The Worlds of Farscape (13 page)

It is important to remember that, as part of his socioeconomic disenfranchisement, Rygel also suffers cultural disenfranchisement. In Hynerian culture, farting is not a social taboo, but considered a normal aspect of biologic functioning. Indeed, it is even a type of communicative act, since Hynerians mostly fart when they are nervous or anxious. Surrounded by beings from cultures highly disparate to his own—and, it should be added, highly antagonistic as well—Rygel's farting is another reminder of what was lost to him, the people and places that best understand him. All exiles feel a sense of disconnectedness, a sensation that, even after twenty or thirty years, never dissipates. While we can all adjust to new surroundings, and learn to thrive in them as the crew of Moya does, we can never wholly escape the pull of our own homespaces, which not only work to shape us as individuals but continually call to us, throughout our lives, no matter how far we roam from them.

Rygel's farting, then, is a feature that humanizes him. It reminds the viewer and his crewmates of his distant origins and, by proxy, of their own. It also reflects a nervous state that is, in itself, a shared feeling. Chiana's intense reaction in the scene epigraphed at the beginning of this essay (where she rounds on Rygel, calling him a “little toad”) is so excessive in part because his anxiety at the moment reflects her own. Malen argues for “‘shit' as a metaphor for negation,” reminding us that excrement is universal to all; all living beings excrete some form of waste, and, as such, it is one of the few experiences that is truly universal. Moya's crew's repeated objections to Rygel's flatulence are a result of cultural conditioning and reflective of cultural difference; biologically, physiologically, corporeally, and constructively, Rygel's gas is a reminder that they have much in common, no matter how different they appear.

In a letter to
The British Medical Journal
, Philip D. Welsby argued “fart” was so repellent a term that it should be replaced by the more “medical ... and prude ... liberation of colonic miasma” (555). “Miasma” suggests decay and toxicity and reflects the negative connotation associated with both the word and the action in question. Yet Rygel's flatus is really a feature designed to not only enable his integration into the
Farscape
family—by bringing him low, out of the realm of the royal and on even ground with the rest of his fellow exiles—it also reflects a commonality amongst all the members of the crew, reminding them, in a rather roundabout and admittedly malodorous manner, that despite their many differences, despite their cultural distinctiveness, they are all very much the same. Thus in describing farting a form of “liberation,” Welsby unintentionally channels the very overarching construct of
Farscape
: a group of refugee aliens, “liberated” from various (real and metaphorical) prisons, joining together for their own common survival, learning and growing from and alongside one another, united by dependency, growing familial, and, yes, by farts.

Bakhtin, Mikhail.
Rabelais and His World
. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Print.

Beechy, Tiffany. “Devil Take the Hindmost: Chaucer, John Gay, and the Pecuniary Anus.”
The Chaucer Review
41.6 (2006): 71–85. Print.

Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine.
Creativity and Perversion
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1985. Print.

Gomi, Taro.
Everyone Poops
. Trans. Amanda Mayer Stinchecum. La Jolla: Kane/Miller, 1993. Print.

Malen, Lenore. “Postscript: An Anal Universe.”
Art Journal
52.3 (1993): 79–81. Print.

Nickels, Cameron C., and John H. O'Neill. “Upon the Attribution of ‘Upon a Fart' to William Byrd of Westover.”
Early American Literature
14.2 (1979): 143–148. Print.

Welsby, Philip D. “To fart.”
The British Medical Journal
2.6189 (1979): 555. Print.

Billie Jo Mason

“Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”—Joseph Campbell

“But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away the hero in your soul! Hold holy your highest hope!”—Friedrich Nietzsche

From the moment astronaut John Crichton first appears onscreen, the audience immediately identifies him as the hero of
Farscape,
a subliminal identification which says as much about mankind's shared ability to recognize the protagonist in mythic tales as it does about the character himself. Indeed, whether he knows it or not, John Crichton is about to embark upon a mythic quest so familiar that his role in
Farscape
goes beyond that of an astronaut flung through a wormhole into another universe, taking the form of an archetypical journey of a stranger in some
very
strange lands. Refusing to linger in the ordinary world,
Farscape
soon reveals itself as a mythic quest for a post-structuralist world, a deconstruction of binary oppositions, a revisioning of the heroic ideal, an existentialist Bildungsroman, as it were. The series disrupts the hero/villain/antihero triad: villain shifts to hero, hero transforms to villain, and sometimes, villains play the antihero. It is this poststructuralist twist, this subversive shifting evolution into the Uncharted Territories of the mythic triad that makes
Farscape
such fascinating viewing.

The fascination with the heroic trope perhaps begins with Joseph Campbell and
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
, his extraordinary examination of dreams, myth and story. A template for mankind's deepest and most profound sense of morality, the hero emotionally connects us to a higher sense of self. In contrast, villains and antiheroes resonate in opposition, helping shape the discourse shared by storytellers throughout the ages. Campbell's work delves into many areas of psychoanalysis and dream therapy but his analysis of story may be summed up as a universal rite of passage as described in three stages, departure/separation, trials/initiation, and return, roughly paralleling the three acts of modern storytelling (28–29).

Farscape
offers a modern twist on this archetypical quest story, but Crichton's lost astronaut evokes something far deeper in the human psyche, something that resonates universally with audiences, or as Joseph Campbell references via the concept of the “monomyth” in
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
, “Why is mythology everywhere the same, beneath its varieties of costume?” (2). Exploring these mythic structures in detail and drawing from subliminal storytelling modes across the ages, Campbell's seminal work explores how heroes are archetypical creations that tap into our subconscious, exploiting our need to hear stories, tales, and legends. Thus, the mythic hero paradigm allows, nay, forces Crichton immediately into the spotlight while relying on time-honored sci-fi plot conventions and requisite protagonist attributes as seen in the series premiere (“Premiere” 1.1). We are entranced by Crichton's journey, emotionally engaged from the start.

These stages in the hero's journey have been appropriated by screenwriters, distilled down and codified into the three-act structure of Hollywood and Westernized media, but it is Campbell who recognized and defined the subliminal paradigm. Christopher Vogler in
The Writer's Journey
lists these stages (note, he changes Campbell's descriptions in many instances and merges beats but this simpler version is helpful for analysis):

Act One: Ordinary World; Call to Adventure; Refusal of the Call; Meeting with the Mentor; Crossing the First Threshold; Act Two: Tests, Allies, Enemies; Approach to the Inmost Cave; Ordeal; Reward; Act Three: The Road Back; Resurrection; Return with the Elixir [12].

Nevertheless, the story remains tantalizingly familiar. The hero is introduced in the ordinary world. He or she receives the invite (wanted or not) to leave the ordinary world and so on down the mythic storytelling how-to list.

As described by Campbell, it is not coincidence that audiences easily recognize these heroic parameters and quickly identify the character in the role and the quest: whether the hero be ridiculous or sublime, Greek or barbarian, gentile or Jew, his journey varies little in essential plan. Popular tales represent the heroic action as physical; the higher religions show the deed to be moral; nevertheless, there will be found astonishingly little variation in the morphology of the adventure, the character roles involved, the victories gained. If one or another of the basic elements of the archetypical pattern is omitted from a given fairy tale, legend, ritual, or myth, it is bound to be somehow or other implied—and the omission itself can speak volumes for the history and pathology of the example (30). In other words, whether it be ancient Greek mythology or
Farscape
, the pattern has not changed all that much. Or has it?

Crichton's all–American good looks, heroic astronaut profession, and easily discernable Western goals and objectives (completing a dangerous mission for the greater good of mankind and America), fulfills audience expectations and adheres to archetypical story modes as he embarks upon a heroic mission only to find himself lost in space, forced to journey through mysterious, dangerous lands, while battling strange and terrible foes, all of whom seem determined to keep him from returning home with the
elixir
; in this case, the secret to wormhole technology. Thus, these subliminal, mythic storytelling modes and traditions, particularly popular in Western mass media and television, enhance this identification, this foundation of myth and fable, enabling John's emblematic, traditional hero quest in the tale.

However, into this mythic structure comes the paradigm of the villain, the echo of the antihero, the binary opposition, and the poststructuralist reaction to this tradition. Villains work in opposition to the hero, creating conflict, driving story, forcing the hero to evolve. Villains are necessary in order for heroes to be, well, heroes.
Farscape,
however, deconstructs the normal role of the hero and the hero/villain/antihero triad in truly fascinating ways, offering instead, characters that evolve from one role to the next: villain shifts to hero, hero transforms to villain, and sometimes, villains play the antihero. Multifaceted and complex, the characters of
Farscape
are deconstructed, shifting and surprising.

Farscape
, in fact, is as intriguing for this deconstruction of character, including its loaded binaries, as it is for the inspired use of the mythic paradigm. The concept of binary opposition is fundamental to structuralism, and indeed, it is hard to imagine narrative conflict without the systemic interaction of the loaded binary opposition sustaining the hero-villain trope. It is not that
Farscape
does not support the concept of opposition so much that it allows all of the characters to shift polarity throughout the show. In many respects, structuralism inherently supports the mythic paradigm with the hero as the loaded binary in the relationship between hero and villain. In “Binary Opposition in Myth: The Propp/Levi-Strauss Debate in Retrospect,” Alan Dundes closely examines the work of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and his essay “The Structural Study of Myth,” a symposium paper submitted in reference to the topic:

In his essay, Levi-Strauss contended “that mythical thought always works from the awareness of oppositions towards their progressive mediations” and further that “the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction” [40].

According to Dundes, Levi-Strauss had “proposed a formula for the structure of narrative” based on an underlying “paradigm (of oppositions),” a coda of “mythemes,” or “basic units of myth,” which “must, generally speaking, lend themselves to binary operations” (40). In other words, Levi-Strauss believed that storytelling functioned partially because of the conflict inherent and created by characters in opposition. In traditional narrative structure, characters rarely shift or transition from their assigned roles despite character arcs, which may offer moments of conflict, but no genuine shift in perceived roles.

Farscape
, however, willfully subverts expectations while reinforcing its own mythic substructure. In fact, Campbell's monomyth offers a cogent reference point for narrative coherence, and while
Farscape
seemingly finds inspiration in Campbell's myth quest, the show reinvents the wheel whenever it sees fit. John Crichton, displaced astronaut, embarks upon a journey, answering what Campbell refers to as the “call to adventure” which “signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown” (48). In the case of
Farscape
and John Crichton, this is perfectly embodied by Crichton's unfortunate mission gone awry, which results in his displacement from Earth and the subsequent wanderings into the Uncharted Territories.

The series opening introduces American astronaut John Crichton, simultaneously swaggering and suffering from pre-launch tension, Crichton's childhood friend and research partner DK, and John's famous, lapsing into legendary, astronaut father, Jack Crichton, as John Crichton prepares to launch his experimental shuttle
Farscape 1
into the upper atmosphere to prove his “own” scientific theory, establishing Crichton's normal world “street creds.” Crichton inadvertently triggers a wormhole in space-time which sucks him and his ship into a very distant part of the universe, separating him from everything he knows, loves and understands. Mythic quest ensues...

In fact, Crichton's first season title sequence voice-over sets the scene for every episode, emphasizing both the quest elements of John's plight, the show's main dramatic conflict and establishing Crichton's relationship with his all-too-alien shipmates: