[I intended to cover 20-22 in this post, guys, I really did. But there comes a point when you look down and realize that you’ve written 3,500 words on a single episode, and if you keep going at this rate you’ll never get to sleep tonight. I suppose we should all have such problems. Stupid TV! Be… less… interesting!]
Three ways of looking at Pierrot le Fou.
First, let’s just get this out of the way: this episode is not actually related to the Godard film of the same name that I referenced in my last post. The title in Japanese actually translates as something like “Requiem for a Clown.” It’s a little hard to know why the translators would do this. I mean, granted, the assassin character is named “Mad Pierrot,” and Cowboy Bebop does love its New Wave, so the reference makes sense. But why change it at all? Did they think that the American audience wouldn’t make the connection between Pierrot and clowning, but would catch the film reference? I find the change somewhat unfortunate. Every other episode references music in the title, why break the pattern? (And if you had to change it, it’s not like Godard has some kind of monopoly on crazy people named Pierrot.)
Of course, I suppose it’s possible that Godard’s film was released in Japan as “Dokeshi no Rekuiemu,” in which case color me embarrassed.
Anyway, this is a really strong episode, and there’s a lot to say about it, on levels both sublime and ridiculous. Let’s start with…
Way #1: Horror.
Cowboy Bebop has never been shy about dipping its toes into the horrific. We get little moments of horror film aesthetics in episodes 4, 5, 6, 11, 16, 20, and (looking forward), 23. But usually they are only moments: the only episodes that are straight-up horror are #11, “Toys in the Attic,” and #20, “Pierrot le Fou.” Even with “Toys in the Attic,” the horror is undercut by its unfathomably weird formalist structure and the goofy twist ending. But “Pierrot le Fou” is pure horror from start to finish.
I mean, it's not exactly subtle.
The episode begins with Spike witnessing the brutal murder of some kind of high muckety-muck (a senior police official, we later learn), at the hands of Mad Pierrot, an enigmatic assassin in Edwardian evening dress. The assassin notices Spike watching, and decides he has to die. That’s literally it: it’s not like the crew was trying to track Pierrot down for a bounty, it’s not like Spike tried to step in and protect the victims. It’s not even like he saw more than the back of the guy’s head! He was just there, wrong place, wrong time. This absence of agency, in itself, is a little unsettling, but not nearly as upsetting as what happens next, which is that Spike gets utterly p0wned.
Going through this sequence frame by frame is honestly hilarious.
Not really seeing the ass-kicking yet. Looks a little Peter-Pan-ish, if anything.
Okay, well at least that's contact. Still, I don't see how -
WOOF. Okay, that's gonna leave a mark.
The killer beats the ever-living crap out of him, and then, once we’ve gotten used to that, ups the ante by violating the laws of physics. The last image here comes from a sequence where Spike’s attacker kicks him into the air four or five times without either one of them touching the ground. It’s not a question of athleticism: the scene flaunts its impossibility as Pierrot bobs through the air like a zeppelin of kung-fu death. It’s a startling and beautiful moment, especially done in silhouette like that, but also an intensely spooky one. Long story short, Pierrot thrashes Spike into the ground, and stands over him holding him at gunpoint. There’s a long tense moment (with a delicious dissonant string effect in the soundtrack) as the two of them stare at each other. We get a good long look at Spike’s face, and it’s clear he’s thinking just what we’re thinking: how the hell did this happen? Luckily, their fight is interrupted by a stray cat, which sends the assassin into a screaming panic, and Spike is able to beat feet thanks to a handy cache of explosive cylinders at the other end of the alley. (This, by the way, is a Wolfenstein solution to a Cowboy Bebop problem.)
I am pretty sure that this is the first time we have seen Spike get beat up. (We’ve seen him hurt plenty, but never out-martial-arted.) It’s definitely the first time we’ve seen him run away. And this really raises the stakes a little bit. At this point in the series we have gotten used to thinking of Spike as an invincible badass. Handing him a beating like this helps to establish him as vulnerable, not only for this episode, but for the all-important confrontation with Vicious that we all know must be coming in the series finale.
But back to the horror tale at hand. After the opening beatdown, we end up in a pretty standard horror plot that most readers will know from the original Dracula and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (but see also the US remake of The Ring, Lair of the White Worm, Silence of the Lambs, Friday the 13th Part II, several of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and dozens of others). It goes pretty much like this: 1) heroes are menaced by the monstrous other, 2) heroes try to learn the monster’s weakness and origin story, 3) heroes successfully defeat the monster using the information they’ve gathered. Or if you’re nasty, 3) the information proves ineffective and everybody dies.
In stories like this, the monster isn’t really a monster. I mean, is it ever? Rather, the monster is an emblem of irrationality. The heroes in turn stand for rationality: even if the tool they end up using is something thoroughly unscientific, they basically represent the triumph of science over magic. On the other hand, if you’re a Freudian, which a lot of the people who write about horror are, you can see this as the triumph of analysis over the unconscious. The monster here represents the repressed trauma, which is interfering with the patient’s day to day life (in this case by physically killing them). The investigation of the monster represents analysis, in which we learn that the masked killer doesn’t really want to hack teenagers to bits, he’s just got some mommy issues. Assuming the analysis is successful, the problem should go away. And if not, there’s always Prozac.
So that’s the basic structure, and some of its symbolic underpinnings. But there are two very distinct ways that this plays out in the stories themselves. In Dracula, the most horrific moments of the plot are front-loaded: Harker’s experience in the castle is deeply creepy (especially the scene with the count climbing face first down the wall), and Lucy’s seduction and death are just as dark. But once the investigation starts – that is, once Van Helsing shows up with his communion wafers and his blood transfusions – the pressure lets up slightly. It still works as horror, but the investigation’s role in the narrative is to control and ease that horror. This is also the way that it works in Buffy: once you’ve had the requisite “hangin’ out in the library” scene and learned the villain of the week’s nature, the show changes from a horror/action/rom-com to an action/horror/rom-com.
However, there are a lot of other works where the investigation itself is not comforting, where the big reveal of the mystery is carefully prepared as the most horrific element of the entire narrative. Psycho works like this, as does Sleepaway Camp. H.P. Lovecraft adored this kind of story–typically, for him, the moment of revelation for the character is the moment where language itself breaks down in the story, so that the reader is still left in the dark (and the character is quite often destroyed by the knowledge). There’s an almost self-parodistic moment at the end of one of his stories where the monster is revealed as “eyes – and a blemish. It was the pit – the maelstrom – the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnameable!” At the risk of being overschematic, one could claim that Dracula is an example of the rationalizing mindset that gives rise to psychoanalysis (Freud and Stoker were contemporaries, after all), while Psycho and Lovecraft represent the fallout from psychoanalysis: artists coming to terms with the fact that the unconscious remains stubbornly unconscious.
Interestingly, Cowboy Bebop plays it both ways. In “Toys in the Attic,” the fear is ramped up, and up, and up, right until the point where we figure out that the monster is actually just some seafood that’s been left in the fridge too long, at which point it totally collapses. In Pierrot le Fou, on the other hand… (feel free to stop the video after two and a half minutes or so).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35mbh48xHw8
So there you have the secret origin story of Mad Pierrot, which also happens to be the secret origin story of Jason Bourne. Raise your hand if you found it comforting. Dear Lord but that’s a horrific collection of images! Especially these:
Shudder.
Now, aesthetically, Cowboy Bebop is all about combining moments of visual excess with exciting musical cues, and this is no exception. It’s just that this time the excess is horrific excess. But here’s the interesting question: where exactly are these images coming from? We’re supposed to think that Ed broke into a super-secret police database, and the very first shot of the sequence is even slightly fisheyed, as if it was lifted from a security camera. But it’s hard to imagine that they would have had random shots from Pierrot’s POV. It’s hard to imagine they would have included multiple closeups on the laboratory cat. The upshot of it is that I don’t think we’re seeing what Ed sees. She sees something like that, yeah, but not all of it. We have information that the characters in the story don’t. And that’s interesting. Especially because the cat is almost certainly the most important part of the whole equation.
While this is going on, Spike has received a letter from the Pierrot inviting him to meet for a final showdown at the killer’s secret lair in an abandoned amusement park. Spike of course goes running off to his inevitably death, much to Faye’s chagrin. That much is to be expected… but elaborately themed secret lairs, final showdowns, and villains who taunt the hero through the postal service are not really trademarks of Cowboy Bebop. They seem to come from a different tradition. And that brings us to the second way of looking at this episode:
Way #2: As a Batman tribute.
I mean, it's not exactly subtle.
We should also note that Batman, as the greatest detective in comics, is an old hand at the kind of horror narrative I described above. Typically he goes for the old-school Dracula style version of it, where the knowledge acquired through Batman’s detective work makes the actions of his rogue’s gallery less threatening. And in any case, Batman is always, always able to use the information he’s required to defeat the bad guy. But neither of these are what happens in Pierrot le Fou, which gets into the third way of experiencing the episode:
Way 3: As a meta-literary investigation of storytelling.
I mean, it's... actually pretty subtle. Carry on.
This is an episode where it’s really helpful to think about Roland Barthes’ narrative codes. (For an explanation of these, see wikipedia here – for my particular take on them, see our series on the philosophy of Batman.) In particular, we’re going to be looking at the hermeneutic code, HER (i.e. the big overarching questions that drive the narrative forward), and the proairetic code, PRO (i.e. the mundane A then B then C series of actions that make up the narrative being driven forward). “Good storytelling,” in the populist, screenwriting-seminar sense of the term, requires both of these. For instance, let’s say we’re writing a little scene from a detective novel. First I’ll give you a version with most of the HER boiled out of it:
Walking out of the nightclub, private investigator Dirk Hammerthrust shivered and pulled his trenchcoat tighter around his lanky frame. As he crossed the street, another man came up behind him. The two men continued down DeGraw street. At the corner, Dirk stopped, fished out a cigar, and began to search his pockets for matches. Finding one, he lit the stogie and took a long, satisfying drag. Spinning on his heel, he slugged the other man square in the jaw, sending him sprawling.
This isn’t completely without HER – I’m sure you all wanted to know how Dirk would react to the man that’s following him, and still want to know why he hit the guy. But I tried to make it as neutral as possible. Now here’s a version that’s HER and only HER:
A dark, shadowy form detached itself from the darker shadows of an abandoned alleyway, and began to follow Dirk Hammerthrust, P.I., timing its footsteps to match his. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Dirk saw his follower, and adrenaline shot through his veins. He’d know that scar anywhere! Torkleson!
Again, this isn’t without PRO: we still know that Torkleson is following Hammerthrust, which is a description of an action. But it’s phrased to reinforce the hermeneutic content. The detail about the footsteps suggests that Torkleson is trying to avoid detection, so naturally we’re wondering whether he’ll be detected, and then there’s all the “dark,” “shadowy,” “abandoned alleyway” business, which reinforces the follower’s status as a mystery to be solved, and any actions that don’t contribute specifically to that question have been removed.
Both of these versions are pretty bad, which is why I said that you typically need PRO and HER together:
Walking out of the nightclub, private investigator Dirk Hammerthrust shivered and pulled his trenchcoat tighter around his lanky frame. As he crossed the street, a dark, shadowy form detached itself from the darker shadows of an abandoned alleyway, and began to follow him, timing its footsteps to match Dirk’s. The two men continued down DeGraw street. At the corner, Dirk stopped, fished out a cigar, and began to search his pockets for matches. Finding one, he lit the stogie and took a long, satisfying drag. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Dirk saw his follower, and adrenaline shot through his veins. He’d know that scar anywhere! Torkleson! Spinning on his heel, Hammerthrust slugged the other man square in the jaw, sending him sprawling.
Now we’re cooking with gas! I mean, it’s still terrible, but it’s better. What’s really interesting about this kind of writing is that it’s more than the sum of its parts. PRO is transformed by its HER context: in the first passage, the punch to the jaw was just a punch, but in this version, you feel the hate behind it. We understand that Hammerthrust has poor impulse control, or at least that Torkleson brings out the thug in him. So it’s not just enough to have PRO and HER to make good writing. HER needs to inform PRO, which is another way of saying that when the characters learn something, it should effect their behavior.
But note that this isn’t the only way that these specific PRO and HER elements can be combined!
Walking out of the nightclub, private investigator Dirk Hammerthrust shivered and pulled his trenchcoat tighter around his lanky frame. As he crossed the street, a dark, shadowy form detached itself from the darker shadows of an abandoned alleyway, and began to follow him, timing its footsteps to match Dirk’s. The two men continued down DeGraw street. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Dirk saw his follower, and adrenaline shot through his veins. He’d know that scar anywhere! Torkleson! At the corner, Dirk stopped, fished out a cigar, and began to search his pockets for matches. Finding one, he lit the stogie and took a long, satisfying drag. Then, spinning on his heel, he slugged the other man square in the jaw, sending him sprawling.
Again, HER has an effect on PRO. But in this version, we learn very different – contradictory, in fact! – things about Dirk. Rather than having poor impulse control, he has the sang-froid to light up a cigar before taking his shot, just to throw Torkleson off balance. We can even take it further:
Walking out of the nightclub, private investigator Dirk Hammerthrust shivered and pulled his trenchcoat tighter around his lanky frame. As he crossed the street, a dark, shadowy form detached itself from the darker shadows of an abandoned alleyway, and began to follow him, timing its footsteps to match Dirk’s. The two men continued down DeGraw street. At the corner, Dirk stopped, fished out a cigar, and began to search his pockets for matches. Finding one, he lit the stogie and took a long, satisfying drag. Then, spinning on his heel, he slugged the other man square in the jaw, sending him sprawling. Suddenly, Dirk recognized his follower, and adrenaline shot through his veins. He’d know that scar anywhere! Torkleson!
This would seem to be a case where HER and PRO are disconnected, since we don’t get the hermeneutic closure until after all the PRO has taken place. But in fact it does: we learn that Dirk is so hard-boiled that he just punches dudes on instinct and asks questions later. And we know this in a way that we could not know it the story simply left us in the dark about when he recognized the man. The upshot of all this is that we, as human beings, have a story-making tendency. Not a tendency to write our own stories, necessarily, but a tendency to organize facts as they are presented to us into a coherent narrative. Given the slightest opportunity, we will find a way for HER to inform PRO.
So what does any of this have to do with Cowboy Bebop? Well like I said last time, as the show closes in on its final episodes, we’re seeing some changes in the way that the show relates to the idea of mystery and narrative closure. “Pierrot le Fou” is mysteries all over the place. For instance, here’s the first image of Pierrot that we get:
Are we not men? / We are Pierrot.
And here’s the second, which you may remember from the first page of this,
and the third
and the fourth
until finally we get this ugly mug
right before he commences to murdering everyone in sight. All of this is interspersed with shots from Pierrot’s POV as he floats over the city, and set to a soundtrack that’s as much ambient sound-design as it is music. The opening sets Pierrot up as a mystery, and then as the images transition from the mere absence of light in his shadow, to an anonymous quivering eyeball, to the same eye heavily shaded by a hat brim, to a clear shot of the eye, and then finally to the face itself, the mystery is slowly unveiled. This kind of thing is just good storyboard work. But the lengths that they take it to are pretty extreme.
The fight scene only raises more questions. Why can Pierrot move like that? Why is he bulletproof? Why does he hate cats? (For that matter, who is he? At this point we don’t know his name.) There’s also the question of whether, or at least how, Spike will be able to beat him. Being the well-trained little narrative engines that we are, we assume that we’ll learn most of these things with time, and that Spike’s victory will be in some way informed by what we learn. This, in fact, is almost the iron law of plotting in narratives with an action component: the central narrative mystery (that is, the big HER) should be about what specific actions the hero must take in order to defeat the villain (the PRO). Most typically, this means gaining some form of knowledge about the villain’s background or operating procedure. “Aim for the gap in the scales beneath his armpit!” and “Cover your heart, Indy!” are just two of the most obvious examples.
Oh, but I haven’t explained the rest of the plot yet! Spike does wind up meeting Pierrot at the amusement park, and they fight for a good long chunk of the show. It’s still very horrific.
See?
See, SEE?! Ugh. I *hate* that animatronic dog.
Plus, whatever steps Spike has been taking to prepare for this second confrontation are not paying off much: Pierrot is still pretty much in control of the fight, even when Faye shows up uninvited to lend Spike a hand. In the middle of this, we cross-cut to Ed hacking the ISSP mainframe, and we see the government assassin recruitment video I showed you up above. In DW Griffith, the rest would write itself. Ed just needs to get this crucial information (whatever it is) to her beleaguered crewmates before Pierrot kills them all, and everything will be fine.
Is this what actually happens?
Well, of course not. Instead, Pierrot and Spike end up squaring off again, in front of the approaching Electrical Parade.
Note how Pierrot isn't in the parade's path at ALL.
Spike is once again in bad shape. He’s down to a single throwing knife, and he can’t keep dodging bullets forever. But then Pierrot notices that Spike’s eyes are two different colors, just like the eyes of the cat in the flashback. And he freaks out, big time, giving Spike the opportunity to hit him with the knife. (Pierrot’s invincibility appears to follow the Dune model, aka, the bloody stupid model, in which bullets bounce off but relatively slow moving objects like a knife sail right on through.) Pierrot breaks down crying, because. as we learned in voiceover, he still has the mind of a child. And then he gets trampled by the world’s most terrifying children’s parade.
Do I lie?
And then, only then, Jet calls to give the report on Pierrot. Spike literally hangs up on him. After all, what does it matter at this point? Spike, who is fighting Pierrot, never learns about his background. Jet and Ed do (at least partially), and we – the audience – definitely do. We learn it at exactly the same point that we would in a normal show: when it cuts away from the fight to show us that montage, it feels totally appropriate, because the big reveal is supposed to come right at the climax of the show. And if WE were the ones fighting Pierrot, we would totally know what to do now: call in Adam West and his cat-launcher. (Waaaaaaiiit a minute. Adam West?! Batman!) But Spike never gets to hear about it, which means that it has no effect on his actions. And that makes “Pierrot le Fou” that rarest of animals, a story where HER and PRO do not connect. Or to think about it another way–in the last episode, “Wild Horses,” there was a big secret that the characters all knew, and the audience only got to see at the end; in this episode, there’s a big secret that the characters never know and the audience gets to see at the end.
I don’t think this is just a coincidence. Like my little example suggested, it is actually pretty hard to come up with a story that works like this. But it’s revealing that we got closure at all. In earlier episodes, the backstory and motivations of the bad guys were left mostly to our imaginations. Six episodes in from the end, we do get to have that closure, even if the writers are still jumping through hoops to make it the most distorted version of closure since Citizen Kane.