Taking Lessons from Cowboy Bebop

by Joshua Fagan

Arguably the two greatest anime series of the 1990s both use established genres and relatively familiar structures in order to explore and undermine them. Neon Genesis Evangelion is more obvious about this critique, as it starts with a relatively familiar narrative about child protagonists being chosen heroes who have to save the world from annihilation and then deliciously contorts that narrative by demonstrating the psychological fragmentation such responsibilities cause to the protagonists. The critique made by Cowboy Bebop, a show about a ragtag group of interplanetary bounty hunters looking for jobs in a futuristic, noir-ish solar system is less immediately obvious but as daring. It takes a journey of soaring through the vastness of space with the powers of futuristic technology and makes it not about exploring new frontiers in the vein of Star Trek but rather about scruffy, uncertain individuals trying to survive in a desolate world.

That Cowboy Bebop is not a glorious steel and chrome future is not unique. Not all science fiction was in the vein of Hugo Gernsback or Disneyworld’s Tomorrowland, even back in the heyday of techno-optimism in the middle of the twentieth century. Even Star Wars occurs in a world of rust and sand and scrappy outsiders. The influence of Han Solo, the amoral disappointed bounty hunter who acts more cynical than he actually feels, is felt throughout Bebop. A great 2021 Entertainment Weekly retrospective on the show refers to it as being “a veritable stew of international influences, including (but by no means limited to) sci-fi classics like Blade Runner, Sergio Leone Westerns, Dirty Harry, film noir, and Bruce Lee movies.” There was no shortage of bounty hunters and Han Solo wannabes in late-twentieth-century science fiction, and there was also no shortage of science-fiction stories with a more cynical, acrid bent, especially with the rise of cyberpunk in the 1980s with works like Blade Runner and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. What distinguishes Cowboy Bebop are two important characteristics: 1) an unrelenting but not uniformly glum depiction of financial precarity, and 2) a focus on the restless search for meaning in a world where no transcendent source of it is present. Both of these are characteristics worthy of study for speculative fiction writers.

The first is something that is easy to signify but harder to make palpable. Han Solo’s ship is rickety and needing repairs, and Case from Neuromancer lives in a tiny apartment in Tokyo while being unable to earn money after suffering serious injuries from his former employer. Making a character motivated by financial gain instead of the good of mankind is an easy way to make that character seem more morally gray, a tradition that extends back at least to the seafaring fiction from which space-travel fiction develops, the work of writers like Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad. Cowboy Bebop spends an unusual amount of time, however, making the financial stress of its characters present. They do not always complain about their lack of money, but their uneasy financial situation is always palpable. They have more conversations than they desire about money: how to get it, how to divide it, how to spend it, and what to do when they lose it. They are rarely poor enough that they feel the pangs of desperation, but they always have to keep worrying about money.

These concerns, in one respect, connect the stoic protagonist Spike, his gruff ex-cop friend Jet, and the wandering femme fatale Faye; they all have a goal in mind, and that goal binds them despite their differing pasts and their outcast statuses. Nonetheless, these concerns also contribute to the weariness of the characters, preventing them from becoming comfortable. Their lack of money signifies that their position is tenuous. What is remarkable is the extent to which they do not complain about their circumstances; they are largely resigned to their positions on the outskirts of an uncertain, faded world, where Earth is in ruins and the human population is scattered throughout the solar system. Their precarity does not simply make them relatable or provide them a reason to keep adventuring. It makes them emblems of an unmoored universe. They exist in a world of commodification and consumption, where everything has a price. In the words of the Victorian reformer and social critic Thomas Carlyle, they exist in a world of “Cash-payment the one nexus of man to man.” Any other ideals or rituals connecting human beings together have degraded. These weary wanderers understand that world and play along with its rules, but they know that such a world is not enough to satisfy them.

This understanding leads to the other important point of emphasis for Bebop, that being the search for vestiges of meaning in a desolate world. The world of Bebop is an agnostic one, without any palpable cosmic order or cohesion. Even its characters hardly aspire to discover ultimate answers in a world that for them is fallen and opaque in a distinctly noir-ish way. There are two different kinds of episodes of this show: those where the characters search for a bounty on a distant planet and almost inevitably encounter a kind of moral quandary, and those where the characters must confront buried secrets from their pasts. An example of the first is episode 8, “Waltz for Venus,” wherein the crew encounter a scared young man who stole a sickness-healing plant from criminals in order to heal his sister’s eyesight. An example of the second is episode 15, “My Funny Valentine,” wherein the amnesiac Faye learns more about the exploitation she suffered in the past. None of the people they meet are perfect, with the well-intentioned thief being one of the more moral personages they encounter, but they are all afflicted with a deep sense of personal yearning, striving for a wholeness that eludes them.

Confronting the ghosts of their pasts does not help in any easily cathartic way. Spike has a nemesis and a lost love. Jet has an ex who abruptly vanished and a former partner in the police force who was actually crooked. Faye has suffered the most, being cryogenically frozen for decades and isolated from the person she once was, her old life a clouded dream that seems to have no relevance to her current existence. At the end of “My Funny Valentine,” as she ruminates on what L.P. Hartley famously called the “foreign country” of the past, Spike comforts her by assuring her that the future, not the past, defines them. This moment functions also as a thesis for the show: as haunted as they are by the past and as passionately as they feel drawn to that past, it cannot provide them the succor that they seek.

Importantly, Bebop does not dismiss the past or argue it does not matter. What makes Bebop’s portrayal of its characters’ search for meaning distinct is that it implies that this search cannot succeed either by relying on the past or by bluntly ignoring or opposing the past. Nostalgic veneration for a bygone wholeness that may never have actually existed can only lead to heartbreak, but refusing to seriously examine the past can only lead to fragmentation and diffuse alienation. Spike, Jet, and Faye all endure harsh confrontations with the past, but these are necessary confrontations, not because they bring catharsis, but because they force the characters to understand, on a concrete and visceral level, that resolution is not going to come from their pasts. It has to come from within, from the connections they have built and the humble, threadbare routines of their tenuous lives.

The sheer imagination and creativity of Bebop are essential to what make it work: from the music to the animation, there’s a sense of style and intentionality to every moment that is indicative of almost all truly great fiction. Still, none of that style and imagination would matter without the grounding provided by the sharply felt material difficulties of the characters and the even more sharply felt existential wanderings they undergo. Only through their melancholy and gradual but necessary acceptance that the world will never be whole, that their lives will never be fully set right, can they embrace the connections they have made and find a degree of peacefulness in the experiences they have. As Carlyle once declared, “the eternal stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.”

Joshua Fagan is a writer and academic currently residing in Seattle. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature and science, particularly the interpretation of evolutionary thinking in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on Anglophone writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.