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I mean, the problem with the Reavers if you want to read Serenity politically is that they don't work as analogous to any group of people, not that the film says it's okay to shoot those people.
Well, the thing with the Reavers is that their basic narrative function is to be "bad lawlessness" in contrast to the Serenity crew's "good lawlessness". Because the distinction isn't actually hard-and-fast on the basis of their actions (this is made clear in Jayne's speech about how he's not a Reaver, even though he kills people for fun), the Reavers have to be made into a different kind of creature so that we don't have to worry about the blurry grey area between "made lawless by the inadequacies of the Alliance government" (Serenity crew) and, er, "made lawless by the inadequacies of the Alliance government" (Reavers). It's not hard to see the term 'chav' functioning in an analogous way, giving a typology and hence a spuriously-defined existence to the "bad working-class" as opposed to the "good working-class". It's more than "the Reavers... don't work as analogous to any group of people", in fact: the Reavers can't be what we're told they are (from what we're told about them, they can't have even the minimal level of social cohesion and team-work required to keep flying their ships around and not raping each other to death). The term 'Reaver' can only mean "morally killable bad lawlessness". (Which is scarily close to what 'yob' means in, for example, Take a Break, currently campaigning to release Penny Parkes from prison and have her nominated for a Government "Taking a Stand" award after she stabbed a teenage boy because he was "a yob". I don't know so much about the term 'chav', because I only ever see it used on Barbelith.)
It seems likelier to me, in fact, that the anxieties objectified in the Reavers are specifically racial (since class discourse is so foreclosed in the US, most of whose fantasies are structured around race, and in particular because of the emphasis on body modification/ bodily difference), so their representation draws on fears about freed slaves (all that rape) and "Injuns", as people have said.
As for class in Serenity: I don't think it's possible to say who's working-class and who's middle-class in the ship's crew, because the film/universe hasn't really worked out a system for symbolizing class (beyond a sort of "luxurious upper-class" sign system for Inara, her clients, and Simon): class just doesn't seem to be a significant axis of identification or symbolism. I took temeres's point about the "middle-classness" of the crew to be more a point about them being typical bourgeois liberal subjects in space. So that a bourgeois liberal audience can congratulate itself on identifying with these scruffy amoral outlaw types, but in fact those characters are just bourgeois liberals dressed as scruffy outlaws. (Not from the film this time, which is sadly fading into a shiny epiphenomenon as I continue watching Firefly and continue being mostly-bored-but-occasionally-outraged by it, but an example from Our Mrs Reynolds: "Wife or no, you ain't nobody's property. Sit down here and read my battered space-captain's copy of The Feminine Mystique, little lady" etc etc.) |
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I got the DVD for Christmas so far the extras aren't all that.