After the End: Loss and Recovery in Cowboy Bebop
Cowboy Bebop notoriously has a reputation for "deep" writing among a certain cohort of media appreciators, in a way that newcomers not-infrequently find contrasts jarringly with its surface-level goofiness. I think it's worth trying to bridge that gap. I think that part of the reason for the gap is the way it begins relatively cheerfully, similarly to how you might wait to bring up your own pain with a new friend until you know them a little better. However, perhaps the more important part is that the ways in which it explores its themes tend toward the implicit. It's not a very intellectually-sophisticated show, but it is artistically well-developed and to some extent spiritually advanced. In this essay I will attempt to explicate some of these themes in accordance with my understanding.
I think that Cowboy Bebop can be productively analyzed as, at least in part, a meditation on the theme of loss and pain. Spike, Jet, Faye, and Ed each have lost a part of their life that's deeply important to them, and each of them pursue different strategies for coping and readjusting their life course, and for what they do when they are forced to re-confront their pain.
Ed was abandoned by her parents, and responded by becoming more or less rootless, a wanderer who comes and goes as she pleases, among the children of the orphanage, among the Bebop crew, among the ruins of old Earth. She develops the skills of a computer hacker, which, being technical and asocial, can be put to use in almost any time or place, wherever she winds up. Honestly, good for her. It's a hard life, though. If you can go without a home or ever needing anything from anyone, then you can't be disappointed by not getting it, right?
When Ed's father reappears, still as unreliable as ever, she jumps at the chance to reconnect and leaves the Bebop and its crew. And why not? it's not the first time she's reinvented her life. Who's to say how long this one will last, either, though?
Faye lost her past, and responded by striving to reclaim it. Her stress over her debt is part of that, I think. I don't recall us ever seeing a debt collector coming after her -- I think the only reason she cares about it is because it's a link to her past, although a negative one. When it turns out to be a false lead, it disappears from the plot almost completely. Still, she digs into whatever clues she can get with a monomaniacal intensity. If you dig deep enough into the past, you should be able to figure out how things got so bad, right?
When Faye finds the ruins of her childhood home, she can finally relax. Her old world left her behind while she was asleep so thoroughly that there's now nothing left of it but dirt and memories. She lets go of what could have been and commits to the life she fell into by accident (and seems to enjoy despite herself) with the Bebop and its crew. She defines herself by her present, rather than her past.
Jet lost his present. He lost his place in society -- his life on Ganymede, his girlfriend, his career as a policeman -- and responded by forswearing it and everything like it. Of these losses, the bitterest to him seems to have been the loss of his career. His betrayal by his partner and his organization seem to have embittered him with society, to the point that he gives up on maintaining a fixed means of employment or a fixed abode. Forced out of the public sector of interplanetary law enforcement, he reinvented himself as a freelancer. You can't be betrayed if you work alone, right?
When Jet's ex-girlfriend and old partner reappear, he fights them! I think that although he can't find it in his heart not to forgive them, he still doesn't want to go back to the society that left him. Nevertheless, along his wanderings he finds himself collecting strays from among his fellow solar outcasts, perhaps in an effort to replace the true camaraderie he had thought he had had.
Spike lost the most of them all, perhaps. He lost both his present and his past, of course, as an assassin and syndicant elite, but he was prepared for that. He walked away from those with clear eyes and no regrets, even though we see that he still has friendliness and loyalty with many of his former comrades, despite his excommunication. I think that the loss he was not prepared for was that of his hope and vision for the future, which for him was tied up in the person of his lover, Julia. This is a dangerous way to invest your emotional resources! When this hope is betrayed, he's left fumbling recklessly through the solar system, scavenging just enough to get by day-by-day, without any real provision or care for the future. If you spare no thought for the future, your hopes can't turn out to be in vain, right?
When Julia reappears, I think Spike almost doesn't know what to do with her. Perhaps the thing that was most valuable to him, his implicit trust in her, remains irretrievable. At any rate, rather than reevaluating his vision of the future, he seems to return to the habits of mind he had purposefully abandoned with the syndicate: revenge -- violence for its own sake. His vendetta against his former syndicate for the death of his friend Annie is backward-looking, not forward-looking. It's destructive, not constructive. It kills first Julia and then him.
After Julia's death, Spike's former vision, which had been so wrapped up in her, is finally and fully aborted. Without it, he returns to what he knows best -- to killing. Unlike the others, he retrieved (at least the outward appearance of) what he lost, and it destroyed him. He loses his protagonism and becomes, like so many Bebop characters before him, the subject of another tiny tragedy in a solar system already full to bursting with them.
If Spike had not been so compassionate, he might not have cared to punish his former comrades' crimes. If he had been more compassionate, he might have walked away without animus. If he had not been so adept a killer, he might not have tried the attempt. If he had been more adept, he might have succeeded. Alas! for reasons and persons unlucky in time and in place! Alas! to be so good and strong, and yet not good enough, nor strong enough! Woe unto the victor, and woe unto the victim. In the end, he is both. Perhaps we all are.
A eulogy: Here lies a scrapper, a scrounger, a scavenger in the dustbin of the solar system, much like many thousands of others, much like all those he fought with and against. We happened to like this one, though.
In the end, we all have our own burdens. What you do with them is up to you. But it's inevitable. You're gonna carry that weight.
In the 2000s, phones had quirks and class....
Maybe I’m not overthinking, maybe I’m just regular thinking about stuff that’s over happening.
Yo, heads up on the elizabeth holms post from 2014. Came out years ago that she was actually running a huge scam with the blood thing and is perhaps not so girlboss
You are an enemy to women
Classic movie night 7/29 6pm Pacific: The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (1933)
Jokes age. Memes die. How many popular post formats from one year ago are still funny? Ten years ago?
What about 93 years ago? Let's look at what people had to laugh about in the Great Depression and find out if any of these bits have survived or come back around.
DM me to join! I've been screening some kind of classic with a few people in Discord every wednesday for a while now. It's a good time.
i saw a coyote! on my block!! and he stopped and looked at me in a hungry cute way!
good luck out there, buddy. please eat the pets of all the tesla owners in my neighborhood
Saw another one last night, up close - he popped out of an alley i was walking past and we startled each other.
fregolious:
I've received an official letter (addressed to the whole block) that someone is feeding the foxes and please stop
In my neighborhood the median nextdoor user (racist, insane) believes that SOMEONE is deliberately attracting coyotes and NEEDS to be STOPPED. I wish I could share some of the screeds but that is identifying information
never shouldve smoked that shit, now i’m on the july 17th 1995 cover of newsweek
Happy 30th birthday bisexuality
Anything That Moves 1996 issue #10 cover
1st : onest ❌
2nd : twond ❌
3rd : threerd ❌
4th : fourth ✅
5th : fiveth ❌
6th : sixth ✅
7th : seventh ✅
8th : eightth ❌
9th : nineth - close, but not quite ❌
10th : tenth ✅
there's some weird logogram/ideogram shit happening here, right?
the numeral '8' represents the word 'eight.' or it can also represent the number eight, but not the word. In the written word '8th,' it represents the number eight but the letters 'eigh.' see? The 1 in 1st represents the number one but the letters 'fir.'
You could almost say 8th and 9th are contractions, but that's not it. First, because we usually mark the missing letters in contractions with apostrophes, which aren't present here. Second, because in a contraction, we change the spelling of the word to better represent how we say it, which is not the case in the ordinals - instead, we're changing the sound that the numeral represents. So what's a numeral?? Is it a logogram? Is it hanzi?
Under the right conditions '1' can be read as 'fir.' So instead of writing 'Douglas fir tree,' you could write 'Douglas 1 tree.' But nobody does. Because we're not as good at thinking in logograms as people who speak Chinese or Japanese? We got good at using alternate pronunciations for characters but we didn't get as far with using alternate readings for characters, even though that is a thing that English apparently does sometimes? Somebody help me out with this I'm going crazy
One of my top ten favorite films of all time. Maybe top five
La-li-lu La-le-lo
Hideo Kojima
Wrote about men who have
Animal names.
He wanted to become
A great film director
But he was forced to make
Video games.
La-li-lu la-le-lo
Revolver Ocelot
Manipulator of
Big Boss's sons.
He had a penchant for
Acts of betrayal and
Homoerotically
Twirling his guns.
La-li-lu la-le-lo
"Otacon" Emmerich
Made evil robots, which
Was a mistake.
Nevertheless he was
Able to do one thing
Ocelot couldn't do:
Marry a Snake.