Isn’t the end of this story one of the most beautiful you’ve ever seen?

OK, before anyone starts thinking I’m crazed, or perhaps just that I’ve read too much Edgar Allen Poe, I do not exactly get a kick out of watching characters kick the bucket. In fact, I will say that poignancy alone does not a beautiful ending make.

It’s the reality of the message itself that grabs me.

I suspect Spike knew full well he was unlikely to walk away from an assault on the Red Dragon alive. I do not, however, think that his going anyway was an expression of despair or some kind of follow-my-love-into-death nonsense. Remember that it’s the moment when Annie dies that Spike decides he has to go after Vicious himself; as Julia says, “You don’t need weapons like that just to run away.” Remember also what Spike says to Faye–”I’m going to see if I really am alive.”

To be alive is to desire and intend and risk. To coast along without those things is to act out death, no matter whether your heart’s still pumping blood.

This is what I mention in passing on Spike, Julia & Vicious: When She Drives. Spike has, I would say, been coasting. He likes the rush of a reckless venture, as he shows in “Jamming with Edward” when he isn’t happy with a high-bounty mission until he gets to go flying under suicidally dangerous circumstances. He isn’t especially concerned with what might happen tomorrow, witness our introduction to Spike and Jet in the very first episode and their little brangle over how much of their last paycheck had to go to cover the damages Spike racked up in the course of capturing their target. He isn’t what you might call careful.

We can read the ending as the logical conclusion of Spike’s addiction to danger. He’s finally found the ultimate risk and the perfect ending for any danger junky: he succeeds and then dies before this ultimate triumph and high can go stale. Spike doesn’t strike me as such a shallow character that this could be his primary motivation, though.

We can also read the ending as a moral about the emptiness of life without love. In support of this we have Spike’s parable swap with Jet, wherein he tells the story of the cat who lived many lives until he met a lady cat and loved her, lived happily with her, mourned her death and was never reborn again. Note the difference between the cat and Spike, though: the cat lived happily with his mate. Spike’s last fight with Vicious also features an exchange that could contribute to this interpretation. Spike says “Julia passed away,” pauses and then says “let’s end it all.” Vicious responds, “If that’s your wish.” But for all Julia was obviously a major influence on Spike, and for all that he says she’s like his other half, I think his parting words to Jet and Faye should prevent such a simple reading. “There’s nothing I can do for a dead woman….I’m not going there to die. I’m going to find out if I really am alive,” he says. There is apparently something besides Julia herself that will let Spike know whether he’s alive or not. I would read Spike’s exchange with Vicious less as Spike giving a reason for his desire to end it than as the authors showing us one of his reasons (far more typical of these authors). I suggest that Spike is trying to reach Vicious one last time, using one of the most powerful experiences shared between them: Julia. It’s when Vicious doesn’t respond that Spike gives up on ever getting him to do so and says they should end it all. Vicious’ prompt agreement says to me that he has been a long time at the location Spike just reached at that moment; the fact that he frames his action as merely an agreement with Spike’s desire also says to me that he has just reached the point of non-desire, non-action, non-life that Spike has spent so long in. Spike isn’t there any more, of course, as Vicious recognizes: “So, you are finally awake,” he says when Spike comes to him. They seem to have swapped positions.

We can really only speculate over what fire in Julia burned bright enough to backlight Spike’s life for him; we see very little of her. Spike describes her by saying “For the first time in my life I saw a woman who was truly alive” (25); Faye tells Jet that Julia is “a beautiful, dangerous but normal woman that you can’t leave alone” (26). Perhaps the fire Spike goes seeking is Vicious himself; he’s certainly the one besides Julia that we see in Spike’s sepia memories. Or perhaps the most perfect figure of what drives and draws Spike to come after Vicious is not Julia, who, as he says is dead and beyond any help, but Shin. Just to make sure we take notice of this character, his name is the word that, depending on the kanji, means both truth and death in Japanese. It’s Shin who betrays Vicious to protect Spike and point him toward Julia. It’s Shin who comes to Spike and covers his back on the way up the Red Dragon HQ to confront Vicious. It’s Shin whose last request Spike carries out: “Please defeat Vicious,” Shin pleads as he’s dying, and adds, “actually, I wanted you to come back.” I infer from that that Shin wanted Spike, not to opt out, but to come back and lead the syndicate. Shin has intention and passion–enough life to die. In that moment, so does Spike.

That’s the point that caught me. Spike does find out that he’s alive…and so he dies.

I believe this ties in with the recurring comments about Spike living in a dream. In the preview of “Ballad” we hear Spike saying “Life is always a dream I can never wake up from, never get back to reality.” When Spike and Vicious meet, Vicious says that angels who are cast out of heaven must become demons, adding “ne, Spike?” to give us the clue that he’s talking about the two of them. Spike responds that he’s just living in a dream he never awakened from, and Vicious offers to wake him up right then. The implication that he’s offering to kill Spike is pretty clear when Spike tells him to wait and Vicious asks why, is Spike planning on begging for mercy?

Here we have waking up equated with dying, but staying in the dream seems to amount to the same thing. Consider “Brain Scratch” and Spike’s words to Spangen: “If you want to dream, dream alone.” Jet notes that “all he could do was dream” since Spangen is paralyzed. Even Ed chips in, at the end, and wishes “This time, have a sweet dream.” In this case, dreaming is something done to escape helplessness, yet that seems to be precisely what Spike objects to. He tells the boy to dream alone rather than pull other people into his dream, to their detriment. This ethic implies that Spike’s life-dream is something he does alone, in isolation. This certainly lines up with the idea that Spike has been coasting, not truly engaging with or investing himself in the people around him. The tag line of “Mushroom Samba,” Life is but a dream, also implies that his dream is hallucinatory–is not something he can consider reality. If Spike’s dream is, in fact, his past, this all makes a good deal of sense; he does not think his past is something he can affect, and yet it’s something that will never leave him. Something he can never wake up from.

It seems that his idea of what a dream is has changed a bit, though. In “Real Folk Blues I,” we have his (gray) memory of asking Julia to flee with him, and he tells her “we’ll live out a life of freedom somewhere. Just like watching a dream.” So dreaming used to mean something neither isolated nor hallucinatory. Now, however, he seems to see his own words as a sort of cosmic irony, and turns the statement around. Now he believes that the dream always was a will-o-the-whisp, was never something he could have touched or lived in. This doesn’t change until the very end. That, I would say, is the part Julia truly plays in Spike’s path to Vicious. Annie gets him started, with her death and her words, “Everyone has lost the sense of where they want to be. Like kites without strings.” That’s the smack in the face that starts Spike waking up. Shin’s loyalty to him and consequent death is the final blow, the thing that hardens Spike’s determination. In between those two, though, we have Julia’s death.

Spike’s flashbacks in “Ballad” accompany a repeating shot of his left eye. When he comes back up to consciousness and out of his dream/flashbacks, in “Jupiter Jazz,” we see his right eye opening. In “Sympathy” his green flashbacks end with a zoom from the mechanical eye to his right eye, and then he wakes up. In “Pierrot” it’s Spike’s right eye that looks down the barrel of le Fou’s gun and reflects like that of the cat who observes le Fou being experimented on, and le Fou’s left eye that we see close-ups of. All this rather postmodern image/symbol montage-ing adds up to a great deal of ambiguity; not once do we ever get a definite answer as to which eye is mechanical. My guess is that it’s the left eye, since his right eye is twice associated with awakening from the past (in “Jazz” and “Sympathy”) and his left that’s mirrored by the medically maddened le Fou. In any case, the shot in which Spike sees Julia die focuses on his left eye, the one that he tells her sees the past (13). This is what leads me to think Julia’s part is to shatter the distinction Spike has drawn between dream and reality. The scene of Julia’s death crosses the past/present boundary. In the last episode, Spike tells Faye that one eye is a replacement, that one sees the past and one the present (which indicates that the mechanical eye may also contain some kind of recorder if my guess is correct, and the shot here pans from left to right as he speaks). “I had thought that what I saw was not all of reality,” he goes on. “I thought I was watching a dream that I would never awaken from. Before I knew it, the dream was over.” And then he tells her he’s not going to die but to see if he’s alive. On the one hand, he’s saying that he thought the past, what the left eye sees, was not real but rather a dream…albeit an inescapable one. On the other, his phrasing indicates that he no longer thinks this. The dream is over, he says. He has seen the present, Julia’s death, with his left eye and as he remembers her death and her words, “this is a dream,” we see his right eye: past and present have crossed and become one. He is no longer dissociated, no longer dreaming. He has awoken, and now must act instead of merely watch.

Please,
Don’t wake me from the dream;
It’s really everything it seemed.
I’m so free;
No black and white
In the blue.

There isn’t a song that fits the final shot of this story better than “Blue” itself; so I chose a song for this page that fits a different part of the ending, one we don’t exactly see: Faye and Jet and Ed and Ein going on. The title song of this page is by Bonnie Rait, off the album of the same name.

Banish Misfortune / Open Paw

Forget Faye, the real mystery character in here is Ein. We know next to nothing about him. We know he’s a “data dog” produced in a covert lab by illegal means. We know he understands how to manipulate technology–both mechanically as in opening car doors and turning on and off communicators and also virtually by way of a holographic system as he does in “Brain Scratch.” He’s pretty darn good at it, too, seeing how fast he breaks into Scratch and traces every branch of it down to the hospice.

We also know he has a sense of humor. Recall “Wild Horses” wherein Ed is working to clean a virus out of the Bebop. She finishes her program and makes a flourishing production of hitting the Enter key–and Ein cuts her off by pressing it himself with no fanfare at all. This causes her to growl at him, of course. That was also the episode where he cut off Faye’s complaints over the com. You can almost see him grin as he looks back at Jet. In fact, Ein seems to contribute most of the subtler humor to the show.

Given this, I suppose it isn’t surprising that he likes to play with Ed, as when she breaks out the hose to “water” Jet’s bonsai. Nor that he chooses to go with her when she leaves. Besides, maybe he can keep her out of trouble.

Ed Wants a Rock

Ed’s departure, while rather depressing, does fit in with her history such as we know it. Ed is another character who doesn’t seem to have much, but in this case it seems less a function of a non-speaking character as with Ein. Ed has little history because she exists in the moment. Like her speech, Ed is only loosely connected to the stolid, linear world most of the rest of the characters inhabit.

We were primed, in “Hard Luck Woman,” to see her departure not as a rejection of the Bebop crew, but as part of who she is. The nun she leads Faye to tells us that Ed wandered in one day and wandered out two years later, only to pop up again after a three year absence. That episode also makes it clear that Ed comes by this habit fair and square from her father. He dashes about mapping asteroid strikes, she drifts about hacking into anything that catches her fancy and they keep a desultory eye out for each other.

That’s the episode that also points up Ed’s resilience. She’s paralleled with Faye, who regains her memories and takes off to find their source. She tells Ed, at that time, that Ed also has somewhere she belongs and someone waiting for her, and that she should also look for it. So she does, planting a false bounty to snooker the guys into finding Appledelhi for her. Faye’s belonging is now a crater. Ed’s, in the person of her father, takes of as soon as she finds him. While Ed takes leave of the Bebop in somewhat the same way Faye does, she seems less perturbed than Faye and has less trouble moving on. It’s hard to say why Ed chooses this time to leave the Bebop, but if we carry the parallel further we might have a clue. Faye stays away from the Bebop until she has overwhelming reasons to go back: she’s adrift, Jet’s injured and Spike has a message from Julia. Faye comes back when she decides that the Bebop is where she belongs after all. Perhaps Ed is going to look some more for her father (icon of belonging). All we have is what she says to Ein, that she is going somewhere very far away. But the tag line of the show, “See you cowgirl, someday, somewhere!”, suggests that she, too, will be back eventually–that the Bebop will turn out to be one of the places she belongs as well.

Red Dirt Boy

I deal with the Vicious/Julia part of Spike’s past on Spike, Julia & Vicious: When She Drives. What I want to deal with here are the things we learn about Spike by association. Eyes are a major meaning exchange in this story, and the times when we get other characters associated with Spike via his eyes are enlightening.

“Sympathy for the Devil,” for instance, starts with a montage of Spike’s memories from when his eye was installed. They’re colored neon green and fluorescent blue. The general impression, what with the jars of organs and things and the shots of Spike’s eyelids being held back, is gruesome–rather mad-scientist-ish. The shot zooms in on his right eye area (which could indicate that his right eye is the artificial one, except that in “Real Folk Blues II” he says that the eye replaced was “destroyed in an accident”; the memory shots in “Sympathy” show his right eye intact. I examine the further implications of all this ambiguity on The End: Luck of the Draw). And then Spike starts awake and looks at Wen. As we start to find out about Wen’s age and non-ageing we get the statement, horrible in its simplicity, “The men who took an interest and experimented on me all died before me.” As in “Pierrot le Fou” the connected imagery aligns Spike with one who is out of balance with time (an ancient in a child’s body or an adult with the mind of a child), as well as with those who have found themselves largely helpless in face of a ruthless power (medical) and are now really pissed off about it.

Why does Spike go after Wen? There’s no indication that Wen might try to strike at him, or do anything but run and establish another new life. I suggest that it is, as the title suggests, sympathy. Spike has already shot Wen in the head and seen the pool of blood and Wen’s prints walking away from it. His expression at that moment is fairly horrified. When Wen, dying, says to Spike, “I feel so heavy–by I feel so at ease now” Spike claims not to understand any more than he understands hyperphysics. But we are offered two strong images to suggest that he isn’t entirely truthful. One is that Wen’s eyes are the same green as Spike’s memories; in fact his suit echoes that green and blue both. The other is Spike’s gesture at the very end, throwing the harmonica into the air and “firing” his hand at it. He makes the same gesture in the last episode, as he dies himself. If he didn’t understand at the time of “Sympathy,” I think he does by the time of “Real Folk Blues.” Certainly those two episodes are also linked by Faye waiting at the door as Spike leaves because she doesn’t think, on either occasion, that he’ll be coming back. The second time she’s right.

Then there’s “Jamming with Edward” which starts out with a shot of an eye that looks remarkably like Spike’s, and a voice saying “always alone.” We quickly find out that this is a satellite AI, but it did make me think. This AI maneuvers the things around it to draw huge eye-catching pictures. Spike, you recall, understands exactly why and when Jet asks why the AI would draw like that says quite accurately that it was lonely. I think we’re meant to take the AI as another parallel to Spike, who is certainly making himself eyecatching as far as Red Dragon is concerned. I mean, come on, he’s a bounty hunter whose home base is on Mars just like the syndicate’s is.

Mohammed’s Radio

The whole issue of loneliness, of course, is a hot one between Spike and Jet. “Jupiter Jazz” demonstrates that for us, with their tiff over Spike’s decision to abandon Faye (and bankroll) to search for Julia. Jet gets pretty indignant that Spike might think he was lonely for company when Jet thought Spike was the lonely one. Both of them rather eat their words at the end of those two episodes. After Jet has said that there won’t be a place for Spike on the Bebop, and then said he’ll let Spike back in if Spike catches Gren (and after Spike has said fine and taken off anyway) we see Spike sending Gren off toward Europa and catching up to hover over the Bebop. A perfectly deadpan exchange follows, Jet asking what Spike’s got, Spike telling him “Nothing” and Jet telling him to hurry up and land because they’re leaving. The undercurrent of things unspoken here is enough to sink ships, especially against the backdrop of camaraderie, loyalty and betrayal that “Jazz” examines. The tag line at the end (do you have a comrade?) points up the fact that, while none of them will ever admit it in so many words, the crew of the Bebop are indeed comrades and will fight with and forgive and support each other accordingly.

After all, Jet probably was lonely too. He’s a team player. His history is the most transparent of all the characters. Practically every other episode we meet another old co-worker of Jet’s that he can lean on for information. From them we get the picture of a man who may cut his friends and fellows some slack, as we see when he reminds Bob of all the confiscated eyedrops whose disappearance he didn’t mention (“Shuffle”), but the very same scene shows that Jet remembers things like that and saves them up to use when needed.

“Ganymede Elegy” shows us the determined side of Jet, and highlights the extent to which he ordered his life by and around a sense of duty. I find it significant that the word used, when Spike and Faye talk about Jet’s sense of justice and duty is bushi rather than giri. Jet’s sense of duty is a highly personal one, not one that’s part of a network of obligations. Spike tells him his old lover’s new flame is a bounty, and Jet says that he will bring this one in. Spike asks, “You’re not going to let him go, are you?” and Jet says that he will deal with this crime in the place where he used to be a cop. Even if it is going to tear up his ex to do so.

In “Black Dog Serenade” we see what that tenacity cost him. Here, again, we also see the writers’ taste for irony. Jet’s old partner, Fad, was the one who worked with Udai and one of the syndicates to trap Jet and shoot him. Now Fad, probably though not explicitly working on behalf of the syndicate to erase Udai who has become obsolete, coaxes Jet into partnering with him again to do so. We, as viewers, are prepared for Fad’s corruption. We are given the blond prisoner in the ship who admits to having been a cop and when razzed about now being a lifer says “Cops are human too.” We also have Fad’s slip when Jet suggests Udai will head back ‘home’ to Europa; Fad knows that Udai is persona non grata with his home syndicate and almost says so. We are readied for the reverse of who shoots who by the similar geographic set-up of this second Udai-hunt. Just as Fad, the first time, says he will go around the building and meet Jet, Jet, this time, says he will come around the other side of the ship.

Jet is given no such lead time. Udai hits him cold with the information that his partner shot off his arm, and immediately afterward said partner saves him by shooting Udai and then not only allows Jet to shoot him but hoodwinks Jet into doing it. Jet has kept his honor and fulfilled his duty. He has not succumbed to corruption like his partner, nor is he dead as Fad says most of the other uncorruptables are. Instead he is alone.

In many ways, Jet’s history and Ed’s history set each other off. Ed lives in the moment; Jet, as Alisa points out, lives in the past. Of course, Alisa also points out that Jet can be pretty difficult to live with precisely because of his unbending ethics and personal certainty. “You were like this back then too,” she says. “You decided everything. And you were always right. When I was with you, I never had to do anything. All I had to do was hang on to your arm like a child, with no cares in the world. I wanted to decide how to live my life by myself…even if that was a mistake” (10). When Jet, in the course of still apprehending her boyfriend tells him to “be strong and protect her,” Alisa seems to realize that Jet either hasn’t heard a word she’s said or has heard it and still considers her a child. All things considered, it’s probably good for Jet to have three partners who do exactly as they please.

I Feel So Good–Home Again

I think Faye’s history is the most poignant. It’s certainly the one with the greatest contrast between past and present, thus her two theme songs; I couldn’t find a single song that fit both sides. She and Spike are foils, on this score, in the same way Jet and Ed are foils to each other. Recall when Spike tells Faye she thinks too much about the past and Faye retorts that he only thinks so because he has a past (15). They are both trapped by their pasts, he by the presence of his and she by the absence of hers.

Most of the time we see Faye as a pretty classic femme fatale. Her behavior on Callisto, of baiting a bunch of thugs into following her so she can beat them up to relieve her frustration is typical. Of course, her initial behavior, of stealing the Bebop’s cash so that the others would, as Jet so cogently remarks, be sure to come after her, is also typical. I think Gren has her number on that one when he says that she distanced herself because she’s afraid of losing them. Not that she’s unwilling to reciprocate rescues, as we see in “Pierrot Le Fou.” She tries to keep le Fou’s ‘invitation’ from Spike, at first. When he sees it he teases her by saying that this one might be the end of him and, when she looks apprehensive, adding “Just kidding!” and asking if she would come rescue him if he said that. She only responds “Baka.” But she does come.

In stunning contrast, “My Funny Valentine” shows her as a vulnerable (even gullible) young woman distressed by losing her past and rather shyly taken with the gallant chivalry of her lawyer cum knight. “Speak Like A Child” cranks up the contrast even more by showing us Faye as a child, gentle and cheerful, if mischievous judging by her remarks about probably being a bother to someone (at which point we see a shot of Spike and Jet). The end of this episode is where Faye’s story takes a sharp turn toward the poignant. The cheer Young Faye does for herself is “Ganbare atashi”; ganbare (or ganbaru or ganbatte) is often translated as good luck, but in this case the slightly more accurate translation of don’t lose is appropriate (what it actually indicates is to endure, persist or stand firm, from the root ganban or bedrock I believe). This is especially so since it gives what I suspect is the intended double meaning “don’t lose, me” and “don’t lose me.” Because that’s precisely what has happened. Faye’s whisper during this cheer is “I don’t remember.” She has lost her.

Small wonder that Faye is so overset when she does remember. We may note that her memories are the only ones in full color, albeit faded; that implies that her memories are, in some way, the only complete ones to be had among these characters (“Hard Luck”). The final implication is harsher, given that when Faye does go back where she now feels/knows she belongs she finds only a crater. Perhaps Faye’s memories are the most complete because she is the only one whose past is so thoroughly gone.

The title soundtrack here is “Easy Money” by Rickie Lee Jones, off Rickie Lee Jones. The sense of humor struck me as very Cowboy Bebop, and the issue of money, easy and otherwise, does rather permeate everyone’s history here. All the same, I chose the sound of this song for contrast more than for consonance with our characters’ histories.

“Banish Misfortune/Open Hand” is an instrumental piece by Patty Larkin off Angels Running. “We Want a Rock” is by They Might be Giants, off Flood. “Red Dirt Girl” is by Emmy Lou Harris off the album of the same name. “Mohammed’s Radio” is by Linda Ronstadt, off Living in the USA. “I Feel So Good” is by Richard Thompson and this particular version (my most favorite) came off A Rare Thing; “Home Again in Eireann” is performed by Sharon Murphy and Whisp, my copy coming off Women of the World Celtic II.

Let us start with a word about music and titles. Each page subtitle is taken from some song that I felt fit with the page content. For your listening pleasure, I have coded RealAudio versions of the songs in question. They are linked to the subtitles. (Note: some browsers will download the file to your desktop; to listen, drag it to your RealMedia player.)

Notes: Spoilers all over, and a litcrit-type going hog wild over the literary value of this show. The term postmodern will, no doubt, appear; this should not be cause for concern, it’s just a reflex.

A Moment for Enthusiasm

Before we get going, I just have to say: The visuals on this show are absolutely the most incredible you have ever seen. Guaranteed. The backgrounds, and especially the skies are stunningly beautiful. Three-d movement of objects is perfect. The composition is…wow. Shots like Faye’s silhouette against the red sky in “Hard Luck Woman”…wow. I mean…wow.

OK, I’m done being speechless, on to the verbosity.

Stories in Song

When a song tells a story it does so in a different manner than most examples of prose or even poetry. I often hear good story-songs called poetry, but that ignores the music itself. A song doesn’t need lyrics to tell a story. If you haven’t already, listen to “Last Train Home.” Not a word all through the song, but it still tells a story. You can hear it. I even wrote a version of the story I hear, many long moons ago; it was probably the best story I wrote in my first eight years of writing stories.

Why am I bending your ear (or eye at least) about this? Because I think that Cowboy Bebop tells a story in the same way a song would. We get evocative bits: brief images, partial pictures, clues. These work the same way music does, by sparking associations that weave together, if you’re paying attention to them, into a bigger picture. Never the whole picture, though. That’s a great deal of the artistry and attraction of it, for me.

Show

Consider “Gateway Shuffle.” Never once, in that entire episode, does any character do anything so obvious as hold up that little yellow phial and say “oh, gee, this must be the virus!” No, instead we hear a passing comment about how an agent who infiltrated Space Warriors was scragged; see Faye get a package from a shot-up pilot; see Twinkle wigged by Spike’s attempts to open the package; and see a rack of yellow phials, which you can only recognize if you’ve really been paying attention to the obscured shape of what’s in the package, lowered into a canister marked with the biohazard seal. Come to that, for a long while we don’t even have anyone tell anyone else, directly, what the virus does. Instead we see gorillas in cages, hear that the virus acts on the 2% genetic difference between humans and apes and see Harrison in a cage too, and hear his cry that he doesn’t want to become a monkey.

It isn’t until the last minutes of the show that we have even the oblique clarity of Twinkle’s statement that humans have gone outside nature and she means to return them juxtaposed with a shot of Harrison going all hairy and be-fanged. Then we have her proclamation, “I’m going to turn you all into apes!” This build up is what makes that final shot of their ship so powerful. The hyper-envelope is closed, the Space Warriors’ ship brakes, and the last phial slips out of Twinkle’s pocket. The last things we see are her horrified face, the phial shattering on the forward windows and, after an outtake of Faye joining the Bebop, the lone sea-rat squeaky toy sitting on the console. No speeches about cosmic justice, no long involved philosophical ramblings about how the SW used the wrong tactics but they might have had a point about the sea rats after all. No overt parallels between the sea-rats being killed by humans and humans being killed by the SW. It’s all left for us to think based on those last shots.

Indirection is the name of the game for this show. The imagery used to evoke feelings, stories, thoughts is downright brutal at times, but it’s never obvious. Consider one of the early shots in “Gateway Shuffle.” Twinkle’s goons have just shot up the restaurant. Their little holo-ad starts up, telling all and sundry that Space Warriors seek to protect endangered species. This shows against a scene of dead bodies strewn around the darkened room. The contrast is entirely arresting, and says huge volumes about the ironic and self-defeating nature of fanaticism no matter how good the cause.

Watanabe and Co. seem especially fond of exercising this style in order to talk about human nature. “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Pierrot le Fou,” while considerably darker than “Gateway Shuffle,” follow much the same pattern.

Consider how we find out that Wen is not actually a child. Spike goes, he thinks, to rescue the kid and winds up getting shot by someone who says he was alive when man lived only on the Earth. At the same time, back on the Bebop, Faye and Jet find a news clip about Wen and are shocked when they see it’s from thirty years ago. Spike’s scene explains Jet and Faye’s while their scene illustrates Spike’s. As we, the audience, put the two together, we have Wen’s story told only in pictures: the pastoral scene with his parents, the explosion, and Wen heaving himself from under his parents’ seared bodies, the only thing left alive in the blasted landscape. It’s this, rather than any explicit homily or pop psych analysis, that gives us to understand just why Wen finds ease in his death in the end.

Consider the presentation of the files Jet finds in Section 13 on Pierrot le Fou. We are shown flashes, very similar to the way in which characters’ memory flashbacks are presented. We see something being inserted into a cell, DNA sequences, a syringe drawing in a thread of blood, the cat with two-toned eyes in an observation window. We see shots of a checker-board room and a man slumped down, interspersed with le Fou wired up to a table and in great pain and stress until the shot of the slumped man shows his face completely vacant. All of these are shown washed out with white, which reminded me a great deal of the effect you get with an overdose of laughing gas at the dentist. In fact, all of le Fou’s scenes are drawn in very subdued colors, the only brightness being the red of either blood or fire. It’s rather as though we see the story through le Fou’s eyes: dark, haunted by disjointed and whited out memories of pain, the only brightness that of violence. Which, as Jet points out, marches with le Fou’s childish and regressed state of mind. Thus, the other source of bright colors, the amusement park.

Don’t Tell

This preference makes sense of two episodes that we might otherwise take for filler fluff: “Toys in the Attic” and “Mushroom Samba”. These episodes have, indeed, almost nothing to do with the overarching plot threads. What they do instead is explore the characters.

Indirectly, of course.

In the first case, we have the Lessons.

Lesson One by Jet: “Humans were meant to work and sweat for their money after all. Those that try to get rich quick or live at the expense of others all get divine retribution somewhere along the way.” This voice over is accompanied by a buck naked Jet, having just been fleeced at dice by Faye, looking for something to wear. We have seen already, in “Black Dog Serenade” and “Ganymede Elegy” that Jet’s unbending ethics make him vulnerable to those who are less honorable and more flexible; that doesn’t stop him from holding firm.

Lesson Two by Faye: “‘Survival of the fittest’ is the law of the land. To fool and to be fooled is the reason we live. I’ve never had anything good happen to me when I trust others.” This as she sits, surrounded by her winnings off Jet. It should be obvious to all and sundry that Faye does, indeed, have what we might call trust issues. On the other hand, she does keep putting herself in a position to be fooled, to trust. Consider Whitney Hagas Matsumoto. Faye will say one thing, but act another, and like Jet her actions leave her open to pain.

Lesson Three by Ed: “If you see a stranger, follow him!” This while Ed takes the infrared glasses to look for space monsters. Quintessential Ed. For one thing, this seems to be how she lives her life; it’s certainly how she came to be on the Bebop. It also displays her casual fearlessness, as she goes monster searching. It’s worth noting that she winds up eating the thing that’s been biting her crewmates. Ed is definitely the wild card that tends to come through in a pinch with an oddball but effective solution.

Lesson Four by Spike: “You shouldn’t leave things in the fridge.” Having just been bitten by what grew on a very old lobster. Spike does tend to focus on the present and practical moment, or at least try very hard to do so. He avoids the big, philosophical picture whenever possible.

9/6/03: One of my correspondents points out another possible interpretation for Spike’s lesson. One of the purposes of refrigeration is to preserve something, food in this case. If, however, one leaves it in too long, the preservative effect fails and the food goes bad. Spike has, metaphorically, put his past in the fridge until he can get back around to it. By the time he does, though, it has gone terminally septic. Thus, his lesson highlights one of his personal problems and foreshadows the result. In particular, Spike isn’t bitten by the lobster-growth until he attempts to eject it, along with the fridge. This parallels the manner in which Spike is not killed by Vicious until he attempts to confront and put an end to him. (many thanks to Joe Halvey for these fascinating suggestions!)

In the second case, we are offered hallucinations.

Faye shrinks, is inundated with water overflowing from the commode and swims with the fish that appear. One possibility that occurred to me is that this imagery links up with Spike’s flashbacks to his eye installation, which features bubbles rising in water and a fish swimming behind a glass orb. Possibly also with the name Bull gives Spike: Swimming Bird (1). In that case, I suppose I would read it as a suggestion that Faye feels her life is artificial, like Spike’s eye. That’s a reading we can only make externally as the audience, of course, because Faye doesn’t know about the eye yet. Another possibility is that this trip features Faye as part of a group, rather than isolated or a loner as she tends to portray herself. This would match up nicely with her Lesson.

8/24/08: Carega points out that water is a major symbolic element for Faye, and that this hallucination may relate to her memories. I must agree, considering how much water appears in the episodes that deal with her remembering, from the water the ship is on when the tape arrives to the ocean her old home overlooks to the lion fountain. Indeed, the story of Urashima Tarou, which the tape delivery alludes to (see below) is the story of someone who went to live under the ocean.

Jet hears his bonsai telling him the secrets of the universe, has trouble remembering who he is from one moment to the next and at some point gets hold of Faye’s lipstick. I really don’t know what to make of the lipstick, but the rest of it supports Jet’s tendency to philosophize (also in line with his own Lesson). It also, over against Faye’s trip, suggests that Jet is more isolated and cut adrift than he likes to admit given the way he’s forgetting things. Losing his identity makes a lot of sense as we meet all the old cop associates he hasn’t talked to in years and find out about the corruption that couldn’t help but push someone like Jet away from his old job.

Spike finds himself walking up endless stairs and finds a frog there who tells him it’s the stairway to heaven; he ends up nearly walking off the prow of the Bebop. Certainly Spike seems to spend much of the show on a journey he can’t see the end of, in a dream he can’t awaken from as he puts it. The frog suggests the same thing that the final song, “Blue,” does: Spike does find ascension. “Everything is clearer now. / Life is just a dream you know, / It’s never ending. / I’m ascending.”

Ed, of course, doesn’t get a hallucination, which may indicate that it would be superfluous given how…individually tailored her reality already seems to be. On the other hand, this also shows her observing the antics of those around her without being caught up in them, which is equally in character. And, once again, she solves the problem at hand (no food) in her own quirky manner.

The tag line that closes this episode is “Life is but a dream.” All the other comments about Spike’s life, in particular, being a dream are significant; I think this is a little clue for us that the hallucinations are metaphors and not purely narrative larks.

Actually, it’s a lot like the way we see gold dragons on red backgrounds on the hyperspace route hoops, and on wall murals on Mars long before we know that the image is significant.

Really Bad Jokes

Just to close the page on a light note…well, lighter…well, ok not entirely hideously depressing, how’s that?

The hosts of Big Shot are called Punch and Judy and if you want to know in detail why this is strange and ironic, go read this. Punch is the puppet who gets away, quite literally, with murder (again and again and again); Judy is his rather harpy-like wife and one of those he kills.

The episode “Bohemian Rhapsody” is named after a song by Queen, and features clues left in the form of chess pieces…kings.

In “Speak Like a Child” the tape is delivered by a company with a tortoise logo, while the player (the delayed delivery of which causes Jet and Spike no end of trouble) is delivered by one with a hare logo. In the story of the tortoise and the hare, the two animals have a race and the tortoise wins the race and the hare loses. This, by the way, runs alongside the associations of the tortoise with the tamatebako (which contains Urashima Tarou’s years of life lost while he was under the sea just as the tape contains Faye’s lost life) and the visual parallel of the hare with the rabbit the race dogs chase (on which bet Faye loses all her winnings as she will lose the past she thought she gained once she goes looking for it and finds only ruins).

Hyperspace has a compression 240 times normal space (you get where you’re going 240 times faster than in normal space). This figure came from the ratio of black lines between film frames to frame space itself: 1 to 240. (See interview with Kawamori Shoji in the extras of Volume Two.) I love these people.

Onward

If you’re still with me, you can find more specific treatments of Faye and Jet, with some ruminations on Faye and Spike, on Faye & Jet: Unsquare Dance; of the relationships Spike, Vicious and Julia, and what the flashbacks can suggest to us, on Spike, Julia & Vicious: When She Drives; of history as a concept and problem on History: Easy Money; of the ending and the implications of Spike’s awakening on The End: Luck of the Draw; and of the various lessons the show seems to teach on Life Lessons: Ice Cream. Please feel free to pitch me your responses, my mail link is at the bottom of the page as usual.

Links

It’s kind of hard to find good Cowboy Bebop pages out there; I suppose it is a rather challenging subject. Lots of good graphics around, but not a whole lot in the way of thoughtful, varied content. Of the discursive sites, Otaku Central’s CB pages are a good ramble.

Asteroid Blues is a nice general site with plenty of images and profiles; easy on the eyes too. If you want someone who does gallery-style stuff, check out All That Jazz for music and pics. There is, by the way, an Emily’s Cowboy Bebop Page; this is not me; it is a nicely done, though incomplete, general site. Just thought I’d mention.

Entertaining tidbits can be had at All I Ever Needed to Know in Life I learned by Watching Cowboy Bebop, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Radical Edward’s Cowboy Bebop Hardrive has a fine image gallery, though the layout is annoyingly widget-ful.

From these you can get to all the others. If anyone is in contact with Team Bonet, please smack them about the collective head for taking down Walk in the Rain, which used to be one of the best CB sites running. I really hate it when people kill perfectly good sites for the piddly reason that they aren’t updating any more. Ask me if I care about updates! Just leave the damned things up!

The song “Last Train Home,” off the album Still Life (Talking), belongs to Pat Metheny, who wrote it and plays it. I don’t normally recommend Metheny’s music, it tends to get too synthy and spacey for me, but this one is an old favorite and it fit superbly.