Music in Serenity

Music in Serenity

The musical score in Serenity pertained to a particular genre of film that is well associated with traditional gender roles.   Although there were not set musical themes for each character, different musical scores were associated with the types of characters seen onscreen.   While the ship, as well as the crew of Serenity was onscreen, twangy Western music provided for the background music; until the antagonists of the film, the Alliance came on, in which the music was a darker and ominous theme that helped set the mood for the Alliances’ negative role in the movie.   The soundtrack to Serenity had many orchestral pieces that evoked feelings of the pioneer as well as it being earthy.   This was mainly heard while the crew, officially called the Browncoats, had a victory or was back at the ship, further paralleling this music to the good guys.   The importance of the Western themed music played as the background music for the crew of Serenity, allows one to correlate Serenity with an old Western.  
In traditional western genre, these films are inherently macho, about battling forces larger than oneself.   “The western hero is a ‘knight with honor in a savage land’; he is like a force of nature himself, free of the burdens of civilization—a wife, kids, a job, getting along with other folks” (Holder, 141).   In this movie, the “knight with honor” would be Mal, the captain of Serenity.   He is essentially the good guy, the loner that aids the helpless, and dutifully fulfills the role of the good guy pitted against the “wild men”—where in this case, is the incredibly civilized society of the Alliance.  
Adhering to the traditional western, women in the film were not the “tamers of wildness” (Holder, 142).   As commonly seen in many instances where women in science and technology assisted their husbands or fathers in their research in the nineteenth century, none of the women in Serenity were the leaders or pioneers.   Although the women were...