Serenity

See it.

Just see it. And SEE IT TODAY.

You want to see it today because it's a way of voting with your feet and pocketbooks. Seeing it is a vote for smart, clever, humane, interesting, fun, exciting stories. As opposed to the dreck that Hollywood normally spews.

Look, Joss Whedon is not Shakespeare, but if you like exciting stories with interesting characters--exciting stories that aren't made for dummies by dummies--then he's your man. Go put down your money and see his movie. You'll like it and you'll contribute to the (first-weekend) box office numbers that seem to be the only thing Hollywood pays any attention to. Strike a blow for non-stupidity in popular culture.

I saw Serenity yesterday, and, honestly, I have to see it again before I have anything interesting to say about it. But a few random thoughts:

1. Seeing it solidified my belief that we are moving out of the era in which movies are the most important forms of visual story-telling and into one in which television series are the most important forms. Movies are like short stories. Series can be like novels (even though most of the dreck on t.v. is just composed of short stories strung together, stories in which you can only identify the characters by their names and the people who portray them.) Serenity is great as a next installment in the Firefly saga, but I have no idea what people unfamiliar with the show will think of it. Whedon is good, and he's better when he has more time for character-development.

2. There's already some chatter on in the rightosphere about Serenity's conservative message. I'm sure there will be liberal replies. Serenity is about Romanticism. It's about the sublimity of space and the power of humanity and of love. If Romanticism is conservative, then its message is conservative. But its message isn't conservative. So we have to doubt the link between Romanticism and conservatism. Serenity is about the good guys. That means they don't fall neatly into the liberal-conservative spectrum. They want to survive and do what's right, and that's common to good people on both ends of the spectrum. They are open-minded and their moral vision isn't clouded by the primitive and superstitious aspects of quasi-literalist Christianity, so in that respect they are at odds with the worst parts of the right. But they recognize that sometimes perpetrating violence against very bad people is the only way to do what's right; in that respect, they are at odds with some of the worst parts of the left. They opposed the Alliance and--in this movie--in particular the Alliance's efforts to use technology and bureaucracy to transform humans into something (allegedly) better, so in that respect they are more closely-allied with contemporary conservatives. But the world they want to build--or save--is a, open, liberal, humanistic world, so in that respect they are more closely-allied with liberalism.

3. Serenity/Firefly, like Buffy and Angel, is largely about teaching moral lessons. True moral lessons, independent of and unclouded by the aforementioned bad parts of Christianity.

4. Stories are important things. Fiction can grab the imagination in ways that neither philosophy nor anything else seems capable of. That, a friend of mine once suggested, is why totalitarian regimes immediately try to control people's access to fiction. Fiction can capture the imagination, and the imagination is more important than most of us left-brain types realize. Anyway. Fiction is complicated, and I need to think more about it than I have in the past.

5. Thanks, Joss. You've done something important for me.