Cowboy Bebop: A Collage

This isn’t my typical kind of structure or work. A year ago I watched Cowboy Bebop for the first time in seventeen years. A show I hadn’t revisited since I was a teenager and I watched it over several weeks, really appreciating each episode. I didn’t sit down or set out to make an essay on it, but I did react to any particular story or frame that appealed to me. Below is that Journey.

Track One: While I’ve seen cowboy bebop a number of times throughout my life, I haven’t really sat down to watch it for probably a decade. I’ve grown a great deal as a writer since I’ve last seen it and one thing you can’t turn off as a writer is a critical eye (because we’re all thieves).

You are constantly analyzing not just the world, but the aspects of world building that make these worlds and the characters in them breathe. The most difficult aspect of world building isn’t developing a fully fleshed out world, anyone can do that. The difficult aspect is communicating this fleshed out world in an organic and compelling way to the reader. You’re constantly toying with how much of the picture you reveal and how much context they have for that picture.

There are no rules in writing, but you typically don’t want pages of exposition explaining something like a tutorial in a video game and you don’t want it so poorly established that your reader is lost. So, it becomes what can you communicate to the reader by the negative space in your story. The unpainted parts of a picture contribute to imagine as much as the painted parts.

And that’s what I want to talk about here, because Cowboy Bebop is a masterclass in communicating an incredibly rich and dense world through the small vignettes of bounty chasing. While Faye serves to give some exposition of the world around them, it is always warranted within the context and structure of the plot.

But you see in this show this incredible technological advancement of our final frontier, with the same general hardships and lives playing out across the galaxy. There is just this diverse array of life happening everywhere. It’s a show that has squatters in an abandoned space station and a heavy metal space trucker. We have realistic robot limbs and people working as dog catchers. We have a number of various genres explored to the cool jazz undertones of an undefined but palpable freedom.

The show in a lot of ways is about creative exploration, where the Bruce Lee space cowboy’s mafia subplot is just a vehicle to explore the richly dense and diverse star system out there. One of my favorite episodes is Jet and Spike looking for a Beta Cassette player (I think that’s it) and have go through an old earth ruins of a mall.

Track Two: Cowboy Bebop features this scene with two men presumably having sex. Faye is there looking for a lead on information for a bounty, but there is no negative comment on this scene. There isn’t a side mark of her saying disgusting or any judgment at all. They’re also not like gay men stereotypes that you sometimes see showing up in anime. They’re just two men having sex and it’s portrayed as just a completely natural part of this world.

This anime was released in 1998 and LGBTQ+ issues in Japan and American were less than welcoming at the time. Here in space everyone is a weirdo and I say that affectionately as a weirdo myself. We see people of diverse bodies, races, gender identities, sexual orientations, and lives. Just think of any random anime and tell me how many black people you remember in it? How about ingenious people? The representation in this show is just beyond any anime I can really think about it and the story and world allow this, but…that’s the point. They told a story that welcomed diversity.

And I’m not saying it’s winning awards for best representation in media, but in 1998 this is a breath of fresh air to see so much life just living. No big statements or points, simply that all kinds of people exist.

Track Three: One thing I didn’t realize was how often Jet isn’t directly part of the action. I believe he has two episodes that heavily follow his perspective, but he mostly deals with support and information for the rest of the crew. I don’t really have a lot to say, but I found this shot in particular to be really beautiful.

One interesting part of this episode is that the B plot line is Ed goes fishing and Faye sun tans. This show lets their characters just exist, which is an absolutely essential, but often overlooked part of characterization. These characters would not be nearly as interesting or compelling if it was 26 episodes about catching a bounty head. It wouldn’t be interesting if all Faye did was violence and try to get money or if Ed just provided mcguffin level hacking.

This is at its heart an action anime, but if it played it straight like an action film, it would never be as respected or acclaimed as it became.

Track Four: I have highly eclectic and often esoteric tastes, where when I do find something interesting, I often explore it until I’ve exhausted it. This relates to art as much as philosophy and just the general perspective of the world around us. As time has gone on, it has become more and more rare for any perspective to have a dramatic shift on the way I look at or interpret the world or the art in it.

There are obviously always minor shifts that occur and a vast world of knowledge that I don’t have. But we define ourselves by the interests we do have and the knowledge we do explore. I bring this up within the context of one of the last major shifts I had. It was from Super Eyepatch Wolf who did a video on Simpsons where he touched on Scenic Simpsons. The episodes of his covering the Simpsons are phenomenal and highly recommended, only in that they explore what an aging medium looks like and the ramifications that has within the souls of the characters themselves.

But the point is this got me in a serious way to look at, appreciate, and consider the scenery in animation. While this background ambiance can be pretty boring or inconsequential to an animation, it can also be defining and subtle in ways you may not appreciate. The level of story telling, world building, atmosphere, depth, and emotion that can be conveyed in just shots of a city or a sunscape can be more important than dialogue between characters. Pathetic Fallacy maybe is more nuanced than just rain when a
character is sad.

Track Five: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman featured a rather interesting character who was made immortal as a kind of bet. Every hundred years Dream would visit this man and ask him if he still wanted to be immortal. This person had through centuries gone through incredible heights and lows of all life had to offer, but always returned that question with “Dying’s a Fools Game.”

After a number of these meetings this person accused Dream of making an immortal man to be someone Dream could talk to. The general idea being that Dream as an anthropomorphic entity was timeless and all relationships with mortal beings were fleeting. Dream could not make any meaningful connection in this capacity, so having a person who never died, who he could talk to, was a way to be less lonely. Dream refused this assertion, saying such thing was the morality of man and not god. So the man said, ‘Okay Duder, tell you what, you meet me again in 100 years and you admit you’re lonely. I never see you again and you were right.”

The next scene is 100 years later, Dream walking into their meeting place and conceding the man was correct and his friend.

I’m reminded of this as I’m watching the midway part of the Cowboy Bebop, where Faye runs off and Spike leaves the ship with Jet telling him to stay gone. We learn Faye ran off because she didn’t want to be abandoned first. Spike ran off because his past was haunting him. Jet ran after Faye because she stole all the money in the safe and he wanted it back.

But we learn there was basically nothing in the safe and it was a pretense for Jet to keep his reluctant family together. He tells Faye that while she stole their money and trashed their ship, she left both his and Spikes vehicles intake and wondered if this was just a test to see if someone would care enough to try to find her.

Spike doesn’t find his girl, doesn’t take his revenge, doesn’t get his bounty, but at the end of the day returns to the Bebop because he had nowhere else to go. Jet was waiting for him and tells him to come aboard because they’re heading out.

I’m not sure I really understood or appreciate the dynamic between these characters before. In Once and Future King, there is a chapter from the author describing Guenever as a difficult character to write because they were complex. To explain this the author said that a character’s action could go against their motivation. In writing, we create motivational through-lines to make sense of the actions our characters take. It would be pretty awful writing to just throw in a random character turn, where they decide they’re going to be evil or throw away things they’ve been working towards. However, people are complex and in real life we don’t always do things that make sense.

Writing complex, real characters is difficult. They have to be very well written, they have to have undertones and subtext that go far beyond just their words and actions. And if you write them well enough, then you can have them do things that may not be logical, but will still make sense.

Jet telling Spike to come on board, even though he is pissed and disappointed and rejected, he is also happy and relieved. This scene more than anything else speaks towards what it means to be family. What it means to be community. What it means to have a home to go to.

Track Six: The World Truly Is

Track Seven: I mentioned it a bit ago, but one of my favorite episodes is when Jet and Spike travel to the ruins of a mall to find a beta max player. The original reason I liked this episode was because it really encapsulates this sense of exploration and wonder that defines the series and builds the world.

It didn’t hit as hard for me this time, because I think I recognize and appreciate these elements more in the other episodes. What did spark my interest was the notion of this destroyed earth. You don’t get a super clear picture of the cause, but presumably an astrogate exploded, took out a big chunk of the moon, and now earth is riddled with meteor showers on the daily.

Life still happens on the planet, but it is just as much in ruins as anything else. The space cowboys and people on the frontier refer to the place with a sort of disdain, a trouble not worth visiting and I can’t help but see this as an actual believable future for our species.

I don’t have any real information on this, but I wonder how often mediums explore a future of normalcy, prosperity, or ruin and how these thoughts change over time. I wonder if given our current climate, if we’re more invested in exploring stories showing the future ruin of society because of the despair we personally experience now. A story of life continuing pass this ruin is in a way the realistic optimism we’re allowed to have. We may not figure shit out, we may not have a utopia, we may lose most of all we’ve come to know and create in the present day, but maybe we’ll figure out something else and life will go on.

Maybe we will get off this planet and get on other worlds and continue the legacy of stories from the start of humans. I think what I really appreciate about this world building is just that. It is the hope that exists within these ruins and the exploration, wonder, and moxie life still has after all these decades.

Track Eight: I think one of the cooler things about Cowboy Bebop is they never fully flush out the backstory of the characters involved. Every time we do visit the characters past, it is never with the contrived purpose of making sense of the present. Too often in media we get the flashback story as a sort of magicians trick to reveal the meaning and context of present action. We are suppose to at the end go ‘ahhh, so that explains it’.

There isn’t anything super wrong with this kind of story delivery, but it’s incredibly simplistic and overused. It feels more like a story by numbers, than the artistic expression of natural story telling.

In this episode Spike is getting his ship repaired by an old pilot/mechanic. There is no context to their relationship that is told to us by exposition. You as the viewer are left to understand what bonds probably exist between this pair by the language of their bodies and words they exchange.

We are left in most episodes to infer the meaning and relationship between characters and through doing this we are more invested in the story because we are participants in creating it. The creator said in an interview he doesn’t like giving direct answers about the show, because then those answers become cannon. He wants the story to exist as it is and be up to the individual to understand the story. While I feel like this is often used as a cop out, where authors want to be over appealing to a broad audience, I think in this case it is valid and sincere.

This also all harks back to the central theme of exploration. We are not only exploring the ruins of the future, the technological marvels of space gates and colonies, the diverse and prolific expression of culture, but also the personality and lives of the characters on bebop.

Track Nine: I have a soft spot for arrogance to absurdity. In this scene Andy is toasting to himself, but then also to his reflection in Faye’s eyes.

Track Ten: Jeff

Track Eleven: Ein was the first speed runner in anime history. This is historic.

Track Twelve: It was really hard choosing a specific image to capture this episode, because it densely delivers across the entirety of it. This scene here is the result of Faye drawing a bed in the dirt of the ruins that was once her home and laying in it.

After all of this time she finally remember who she was and in that memory found a place to be. She tells Ed there is nothing better than the feeling of belonging and she is leaving the Bebop now that she found it.

As she runs up the hill to the mansion of her family, we keep cutting between the colorful past and the gritty present. The joy she has as a young girl and the young woman running back to the place that was her home, juxtaposed to the hopeful desperation of her adult self aiming to recapture what was lost.

She discovers it is all gone though and the only thing she can do is draw a bed in the ground and capture to the smallest extent an existence that is truly and forever gone.

This episode has both Faye and Ed deciding to leave the strange chosen family of the bebop for the familiarity or promise of the one assigned at birth. Characteristically neither says goodbye and in the span of a day Jet and Spike are left back where they started. As men, knowing nothing else, they eat eggs with reckless abandoned to stuff that discomfort and loss.

While this is a very thematically appropriate episode, it is also a painful one. Everything changes, even the bonds we form, but for a time there was a sort of family and stability on the Bebop and to see that go is sad. I’m inclined to say this is the most powerful episode of the series — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj5zvVwAmQI

This episode is one that’s especially difficult to come back to when you’re an adult, if you watched this show as a teenager. Intellectually I could grasp and capture the elements of the show, but I was too young to know what it was like to lose everyone in your life and have to build that back. I didn’t really have a ‘past’ then that I could have a relationship with in any capacity whether it be regret, longing, or haunted by. And while most people haven’t had that level of loss, I have — and the notes this song hits resonate a somber deeper and more complex than I could ever really hope to describe in words.

Those two men eating eats eggs aggressive is as powerful a scene of loss as anything you can imagine. It isn’t clutching your lover in the rain as they die, it isn’t crying or wailing towards the heavens because Goku is stronger than you, it isn’t how we normally see loss portrayed in media, but it is how we see loss portrayed in real life. We can feel this, we can imagine ourselves doing it, we understand exactly this level of real loss because this scene is real. I have to assume the writers involved took this from their own memory, because I doubt a writer would ever think to create this scene out of the ether.

Track Thirteen: I thought after such an overwhelming powerful episode, what could possibly top it? Behold, the only bar I find appealing.

Track Fourteen: The final shot of Cowboy Bebop is Spike taking a casual nap, which signifies the chill smooth jazz and water flow of the world they live. One major drawback to me talking about this show is that it is inspired so much by music that I don’t really have the ability to appreciate in a significant way. It isn’t because it is jazz, I just don’t have any aptitude for music in general. I can’t appreciate the layered subtlety completely intertwined and transformative for both the animation and the story.

I mean, I’ve read about it, I understand it is there, I unconsciously benefit from it, but I’m not the person who can untangle all of these elements to really understand how they combine to create something more than the sum of its parts. I know world building, I know characterization, I can work my way through artistic animation and filmography of sequence, but music is for people with a better ear. Simply put, I don’t grok it.

I want to address this because is an incredibly important aspect that I’m always going to unconsciously downplay because my interests are elsewhere, but back to those. The final sequence of this anime is Spike confronting his past and it is honestly one of the weakest parts of this show. Vicious and Julia are both extremely one dimensional past mcguffins and even though we’ve heard their names littered throughout the series, nothing actually captures us as the audience to give one shit about them. The entire two part conflict just feels like a weaker plot arc that could’ve happened literally anywhere in the show. The movie was honestly better in basically every regard and I feel like serves as a better ending to the series.

And here is the extremely weird part for me. I completely hated Mushishi because there was no fucking plot anywhere. I felt like it was just a bunch of vignettes and sequences and isolated stories that added up to just itself. I think I probably wasn’t in the right place to enjoy it when I watched it. I like a structured narrative to story, even if loosely. I want things to go somewhere to establish a foundation from which we can appreciate the extra or filler more.

But watching this anime now, where Spike is implicitly a lite protagonist and the structure of the plot is loosely his past catching up to him, I don’t think any of it is needed. These characters, these episodes, this world is better served by being water. In short my recommendation is skip the last two episodes and watch the movie.

And it’s kind of a bummer to leave on a sour note for a show that was really a masterpiece, but that’s also kind of how it goes. The show does end with a literal bang, but the final episode is more of a fade out within music, characterization, and animation. The reward and appeal of this show isn’t in the conclusion it is in the exploration, the journey, the sound and ambience of everything in it. It was an Experience with a capital E. It was something incredible, something special, something that really meant something to a lot of folks who watched it. It was the real folk blues.