Mal's speech, or, On not making a better world (1)

This report is maybe twelve years old? Parliament buried it, and it remained buried, until River dug it up. This is what they feared she knew. And they were right to fear. 'Cause there's a whole universe of folk who are going to know it too; they're going to see it.

Somebody has to speak for these people.

You all got on this boat for different reasons, but you've all come to the same place, so now I'm asking more of you than I have before --- maybe all. [Because] sure as I know anything, I know this: they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten, they'll swing back to the belief that they can make people ... better. And I do not hold to that.

So no more running. I aim to misbehave.

In the DVD commentary on Serenity, Joss Whedon describes this as Mal's “St Crispin's Day speech”, and it's instructive to compare it against the original. Much as I love both the speech and the film, the comparison is not entirely flattering.

Let us be clear: Whedon holds that schemes to change the human condition are doomed to fail, and that it is wicked to make the attempt; I do not want to complain about this. There was quite enough utopianism last century to last us for ... well ... some time. We are not free of its pull, and there is a certain tendency lurking around the so-called progressive strand in our society that cleaves to the idea that if only we could make this modification, this tweak, then everything would fundamentally change for the better. I am happy for someone in popular culture --- even better, given the topic, for someone in geek-cult culture --- to set up a stall in opposition to this.

But there is more to the speech than resolve against such overreaching folly. I spoke approvingly of Whedon's ethic in an earlier post, but it is not without its own self-indulgence. It is, of course, romantic, and in a wishful-thinking kind of way. Mal and the other Browncoats, the losing side in the War for Independence, are nothing if they are not the Confederacy: courtly, honourable, local, and resistant of the encroaching, homogenising, antiseptic modernism of their opponents. But the Independents are a fantasy of the Confederacy, defeated in an Honourable Cause without slavery or intransigence or any real wickedness of their own. (Cf. the Bajorans in DS9, who were contentious, superstitious, and caste-ridden, as well as being plucky and Unjustly Colonised.) This is having one's cake, and eating it, all at once.

The speech itself contains an indulgence more modern, and in its way more worrisome. Finally, it says, and reluctantly, I have been goaded into action by a decisive and indisputable evil: an evil with a conveniently vast and identifiable roll-call of victims. Now I can, and I should, act; and I will be justified in acting.

Am I wrong to see the image of a certain Western sensibility here? I mean the tendency, at once jaded and enthusiastic, that needs to label some evil as “genocide” before it can be seriously opposed; the demand that any worthy military effort must be assimilable to the fight against the National Socialist Party of Germany. There is a lot of this about, and it will not do: on the one hand, we did not know that the Nazis were going to perform genocide when we (rightly) chose to fight them; on the other hand, we (and I do mean we, i.e. including myself) have at least in the case of Iraq made war recklessly, while in the grip of the view that We Have To Do Something.

The calculus, in having recourse to violence, is just not this binary.

Simon's speech

I am very smart.

I went to the best medic-ed in Osiris, top 3% of my class; finished my internship in eight months. "Gifted" is the term.

So when I tell you that my little sister makes me look like an idiot child, I want you to understand my full meaning.

River was more than gifted, she ... she was a gift. I mean, everything she did --- music, math, theoretical physics, even ... even dance --- there was nothing that didn't come as naturally to her as breathing does to us. And she could be a real brat about it to: I mean, she used to ... [awkward pause]

There was a ... a school, a government-sponsored academy: we had never even heard of it but it had the most exciting programme, the most challenging. We could have sent her anywhere (we had the money), but she wanted to go: she wanted to learn. She was fourteen ...

I, ah ... I got a few letters at first, and then I didn't hear for months. Finally I got a letter that made no sense: she talked about things that never happened, jokes that we never ...

It was a code. It just said: "They're hurting us. Get me out."

[Zoe asks, "How'd you do it?"]

Money. And ... and luck. For two years I couldn't get near her, but then I was contacted by some men, some underground movement, they said that she was in danger, that the ... that the government was ... playing with her brain. If I funded them they could sneak her out in cryo, get her to Persephone, and from there I could take her ... wherever.

[Inara: "Will she be alright?"]

I don't know if she'll be alright. I don't know what they did to her; or why. I ... I just have to keep her safe.

Simon Tam is explaining to the Serenity crew why he was smuggling his sister in a crate on board their ship; why the Alliance is after them; why he would risk everything, his own life, and the lives of others into the bargain. It's the Whedon ethic in a pure form: a high value on personal loyalty and obligation; a willingness to break rules; a suspicion of grand causes; and the utter rejection of wrongs done by groups "for the greater good".

And it is heartbreaking. People have talked about "found families" in Joss Whedon's programs --- the emphasis on the group of friends, over and above natural family --- but Simon and River Tam are an example of total, unwavering, illusionless devotion. River knows that her brother is a stiff: awkward, humourless, unrelaxed; and Simon knows only too well that River was always fragile, and that now she's broken ... and more than a little crazy. Yet for them, that doesn't change anything.

The sci-fi western Firefly was that rare thing: a cult television program that lived up to the hype; a pearl of great price that the network didn't properly recognise. It earned its impossible fairytale ending: the wonderful movie Serenity, a critical and popular success, vindicating the cancelled show. And bringing Simon and River's story to a fitting conclusion. It bears watching again and again, over years now, but recently the start of it all has been returning to my thoughts. The TV show is quite arch, even flip about some things, but there is a centredness to it as well, a real conviction. And this is exhibit A.