Often, the best Cowboy Bebop sessions are the ones that aren’t directly about the crew. The show somehow finds deeper meaning and interest in its characters when they have to react to some new or weird or heartbreaking situation not directly involving them. This is a universe filled with all these lives adrift and so much of its conflict comes when paths cross. “Pierrot le Fou” is another standout session, full of taut tension, haunting imagery, and desperate people. It’s also not about the Bebop crew at all, while being fully about them. As always, there are spoilers for this session, as well as previous sessions.
1. Literal Chance
I’ve written at length about how the Bebop crew tend to drift in and out of different situations. Sometimes, these can are circumstantial, stemming from a separate event, while other times they kind of evolve from a previous problem. In “Pierrot le Fou,” however, Spike’s encounter with the eponymous character is entirely accidental. Le Fou is taking out a hit on some gangsters, while Spike just happens to be at a nearby bar playing billiards. He pauses outside for a cigarette, turns, and happens to watch all this devastation. Le Fou, of course, can’t leave any witnesses, and Spike barely manages to escape with his life. This leads him down a dark well of obsession, tracking and following le Fou’s moves and backstory until he ends up at this nightmarish amusement park for their final showdown.
2. Racking Up the Tension
Like “Toys in the Attic,” “Pierrot le Fou” expertly builds up tension. The score is minimal, generally a sustained hum, used long before Hans Zimmer made it his modus operandi. The camera sours over the city, flashing us with only a quick shadow here and there. Watanabe and crew linger on shots of le Fou’s wicked and solidified smile, on him descending from the sky like some manic bird of prey. Cowboy Bebop rarely dipped its toe into outright horror, but when it did, the crew at Sunrise were probably right up there with The X-Files in racking up pure primetime tension.
3. Capture That
Okay, look, we all know Cowboy Bebop is littered with vivid imagery, especially in how it renders violence. But everything sort of comes together in this session; I think it’s worth pointing it all out. There’s the high contrast coloring at the beginning, with heavy shadows and a small amount of color. There’s Pierrot le Fou’s haunting smile. There’s that shot of Spike getting his ass handed to him, the noir shadows against the alleyway wall, all of it uncomfortably offset by huge flames and explosives. And we haven’t even made it to the ending sequence at the amusement park yet, which takes the alleyway fight and pushes it as far as possible.
The session offers plenty more nightmare imagery, and I think you can tell the crew at Sunrise were having a ball using shadows and silhouette and high-contrasted lighting throughout.
More than that is how “Pierrot le Fou” often drops out the soundtrack, or uses a minimal amount of sound, to deliver the story, relying almost strictly on its visuals this time around. Just watch the showdown scene where Spike and le Fou plan their next moves while a parade passes between them.
4. He Appears with a Smile and He Leaves with a Smile
Eventually, the Bebop crew are able to put together the pieces about le Fou. We learn that he was an experiment gone wrong (as so many of this show’s antagonists tend to be), his body cooperated by some shady government and pumped full of chemicals to turn him into this massive killing machine. It also stunted his mental development: his murdering tendencies come more of a pre-adolescent psychosis, at seeing the whole world as toys to bang together with no concept of the overall damage or destruction. What makes something like the amusement park sequence so horrifying is how le Fou is genuinely playing with the rides and attractions, how his interaction with them is not too far off from Ed goofing off around the ship.
Le Fou is most definitely a terrifying character, but it’s also terrifying to think about what kind of world created him before discarding him as a lost cause. This session is loaded with plenty of jaw-dropping imagery, yes, but the standout moment is when Ed finally hacks into some old files and we’re shown how Pierrot le Fou came to be. How he was made by the ISSP to help in their policing or whatever, but then thrown away the moment he shows any sign of problems.
Continued below5. What Do We Learn About Spike, Then?
I mentioned earlier we get to know the Bebop crew better when dealing with their reactions to other characters, and I think there’s something about Spike here that mostly sets up for the finale. Much like the Betamax tape, le Fou is not an active target for the crew. We talked earlier about how his encounter with the balloon man was pure chance and Spike barely got away with his life. Despite being wrapped up like a mummy and teasingly tortured by Faye, Spike still can’t shake the man from his mind until he knows all the answers. He pursues him relentlessly, partly out of revenge and partly out of a desire to know more. Spike’s a curious character, driven by his need for knowledge. But he’s also a character who doesn’t ever stop until it’s too late. Right after he manages to subdue le Fou, Jet calls with all the information we know about the assassin and Spike tells him just to forget it as a giant drumming dog stomps the life out of le Fou. Where does his empathy begin? Where does his relentlessness end? Is it only death or defeat that causes Spike’s anger to uncloud and his mind to open? Cowboy Bebop is laying the groundwork for its finale, where we’re going to see all these characteristics reach their head.
Also, before we go, there’s a little moment for Faye and her evolving relationship too. Le Fou sends an invitation to Spike to join him at the amusement park, which Ed intercepts and presents to her. Faye tells Ed to keep it a secret, to especially not show it to Spike, but lo and behold, who’s right behind her? Faye from a few sessions ago would have encouraged his action, but we’re seeing her slowly move out of her hardened exterior too. It might be a little late, but hey.
What did you think? How does this session stack up? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you next time, space cowboys, for the “Boogie Woogie Feng Shui.”
