Before I start writing, I’m gonna celebrate a little bit because I got to write about Cowboy Bebop TWICE in this class! That’s a whole two more times than in all my other classes at Penn combined. Anyway, Cowboy Bebop is an anime that follows four bounty hunters as they roam the galaxy and do their very best to ignore their trauma. It synthesizes influences as disparate as jazz, sci fi, and western and kung fu cinemas in a way that made me fall in love with it instantly. When I heard Netflix would be releasing a live action remake of Bebop, I was cautiously optimistic, but that optimism was entirely unfounded. The remake wasn’t just disappointing. It was flat out bad. One of the things that absolutely baffled me about the remake was how it simultaneously acknowledged and obfuscated the queerness of the nonbinary characters in the original. The fact that a show released in 1998 is more willing to highlight nonbinary characters than the 2021 remake of that show is indicative of how making diversity a checklist can play into the stereotyping tendencies of the regime of representation.
There are two characters that I’d like to highlight to investigate this. The first is one of Bebop’s four main characters, named Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV. Oh, that’s a bit long, isn’t it? They usually just go by Ed, and they’re as delightfully chaotic as that name suggests. The second is Gren, the central character in the two-part episode, Jupiter Jazz. I don’t currently have the space for a detailed discussion of how the show represents these nonbinary characters, but I will point you to the third chapter of Ladyknightthebrave’s excellent video essay on Bebop for just that (2021). She does a better job of it than I could, anyway, highlighting the many positives without ignoring the more problematic elements. The thing to take away here is that the show imbues Gren and Ed with their own agency, their own pride, without falling into a stereotypical depiction of the nonbinary community. These depictions are important because of how they contribute to the regime of representation, which Stuart Hall (1997) defined as “the whole repertoire of imagery and visual effects through which ‘difference’ is represented at any one historical moment” (p 232). In avoiding the stereotypes that surround the non-binary communities, Bebop fights back against the regime of representation’s tendency to reduce a community to “a few essentials,” to fix them “in Nature by a few, simplified characteristics” (Hall, 1997, p. 249). In a world where nonbinary representation is frighteningly rare, Cowboy Bebop offers two positive examples of it.
I wish I could say the same about its remake. Pre-release, things looked promising, with the announcement that the non-binary actor Mason Alexander Park would portray Gren as explicitly non-binary in the remake (Curto, 2020). But the surprising absence of Ed in any promotional materials hinted at the disappointment to come. In the remake, Gren is made into a vaguely queer bartender and Ed is relegated to what is essentially a post credits scene for the season. One would think that, with the advances in non-binary visibility and acceptability made between 1998 and 2021, the remake would be able to better explore Ed and Gren’s stories. Instead, they are very nearly erased from the series. How did that happen? It appears to me as if the creators of the remake complied with our current time’s demand for explicit visibility of minority communities without considering the quality of that visibility. Along with making Gren explicitly non-binary, they gave all three lead roles to people of color, which should be a good thing (although they did inadvertently play into stereotypes like the black absentee father). But they made a crucial mistake that aligns with one of the things that Andi Zeisler points out in her book, Feminism and Pop Culture. Similar to how MTV in the 80’s “made a handful of women into rock stars while relegating countless others to a background in which they writhed, half-naked and faceless,” they thought simply putting someone on screen would be sufficient for good representation (Zeisler, 2008, p. 13). Gren’s lack of any perceivable character in the remake, especially when compared to their depth in the original, truly makes it seem like they were an element of a diversity quota that the creators were checking off one by one. Every instance of non-binary representation in pop culture contributes to the regime of representation that classifies their form of “difference,” so it is essential that this representation is “more plentiful but also less stereotypical” (Zeisler, 2008, p. 20). I wish it were true that the remake of Cowboy Bebop was able to match or improve on the representation of non-binary folks in the original. Instead, Gren feels like an afterthought and Ed is nearly forgotten.
I’d like to end this post by acknowledging that it is possible, even likely, that there were plans to further flesh out the characters of both Ed and Gren in future seasons of the remake. We will never know if that is actually the case because the remake was canceled after just one season, but who knows? Let’s be honest though, do we really want the people who wrote this dialogue adding anything more to the regime of representation?
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