I reviewed this movie earlier this year, but I also started another run through of Cowboy Bebop basically as soon as I finished the last one, so coming back around to this film was inevitable, and watching the series and film for the umpteenth time put a few thoughts in my head, one of which I hope to develop a little here.
The thought on my mind about this movie is the fact that it has the inherent problem of having to tell a story in which the main characters aren't allowed to change, but also that a story about Cowboy Bebop is one of the few series where that doesn't have to be a detriment to the film's individual story, as the film relies on the series' themes and structure to circumvent it. Due to how Bebop ends, the only way for another story to be told is through it taking place sometime before its finale. For any other series, this could potentially incur two problems: one, it needs to fit in to the series' narrative, and two, it can't create or result in any drastic changes to the main characters, everyone who matters to the finale has to be relatively the same by story's end. Cowboy Bebop is one of the few series that doesn't have to change anything about itself for neither of these things to have an impact on how the story is told. Bebop is a serial that tells stories connected by theme rather than narrative. While there are parts of the story that have to occur at definite times, every tale is designed to be mostly self-contained, working through the events of each episode without those events having any effect on the series' narrative later, instead focusing on the themes presented by the narrative, of the dreamlike state in which Spike approaches life, or the repeated use of characters running from the past to act as a reflections of the series' leads, while also leaving an impact that goes unspoken. Knockin' on Heaven's Door behaves much the same way, utilising a lot of themes and issues fans of the series are familiar with while telling a story that we know will stay with the main characters without them ever having to talk about it. The second problem is avoided by Bebop's altervative approach to subjectivity in stroytelling. Rather than focus on its main characters, Bebop more often than not uses its leads as the lens through which the audience views other characters, and those characters are the subjects of the episodes. A villain of the episode is examined by the leads and is ultimately the one who changes in the episode, rather than the leads, and each time this happens it serves to reinforce the effect that these sorts of experience will have on the main characters during the episodes where they are the subject. Once again, Knockin' on Heaven's Door takes the same approach. The villain of the story, Vincent Volaju, is who we learn about during this movie, seeing his experiences and how they've changed him as a person leading up to who he is in the film, and it is he who is ultimately changed by the movie's events, while Spike, Jet, Faye and Ed are all back to where they started. It's understandable if some people find this sort of storytelling frustrating; the characters we spend the most time with are the ones we end up knowing the least about for a good portion of the series, and these experiences seem to mean so little until we actually get a chance to see them reflect on themselves for a moment; additionally, true to life though it may be, some don't enjoy seeing characters go round in circles avoiding their pasts only to confront them in ways that will inevitably destroy them, but these are the exact reasons that Cowboy Bebop has stuck with me for as long as it has, and why I unashamedly and unironically refer to it as the best TV series I've ever seen. But I digress. By nature of Cowboy Bebop's structure, it circumvents some of the biggest writing blocks for stories that occur in the middle of a series that's already concluded. I might come back to this at some point, as Bebop something I love dissecting and discussing, and this is only really surface-level stuff, come to me on a whim, but at one in the morning it starts to get difficult to process.
Published: July 12th, 2017
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