Overthinking Cowboy Bebop: Session 19

[Sorry, Jet, only one episode this time.  But on the bright side, you also get to hear my Grand Unified Theory of Cowboy Bebop™!  Expect to see a post on the rest of the episodes from this disc sometime soon, and then I’ll close out this series in July by writing up the last disc of episodes and giving the good people at Fox some friendly and sure-to-be-ignored advice about how to not wreck the thing when they make a movie out of it. – Stokes]

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, ”I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, ”As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.” – Umberto Eco

Cowboy Bebop starts off as a goofy action show.  Kung-fu, wisecracks, car chases, and spaceship dogfights are the order of the day.  About a quarter of the way into the series’ run, it turns into a stylish neo-noir (with occasional dips into magic-realism), concerned with honor, debt, and the importance of keeping one and paying the other in a world rife with moral decay.  Another quarter of the way through, and it turns into a subversion of that same noir morality, in which honor is revealed as empty pride, and debts are shown to corrupt both the debtor and the debtee.  And now, as we head down the home stretch, it becomes…

Well, none of the above, and all of them.  It would probably be more accurate to say that Cowboy Bebop has always been all of these things at once, although I do think that an average viewer would probably notice the goofiness more at the beginning, and so on.  That doesn’t mean that nothing has changed though.  Like I said in the my very first post on the subject, Cowboy Bebop is a piece of iterative art.  Running through the motions – a giant failure in most narrative forms – is here an important and constructive way of creating meaning.  It’s only fitting that a show whose plots are always about shadows reaching up out of the past should depend so thoroughly on the audience’s memories.

19) The presence and importance of the past is amply on display in the episode under consideration today, Wild Horses.  The story is a little bit scattershot, but I’ll try to give you the broad strokes.  Spike is off trying to get his spaceship tuned up by Doohan, a reclusive genius who basically fills the role of the Yoda character in Star Wars, or the Hattori Hanzo character in Kill Bill, or the Invisible Swordsman character in The Three Amigos, except instead of training Jedi, or making swords, or getting shot by Chevy Chase, he’s a spaceship mechanic.  Meanwhile, Jet and Faye chase down a band of space carjackers who have perfected a computer virus that can incapacitate any spaceship.  (N.B. the show refers to these guys as “space pirates,” but I reject this term because it implies a level of awesomeness not evident in the text.  There’s nothing nautical about these guys.  Well, they do transmit their virus by harpoon… space whalers?)   After Spike gets his ship fixed, and Jet and Faye get utterly schooled, all three of them unite to take the pirates carjackers down.

A normal show (i.e. one that trades on fantasies of masculine empowerment) would probably end with Spike blasting the carjackers out of the sky, after saying something like “Now, you will face the power of this fully operational Swordfish II,” or worse, “Leaving so soon? Oh well, I guess I’ll see you laser!” This is not what happens.  Instead, Spike flies juuuust well enough so that the carjackers end up accidentally harpooning themselves seconds after they harpoon him, and both crippled ships go careening into Earth’s gravity well.  From this point, a normal show would probably have had Spike and the carjackers having to put aside their differences and join forces to escape… but this being Cowboy Bebop, the carjackers instantly collide with an asteroid and explode.  (No bounty for you, protagonists.  Sorry!)  Then there’s one more big action sequence where Doohan comes charging to Spike’s rescue.  This is important, and we’ll come back to it in a bit.  First, let’s talk about this episode’s major symbolic theme, which is:  old junk is better than new crap.

I Repeat:  Old Junk is Better Than New Crap

But pithy though that is, it doesn’t really capture the idea I’m getting at, so let me give you an example from my own life.  Modern cell phones are (smartphones excepted), what I would call “new crap.”  They are flimsy little bits of plastic, cluttered with adware, and with features that I don’t have any use for, and with hideous, hideous pixel art.  They are designed to break in a couple of years so that you buy a new one (or rather, so that you sign up for another binding contract).  Now, contrast this to the first cell phone I ever had:  the Nokia 3310.  This was by no means a glamorous phone.  Its silhouette can be most charitably described as post-communist chic, its sound processor could only process one waveform (a sawtooth wave that sounded like a duck giving birth to an oboe), and its screen was black and white lcd with a resolution of something like 10×20.  It was old junk.  And it lasted more than five years. Eventually the screen gave out, but the casing still looks like it did when I bought it.  Unlike my current phone, which I routinely fail to notice ringing, the Nokia was loud and vibrated like an off-balance washing machine.  If I could find one, I would trade in my current phone for a Nokia Brick any day of the week.  Appliances were appliances back in the old days!  And we had to walk five miles to school!  Uphill both ways!  Get off my damn lawn, you whippersnappers!  Etc. etc.

While I’m sure that my old phone wasn’t actually all that great, my whole point here was to illustrate how powerful nostalgia can be:  it doesn’t matter whether old junk is actually better than new crap, what matters is that this is so easy to believe.

Anyway, Wild Horses trades on this idea heavily.  On the level of the plot, the crew are able to hold their own against the pirates only after they shut off their fancy new “monocomputers” (which are crippled by the virus), and start navigating via “an old communications satellite” and communicating by walkie-talkie.  We see Jet fly into a rage after the carjackers call his ship an old junkheap.   We’re treated to shots of Spike and Jet’s ships looking much the worse for wear.  Doohan is constantly shooting down his assistant Miles’ suggestions for ways to modernize Spike’s ship.  Miles is a devoted fan of the Blue Socks, a baseball team whose glory days are long behind them.  And Doohan is pretty damn grizzled in his own right.  See, everything worthwhile is totally beat up!

But two images in particular are worth paying closer attention to. First, this is what a monocomputer looks like.  Forget for a minute that, within the specific plot of the show, these are less useful than “old fashioned” 20th century computers.  Focus instead on the fact that the cuttingest edge technology of Cowboy Bebop’s universe…

… operates on freaking punch cards.  Sometimes, old junk will be the best tool for the job.

Second, take a look at this little doohickey.

It’s a broken piece of Spike’s spaceship that Doohan replaces in the first half of the episode.  By any rational standard this is trash… and yet, Spike hangs onto it, and it ends up saving his life:  he uses it to carve an HUD into the inside of his cockpit, allowing him to make some precise and crucial adjustments to his orbital path, in a move apparently based on the real life exploits of astronaut Gordon Cooper.

But as is my wont, I’ve been saving the big one for last.  Doohan and Miles fly up to rescue Spike at the end of the episode, right?  And what do they fly up to rescue him in?

When we first meet Doohan, Spike makes some comment about how he’s “still trying to get that old antique airborne.”  Could mean anything, really.  And then there are some visual hints.  (Note that when you’re actually watching the show, you only get to see these images for, like, a second each.)

Okay, everyone write down your guesses.  Then click to the next page.

Okay, maybe the fact that it’s the Columbia is a little unfortunate, and you can understand why they pulled it from US circulation for a while after the disaster.  But you can also understand why they do air it in reruns today.  Cowboy Bebop was made well before the Columbia disaster, and this episode is such an unabashed love letter to the idea of spaceflight that I can’t imagine someone finding it disrespectful.  (Disrespectful, no.  Morbid, however… Just as the episode ends Doohan is grumbling about how reentry is going to be dangerous because of damage to the insulating tiles.  So yikes.)

One of the things I’ve talked about in these posts is the way that the Cowboy Bebop show runners like to withhold certain crucial scenes and pieces of information from the audience.  With this episode, I think that’s beginning to shift.  Granted, we don’t get to actually see their death-defying landing – instead, we just see the picture of it hanging up on Doohan’s wall.  Still, they could have left us hanging in space, and they didn’t do that.  More to the point, look at the way the secret of Doohan’s “hobby” is teased throughout the episode, before being revealed in a veritable orgasm of hermeneutic closure.  Wild Horses seems to mark a fundamental change in the show’s approach to the revealing of secrets.  As we close in on the ending, the show is beginning to provide answers on both smaller and larger levels.  The outstanding large questions being:

•  What the heck is Faye’s deal, anyway?
•  What the heck is Ed’s deal, anyway?
•  Who is Julia? (or, What the heck is Spike’s deal, anyway?)
•  What caused the gate incident? (or, What the heck is the planet earth’s deal, anyway?)

Note that we pretty much DO know what Jet’s deal is.  So arguably this process began back in “Black Dog Serenade.”

I still wouldn’t be surprised if some of these questions are only half-answered, or even left entirely to our imaginations.  Cowboy Bebop is not like Lost or the X-Files, where answering the questions are the whole point of the final episodes.  Rather, we’re getting episodes that are “about” hermeneutic closure in the same way that earlier ones are “about” noir or blaxploitation.  For instance, notice how in Wild Horses the central “mystery,” (what is Doohan’s pet project?) is something that all of the characters know from the beginning: only the audience is kept in the dark.  And that’s really, really weird. It’s anti-dramatic irony.

And that about sums it up for “Wild Horses.”  I’m not done with the subject of old junk, though.  This is not necessarily my favorite favorite episode of Cowboy Bebop, but watching it finally solidified my ideas about what the show is really about.  I’ve been kind of talking around this idea for a while now, but I feel like at this point I can finally put it into words. Are you quivering in anticipation?  Click through, click through!

Stokes’ Grand Unified Theory of Cowboy Bebop

As we learned from “Speak Like a Child,” obsolete technology in Cowboy Bebop is a stand in for the series itself, or more specifically for the genres, cliches, story devices, and other cultural detritus that the writers used to cobble together the narrative (which in turn makes obsessive-compulsive technology geeks like Doohan and Miles into something like author avatars).  It’s very interesting, then, that this episode has the characters constantly destroying the technology they fetishize.  The little golf-tee looking thing is only useful to Spike in that it’s broken, and therefore sharp enough to scratch glass.  Spike kicks his ship’s computer apart to fend off the carjackers’ virus.  When Doohan shows up in the Columbia, the Swordfish is out of fuel, so Spike propels it into the docking bay by venting the atmosphere out of his cockpit, and then slows back down again by smashing both its wings off.  And from the looks of things, all that work that Doohan’s been putting in on restoring the Columbia (for years and years, mind you!), is going to have to start over again from scratch.  Following the allegory through to its logical conclusion, this suggests that Cowboy Bebop, as a show, is primarily concerned with destroying the same old narrative tropes that it references so lovingly.

This had me stumped for a while, I’ll admit.  I mean, it’s not that strange of an idea in itself…  It’s pretty easy to read a movie like High Plains Drifter (where – spoilers! – Clint Eastwood’s iconic “mysterious stranger” character turns out to be an undead rapist) as an attack on the very idea of “The Western,” or to read Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer as an attack on the idea of “The Horror Film.”  But I’ve seen some savage deconstructions in my time, and Cowboy Bebop doesn’t feel like a savage deconstruction.  For all its peculiarities, it’s still a remarkably joyful show to watch (most of the time), while Henry and High Plains Drifter are worthy but punishing slogs.  And while there are other types of narrative that feed off of older stories (parody, pastiche, satire, homage), all of these have their characteristic moods, and Cowboy Bebop doesn’t feel like any of these either.  The show’s relationship to its sources is, if not quite unique, at least distinctive and idiosyncratic, and bears some teasing out.

To begin with, Cowboy Bebop requires you to understand the stories and genres that it is riffing off of.  Doohan doesn’t get enough screen time to make sense as a character in his own right.  You need to bring the Yoda/Hattori Hanzo archetype to the table with you, and use it to fill in the blanks.  Same with the sleeping beauty aspect of Faye’s backstory, or the noir aspect of Jet’s, and right on down to the first episode where you know, absolutely know, that Asimov Solensan is going to die in a hail of gunfire as soon as you learn that he’s trying to make one last big score before leaving the underworld for good.  Just the fact that we do know these things is not so unusual – what sets Bebop apart is the degree to which we MUST know them in order to get anything out of the show.  In most narratives, the writers go for what’s called a “well-made plot,” i.e. one in which all of the actions are coherently linked by causal logic.   Mythic undertones (the stuff we bring in through our knowledge of genre, and so on) are like icing, or gravy:  surplus meaning that reinforces the meaning already present in the story itself.  The plot of Indiana Jones 3 still works if you take all the Sean Connery daddy-issues stuff out of it — it wouldn’t be as compelling, but it would still make sense.  Not so for Cowboy Bebop.  Here, the undertones are pretty close to the only meaning that’s present.  Rather than the icing on the cake, they’re the flying buttress on the gothic cathedral:  they may look decorative, but if you take them away the whole edifice comes crashing down.  That is to say:  you cannot enjoy Cowboy Bebop unless you are conscious of its intertextual references.   Okay, that’s a little strong.  But at the very least, my own enjoyment of the show – which is what, after all, I’m trying to communicate to you – depends on the knowledge gained through a lifetime of fairly indiscriminate reading and movie watching.

Unfortunately, knowledge comes with a price.  Read enough fairy tales, and you can tarnish the sense of wonder evoked by the fairy tale. Sleeping Beauty is never quite the same once you’ve worked out the sexual subtext.  See enough film noir, and the haze of cigarette smoke can no longer represent the moral haze surrounding the characters’ actions:  instead it just screams “Hey, Film Noir!”  Cowboy Bebop inhabits a textual universe in which narrative has become disenchanted, in Max Weber’s sense of the word.  Storytelling devices are present, but we are conscious of them as devices, that is, as tools which we can use to generate a specific effect.  We still know they work, but we no longer have faith in them.  They no longer enchant us.  It is impossible to be surprised when Jet’s old partner betrays him in Black Dog Serenade:  the plot device (trusted partner in a noir setting turns out to be playing the protagonist for a chump) has been made instrumental – another of Weber’s terms – meaning that it is subject to our conscious control, but it can no longer influence our subconscious.  Contrast this to Star Wars, which relies quite strongly on these old structures still having the capacity to enchant and surprise.

What Cowboy Bebop resembles most closely, in its disenchanted approach to narrative, is the French New Wave.  And here I can stop hedging my bets about authorial intention, because New Wave’s influence on Cowboy Bebop is obvious and proudly worn.  Dig those bright primary colors!  Dig those random intertitles!  But if Cowboy Bebop is New Wave, it’s New Wave with the coolness factor turned up to eleven.  As important as all those movies are, they too tend to be kind of joyless.  In a culture where New Wave cinema is mostly experienced as posters on dorm room walls, this is something I think we tend to forget.  We talk about the use of jump cuts, the unmotivated sound effects, the shattered fourth wall, the yé-yé pop soundtracks, but we don’t usually talk about the glacial pace and the desperately unlikable characters.  The disenchantment of narrative and cinematic technique in the New Wave is meant to reflect the broader disenchantment of life in 20th century society.  The New Wave has no room for zero-g kung fu.  It has no room for gleeful, brilliantly choreographed car chases.  I’m sure Godard would think that “Mushroom Samba” is just another opiate for the masses…  in fact, you could argue that Cowboy Bebop’s attitude is less 1960s New Wave and more 1860s Romanticism.  For all that they spent a lot of time swanning about on the moors, the Romantics were actually pretty cynical about life in general.  That’s why you had to go swan about on the moors in the first place!  Society as a whole was a constrained, depressing, meaningless place – instrumental, in a word – but there were still some things that had a certain enchantment about them, and it was the business of the sensitive soul to seek them out.  Calling back to one of my first posts about the show: these fragments of the enchanted are what we in the audience experience as “jouissance.”

It’s important to recognize that what provokes jouissance for the Romantics is not necessarily what provokes it in an episode of Cowboy Bebop. The Romantics didn’t put as much weight on the depiction of unfettered physical motion, and on the other end we aren’t going to see Spike redeemed by the love of a good woman (thank the lord).  But it’s interesting that their lists do overlap on a couple of points.  One of these is music.  And another one is horror.  And that leads us very nicely into the next episode, but not today.  Before I go, I think I promised you a theory:

(New Wave disenchantment of narrative and filmmaking techniques)+(Romantic belief that the quotidian can be transcended, although not easily)=Cowboy Bebop:  a New Wave cinema that’s as stylish and fun as we (i.e. 21st century bourgeois Americans) always imagine the New Wave to be. And furthermore (or “and therefore?”), a New Wave cinema that is almost completely depoliticized.  Which is a rather sharp swerve away from the actual New Wave, but maybe I’ll pick that one back up next time.