(Please note that these posts are and will continue to be filled with horrible, horrible spoilers. If you haven’t seen Utena, please, for the love of whatever deity you do or don’t worship, go away and fix that.)

This wasn’t going to be the next Utena post, but, with all the recent debate about feminism, I guess I’m in a sex-and-gender sort of mood.

So, a question: who has power in this show? Is it Utena? The student council? Anthy? Cars? J. A. Seazer?

The answer is, of course, men. Or boys, as it were. People with penises.

Utena herself does a lot of conquering, but this is precisely what she’s meant to do. All according to plans drawn up by dudes. Akio means to hone her into a sword for his own use.

You could argue that Anthy is really the mastermind behind everything. Here’s one take on the ending:

… [T]he betrayal is just a final testing of Utena…to see if she can truly replace Akio in her eyes…Utena passes the test, takes on the suffering that Anthy rightfully deserved and now Anthy walks out on Akio in search of her new prince…who she will now torment at will. As soon as she steps off Ohtori Academy she lights a cigarette and grins. …

animekritik, “The Apocalypse Arc (Revolutionary Girl Utena)”

Not that kritik necessarily prefers this reading, mind; he just suggests it as a possibility. I’m not really feeling it, though. Maybe I just want the ending to be a triumph of sincerity, but I saw it as Anthy’s genuine rejection of Akio’s cycle — and her being in a position to leave it suggests that, indeed, she was within it, rather than above it. So, while she’s very good at manipulation herself, and while Utena may partly have been a pet project of hers (see here), I think that Anthy manipulates people in a way that most often serves Akio’s purposes.

Maleness is the force that drives the student council. Its apparently weakest male, Miki, is jerked around by his sister — but consider that she jerks by way of screwing around with men. She needs male aid to get under her brother’s skin. The council’s most obviously strong female, Juri, is essentially conquered (and cuckolded) in the third arc, her love interest used and discarded by the guy who removes her sword in the following fight. She does conduct that fight, but only under male auspices. Nanami spends most of the show agonizing over Touga. The whole student council is part of Akio’s plan.

Akio, Akio, Akio; penis, penis, penis. There’s a racial angle, too, but ADWM did it really well already, so let’s stick with the phalloi.

Does Utena actually manage to break the patriarchy barrier? I do think so, yes. But it’s not a straightforward, point-A-to-point-B sort of message.

She isn’t an unbridled force of liberation. She doesn’t win equality with her sword. Which is good, because that method risks being disingenuous — consider the Faux Action Girl trope. Battles for equality are never wholly physical, when they need to be physical at all. They’re ideological. We have on our hands brutish, poisonous, bad ideas, and you can only counter an idea with an idea.

Revolutions start as ideas, don’t they?

For much of the show, Utena is oppressed. She doesn’t exactly consent to this — like the viewer, she doesn’t understand the thoroughness of it at first. Her point of view is limited. Like every human being I’ve ever met, she is, given the right conditions, subject to deception and manipulation, sometimes partly because the manipulators are sexually attractive to her. She can’t just charge at oppressive social structures full-bore because those structures engulf her. She has to attack them from within, and that’s more difficult, and she is, after all, still half a child. She has to learn.

Let’s put it another way. Hélène Cixous famously argued that “woman must write woman. And man, man.” (No, the irony of my doing this post in the context of that quote is not lost upon me.) Utena’s overtures toward blurring her identity are conducted within the “language” or sign system allotted to her. For example, she appears to transgress by wearing a male uniform coat, but the Ohtori Academy uniform is Akio’s province. She beats men in swordfights using the Sword of Dios.

A revolution is distinguishable from a coup in that it represents an institutional shift rather than a mere seizing of power. To revolt, you must strive for a system that differs from the norm. It’s not enough to turn Akio’s own language, i.e. swords, against him. You need an alternative way of looking at things.

I like to think that Utena pulls this off. She loses the physical battle, in the end, but the idea of Utena effectively dismantles Akio’s system. She does more than achieve a position of power; she empowers others to step outside.

… Utena succeeds, not as a Prince, but as a Revolutionary, by inspiring Anthy to step up herself out of her subservient role as the Rose Bride and save herself. Thus, together they destroy the archetype of the Prince and the Princess and are on their way to create a new, more equal ideal as friends and soulmates. Their example also manages to help all the Duellists break from their fixation on their idealized memories and move on toward smashing their own coffins. This is the Revolution in SKU.

etrangere, “Utena’s Revolution or la Fin de l’Ancien Régime Romantique”

Yes, this. But I don’t want to leave off without acknowledging the ambiguity of the ending. We’ll see what we want to see. I mean to point out that it’s possible to see liberation in there somewhere. My attitude is, if you can see liberation, do.

What started out as a plan for a single article has turned by some process into an informal series blog; I won’t be religiously writing about each episode as I watch the series, but as and when sections of it stand out as interesting I will write about them, bringing in my views on the series as a whole.

The opening two episodes of Eureka Seven, as discussed in the previous article, work hard to provide a detailed introduction to the setting; one which is established as a living, developed world. It does this through a tight focus on character and relationships, letting the less relateable elements be introduced naturally by simple depiction rather than explanation. There is a strong viewpoint in the form of Renton, who is presented as character and narrator in a visual equivalent of the first-person narrative voice. With the introduction completed, the main plot arc begins and the viewer is launched into Renton’s story. The contrast between his confident internal monologue and awkwardness around Eureka is expanded via the blurring of the distinction between narration and spoken dialogue; what seems to be at first another lengthy digression about his insecurities around women turns out to be him thinking aloud – most of episode 3 plays on his confident facade being broken down by uncertainty about what happens next. The climax of the episode, a tense escape from an occupied airport which introduces a number of new characters, emphasises clearly how passive and naïve Renton is. It is the apparently innocent and docile Eureka who is shown to be prepared to fight to protect him and others, while despite all his arrogance he is reduced to holding on as she flies the Nirvash.

If episode 3 marks the true conclusion of the introductory section of the plot, episode 4 provides a fresh start for Renton. He has achieved his aim stated at the very start of the series – to escape boring town life and travel with Holland – but is immediately disillusioned. His introduction to the crew of Holland’s personal aircraft, the Gekko, is a humiliating one, with him known only as someone who makes Eureka laugh and fixed the Nirvash – while in his dreams he hopes to be accepted as a peer by his idols, the reality is quite different and he is seen only as a nuisance. His first conversation with Holland following his arrival on the Gekko makes this clear, as Holland reminds Renton that it is his ship and his home, and that Renton is only a guest. This provides a stark lesson which will define future plot arcs – that independence, and rejection of authority and family, is not as easy as it first seems.

As an outsider unfamiliar with the closed society which he now inhabits, Renton becomes driven by two things as a defence mechanism – trying to convince himself that Holland and his crew are as he imagined, and trying to remain close to Eureka. This unwillingness to accept reality means he does not integrate well, and creates conflict in a realistic fashion. Viewers can clearly see how this awkwardness, uncertainty and ultimately lack of respect for a new community is realistic behaviour for someone suddenly given both freedom and responsibility, and the focus of the plot becomes more about Renton’s learning process and maturing. The difference is made clear between a familial relationship and a peer relationship; while Renton opposed his grandfather and felt oppressed by him, the environment was still a supportive one. Opposing Holland and Talho, the Gekko’s first officer, leads to him being punished and further ostracised and enforces his outsider status.

The combination of this anti-authority petulance and genuine naivete as shown by his awkwardness around Eureka and Talho (who plays on his sexual frustration and inexperience) fosters a sense of resentment, and this leads to him rejecting genuine offers of kindness. The conflict is then heightened by the introduction of three children Eureka acts as a surrogate mother to, who with natural childishness tease and reject the newcomer. Renton’s own immaturity and delusions of importance immediately set him in conflict with the children as he tries increasingly hard to ingratiate himself with Eureka. A conflict is established between his imposing on the Gekko’s society, and the functional importance that Holland recognises in him; while he does not try to integrate as part of the closed society, he exists only as a tool in the form of the Nirvash’s copilot, sleeping in the hangar. Over the course of these four episodes, the viewer is thus presented with an idealised view of the world through the dreams and delusions of a self-important teenager, and then sees them shattered to make way for a truer depiction. The climax of episode 4, when Renton is told that a risky mission to ship organs for donation which he was sent on in place of attending a “lifting” tournament was likely to have involved people selling body parts to pay debts to organised criminals, provides the absolute end to his idealised world. The crew of the Gekko, and Holland their leader, will not fly the trapars to pay their way, but will aid the mafia.

To conclude, episodes 3 and 4 mark the end of Renton’s ideals and dreams, and provide a more realistic yet depiction of the world of Eureka Seven; the Gekko’s crew, and Holland, are an almost amoral and lawless society but at the same time a closed and closely-regulated one. Renton’s naïve insistance on clinging to the ideals he has built up, and unwillingness to fit in and be treated as an adult and peer, means that he remains a poor fit for them. His inability even to complete a training flight in the Nirvash without suffering from airsickness makes this especially clear; if episodes 1 and 2 showed us the world according to Renton, these episodes show the insignificance of Renton within the world.

With regard to science fiction, I hold that setting should not overshadow plot, and exposition should be limited to the minimum necessary for the story. The 2005-06 series Eureka Seven, in its opening two episodes, effectively creates a sci-fi universe that is entirely believable, populated with characters who are similarly credible. While the setting is fantastical in nature, it is nevertheless convincingly portrayed and the viewer is able to easily accept it because those parts of it which are instantly relatable are realistic.

Realism in science fiction need not mean the technology featured is purely that which is currently existent, or even that which is within the bounds of reality; it is as much about the depiction of the impossible as whether or not something could exist. The central conceit of Eureka Seven is that a newly discovered kind of particle, the trapar, allows for anti-gravity technology to function in a fashion equivalent to surfing on ocean waves. Where the series excels is in making the viewer instantly accepting of the concept of trapars and thus able to understand how they relate to the narrative without needing lengthy exposition. This is done to an extent through context – there is no specific explanation in the first two episodes of how any of the technology functions, simply depictions of it working. The opening sequence features LFOs, military craft designed to use trapars for flight, and by showing the dogfighting style that the technology necessitates, the viewer is furnished with the context needed to understand the setting.

However, the focus is subsequently shown over the course of the first two episodes to be more on the characters than the machines or the technology; the conversation as the scene starts gives more of a clue about who the viewer is seeing rather than any details about the future they inhabit, setting the tone for the rest of the series. Eureka Seven is a science fiction series that is about its cast of characters, rather than setting. The juxtaposition of a dogfight in inexplicable machines with what follows, a scene of daily life for the ordinary people who inhabit the created world, highlights this believability. The viewer is introduced to the protagonist, Renton, and his pervasive narrative voice; the series will be about him first and foremost. A key part of a believable science fiction setting is that it appears to exist beyond those characters immediately featured in it, and Renton’s inner monologue and personality, shown both contextually through his bedroom and explicitly through his descriptions of daily life. By describing the world through the voice of a character who will be central to the plot, the viewer is given three pieces of information in one process – firstly, information about Renton, secondly, information about the world Renton inhabits and thirdly, what Renton feels about this; he is established as an unreliable, self-centred narrator who complains about his life, and most of all a realistically depicted teenage boy.

A scene where Renton is at school provides further exposition in a natural fashion; the response to his family apparently being celebrities is realistically handled, with fellow students remaining sceptical that their unremarkable classmate has a famous background. The pervading sense through Renton’s interactions with his classmates and grandfather is that his absent father and sister are not the simple heroes that the glimpses of the setting’s history present them as – but yet Renton’s obsession with living up to their example is what drives him to make all his early decisions. The viewer learns much about the context and motivations of the characters through seeing how they act in the present, and for this to be effective the characters must act believably.   So from only a few scenes, Eureka Seven has imparted a lot of information about its setting; the level of technology, and the way in which these innovations have affected daily life. Renton’s obsession with lifting, an extreme sport using the trapars to surf on skateboard-like devices, is set against the LFOs fighting in the sky and it is this intersection of his obsession – both with the sport itself and the celebrity Holland – that by the end of the second episode has defined the course of the storyline. When the mysterious LFO called the Nirvash is introduced, and its pilot Eureka, the two become even more closely linked; dangerous lifting stunts like Holland’s trademark “Cutback Drop Turn” are now a means of fighting. Again, future plot developments are being foreshadowed in a way which focuses on creating a credible setting rather than simply providing exposition.

If, then, the setting and leading characters are so believably drawn up that the viewer is able to learn from naturalistic rather than self-consciously expository dialogue large amounts about the setting and their motivations, the character of Eureka becomes even more interesting. Her dialogue with Renton shows an innate familiarity with the setting from an entirely different perspective, one which is quite unrelatable for the viewer; the interplay between the two characters proceeds to change the viewer’s perception of what has gone before. She is presented as an otherworldly figure, detached from the materialistic and immature aims that have driven Renton’s petulance, and his response to this (perceiving it as vulnerability, reflected in his unwitting patronising of her) is used for comic effect. The viewer may initially share Renton’s perception of her but as her character develops, the distance that emerges between the two viewpoints moves from simple comedy to its own form of implicit exposition; we have seen Renton the petulant, materialistic teenager, wishing for control of his own life and rebelling against authority in his desire to emulate the counterculture hero Holland. This is then shattered at the first sight of a pretty girl; he is human in more ways than one.

To conclude, it is the focus first and foremost on interactions between characters, and the lessened emphasis on technology in the crucial opening sections of Eureka Seven that set it apart and establish the tone of the whole series. A character who has become complacent in his life and seeks to rebel is presented with a truly incomprehensible and untouchable object of desire, and the motivations which his voice has set forward (to fight what he perceives as boring town life and emulate his own idols while also living up to the expectations of his absent family) become changed; it is clear from the opening that the main focus of the series, despite the dogfighting LFOs and mysterious alien corals that emerge, is on Renton as a character and his relationship with his grandfather, Eureka and Holland. This emphasis on character, and the concise and natural exposition, makes it easier for the viewer to believe in the world the characters inhabit; even the simple act of juxtaposing Renton’s attempts at lifting with the visceral combat in the opening sequence (and the simultaneous juxtaposition of the photojournalist in his LFO turning war into a stylish spectator sport) contributes to the ease of suspension of disbelief; the trapars which are key to the plot are presented not as a convenient gimmick but as an integral part of a believable world.

One of my favorite depictions of far-future space travel comes from Dan Simmons’s Hyperion (or it might be Fall of Hyperion, which takes place five minutes later, so it doesn’t matter). Therein, your average ship of the line has a crew of about ten, all packed into a relatively small room full of consoles. You tell the computers what to do and the computers tell the ship what to do.

Of course! Right? Why wouldn’t spacecraft work like this? Why, on anything but a passenger ship, would you need more than a dozen crew members? Our computers can drive cars, and presumably they’ll improve in the next thousand years.

I was happy to find that Mouretsu Pirates embraces this kind of practicality. In fact, I suspect it’s a lot more sensible a show than its ridiculous (bodacious?) anime veneer would lead you to believe.

Yes, okay, I suppose we should address that veneer first. In this universe, piracy is regulated and benign — it’s no kind of piracy at all, really. In this universe, the heroes are 16. In this universe, you put a high school yacht club in charge of a decommissioned war machine. All seemingly par for the anime course. Teenagers run the place.

But Mouretsu Pirates does something that Macross Frontier at least began to do. You may recall that the latter takes care to set up an environment in which kids with recognizable sensibilities can reasonably fly expensive space-planes and shoot intergalactic bugs. The teenage pilot is an institution — there’s a high school for them, complete with a monument, Hikaru Ichijou’s VF-1, there to remind us that people in the Macross-verse have been doing this since 2009 or so. And in the last 50 years, “normal” human society has taken in and adapted to a people for whom war was all of culture. You can almost believe that Alto Saotome acts reasonably, given his environment. He isn’t thrown into mercenary defense contractor work as a plot convenience. This is just something that people do.

Mouretsu Pirates does this. It gives us an anime setting with internal consistency.

Piracy (privateering, actually) has a historical precedent. It’s been declawed by years of peace, meaning that a teenage pirate isn’t always in mortal danger. It has become so highly formalized, its inheritance laws so unbending, that either Marika Katou inherits the Benten-maru or nobody does. Explanations are always forthcoming. The setting and the plot points work together, which is far more important than their making real-world sense.

But there is, after all, a kind of sense to things. The show does engage with our sense of…sensibility.

Exhibit A: electronic warfare.

While giant lasers aren’t exactly weapons of last resort, nobody seems eager to use them to kill anyone. They are, as Ririka says, most useful as tools of intimidation. You might wave your guns around to scare the passengers of a luxury liner, you might burn away an enemy ship’s armor to convince it to flee or surrender, but you generally aren’t trying to scuttle a ship full of people.

And you wouldn’t really need to. If your hackers are good enough, you could seize control of your enemy’s life support system and turn it off. That’d take much less energy than carving them up with lasers, and the result is the same — or better, as you’d have a wholly intact prize to tow home.

I appreciate that, most of the time, the fights are won or lost during the electronic warfare stage. Only when the two sides reach an impasse, or when one side or the other doesn’t feel like sitting around waiting for the hacking to happen, are shots fired, and usually these shots look more dangerous than they are.

I know someone will want me to acknowledge that the hacking in Mouretsu Pirates doesn’t look like hacking. But I guess I don’t care much about that. Actual hacking is much more utilitarian, and I like pretty holo-screens.

Exhibit B: detail.

I’m of the opinion that the science in science fiction doesn’t have to look correct to someone with a relevant doctorate (I’m the kind of person who usually finds hard SF tedious). The purpose of detail isn’t to convince us that this universe might be possible in a few hundred years. As long as they aren’t irreconcilably ridiculous, little details make a setting feel richer and more fully realized simply by existing.

Places and objects in Mouretsu Pirates feel like physical spaces and things. Space suits are complex devices. Solar sails get caught on things while deploying. I especially like the scene in which, to get around a crowd, Marika and Mami use stairs and hallways.

Because, yeah, that’s how buildings work. Can we just assume that this happens? Sure, but sometimes you want to have an idea of how a place is laid out.

I have one complaint in this regard: I wish we could see more of what Bentenmaru looks like between the bridge and the captain’s quarters. Presumably other rooms contribute to the performance of the ship.

But I can wait. Slow pace doesn’t bother me. 98% of any enterprise is busywork and waiting, and maybe I’m strange, but I like to see some of that 98%.

And all the men and women merely…yeah. That bit from As You Like It remains quotable in all circumstances. It’s particularly applicable to Utena, though, and in this post I think I’ll manage to address something that Ryan A. brought up in a comment to the last.

He made two salient points, actually. Let’s start with this one:

…[M]uch of Utena is almost presented as if it were a play. Particularly, extraneous characters/bodies are few to none, especially outside the school. Anyone in-frame is likely a named character, and in my opinion, this lends to the idea that the presentation is specific and similar to a staged presentation.

Yes, there’s this. Several theater traditions make the most of only a few characters. Greek theater comes to mind immediately (not least because of the J. A. Seazer chorus). There’s also Commedia dell’arte, which, with its relatively fixed pool of character types shared among multiple authors, reminds me more of anime the more I think about it.

But I have to be honest: this isn’t something I noticed until Ryan mentioned it. I was more stricken by the characters, however many there are at a time, acting like entertainers of all kinds.

Maybe the fanservice would be a good entry point.

Clearly — it seems clear to me, anyway — stuff like this partly amounts to the characters showing off for the audience, whatever other purpose it might serve. I suspect that Akio could exposit with his shirt on, that he and Touga could watch the fights from somewhere other than in bed. Akio’s chest has aesthetic value (which opens a can of worms to be addressed later). Whether he’s acting like a model or a porn star is for you to decide, but either way he’s putting on a show.

Now, you might argue that I’m co-opting something that happens in all anime ever to make an Utena-specific argument. Fair enough, but the performing doesn’t end with the titillation we’re so used to.

We’ve got the shadow plays, which are explicitly dramatic performances. We’ve got Touga’s obligatory monologue about the car, along with other repeating acts. Miki is a musician, and maybe you could argue that Juri and Saionji “perform” with their swordfighting — they’re shown to attract audiences, anyway. Some of these things are logically necessary or plot-relevant; others are more symbolic or simply cool; but there’s so much of it going on that it’d be hard to document every instance in a post of moderate length.

One thing that interests me is how the student council’s balcony is so often a site of exposition backed by performance or entertainment. The knife-throwing bit shown above is probably my favorite, but there are many other examples. In one carnival-esque case, the dialogue is accented with balloons of relevant color:

In another case, a baseball announcer provides commentary, and a scoreboard keeps track of things:

Now let’s bring it home. Ryan again:

…I’m not sure if I’d call many of the locations a literal stage.

What is a stage? I’d suggest that a stage is defined by the drama done or meant to be done upon it. Until the rise of professional theater, it wasn’t uncommon for dramatists to bring their stages with them or make stages of any area broad enough to hold an audience. This is what Utena’s characters seem to do. They increase the sense of artifice that hangs over Ohtori Academy by staging performances throughout the school. The balcony stands out in its ability to react to dialogue with its own props, and even then you could argue that the characters must go up there and talk before it turns stagelike.

But it’s not as if the cast’s hamming it up serves only the setting. It’s often funny. It’s postmodern transparency, I suppose, ever reminding us that this is anime.

And it’s thematic. Making such a big production out of things is a luxury (or affliction?) of youth. I’m guessing you’ve been there and know what I’m talking about. Most notably: 1. Akio can participate because of his strange, static position between childhood and adulthood; 2. Anthy doesn’t seem to know how to do it, instead underplaying everything; and 3. some characters (Utena, Nanami) do it less and less as the show heaps troubles upon them. This is something that children stand to lose.

Utena is somewhat less clear about what children stand to gain.

I can’t think of Utena’s dueling arena as anything but a stage. It reminds me of the classical Greek chorus, which isn’t necessarily where all the acting would’ve happened, but the duels are musical enough for it to be appropriate anyway.

Consider:

The whole show is aggressively theatrical, thanks in part to the elaborate setting and the angles from which we see it. Often we’re looking at things from the side, as if peering through the fourth wall into a stage. The screencap above the break gives one example. Here’s another:

We’ll cover the use of shadows in more detail later, but the Kashira Players, those shadowy expositors, become relevant here, too. In the first arc they’re a duet performing independent of the “real” characters, summarizing things before each fight. The Black Rose arc’s solo act complicates the scenery, introducing a level of interaction between Utena and backdrop. C-ko gets up to some crazy business; Utena comments or delivers a punchline.

I think it might be embarrassing to like The Glass Menagerie as much as I do, what with its classic Tennessee-Williamsian unsubtlety and all. But so it is, and that’s what the Black Rose shadow plays remind me of. Directors usually leave it out, but Williams intended for there to be a screen behind the stage on which would be projected thematically relevant images — it seems over-the-top until you remember that The Glass Menagerie is supposed to be a memory play, that the exaggeration is the point.

Utena also capitalizes on exaggeration. But it doesn’t tell us outright, as The Glass Menagerie did, that the unreal things aren’t real. We don’t even know whether C-ko exists until much later.

Unreality becomes a trend: first Utena talks to a wall, then the ending of the Black Rose arc reveals that Nemuro Hall was a kind of artifice and that Mamiya never existed as shown in the present. It’s not that surprising when, following this sort of thing, Akio turns off the planetarium projector.

But it’s still unsettling. Some of the places that looked like stages really were only stages. How much of what we saw was “real” and how much was elaborate stagecraft? The longer we follow this line of questioning, the easier it is to forget that Utena is anime, that the idea of a physical stage is, on the most literal level, entirely inapplicable.

Let’s consult Aristotle — no, wait, don’t go. This isn’t complicated enough to be boring. It’s just that, in Aristotle’s estimation, spectacle was one of the six essential components of drama.

It’s explained in the Poetics like this:

… [S]pectacle, to be sure, attracts our attention but is the least essential part of the art of poetry. For the power of tragedy is felt even without a dramatic performance and actors. Furthermore, for the realization of spectacle, the art of the costume designer is more effective than that of the poet.

You don’t find spectacle in dialogue. Spectacle is big, loud accoutrements. It’s Ohtori Academy, a walled primary and secondary school built around a fairy tale tower and a magic forest. It’s school uniforms with epaulettes. It’s swords coming out of people’s chests and a tremendous stage beneath an upside-down castle in the sky upon which swordfights happen.

It’s also people turning into cars — I don’t want to get into the movie until later, but this is relevant. If you’re a consumer of media in the 21st century, you’re no stranger to spectacle. We’ve elevated the art of spectacle to new heights. To Aristotle spectacle was fancy costumes; to us it’s grand settings and explosions and weird imagery constructed entirely through the use of calculating machines. So, a far cry. And one of the things we’ve learned from our many experiments in spectacle is that it can be a poetry unto itself, another language atop the language of the dialogue. You can use over-the-top imagery to suggest themes or states of mind, and you can generally count on people paying attention to this imagery because it’s fun. This happens in anime all the time; I don’t think there’s anything quite like anime and manga if you’re looking for crazy bullshit toward an end.

Pointed spectacle happens to be one of my favorite things in any medium, and Utena has a lot of it. Some of it we’ve seen before; extravagant, enormous, confining schools aren’t uncommon in anime by any means. Other images are less common, but we’re familiar enough with the technique that they aren’t too troublesome.

Utena’s spectacle, though, is — pardon the convolution — almost meta-Aristotelian. It acts upon us just fine, and its many contributions to the “power of tragedy” remove it from what Aristotle seems to have had in mind. But the characters themselves regard it, as Aristotle did, as often incidental to dialogue and interaction.

Consider that Utena initially isn’t bothered much by Ohtori Academy. This is explainable: she and it exist on the same Earth, and she’s probably seen pictures of it or toured it before. Stranger is her lack of response to the “special effects” (lol) surrounding the swordfights. I can’t imagine she’s ever been anywhere quite like the dueling arena. But as far as Utena’s concerned, she has more important things to worry about: avenging Wakaba, doing some kind of good for Anthy. Excepting a few acrobatic feats and some swordomancy, the duels themselves are fairly mundane; they don’t even last that long. The characters don’t shoot fireballs at each other. They just swing swords. Sometimes they weave around desks and dodge cars, but note that these things come from “staging” rather than script.

Maybe you could do with Utena what’s done with Sophocles and Shakespeare: you could drop the script in a wholly different setting and, with a few modifications, make it work. Of course, whether your spectacle turned out as well and pulled as much weight as in the show would remain to be seen.

It’s jarring, though not necessarily in a bad way, when characters shrug off things as new to them as to us, things that make us pause and gape or mumble an involuntary “holy shit.” This isn’t the only way that Utena challenges our viewerly sensibilities. And, in a genre-savvy kind of way, it’s consistent with the classical undertone that runs from start to finish.

Arguably Cowboy Bebop is about whichever of the characters you choose to focus on. Or maybe it’s about all of them. The whole crew gets a fair bit of screen time, enough that all the central characters feel…central. In terms of story mechanics, they’re all integral to one another. They’re excellent foils, and you learn quite a lot about them when they interact.

I know this. But as I came into the show’s final stretch, I’d already decided that, for me, during this initial viewing, it was about Spike.

I suppose we should start with “Pierrot le Fou.”

I found this episode deeply troubling, and for a while I didn’t know why. It seemed there was nothing about it that I shouldn’t like. I love the Batman feel of it, the fight with a supervillain in an amusement park. I like bad situations, circumstances in which nobody’s right. The resolution even manages to be as benign as possible: the Mad Pierrot can’t be allowed to go on killing people, whether or not he has any idea what he’s doing, and Spike probably saves many lives by ending one.

But after a few days of thinking about it, I realized that I hate Spike in this episode. I hate that his problem with the villain seems largely personal. I hate that, when given an opportunity to learn about this human being he’s just killed, to accept an inkling of responsibility for ending a life even if that was really the “ideal” outcome, he turns it down. “I don’t need it anymore,” he says, as if the information was only ever useful to him as a weapon, and, now that the battle’s over, why should he care? In practical terms, Spike declines to watch those scenes that, for me, make this such a strong episode, and that’s infuriating.

And the more I considered it, the more I realized that Spike has always been a tremendous pain in the ass and an occasional thoughtless bastard. I still enjoy him as a character — maybe I enjoy him more for this, even. But I don’t “like” him in the sense that I wouldn’t want to have a drink with him.

He does occasionally do things purely for a friend’s sake, as in episode 21 — but he seems to spend most of that episode not caring much. Why shouldn’t there be any smoking on the bridge in the living quarters?

The following episode might be my favorite. Therein Spike meets a bounty hunter who is marginally more stupid than he is, and proceeds to use the episode’s mark merely as a means of getting at said bounty hunter. The rivalry results in quite a lot of nothing getting done — in fact, it’s generally detrimental to everyone within a two-mile radius; the Teddy Bomber is able to keep on bombing, and Spike vs. Andy fights tend to cause a fair amount of collateral damage. In the end, the Bomber comes out looking better than either of the bounty hunters ostensibly dedicated to ending his reign of terror — he’s misguided, but he never wanted to kill anyone, he learns his lesson, and he at least has principles (which, true to form, Spike never lets him express).

The episode’s climax is an utterly pointless fight resulting in Spike’s being crowned by the king of the dumbasses.

Good stuff. I like when failure is played for laughs.

I don’t want to go through every one of the final episodes like this. To do so might obscure the fact that Spike sucks in almost every episode, and there’s lots of tasty, tasty fail to be gleaned from even the earliest. I’m also hesitant to lay into the guy in any kind of methodical way, as, remember, encounters with Spike sometimes result in self-improvement for the third parties. Whether Spike intends for this to happen doesn’t seem as important as the fact that it does happen. I’m not trying to indict Spike here — but I’ve talked about his good points already, I think, and his flaws do more to move the story forward.

Some bits of the series are more complex and productive in this regard than others. The movie may well be the most convoluted jumble of failure and success of them all. Its resolution — and, actually, let me take a moment to point out that if you haven’t seen the movie, you should go do so immediately; I can wait — its resolution is almost indisputably positive. Vincent has in common with the Mad Pierrot his being out of his right mind through circumstances not of his making, but he comes across as more sinister and deliberate. He’s sane enough to calculate. I’m not really sad to see him (or his plans) go.

Spike’s actions do save quite a lot of people. Bottom line, that pretty definitively makes him one of the good guys. But, again, he doesn’t seem to care much. It’s Faye’s bounty to begin with, more or less; Spike gets involved when the payoff ramps up. And while he at least does some of the legwork this time, he doesn’t seem fully invested in the pursuit of Vincent until it gets personal.

So ridiculous is Spike’s tough guy posturing in the face of mass murder that you have to wonder how much of it is just a front.

It seems crazy to me that Spike can sit here and tell Vincent that he doesn’t give a damn about the world, that he’s just here to pay back a favor. I mean, this isn’t such a strange thing for an action hero to say during the final fight, especially if s/he wants to goad the Big Bad into making a mistake. It’s problematic in this case because the general lack of concern for anyone but himself (and sometimes his very immediate acquaintances) is consistent with things he’s said and done before. We can believe it.

Compare the scene in which Faye has to pull a knife from a corpse.

She didn’t even know this guy, but she at least tells him to rest in peace for the protocol of it. And look at her face: I don’t know about you, but it looks to me like she genuinely regrets having to do this. She’s not taking the death of a stranger (even technically an enemy) lightly. And Faye’s the one who gets shit for being frivolous!

Maybe Spike’s an anti-hero, but I’d expect even an anti-hero to be more outwardly focused, more concerned about the present. That’s really the key to Spike’s failure: he’s not strictly selfish so much as he’s unable to grasp the world around him. He himself admits this: one of his eyes sees the present, he says, and the other sees the past. Both points of view are characterized by a lack of depth perception.

Let me put it this way. He’s not a terrible person, necessarily. He’s just afflicted by the kind of bitterness you can only really experience when you’re young, bitterness born of the conviction that things can never again be as good as they were Back When (compare/contrast Jet’s bitterness, the self-deprecating bitterness of an old man). Unfortunately this is a self-fulfilling prophecy; you certainly won’t find things that make you happy if you don’t look for them. And Spike’s is an egregious case. He fails to see potential sources of happiness in the present, and when he charges headlong at his past, he demonstrates a blindness or ambivalence toward all the bad things he left behind, things he’d really be better off without.

That’s kind of what gets him killed in the end.

Or, technically, the charging headlong is what gets Jet shot in the leg and Julia blown away.

That this was so frustratingly avoidable is what makes it tragic. For me the entire “Real Folk Blues” experience was underscored by a desire to yell at the screen. Leave the past alone! Sometimes circumstances dictate that two people shouldn’t be together!

He can’t learn this lesson, though. His mistakes are too much a part of who he is. He can only decide that he has nothing left to live for (a decision that makes me feel sorrier for Jet than for Faye, to be honest) and head toward death. As long as he takes Vicious with him.

Which he does. So, yay?

It’s my sympathy for Faye and Jet that lets me see this as a net positive end. Spike was a real trainwreck — he was self-destructive, and, left to his own devices long enough, of course he would destroy himself. It’s a wonder that he didn’t take his devotees aboard the Bebop along with him. They’ll miss him, sure, but now they don’t have to deal with his dragging everyone into danger because, for example, he heard the name Julia on the radio.

That sounds callous, but consider that Jet and Faye — Jet especially; Faye more so later — were fixated on Spike. He was often the imperative that drove the plot; he’d either cause trouble, make the plans, or change someone else’s plans. It seems supremely appropriate to me that the show ends the moment Spike does. As Ghostlightning points out again and again, and as the setting indicates, Cowboy Bebop is characterized by stagnation, by a lack of progress over time. Spike embodied this, and, though it may be cruel to say so, I find Spike’s death hopeful in the sense that those of the crew who haven’t done so already can now move on to other things. It’s debatable whether they’d succeed at doing so, but I’m content that the possibility of it exists.

Convenient for them, right? We the consumers live in the eternal narrative present. Everything plot-wise is always happening now, as we think of it. Spike remains lodged in our gullets. His failure is hard to swallow if you’ve failed in the same way.

Maybe this is the point. You’re always being asked to reconcile Spike’s past-and-present point of view with science fiction, traditionally a genre of present-and-future, and with whatever you believe to be true about how happiness works. It was occasionally trying, but I appreciate that dissonance now. It cut me and I bled ideas.

Fail, Spike. For our sake.

This shit is pretty unambiguously pretentious and I don’t like it. But I don’t really hold it against the show. It isn’t just the creators jerking off. Opinionated metafiction is one convention in a set of conventions that Bebop calls upon, then shows us through the eyes of a cast that doesn’t hail from the same set of conventions — this technique is a large part of why I like the way Bebop does references so much.

The aforementioned set of conventions is, despite the year in which Bebop came into being, modernism, and it’s easy to understand why the show feels so modernist. Many of Bebop’s references and remembrances hail from the early 20th century, modernism’s heyday. I don’t intend to do a lecture on modernism here — probably we’ve done that already, and you’re sure to find it in the archives. I mean to talk about one general trend within modernism that, though it’s been present in Bebop since the beginning, began to stand out to me at about the midway point.

It’s funny, actually, to find this trend in a show like Bebop. A good deal of science fiction is, as William Gibson put it once, agnostic with regard to technology. The fictional future isn’t unambiguously good or bad — in fact, because it has people in it, it remains entirely ambiguous. Not so much in Cowboy Bebop, whose characters are indeed complex, but whose future is pretty grim. We’ve got a ruined Earth and a sequence of colonies afflicted by relative squalor. If I remember correctly, the only characters we’ve seen wearing expensive clothes have been criminals and warp gate CEOs.

The modernists, too, were nostalgic. Eventually the postmodernists would come along and dispel that, would claim that the past was never any fuller or richer than the present and we only pretended it was, but sometimes Bebop doesn’t acknowledge this. It’s funny because Bebop is nostalgic for a better past that hasn’t happened yet, but it evokes the mood of modernist works so well that it almost has to be.

tl;dr: Bebop’s present sucks and its past was better. I’ll review how each episode from 12 to 19 either reinforces or riffs upon this. Some episodes do both.

Sessions 12-13 (“Jupiter Jazz”)

Setting: a grungy city in which there are only men. These episodes are fairly straightforward, as there’s a lot of Spike angsting over his lost girlfriend and confronting his friend-turned-nemesis. Whenever Spike gets an opportunity to chase after his past, he takes it, consequences be damned.

Interestingly, it’s here that Cowboy Bebop (in all its Americana) chooses to nod toward war fiction.

When war fiction’s nostalgic, it tends to pine for the time before the war in question became inevitable, the time before the world went mad. For obvious reasons, I suppose.

Not so, in this case. Instead we get a character who seems not to mind having been shot at, as it meant he could participate in the camaraderie he holds in such high regard. He thinks of the past as better, though his is a past that might have killed him. It’s not the same, certainly, but it’s a little reminiscent of war propaganda, quite a lot of which coincided with the modernist days (because, you know, imperialism and World Wars). We don’t really see the opposition, nor do we get any political background; we see one group of soldiers shooting at nothing, dodging explosions with relative ease, and kicking back in camp. It’s creepy, and, while Gren does maintain the nostalgia thing in an odd way, he’s creepy as a consequence.

Session 14 (“Bohemian Rhapsody”)

This episode does and doesn’t invert the trend. On one hand, Hex was at the top of his game in his youth. He was a genius programmer and a chess prodigy, and now he’s a senile old man. On the other hand, the entire episode relates the much-delayed resolution of Hex’s striking back at the sorts of things he had to worry about when at the forefront of space innovation. He may well be happier in his senility. His biggest concern now is losing at chess. And death, maybe, though he doesn’t seem the sort to ruminate upon his own mortality. His happiness may be of an empty or involuntary variety, but that doesn’t seem to bother him any.

Session 15 (“My Funny Valentine”)

A strange episode for the purposes of this post, as Faye has no past, in a way. She remembers only the grim universe of the present, in which twenty-year-old amnesiac women are played for all they’re worth, even when they don’t own the clothes on their backs. And yet she retains a certain affection toward Whitney. Con man though he may be, he was briefly a part of her life, and she feels she owes him something for that.

Or we could think of it this way: Whitney was always lying to Faye, but she experienced a brief period of happiness, and that was his doing. This doesn’t let him off the hook, by any means; he’s still an asshole. But she was happy. But…this is complicated.

Session 16 (“Black Dog Serenade”)

This episode is more postmodern (maybe the last was, too). Yes, Jet was happier in the past, and now he’s something of a lonely old man. We learn here that some of his fond memories depend upon fabrications, that in fact his partner was responsible for the loss of his arm. Like Faye, any nostalgia he might express for a past happiness dependent upon his limited point of view or his lack of information would feel somewhat inauthentic. This sort of story cuts to the heart of nostalgia, and I appreciate that Bebop takes the time to do this even while weaving about itself a distinctly modernist vibe.

Session 17 (“Mushroom Samba”)

I can’t decide whether this episode isn’t terribly relevant to my present purposes, or whether it’s so relevant that I experienced an initial sensory overload that led me to conclude that it isn’t terribly relevant.

It continues an occasional, distinctly un-nostalgic theme, a general disdain for the drug culture of the 60s and 70s. Users of traditionally illegal drugs in Bebop aren’t terrible people, necessarily, but they’re depicted as pretty ridiculous. We saw this back in episode 14, too. It’s a stronger indictment if you choose to include all the Red Eye stuff as part of this.

It nods toward colonialism. See the screencap above; “Western World Development” makes me think of nothing so much as Manifest Destiny.

Giant flying blonde white woman bringing the light of pastoralism to the brown-skinned peoples of the frontier! Except instead of a giant flying blonde white woman it was a bunch of white dudes with guns and smallpox, and instead of bringing the “light” of pastoralism they just killed a lot of people. It’d be hard to sympathize with anyone who felt particularly nostalgic about this.

In “Mushroom Samba,” though, space-Kansas is where two or three blaxploitation movies collide. I thought there’d be something to say about this (sub)genre having been removed from its usual urban setting — nostalgia for the city, in other words — but, as it turns out, there’s a western (sub-)subgenre within. Suffice to say that the space-frontier isn’t wholly dominated by white people.

I guess this episode is an inversion, if it’s anything.

Session 18 (“Speak Like a Child”)

If not for the crazy space shuttle business of the following episode, I would’ve ended this post here, as, after a whole handful of variations, it brings the earnest nostalgia back. For all intents and purposes, our heroes spend the entire episode (hilariously) chasing after the means of unlocking Faye’s past, the time when she was happy. Because, remember, her present troubles began only a short while after she awoke from suspended animation. Arguably they began immediately after she awoke, or a little earlier, as she was the victim of a scam all along. And, again, that’s all she knows. She’s lost the good times completely and irrevocably.

We also get a 20th-century-tech otaku. Nice.

Session 19 (“Wild Horses”)

Easy. The space shuttle, one of the earliest reusable spacecraft, saves the day! And with an old man at the helm, no less.

Coda

Nothing in Bebop is simple — clearly, as it took me over a thousand words to justify the statement “Cowboy Bebop is nostalgic,” and to try to finesse my way through those instances in which it doesn’t entirely apply. The variations are the point, though. I’m happy to have discovered that the sense of nostalgia about the show doesn’t come across as an accident or a reference to a bygone movement simply for the sake of reference. What we get instead is a kind of dialogue between the time in which the show was made and the period that it nods toward so often — another example of Bebop’s catechismal quality, its talking to itself.

I wanted to get around to writing about the characters before I knew too much about them, hence my stopping myself before that big two-part thing in the middle and forcing myself to do this post (“forcing” because, goddammit, Bebop is a hard show not to watch). Is that strange? Maybe. I think it might help me track both changes in the characters and changes in how I feel about them.

I expected something like Star Trek, the original space western, in which the core cast isn’t really who you’re invested in on an episode-to-episode basis. In the original series especially, there’s never much at stake for the Enterprise crew. You know that the last five minutes of any given episode will bring them back to the status quo. As a consequence, you’re often invested in the “side” characters, those who show up for a single episode and then disappear, as these are the people whose planets are destroyed and such. These are the characters strong enough to carry a movie. Star Trek is long enough that this begins to change a little; there exist episodes largely about the bridge crew, and it’s hard not to become attached to characters after 79 episodes. But, generally speaking, it’s quite episodic.

Bebop isn’t like that. Episodic it is, in a way, but it’s much more of an adventure through the identities of its protagonists. They haven’t changed dramatically as of yet, but this is the sort of show in which the magic happens in the silences between (and sometimes during) fights. Spike exercising at the beginning and the end of the first episode. Jet speaking with his former lady friend in her bar — the “camera” jumps over to her and away, over and away, as if he can’t keep his eyes on her — and his reconciliation at the end of episode ten not so much with her as with himself. We care about some of the one-off characters, but so many of them are cliches for the sake of being cliches (this is not a criticism; more on this later). Mostly we’re watching to see, which is to say that I’m watching to see, what the events of each episode do to our heroes.

Again, if you’re tracking change, it helps to have a place to start. I realize that eleven episodes constitute quite a broad starting point, but only since the ninth have we been able to say that the gang’s all here. Blame the show for introducing Ed so late.

The team mom

Superficially, Jet seems like the manliest of the gang. He’s got an epic beard — a beard so epic that he has eyebrows under his eyes. He has a metal arm that may actually not be quite as muscular as his real arm. He’s always making uncomfortable comments about women.

But despite that, the most traditionally feminine activities on the ship are relegated to him. He’s the cook and the nurse. The kids make a mess and he cleans up after them. In fact, he seems to live for Spike, in a strange sort of way. I don’t mean that he’s attracted to the dudes, but when there are bounties to be had, he usually plays a peripheral role in acquiring them. He leaves the Jeet Kune Do and the dogfights to Spike; he stays out of the spotlight so Spike can have it all. One wonders whether the Bebop crew might be a little wealthier if Jet took charge more often, but that isn’t his style. He’s the medic — he doesn’t solve problems, he fixes them.

Just as planned, I’d say. Cowboy Bebop has this tendency to render its characters considerably less cool (and somewhat more likable) than they seem, and Jet might be the most obvious example of that trend.

The prodigal son

Spike is a trying character, one whom it’s possible to have a fairly strong reaction toward or against. This applies to we the viewers, I suppose, but it’s especially true of those he encounters throughout his adventures. A few characters admire him (Rocco Bonnaro), some come to like him (V.T.), but quite a few are annoyed by him. In fact, those who come to like him are often annoyed by him.

In that sense, he’s really not an unusual anime protagonist.

I thought I might have trouble with this show because it wouldn’t be “anime” enough. This was a dumb thing to worry about, it turns out; for all its film references, it’s quite firmly rooted in the animated tradition. We know Spike Spiegel. He’s that hero who tends to be rather lucky with regard to his own personal safety, and certainly possessed of several degrees of competence, but who has a knack for getting himself into trouble. Jet’s warning Spike not to gamble (because he’d win too much, and so cause problems with the casino management) seems like a nod to this. He’s a little Lina Inverse, a little Vash the Stampede, and a little Justy Tylor.

The action in many episodes amounts to a conflict of fortunes. Often Spike must leverage his considerable survival ability against his unmatched talent for landing in bad situations. As Jet stays out of the way most of the time and Faye spends the first fifteen minutes of each episode doing her own thing, that frenetic action that Bebop is known for generally springs from Spike himself.

I like him. I like that character. So does anyone in the show who gets to know him. That’s what makes him the prodigal son — he isn’t exactly “prodigal” in the dictionary sense, but, like the son of the parable, people cut him a break.

We know that he was involved with organized crime at one point. The way he talks about it with Vicious leads me to believe that he did some not-very-nice things. He’s also pretty good at getting his marks killed (or chasing after marks who get themselves killed), and so missing out on some hefty bounties. Nobody holds grudges about this, though. I certainly don’t, but I have the convenience of being a viewer. I still get to eat when Spike messes up.

One could suggest that the rest of the crew should drop Spike off somewhere and go about their lives, but that doesn’t seem at all reasonable. He is quite useful, when he gets around to it. And, true to his name (“spiegel” = “mirror”), he’s always able to make people reflect upon themselves, to self-interrogate. He’s got a variation upon that healing aura that we’ve learned to associate with slice of life protagonists. He follows his material errors with redeeming emotional acts. I don’t mean that he’s always nice to people — he isn’t — but the way he relates to people is generally of benefit to both the secondary characters and the viewers.

We could debate whether the show’s “about” Spike, but I definitely see him as the glue that holds it together.

The middle child

I hesitate to assign concrete ages to the members of this metaphoric family (pay no mind to the fact that the prodigal son of the parable was the younger of two). When I call Faye the middle child, I mean that she doesn’t stand out much, which is what makes her stand out.

Alright, yes, there are the bright yellow hotpants, the bewbs, and, between them, the improbably narrow waist. And we know as soon as she’s introduced that she’s by no means useless, however much she chooses to bum around thereafter. She has the skills required to remain on the run from both the law and various(?) criminal elements. On a mostly unrelated note, she’s also the reason I chose Japanese audio over English — as good as the dub may be, it suffers from a severe lack of Megumi Hayashibara.

But she lacks specialization. She hasn’t the beatdown ability of Spike nor the hackmagic of Ed. She may well be cleverer than either of them, but Spike and Jet are plenty capable of formulating reasonably effective plans. There’s something to be said for feminine wiles in the gritty world of bounty hunting, but otherwise she seems not to bring much in the way of unique skills to the party — seems because we don’t actually see her do that much.

So she acts cool, in every sense of the word. She won’t get her hands dirty chasing after bounties unless she knows there’s a tangible and substantial reward in it for her. She acts cool when facing down gunmen and negotiating with a dangerous casino magnate — actually it isn’t a negotiation, but she’s cool enough that her lack of leverage hardly seems to matter.

In any other show she’d be the resident Action Girl. In Cowboy Bebop she eats dog food.

Again, Bebop has a tendency to peel away coolness. I’m not impressed when Jet’s a misogynist or Faye taunts the dog. But these are the things that make me believe in these characters. And with Faye there’s an added critical angle — often in actiony, generally male-oriented, “cool” art the so-called Action Girl really isn’t. If Faye’s not going to be allowed to show her particular strengths, then fine, she’ll give a big middle finger to the world and sunbathe while the manly men chase after the bounty. Because that’s what they want, isn’t it? Never mind that she was integral to the resolution of the fourth, seventh, and ninth episodes. Never mind that she’s always carrying half a dozen Bond gadgets in the form of feminine accessories. She’ll be just over here if you need her.

The baby

The oldest and youngest children in a given family occupy unique positions. Often the oldest is saddled with expectations, asked to serve as an example, and is rewarded with authority over younger siblings and a certain degree of freedom — this would be Spike, or Jet, if you don’t want him to be the parent.

The youngest has a kind of immunity, an ability to get away with things. The youngest remains the baby in the eyes of anyone old enough to remember them as an infant. I haven’t known her that long, but this seems to be the general gist of Ed.

Trope-wise, Ed’s the cyberpunk kid. Not the young female badass, mind; that’s a different character. I mean she’s the kid who likes computers and such, who knows some not-quite-socially-acceptable tricks involving networks and AIs, but who doesn’t seem to have much direction in life quite yet. Maybe she’ll grow up to partake in cyberpunk-esque intrigues, but now’s the time for having fun. She’s kind of a female, less broody Bobby Newmark, a.k.a. Count Zero — she muscles her way into the adult world of the Bebop, but she doesn’t know what she’s in for.

That makes her a nice alternative point of view. And it’d seem that, until she is fully involved in things, she has that aforementioned immunity. She eats the monster that stalks the ship throughout the eleventh episode, in a scene of pure comic anime ridiculousness. Or, alternately, maybe she’s the innocent character put in a position where she’s likely to see horrible things, the character whose innocence we’d protect if we could.

So then maybe she’s…

…On second thought, this post is long enough already.

And your little dog, too

I get a sense of dread when a story introduces a dog.

I mean, I rather like animals. They’re also useful. I mentioned the dog food scene already — you can use a pet to humanize characters, whether the characters feed their pets or tell their pets they’ll have to work for their food. Humans have pets. It’s an especially human thing to do.

But dogs are easy targets. Bad things happen to dogs. There’s the Old Yeller contingency, and sometimes villains go after dogs to show how evil they are.

So I cringe a little whenever Ein’s onscreen. I try not to get attached.

Goddammit!

I offer you a quote from Ghostlightning, whose ongoing effort to engage with Cowboy Bebop’s love-remembering elements is one of the most meticulous and goddamn heroic blog activities I’ve ever seen:

We won’t find anything in Cowboy Bebop that has a reference that figures so significantly in the narrative so as to be the primary source of meaning and value. Cowboy Bebop can be fully enjoyed not knowing a single reference or allusion the show is making.

“A Masterpiece of Remembering Love: Cowboy Bebop; Episode 01 ‘Asteroid Blues’”

I’m certain that’s true. I’m enjoying Cowboy Bebop quite a lot despite being lazy about music and film (as mentioned before). I might be intimidated by the prospect of doing a series like this at the same time as Ghostlightning — walking in the shadows of giants and all, though he of all bloggers wouldn’t want anyone to feel that way — if not for my being reasonably confident that I won’t cover too much of the same ground. This is my first viewing of the show, for one thing. And, where GL’s Bebop posts are love songs to the act of remembering love, I like to write about and fangasm over structural points of interest and masterful acts of manipulation moments of emotional resonance.

Good thing, too. For someone like me, Cowboy Bebop is downright meaty.

As I began, I remembered a time when cartoons from Japan were exciting and alluring and new. A very specific time, I mean. I was in the fourth grade — this was before Cowboy Bebop existed, incidentally — and somehow or another I’d managed to acquire the first few episodes of the Record of Lodoss War OVA from the local video rental place. What I remember most from that viewing isn’t Lodoss War itself (which I had to rewatch to recall in any detail), but the trailers preceding it, complete with cheesy narrator (“This isn’t animation…it’s JAPANAMATION!”). I can’t remember what specifically was previewed. Things like Bubblegum Crisis and Project A-Ko, I guess. But I remember that these trailers must have sampled the most stylish, violent and/or sexy scenes from their respective shows or movies. I was nine or ten years old and infinitely impressed. I interpreted the trailers as a promise.

Then, some years later, I finally did get into anime, and my tastes leaned well away from the realities of the kinds of shows previewed on the Lodoss War VHS tapes. But there was still that promise. Cowboy Bebop seems to have remembered it. In many ways it’s the un-show I constructed to illustrate “anime” in my mental dictionary.

The second thing I noticed was the pacing.

The pacing is weird, which is to say that it’s a little atypical of anime. Often you’re lulled into believing that you’re watching a movie, and you’re surprised when the ending theme kicks in after 22 minutes. Speaking purely practically, it’s a damn effective way of getting people to keep watching.

But it can be disorienting if you come in with expectations. You aren’t always watching people talk or fight or otherwise interact. Sometimes there are no people onscreen, and during many of these scenes the characters don’t bother interjecting via voice-over. There may not even be any music.

The first episode especially shows us a lot of space.

I found myself wondering about the point of it all. It reminded me of the first Star Trek movie — you know, the one in which there’s about ten minutes of plot and 300 hours of pretty lights and spaceships moving really slowly.

That might be an unfair comparison, but I don’t mean it as a criticism. The spaceships-moving-slowly thing works so much better in Bebop. It doesn’t take up that much time, in the grand 26-episode scheme. And it occurs to me that, when I said that Bebop shows us space, I probably should’ve said that it shows us spaces.

Environment (visual, aural) is important in this show in a way that it wasn’t in the Star Trek movie. A comparison with the original Star Trek TV run would be more apt (though not perfect; I’ll get to that when I talk about the cast). Place is a force or “character” here, though not in the same way as in, say, Kino’s Journey. Here it’s less immediately, directly powerful and far more talkative.

If, like me, you pay more attention to the scenes and their transitions than to the dialogue (resulting in many a rewind, let me tell you), you might get the impression that Cowboy Bebop is a show in constant conversation with itself. I don’t mean that it’s “meta” (that it talks to relevant things outside itself), which certainly it is (and does). I mean that its consistency reminds me of an active thought process or an internal monologue. It’s a little like catechism, in other words, albeit considerably cooler.

In the first seven episodes, I notice at least two distinct models for scenes in conversation. There seem to be others, but the following are the most sustained and least personal, and I can make the strongest cases for them.

Q. Does [x] have value? A. Yes.

Ghostlightning again:

I hesitate to use the term “middlebrow” because it is generally used negatively or even derisively, for people or works who “put on highbrow airs” while remaining populist and accessible. Put in a clumsier way, it’s a kind of pretentiousness. But I will use it here for Cowboy Bebop, not only because it has excellent episodes “to balance” lowbrow content as one would classify “Heavy Metal Queen” [episode seven] of being, but rather because the execution of this episode is on a high level.

“Raising the Brow: B-Movie Goodness in Cowboy Bebop 07 ‘Heavy Metal Queen’”

I sympathize quite a lot with the use of “middlebrow” as a nonjudgmental descriptor, but maybe Cowboy Bebop resists such classifications altogether. It almost has no choice but to do so. Some of the creators seem to be the sorts of people who set out to make “art,” but they’re working in a medium that gets panned in the evening news as a gathering of pornographers (and, remember, Bebop aired in 1998). Several avenues of argument are available to people in that position. They could try to topple the canon, at which point all art is low; they could try to expand the canon, at which point more art is high. They could redefine the canon, even. But the real problem is that people talk and think about art in these terms to begin with — that people are inclined to distrust any medium that isn’t 400 years old, and, when such a medium finally earns some “legitimacy,” that its practitioners insist upon rewarding themselves by setting up new divisions of their devising and under their control. The child abused by its parent responds by abusing smaller children.

Cowboy Bebop looks into the eyes of those with brows lowered and those with brows raised high. I don’t think it seeks a compromise so much as it shaves its own brows clean away.

Nowhere early in the show is this more explicit than in the fifth episode, which juxtaposes, in subsequent scenes, an opera house and a convenience store, (religious) opera and porno.

There’s much to be gleaned from the contrast here, but what interests me most is that, by the time all’s said and done at each of these locations, the lines between them have been blurred. The opera house becomes a stage for smut, location of rather messy murder and fanservice vehicle Faye Valentine (who is more than that, yes, but she is a fanservice vehicle). The convenience store with its racks of porn hosts a meeting of old friends the likes of which you might find in a Hemingway story, a brand of narrative with the cultural seal of approval. In any given story there is pondering and pandering. Cowboy Bebop doesn’t try to obscure that by arranging its brows in a particular way; it throws its trenchcoat open and invites you to look.

Oh, also: that fight in the Chartres Cathedral facsimile.

Among other things, Chartres Cathedral is an enduring example of French Gothic architecture, a demonstration of the power of symbols cited by Joseph Campbell, and a launchpad for philosophizing about art, art-making, and authority for Orson Welles and other filmmakers.

Spike Spiegel blows it up with a hand grenade.

Q. Does [x] belong to [y]? A. You’d be surprised.

Cowboy Bebop is really quite American, in the United States sense (apologies in advance if you object to the U.S. appropriation of a word that means two continents; for my purposes, it’s just convenient). You’ve got things like long-distance trucking and hitchhiking, staples of American literature and film thanks to the breadth of the country and the highway system.

You’ve got a Mexican/Tijuanan cantina, “American” by virtue of its being little more than a site of activity for people who aren’t necessarily Mexican (i.e. Asimov Solensen), as in film westerns. (Incidentally, “El Rey” is the name of a fictional town inhabited by American expatriates.)

And you’ve got the music — jazz, blues, occasionally metal. The first in particular represents a mashup of cultural traditions from throughout the world, but it’s generally thought to be distinctly American because the U.S. is where the synthesis happened.

Jet Black is a fan of jazz and blues. We can understand this. He’s (kind of) a cool guy, for one thing. He’s an adult, and he doesn’t seem to be young anymore at that. Lacking the left arm with which he was born, he’s clearly seen and done some things. We’re not surprised that this is the character who dreams about Charlie Parker quoting Goethe.

He makes a comment about singing the blues in the womb or something. But in seven eleven episodes we don’t see him act upon that. He’s lived the blues, sure, but he never gets around to playing them.

In Cowboy Bebop, this is the face of the blues:

Yep, a little white kid. He’s in the news and everything. This image is made jarring by its providing a source for the soundtrack of Spike’s weird episode-opening daydreaming, and then for Jet’s deferring to the kid’s harmonica mastery.

We learn as the sixth episode carries on that this isn’t technically a kid. He “suffers” from a peculiar kind of illness. But despite the episode’s being called “Sympathy for the Devil,” we’re never really shown how hard it is to live as he does, apart from one scene in which his parents/guardians die. Mostly he just makes life difficult for people around him — in a literal way, he is the blues, or he brings them. Being the episode’s titular devil, he might interface with the devil stuff in blues mythology, but I don’t know much about that.

It’s worth bearing in mind that, though I may be inventing a correlation between screencaps here, the whole sixth episode has to do with expectations defied. I’m not going forward without prompting.

Now, how to untangle this?

I suppose it’s partly cautionary. In other words, be careful when making assumptions about the art that a particular person might find enjoyable, applicable, or otherwise useful. Maybe the corollary is that paying attention to the art that a person actually, actively finds useful can tell you something about them, but I’m not so sure about that. Taste is slippery.

I tend to think of it as a nod toward Cowboy Bebop’s appropriating as much as it does from the U.S. and elsewhere. Art may have cultural boundaries in terms of the knowledge it requires of you, but it has no physical boundaries, especially in a setting including both the internet and FTL travel. Jazz doesn’t belong to the United States (or to cool people, or whomever), nor do trucking or hitchhiking as tropes (or as activities, really). The jazz song is an object that transcends physicality and ownership, whatever the IP barons would like you to believe. You hear it and it’s yours. It doesn’t matter if you’re Charlie Parker or a little white kid or a Japanese anime director.

Much like a Haruki Murakami novel, Cowboy Bebop exemplifies or performs this idea even when the scenes aren’t riffing off of each other to that effect. This is almost inevitably what happens as you watch; unless you’re familiar with every culture and every nuance thrown into the mix, you’re appropriating things or being asked to — and I always did appreciate stories that ask you to learn something.

You may wonder how I ended up with a sample group of seven episodes here. Post length, partly. And also because these won’t exactly be “episodic” posts — the episode progression won’t entirely determine the order in which I do things. I’ll have points to make. There will be overlap.

Next up: episodes 1-7 again, plus 8-11, and characters. I may do something about Gibsonian hackermancy, too. We’ll see.

When I write about these things, I’d very much prefer to focus on what I like about them. And I fully expect to like them overall. Enough people like them. In fact, quite a lot of people whose opinions I hold in high regard (mostly because they tend to like the same general sorts of things I do) like these things.

Cowboy Bebop, though, requires some qualification. It might help you to know a few things about my art preferences and foreknowledge before we begin (and, once we’ve begun, I’ll have other things to talk about). After all, the show enjoys a strange sort of cultural cache here in the west. It’s one of the very, very few Japanese cartoons that non-fan Americans are allowed to watch; it’s the absolute favorite of many a film-snob-type fan.

Not super-long ago, tight compadre OGT related himself to the problem thus:

… I manage to evade the extremes of opinions about Cowboy Bebop: I neither worship it as the feather of truth that the hearts of other anime must be weighed against, nor do I revile it as some kind of impure anime too tainted by Western influences to qualify as “true anime”.

“Cowboy Bebop THE REWATCHENING”

The problem being that, very generally speaking, we are kind of expected to feel one way or the other about it. Or maybe it’s that one extreme begets the other, at which point they become symbiotes, devouring or at least overshadowing the moderate stance.

I don’t imagine I’ll takes sides here and I’d rather not. But if you know me, you could make certain reasonable assumptions about how I’m likely to feel about the show, however much I end up enjoying it. I’m a bit of an apologist for the anime mainstream — I maintain that, while sometimes problematic, this or that formula can be very effective when it isn’t simply regurgitated wholesale for its own sake. Cowboy Bebop eschews the anime formulae we know so well in favor of western film conventions — conventions in which I’ve never been especially interested, to be perfectly honest.

See, I’m probably not among this show’s ideal audience. I’m not much of a film fan; young Pontifus discovered anime via video games and Saturday morning cartoons. And, though I’m reluctant to call myself a hipster, per se, I’ve always been attracted to idiosyncrasy. Those anime conventions I defend so ardently may be conventional for a given population, but I’m not exactly a member of that population. I could name ten chiptune/FM synth musicians or ten indie/post rock bands faster than I could name ten famous jazz musicians.

If Cowboy Bebop is “for” anyone, it may well be for people steeped in mainstream western culture. My own culture, ostensibly. I like jazz well enough and I respect the innovations of early filmmakers, but I’m afraid I never had much use for a mainstream that largely excluded the things I liked.

And yet I feel an affinity with Cowboy Bebop’s “author.”

Being a TV production, there’s no one person responsible for how it turned out. We could sort out the group effort, if we really wanted to. Director Shinichiro Watanabe is known for his cultural mashups. Writer Dai Sato is an outspoken opponent of the moe movement. And so on, I’m sure, but Cowboy Bebop conflates and contorts the contributions of these individuals into a single product. When I say that I can relate to the show’s “author,” I’m not talking about any one member of the production crew; I’m talking about the author-concept suggested by the show itself. Something like the Barthesian implied author.

Let’s call him/her/it Author-san.

Cowboy Bebop seems tailor-made for us, by whom I mean westerners, and western SF fans in particular. It’s easy for us to enjoy it. From our point of view, it seems well in line with the sorts of things it’s socially acceptable to call “good” or “well-wrought” or “classic,” and it’s no wonder that we aren’t hassled too much by our peers if we profess to like it. It’s like enjoying a Miyazaki film (which, while sometimes more thoroughly “Japanese,” usually has the Disney stamp of approval).

Consider, though, the Japanese otaku culture that gave Author-san authority in the first place, the culture out of and into which s/he made Cowboy Bebop.

Hiroki Azuma points out that this is a reactionary bunch. They distance themselves from their fellow citizens, who appropriate and enjoy western culture, by positing themselves as especially Japanese. Azuma problematizes this (“Between the otaku and Japan,” he writes, “lies the United States”), but it doesn’t matter much with regard to Author-san whether it’s problematic or not. Author-san happens to like jazz and film noir. S/he also happens to like cartoons — happens to like them so much that s/he has made a career in the industry that produces them. But, just as some friends of mine would laugh at me for extolling Aria as a grand human achievement, some of Author-san’s friends simply cannot understand why western imports speak to him/her as they do.

“Why?” Author-san asks. “I’ll show you why!”

Thence Cowboy Bebop.

Clearly this is fictional — it’s a series of assumptions based on a show I haven’t even seen yet (apart from bits and pieces on TV, anyway). The point is that I’m disinclined to bemoan Cowboy Bebop for courting the western mainstream. As far as I can tell, it does and it doesn’t — and what interests me more than either proposition is the tension between them. It’s a tension that I hope to find in the show itself, albeit not one that I feel much like lingering upon or arguing about. I’m more concerned with simply enjoying the show, and I’m reasonably confident in my ability to find something to like about it, even if I do suffer from the occasional hipster tendency.