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or "Everything I Needed to Know About Cowboy Bebop
I Saw in the First Minute"
Throughout the series, rain/water is almost always present in some form or other whenever there's a momentous change for a character or for a character's situation, and smoking (as in who is smoking and who is not smoking) also comes into play as well. So far, we've got no idea who this guy is, but as we watch, we see him drop his cigarette. Our POV follows the spent butt to the ground, where the man's shoes are revealed. Now, any otaku worth his/her pocky will immediately recognize the peculiar roundness of the shoes as being the same as those of fan-favorite Lupin III.
Rather than being a reasuringly familiar image, the shoes create an feeling of alienation (hey! when was the last time you ever saw Lupin so serious?) in that generally one associates Lupin with action/adventure/comedy, and so far we've just got a guy standing in the rain, smoking, and holding a bouquet of roses. As far as we know, he's just building up the nerve to ask a girl out. This ain't the only time we'll see this character (and, in fact, other characters) associated with Lupin or characters from other anime. In some ways, Cowboy Bebop is almost a functioning encyclopedia for 70's and 80's anime. Anyhow, as the cigarette falls, the character moves off. We see his back, and then our POV shifts down so that we see his face vaguely reflected in a puddle, and into the puddle falls a single rose. The rose replaces the image of the man as he walks on.
Another two biggies in the symbol department: reflections and roses. And we're not just talking physical reflections, like images in glass or in other people's eyes, but also reflections of one character in another, or reflections of certain situations and relationships. Roses, too, are gonna come back to bite ya in an especially beautiful way in the final two sessions, but hey! we ain't there yet. From the rose we go to a gunfight in a church, where an unknown assailant is doing John Woo proud. Through flashes of gunfire, we see that its our protagonist, though his face is still mostly obscured by shadow. As the violence continues, we cut back to the fallen rose, which is slowly growing redder and redder, as if sympathetically bleeding with our protagonist.
Amid all the shooting, we see a single gun aimed directly at our protagonist, and also threatening us as viewers as well (this POV, where we the viewer are threatened along with the character, continues throughtout the series until its most bittersweet final use in Session 26).
In reaction to this shot, we see a close-up of his left eye, widening in shocked pain or perhaps realization, then we see him attempt to detonate something. As the gunfire flashes, we see a close-up of the side of his face, briefly illuminated.
In that second, we see him smile, Lupin-esque and yet a smile entirely of this character. A smile which seems not just willing to face death, but almost welcoming the adrenaline rush and challenging it to take him along for the ride. And as he smiles, we see a single roll of blood trickle down the side of his face, an echo of his smile as it follows the same arch, like a scarlet tear.
Boy, that's killer stuff. Anyhow, we've got a whole bunch of stuff here: eyes, shooting/threatening the viewer, bloody tears, Christian symbolism, and the shift from "black and white"(dreams/memories?) to color (reality?) as per the "bleeding" rose. All of these come into play throughout the series, but really what's most strongly left in the viewer's mind at the end of this sequence is the smile, the inexplicable smile of our protagonist who, for all we know at that point, might as well be dead.
... kinda makes you wonder what kind of person smiles at death ...
Well, I guess if you really want to know, you might as well go on ...
Questions? Comments?
E-mail me at:
p_ranger@gurlmail.com
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