'YOU CAN'T TAKE THE SKY FROM ME'

I'm intrigued by the theme song for Firefly and in particular the line 'You can't take the sky from me'.

In the context of Firefly is the sky/space the new 'promised land' wherein salvation is found?

Where are people looking for salvation today?

MAL REYNOLDS - WESTERN HERO

Reading more about Westerns gives me additional insights into the make up of Mal's character: Peter Francis writes:

There is a recurring image of the Western hero beaten to a pulp and yet overcoming physical woulnds to defeat the bad.

He quotes Gary Wills who writes about John Wayne's popularity:

The archtypal American is a displaced person - arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, fearless himself, feared by others, killing but cleansing the world of things that 'need killing,'loving but not bound by love, rootless but carrying the Centre in himself, a gyroscopic direction-setter, a travelling norm.

Then he lists other characteristics such as 'active rather than passive' 'not emotional but rather coldly rational and logical' 'in control' 'seeks to triumph' 'no compromise'.

See 'Clint Eastwood Westerns: Promised Land and Real Men' by Peter Francis in Christianson, E.S., Francis, P & Telford, W.R., Cinema Divinite, (London: SCM Press, 2005) pp 187-188.

Mal's loyalty for his crew overshadows some of these characteristics but in general they could have been written as a description of his personality.

Even when he puts his hands up in a gesture of surrender (which seems to happen in almost every episode!) he still seems to be in control of the situation.

THE PREACHER IN THE WESTERN

I realised that most of my background reading has been about the genre of sci-fi and not about the western - and as Firefly brings the two together I thought that I ought to correct that oversight.

So, yesterday I read 'Clint Eastwood Westerns: Promised Land and Real Men' by Peter Francis in Christianson, E.S., Francis, P & Telford, W.R., Cinema Divinite, (London: SCM Press, 2005) pp 182-198.

I have to confess to being woefully ignorant of this particular genre. However, Francis' description of the preacher in Pale Rider made me wonder what other preachers there are in westerns - and how they compare/contrast with Shepherd Book?

Can anyone help me here?

NO ALIENS

Right, got to get serious about this dissertation now. I'm going to try to blog 'little and often'.

A thought that's been buzzing around in my head ever since I heard a recording of a seminar about Battlestar Galactica at Greenbelt is:

Is the fact that there are no aliens (i.e. nothing supernatural) in Firefly, symbolic of a world in which there is no God?