Bebop Musings

PAST: The Promise of the Double Edged Sword by Sado

We may find the allure of Cowboy Bebop in the action, drama or the comedy. It may be in the music, the animation, the story. It may even be-to some-in the over all lack of sense of it. But the heart of Cowboy Bebop is in its humanity. No, not heroic endeavors of goody two shoe men, or the rescuing of damsels in distress, or platonic love that has been boring many of us since childhood. Not nobility. Not goodness. Not purity. Cowboy Bebop captures humanity: our confusion, our self constructed façade of apathy, and above all our resignation to the flow of life, to the point where we are like a boat without paddles sailing alone in the middle of a river. Without destination. Without purpose. Simply floating…endlessly…as if the only purpose of it was to remain afloat and be the proof of the fact that it had sailed, that it had a past. This past is the centre of humanity. Past is the double edged sword (1) that is the centre of this universe-the only thing keeping us alive, the only thing that can kill us (2). You can’t live without dying. You can’t die without living.

In the world of Cowboy Bebop, past is of utmost importance. It is the source of our existence yet as elusive as a dream (3). Past held the secret for all the characters of Bebop. It held all the answers. What they are? Why they are? Who they are? It imploded with all the answers and questions that was the base of their existence. It was an elusive reality that came when they never expected it but was never there when they chased it. The reunion with past gave them all that they sought or all they wanted to escape from and a final release or a captivation, however, symbolic. Like a hidden demon or god that reposes in our mind constantly telling us that we are, yet blurring out the present to the extent that we move around this noir-style, ghost of a world groping and puzzled, searching for one more reconnection with the world that already slipped by the moment we gazed at it. Life is, living is, continuously moving forward, while trying to grab onto all those images that have already slipped away. All that is imminent is already past when you realize it. Present has already become past the moment you sat down and thought about it. Images in front of you are already going by. The art of life is keeping the images gone by locked in our eyes for as long as possible, hoping that in the end when you finally meet your past, there is something that it offers you or something that it will take away. A final release or a final captivity. A final confrontation with the truth of our own existence. A final lesson that life had delayed teaching us or a lesson that we never wanted to learn.

All of which comes from reliving the past. There is no other way.

For the characters of Cowboy Bebop the past kept its promise. Jet’s love life, a stopped time watch, reunion that only further exposed him to the sharp edge of loneliness and a final understanding of life’s hidden secret. Faith’s zest for living life to the fullest, frozen sleep and amnesia that alone got her as far as she did, the puzzle falling in place only to become a bigger one and another final confrontation with the arcane truth of life. Ed’s constant search for family, her content in being lost, her rescuing from a barren planet, a subsequent reunion with those of her past that only led to further alienation and full understanding of what was truly important. All of them upon a deeper contact with their past-something that they had chased all that time-only resulted in further distancing from their own centre and them reliving it all over again. However, they learnt that which they failed to learn before. The more they chased their past, the more they experimented with the art of life the closer they came to the one great lesson that they had failed to learn or avoided to learn.

Sorrow, anguish, pain, angst, remorse, guilt. It was all there. In the end, though, the alienation alone was what became the poison that was the food of life. Great joy is preceded by great anguish. Great anguish is preceded by great loss. Past is a double edged sword after all. No joy can be gained if we never lost that which we chased the most. No lesson can’t be learnt unless a price is paid.

For Ed losing her family again, gave her the libration that she didn’t value until then. It showed her those people who were truly dear to her. Though filled with sorrow (however much she hid it) there was hope and a new beginning. She possessed the knowledge of her true family in Ein and the rest of the crew but also understood the lesson of freedom. In Ein, with whom she ran off into the sunset, Past taught her the lesson of family and freedom and where to draw the line.

For Jet his reunion with his long lost sweetheart resulted in him having to relive the past in losing her again. All he saw once returning to the past was that the present had already come-time had not stopped and towed along with it was his own life even if he had stopped the watch that marked that time. But this time he learnt what he failed to before. A better realization of all that was imminent came to Jet-his new job, the Bebop crew, his new best friend and comrades-and above all how a stopped clock doesn’t stop time. The stopped golden watch that he carried with him since the day his sweet heart left was his only connection of the day that changed him, the only real connection to his past. And that connection, as he realized, wasn’t required. He was content with having the past slip away and become an elusive shadow.

The video of Faye as a child and her subsequent return to the traces that were her house was symbolically one of the most powerful scenes of Cowboy Bebop. She returns to find the ruins of her house on an abandoned planet that has nothing to offer. Just like the wasteland called “Past”, that planet was merely a reconnection with what was and what is no more-a mere chance to relive one’s life in the hopes of learning what couldn’t be learnt. Earth was in fact a planet that was destroyed with mankind continuing their sins of war and greed on the rest of the solar system. Faye, upon her return to Earth, saw only that the past was already gone. That nothing was to ever come of it…and the only thing that she had lost was her ability to the whole time was her ability to let go and move on.

The enigma of the past is at its highest strength, however, when we look at Spike. Spike’s past life, Julia, Vicious, an escape through a fake death into a life that was both disconnected yet suffocating, reunion with a part of himself and a final release from all that had shackled him. For Spike his connection with the past was symbolic as well as emotional. It was psychological as well as physical. His philosophy of life as a dream, his love and continuous search for the enigmatic and elusive Julia, his guilt and sorrow of his past life and above all his fake eye (4) in which he continuously saw the past-all these were chains from the past that tied him to it. No other character was as submerged in the past as Spike. And the promise of the past never played out with any other character the way it did with Spike.

His whole life since his escape after faking his death was plagued by the disconnected fragments of his past life involving Vicious and Julia. Julia was the missing part of his life, a ghost lingering in his past that continuously haunted him till the end of his life. As he had told Jet, Julia was a part of him, a part that he had lost in his past. She was his connection to all that was good and pure in his previous life-the main part of his existence without which his life was meaningless. Singularly the only thing in his life that was keeping him alive in a world that he never believed in. Vicious was the part of his life that he always sought escape from, the part he had purposely broken away from. He represented all that was evil and had defiled him in his past life. The dark ghost that haunts his past. He was the other side of the coin. A dark, imposing shadow intertwined with the bright yet elusive shadow of Julia. Spike’s life always swung between these two images of his past, one which he sought the other which he sought refuge from.

Spike’s past was the most symbolic of our own pasts. We all have dark shadows that tread the wasteland of our past amidst the bright ones. Those that we want to cherish and those that we seek refuge from. In that, Spike, was the one we could relate to the most feeling sympathy for him in his escapism and hope in his quest for Julia. Julia herself was more like a promise from the future. While Vicious was his past, Julia was more like a light from the future. He sought to be with her and escape to a place where there would be a new life for them both. There was future in Julia. In so, Julia serves as the threshold for Spike’s aspirations and hopes throughout the series .While most of her we see is in his flashbacks (5) the main symbol that Julia takes is that of Spike’s hopes of peace and escape in the future with a full acceptance of the good side of his past.

So what did Spike’s encounter with the past yield?

The last two episodes of Cowboy bebop are the most beautiful ones. Spike is finally reunited with Julia on the same graveyard from where they were to escape all those years ago. Just like that time, it was a rainy day, almost too gloomy for anything as hopeful as an escape to a better life to be possible. True to it, Julia had not showed up the last time and the return of the same sepia tone scenario as they meet again was the subtlest of hints that this escape was not to be this time either.

The whole scene with them facing each other in unblinking silence and Spike’s uncharacteristic gloominess and Julia pointing her gun to Spike as she could have chosen to, was almost magical in its emotional tension and suspense. There were no smiles, no tears, no anger-and for the longest time not even any words. They stood their staring at each other, unblinking, as the rain played between them and the created the only sound-as if under that rain and that overcast sky they both had already realized that Fate had already planned against their happiness.

Finally words are spoken.

Julia: it was raining that day as well.
Spike: …
Julia: I was supposed to kill you. If I’d killed you that day, I would have been free.
Spike: So why didn’t you? Why did you chose to be pursued.
Julia: Why did you love me?

Finally Julia hugs Spike, who still seemed too emotionally distant for even Julia. Spike’s usual unresponsiveness was at its most here, characteristically not showing his love for the ones he truly loved but without the façade of cockiness that he usually hid it with. It made it seem genuine. Spike spent the last few years searching for her and after all that hardship was having trouble excepting that he had found it. Or was it that Spike had already realized that once he had reunited with his past he was already bound to relive it-he understood that he was going to lose her once again. Even as Julia hugged him, Spike stared unflinchingly ahead of him. Without words. Without emotions.

Both remained emotionally distant for as long as they are seen together. Without emotion or even thoughts, as if animated by the very sadness that had sustained them all these years. Emotionally distant, they make plans to escape, emotionally distant they travel in Julia’s car and shortly after Julia is killed in a gunfight right in front of Spike’s eyes. As Julia dies in his arms, saying something that was barely above a whisper, Spike stares at heaven in obvious anguish but this time his expression was devoid of any yearn or hope.

He didn’t cry. No matter how much the sorrow was-he just stared at the sky in total silence watching the rain fall down on his fake eye. It was a stare of emptiness. Julia’s death was the death of the good part of Spike’s past. It was the death of what he had sought all these years and though he was emotionally distant when he found it, it was only because he felt that he was about to lose it again. Above all Julia’s death was the death of his hope. With everything that he sought gone and all his hopes shattered there was only one thing left-bury the other side of his past as well…confront Vicious.

The next few minutes of Cowboy Bebop had Spike return to the Bebop and confront his comrades, Jet and Faye. In his own way he said goodbye to them both. While his farewell for each was different his last words to them both echoed with a prophetic truth: his story to Jet about the immortal cat and his parting line to Faye, that he was going to find out if he ever been alive.

The story of the tiger striped cat that Spike tells Jet resonated with Spike’s own past. The uncommitted cat that never did really die no matter how many times it got killed-it was a story that was actually his own. Spike, an uncommitted man for his whole life, escaped from the jaws of death on many occasions. He survived gunshots, falls from high places, explosions and crashes. But he never really died, despite the impossible injuries (seen on more than one occasion with bandages over his whole body).

Then the tiger striped cat met a white cat that lived with him. They lived together for many years until the white cat dies. The tiger striped cat cried a million times and then died. It never came back to life again.

Spike, until that point, had spent his whole life in danger, suffering great injures and escaping death numerous times and while it may seem like he was just a “dangerous guy”, in reality he put his life in danger for nothing. It wasn’t to accomplish anything. Spike never accomplished anything throughout the series. Just like that cat, all of Spike’s deaths were meaningless because Spike too lived uncommitted. The only commitment that Spike seemed serious about was Julia. The white cat for the uncommitted tiger striped cat. Upon Julia’s death the single commitment that Spike took had failed and like that cat, upon finally knowing what living committed was, he couldn’t live without it. Life had taught Spike a lesson. His uncommitted nature was finally tamed once he rediscovered his past in the final few moments with Julia.

Finally Spike confronted Vicious. After carving his way through the bottom floors Spike came face to face with the dark side of his past and by then he had already inched too close to death, having been shot, cut and been in a middle of an explosion. Vicious’ last words to Spike before their gun-and-sword fight echoed with the omniscient truth of the Cowboy Bebop universe-”I am the only one who can kill you. I am the only one who can save.”

It was true, though not in the way Vicious had assumed it. The past was the only thing that could kill and the only thing that could save. Everyone in the Bebop universe was either saved by their past or were killed by it. Julia and Vicious were parts of Spike’s past. Julia was the only one who could save him. Not his comrades of the Bebop crew. Vicious was the only one who could kill him. Not the countless foes that Spike encountered.

With Vicious killed, we see a shot at Spike’s fake eye as he remembers Julia’s last words which were blanked out before.

Julia: this is…a dream.
Spike: yeah…just a bad dream.

Spike’s encounter with the past had ended. The past had kept its promise by teaching him what he had failed to learn throughout his whole life-the value of living a committed life, the importance of the people in his life and the futility of trying to escape from the past. The past is the absolute reality of the Cowboy Bebop universe. A transcendental law that governs the people and their lives, teaching them the lessons of life that they always failed to learn and above all offering them a chance to redeem themselves.

Just like Faye, Jet, and Ed, Spike’s encounter with his past had cleansed him of all the things that had defiled and tortured him throughout his life. He had learnt, finally, what he hadn’t his whole life. Though he had not accomplishing anything material in his life even in the end, Spike did gain the ultimate prize: liberation from all that that tortured him, redemption and dying with a smile on his face. That was what Past had to offer him.

Notes

1. Interestingly Spike is a Gemini

2. The fact that the past is as elusive as a dream does shed an arcane glow on Spike’s way of looking at life…that life is a dream.

3. What makes the fake eye so interesting is that it is capable of time freezing and storing memories. What Spike sees is stored in it and hence we see those flashbacks as they were. Further interestingly Spike apparently lost that eye in the incident where he faked his death or in the gunfight prior to collapsing near Julia and having her take care of him. Both were pivotal incidents in his life and both involved Julia-in the later their meeting one another and in the former their separation. Also the eyes are the windows to the soul. The fact that Spike’s right eye is a fake means that there is no one can see the complete image of his soul-which would be in line with how he has lost a part of himself…that part was Julia.

4. This sheds a lot of light on Vicious’ line to Spike on more than one occasion: “I am the one who can save. I am the one who can kill you.”

5. Most of the time Julia is seen in the sepia toned, noir-like places even looking more like an image than anything else. Other times we here of her “smiling, sadly” in bars as Gren played ‘goodnight Julia’ on his sax.