Cowboy Bebop, and the Beauty of Impermanence

I’ve been thinking a lot about the term ‘liminal space.’

Spike just simply is one of the coolest protagonists out there. I can't enunciate why, he just is.

It goes without saying that over a year ago the world kind of came to a screeching halt, and since then there have been days, weeks, sometimes months where it feels like time itself is holding its breath. I haven’t been in a movie theatre since February 2020, which is itself weird because I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not 2020 anymore. When I think of ‘last summer’ my brain takes me to the summer of 2019, and I keep forgetting in a weird spatial way that an entire year has passed. There have been plenty of articles written over the past year about how the human body being in the same space for months on end, living out the same schedules, screws up the ways in which the brain processes memory, and so time feels elastic. Everyone lives in stasis, waiting for a distant and uncertain resolution.

Okay, Glendon, you’re writing a review, why are you getting existential on us?

Jet is the easiest character to overlook, but only because he appears the most stable. You need someone who at least pretends to be the rock holding everything together.

So, I’ve wanted to write about Cowboy Bebop kind of since I started this thing (in fact, an earlier idea for this article sows up in my original set of notes), but I never really knew how to approach it. After all, this is ostensibly a movie blog, and shifting into an anime mini-series seems pretty off-the-mark. But at this point, I’ve talked about a few shows and Cowboy Bebop has a movie sequel (in-betweenquel?) attached to it anyways. Yet, still; why Cowboy Bebop?

Directed by Shinichirō Watanabe, the twenty-six-episode show ran back in 1998, and with its (notably impressive) dub became one of the first widely popular animes in the West. This owes a lot to its extensive American influence. Cowboy Bebop is Firefly before Joss Whedon ever thought up Firefly, but taken to a whole new level of sophistication. It’s a Western in space complete with “cowboy” bounty hunters, but it’s also a gritty detective noir. And sometimes it’s high-energy slapstick. And sometimes it’s pulling straight from Ridley Scott’s Alien. Everywhere you look there’s something else going on; references to the band Queen, a character designed after Bruce Lee, a mash-up of V for Vendetta and the Penguin, etcetera, etcetera. This all comes to the name of the thing – drawing from jazz bebop, Cowboy Bebop builds itself around a system of improvisation, borrowing from various forms by breaking tradition styles, forming a work “which becomes a new genre itself.” The jazz motif runs throughout the entire show, as the Space Western is scored by high-soaring jazz instrumentals. The music propels the entire thing forward, representing the modus operandi underpinning the entire project.

That’s what Cowboy Bebop is, but that still doesn’t answer the question – why? Why talk about this show?

I really didn't like Faye at first, but she grows on me the most over the show. Her background episodes all break my heart.

As I’ve already enunciated, Cowboy Bebop is a show that might feel very familiar to modern viewers. Even beyond the way it codified the Space Western concept, the central cast of the show seems at first to play typically into classic found-family tropes. You have the irresistibly cool and edgy Spike Spiegel, the stern but good-natured Jet Black, Faye Valentine as an untouchable femme fatale, and spunky but loveable Ed Wong. Also Ein, the super-intelligent corgi. Once the chips are laid out, everything seems clearly set for a long-running, episodic show about this ensemble of bounty hunters living out life on Jet’s ship, the Bebop. But before long, the show peaks into Spike’s fractured psyche, haunted by a past he can’t escape from. Jet, try as he might, constantly finds himself entangled in his unresolved past-life as a criminal investigator. We learn that Faye’s high-life pursuits are an attempt to experience a past she’s never had. Even Ed has secrets she’s running from. None of these characters have any sense of future, because they’re all caught up in old lives.

They all live in liminal space.

Ed is the glue of this show. She balances out the melodrama and gives everything a sense of momentum.

That’s the trick about Cowboy Bebop. It’s often hailed as one of the greatest things to come out of Japanese animation, and while that’s true, I think it risks giving the wrong image. If you were to pick out a few of the best films of the past few years – Parasite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, etc. – you’d find stories with razor-sharp pacing and not a single wasted moment (…those examples also both happen to be foreign films, which wasn’t intentional, but goes with the theme). Cowboy Bebop isn’t quite like that, in fact, much like its characters, it meanders quite a bit. The show, too, is in stasis.

Talking about the “plot” of the show is a hard thing to do, because, what is the plot? It’s tempting to point towards the episodes that center around Spike’s backstory, as they frame the general structure of the show. But realistically, Spike’s “story” only spans five twenty-minute episodes across the twenty-six-episode run. In truth, the plot is that stasis. As much as it advertises itself as a Space Western, so much of the show is built around noir tropes. Every new episode is a mini-noir, framing the cast in a new gloomy, emotive setting. They rub against a wide variety of fleshed-out and lived-in characters of all walks of life. These micro-stories all walk this tightrope of being constantly expressive and confident in their high-emotion but without falling entirely into laughable self-seriousness. And all the while, our central cast continues in stasis. Even as their choices in every episode slowly peel back the layers of our characters, we become more and more aware of how stuck they are in their life. Their fractured, messy backstories are weights, holding them back from fully living presently. Moreover, they are constantly at the end of their rope, never quite able to bring in the bounty that will give them a break. They’re always poor, barely able to afford food, and constantly have 0 patience with each other. Despite how much we are slowly learning about these characters, they are refusing to grow, choosing isolation and stagnation over coming together as a group. They chose stasis.

The way all of these characters tiredly put up with each other gives me so much life. They're truly coworkers, not friends.

In fact, the deeper you dig, the more you realize the entire world of Cowboy Bebop is in stasis. Every episode reveals how much the people of 2071 are living in the constant shadow of the old world. The crew has to dig through the ruins of Earth to find a machine that can play a Betamax tape. Eccentric revenge plans spark in the present from wounds 70 years old. An old mechanic spends his time repairing old planes and even the space shuttle Columbia (the show was made years before the Columbia disaster, and yet its presence only becomes more poignant). Old history comes back to haunt modern corporations and companies, as the sins of their past weigh them down. The world itself is stuck in its past, unable to make peace and thus unable to move forward. Everyone is haunted by the ruins of their history, a sense of innocence that no one can get back to, and a future that seems incredibly uncertain.

Everyone is in liminal space.

The movie really deserves its own article; it does an excellent job at expanding on the show's core themes while also just feeling like a huge, big-budget episode.

It took me a few watches to realize that the beauty of Cowboy Bebop isn’t in the things happening before you. And, to be clear, there’s a lot of cool shoot-ups and dogfights and high-stakes adventures. But beyond all that, Cowboy Bebop is really a show about space. Not, like, in the cosmic sense, but in the space between moments. The breathless moment where time seems to stop. It’s about liminality. It’s about slowing down and taking a hold of every spare moment, every interaction. The more that I watch this show, the less I feel any sense of urgency; I just want to slow down and exist with this world and these characters. Because as much as this show is about liminality, it’s also about the impermanence of life. And to talk about that, I need to mention the ending.

Because the fact is, Cowboy Bebop ends, and that ending frames everything – if only for the fact that it does end. I don’t want to spoil anything here, but sufficed to say, there are no continuing adventures of the crew of the Bebop. Even the movie isn’t a sequel, it’s another story that exists somewhere in the middle of this narrative. The show begins with only Jet and Spike on the Bebop, and the audience gets to slowly see the rest of the crew come together. But they also see it all end. Everyone in their own way realizes that the fulfilment they’ve been seeking isn’t on this ship. It isn’t with these people. That was the most shocking thing to me about this show – despite appearances, it isn’t a found family. They never really open up to each other, they never find their sense of comfort in this motley crew that’s been assembled. Rather, this season of their respective lives is just a means to an end, a catalyst in their individual journeys. We as an audience are privy to this secret, sacred moment where all these colourful lives briefly intersected – but not a moment more. All things come to an end, and those endings are messy and disorganized. They’re rarely opportune. But that’s life.

"I'm just a humble bounty hunter, ma'am."

I’ve always been struck by the rawness of Cowboy Bebop’s themes, but especially in this time that central essence hits very closely. Within a time where the world itself is holding its breath in stasis, I keep running into endings. It's a season of transitions where you're really not able to transition. I graduated around a month ago, which brings such a mix of conclusions within open-ended opportunities. How many people have I unknowingly talked to for the last time? And how many patterns and structures look totally different now that I don’t have school to organize everything around? For me, Cowboy Bebop is a show that embraces the tension between liminality, and the inevitability of endings. We all exist in the middle, in times of unpredictable uncertainty. As Spike says, “whatever happens… happens.” All that we can do in the moment is to play in the middle – and we play there as long as we can until life comes and ends things for us. If the past is a weight, the cast of the Bebop encourage us to deal with that heaviness before the inevitable happens and it becomes unbearable.

Every show needs a pet corgi that knows better than anyone else on the ship, yet can't communicate with them because he's just a dog.

It’s hard to sum up this show in a tight article – maybe it’s impossible. As Watanabe intended, the show often defies the structures of genre. But, at its core, it’s a story about humanity. It’s about love, loss, revenge, regret, and so many other things. It’s twenty-six episodes of fresh and exciting stories that have their own emotive range. More than anything, it’s a story about characters wrestling with their past in the ever-felt present. It is a show that sits in the tension between those points, that lives in that liminality. It’s about the way that emotional baggage becomes a weight that carries through a person’s life. Our past dictates our present, and the way we meet that past impacts how we look to our future. All of us our people of context, and the true improvisation of life is in deciding how much our context shapes us. Will we engage our old mistakes head-on, or live life in pursuit of a childhood long gone? Will we live our life dreaming of different choices, or shoulder our heavy burdens and deal with the present?

Because in the end, whatever happens, you’re gonna carry that weight.