Serenity - Part 3
Oct. 10th, 2005 02:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenWent to see Serenity again tonight with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xannoside (thanks again for coming, dude!). I'm impressed that I can say I still am not at all bored by any part of the movie. I'm the type who sees movies over and over, everyone who reads this knows that, and if not, you'll learn. I saw The Matrix twelve times in the theater; hell, I saw Con Air five times in the theater and I bought and read the novelization of the same (please, don't ask, I can't explain it either). Something gets in your head, you can't get it out, we all have that. Movies do that to me, but a lot of the time I find myself going to purge the thinking and to see the parts I like best and twiddle my thumbs through the rest.
Such is not Serenity. I was never bored. I find new things to look at each time, as I do with other films, but the difference here is that I actually regret noticing other things because I have to stop paying attention to what's going on in order to be so anal. The story is that invovling.
That said, I do have some new appreciations coming back from my third viewing:
Firefly was remarkable for its peculiar adherence to certain realities of space-related activities. For one, there is no sound in space, and any shots taking place in space were only accented with music or with communications between people in suits (who were able to have noise because of the air in said suits). I remember reading fan questions as to whether Serenity would adhere to this, but didn't really work it out until the second and third viewings (I was busy being distraut the first time). The second time through, I felt they were being loose, not having sound at parts and having it in others where it would be dramatic. What the third viewing showed me is that it was being literal as possible about the limits of sound in space. Whenever the ship was in an atmosphere, there was sound; the big battle at the end takes place within the atmosphere of Mr. Universe's little planet/moon, so there's lots of explosions.
Now, I doubt the casual viewer appreciates this, but this is one of many sound cues I found fascinating. There isn't sound/noise/music just for the sake of it. Serenity isn't cluttered with superfluous noise, and there isn't an underlying chorus or theme to every character or every scene. The best use of this was in the introduction to the Operative. The man has been shown to be a strangely devoted and seriously deadly threat at the start, but when Mal reveals that he knows the Operative is an assassin, there is the Operative glaring back at him and...nothing. No "dun-dun-dun!" or deep note from the far left end of a piano. At the moment that there might have been a clinching dramatic theme, there isn't one. At once this serves to both show how powerful the character (not to mention, the actor) is that he needs no such symphonic pathetic fallacy and it remains true to the character in question--the Operative is not one for show, and he does not have his own theme song.
Contrast his void of sound with the treatmen of Serenity, the ship with the 'funereal' name, who starts and ends the movie with graceful, haunting and haunted music kissing her curves. Forgive me for my crude appreciation of music theory, but I'll try my best to explain it. Serenity's string theme starts with a solo, probably on cello, of a few thick bass notes, conveying a respectful, almost-dirge-like reverence that speaks of her age; it's then kicked up by a jauntier rejoineder that suggests the fast living she does with her current crew, and ended, of course, with the slightly off-kilter scratch of her being dinged up. All the noise, all the wind instruments, brass bands, and Oscar-nominated composers in the world can throw a tune at you, but it takes something as subtle as that theme to portray a venerable, lively, un-perfect 10th character like Serenity.
Silence is contrasted with noise when River flips out in the Maidenhead, too, as the sounds that we hear become only those that she hears. The bar fades slowly into the song for the candy bar commericial, at first seeming odd that the ad should be so loud until we're clued into our third-person associated POV. Then there is no sound, there is only River's voice, clear despite being a whisper, and the dull thunks of the first five or so people she proceeds to destroy. When the sound snaps back in again...the only thing like it I can fathom is the International cut of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 where the Blood-Spattered Bride blinks her violent world that's gone black and white back into color. Suddenly, River's not detached, and we're not, and we're horrified by what she's doing. It's truly awesome. This same effect is used later for comic effect when Simon confesses to Kaylee as Jayne and Zoe fire off rounds at the Reavers. In that case, the dissonance of expected sound priority and delivered results serves to tame our revulsion and fear of what the Reavers represent with a slice of hope.
This is something that bothered me last time, too, but was centered mostly around Simon: the wardrobe choices. It's not that I disagree with them or dislike them (except in Simon's case where I definitely do think almost everything he wears is hideous), it's more that they perplex me. For one thing, why the clothing change when and where it takes place? The time cues one might glean from a wardrobe change are denied when people change outfits at incongruous times or never do at all. Kaylee, for one, almost never changes her outfits. Save for the short jaunt off ship at Beaumond and the end scene, she wears the same shirt under her overalls through everything. Wash is another fashion victim, who gets to sport only the collars of his famously loud Hawaiian shirts from underneath a jumpsuit as toned down as his haircut (and what is with the binder around his chest?). Mal and Zoe change clothing only imperceptably--Mal seems to own thirty shirts with the exact same style only a few color points away from each other at any given time (from dried-blood red to...maroon), and Zoe wears her leather bodice and bolero throughout and recycles the high-necked pink shirt from the start to the end. Her white dress at the funeral scene is practically the only noticeable change she gets.
And then there are the serial clothes horses--Simon, River, Inara, and Jayne. Jayne's is a tad less noticeable because he only really alternates his t-shirts and couple of them are similar enough in color to get away with it. Inara is the start of the bizarre changing room sessions. She (understandably) switches out of her undergarment-type outfit she escapes in into another outfit for Haven and Miranda, then changes again on the way to Mr. Universe's complex. At one point, it seemed like she wore something different on the journey than she ended up in on the landing. River wears a different dress following the heist she assists on, but spends every last minute of the movie save the climax in the same blue dress she wore when she flipped out. There's a good reason for her to change out of it at the end--she pukes wearing the blue dress--but it's a thin excuse and doesn't explain why she spent the rest of the time in one dress when her brother changed clothes at least twice.
Okay, let's get onto Simon (and let's pause to enjoy that phrase, shall we?). Simon...looks terrible, in terms of clothes. I don't know what else to say except that it's all down hill after he decides to leave Serenity. I love him in the Alliance military uniform (man, am I glad they changed those for the movie), and can tolerate the cultist duds he wears under it, and even like his sweater. Other than that....does Joss hate Simon or just Sean Maher? Moving on, the point here is that Simon changes his clothes too damn much. He wears one outfit to leave Serenity and stays in it until the first stop at Haven, when he loses the stiff-necked pin-stripe suit jacket for the beaded-collar, oriental-knock-off shirt. Then, before they reach Miranda, he changes to another shirt, a mess one overlaid on a dark sweater (the sweater would have been fine, but a mesh shirt? Simon, the 'verse's pretty boy, we get it! I promise!). It's not a shirt that was under the other either, given it's cut, so that means River stayed in her blue dress, Simon and Inara and Jayne changed. Mal, Zoe, who knows, and Wash and Kaylee same old, same old.
Maybe it wouldn't bother me if the characters who got shortest shrift in terms of plot weren't also the ones getting shafted on the clothes and style (Wash and Kaylee being the biggest ones here). Oh well.
At this point, I've heard that Joss Whedon himself has confessed to engineering Serenity such that it contradicts statements made at the beginning and events throughout Firefly. The violations center solely on River and Simon's escape from the Academy, particularly Simon's depth of involvement and knowledge of what was done to her there. For the sake of treating old fans and bringing virgins up to speed, the beginning that details the escape and the Operative's mission seems to violate Firefly canon. Watching it again, I can conclude that it doesn't have to, probably does anyway and will most definitely be ignored by the larger Firefly fan community.
Why it doesn't have to: where the escape is problematic concerning Simon's level of personal involvement can be more easily dismissed than other aspects. Simon says it took money and luck to get River out, and nothing Serenity shows demonstrates this to be anything other than the case. Simon's emphasis on money when he tells the rest of the crew in "Serenity" (the pilot of Firefly) seems to imply his physical distance from the rescue effort, as does the bit about his financing a group of men to smuggle River out in cryo. Strictly going by what's presented in show and movie, this isn't discontinuous with what's shown in Serenity. It makes sense, especially given how much the men assisting Simon seem to know about River's treatment, that no matter how able she appeared when first liberated, River would need to be put into cryogenic stasis in order to survive the journey to the outer worlds. Simon's accomplices, as Simon himself learns, would know that she's going to be basically psychotic and unstable, and that's not a winning combination if you want to move about stealthily and inconspicuously. So, despite the fact that Simon calls the rescue a smuggling job first and foremost, it is a rescue, just like the one we saw in Serenity.
Problems begin to arise from the few minutes that precede the escape and follow River's dream. Firefly established Simon as two things: smart and awkward. While the former works for his ruse, the latter was shown to trip him up in "Jaynestown" when he had to pretend to be a buyer of mud. There is a slight justification to be had in saying that Simon might know better how to convey the arrogance and presumption of a military officer (given his spoiled upbringing) than a tradesman in a border world whose rules are foreign to him. All right, say I give you that Simon is somehow magically able to turn off his awkward ineptitude at lying for Serenity's purposes and then resume his bumbling later for Firefly (this is still somewhat in continuity, given how uptight, severe and humorless he is in "Serenity"). If, then, he is so smart and capable of pulling off that disguise, how is it he can't remember the expressly conveyed information about River's condition once they're out of the Core? The doctor at the Academy says, explicitly, that River is trained for combat--I think he even used the term 'living weapon.' He also described the treatments River received with the words 'neural stripping'--and if you're at all familiar with Firefly, you'll recall that in "Ariel," Simon mimics those same words ("They stripped her amygdala"). Yet Simon says in "Serenity" that he has no idea what was done to River and is surprised to find she'd had her brain operated upon in "Ariel." And I haven't even gotten started on the fact that it is Simon who brings up the possibility of River-as-psychic first, not the other doctor, and he has it confirmed.
Where can Simon-the-smart be compromised to allow for a loss of this knowledge? Truthfully, there's only so much stress/paranoia/denial can account for. I can believe that Simon is skeptical of River-as-psychic until the end of Firefly because the idea runs counter to his grounding in the physical sciences--Simon isn't the man of faith on the show; he believes in what lies in front of him, things working because of their visible, observable design. But to forget that River had been operated upon is quite a stretch for a supposedly gifted surgeon. Likewise the information about her combat skills, though it's possible he believed them to be remnants, psychologically embedded programming like the safe word and such, which I understand him not announcing to the crew for fear they'd turn him and River over (given how tenuous their position on the ship was, this is an acceptable and believable course of action that remains in-character for Simon). The fact is that Simon is supposed to be smart when it comes to medicine, and the movie's only violation of Firefly canon is this one lapse. As this ret-con is made to bring virgins into the fold of the Browncoats, it's one I can live with. It's just unfortunate that it undermines the genius pathos of "Serenity" and "Ariel," two of the show's strongest episodes.
There's more (there always is with me--I'm the girl who wrote nearly three billion words on The Matrix Revolutions and I hated the bloody movie). There's more even on this ret-conning issue in particular that I want to deal with, mostly as regards to characterization. The movie has taken our heroes to darker places (those lucky enough to have some focus in Serenity), and I intend to wax poetical about it for another good thousand or so words when I get the chance. Mal, Zoe, the Browncoats, and the rest of the crew's perceptions as to the consequences the war had on the captain and first mate are at the top of my 'must discuss' list (brought about by the brilliant bit in the middle with Adam Baldwin being Jayne at his nastiest and, funnily enough, savviest).
xannoside (thanks again for coming, dude!). I'm impressed that I can say I still am not at all bored by any part of the movie. I'm the type who sees movies over and over, everyone who reads this knows that, and if not, you'll learn. I saw The Matrix twelve times in the theater; hell, I saw Con Air five times in the theater and I bought and read the novelization of the same (please, don't ask, I can't explain it either). Something gets in your head, you can't get it out, we all have that. Movies do that to me, but a lot of the time I find myself going to purge the thinking and to see the parts I like best and twiddle my thumbs through the rest.Such is not Serenity. I was never bored. I find new things to look at each time, as I do with other films, but the difference here is that I actually regret noticing other things because I have to stop paying attention to what's going on in order to be so anal. The story is that invovling.
That said, I do have some new appreciations coming back from my third viewing:
Firefly was remarkable for its peculiar adherence to certain realities of space-related activities. For one, there is no sound in space, and any shots taking place in space were only accented with music or with communications between people in suits (who were able to have noise because of the air in said suits). I remember reading fan questions as to whether Serenity would adhere to this, but didn't really work it out until the second and third viewings (I was busy being distraut the first time). The second time through, I felt they were being loose, not having sound at parts and having it in others where it would be dramatic. What the third viewing showed me is that it was being literal as possible about the limits of sound in space. Whenever the ship was in an atmosphere, there was sound; the big battle at the end takes place within the atmosphere of Mr. Universe's little planet/moon, so there's lots of explosions.
Now, I doubt the casual viewer appreciates this, but this is one of many sound cues I found fascinating. There isn't sound/noise/music just for the sake of it. Serenity isn't cluttered with superfluous noise, and there isn't an underlying chorus or theme to every character or every scene. The best use of this was in the introduction to the Operative. The man has been shown to be a strangely devoted and seriously deadly threat at the start, but when Mal reveals that he knows the Operative is an assassin, there is the Operative glaring back at him and...nothing. No "dun-dun-dun!" or deep note from the far left end of a piano. At the moment that there might have been a clinching dramatic theme, there isn't one. At once this serves to both show how powerful the character (not to mention, the actor) is that he needs no such symphonic pathetic fallacy and it remains true to the character in question--the Operative is not one for show, and he does not have his own theme song.
Contrast his void of sound with the treatmen of Serenity, the ship with the 'funereal' name, who starts and ends the movie with graceful, haunting and haunted music kissing her curves. Forgive me for my crude appreciation of music theory, but I'll try my best to explain it. Serenity's string theme starts with a solo, probably on cello, of a few thick bass notes, conveying a respectful, almost-dirge-like reverence that speaks of her age; it's then kicked up by a jauntier rejoineder that suggests the fast living she does with her current crew, and ended, of course, with the slightly off-kilter scratch of her being dinged up. All the noise, all the wind instruments, brass bands, and Oscar-nominated composers in the world can throw a tune at you, but it takes something as subtle as that theme to portray a venerable, lively, un-perfect 10th character like Serenity.
Silence is contrasted with noise when River flips out in the Maidenhead, too, as the sounds that we hear become only those that she hears. The bar fades slowly into the song for the candy bar commericial, at first seeming odd that the ad should be so loud until we're clued into our third-person associated POV. Then there is no sound, there is only River's voice, clear despite being a whisper, and the dull thunks of the first five or so people she proceeds to destroy. When the sound snaps back in again...the only thing like it I can fathom is the International cut of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 where the Blood-Spattered Bride blinks her violent world that's gone black and white back into color. Suddenly, River's not detached, and we're not, and we're horrified by what she's doing. It's truly awesome. This same effect is used later for comic effect when Simon confesses to Kaylee as Jayne and Zoe fire off rounds at the Reavers. In that case, the dissonance of expected sound priority and delivered results serves to tame our revulsion and fear of what the Reavers represent with a slice of hope.
This is something that bothered me last time, too, but was centered mostly around Simon: the wardrobe choices. It's not that I disagree with them or dislike them (except in Simon's case where I definitely do think almost everything he wears is hideous), it's more that they perplex me. For one thing, why the clothing change when and where it takes place? The time cues one might glean from a wardrobe change are denied when people change outfits at incongruous times or never do at all. Kaylee, for one, almost never changes her outfits. Save for the short jaunt off ship at Beaumond and the end scene, she wears the same shirt under her overalls through everything. Wash is another fashion victim, who gets to sport only the collars of his famously loud Hawaiian shirts from underneath a jumpsuit as toned down as his haircut (and what is with the binder around his chest?). Mal and Zoe change clothing only imperceptably--Mal seems to own thirty shirts with the exact same style only a few color points away from each other at any given time (from dried-blood red to...maroon), and Zoe wears her leather bodice and bolero throughout and recycles the high-necked pink shirt from the start to the end. Her white dress at the funeral scene is practically the only noticeable change she gets.
And then there are the serial clothes horses--Simon, River, Inara, and Jayne. Jayne's is a tad less noticeable because he only really alternates his t-shirts and couple of them are similar enough in color to get away with it. Inara is the start of the bizarre changing room sessions. She (understandably) switches out of her undergarment-type outfit she escapes in into another outfit for Haven and Miranda, then changes again on the way to Mr. Universe's complex. At one point, it seemed like she wore something different on the journey than she ended up in on the landing. River wears a different dress following the heist she assists on, but spends every last minute of the movie save the climax in the same blue dress she wore when she flipped out. There's a good reason for her to change out of it at the end--she pukes wearing the blue dress--but it's a thin excuse and doesn't explain why she spent the rest of the time in one dress when her brother changed clothes at least twice.
Okay, let's get onto Simon (and let's pause to enjoy that phrase, shall we?). Simon...looks terrible, in terms of clothes. I don't know what else to say except that it's all down hill after he decides to leave Serenity. I love him in the Alliance military uniform (man, am I glad they changed those for the movie), and can tolerate the cultist duds he wears under it, and even like his sweater. Other than that....does Joss hate Simon or just Sean Maher? Moving on, the point here is that Simon changes his clothes too damn much. He wears one outfit to leave Serenity and stays in it until the first stop at Haven, when he loses the stiff-necked pin-stripe suit jacket for the beaded-collar, oriental-knock-off shirt. Then, before they reach Miranda, he changes to another shirt, a mess one overlaid on a dark sweater (the sweater would have been fine, but a mesh shirt? Simon, the 'verse's pretty boy, we get it! I promise!). It's not a shirt that was under the other either, given it's cut, so that means River stayed in her blue dress, Simon and Inara and Jayne changed. Mal, Zoe, who knows, and Wash and Kaylee same old, same old.
Maybe it wouldn't bother me if the characters who got shortest shrift in terms of plot weren't also the ones getting shafted on the clothes and style (Wash and Kaylee being the biggest ones here). Oh well.
At this point, I've heard that Joss Whedon himself has confessed to engineering Serenity such that it contradicts statements made at the beginning and events throughout Firefly. The violations center solely on River and Simon's escape from the Academy, particularly Simon's depth of involvement and knowledge of what was done to her there. For the sake of treating old fans and bringing virgins up to speed, the beginning that details the escape and the Operative's mission seems to violate Firefly canon. Watching it again, I can conclude that it doesn't have to, probably does anyway and will most definitely be ignored by the larger Firefly fan community.
Why it doesn't have to: where the escape is problematic concerning Simon's level of personal involvement can be more easily dismissed than other aspects. Simon says it took money and luck to get River out, and nothing Serenity shows demonstrates this to be anything other than the case. Simon's emphasis on money when he tells the rest of the crew in "Serenity" (the pilot of Firefly) seems to imply his physical distance from the rescue effort, as does the bit about his financing a group of men to smuggle River out in cryo. Strictly going by what's presented in show and movie, this isn't discontinuous with what's shown in Serenity. It makes sense, especially given how much the men assisting Simon seem to know about River's treatment, that no matter how able she appeared when first liberated, River would need to be put into cryogenic stasis in order to survive the journey to the outer worlds. Simon's accomplices, as Simon himself learns, would know that she's going to be basically psychotic and unstable, and that's not a winning combination if you want to move about stealthily and inconspicuously. So, despite the fact that Simon calls the rescue a smuggling job first and foremost, it is a rescue, just like the one we saw in Serenity.
Problems begin to arise from the few minutes that precede the escape and follow River's dream. Firefly established Simon as two things: smart and awkward. While the former works for his ruse, the latter was shown to trip him up in "Jaynestown" when he had to pretend to be a buyer of mud. There is a slight justification to be had in saying that Simon might know better how to convey the arrogance and presumption of a military officer (given his spoiled upbringing) than a tradesman in a border world whose rules are foreign to him. All right, say I give you that Simon is somehow magically able to turn off his awkward ineptitude at lying for Serenity's purposes and then resume his bumbling later for Firefly (this is still somewhat in continuity, given how uptight, severe and humorless he is in "Serenity"). If, then, he is so smart and capable of pulling off that disguise, how is it he can't remember the expressly conveyed information about River's condition once they're out of the Core? The doctor at the Academy says, explicitly, that River is trained for combat--I think he even used the term 'living weapon.' He also described the treatments River received with the words 'neural stripping'--and if you're at all familiar with Firefly, you'll recall that in "Ariel," Simon mimics those same words ("They stripped her amygdala"). Yet Simon says in "Serenity" that he has no idea what was done to River and is surprised to find she'd had her brain operated upon in "Ariel." And I haven't even gotten started on the fact that it is Simon who brings up the possibility of River-as-psychic first, not the other doctor, and he has it confirmed.
Where can Simon-the-smart be compromised to allow for a loss of this knowledge? Truthfully, there's only so much stress/paranoia/denial can account for. I can believe that Simon is skeptical of River-as-psychic until the end of Firefly because the idea runs counter to his grounding in the physical sciences--Simon isn't the man of faith on the show; he believes in what lies in front of him, things working because of their visible, observable design. But to forget that River had been operated upon is quite a stretch for a supposedly gifted surgeon. Likewise the information about her combat skills, though it's possible he believed them to be remnants, psychologically embedded programming like the safe word and such, which I understand him not announcing to the crew for fear they'd turn him and River over (given how tenuous their position on the ship was, this is an acceptable and believable course of action that remains in-character for Simon). The fact is that Simon is supposed to be smart when it comes to medicine, and the movie's only violation of Firefly canon is this one lapse. As this ret-con is made to bring virgins into the fold of the Browncoats, it's one I can live with. It's just unfortunate that it undermines the genius pathos of "Serenity" and "Ariel," two of the show's strongest episodes.
There's more (there always is with me--I'm the girl who wrote nearly three billion words on The Matrix Revolutions and I hated the bloody movie). There's more even on this ret-conning issue in particular that I want to deal with, mostly as regards to characterization. The movie has taken our heroes to darker places (those lucky enough to have some focus in Serenity), and I intend to wax poetical about it for another good thousand or so words when I get the chance. Mal, Zoe, the Browncoats, and the rest of the crew's perceptions as to the consequences the war had on the captain and first mate are at the top of my 'must discuss' list (brought about by the brilliant bit in the middle with Adam Baldwin being Jayne at his nastiest and, funnily enough, savviest).
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-10 02:36 pm (UTC)Ah, yes, I forgot to mention that part. I did notice that, and it was probably most effective because it comes in the middle of an argument between Mal and Zoe that leaves both of them nonplussed and little less than fondly nostalgic about the old days and the new ways. The atmo burn comes off right before Mal says their code is why they lost the war, and Wash comese out of the cockpit into that silence...gah, it was beautiful.
I'd love a copy of the soundtrack, just for the Serenity theme if nothing else.