“So Here's Us, On the Raggedy Edge”: Exoticism and Identification in Joss Whedon'sFirefly

Abstract

In his short-lived television show Firefly, Joss Whedon created a future clearly rooted in the present through melded Asian and American influences. Since one of Whedon's overriding concerns in his art is identification of and with his characters, Firefly offers a rich tapestry to explore the ways music, particularly non-Western music, is used in formulations of identity. Exploring the visual and audible representations of the exotic permeating Firefly, this article finds that the show reverses standard musical depictions of non-Western elements and creates new patterns of identification that aid in viewer attachment.On 20 December 2002, the Fox network aired the pilot for Joss Whedon's scifi/western show Firefly. While the airing of a television show's pilot is not usually a strange occurrence, in this case the pilot aired as the final broadcast of a show that had been canceled eight days earlier. It was the eleventh and final episode broadcast out of fourteen episodes produced and drew the show's lowest ratings.The story should have ended that Friday evening as the show faded into memory, but surprisingly it did not. Firefly had developed a cult following over its three months of broadcast life, and its fans began inundating networks from UPN to Sci-Fi trying to find the show a second home. 1 Their efforts did not result in new life for the show on television, but did give Fox a reason to release a DVD box set of the complete series, including the unaired episodes, on 9 December 2003. The set sold well enough that the following March, Universal Pictures acquired the rights to the property and announced that Whedon would write and direct Serenity, 2 a feature film version of the series featuring the entire original cast.While devotion to a media work is a common feature of contemporary fandom, the level of devotion Firefly has inspired and the results of that devotion are nothing short of astonishing. Observing the phenomenon led me to question why viewers identified with the show and its characters so strongly and what role, if any, music played in the