Cowboy Bebop Session #5: Ballad of Fallen Angels

After somewhat of a hiatus, I'm back...

I'm just watching a bad dream I never woke up from.

Session 5: Ballad of Fallen Angels

The first image we see coming out of the opening is a man pricking his thumb and signing a letter in blood, continuing with the whole red/blood color theme the series has going. We're at some sort of a meeting of two crime lords (seemingly) forming an alliance. There's an interesting shot where they shake hands, one wearing an all suit, the other wearing all white, with one half of the room bathed in light coming in from the window and the other half obscured in shadow. It creates a yin-yang sort of effect. A few seconds later (I have it paused at 02:12 right now), we get a shot angled from above where we see the bright light outside, while columns in front of the window cast bar shaped shadows on the floor. This is sort of chiaroscuro effect is something you see a lot in noir movies. It's often said to be a metaphor for characters being imprisoned by something--visually their "behind bars." We learn that the man in the black suit is a member of the Red Dragon clan (color theme!). As he watches the other gang faction speed away, suddenly their ship explodes and he turns around to see himself with a sword at his neck. We get our first shot of Vicious walking in from behind, his massive bird squwaking on his shoulder. As Vicious kills the man in the black suit, we cut to a shot of the bird's big blood red eye, then to blood spilling on the floor. With his last words, the man in black insists, "if Spike were here, you would never have done this," and after Vicious smirks we cut to a shot, I guess from somewhere else in the room of a sculpture on the wall with two cherubs. This shot is in the same sort of washed out bluish-gray light as the very first flashback scene back in "Asteroid Blues." Feathers slowly descend across the shot. Then we get the title screen.

On board the Bebop, Spike is lobbying Jet, trying to convince him to pursue a bounty on the head of the Red Dragon clan leader who we just saw get killed. Mao Yenrai is his name, we learn. Faye enters and interrupts their argument, a distraction that Spike uses to leave by himself. Jet is not happy and leaves the room. Faye gets a message about "something big" that's meant for Jet. While doing this, she picks up a ace of spades on the ground from a deck that Spike was shuffling. Not the first time we've seen poker cards. Following the lead, Faye runs off and ends up at an opera. She ends up in Mao Yenrai's box with a gun at her back. Elsewhere, Spike visits a surly convenience store owner who is convinced that he died three years ago. She has a framed photo of Yenrai behind the counter. Spike asks what happened to him. We don't hang around for the answer. Switching back to Faye, she realizes that whoever has her captured at the moment has Mao's body propped up in one of the seats of the opera box. Vicious enters and tells Faye his name. Halfway point break.

Back at the convenience store, the owner, Annie is a bit drunk and telling Spike not to get involved with Vicious while opining about Mao's death. The next scene is Spike back aboard the Bebop, but in between is a are two completely silent shots, one of a stained glass window depicting a heavenly looking scene in a darkened room, followed by the shadow of Vicious bird obscuring the purple-ish light from the window on the floor. On the Bebop, as Spike is getting his various weaponry ready, Jet reveals that he knows Mao is already dead and that Spike would be walking into a trap if he were to go after his bounty. Spike says that he knows but that he "has a debt to pay off." Trying to convince Spike not to go, Jet very vaguely alludes to how he lost his arm by "being too gung-ho." At the end of the series, there will be another scene aboard the Bebop where Spike tells Faye how he lost one of his eyes. That scene will end the same way, with Spike running off to deal with elements of his past. A message comes in from Faye, handcuffed to a pole, announcing that she "kinda got herself caught."

As we switch scenes again, Spike approaches a giant cathedral under cloudy skies, tinted with an eerie purple hue. In between shots of Spike walking in and Vicious crouched down waiting with his big sword in hand, we get glimpses around the cathedral, including several of the stained glass windows from before. Spike gets into a gunfight with Vicious's men. In the commotion, Faye gets away and flees out of the church. Vicious eventually gets Spike pinned down to the ground, and while telling him that he looks like a ravenous beast, we cut to a low-angle shot of a cross somewhere in the cathedral, buried in shadows. Anime directors seem to love throwing in Christian symbolism. Maybe the most well known example is Evangelion, which is steeped with it. Spike shoots Vicious in the shoulder, who simultaneously stabs him in the shoulder. Vicious recovers and throws Spike out of the big circular window. As Spike falls, we continuously see an extreme close up of his fake eye--his red eye--intercut with scenes from his past, some of which we saw at the very beginning of "Asteroid Blues." We see our first real glimpses of Julia, which always seem to be encased in a golden color scheme, contrasting the washed out blue-gray of the rest of Spike's memories. We also at one point see the same shot of the cross again. Spike thinks he hears Julia singing. He wakes up and sees Faye. He insults her singing and Faye slaps him and storms out of the room. In the commotion, Spike ends up with a poker card on his forehead. He picks it up. It's the ace of spades.

As I said, anime directors seem to love throwing in Christian symbolism, sometimes for seemingly no real reason and maybe the use of the symbolism here begins and ends with that. The intercutting of religious symbols with violence, though, is also something that Francis Ford Coppola used to great effect in his crime epics, the Godfather films, notably the baptism scene at the climax of the first film, and the scene where Vito is climbing rooftops to kill the Black Hand as there's some sort of a religious festival going on in the streets. Godfather III (mehhh...) also has an extended opera scene at the end, where a guy ends up getting poisoned and slumps over dead in an opera box. Maybe that inspired the opera scene in this episode, I dunno.