The Re-connexion of Faye

An episode of Cowboy Bebop where many would say very little actually happens--no action sequences, murders, bounties, or scores settled--turns out to be one of the more crucial episodes of the series. The loop is finally closed between the past and the present with the former reasserting itself, making it clear that, despite the strange and scrambled surface, the past is always an integral part of the present.

Session Eighteen: Speak Like a Child

The episode begins with an amusing juxtaposition: Faye (Megumi Hayashibara) trying her luck at the horse races intercut with Spike (Koichi Yamadera) trying to catch a fish from the deck of the Bebop. Just as it seems both are about to succeed, both ultimately fail: Faye's horse narrowly loses and Spike's fish breaks free of the line just as he's reeling it in.

At the same time, while hanging up laundry behind Spike, Jet (Unsho Ishizuka) is telling a story to Edward (Aoi Tada), the Japanese folk tale Urashima Taro. This is interesting on a couple levels; here we have Jet, the eldest member of the crew, passing a tale along to the youngest member, Edward, not unlike the way in which folk tales must have been handed down for generations. Then there's the content of the story itself; similar to "Rip Van Winkle", it's about a man who's taken to a fantastic dream palace after saving a turtle and in the process he skips over many years. He's given a strange box called a Tamatebako when he returns home and he's told not to open it. We don't find out what's in the box in the Cowboy Bebop episode but in some versions of the story the box causes the man to transform or instantly age.

In a sense, this is the story of "Speak Like a Child", which ends with Faye finally getting a sense of her past. For the first time she becomes, in a way, the old woman she is. We learned earlier, in "My Funny Valentine", that Faye had been in stasis for decades, that she'd had a life before the hyperspace gate explosion that forever altered the solar system, but she had no memory of that life. Like many episodes in the latter half of Cowboy Bebop, an item from the past turns up and has an important role in this episode, in this case a videotape which turns out to be Faye's own Tamatebako.

But she runs away from it without seeing it because she can't pay Jet back for the cash on delivery charges. Instead it's Spike and Jet who go on the journey to discover its meaning, to find an antique Betamax that will actually play the thing. After an amusing scene with an antique technology dealer, the two decide to go all the way to Earth, which, when Edward mentions this to Faye, leads Faye the conclusion exactly opposite to the reality--she thinks they've run away from her. As Gren told her in "Jupiter Jazz", she thinks she can lightly run away from this new family of hers but she cares more than she thinks she does. She's indignant and hurt that Spike and Jet have left her so far behind. Little does she know they're doing it for her.

We're not told this directly, likely the men aren't even admitting it to themselves. But when we know they're broke, it seems hardly cost effective to spend fuel going all the way to Earth just to find out what's on a videotape, however valuable it might end up being if they somehow found the right dealer. Nonetheless, when Faye does come back and they finally have a player for the tape, Jet won't let her watch it unless she repays the delivery charges and Faye, once again, assumes she can just walk away from debt she's incurred through no real fault of her own. But she can't resist watching in secret so she sees the extraordinary time capsule she made for herself.

It's not just footage of the girl Faye once was, it's the younger Faye actually speaking to the older Faye. The young Faye asks questions about who her friends will be, what kind of life she'll be leading. She doesn't realise just how vast a gulf of time and memory there'll be between her past and future selves. But that gives her words an unintended, remarkable potency: "I am no longer here. But I'm here to-day and I'll always be cheering for you right here. Cheering for you, my only self." The past is gone but the past is also always present, just like the story of a Tamatebako that inevitably repeats itself.

...

This entry is part of a series of entries I’m writing on Cowboy Bebop for its 20th anniversary. I’m reviewing each episode individually. My previous episode reviews can be found here:

Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four
Session Five
Session Six
Session Seven
Session Eight
Session Nine
Session Ten
Session Eleven
Sessions Twelve and Thirteen
Session Fourteen
Session Fifteen
Session Sixteen
Session Seventeen

Directing the Course of a Valentine

One of my favourite episodes of Cowboy Bebop finally gives a backstory to Faye that's surprising but also, in quite a few ways, very much in line with what previous episodes had given us.

Session Fifteen: My Funny Valentine

The title this time comes from the very famous, frequently covered Rogers and Hart song from the 1930s. I doubt there are many who are unfamiliar with the song but, just in case, here's one of my favourite renditions:

Obviously there's the connexion to Faye Valentine (Megumi Hayashibara), given her name, but the lyrics, which convey the affection the singer feels for a lover not only despite but because of his or her appearance or behaviour that's contrary to the ideal, have a broader resonance for the story.

The episode begins with Faye in an initially unexplained flashback strikingly similar to some flashbacks we've seen of Spike (Koichi Yamadera). In both cases, each character is naked, apparently unconscious, bathed in a blue-green light, and surrounded by masked doctors or scientists. But, unlike Spike's flashback, we get some explanation for Faye's within the same episode.

Faye is being thawed out after having been cryogenically frozen for over fifty years. Like the kid in Session Six and Chessmaster Hex in Session Fourteen, Faye is a person from before the hyperspace gate accident that changed everything, the physical changes to Earth wrought by meteors being mirrored by chaotic cultural changes. We see this in a funny moment when Faye wakes and misinterprets everything in the room, from the washing machine she thinks is a television to the thermometer she thinks is a cell phone. Not unlike the many other misleading signifiers of race, gender, and apparel seen in other episodes. Now Faye embodies the experience of the series.

But the biggest mistake is her Prince Charming, Whitney Hagas Matsumoto (Akio Otsuka), who immediately compares her to Sleeping Beauty. Faye wakes with no memory of who she is or anything about herself and in this vulnerable state she has little choice but to trust this guy. And then we see, in the present, he's a complete fraud, in fact a small time matrimonial conman who's nabbed by Jet (Unsho Ishizuka).

And now, like the subject of the song, Hagas Matsumoto is hardly the physical ideal of a Prince Charming due to some fat implants. He's also, one should note, one of the show's typical conglomerations of race and culture, his three names each originating from different cultures and his appearance not easily identifiable as any race, though he does reveal the black doctor, Baccus, is his uncle.

Baccus tells Faye his name is a reference to the god of wine and this makes sense for the con artist he ends up being. It turns out they've thawed Faye just to unload a whole lot of debt on her. So the character defining enormous debt we've known about was, at least at the beginning, not her fault. But she believes it is and even when she learns better one assumes that kind of thing, coming right at her rebirth, would have a lasting psychological effect, like a girl being taught women are responsible for original sin.

There are serious implications to that and later episodes will introduce a more sombre tone to Faye's story but for this episode there's an engagingly light tone as we sympathise with poor Fay even as the strange encounters with the future are as ridiculous as they are frightening.

...

This entry is part of a series of entries I’m writing on Cowboy Bebop for its 20th anniversary. I’m reviewing each episode individually. My previous episode reviews can be found here:

Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four
Session Five
Session Six
Session Seven
Session Eight
Session Nine
Session Ten
Session Eleven
Sessions Twelve and Thirteen
Session Fourteen

Gambles in a Fairy Light

Three episodes in, Cowboy Bebop finally introduces Faye Valentine, its female lead. Faye herself, and the episode that introduces her, continues the show's jumbling of familiar symbols, forcing us to take characters and events on their own terms.

Session Three: Honky Tonk Woman

The title of this episode, like many of the episode titles, comes from a famous English language song, in this case "Honky Tonk Woman" by The Rolling Stones. The song's description of a promiscuous woman who's left the singer broken hearted doesn't really fit Faye insofar as she never seems to break anyone's heart over the course of the series. But does fit insofar as she is a woman who is quite comfortable exploiting men for her own pleasure only to cast them aside later. Which makes ironic the quote from Goethe included in the episode, "Only hands can wash hands," which comes from an epigram:

Wie du mir, so ich dir

Mann mit zugeknöpften Taschen,
Dir tut niemand was zulieb:
Hand wird nur von Hand gewaschen;
Wenn du nehmen willst, so gib!

Which Google translates as:

Tit for tat

Man with buttoned pockets,
Nobody cares for you:
Hand is only washed by hand;
If you want to take, give it!

When Jet tells Spike that Charlie Parker had spoken the words in his dream, Spike wonders with some apparent scepticism if Charlie Parker would quote Goethe. The great jazz musician of the mid-20th century does seem a long way from the German poet of the early 19th. And yet, why shouldn't he quote Goethe?

Charlie Parker is certainly a more appropriate figure for Cowboy Bebop as he is considered one of the founding innovators of the jazz subgenre called bop or bebop. Characterised by spontaneous improvisations based on familiar jazz melodies, one could describe it as a form of post-modernism, yet it is a much more affectionate version than that of someone like Salman Rushdie. Rushdie's version of post-modernism is generally bent towards subverting and fighting the familiar. The great bop artists instead took the familiar and made it their own with expansions based on their own feelings and instincts.

And one could say that's the world Cowboy Bebop is presenting--familiar symbols re-contextualised and built on by new generations of people, naturally growing their own impressions and associations. The show's score by Yoko Kanno frequently seeks to emulate bop musicians, particularly during action sequences where fluid animation complements Spike's strangely easy going martial art. But that's an issue better left to be discussed with episode eight.

Faye first meets Spike at a blackjack table where she's been forced to act as dealer. Once again, the show makes a point of how you can't trust appearances when Faye mistakes Spike for the man she's supposed to be making a surreptitious exchange with. Spike happens to look like him a bit.

Faye is voiced by the great seiyuu Megumi Hayashibara, a voice actress known for versatility. It's extraordinary to think the same woman voiced Rei Ayanami on Neon Genesis Evangelion and Girl Type Ranma in Ranma 1/2. It's no wonder Satoshi Kon chose her for the lead role in Paprika that required such versatility.

Faye Valentine's name is one of the more straightforward uses of symbolism. "Faye" can refer to fairies, as she herself points out in a later episode, but it also has the connotation of treachery or illusion, so as a "fey valentine" she presents a counterfeit lover, like the "Honky Tonk Woman", a capricious figure of heartbreak. Though Faye is more likely to break a safe than a heart.

But her sexuality is always on display visually however infrequently it's invoked in the narrative. The mob boss who captures her at the beginning of the episode finds an ace concealed in the seat of her shorts and Faye's look of discomfort, which at first seemed to be provoked at the unwelcome molestation, is revealed to have signified her reaction to her cheat being discovered. Her clothing is self-consciously fetishistic and one could call her a femme fatale, if a particularly benign one. She's never a villain in this episode but more of a competitor for Spike and Jet.

Why aren't Spike and Jet interested in her sexually? One of the models for Spike is the famous anime character Lupin (himself based on the famous French thief character) and one of the more striking differences between Spike and Lupin is Spike's stoicism and coolness compared to Lupin's unabashed, comic lasciviousness. We learn later more about the women both Spike and Jet have fallen in love with. Instead of the coy flirtation that the protagonists are too self-conscious to acknowledge found in most anime, Spike and Jet are presented as too mature to pursue a woman simply to gratify sexual pleasure. Faye, meanwhile, is too mercenary to waste time being horny. Somehow this does add a sexy undertone to things, like the notes in jazz that aren't played. Like a Hitchcock woman, Faye is frequently humiliated and her constantly referred to debt, and her lack of shame over it, have the piquancy of original sin. On the other hand, Jet and Spike are also often humiliated and at her mercy--the physical vulnerability they trade with each other adds to the other elements to highlight those notes that aren't played.

Faye cuts in on a fantastic set piece in the climax of the episode where Spike goes EVA to make an exchange. He and the other party are to toss their respective items across empty space between a slowly rotating, enormous pylon of some kind.

And then Faye comes in to take the goods and there's a callback to her calling herself Romani, or a gypsy, which Spike now calls her with some bemused respect. Of course, we later learn than this is another familiar symbol in which we shouldn't have put our faith, and yet it's not necessarily false.