hand, both did away with knobby heads (“The Message”), and taught us more about the Mudders than we have ever learned about Yoda.

Star Trek has of course always been much more carefully fleshed out (Po’tajg, speakers of Klingon!), but if you can find a 13-episode run, in any of the by-now seven series, that is as unassailably and dependably solid — as cleverly written and remarkably performed, unfailing smart and smartly funny — as the 13 episodes of Firefly, I will eat my very fine hat.

From the moment I hit play on the pilot episode (the real pilot, not the episode that Fox made Whedon air first but which I knew to watch second), I was changed. I am today a different person than I would have been without Simon Tam’s love for his sister, Wash’s goofy anti-masculinity, Zoe’s heroism and dry delivery, Book’s secrets, and the drops of Mal’s blood on Serenity’s floor as he labored to save his ship (his home, his chosen family) in “Out of Gas.” When we love any work of art, when a world or a word or a song fills our heart, it roots deep and makes us anew.

And so here, finally, we land on the question that we, the fans of any kind of art produced by any flagrantly awful person, have to answer, for ourselves if for no one else: How much of the abuser’s abuse is baked into and inseparable from the thing I now carry in my spirit?

Must I, in this case, reconsider my attachment to Kaylee, a character as sweet and unspoiled as freshly picked strawberries, who knew Serenity’s engines as well as she knew her own skin and also unashamedly, guilelessly loved and longed for sex? Must I begin to hear Mal’s frequent use of the word “whore” not as one well-crafted character’s all-too-human imperfection but as a statement of his creator’s true intentions?

Is the rot mine now? Must I cut off that limb? Am I, dear God, complicit?

This is an era of constant cultural disillusionment. In the first half of February alone, a hugely popular country singer was suspended by his label after hurling the n-word in a drunken rage, and an actress on the Star Wars series The Mandalorian was fired for, well, for being a lot like Adam Baldwin. Over the last several years, a whole lot of fans of all manner of pop culture have found themselves struggling with genuine grief as they decide whether or not to cut the offensive artist and/or the art in question from their lives.

My own wave of cultural disillusionment began when Bill Cosby was revealed to be a violent sexual predator. I grew up listening to his stand-up albums, studying the covers as his voice spun off big, shiny LPs; to this day, there are words I say, ways I think, and shapes to my writing that are a direct result of Bill Cosby’s humor. More recently, JK Rowling has revealed herself — willingly! gleefully! constantly!— to be an unrepentant transphobe. I couldn’t tell you how often I’ve read every last word of the Harry Potter series, but I can tell you that I’m a grown woman who can explain, chapter and verse, why she’s a Gryffindor.

All of which is to say that I’ve been grappling with these questions for over a decade, and I would argue that, first and foremost, no: You are not complicit. I am not complicit. I no more knew in 2011 that Whedon delighted in making women writers cry than I understood in my childhood that Cosby’s Spanish Fly bit was about date rape, or could have guessed that the woman who wrote “it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be” would commit herself to the dehumanization of trans people.

But beyond that, I could nor more extract Bill Cosby from the language center of my brain than I could actually cut off a limb, and I don’t want to lose the skills I gained on that long-ago living room floor. Neither do I want to lose the way my heart squeezes when my memory replays Dumbledore rumbling that “it is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities,” or suggest to my children that the discussions we had as I read them those words, and so many others across so many wondrous nights, are now best forgotten because Rowling did not seem to internalize the lessons her own art carried.

It is significant, though, that Cosby and Rowling, along with so many other flagrantly awful people, produced art that flowed from a single source: Themselves. There’s no salvaging Cosby’s words, they’re rife with rape or its echoes, and no one but him can claim them. I cannot wish away what he taught me about how language works, but I will never again voluntarily listen to him wield it.

Rowling, on the other hand, clearly tapped her better angels in creating Harry Potter; the gifts she gave us remain, and we can still strive to be the people and build the world she helped us to dream, even if she, manifestly, cannot. My relationship with JK Rowling is over, but Harry, Hermione, and Ron are mine, now.

It’s equally significant, then, that Firefly (and, for that matter, Buffy) is not the work of a single artist. As Whedonesque as Whedon’s worlds are, they are the shared work of countless people, from whoever stitched that teddy bear onto Kaylee’s coveralls, to Jewel Staite, whose eyes told us all we needed to know about a girl’s love for her ship, to the director who positioned Nathan Fillion so carefully on that rock in “Trash,” to Fillion himself, whose Mal was a big damn hero filled with ruin and humor and the ability to make a made-up patois sound like the language of your truest home.

Everybody has to make up their own mind, draw their own lines in the sand, about what they can and cannot stand in the art they consume or the artists who produce it***, but I would submit that no one need reject the gift, even if they no longer want to associate with the giver. To borrow from a complete stranger on Twitter (@sigridellis), “don’t be mad at the love you held for the work. The work helped make you…. Take the lessons you learned from the work and face evil. Name it. Expose it. Be the person the work made you yearn to be.”

My relationship with Joss Whedon is over, unless and until he chooses a path of genuine amends, but Firefly is mine. I will not allow his abusive behavior to rob the writers, directors, set-builders, and actors of their work, nor to erase the world they so lovingly created, the story they so masterfully captured, from who I am and who I want to be.

Burn the land and boil the sea— you can’t take the sky from me.

* Indeed, Adam Baldwin once personally tore into me on Twitter!
** This post and my thoughts concerning these franchises is limited to live-action television and/or feature films. The fact that “canon” includes random and shifting collections of tie-in novels (some of which I’ve actually read!) and animated series, and that these may provide information crucial to the events of the films or live-action series, is irrelevant. If a movie needs a book to explain its characters, it’s not doing its job as a movie.
*** Just, FTR, I am aware of the stories about the unpleasantness between Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic on Castle.

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