You Still Don’t Understand Cowboy Bebop
I didn’t like the Cowboy Bebop movie on first view. The action movie pacing didn’t let the world breathe in the same way that the tv show’s slow-burn scene-setting transition shots allowed. We’re mostly inside a wealthier colony of Bebop’s wholly original world, so the poor and derelict regions don’t get any screen time. The movie’s backgrounds are more detailed but less diverse, notwithstanding the welcome inclusion of an Islamic neighborhood. But we can’t fault the movie’s team for bringing its world to a bigger audience. The film actually does an excellent job of restating the major themes of Cowboy Bebop. Though an entire 26 episode show is crammed into about two hours the major lessons of Cowboy Bebop are rendered consistently. It’s as if Shinichiro Watanabe and writer Keiko Nobumoto redoubled their efforts to make sure their work would not be misinterpreted.
The movie places its villain Vincent Volaju in between the show’s protagonist and antagonist, Spike and Vicious. Spike has a heart of gold but carries himself with such a blasé attitude that he seems distant and unconcerned about… well anything. Though he gets up for earning enough to eat, ever since he was stood up by his love he barely has a care in the world. A man in a perpetual dream with nothing to really care for, Spike is a passive nihilist on the exterior but a genuinely good person inside. Vicious is a cold, unfeeling killer who only seeks greater power. He openly states that “there is nothing in this world to believe in” and only acts to ascend to the top inside of his criminal syndicate. Vincent is a little bit of both.
Actually, there’s a little bit of nearly every serious villain and hero in the show in Vincent. He is the victim of an experimental nanotech drug given to him during his time in a war (Gren, Jupiter Jazz). A resulting side effect was a complete loss of memory (like Faye). He wanders about the world without any recollection of who he was and therefore has no purpose in the future. He (like Spike) lives in dream world, in his case symbolized visually by bright orange butterflies incessantly flapping around his field of vision – another side effect of nanotech virus. He, like Vicious, has a thirst for destruction and his plan is to kill every last person in the world with a similar virus to the one he was given. There is something of a revenge motive in him but this is brought to the most extreme levels by the near-complete disintegration of his psyche as a result of the virus.
Vincent combines the inescapable hallucination characteristic of Spike with the sinister thirst for destruction of Vicious. He is the bridge that connects Spike and Vicious thematically or, you might say, he allows Spike to come to terms with the fact that he is fated to confront Vicious and his dream must come to an end. I’m not saying that Vincent is half active, half passive nihilist (he is fully active nihilist) but it is the fact that he is stuck in a dream not of his own making that makes him more relatable to Spike.
Cowboy Bebop is filled with characters stuck in a dream. The world itself seems to be going through something of a prolonged fever-dream having shot out from the earth, terra-forming various moons, planets and asteroids. There are dreams of escape to affluence beyond the slums, dreams of revenge against the corrupt, psychedelic mushroom dreams, dreams of regaining a lost sense of home that no longer exists, but also good dreams intended to increase the happiness of others and relieve them of their burdens. Humanity has lost its terra firma, stuck in a state of drift.
Vincent’s dreams are so extreme as to compare with Spike’s – it consumes his entire life. In fact, it has reached a point where one cannot tell if they are alive or dead. Both Vincent and Spike at times wonder and even state plainly that they already died in the past, currently living in a ghostly/zombie state detached from the rest of the living world. The show creates some confusion about this in both of their cases and it leaves us wondering: is Spike/Vincent dead or dreaming? He claims both at various times and it’s all a bit ambiguous, so much so that I think it was deliberate. The loftiness, the groundless of dreaming leads one to wild mood swings and overreactions. The failure of a dream-deferred, as most dreams are, can make it seem like a precious life has been killed and the rest is just an afterlife. What happens when the dream is all over? Is there anything left?
Spike is lucky in this regard. His “afterlife” is a continuation of his dream – he still has a chance to complete some unfinished business. Though he claims to have died, the more fitting condition is that of a dream. It’s through “solving” Vincent’s troubles with a western-style showdown (himself standing in for a host of other characters from the show) that Spike comes to see that his death is off in the future and not something that has already come to pass. Vincent asks him this question at the end:
VINCENT: Tell me before this life of yours ends. Did I died on Titan long ago? Is this world just a dream that these butterflies are showing me? Are they part of the dream? Or are the butterflies real and Titan just a nightmare that I cannot wake up from? I can’t tell.
[*This is the English dub which I prefer in this scene. The Japanese original is translated as: “Before you die, tell me one thing. I died up there on Titan. Is this world the one the butterflies showed me in the dream? Or is that world the actual reality? And my world just a dream? I don’t understand.” I think it was the correct choice to replace the flat statement of death with a question “did I die?” for english.]
He finally resolves the dilemma when he comes to the understanding that “there never was a door.” The reality he wished to escape to was an illusion the whole time. Seeing his past love Electra let him regain his memory and shake him out of his grand revenge plan.
VINCENT: I remembered. She’s the one I used to love. I wanted to get out of this world of dreams. I kept searching for the door that would lead me out. I understand now, there never was a door.
[*Once again, english dub.]
The door blocking his path to heaven was a figment of his imagination, the memories of his loved one are all that remains. His problem was seeking a reality outside of his dream-life that would relieve him and everyone else of a great burden (as well as revenge). In this way Vincent is a copy of Ronny Spangen from episode 23, Brain Scratch.
Vincent’s response to a life saturated by a dream is to attempt to “save” every human being by killing them, ending the “unreality” of this corrupted world into which he projects himself. He would have been better off accepting the dreaminess of life and stop looking for a door outside of it, as he eventually does in the end.
If that wasn’t enough, the complexity gets another added layer. Alongside the dream/reality vs life/death tension we are given another: dream/reality vs heaven/purgatory. Vincent is constantly talking about purgatory. His anger against the corrupt officials who experimented on him blends into a generalized hatred of the entire world as it stands because of his delusions. He thinks we are all stuck in a purgatory that is preventing ascension to heaven/reality. As a frozen people stuck mid-passage we can only be redeemed by total death. Vincent actively attempts to bring about this outcome as a kind of “angel of death.”
The mixing of metaphors in Bebop makes the main lesson difficult to parse through. Is this ultimately a Christian show or anti-Christian? The talk of heaven and purgatory and angels and devils comes mostly from the show’s villains and the tender moments come from the relatively mundane/ordinary acts of kindness. The subtitle to the Cowboy Bebop movie “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” (removed from the English release) only adds further to this confusion, especially when we take a look at the final song that plays during the end credits. This is the final send off from Cowboy Bebop so it is worth looking at the entirety of its lyrics:
Happiness is just a word to me
And it might have meant a thing or two
If I’d known the difference
Emptiness, a lonely parody
And my life, another smokin’ gun
A sign of my indifference
Always keepin’ safe inside
Where no one ever had a chance
To penetrate a break in
Let me tell you some have tried
But I would slam the door so tight
That they could never get in
Kept my cool under lock and key
And I never shed a tear
Another sign of my condition
Fear of love or bitter vanity
That kept me on the run
The main events at my confession
I kept a chain upon my door
That would shake the shame of Cain
Into a blind submission
The burning ghost without a name
Was calling all the same
But I wouldn’t listen
The longer I’d stall
The further I’d crawl
The further I’d crawl
The harder I’d fall
I was crawlin’ into the fire
The more that I saw
The further I’d fall
The further I’d fall
The lower I’d crawl
I kept fallin’ into the fire
Into the fire
Into the fire
Suddenly it occurred to me
The reason for the run and hide
Had totaled my existence
Everything left on the other side
Could never be much worse that this
But could I go the distance?
I faced the door and all my shame
Tearin’ off each piece of chain
Until they all were broken
But no matter how I tried
The other side was locked so tight
That door, it wouldn’t open
Gave it all that I got
And started to knock
Shouted for someone
To open the lock
I just gotta get through the door
And the more that I knocked
The hotter I got
The hotter I got
The harder I’d knock
I just gotta break through the door
Gotta knock a little harder
Gotta knock a little harder
Gotta knock a little harder
Break through the door]
Though the song is titled “Gotta Knock a Little Harder” and the original Japanese release of the movie is subtitled “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” the door in the song, just like the people shown scattered around the city during their parade, is a door between individuals. Through the door is intimacy, though the door need not be a closed. The door represents the various barriers we erect to keep others outside our singular lives. We shut the door when we are isolated and defensive, unable or unwilling to accept the warmth of friendship or love, or when we lock the door so tight that we crawl and claw our way through the fire of our own making. The door can be shut, opened, walked through, or locked but when it is locked hurt ourselves the most.
It all comes down very abruptly as Vincent has a last-second change of heart when he sees his past love. All of his old memories come flooding back in a single instance and his evil plan is suddenly a big mistake. It’s all much too quick to hit very hard emotionally without taking the same time that the show did with its memory flashes, letting the weight of the past sink in gradually. But let’s be generous and take the movie as a thematic summation. Vincent does indeed fit in with the rest of the moral universe of Cowboy Bebop even if he is overloaded with meaning and his turn too abrupt.
Let’s compare this with the serene ending song of the show, ‘Blue’:
Never seen a blue sky
Yeah I can feel it reaching out
And moving closer
There’s something about blue
Asked myself what it’s all for
You know the funny thing about it
I couldn’t answer
No I couldn’t answer
Things have turned a deeper shade of blue
And images that might be real
May be illusion
Keep flashing off and on
Free
Wanna be free
Gonna be free
And move among the stars
You know they really aren’t so far
Feels so free
Gotta know free
Please
Don’t wake me from the dream
It’s really everything it seemed
I’m so free
No black and white in the blue
Everything is clearer now
Life is just a dream you know
That’s never ending
I’m ascending
I believe the lyrics of these two final songs deserve to be included in both the show and the movie’s script because they are sung so clearly and put a fitting cap on their respective works. The Latin chorus flowing through the background is translated as
“As Jesus, the Messiah, you sing to me”
and the last line is “I’m ascending.” This would suggest that Cowboy Bebop is a Christian show after all and Spike’s death a sacrifice as much as much as a settling of a score. It’s a story mixing the genres of Nior, Western and Sci-Fi set mostly to Jazz so it shouldn’t be too surprising that a transcendental morality like this would find its way inside. However, it’s useful to remember that the sagely wisdom comes from a shaman-like character named “Old-Man Bull” and his metaphor of choice is a star. Each life is a star that burns for a time and fades or falls upon death. To fear death is the waste of a good life. The American/western influences of Cowboy Bebop do not forget indigenous voices, in fact they are filtered through such a voice in its most poignant moments.
What sets Spike apart from his villains is his basic benevolence, his kindness to strangers, and, after his long journey through the show and movie, his willingness to forgo his desire to escape and come back to his fate: to confront Vicious. To attack Vicious is to return to his old life and stop running towards an impossible dream, to do the most good in the world by stopping an inevitably bloody and tyrannical future. The passive nihilist casts off the nihilism and finds the courage to defeat the power-hungry active nihilist, even if it means ending the dream and dying (or letting the star fade away).
Spike’s death is something of a sacrifice but it’s also a coming to terms with the inevitability of his fate. He is marked for death in the show’s first episode by Old Man Bull. Another time we hear that Vicious is the only one who can kill him. What Spike’s encounter with Vincent does is demonstrate the fruitlessness of trying to find the door that leads from dream to reality: heaven’s door. The dream that is life is all there is. We cannot escape our fate. Spike must face Vicious, it is in his good nature to put a stop to his rampage and prevent the world from getting even worse than it already is. He must stop running and accept that this struggle will kill him. It’s a heroic assumption of one’s fate but also a sacrifice.
Spike’s story is a happy tragedy. In a tragedy it’s the character defects that ultimately bring down a hero in a fit of hubris. One glaring weakness thwarts a character otherwise capable of great deeds. This is not Spike, he fixes his weakness and assumes his fate. It costs him his life but it is also the most good he can do for the world. The kindness he has displayed is also training for a good death; the benevolence he has seen in others has taught him what it means to keep the world from collapsing into tyranny. Vincent holds up a mirror to Spike and shows him what destruction can be wrought by someone trying to escape their fate, to find an ideal beyond the dream that is their life.
Cowboy Bebop is not The Matrix (a movie released around the same time as the show). Its characters are not stuck in Plato’s cave struggling to find their way to the surface to see the light. That Spike makes his sacrifice and “ascends” is not a transcendence typically depicted in film, it’s a dispersion into the blue of the sky. The door never was a doorway to heaven but doorway to creating greater happiness in the rest of the world and its people. To the extent that Christian terms are used, they are interspersed with indigenous ones, casting as wide a net as humanly possible. At every step of the way in Cowboy Bebop we are reminded that this is a multicultural work of art and everything is blended into the same dream of a common humanity.
Every story in Cowboy Bebop has a final send off and the movie’s is “Are you Living in the Real World?” This adds yet more confusion to the core message. The question is not a provocation to the viewer to “get real.” The question is a spur to contemplation, a challenge for the viewer to confront the fact that “life is but a dream.” You can make it a good dream or a nightmare but there is no escaping the truth that it will end.
Critical Fantasies 