I can't remember exactly what made me think this in the movie now, but I was struck by how Whedon had created a future in which women were almost, but not quite the equals of men; and how, given the long history of women being more overtly put in an inferior role, this might look to many watching it like actual equality.

Much like the situation in our world, actually. But I would like to imagine the future could do better.

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Yeoman Janice Rand - whose character was removed when studio execs realized that Kirk was a more attractive figure to both male and female viewers if he was a swinging single with no attachments to anyone on the ship.

Majel Barret was supposed to be the captain's "Number 1" (she was the Number 1 in the pilot "The Cage"), but, again, execs thought that having a woman in a commanding position was too far-fetched (even though Roddenberry thought otherwise, I believe). So her character was written out of the series altogether, although Barret returned as the very wishy-washy Nurse Chapel.

As much as I love the general Whedonverse, I agree with you about Inara. Such a disappointment, and rather sloppy characterization. I would have prefered to see someone with emotional and physical control along the lines of the Bene Gesserit. Now THAT would have been interesting!

Livia

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Thanks for the clarifications, and yes, I agree about the Bene Gesserit.

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It's clear after you see "The Cage" that what the writers did with the character of "Number One" was merge her into Spock. The cold, correct, unemotional Exec Officer side of his personality came entirely from her; it was quite absent from Spock in "The Cage," where he was a fey, curious science officer. With the ears, of course, and more devilish-looking than he was after the refurbishing.

But though revised Spock was second-in-command and had the default personality that goes with that job in cliche naval stories, he didn't really act as Exec Officer the way "Number One" seems to have. It was a gap filled on TNG with Riker, who was less the stereotyped Exec character but who more clearly had the job (and the name "Number One" was even revived as his alternate title).

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Actually, I'm so glad the Companions were not like the Bene Gesserit. So all-seeing, so all-knowing, they just bugged me. Yeah, if you're so all-seeing, see this! [makes rude finger gesture behind back]

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Yes, it's a shame about Mal/Inara (although still a stunning success as a cancelled series). The link is interesting, too. I think Mal's character suffers in this as much as Inara, in that they can't make Mal make sense of Inara. Because Inara doesn't make sense.

It's frustrating because I actually like the actress.

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Me too. I keep thinking: give her a clear character and good material and she'd be fascinating.

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But you can't have a western without Miss Kitty! (Kidding, kidding.)

I think I would have found the idea of the Companions more convincing from the start if Baccarin hadn't seemed so terribly stiff. She grew into the part some as the series went along, but she could never deliver the Correct Companion speeches as if she believed them. (And in the deleted scene on the movie DVD, in which she's talking to the woman at the Companion House, she's right back to reciting from memory instead of acting.) She reminds me of Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, struggling with all those inexplicably contraction-free lines while her co-stars make it look perfectly simple.

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Yeah, agreed. But I think the flaws are built right into the character, that is, she's not clearly imagined as the others are, but contradictions not human so much as in world building. (I added a graph about this, post tea and caffein brain booting.)

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I agree that there were serious problems with Inara's characterization, and that it does seem that Whedon and the other Firefly writers came up with a concept for the character (geishas in space) but neglected to think through its ramifications or to give Inara any shading or depth. That said, I think that when you write that

Inara doesn't talk, doesn't react, but most of all doesn't move like someone who has had years of training and hard-won control of physical expression.

You may not be pointing out a flaw in the character (or, at least, not completely). There is a reason, after all, for Inara's being somewhere in the armpit of the 'verse, renting a rinky-dink shuttle on a half-dead cargo ship. By all accounts, Inara had a bright future ahead of her as a companion working in the Core, and there's no question that if she were back there, she'd be earning more money, getting more respect, and dealing with a more sophisticated and important class of clients. Something brought Inara to the Rim, and I would suggest that her slipping control is either a cause or a symptom of that reason.

Which, again, is not to say that the character, and her relationship with Mal, is not problematic and probably one of the weakest aspects of the show. I'm not even entirely certain that Whedon would have known what to do with her had he been given the chance to properly develop Firefly.

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That's a very good point about Inara being at the armpit of the universe. (And that reminds me: I need to add the link to your discussion up at the start.)

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Short: ***nods head***

Long: Space Whores, Geishas and Sinnin'

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I kind of have a different view on a lot of this.

I don't see Simon's problems with understanding Kaylee to be the result of his being aristocratically above her as those of being a nerd. His snubs of her are uninentional awkwardness, without the touch of disdain that a self-superior aristocrat would betray. He has great compassion as a doctor (which besides his love for his sister is the reason he's so dedicated to taking care of her), but he can't interact with others any other way, romantically or anything else.

While his inability to deal with rough frontier life is the result of his aristocratic background, that's not a necessary condition: in Westerns the city slicker need not be rich but can be as out-of-place as the aristocrat.

As for Inara - the easy answer to "she doesn't act like a geisha" is to say that Companions aren't geisha, they're Companions. This is an imaginary universe; the rules can be different. But that doesn't address whether it feels plausible, and you say it doesn't. However, you say you blame the writers more than the actress, but your specifics make it sound like more of an acting problem than a writing problem. (Interestingly, IIRC this is the one role that was recast after initial rehearsals.)

I don't have much to say about Mal's role with her: he's attracted, he (unlike, say, Kirk) knows better and resists; good for him. The most truly awful scene in the entire series for me was Mal's love scene with the madam in "Heart of Gold." Hideous, embarrassing, a mistake, a side of the character we should never see.

As for Inara, if you exclude her jealousy scenes in "Heart of Gold" (again, a horrible mistake), I don't see her as abandoning her training due to romantic emotional response. I see that kind of thing in stories all the time and it bugs me (it destroyed the plausibility of the film Brazil for me, for instance). I didn't see it here. Inara is in love with Mal, and it surprises her, partly because she also hates him (despises him, in fact, in the way Simon does not despise Kaylee) and partly because she's trained not to do that. But she doesn't abandon her training: she suppresses it and only lets it out in little bits when nobody is watching. Her kiss of the unconscious Mal in "Our Mrs. Reynolds" is the key event here: watch the flustered way she tries to deny it afterwards.
I believe the main plot function of Inara being a Companion is less what it says about her than to generate comic scenes with other characters: Mal, Kaylee, and Jayne in particular have some priceless responses as they try in their highly disparate ways to deal with the concept.

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Excellent point about Simon being more of a nerd than an aristo.

And I very much agree about the scenes you pointed out. But as for blaming the actor for the flaws, I dunno...in so many of the tight character scenes you can sense the director channeling the energy, in effect, of the characters, but with Inara there is an utter absence of direction--she's so frequently left standing around wringing her hands. As if no one knows what to do with her, including of course the actor.

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Where do you get that Inara hates Mal? She's exasperated by his brutish manner, but she doesn't hate him. Her exasperation seems affectionate.

I don't know if Abigail actually said all of this (but she did say some of it): Mal and Inara have a complicated relationship, where each of them sees the other one as beneath them.

Mal sees himself as a respectable businessman. True, he has to occasionally take on some smuggling, because a businessman has a responsibility to make payroll. He sees Inara as a common whore. And yet he comes to respect her as a person, as well as being attracted to her, both sexually and romantically, despite himself. He's got a Madonna/whore thing going on, and she's definitely a whore. He's trying to work up what he sees as an appropriate level of contempt for her, and he just can't manage it.

Likewise, Inara is (in her eyes, in her culture) a respected professional, and Mal is a smalltime criminal, as well as being a jerk. She's trying to work up what she sees as appropriate contempt for him, and she can't do it.

One major difference between Mal and Inara: By the last few episodes of the series, and in the movie, Inara knows that she's in love with Mal. Mal hasn't really thought about it, but we can see that the remarks which were formerly acidic and contemptuous have now become affectionate teasing.

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Training, at bottom line, is not for situations where you're in control, it's for times when all hell breaks loose--physical dangers, and in this case, it would mean intimacy, when human emotions run especially high.

Oh, yes. I think that's what I love so well about Zoe - because we do see this with her character. When Zoe drops her mask and smiles, it means more.

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I find much to dislike in Joss Whedon's work; I went to Serenity with the gf and regretted going. But, being a contrary sort, I actually feel like defending Whedon on one point, and explaining him on another.

I think the reference point for the Mal and his crew is as third-worlders, with a North American background in a time dominated by East and South Asian culture. The outworlders they trade with are variously European, Latin American, and--I think--African. The crew are poor, but more than that they are outsiders who do not understand the dominant culture and are rejected by it.

Inara is most fully a person of the dominant culture of her time and I agree that her psychology is not well worked out; there is a failure of character development. There are a great many and varied cultural models for courtesans; the geisha is the one most familiar in the USA these days, but courtesans were also part of European culture and there were concubines in the Islamic world. Today, in the prurient yet straight-laced USA, powerful men have their mistresses. The training and skills of these women has been extremely varied historically; the intense control and training of the 19th-century geisha was derived from 19th-century Japanese culture; 19th-century Parisian courtesans learned very different skills and behaved very differently, though they were alike ability to separate their clients from their money. And courtesans sometimes, unpredictably, fell in love, so I find that plausible. Still, I do agree that Inara is not convincing.

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Courtesand did sometimes fall in love, but they, and the society around them, pretty much knew how to handle it.

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My only contribution to this discussion is that Whedon appears somewhat defensive about Inara's reception among fans. He says his wife is the one who suggested the character and therefore he doesn't understand why women, especially, seem affronted by her. I'd just point him to your and Maia's discussion for his answers.

I still think that casting an older actress as Inara would have made the relationship much more interesting, and possibly even more viable. Nandy, in fact, was far more compelling to me as a character, the "fallen" Companion trying to make it in the Rim worlds, bent but not quite broken by the harsh reality of her life, than Inara's "good girl out of her element but still trying to be such a good girl" ever was.

It also amused me, as a belly dancer myself, that they drew heavily on Orientalist paintings of harem girls for Inara's clothing, along with Asian elements. Asian-woman-as-exotic-conquest and instantly-sexually-available-harem-girl sterotypes may underline why Inara, as conceived by a Caucasian, Occidental male, never worked as a true geisha/Companion.

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Yes, about the belly dancing image.

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What would have been really radical would have been if the Companion had been a man. That would have convinced me that we were dealing with some actual extrapolation and a different future and culture. When the Companion is a woman, no matter how much you try to gussy it up, it's just the same old ideas about women as sex objects.

They also lost a big opportunity in "Heart of Gold" when Kaylee asks if there are male Companions, but then Jayne is the only one of the crew who actually has sex with one-- and it's a woman, of course. It would have been perfectly in character for Kaylee to accept the offer too, but the male Companions we saw were effeminate pretty boys, and the viewer, as far as I could tell, was intended to interpret them as being there for the use of gay men.

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Yup yup yup.

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Simon, who has been deeply sensitized to a young girl's needs and dilemmas, due to his relationship with his sister, would have some psychic stumbling blocks to dealing with Kailee -- as well as the bumps from class differences and growing up in the center, instead of the frontier.

Love, C.

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It's a huge relief to find I'm not the only one who took huge issue with that particular inconsistency - my one genuine problem with a fandom I otherwise wholeheartedly cherish. But I surprised myself by wondering, in Joss' defense, just how much of that characterization is a result of things being dummied down for television. Because let's face it: your average TV viewer is just not going to comprehend a character who behaves utterly differently depending upon her situation. It would've been ludicrously difficult to successfully write a woman who was never entirely genuine with anyone, and yet still make her feelings and relationships a major plot point. There are of course ways it could have been done; by emphasizing her different attitude with each of her clients, with little snatches of conversation here and there, perhaps by playing up her friendship with Kaylee and allowing her to be a bit more honest and open in those scenes. Girlfriends talk about the boys they like, after all. But doing any of that would've made Firefly a drastically different show and, more than that, would have required much more attention to detail on the part of the audience - and American audiences are not known either for their attention span or their intelligence.

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I do think that having the characters act out the logical ramifications of what they say would just add to the believability...but of course, like you rightly point out, we don't know what kind of negotiations happened at network and producer levels.

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that this issue of elite training and control is something that transcends gender

I appreciate that because I'm in the process of writing a future-geisha MC. Sadly, with the fantasmic power of Firefly, I really feel like I'm copying something, even though I envisioned this character two years before I'd heard of Firefly. Anyway, I do want to find a way to establish the training she's gone through. Granted, my version of geisha is one that the original geisha, as we know them, died out as a culture about 200 years prior to my story. Then, about 80 years later, there is a "revival" and it changes, although I'm still hashing out how, heh.

Anyway, good commentary on the dynamics of such an awesome show.

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Good luck with that project!

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I would like to say that in the book Serenity and also I think the deleted scene with Sheydra, Sheydra mentions the Alliance set up the Companion Houses. That means the Companion "guild" is most likely government run. Since the only other women the series shows with Companion training are Saffron (a rogue) and Naidi (shunned) we don't really know if Inara has the training she thinks she does.

While this is a stretch something about the guild being government-run seems odd. . .


((By the way, I'm Kes. I've been stalking your journal for a while now and feeling rather creepy about it. So I'm commenting now and friending you. I hope you don't mind))

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good thoughts, and welcome!

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very intersting, thanks for sharing these thought! i knew that inara bugged me but i hadn't really thought all the way through why. and i think you've really hit it here--the way the character is embodied seemed at odds with the role she's supposed to have. and as such, it makes her a poor match for mal, who is much more a product of the role he has been trained to play.

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