Overthinking Cowboy Bebop: Sessions 1-5

Howdy, y’all!  It’s good to be back, it really is.  Hope you missed me.  Since it’s been almost a month since the introductory installment, you might want to give it a quick once over, especially if you don’t really know the show. And a quick reminder:  while you can say anything you want about episodes 1-5 in the comments now, don’t go spoiling the later ones.  At least not much.  Like I said last time, I’m not totally sure that Cowboy Bebop is a show that the concept of “spoilers” really applies to.

In typical “Overthinking X” fashion, I’m going to begin with a quick plot summary a long plot summary of the particular episodes in question.  And actually, for the first one, I’m going to go into some pretty extensive detail.  A problem that I can see myself having to deal with a lot, writing about this show, is that a lot of the important stuff is in the details, and it’s hard to talk about the details in isolation.  We could be looking at some mammoth posts here, people.  I’ll try to keep a lid on it in the future.  For today, just settle in.  You might want to get a snack.

1:  Asteroid Blues
Before the credits, we get our first tease of the Mysterious Tragic Past of Spike Spiegel.  This is atmospheric as hell:  a silent montage of breaking glass, dripping blood, rose petals, birds, dudes standing back to back with guns, all jumbled up in a montage set to a haunting and melancholic celesta melody.  The overall effect is like John Woo sneezing into a music-box.  While it’s pretty hard to tell what’s going on, it is fairly clear that the battle ends with our boy Spike getting shot to death.  Before the credits.  Of the first episode.  But apparently he got better, because after the title sequence, and a leisurely montage of spaceships coming out of hyperspace near a terraformed asteroid, the camera makes its way inside the good ship BeBop (sic), where we find Jet Black sauteeing some mushrooms and peppers, and Spike practicing kung-fu in the dark.

Jet calls Spike to dinner, offering him “special beef with bell peppers.”  Spike screams bloody murder over the fact that there isn’t actually any beef in it.  Jet explains that they can’t afford beef, because they spent all the money they made last time fixing the damage to their equipment.  In most shows, this would be throwaway dialogue, but here I think it’s kind of important.  Not having enough food, or not having good enough food, or not being happy enough with the food that you have – because Jet’s vegetable stir fry actually looks pretty appetizing, for a drawing – is a leitmotif that Cowboy Bebop will continue to lean on for the duration of its run. Also, the fact that the crew of the Bebop is caught in a sharecropper-like cycle of debt has a symbolic value that will become clear later on.  (Interestingly, the soundtrack here is sharecropping music, all slide guitar and mournful harmonica.  This might be accidental, though… it’s not the most obvious connection to make, especially for the a non-American audience.)
Meanwhile, in the plot proper, we are introduced to renegade drug dealer Asimov Solensan and his pregnant girlfriend Katerina.  Solensan has stolen a massive cache of drugs off his mafia associates and is trying to unload the merchandise so that they can start a new life on Mars.  So let’s see, he’s a drug dealer trying to make one last big score before leaving the game for good, and she’s hoping to leave an impoverished dust bowl for the deep space equivalent of a farm where they can raise rabbits and live offa the fatta the lan’, AND she’s pregnant… yeah. This will end well.

A classic story.  But here’s the little wrinkle:  the drug dealer isn’t just peddling cocaine, or even Space Cocaine™.  He’s got a load of eyedrops that give you crazy superhuman reflexes and strength.  His mafia bosses keep sending squads of hitmen after him, but he just dips into his stash, hulks up, and mops the floor with them.  When Spike first bumps into Solensan, he declines to take him in because there’s no challenge in it.  But once he learns that his target is an unstoppable roid-fueled juggernaut, well, that sounds like a job for Spike Spiegel!  (This would feel more heroic if he hadn’t spent the entire first act bitching his partner out for not having enough money to buy steak.  Dude. If you’re going to turn your nose up at the easy money, don’t complain about being poor!)

Spike tracks Solensan down again, and they have what turns out to be a pretty awesome fight, if you like over the top slow motion bullet-time kung fu (and really who doesn’t?)  It’s not clear to me whether Spike prevents Roidy Mcgee from taking his magic eyedrops, or whether Spike is just so badass that it doesn’t matter, but either way, Spike is winning when the Mafia shows up with machine guns and scares everyone off.  Solensan’s pregnant gal pal Katerina lays down suppressing fire, catches a round, and turns out not to be pregnant after all.   And then the awesome kung-fu battle segues into awesome flying car chase.  Eventually, Katerina realizes that they’re not getting away – Spike is overtaking them, and there’s a huge police roadblock at the hyperspace gate, which I guess is the equivalent of the Mexican border…IN SPACE!! – so she makes meaningful eye contact Spike, and then shoots her boyfriend in the head, seconds before their spaceship explodes in a hail of gunfire.

The epilogue finds Spike and Jet back on the Bebop, practicing kung-fu and cooking bell peppers.  Cut.  Print.

Something very interesting happen here, that set a pattern for the rest of the episodes.

1) The things that feel the most badass, usually don’t make a lick of sense.  Why did Katerina shoot Solensan?  It’s framed as a mercy killing, but I don’t see how his death is any less painful (or honestly, any different) from her own death, like, two seconds later.  Why doesn’t Spike take Solensan in when he first finds him, strung out and vomiting in a gas station bathroom?  I’m not really complaining about this — I have nothing against things that feel badass — I’m just pointing it out.

2) Everything works out for the worst for everybody.  Spike and Jet don’t get their bounty.  Solensan and Katerina don’t get to go to Mars.  The gangsters don’t get their drugs back.  I guess the police were able to successfully blow up an escaping fugitive?  Wooooo-hoooooo.  There’s a lot on the surface of Cowboy Bebop that screams Fun! Cool!, but right under the surface there’s a sense of futility that borders on nihilism.  When people say that the show is influenced by film noir, I think this is what they’re really talking about.  If anything, it’s closer in tone to the deconstructed neo-noir of the 1970s — you know, Chinatown and the like.  And the soundtrack during the car chase sequence, with a meditative saxophone noodling over a bed of moody synths, is very evocative of the Chinatown soundtrack, which I don’t think is a mistake.

3) Speaking of the music, something really interesting happens at the beginning of the fight scene.  The deconstructed delta blues that’s dominated the soundtrack so far turns into a high energy big band tune, more or less in the style of the opening credits song, and as a result, the fight scene is disconnected from the rest of the episode.  And this is how the action scenes (fight, chase, what have you) in Cowboy Bebop usually work.  In fact, this is arguably the way that any action sequence has ever worked, in anything.  They’re sort of like the songs in Glee, or the slapstick in a Chaplin movie, in that they are completely disconnected from the story but at the same time they’re pretty much the reason to watch the story in the first place.  As with much else, Cowboy Bebop takes this narrative trope and makes it obvious and self-conscious.  Every episode I’ve watched so far has had at least one extended action sequence, and regardless of whether they have any bearing on the plot, they’re always carefully bracketed on the soundtrack.

Whew!  Okay, now a much shorter recap of the other episodes.

2)  Stray Dog Strut

The Bounty of the Week is Abdul Hakim, a serial pet thief.  He’s stolen Ein, an extremely valuable “Data Dog” – if you’re confused, don’t worry, because I checked wikipedia and they NEVER explain what this means – and as a result there’s a whopping price on his head.  Spike and Jet don’t get the bounty, but they do wind up holding the dog.  Who is apparently worth millions.  And they know this.  But selling him never occurs to them.  So apparently Ein can control people’s minds?   I dunno, he is pretty cute.  This episode has tons of weirdly specific references to the Bruce Lee movie Game of Death – also known as “The one where Bruce fights Kareem Abdul Jabbar.”  There’s also a weird, grating moment where Abdul Hakim’s ethnicity is referred to as “Negloid,” which I guess is less problematic to the original Japanese audience, but to Americans reads as a kind of recursively racist combination plate of insensitive description of African heritage and insensitive depiction of Japanese accent. On the bright side, it also contains my favorite supporting character so far, who I call “Turtle-head-black-market-pet-store-lady.”

3)  Honky-Tonk Woman

Here we meet Faye Valentine.  All we learn about her so far is that she’s good at cards and cultivates an air of mystery, because already in this first appearance we hear two flatly contradictory accounts of what her deal is.  She’s in deep with the mobbed-up owner of a deep space casino, who is using her to facilitate the turnover of a secret encryption key hidden inside a poker chip carried by a courier with the same hair color and same one suit that Spike always wears by… aaaaAAAAGH! so okay, you’re seeing what I mean about parts of this show not making any damn sense.  The mafia guys want the encryption key to be turned over in the course of a poker game to avoid attracting attention, so presumably it’s incriminating for them to ever be in the same room as the courier.  But they have no problem kidnapping, torturing, and whacking said courier when the deal doesn’t go down as planned?  And rather than just have the guy bet the chip on something and lose, they plan for him to start gambling, win huge, blow everything but the chip on one last hand, and then offer it to the dealer as a tip?  And then, rather than use their most trusted dealer for this plan, they use a notoriously unreliable outsider that they brought in because of her quasi-mystical skill at cards – quasi-mystical skill which, remember, is totally useless because the guy isn’t even supposed to bet the chip in the first place?  What. Ev. Er.  Credit where it’s due, though, the climax – where our heroes make a failed and double-crossy attempt to sell the chip back to the mobsters – is a tremendous set piece, with some seriously excellent zero-gee choreography and another badass hard-driving jazz cue to go with it.  At the end, the mobsters blow up their own ship. Faye waltzes off with the money, because in this episode she’s a guest character:  one episode later she will join the Bebop’s crew, and never succeed at anything ever again. Spike and Jet end up with the chip, but rather than sell it and become millionaires, they decide to just get rid of it, presumably because the technology is too dangerous to fall into the wrong hands.  Specifically, they decide to hide the chip by wandering into another casino and betting it on roulette.  Which is poetic, but — if you’re really committed to keeping the technology out of the wrong hands — like, really, unbelievably stupid when compared to other options such as flinging the chip into the pitiless vacuum of space, or into the sun, or hell, just smashing it with a hammer.  Yeah, what better place to lose a chip than in a casino, I know, but if space casinos are anything like the Vegas kind, those chips are all labeled, so finding the encryption chip is less like looking for a needle in a haystack and more like looking for a needle marked “Luxor” in a pile of hay that’s all marked “Caesar’s Palace.”
Okay, so this was not my favorite episode.  But Faye’s an interesting character, and I guess they had to introduce her somehow.  Musically, this one is noteworthy because it introduces a little honky-tonk piano tag that will keep coming back in one guise or another in almost every episode from now on.  This is important enough that I might even transcribe it for you in a later post, but I’ve got other things on my mind this week, so let’s move on.

4)  Gateway Shuffle

This episode is on craaaaaack!  Okay, so there are these radical eco-terrorists, the Space Warriors, and they are seriously upset at the government of Ganymede, because they keep hunting a “gentle and intelligent” animal called “The Ganymede Sea Rat” for food, just because it’s a cultural tradition.  (And at this point, we all probably start wondering if Ganymede is supposed to stand in for Japan, and the Sea Rat for whales.)  To make their point, the Space Warriors have engineered a retrovirus called “Monkey Business,” which, we are told (at first), acts on the two percent of human DNA that is different from Monkey DNA.  Then we very quickly learn that the effect is to turn people into monkeys.  Hilarious.  And I might add:  craaack.

Spike and Jet capture the Space Warriors’ leader, but her underlings threaten to unleash the virus on Ganymede if she isn’t released immediately.  They do release her, but she just launches the virus anyway, and then it’s up to Spike and Faye to chase down the missile in hyperspace and blow it up before it hits the planet.  Only they don’t manage to do it, and the government decides to fix the problem by shutting down the hyperspace gate instead, almost trapping our heroes inside.  And at the very end, the Space Warriors end up hoisted on their own petard, trapped in hyperspace and monkified (which is probably preferable, at least in terms of boredom and despair, to being trapped in hyperspace and unmonkified).  Faye – who is still a valuable bounty head in her own right – just sort of invites herself into the main cast of characters, and the guys – who just minutes before had her tied up in the brig pending transfer to police custody – just sort of go along with it.  She goes off take a shower.  Spike gets annoyed by this, and follows her with the intention of giving her a piece of his mind.  We hear Faye scream as he walks in on her, and then gunshots.  Jet stifles a rueful laugh, the subtext being “Oh, that Spike.  Always getting shot in the head.”

5)   Ballad for Fallen Angels

Spike learns that an old friend from his Mysterious Tragic Past™ (which, we now  learn, is mafia related) has been murdered.  He immediately suspects his old brother in arms, a sword-wielding psychopath by the name of Vicious.  Jet suspects that it’s all actually a trap for Spike. Narrative convention being what it is, they are both right.   Meanwhile, Faye goes to the opera looking for a bounty, and ends up captured.  (The scene in the opera box, where Spike’s old friend’s corpse is propped up watching the show, is one of the most awesome and most nonsensical to grace the show so far.  Even if you were going to set up this elaborate trap at the opera, why bring the corpse with you?  Especially when your whole plan hinges on people still thinking he’s alive?)  Spike goes to rescue her, and the last ten minutes play like a miniature animated John Woo movie:  shootouts in an abandoned church, Mexican standoffs, gratuitous slow motion bird and/or feather shots, face melting guitar solos… the whole deal.   (Actually the guitar solo isn’t really a John Woo thing, but it’s undeniably awesome.)

It ends with a flashback montage, as Spike, shot and stabbed, does a reverse swan dive through the rose window of an exploding church. (!!) We see a brief flashbacks of his earlier life as a mafia enforcer.  We’ve already seen some of these, actually – the rose dropping into a puddle, for instance – in the teaser introduction to the very first episode.  And just like the music there sort of sounded like a music box, so does the music here…. although other than sounding like music boxes, the pieces aren’t at all alike.  (And this in itself is sort of a neat trick – making a musical reference without repeating the melody, harmony, or instrumentation of the original is not exactly easy.)  The flashback ends with Spike’s memory of being nursed back to health by a mysterious and beautiful… baker? Or something? who sang to him while he was laid up in a full body cast.  This cuts back to the present, on board the BeBop, where Spike is once again laid up in a full body cast, and Faye is singing the same song.  The symbolism is clear:  she’s going to be his love interest.  Or possibly his baker.  She opens herself up to him a little by saying she was worried, he insults her singing (this comes off a lot more dickish than I think it was meant to), and she clobbers him with a pillow.  Cue the honky-tonk piano theme, and the end of the episode.

Okay.  Deep breath.  I have three points that I want to make here, and I don’t really have time to integrate them, or expand on them as much as I’d like to.  Next post I write about this, I’ll probably spend less time recapping the episodes and more getting into the analysis, because honestly, the people who have read this far will have already seen the series, and anyway the name of the site isn’t Overdescribingit.

First:  Jouissance

So yeah, apparently I couldn’t make it one full post into this series before I alienate everyone by talking about Lacan.  But this is Lacan-lite, I promise.   Jouissance is a French word that’s a little difficult to translate:  it means something like enjoyment, but with faintly racy overtones.  Maybe ecstasy would be better, although jouissance doesn’t carry the same connotation of an extremely strong sensation.  In Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, jouissance is what we feel when our carefully constructed symbolic representation of the world slips for a second and instead we experience the world as it actually is.  It’s not necessarily a pleasurable sensation – it can take the form of fear, nausea, boredom, or what-you-will – but jouissance works as a descriptor because there’s that hint of animalistic irrationality about it.  (Now, there’s a LOT that’s wrong with this description, especially the phrase “the world as it actually is,” but there’s not much to be gained for our purposes by going into more detail.)  For people who write about aesthetics from a Lacanian perspective, jouissance becomes a really critical concept, because you can make the argument that creating moments of jouissance is what Art, big-A Art, is really all about.  This idea (or something very much like it) is actually quite a bit older than Lacan:  don’t we all pretty much accept that art speaks to the emotions or to the spirit first, and the intellect second if at all?

My take on Cowboy Bebop has to do with those strangely detached action sequences.  The episodes are neatly divided:  on one side, you have the plot, characters, motivation, and all the other rational elements of narrative fiction.  On the other, you have these extended set pieces that are about nothing more (and nothing less!) than looking and sounding cool.  And the sense of exhilaration and excitement that these scenes can create when they’re done well is pure audio-visual jouissance.  You get this most obviously in the fight scenes, but not only there.  The best example, for me, comes from Stray Dog Strut, where Abdul Hakim is chasing Ein through a market and stops to throw fruit at him.

This picture doesn’t really get the effect across at all.  What makes the segment truly surreal is the way the fruit moves, because it’s not really in the same three dimensional space as the dog.  None of it hits him – none of it even hits the pavement!  Rather, it just moves from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen.  All of this is over in a second, so when you’re watching it you don’t have time to realize what’s weird about the motion. You just register it as weird, as motion that’s outside of the symbolic framework that governs our sense of how things are supposed to move. And this – call it jouissance, or anything else – is what makes the scene work, and arguably what makes the show work.

Second:  Discipline.

In any work of art, there’s a power dynamic between the creators and the audience.  The writers control what the audience sees, and when.  Some are very kind:  showing the audience what they want to see whenever they want to see it.  Some make us work a little more.  The creative team behind Cowboy Bebop are some sadistic controlling bastards. I don’t mean that they make the show unpleasant to watch.  I just mean that the constant withholding of critical information and images is part of what makes the show what it is. Consider the stuff they keep back:

•  We don’t get to see Katerina shooting Solensan (we just see the aftermath)
•  We don’t get to know why Ein is so important
•  We don’t get to see Spike and Faye’s poker game (instead, we get an oblique montage of casino-related imagery)
•  We don’t get to see the Space Warriors turning into apes (we just cut away after the vial shatters)
•  We don’t get to know what motivates Vicious’ power play within the crime syndicate
•  And hey, while we’re on the subject of character motivations, we don’t get a reliable one of these for ANY of the main characters, at least not yet.  One it’s own, this one is pretty normal for early in the run of a series.  But as part of a pattern, it begins to look like something more than narrative convention.  As part of this pattern, even the fact that the heroes never collect on a bounty starts to look like some kind of sick game.

The most interesting version, again, comes from Stray Dog Strut.   At the end of one of the chases, Spike and Abdul Hakim confront eachother on a bridge.  They’ve both been established as unspeakably badass martial artists.  Surely we’re in for the kung-fu fight of the century, right?  Remember, this is the second episode, and a big chunk of the first episode was devoted to kung fu, so at this point, it looks like Cowboy Bebop is basically a kung fu show.  Especially since this episode has been dropping references to Bruce Lee and Game of Death at a rate of about one per minute.   So what happens?  Well, they fight for a second or two.  But the camera stays focused on Ein the whole time.  All we see is their feet shifting around, and occasionally zipping out of frame as one of them tries for a roundhouse kick.  Okay, but surely that’s just the teaser, right?  After all, that was in the first act.  The final act will have the kung fu battle to end all kung fu battles, right?  Wrong.  Abdul Hakim crashes his car and gets arrested without confronting Spike again.

The writers used the second episode of the show to frustrate the expectations created by the first episode of the show.  Hardcore.

Third:  Formalism

Isn’t it interesting how different Ballad for Fallen Angels is from everything that came before it?  This is maybe the most obvious point to make about the show, but no less worth making.  It’s the first episode where we learn anything about Spike’s past.  It’s also the first episode where he kills people.  (In the earlier fight scenes, he would cheerfully jumpkick a guy with a machine gun, apparently just for the fun of it.  In this one, he just shoots a whole bunch of people, and he’s quite businesslike about it.)  It’s the first episode where Spike displays emotion about anything or anyone other than himself:  whether he goes to rescue Faye because he doesn’t want her hurt or whether he just wants a chance to kill Vicious is an open question, but either way someone’s getting through to him.  More trivially, it’s the first episode where the title card doesn’t have music (instead we get the sound of Vicious’ pet bird squawking), and I think the first where the little graphic that tells us we’re coming back from the commercial break doesn’t get any sound at all.  It’s certainly the first episode where the awesome action scene has no music.  The big musical set pieces here are reserved for the moments before and after the attack:  Spike marching into the church and falling out of the window.  During the fight itself, all we hear is gunfire.
So basically where the first four episodes are light, even frothy, the last one is as serious as a heart attack.   In fact, it’s so serious that it almost wraps its way around to being silly again… or at least, serious enough that it violates narrative causality in that wonderful jouissance-provoking way. The “In the Rain” song in the video above is a great example of this, as is the scene in the opera box.  When Faye turns and sees Mao Yenrai’s corpse, propped up in a chair with blood smeared down his face, eyes open as if he was watching the show, I don’t mind telling you that a chill ran down my spine.   So as different as this episode is, it is still recognizably Cowboy Bebop.  It still does trade on these little moments of surrealism.  It still does have a bad-ass action sequence.  It does still end with the honky tonk piano riff established in episode three.

In the comment thread for the last of these posts, Mlawski said that the story of Cowboy Bebop develops more like music than like a traditional narrative.  Let’s lean on that metaphor a little.  When you’re making an extended musical form, you only have two basic tools:  repetition and variation.  That is, each time you write a section of music, you have the option of 1) doing the same thing you just did again, and 2) doing something else.  A third important technique (really just a version of the first two) is to do something, do something else for a little while, and then bring the first thing back.  This is grotesquely oversimplified, but whatever.  It does tend to play out in the way that actual musical forms work, whether it’s something relatively simple, like an ABAB song form, or something relatively complex, like Sonata form, which I would need a whole other post to even inadequately explain.  The point though, is that it’s possible to make interesting and important shapes even if you never alter your basic building blocks at all, and even if the blocks don’t have “meaning” in the same way that stories typically have meaning.

Okay, so you see where I’m going with this, right?  If Cowboy Bebop was a piece of music, the first four episodes would be variations on a single theme.  The fifth episode would be a contrasting theme.  We can probably expect a tug of war between these tendencies to play out over the duration of the show — possibly within individual episodes, but more likely (I’m guessing) between the different episodes.  We’ll get a light one here, a dark one there, etc. and the pattern of light and dark that this creates will eventually determine the overall shape of the series.  It will be interesting to see which one wins out in the end… and also whether there are any episodes that don’t fit into either category.

All right.  Nothing more to see here, until you add it in the comments.