cowboy bebop, an introduction on adaptability

or, we were born cool; or, make it new even if it requires burning down a fandom

What do you feel when you walk face-first into a work of art you’ll never forget? What does it mean when even three combustive notes of a song can cast you spiraling back through the decades to the child you once were staying up way too late to watch something that the commercials made seem so cool, so illicit, so not meant for kids?

Anime wasn’t new to me by the time this arrived on my late night television, but it did remind me of memories I had sort of forgotten that I had. Weirdly, these were my first experiences with anime, which I only realized later. At the time, I had no name for these bizarre, hyperviolent, hypersexual cartoons.

I’ve mentioned before that I was an up-all-night kind of child. This worked out well for me because my parents habitually went to bed early. After 10pm, often the only people awake were me and my older brother, who often influenced the things I watched late at night.

But my first memories of anime don’t include him. None of my memories of anime include him. Something strange used to happen on the SciFi channel back when that was its name. It must have been the mid-90s because I remember being a child who had yet to even see Pikachu for the first time. But I was there at 1am one night when something otherworldly happened on the TV.

I actually think I encountered Vampire Hunter D because my memory is filled by baroque architecture and gothic flavors, of blood and violence, of haunting images that would stalk me for years. I remember being transfixed, swept up in images that couldn’t fit cleanly inside my head. And so my head began to expand to swallow these new, strange worlds happening before my dumb child eyes.

My memories of these middle of the night animated spectacles meant for adults haze around me. So many specifics are lost to my stupid sieve of a brain, but I know I watched Ghost in the Shell because, years later, when I thought I was watching it for the first time, I remembered watching it years before, its language and images already under my skin. Wicked City, too, and some other weird and wild and truly unpleasant animated movies made for lonely late night watching.

I’d sneak out of my room and creep downstairs and bathe in blood and violence and offputting sexual imagery I didn’t understand but couldn’t look away from. There was something mesmerizing about the animations, the fluidity or choppiness of movement, depending on the person animating these weird made for midnight movies. But, too, I remember one day they just stopped and I lost track of these bizarre fever dreams and even forgot them completely. Forgot it happened. Like my brain actually could not fit these strange experiences inside my head.

There I was, older—kind of—and prepared to watch this new show that promised to be just effortlessly cool. I was thirteen and I knew things, buddy. When someone showed me a commercial of a cartoon too adult to show during the daytime, I started making plans to ensure I caught every single minute.

I mean, just watch that video. I don’t care if you hate anime (probably you should—it’s bad and dumb) or think cartoons are lame (buddy, I’ve been dreaming in cartoon for most of my life—I love them, even the trash ones). This little scene here is cinematic and epic and makes The Matrix look kind of embarrassing in comparison. I would know! I was eleven when I watched The Matrix!

Like I said, I knew things, man.

Cowboy Bebop was a slurring slosh of Hong Kong action, cyberpunk fun, Spaghetti Westerns, noirish badmen and femme fatales, and, well, boobs. This is somewhat embarrassing for the casual watcher now. Especially when recommending it. There are a lot of boobs in this show, which…I mean, I was thirteen. This was about as hot as it got.

Even despite that, Cowboy Bebop had style and a real grasp of cinematic grammar. The composition of frames, the fluidity of bodies in motion, the way it uses music and sound effects to create atmosphere and drive home a particular moment—the show really is stunning. Marvelously crafted. It’s the kind of show that gets inside you and teaches you more about art than you’d admit until you’re over thirty and writing on substack to a small audience.

With all this in mind, you’d think I’d be excited for a live action version of a show that meant so much to me.

You’d be wrong!

Now, I’m not one of these insufferables who hate adaptations because they’re adaptations. I’m a different kind of insufferable who hates adaptations that seem slavish to the originals they’re adapting.

A cartoon can do things live action can’t do. Live action can do things a cartoon can’t. Just like a book can do things a TV show can’t. If you’re adapting something and don’t seem interested in using the language and grammar and syntax of the media you’re adapting something into…then why bother adapting it?

I think the nerds have been ruinous to many aspects of culture, what with their disdain for thing-likers, but their unflinching Pharisaical desire for fidelity to originals has made many adaptations just as terrible as the adaptations that seem to ignore the original entirely.

We’ve all been disappointed by movies based on books that feel as if no one involved had even bothered to skim through the book, movies that make you wonder why they handed the adaptation duties to someone who might actively hate the source material.

This is obviously terrible.

But is it better when an adaptation is so devoted to textual fidelity that it becomes dull and stripped clean of everything that makes visual media interesting in the first place? Just a joyless exercise of recreating iconic animated moments but using real people.

The best adaptations capture the feeling and sensation of the source, even while they discard the text itself. Game of Thrones has become a bit of a punching bag (for good reason!), but the best seasons of that show were not the ones most faithful to the text. Season One was nearly an exact recreation of the first novel. But Seasons Three through Five (and parts of Six) are the ones that really stand out for their brilliance (though, man, I could write, like, 5,000 words about Arya and Tywin in Season Two—that was great). And this came through the way they discarded what simply could not work on film.

Fight Club is a better movie than book because of the ways David Fincher changed the story. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings are great as movies despite the many ways, large and small, that they diverge from Tolkien’s text (give me Tom Bombadil, you cowards, but also keep that wonderful horror-film-texture of The Fellowship of the Rings, which is the best of the three movies almost exclusively because it treats the story as horror rather than epic fantasy).

Jorge Luis Borges had it right when he said “The original is unfaithful to the translation.” I think this is especially true with regard to adaptations.

The original exists. It’s here. We can read it or watch it or whatever. You are choosing to make it new. So make it new. Make it bold. Make it great. Capture the spirit of the novel or game or anime, but then make it your own.

And this Cowboy Bebop show premiering today on Netflix…I’m not hopeful. My main fear is that they intend to essentially make a shot for shot remake of the anime. Which, I mean, what’s the point?

The cartoon still exists. It’s even on Netflix now! You can just watch that.

I don’t want the live action Cowboy Bebop to be identical to the anime. I want it to be bold and wild and experimental. I want it to feel like Miles Davis at his Bluest but also at his Bitches Brewest. I want the Hong Kong gun fu at its John Woo-est. I want style and fluidity. I want an adaptation that understands why Cowboy Bebop endures.

And let me tell you, for all its aesthetic sloshing and freeform action that owes as much to Charlie Parker as it does to Bruce Lee or Sergio Leone, Cowboy Bebop is not great because of its specific influences that inspired it. It’s great because of the way it borrows gluttonously and gleefully from genres across film, literature, music, and philosophy to make something that is great and entertaining even if you don’t notice the allusions, the homages and references.

Part of me would prefer this new adaptation simply make a new mix. Or, to use a musical term, a remix. Give me my familiar Space Cowboys, but spice them up with Illmatic and the Coen Brothers. Give me a Spike whose fighting is more Jackie Chan than Bruce Lee. Give me a Faye who’s less Dunaway and more Zhang Ziyi. And I’d love to see a version of Jet that feels more like Columbo than Marlowe.

My point isn’t that this Bebop adaptation needs to be something specific, or even specifically what I outlined in the last paragraph (it might be a terrible way to adapt this, incidentally: giving no one what they want), but that it should take what’s great about the original and iterate on that. Make something bold and spicy and stylish and wild. Make an adaptation worth watching.

If there’s anything wonderful about an adaptation coming to the market, it’s that it got me watching Cowboy Bebop again this last month.

For a show I’ve seen a few times, a show whose imagery is so inside my head when I close my eyes, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it this time. It had been probably ten or fifteen years since I’ve watched it, and there’s always a danger to returning to media that meant a lot to you when you were an angry young man impossibly lonely and depressed, but I loved this almost as if it were new to me, for wholly new reasons.

The show is just effortlessly cool and stylish. It’s episodic almost as if in defiance of what you want from it or what we’ve come to expect from television. This, actually, is something that always used to bother me about the show: I wanted that grand Syndicate narrative front and center. But Shinichiro Watanabe instead gives you breadcrumbs, demands you figure it out, make sense of who these people are, and especially how all these breadcrumbs are pieced together to form a gingerbread house in a forest that houses your dearest memories.

The show is so many things, but it is relentlessly itself. Stupidly unlike any other show or movie I can think of. Yes, it borrows wildly from dozens of genres and styles, influenced by everything from Duke Ellington at his coolest to Clint Eastwood at his scowliest to Faye Dunaway at her most mysterious to Chow Yun Fat at his gunliest. But it makes all these things melt into just the best kind of ramen you can imagine.

And so I wonder: will this adaptation do something new with this source material? Will it be as bold and experimental? Will it become its own independently unique show?

Or will it be a remake of a show that still exists, that you can watch just as easily?

I wrote everything above before¹ this most recent trailer came out.

Some stray thoughts on this trailer:

• Clarifying where the name Spike Spiegel comes from is interesting because, in my head, Spike is not an Asian man but a Jewish one. From Mars. I understand why people felt like he should be Asian because of the way representation has become, to a certain type of person, the same thing as political activism. I’m fine with Spike being Asian, but—I don’t know—I liked it when he was Jewish.

• This is just a trailer, but, from what I can see, the cinematography here is way worse than the 20 year old cartoon’s cinematography. I mean, there’s something so ugly about the way they turn that iconic moment from the cathedral scene that I embedded way up above where Spike and Vicious are swordgunningly stunning in silhouette.

• I said above that I was worried they’d be so caught inside remaking the show as an exact replica that I couldn’t imagine why they’d refuse to actually make this adaptation an adaptation. I am now even more worried because it looks like I was both right and wrong. Right in that they clearly want to hit the same kind of storybeats and have all the iconic moments. However, I believe they’ll be making each of these episodes 40-60 minutes, which more than doubles or even triples the original runtime of each episode. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but I think the additions look less amusing and charming than I’d like.

• It’s good that Faye Valentine wears actual clothes in this adaptation. I was going to put a picture of her original costuming side by side with the new costume, but even that felt vaguely pornographic and embarrassing. So, uh, I’m glad they gave the woman some actual clothes. She looks comfortable.

• Back to Spike: seems like they’re leaning into playing him as a psychotic murderer, which is…well, it’s, uh, something.

• Back to the visuals: this reminds me of the awful choppiness and panel driven nonsense of Robert Rodriguez comic book movies, which might make sense if this was originally a comic book or if that had ever been a good way to adapt a comic book. But it’s not, never was. And so…I don’t know. It’s a choice is maybe the most generous thing I can say here.

• The cast has…limited chemistry based on this trailer. And, I mean, like—that’s the whole thing that makes the show work. The interplay between these bounty hunters.

• Also, where’s Radical Edward?! And Ein?!

• They said the fuck-word, which lets you know that this is actually for Big Boys and not little babies.

• Looks like they’re probably going all in on the Syndicate narrative. I think I would have been more excited by this in 2002 than I am now. Now, I think the opaque delivery of this narrative is part of what makes Cowboy Bebop inescapably magnificent. Vicious really only works as an antagonist because he’s so cloaked in mystique and inscrutable power. They’re going to Prestige TV the hell out of this storyline, which, I imagine, means turning the whole show in its direction. This will cause the show to lose its loose, episodic, experimental structure and rhythm and instead turn it into something like Jessica Jones, where we’ll make the conflict clear early on, then move lethargically towards the Big Bad Guy for several hours that feel more like indifferent detours than side adventures, before we crash straight into some swordgunning action.

Anyrate, I hope this is good.

I’m going to start it now.

Maybe I’ll let you know how I feel in a few weeks or years.

See you, Space Cowboy!

1. Just, uh, so you’re all aware, I write these essays like they’re my thoughts happening now, in real time because they are, but almost all of these have been written weeks or even months before you get to read them. I was not lying way back at the beginning of this whole newsletter when I said I had essays to fill up the rest of the year and beyond. So later when you read an essay where I talk about doing something that week or a week ago, just know that you’re reading a ghost of this moment in time when that was true, because it no longer is true. For example, I wrote an essay about Shadow of the Colossus, in, like May of 2021. It was actually the first of these essays I wrote and what directly led to the rest of these essays even being written, this newsletter even existing, and yet you probably won’t see it until December or January (I’m trying to find the right time to release it based on a whole list of factors that seem, to me, temporarily important, until I shuffle up the schedule again). Originally, that essay was going to be published in September, then, actually, the last week of October, then again today, at this exact date of November 19th, 2021, but now—who knows. But, uh, yeah, just a little aside about how I think about things when I schedule them. Funnily enough, the moment I’m writing this is on October 27th, 2021, but you’re here on November 19th, thinking that I probably put this ramble together moments before sending it out to your inboxes. But, alas—no. What I’m telling you here in this footnote is that time means nothing to me. You mean everything to me, but we will always be out of sync, our clocks forever brokenly flailing our arms in circles, hoping to finally meet at midnight in some future as yet unknowable date.