Western Shoot-out: The Virginian versus Bonanza

We watch DVDs and do not subscribe to cable. We enjoyed some television drama from the 21^st century such as Num3ers, Firefly, Bones (earlier years), Grey’s Anatomy (earliest years), and Sherlock, and sometimes we return to an episode or two. We also dig back into classic TV. Most classic television does not meet current standards for writing. Those were simpler times. 

Working our way through the first season of The Virginian, we also tried a Bonanza compilation. Although it is touted as centering on moral dilemmas, Bonanza is slow on the draw. To be fair, as a 90-minute show, The Virginian had the long-range advantage for plot development and characterization. The plain truth is that that actors—James Drury, Doug McClure, Gary Clarke, and even Lee J. Cobb—were comfortable riding horses while the boys from the Ponderosa seldom dismounted smoothly though mounting usually went better. Much of The Virginian was shot outdoors with riding and roping in wide vistas, though the close-ups are often stage sets. (I believe, also, that they used some kind of movie screen background with overlays to blend close-up action supposedly taking place in the wilds.) Almost all of Bonanza was shot on a sound stage. The cowboys in The Virginian wear chaps because they work hard. We seldom see the Cartwrights work at all.

According to Wikipedia, citing “Bonanza Television Show – ONE” at www.onlinenevada.org, Bonanza “is known for presenting pressing moral dilemmas.” But that is the essence of all fiction from the romanticist school. Almost all TV drama and popular fiction in general centers on conflicts of values. Technically, a dilemma is not just any choice, but a pair of undesirable alternatives. That was seldom the core of a Bonanza drama, but, in fact, often the case in The Virginian. Although everything usually works out well enough for the better folks, life on the frontier is uncompromising and unforgiving. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Back in the Saddle Again 

Firefly: Fact and Value Aboard Serenity 

When Old Technologies Were New

Ma Kiley: Railroad Telegrapher 

The Success of the WEIRD People 

Rachmaninoff

My mother was more for Chopin and Liszt and we had a lot of that, especially as sheets and books, but also on 33-1/3 LPs, eventually in stereo. So, growing up, we had at least one Rachmaninoff, the Preludes and Variation on a Theme by Paganini, perhaps. And also the Second Piano Concerto. But I never knew that until I read Atlas Shrugged in high school and my 11^th grade American history teacher told me that that particular work was one of Ayn Rand’s favorites. I listened to it often while reading Atlas Shrugged through twice. To me, it is the soundtrack for the book and the soundtrack that the movie should have had.

Rand mentions it and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in The Fountainhead, at the beginning of Part IV. We see an anonymous young man in the woods. Recently graduated from college and seeking a path for his future, he responds to the beauty of the world around him and yearns for something within himself to answer the promise in the music. 

 

Rachmaninoff was an icon in the society in which Rand matured. In Dr. Zhivago, Yuri, Lara, Komarovsky, and Pasha are all at the very fine party in a sparkling home, while in the background, Rachmaninoff plays for the guests. 

 

It is not that I don’t care for music (see Hallelujah here), but that I have a slight hearing deficiency. The piano worked well enough for me because you hit the key and you get the note. As open instruments, the coronet and French horn were impossible for me. In the third grade, we took a “music readiness” test in which we had to identify higher and lower notes; and once they got close, I could not tell them apart. But music is a language; and I am good at languages, dialects, and accents. I have two cassette tapes, Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff and Gershwin Plays Gershwin. You can hear covers all over YouTube and the performers are accomplished professionals. But these are not just different performers with their own subtle interpretations. They are the right way to play the music because there is no substitute for creation.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Labor Day Celebrates Productivity 

Love, Loss, and Redemption in Atlas Shrugged 

Autobiography of a Worker 

Reflections on the Passings of Comrades 

A Few Good Men: A Few Deep Flaws

Nominated for both an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award ("Oscar") and a Hollywood Foreign Press Association (“Golden Globe”) award, the drama is compelling. The movie began as a Broadway play. Live theater is continuous rehearsal for the writer and director no less than for the cast. So, it came to the screen fully formed. But it does not stand up to repeated viewing. As a legal battle engaged in a courtroom, the intensity is irresistible. Contradicting that is the “naturalist” assumption that victory is impossible, that a draw is the best you can hope for.

Most of the $33 million in production costs went for salaries.  Tom Cruise got $12.5 million. Jack Nicholson was paid $5 million. Demi Moore accepted only $2 million for the chance to take on a “genderless” role. (One production insider wanted to know why if she is not going to sleep with the lead is the character a woman? Aaron Sorkin called that his worst experience as a screenwriter. That and more on Mental Floss here.) But any competent screen actors could have had the roles. In fact, Rob Lowe played the lead for a year on Broadway. Regardless of who played the parts, they would still have had to act like Sailors and Marines. Most of them failed at that and the fault lies with the director and producer, Rob Reiner.

Writer Aaron Sorkin and director Rob Reiner have no military experience and they apparently had no military support. So, the production projected an embarrassing lack of military bearing. Lacking US DoD support, Reiner apparently did not hire a military advisor. (Michael McClosky is credited as “Major Michael McClosky” but I found no corroboration for his military rank.) The most glaring evidence is in Demi Moore’s portrayal of LCDR JoAnne Galloway. We might accept LTJG Daniel Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise) whose hands are always his pockets in order to signal us that he is the cocky underachiever whose long string of successes came from plea bargaining. But there is no way that an investigator from the inspector general’ s office who is two grades above him would put up with that. Here is a rhetorical question: What do you do when you have your hands in your pockets? Answer: You better be taking something out of your pockets. It is completely unacceptable that LTJG Kaffee is eating an apple as he enters LCDR Galloway’s office. He might try it, but an IG investigator outranking him would give him a corrective interview immediately. Also unacceptable is her introducing herself as “JoAnne…, uh, Jo…”  On target is the reply from 1LT (MC) Jonathan Kendrick: “May I call you Jonathan?” “No, you may not. You may call me Lieutenant Kendrick because when we have to go somewhere to fight, you Navy boys always provide a nice ride.” That is a stock response, a cliché, and a fact of life. On the other hand, it was for the audience’s benefit that COL Jessep reprimands his executive officer, LTC Matthew Markinson. “Don’t ever contradict me in front of another officer,” is the kind of warning that (a) never would have needed to be said or (b) at worst, was settled between them three years ago.

Within the naturalist school of aesthetics, the universe is indifferent to human action. Technically, that is correct; and it is that which allows success. The universe is not hostile. However, aesthetic naturalism is disingenuous. The inherent indifference of the universe actually means that each victory must be balanced by an equal or greater loss: you can never win. It is not just that there is a cost. Of course, everything costs. But to naturalism the final costs always outweigh the temporary benefits. Therefore, in this story, the accused Marines are found not guilty of murder, but are dishonorably discharged. The slower of the two (LCP Harold Dawson) still does not understand the verdict as they are led away. In the final moment, as recompense, LTJG Kaffee tells PFC Downey that he does not need an armband (his chevrons) to have honor. In return, the Private calls himself to attention and salutes the officer—which he refused to do earlier when he felt that the Lieutenant was not honorable enough to defend him. But for the Private, the dishonorable discharge is the worst possible outcome at the moment. He and the Lance Corporal were willing to suffer life in prison rather than to betray the officers who ordered them to haze (and thereby accidentally kill) their barracks mate. They were willing to accept all of the consequence of following orders. The betrayals by those officers who gave the orders and sought to cover up the murder and their roles in it is not deeply explored but only held up to view for a moment. LTC Markinson’s suicide, hallmarked by a letter to the parents of the victim, would have been a better focal point for the drama. In the universe of aesthetic naturalism, no person or act is more important than another. Naturalism denies the heroic by trivializing it, and at the same time giving focus to the unimportant.

According to the media histories Aaron Sorkin based his screenplay on a real event at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. Sorkin’s sister was in the JAG Corps, and she told him the story. After the play became a movie, four lawyers claimed that they were the models for the character of LTJG Daniel Kaffee.  (See “Four Lawyers Claimed …” New York Times, here.) See also the true story of the accused and exonerated Marine that came to light when his body was found in a riverbed (“Ex-Marine who felt 'A Few Good Men' maligned him is mysteriously murdered,” by Bill Glauber, Sun Staff Writer, Baltimore Sun, April 10, 1994, here).

Naturalism is supposedly an unvarnished, journalistic recounting. Fiction is a convenient medium for telling the truth. But that is not what happens. The truth is always complicated, and how you simplify it depends on who you are. The Romantic theory is that people come into conflict when their chosen values are opposed. Even the bad guys are purposeful. But evil is powerless. Therefore, the good guys win, even when (as always) victory is purchased at a cost. In the universe of Romantic fiction, that cost brings a value worth the price. In the universe of Naturalism, even if there are "a few good men" it is not clear who they are.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

More on The Forever War 

JAG: 10 Seasons of Military Bearing 

Firefly: Fact and Value Aboard Serenity 

Plenty of Time When We Get Home 

JAG: 10 Seasons of Military Bearing

Last week, Laurel and I viewed the final episode of the final season of the television series JAG. It took us about a year to work through the set. Laurel is a voracious reader, primarily of murder mysteries and computer documentation. As a writer and reader of non-fiction, I am informed by Ayn Rand’s theory of aesthetics expressed in The Romantic Manifesto. For being television, written, shot, and edited on a grinding production schedule by a large, changing staff of writers and directors, with the attendant holes in plot, character development, and theme, JAG held up well.

Ayn Rand based her theory of art on Aristotle’s maxim that fiction portrays people as they can and should be. Every work of art is “a selective recreation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments.” (The Romantic Manifesto, Signet 1971, p. 19) An artist cannot present all of reality, so some aspect of it stands for the whole. Is the world hospitable or hostile or indifferent? Rand called this one's "sense of life."

Complicated pasts leave them internally
conflicted. Their moral lodestars are on
the far horizon. They eventually find home port.

“Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man’s concepts into the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly as if they were percepts.” (RM p. 20) 

"Since man lives by reshaping his physical background to serve his purpose, since he must first define and then create his values--a rational man needs a concretized projection of these values, an image in whose likeness he will re-shape the world and himself. Art gives him that image; it gives him the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals." (RM p. 38)

A biography of Abraham Lincoln’s life could run six volumes, chronicling every detail, but the characterization of President Lincoln in a Civil War drama will subsume and encapsulate all of that and deliver it to the audience, according to the intent of the artists--the actor, writer, director, and the others in the team. Ultimately, someone has artistic control of the final product and it is that person’s vision of life that we receive.

Petty Thief to Petty Officer
Zoe McLellan played
PO1 Jennifer Coates

In this case, the controlling artist was the executive producer, Donald P. Bellisario. A Marine Corps sergeant, Bellisario also created the original Magnum, P.I., Airwolf, and Quantum Leap. That last reveals the most about Bellasario’s view of your place in the universe. Is history inevitable? To what extent can you make your own life? In JAG, there is no doubt that we all make choices and accept responsibility for those decisions. Sometimes, the characters are in circumstances that are very constrained, but “I had no choice” is met with “You always have a choice.”

(I perceived a hidden undercurrent from Quantum Leap in the re-enactment episodes. The story is carried forward by the same actors, though in costume. Season 5 Number 11 “Ghosts of Christmas Past,” take place in the Viet Nam war. Season 6 Episode 23 “Mutiny” is a re-creation of the Somers Mutiny. Season 9 Episode 14 “Each of Us Angels” is set in World War II. Season 9 Episode 18, “What if?” offered alternate stories launched when they read fortune cookies at a restaurant. In the world of Donald P. Bellisario, you always have a choice. Tangentially, I followed the historical clues offered in Mutiny. Read here. )

Our viewpoint characters,
the normal couple.
Beset by life's hard losses,
they never lose their moral compass,
and so they persevere and thrive.

Of course, the show suffered from errors of fact and the fan base responded. You can read other foible finding on the  TVtropes.org wiki. Nonetheless, I benefited from keeping a handbook of military justice at the couch, just to help with the details. It is not the purpose of fiction to be didactic, but it is important not to make up everything, otherwise you are not even creating science fiction but are selling fantasy.

We bought most of the DVDs, borrowing a couple of seasons from the local library. We have not watched broadcast (cable) television since 2010 and we were never big consumers before that. But people recommend shows and we read about them. In this case, JAG was a back-filling of our NCIS collection. (NCIS was piloted in Season 8 of JAG.) We discovered NCIS sometime after 2006. We picked up Season 1 of The West Wing at a neighborhood Blockbuster just as that series was concluding. We eventually viewed Mark Harmon's portrayal of Secret Service Agent Simon Donovan and found it positive and realistic. That led us to NCIS. 

Just for contrast here, we did once watch most of an episode of CSI but could not tolerate more. In fact, we withstood two seasons of torture with 24, so we think we’re tough. As for politics, I did view half an episode of The Veep (reviewed here ) but I would rather clean the latrines after drill. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Romantic Realism 

Ayn Rand and Star Trek 

The Art of Finance

Objectified 

Art and Copy 

Ayn Rand and Star Trek

Ayn Rand was a fan of Star Trek. As surprising as that may be, it is understandable. First, she knew about the show because it premiered in the TV season 1966-1967. Rand was at her height, deeply involved in popular culture, and commenting on it. The Objectivist Newsletter had become The Objectivist magazine. Those forums carried her essays on aesthetics, which became the anthology The Romantic Manifesto. Star Trek was and remains an example of romantic fiction. It is also true that Gene Roddenberry was fan of Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand coined the phrase "bootleg romanticism." It is the title of a chapter in The Romantic Manifesto. The label identifies works of art that may have some technical flaws, but which present a heroic sense of life in which good triumphs over evil in a battle defined by chosen values. The early James Bond novels and the first film versions are examples of that. Star Trek also fits the definition, and perhaps rises above the unconscious or “intuitive” choice of an author or artist to present a heroic struggle because Roddenberry read The Fountainhead several times and had read Atlas Shrugged. Roddenberry supposedly named Yeoman Janice Rand as a nod to Ayn Rand. Some years after Star Trek: the Original Series was cancelled, Gene Roddenberry read The Romantic Manifesto.

"In Gene Roddenberry's sci-fi series, Andromeda, there is a colony called "The Ayn Rand Station" founded by a species of "Nietzscheans."

"The Illustrated Rand" by Chris Matthew Sciabarra,
The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1,
Centenary Symposium, Part I:
Ayn Rand: Literary and Cultural Impact
(Fall 2004), pp. 1-20

"While I do not know if Rand and Roddenberry ever met, it has been established through two sources that Gene Roddenberry read much of Ayn Rand's work, including reading Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead ("four or five times") and the Romantic Manifesto. Two of his proteges, Myrna Culbreath and Sondra Marshak, became authors and are unabashed Objectivists. STAR TREK" LIVES!, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston, (New York: Bantam, 1975), reviewed by Gary McGath for Ergo (November 19, 1975), archived here: http://www.mcgath.com/stlives.html 

J. Neil Schulman interviewed Ayn Rand for the New York Daily News.

“We spoke on the phone for another four hours. Rand initially would not agree to let me interview her, but by the end I brought her around.

            She interviewed me during that phone call as much as I interviewed her.

             She told me that she watched Star Trek and Spock was her favorite character. “

J. Neil Schulman: "I Met Ayn Rand"

http://www.pulpless.com/jneil/glp_imetaynrand.html

Another writer in the Star Trek Universe included Ayn Rand's works in a "Mirror" novel about Dr. Carol Marcus and her son (by Kirk), David:

http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Ayn_Rand_(mirror)

(I believe that that work, The Sorrows of Empire (2007/2010) was still under the nominal approval of Paramount. They controlled the Star Trek universe closely for many years. For one just thing, they needed to prevent fanfic Kirk-Spock romances from becoming canon.) 

Comments by Barbara Branden and others here:

“Ayn Rand and Gene Roddenberry”

http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/0505.shtml

Comments by Matt McKeever here:

“Gene Roddenberry and Ayn Rand”

http://www.solopassion.com/node/8805

Back in the 2oth century, I attended a trekker con in Livonia, Michigan. Armin Shimerman (Quark) was the Guest of Honor. The Ferengi were as close as Star Trek ever came to honoring merchants. Harry Mudd and Cyrano Jones were not heroic. Quark had potential. I asked Armin Shimerman if he ever read anything by Ayn Rand and he said that he read The Fountainhead in college and in preparation for shooting the next season, he was going to read Atlas Shrugged.

Quark: I think I figured out why Humans don't like Ferengi.

Sisko: Not now, Quark.

Quark: The way I see it, Humans used to be a lot like Ferengi: greedy, acquisitive, interested only in profit. We're a constant reminder of a part of your past you'd like to forget.

Sisko: Quark, we don't have time for this.

Quark: You're overlooking something. Humans used to be a lot worse than the Ferengi: slavery, concentration camps, interstellar wars. We have nothing in our past that approaches that kind of barbarism. You see? We're nothing like you... we're better.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708627/quotes

See also http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ferengi

Armin Shimerman played Dr. Potter from the State Science Institute in Atlas Shrugged Part I.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Knowledge Maps

The Ferengi Rules of Commerce

Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow

Red Shirts: Expendable in Fact and Fiction

200,000 Pageviews

On or about July 17, 2017, this blog tallied its 200,000^th page view. Launched on 2 January 2011, about 100 people per day read the posts, often as a result of Internet searches for topical information. Everyone can be a publisher, and perhaps too many people are. But I believe that we are experiencing a renaissance, a silver age, if not a golden age, in which the sharing of information – facts and opinions alike — creates a flourishing. Our lives are better.

In a previous post, I wrote about Jerry Emanuelson’s algebraic proof of Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage. Emanuelson has other interests. He previously created and marketed a high school level kit for experimenting with superconductors. The Internet gave him an easy and extensive exposure.

Science hobbyists of our generation knew well the Edmund Scientific Catalog. Edmund also wrote about the scientific method. He taught it as a 14-step engagement in discovery. Norman W. Edmund lived long enough (1916-2012) to bring his work to the Internet (see here http://scientificmethod.com/index2.html ). It proved much more efficient than the U.S. Post Office.

The most popular articles from this blog so far are:

What (if anything) did Dorothy Learn? (4626)

Contradictions in the Constitution (2400)

Alongside Night to Run in Austin (1799)

Bob Swanson and Genentech (713)

William Sheldon: Psychologist, Numismatist, Thief (655)

Debt: the Seed of Civilization (556)

Crimes Against Logic: Exposing Bogus Arguments (409)

There is no John Galt and that’s Worse (356)

Supplies and Demands (340)

Romantic Realism (339)

Those numbers come from the Stats under the All time button on my control panel. However, I also have other numbers under View Count in the Posts:

Forgery and Fraud in Numismatics 1187

Debt: the Seed of Civilization 1183

Harriman’s Logical Leap Almost Makes it 884

(see, also, David Harriman’s Logical Leap 408)

Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science 877

Nerd Nation: Natalie Portman, Danika McKeller, and Felicia Day 831

Unlimited Constitutional Government 797

ELI the ICE Man: Science and Technology 788

Hacking Computer Security: BSides Austin 2013 747

Art & Copy 729

Megacities 726

… that goddam Ayn Rand book 717

To Make Money 658

The Problem of Induction: Karl Popper and His Enemies 643

Employee Theft 639

The Fallibility of Fingerprinting 634

Sándor Kőrösi Csoma 626

Murray Rothbard: Fraud or Faker? 592

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security 569

Venture Capital 566

Where All Children are Above Average 556

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 553

Gregory M. Browne’s Necessary Factual Truths 529

Republicans for Voldemort 528

Ayn Rand versus Conservatives 527

Firefly: Fact and Value Aboard “Serenity” 517

De Magnete by William Gilbert 466

George Boole’s Laws of Thought 459

Money as Press and Speech 439

Money as Living History 433

Against Gulching 396

Ma Kiley: Railroad Telegrapher 367

Short Snorters 354

The Virtues of Aviation Culture 339

A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing 335

The search terms that bring people here include Çatal Hüyük, (catal huyuk), supply and demand, supply and demand curve, contradictions in the Constitution, Merry Newtomas, and Employee Theft Facts. Although I write about Newtonmas every year, none of them makes the top of the lists.

Mirror sites

http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.de/

http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.fr/

http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.se/

http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.si/

http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.jp/

Among others…

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Most Popular Page Views  (11 January 2017) 

Most Popular Necessary Facts (8January 2012)

100,000 Page Views

Romantic Realism

Romantic Realism is a school of aesthetics that developed as a consequence of the works of Ayn Rand. Rand saw herself (paraphrasing) as "the last of the Romantics or the first of their return."  The label Romantic Realism appears nowhere in Ayn Rand's  The Romantic Manifesto (1969). However, many of the artists who create these modern expressions of heroic values found validation in Rand's works. Quent Cordair Fine Art Galleries of Napa, California, sells their sculptures and paintings. (One artist not in their sales group, but in that style, is Michael Newberry.) 

Bryan Larsen at Quent Cordair Galleries

Perhaps the best known realist painter was Norman Rockwell. The problem with his realism is that the themes are from the naturalist school: quaint, commonplace, everyday. Some of his works do step outside of the village life typified by Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Perhaps his best was "Freedom of Speech" one of the Four Freedoms series that he created as propaganda for America's efforts in World War II. But that was an exception.

Tamara Bonêt at Quent Cordair Fine Art

Aesthetic romanticism was launched by the French school of the 19th century: Gericault, Delacroix, and Rodin. It was expressed best by the Academic schools (France, America, Britain) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. William-Adolphe Bouguereau's realistic myths typify that. But they were submerged by later critics and theorists who promoted Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, and stuff even worse. The reason (or excuse) that I learned in an art history class in college was that the invention of the photographic camera made realism unnecessary. So, artists sought new modes.

Quent Cordair at Quent Cordair Fine Art

Of course, it is impossible to get a snapshot of a successful Icarus descending. And even mundane images of shepherdesses or mourners would have to be staged, lit, shot, and developed, each step an artist's choice of values.

Karl Jensen at Quent Cordair Fine Art

That is the essence of aesthetics, according to Ayn Rand: "Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments."  And that is where Bouguereau failed: his people are often sad and wistful, the girls often vacuous. None of his figures are positively assertive. The best are enraptured with passion, but it is passive pleasure given by others in adoration.

Pursuit by Michael Newberry at
http://www.michaelnewberry.com/

Romantic Realism takes the style of  the Academic school and empowers it with the internal engine of motivation.

"Quent Cordair Fine Art was established by artist Quent Cordair in 1996. As a premier provider of contemporary Romantic Realism in painting, sculpture and drawing, QCFA has grown to serve an international clientele of private and corporate collectors.
"Romantic Realism, the movement which renews the high esthetic standards and techniques of pre-20th century ateliers, brings a rebirth of comprehensibility, beauty, romanticism and stylization to contemporary subject matter. The gallery's collection emphasizes themes which celebrate the moments of happiness, joy and success possible to Man on earth.
"Subject matter includes figurative, narrative, allegorical, still lifes, seascapes and landscapes. Award-winning painters and sculptors of international renown are represented, as well as emerging artists of unique vision and accomplishment. Commissions are available for portraiture, murals, garden and architectural projects.
"QCFA's extensive website serves as an invaluable resource for private collectors, interior designers and landscape designers. For additional information, please call (707) 255-2242." -- http://cordair.com/

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Art as Ordered Narrative  
The Art of Finance 
Art & Copy 
Money is Speech 

Firefly: Fact and Value Aboard "Serenity"

This is an example of Romantic fiction as elucidated by Ayn Rand in her book, The Romantic Manifesto.  These characters act on the basis of their values.  While they each know their self-interest, for each that is different, based on their personal life experiences.  Thus, the show is about morality: beliefs becoming actions.  Those different goals bring tensions and conflicts.  

 This show ran 14 episodes in 2002 before it was canceled.  It was recommended to me by another libertarian, who is not an Objectivist. His brief mention on the Objectivist Living discussion board stressed the anti-authoritarian frontier theme.  I think that he missed the more salient perception.   This is not bootleg Romanticism, or smuggled values, but the real deal.

The hero is Malcolm Reynolds.  He owns a spaceship, Serenity, that hauls cargo and passengers.  Serenity is a "firefly" class ship, called so because the tail lights up when power is engaged.  These are sublight ships.  The story is set in the early 26th century.  FTL does not exist.  Terraforming does.  China and America have united to dominate Earth; and Earth dominates the Alliance of human worlds.  (There are no other sentient species.) Reynolds had been a "browncoat," a fighter in a sessionist faction whose revolt failed.  Now, he seeks the frontiers, not quite far enough away from the Alliance.  His crew of three consists of a former combat comrade and her husband who is the pilot, and also an engineer.  Also along for the ride are a hired gun, a non-denominational Christian "Shepherd," a professional Companion (prostitute), and two refugees, a doctor and his sister.

 Each of them has a defined self-interest.  Usually,  those coincide, thus the crew can function.  Often, however, their values are in conflict as their different goals require independent choices in each situation. 

The ship's hired gun, Jayne Cobb, was bought out from the men who hired him to kill Malcolm Reynolds.  Cobb says, and Reynolds understands, that if the deal is ever good enough, he will turn Reynolds over to the Alliance.  Yet, Jayne Cobb is there, at the ready, when he is needed because it is in his self-interest to do so. 

"... value is objective (not intrinsic or subjective); value is based on and derives from the facts of reality ... Every proper value-judgment is the identification of a fact: a given object or action advances man’s life (it is good): or it threatens man’s life (it is bad or an evil). ... since every fact bears on the choice to live, every truth necessarily entails a value-judgment, and every value-judgment necessarily presupposes a truth.  "Fact and Value" by Leonard Peikoff, Ph.D. here.

Malcolm Reynolds is a smuggler.  He achieves that by not getting caught and having the right-looking papers.  He and his crew do not need the attention that comes from having the doctor and his sister on board.  They are fleeing the Alliance because Simon Tam broke River out of a government lab that was deconstructing her super-genius mind.  But Captain Reynolds knows himself and his values.  Doctor Tam and River are his passengers, even as they endanger his mission. 

On The Atlasphere here you can find a review of Firefly that centers on creator Joss Whedon's fight to keep the integrity of his work. 

The enduring attraction of this work is evidenced by the continued "fanfic" (new fiction in the universe created by fans, usually canonic, sometimes not).  The Firefly Fan site is here.  The Firefly Wiki  includes characters, actors, a lexicon of the universe, and a guide to the Chinese spoken in the show.  You can watch the show on Hulu, TV.com, and Xfinity.Comcast.  If you watch it on DVD, you can enjoy the backstory and commentary about the struggle to create and maintain the integrity of the work.  A movie, Serenity, was released in 2005.  Much more about Firefly will be revealed by your web browser.

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Anthem as a Graphic Novel
Redshirts: Expendable in Fiction and Fact
Reflections on Atlas Shrugged Part 1
Nerd Nation