Cowboy Bebop

Cowboy Bebop
27 Episodes
Bandai Visual Company / Sunrise
1998

“And there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.”
-Ernest “Papa” Hemmingway

When I started thinking about writing a column on television, particularly genre television, one of the first conclusions I came to was that I only wanted to write about shows that had already taken their final bow. In part, the decision was a logistical one. After two years of covering comics, I know all too well the trials of chasing a story that’s perpetually in progress and the pitfalls of casting a judgment too soon. These are things I want to avoid, but honestly, my reasons run deeper. I’m obsessed with stories. I have been all my life. I see everything through a lens of story, in references and metaphors, how it might look on the page.

“It’s not finished,” I said to my wife in a nasally voice as she stood up to turn off the DVD player during the closing credits for The Real Folk Blues, the last of Cowboy Bebop’s 26 episodes. The song played out, the star fell, the words, “you’re gonna carry that weight,” came up on the screen. “It’s finished.” I said, finally completing my reference to a wholly different TV show* (and naming this column in the process). And it was, it was all over, again. Call it an epilogue, a swan song, a coda, it’s all the same thing. It’s the slow savored cigarette after the climax, it’s a life affirming moment, even when it’s all about death (and it usually is). Endings are everything, the retroactive defining moment for any story. It’s not about happy endings or sad endings, but the right ending, the perfect ending for a given story. Endings feed our faith. Whatever you believe, when a story comes together and the ending is just right, no matter how fantastic the tale, nor how somber the final note, there is a reassurance that life and story run parallel, that our experiences have some meaning. We’re reassured that in the end they’ll be symmetry, as though we were both fated and free all along. Maybe that’s just me – I think stories are my religion.

I wanted to write about Cowboy Bebop for this column because of its sublime ending. It seems the perfect cornerstone to introduce a column that’s going to be largely about conclusions. But there’s more to the show than the ending, or else those final moments, no matter how masterfully crafted, wouldn’t mean shit. The real crux of it is the characters – cartoonish too extremes and yet painfully resonant – what makes them so captivating?

The problem is that so much of Cowboy Bebop is in the details. It’s uniquely Japanese, and yet undeniably American. It’s Dashiell Hammett filtered through Akira Kurosawa, then Sergio Leone, then back through American culture and across the pacific again, intermingling in the mind of director Shinichiro Watanabe with a thousand other effect-loops of influence. It’s a beautiful hodge-podge of cultures, myths, and archetypes. It’s pure fiction, and it’s all in the details. I could talk about the music, the iconic power of repeated imagery, the nuances of written language and the aesthetic of text itself, I could talk for a long damn time about isolated notes of detail and never scratch the surface of the whole harmony. The product is a meticulously assembled aesthetic of cool, and it’s instrumental to the bonds Watanabe evokes between his characters and the audience.

Important as the details are, it takes broad strokes to make them work, and the most important one for Cowboy Bebop is pacing. Watanabe walks a fine line, trying to simultaneously tell a grand tragic saga and a series of genre bending stand alone stories at the same time. And while he wobbles once or twice, he never falters. The balance between episodes heavy with sentiment and those light of heart oscillates like a good mix tape – in carefully choreographed tides of slow sad songs, rowdy outburst of emotion, and unassailable anthems. There’s a natural seeming rhythm to it. Relationships grow as much in the lulls between upsets as they do in our moments of duress. The shifting mood and pace of the series makes the way the connections between characters develop seem uncannily familiar. I think, in a way, the intent is for the audience to fall in rhythm with them, to join in and jam.

It’s possible I may be making too much of the show’s Jazz theme, but it’s hard to overstate the importance of music to the series. As a musician and music lover myself, and with a particular fondness for American music, I find it to be one of the most dominant elements of the series; a real unifying element, and one which even impacts on the narrative in important ways. One crucial early turning point in the series happens only because of a dreamt message from Charlie Parker. Without the dream, or grizzled Jazz aficionado Jet Black’s unquestioning acceptance of it, the story could not have taken the course that it did. If you know anything about Jazz, you know that no fan could take a message from Bird lightly.

The music of Cowboy Bebop affects the story so directly only on a few rare occasions throughout the series, but it’s always there. Even when it’s subdued to nothing more than a backbeat, it’s powerful and evocative, and it always has an effect on the story as a whole. From the bombastic opening credit sequence to the quiet tinkling of a music box in Jupiter Jazz – not to mention the low-mixed, savory little licks of steel guitar and harmonica that are everywhere in the series – there is a constant sense of the love and attention that went into the sounds of Cowboy Bebop.

“This is not a kind of space opera,” reads a passage from the title card in the middle of Ballad of Fallen Angels, one of most poignant episodes in the series, “it’s a sort of space jazz which is filled with street sense and life.” Elsewhere, the peripheral text of the series speaks of jazz-agers, beatniks, punks, and others; “Outlaws in our society who live in pursuit of autonomy.” A correlation is carefully constructed between music and rebellion, creation and isolation. There is an undeniable motif of loneliness which characterizes the series. Its central characters choose for themselves a life that keeps them on the distant fringes of their culture, and then carry it further. They have little association with, and even less esteem for, their fellow bounty hunters. Even their relationships with one another are strained, defined by poker faces and terse silences.

But they’re not autonomous, not really. Their collective story is shaped by deeply felt personal obligations and instinctive emotional reactions. The extremes of the life they’ve chosen drive them to equally extreme actions. In the waning hours of the series, with the end looming so close even they can see it coming, the central characters begin suddenly, desperately, trying to reach out to one another. And as people have done in such situations, literally since the dawn of civilization, they turn to stories. Jet paraphrases Ernest Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro for Spike, and when he explains why, his reading of the story is so poetic and simple, even Papa’d be proud. Later, Spike responds with a fable, and the little joke he ends it with, as though still half-heartedly pretending that he puts no stock in stories, has nearly the same poetic grace.

Perhaps the most powerful moment of final and almost futile outreach comes when Spike tells Faye about his false eye. “Why are you telling me this?” is her first and only question. He answers by reaching back to Jet’s take on Kilimanjaro, and she can only reply with a tearful barrage of sudden aimless gunfire. It’s an inarticulate and violent outburst of emotion, but for all the grace and power of language, we need those too.

I feel like I’ve talked as much about myself here, as about Cowboy Bebop, but it couldn’t be helped. Not only do I feel obligated to introduce myself to you, my hypothetical new audience, but I also feel a deep personal connection with this story. The first time I ever collaborated over a piece of writing, it was a song about Cowboy Bebop, penned in a frenzy over a marathon amphetamine weekend. It was one of the first things my wife and I watched together when we started dating, and for the longest time, the last words my first love ever said to me face to face were, “see you, space cowboy.” My last year living in a punk house before being domesticated, it seemed like my friends and I watched Bebop every night, and now three of us play together in a band called Asteroid Blues. The story of Cowboy Bebop is defined, for me, by all the ways it relates to my own life; and it’s one of my favorite stories, not just in the relatively narrow confines of genre and television, but in any medium, in any form.

Adios, Cowboy!

* Spaced, starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jessica Stevenson, and directed by Edgar Wright, in case you were wondering.