postmodern in relation to firefly the television series DVD

The cultural artefact that was chosen is the television series Firefly DVD. The show is a Science Fiction-Western series which is based around characters on the losing side of a Galactic Civil War who live on frontier of civilisation which is a nostalgic homage to the American Civil War and the culture of Confederate South excluding the problematic history of slavery. The show was created by Josh Whedon famous for writing and directing Buffy The Vampire slayer. The series ran from 2002 to 2003 when it was cancelled, although it the show was short lived it managed to obtain cult status because “The expensive boxed set sold somewhere north of 200,000 copies.” which hastened the development of a fan community around this artefact due to expropriation of this commodity.

The DVD as a commodity has an attributed Sign-value to the product. This suggest that image which is attached to the product adds cultural capital to the artefact. This would increase the economic value to the DVD commodity than other shows due to individual preference. Postmodernism believes that “everything becomes culture” The artefact Firefly is certainly emblematic of this.

Firefly presents the environment of dry terror-formed desert world's which punctuate an alternate solar system, a homage to the Westerns which is a pastiche, a term coined by Fredric Jameson who would describe the Western and Science Fiction Anaesthetics of the show as “‘blank parody’”. The Opening Credits of the show which is posted below supports this by using a country and western song and the imagery of spacecraft in the titles theme. “The postmodern text points to itself as a constructed text in its quotation and use of old texts: it makes no attempt to naturalise itself as a realist text.” The death of originality is another aspect which can be witnessed in this text because it merges two distinct genres Science-Fiction and the Western, which shows the “recycling of the past” rather than creating something which is completely new and this suggests there is no originality.