Because this blog really needed another Cowboy Bebop post. And because new episodes get microanalysed all the time, and I liked seeing lelangir go over some of his best-loved scenes. And because I tend to write about series as a whole, when a stand alone episode can merit analysis. So then, episode 22, ‘Cowboy Funk’.
We’ve got our terrorist, Teddy Bomber, with his political mission. And we’ve got Andy, Space Cowboy, hogging the limelight. It’s an episode which starts with an elegant futurecrafted sci-fi tower, wanders through an affluent bar, a dusky local market, and finishes in bombed-out ruins and a dusty highway.
Oh Architecture! Home to meticulously planned modernity, intellectual constructions whose intentions baffle the public - peculiar shapes and titanic gherkins. Shaping our lives, representing our societies. Our pathetic villain cares deeply for it, for the symbolism of bringing those skyscrapers crashing down. And our heroes? For them, it’s a playground, or a place to make a living.
Our terrorist only wants to be heard, to live out his thoughts. In the first moments of the show his face is hidden, he laughs to himself, he has knowledge, power. Soon he’s sweating, people are ignoring him willy-nilly, the TV hosts don’t even bother to make time to read out his manifesto. He’s on his way to a kind of passive acceptance of his own weakness, the futility of his attempts at making a style which can change the world.
In contrast to this desperate attention-seeker we have two men who surrender to image, who achieve a sort of purity. Teddy Bomber tells people to listen to him, Andy rides a horse through a window. Which is rather more effective attention-seeking. While the bomber worries about his image, sticking to teddy bears, creating simple patterns in his trail of destruction, Spike and Andy are surrendered to their style, living it out.
Or, at least, that’s how Spike used to be defined. Turns out, he isn’t truly the ultimate ’space cowboy’. Season two of Bebop sees a Spike who is rather less bulletproof, who takes the odd beating. In ep. 22 he’s seen talking himself up - the surest sign of impotence in a universe where actions speak loud. He claims to have a higher “level.. no.. rank”, and shows the viewer that, for all his cool, there’s a faker inside him too - that he’s just a bit less fake than Teddy Bomber, more able to detach himself from real life and be his image.
Meanwhile, Andy claims not to remember a man he chased yesterday, he lives in the present, he doesn’t have a mask to drop. Staring into Faye’s eyes (at his own reflection), he lives within his own image - and can, if necessary, swap between images. Andy is a kind of postmodern Ăbermensch, his identity is entirely false, and thus flawless, impenetrable. Of course he’s also a rich kid, a spoiled child on a joyride, but he transcends this real identity, the soundtrack of the world announces his entrances - the writers allow him to be inhumanly pure.
The episode is where the central characters in the show meet fiction - Spike finds a doppelgänger who is as outrageous to him as he himself would be to us in real life. A ludicrously exaggerated archetype who reveals a truth. The same applies to Faye, who goes home with this ultra-Spike, in her killer dress, and acts out a mockery of her relationship with the original comic self-obsessed Space Cowboy. Andy couldn’t exist in real life, he’s set up as the opposite to the realistically hopeless Teddy Bomber - as pure style. He makes our cast feel a bit more human, and, because he’s got pure style, he steals the show.
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