Mirror Image: Faye and Spike
WARNING: This article contains SPOILERS for both the TV series and the Cowboy Bebop movie!!
On my second viewing of Cowboy Funk, grinning as I watched Faye giving Spike a hard time about being just like Andy, it occurred to me that Faye knew what she was talking about because she had an eerily innate understanding of Spike. In other words, Spike and Faye are as alike as the proverbial two peas in a pod.
Now, I suppose somebody’s reading this and thinking, “Holy crap, make up your mind! You just wrote a War and Peace length bit on how Faye and Julia are alike. So which one is it, anyway?”
Yeah, it does seem like I’m waffling, but the thing is, I’m not saying Faye is exactly like Spike or Julia, only that events and situations in the series invite comparisons between Faye and Julia, as well as Faye and Spike (and even between Faye and Jet’s old girlfriend, the short-haired brunette in debt.)
Sometimes, Spike and Faye were so alike it was scary…having one Spike running amok on the Bebop was nerve-wracking enough, and adding Faye to the mix? Poor Jet. It’s amazing he had any hair left by the end of the series; another, less patient man probably would’ve pulled all his hair out in frustration over the antics of his so-called “partners.”
So, re-watching Cowboy Funk and listening to Faye rag on Spike about destroying property and making huge messes had me thinking, “gee, there’s the pot calling the kettle black.” The first time Faye shows up in the show, what does she do? She embroils herself in a shoot out with a bunch of goons and gets some guy’s shop all shot up (kind of similar to what happens to poor Annie’s shop toward the end, when Spike gets into a shoot out with Vicious’s thugs.) Then later in the same episode she summons the Red Tail and makes a big mess of the casino, blowing things up without much consideration for bystanders. She shoots the daylights out of the abandoned cathedral in Waltz for Venus, to the point where both Spike and Jet get a little nervous. And I don’t think anybody would argue that she’s pretty reckless most of the time.
One of Spike’s coping techniques is to challenge himself by getting into dangerous situations. I never felt he had a death wish, but for the most part he wasn’t afraid of dying. Pushing himself to the limit, right to the edge of nearly getting himself killed, was his way of feeling truly alive. The only time he feared dying was when he’d developed emotional attachments to people, which forced him to acknowledge what he had to lose.
In a similar fashion, I started to wonder if Faye’s reckless gambling was her way of coping with the debts she’d been so unfairly saddled with. She believed her situation was hopeless, that there was no way she’d ever be able to pay that money back. So whenever she had money, she spent it or gambled it away as quickly as possible. Maybe she couldn’t get to keep it, but then neither could anybody else. She’d been royally screwed over, so why not stick it to others? I always felt there was a lot of repressed anger and fear in Faye because of what happened to her following her reviving. She was also very afraid to trust people, so she had a tendency to screw them over before they could screw her–which explains her stunt in Jupiter Jazz. Gren read her spot on.
Dreams are obviously a big theme in Bebop, mostly with Spike, but this applies to Faye as well (even Jet uses the “felt like a dream” analogy when talking about his emotional numbness after Alisa’s departure.) In regards to Spike and Faye, compare the scenes from Sympathy for the Devil, where Spike is remembering his eye operation, to the scene in My Funny Valentine, where Faye is waking up from her cryo sleep. They’re very similar–watery, dreamy, associations with fish. At one point, Faye says to Witney that it’s “all just a dream.”
Boy, doesn’t that sound familiar?
Vicious taunts Spike about “waking him up,” and Witney blathers on about “waking Sleeping Beauty.” Vicious also calls Spike a “beast” a couple of times (BoFA and RFB II), and you could say that, in the end, Vicious certainly roused whatever “beast” was sleeping in Spike.
The same could also be true about Witney awakening whatever beast was inside Faye–as it was shown later in the series, she’d been a sweet kid before the accident and Witney’s betrayal. If Faye was the “beauty” and Spike was the “beast” though, the fairy tale didn’t end the way anybody expected it to end. And the tag line at the end of My Funny Valentine was “let sleeping beasts lie” with a close up of Ein. I’d say it was just for comedic effect, but lots of things in Cowboy Bebop have multiple meanings, so I always wonder…
Spike and Faye even get similar lines/associations:
Spike to Faye in My Funny Valentine: “Hey, isn’t that supposed to be my line?”
Spike to Andy in Cowboy Funk: “Hey, that’s my line!”
Faye in Heavy Metal Queen: “I’m not the delicate type.”
Spike about Faye in Waltz for Venus: “She could be a little more delicate!”
Spike in Wild Horses: “I told you, I’m not the delicate type.”
Faye in Wild Horses: “We shoot and see which one runs.”
Spike: “For once, I agree with you.”
Jet complaints about them are practically interchangeable. “And worse, she takes off like a bullet and we never know where she is.” And who else takes off like a bullet all the time?
Jet in general: “What makes them think they can just take off and do whatever they want?”
Edited to add: From Omar (thank you!), who emailed me about something I forgot to mention, which is that at the end of the series, Faye is about the same age as Spike was when he left the Red Dragons, lost everything, and had his world turned upside down. Just a little something else that invites comparisons between them.
There’s also the nice scene in Brain Scratch with Spike sitting over Faye, waiting for her to wake up again, which is a bookend to the scene with her watching over him in BoFA. There’s an emotional distance in their interactions, true, but the concern is still apparent.
I always figured Spike was so knowledgeable about Faye’s cheating ways because he’d probably pulled his share of similar tricks. He’s shown to be something of a pickpocket in the very first episode, and it takes one cheater at cards to know another.
Even in the CB movie, Knockin' on Heaven's Door (a.k.a. "KOHD"), Faye and Spike are paired off with other characters in parallel ways. While Spike’s sitting in jail and bonding with Vincent’s ex-girlfriend, Faye’s tied up on a floor and “bonding” with Elektra’s ex-lover.
Spike kind of hits on Electra, and Vincent sure gets physical with Faye, although not in a good way. Poor Faye, she always seems to end up with the psychos…and even stranger was how Vincent, like Vicious, knew Faye was with Spike. As usual, Jet didn’t get mixed up in any of this crazy stuff, but the parallel pairing in KOHD makes perfect sense because Faye–the woman without a past–is the best foil for Vincent, the man with no past.
There’s also lots of similarities between Vincent and Spike, which I won’t go into here, and maybe that means kissing Vincent was the closest Faye ever got to kissing Spike. As for Spike and Elektra, her talk about wanting to “save” Vincent was interesting, and made me wonder if Spike might have been trying to “save” Julia when he fell for her, or if it was the other way around. Or maybe if some of that part of his talk referred to his friendship with Vicious.
And of course there’re parallels between Vincent and Vicious too (not just that their names each start with a V). Both are dangerous and have to be put down by a former lover/friend. I don’t recall a direct statement in the CB movie that Vincent and Elektra were lovers, but I thought it was strongly implied when AIDS was mentioned shortly before it’s revealed Elektra has the nano-virus in her blood–she’s questioned as to how she got it, and asked if she come in close physical contact with Vincent. Well, I’d say sex is about the only way that would’ve worked…and Vincent later kisses Faye to give her immunity. Why he takes a fancy to Faye in the first place isn’t really clear, but maybe she reminds him in some way of Elektra. It’d be just Faye’s luck, always the stand-in for somebody else’s ex-lover…
I’ve seen comments that Spike and Faye could never get together romantically because they were far too similar, and I think there’s some validity to that. Faye seemed to be drawn to the fatalistic side of Spike, but I think she really wanted someone she could trust to never let her down and who’d always be there for her–who wouldn’t treat her as if she were always getting in the way. In some respects, Jet would be a better match for her, providing he could work through his own issues.
Hmmm…got a little off track there.
ANYway, I think that although Spike and Faye were very similar in many ways, Faye valued her life more than Spike. If nothing else, I’d like to think Spike’s fate was a wake-up call for her to get her own act together before something bad happened.
By Michele
Now, I suppose somebody’s reading this and thinking, “Holy crap, make up your mind! You just wrote a War and Peace length bit on how Faye and Julia are alike. So which one is it, anyway?”
Yeah, it does seem like I’m waffling, but the thing is, I’m not saying Faye is exactly like Spike or Julia, only that events and situations in the series invite comparisons between Faye and Julia, as well as Faye and Spike (and even between Faye and Jet’s old girlfriend, the short-haired brunette in debt.)
Sometimes, Spike and Faye were so alike it was scary…having one Spike running amok on the Bebop was nerve-wracking enough, and adding Faye to the mix? Poor Jet. It’s amazing he had any hair left by the end of the series; another, less patient man probably would’ve pulled all his hair out in frustration over the antics of his so-called “partners.”
So, re-watching Cowboy Funk and listening to Faye rag on Spike about destroying property and making huge messes had me thinking, “gee, there’s the pot calling the kettle black.” The first time Faye shows up in the show, what does she do? She embroils herself in a shoot out with a bunch of goons and gets some guy’s shop all shot up (kind of similar to what happens to poor Annie’s shop toward the end, when Spike gets into a shoot out with Vicious’s thugs.) Then later in the same episode she summons the Red Tail and makes a big mess of the casino, blowing things up without much consideration for bystanders. She shoots the daylights out of the abandoned cathedral in Waltz for Venus, to the point where both Spike and Jet get a little nervous. And I don’t think anybody would argue that she’s pretty reckless most of the time.
One of Spike’s coping techniques is to challenge himself by getting into dangerous situations. I never felt he had a death wish, but for the most part he wasn’t afraid of dying. Pushing himself to the limit, right to the edge of nearly getting himself killed, was his way of feeling truly alive. The only time he feared dying was when he’d developed emotional attachments to people, which forced him to acknowledge what he had to lose.
In a similar fashion, I started to wonder if Faye’s reckless gambling was her way of coping with the debts she’d been so unfairly saddled with. She believed her situation was hopeless, that there was no way she’d ever be able to pay that money back. So whenever she had money, she spent it or gambled it away as quickly as possible. Maybe she couldn’t get to keep it, but then neither could anybody else. She’d been royally screwed over, so why not stick it to others? I always felt there was a lot of repressed anger and fear in Faye because of what happened to her following her reviving. She was also very afraid to trust people, so she had a tendency to screw them over before they could screw her–which explains her stunt in Jupiter Jazz. Gren read her spot on.
Dreams are obviously a big theme in Bebop, mostly with Spike, but this applies to Faye as well (even Jet uses the “felt like a dream” analogy when talking about his emotional numbness after Alisa’s departure.) In regards to Spike and Faye, compare the scenes from Sympathy for the Devil, where Spike is remembering his eye operation, to the scene in My Funny Valentine, where Faye is waking up from her cryo sleep. They’re very similar–watery, dreamy, associations with fish. At one point, Faye says to Witney that it’s “all just a dream.”
Boy, doesn’t that sound familiar?
Vicious taunts Spike about “waking him up,” and Witney blathers on about “waking Sleeping Beauty.” Vicious also calls Spike a “beast” a couple of times (BoFA and RFB II), and you could say that, in the end, Vicious certainly roused whatever “beast” was sleeping in Spike.
The same could also be true about Witney awakening whatever beast was inside Faye–as it was shown later in the series, she’d been a sweet kid before the accident and Witney’s betrayal. If Faye was the “beauty” and Spike was the “beast” though, the fairy tale didn’t end the way anybody expected it to end. And the tag line at the end of My Funny Valentine was “let sleeping beasts lie” with a close up of Ein. I’d say it was just for comedic effect, but lots of things in Cowboy Bebop have multiple meanings, so I always wonder…
Spike and Faye even get similar lines/associations:
Spike to Faye in My Funny Valentine: “Hey, isn’t that supposed to be my line?”
Spike to Andy in Cowboy Funk: “Hey, that’s my line!”
Faye in Heavy Metal Queen: “I’m not the delicate type.”
Spike about Faye in Waltz for Venus: “She could be a little more delicate!”
Spike in Wild Horses: “I told you, I’m not the delicate type.”
Faye in Wild Horses: “We shoot and see which one runs.”
Spike: “For once, I agree with you.”
Jet complaints about them are practically interchangeable. “And worse, she takes off like a bullet and we never know where she is.” And who else takes off like a bullet all the time?
Jet in general: “What makes them think they can just take off and do whatever they want?”
Edited to add: From Omar (thank you!), who emailed me about something I forgot to mention, which is that at the end of the series, Faye is about the same age as Spike was when he left the Red Dragons, lost everything, and had his world turned upside down. Just a little something else that invites comparisons between them.
There’s also the nice scene in Brain Scratch with Spike sitting over Faye, waiting for her to wake up again, which is a bookend to the scene with her watching over him in BoFA. There’s an emotional distance in their interactions, true, but the concern is still apparent.
I always figured Spike was so knowledgeable about Faye’s cheating ways because he’d probably pulled his share of similar tricks. He’s shown to be something of a pickpocket in the very first episode, and it takes one cheater at cards to know another.
Even in the CB movie, Knockin' on Heaven's Door (a.k.a. "KOHD"), Faye and Spike are paired off with other characters in parallel ways. While Spike’s sitting in jail and bonding with Vincent’s ex-girlfriend, Faye’s tied up on a floor and “bonding” with Elektra’s ex-lover.
Spike kind of hits on Electra, and Vincent sure gets physical with Faye, although not in a good way. Poor Faye, she always seems to end up with the psychos…and even stranger was how Vincent, like Vicious, knew Faye was with Spike. As usual, Jet didn’t get mixed up in any of this crazy stuff, but the parallel pairing in KOHD makes perfect sense because Faye–the woman without a past–is the best foil for Vincent, the man with no past.
There’s also lots of similarities between Vincent and Spike, which I won’t go into here, and maybe that means kissing Vincent was the closest Faye ever got to kissing Spike. As for Spike and Elektra, her talk about wanting to “save” Vincent was interesting, and made me wonder if Spike might have been trying to “save” Julia when he fell for her, or if it was the other way around. Or maybe if some of that part of his talk referred to his friendship with Vicious.
And of course there’re parallels between Vincent and Vicious too (not just that their names each start with a V). Both are dangerous and have to be put down by a former lover/friend. I don’t recall a direct statement in the CB movie that Vincent and Elektra were lovers, but I thought it was strongly implied when AIDS was mentioned shortly before it’s revealed Elektra has the nano-virus in her blood–she’s questioned as to how she got it, and asked if she come in close physical contact with Vincent. Well, I’d say sex is about the only way that would’ve worked…and Vincent later kisses Faye to give her immunity. Why he takes a fancy to Faye in the first place isn’t really clear, but maybe she reminds him in some way of Elektra. It’d be just Faye’s luck, always the stand-in for somebody else’s ex-lover…
I’ve seen comments that Spike and Faye could never get together romantically because they were far too similar, and I think there’s some validity to that. Faye seemed to be drawn to the fatalistic side of Spike, but I think she really wanted someone she could trust to never let her down and who’d always be there for her–who wouldn’t treat her as if she were always getting in the way. In some respects, Jet would be a better match for her, providing he could work through his own issues.
Hmmm…got a little off track there.
ANYway, I think that although Spike and Faye were very similar in many ways, Faye valued her life more than Spike. If nothing else, I’d like to think Spike’s fate was a wake-up call for her to get her own act together before something bad happened.
By Michele
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