Sessions 25 & 26: The Real Folk Blues, Pts. 1 & 2
For one month, The Dot and Line is publishing essays, interviews, and discussions about each episode of Cowboy Bebop, which turns 20 this April.
The thud of Julia’s head on the roof is what always stuck with me. In the finale of Cowboy Bebop, “The Real Folk Blues,” she and Spike reunite for the first time in years and resolve to run away together — away from Vicious and from a life of violence. Of course, minutes after they decide this, they have to deal with syndicate goons first. The ensuing firefight takes them outside, into the rain. Julia is shot. Doves fly. She falls in slow motion. Even in the rain, Julia looks angelically brighter than the scene around her. Then her skull crashes down to the earth.
It’s always been an upsetting scene, but that thud helps illustrate a disconnect in Bebop, one Julia points out in her final words to Spike: “It’s all a dream.” As she dies, Spike mournfully agrees with her. For Spike, this is not literally a dream, but the start of a grieving process that will end with his own death. The thud was a hammer, bludgeoning him to reality. The psychological toll of Julia’s death on Spike is far more traumatic than simply the murder of a loved one. The first thing he does after her death is see his old partners, and the second thing is a suicide mission to kill the guy responsible. Here’s why.
The only armor Spike wears is sprezzatura
Think about how Spike is introduced in “Asteroid Blues.” He’s laconic, almost absurdly competent, relishes in his ability to shrug off just about anything, and cocky as hell. While guarded about his past, Spike doesn’t project the aura of a person tormented by a violent history and an old flame he can’t get over. All of that is a glamor you can trace back to a 16th Century Italian fashion tenet called “sprezzatura.”
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As defined in Baldassare Castiglione’s 1508 handbook for court life, The Book of the Courtier, sprezzatura is “a certain nonchalance [sprezzatura], so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” It started as a tip for how men of society should dress and comport themselves—basically, try a little, but definitely not too hard, ever—and has grown into a fashion mantra. Men throughout the 20th Century, from industrialist Gianni Agnelli to musicians like Miles Davis to contemporary fashion icons like Michael Bastian, took it for proof that you don’t have to look entirely put together to look terrific and that, in fact, it was quite the contrary. The Esquire and GQ magazine editor Ross McCammon put it perfectly in his book Works Well With Others:
Sprezzatura allows for—and, more important, promotes—whimsy, messiness, flaws. Your tie is askew. Sprezzatura. Your shirt is a little untucked? Sprezzatura. Those prints don’t mix? Sprezzatura. You’re accidentally wearing your shirt inside out? Just call it sprezzatura and go about your day. Sprezzatura endorses comfort, individuality, contradiction, wrinkles.
The Spike we meet at the start of Bebop would seem to endorse all of it too, down to the slightly untucked shirt. This is no coming-of-age tale where we discover how he became a practiced marksman, martial artist, and pilot. He just is. He doesn’t do anything too quickly unless it happens to involve sleight-of-hand or kicking ass, and those are exactly the things he’s best at anyway. That outlook carries over to his fluidly choreographed, Bruce Lee–influenced fighting style and—crucially—his approach to life. One of Spike’s defining quotes in Bebop is, “Whatever happens, happens.” Sprezzatura!
It carries over to his sense of fashion, too. He wears a thin-cut navy-blue leisure suit with a fit that accentuates his lanky frame, a loosened thin tie to match, and a yellow shirt with a collar that’s popped more often than it’s not. He defaults to simple leather shoes, and his green hair dominates his silhouette. A Lupin III look, but with a little flair? Sprezzatura! One eye just slightly lighter than the other? Sprezzatura! And for the majority of time we watch Spike interact with his partners or with the outside world, he doesn’t need to comment on any of this.
Spike’s sprezzatura is his armor. It’s a veneer he uses to shield himself from a violently traumatic criminal past, unrequited love, and the new connections he could be making in the present. It also invigorates and defines his time on the Bebop. On some level, he gets a kick out of busting Jet’s balls and doing things like swallowing cigarettes in non-smoking areas. On another, his casual approach to fighting throws enemies wildly off guard, making him effective at his job when he’s not too reckless. His cool is often what keeps him alive through most of the show. That sprezzatura is three years in the making: three years since he was “killed once before by a woman,” as he puts it in the first episode. If he can shrug it off, it’s not a big deal.
The final episode of the show shatters Spike’s armor
Except something like nearly getting killed totally is a big deal. The problem with sprezzatura—and with putting up the kind of psychological resistance that Spike does during all that time—is that, aside from the trappings of fashion, it’s impossible to maintain forever. Spike’s former connections, for all the sprezzatura in the world, do matter to him. In “Ballad of Fallen Angels,” because an old mentor has been killed, he confronts Vicious head on, bailing on Jet in the process. In “Jupiter Jazz,” he goes on a wild goose chase when he hears the (very common!) name of Julia, then later flies into a rage when he hears the word “Vicious” spoken out of context. Then we get to the events of “The Real Folk Blues.”
And it takes time, but by the end of Cowboy Bebop, his new connections matter to him, too. He’s genuinely sad and introspective when Jet’s leg is wounded due to a run-in with Spike’s syndicate ties in “The Real Folk Blues, Pt. 1.” He and Faye share an extremely emotional farewell before his final confrontation with Vicious—one they certainly didn’t have in “Sympathy for the Devil,” when he left for another mission that could have ended with him dead. But the thing that finally, really sets him off—that takes that last chink in his psychological armor and shatters it—is the THUD, the death of Julia.
Spike wasn’t always an emotionally unavailable rake nearly incapable of meaningful human connections. For all the pain his life in the Red Dragon syndicate caused him, it also brought him friendship, as well as love. The flickers of flashbacks that we get throughout the show hint that Spike and Vicious were once comrades, that Vicious was probably romantically involved with Julia first, and that ultimately she chose Spike, prompting Vicious to turn on both of them. They also show us a Spike who was entirely unafraid of showing an earnest, hopeful side. “We’ll leave here. We’ll get out of this,” he tells Julia, with all the sincerity a 24-year-old can muster. “Live, be free. It’ll be like watching a dream.”
Then came the betrayal and his departure from the syndicate. Then came the medical operations that gave him his new eye. Then came the Bebop. Then came the psychological resistance. As Victoria Freyre pointed out last week, “The Real Folk Blues” is such a powerful gut punch because for a brief, simple moment, it imagined a Spike and Julia who could run away from it all. Maybe they could take out Vicious and finally be free of syndicate goons. Maybe they could join Faye and Jet on the Bebop. Their old friend Annie dies, perhaps believing some version of this might come to pass. Then the bullets start flying again.
What happens instead is a character death, but it also leaves Spike feeling as if he has nothing left. With Julia gone, so goes what he thought was his last best shot at a meaningful relationship with another person.
The tragedy is that sprezzatura blinded Spike to other relationships
In Spike and Jet’s final talk together, Jet offers a retelling of Ernest Hemingway’s story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” It ends with its protagonist, who feels the life flowing out of him, looking at a white snow-capped mountain and thinking about how close he came to dying.
“I hate stories like that,” Jet grumbles. “Men only think about the past right before their death. As if they were searching frantically for proof that they were alive.” Jet knows what Spike intends to do and wants to save him from himself. He wants his partner in the bounty-hunting business to stick around, and he wants his friend to stay alive. For Jet, his connection to Spike is incredibly meaningful, even if Spike can’t see it that way enough to be dissuaded (and even if Jet’s own toxic masculine hangups prevent him from giving his boy a hug). Spike responds with this story:
There once was a tiger-striped cat. This cat died a million deaths, was revived, and lived a million lives, and he was owned by various people who he really didn’t care for. The cat wasn’t afraid to die. Then one day the cat became a stray cat which meant he was free. He met a white female cat and the two of them spent their days together happily. Well, years passed and the white cat grew weak and died of old age. The tiger-striped cat cried a million times, and then he died too. Except this time, he didn’t come back to life.
I hate that story. I hate cats, you know that.
The last two sentences of the story are probably a gift to Jet—one last laugh for an old partner before he has to leave him forever—but the rest of it re-confirms the psychological resistance that Spike has built up. (And if you’re interested in reading it, the full Japanese fable Spike is retelling cuts even closer to sprezzatura; the tiger-striped cat is obsessed with appearances, preening, and glamor.) It’s also more of the same shrugging that defined his psychological resistance while they were partners.
The same is true of Spike’s later interaction with Faye. He gets inches from her face, a more intimate distance than they’ve ever shared at any point in the series before, and tells her the truth about his eyes: one is fake and the other is real, and he feels that his vision of reality is distorted as a result. His final line to Faye references the conversation with Jet: “I’m not going there to die. I’m going to find out if I’m really alive.” And Faye, who has met a grand total of two or three halfway decent men she can trust throughout the course of all of Bebop—who is similarly so traumatized by her own past that she’s actually learned she can only survive by moving forward—can’t help but sob and fire her gun at the ceiling. Spike can shrug so many things off, but his badass-anime-hero vendetta against Vicious is the one thing he can’t shrug off, at the expense of his own life and his very real emotional connection to his partners. That’s the tragedy.
And then he’s gone. Bang.
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