And for Spike, the hero in Cowboy Bebop, it means real.
Spike's final choice to die is a romantic stubbornness. I don't want to give him a good or bad judgment, because this kind of judgment is too weak and ridiculous. Everyone has his own life, his joys and sorrows, others can understand some, but it will never be all.
For spike, the past definitely doesn't mean good, it even means too much pain and pain, but why does he want to go back to the past?
Because for Spike, the most important thing in life is not lightness and comfort or heaviness, but truth - as he himself said, he just wants to live truthfully.
In the past life, there was the woman he loved the most, Julia - and Julia and the past she represented existed as a heavy reality.
Of course we can pursue lightness, but life without weight is the easiest to disappear. Such as the ghosts and shells in "The Shell", they are always interdependent. When ghost seeks some kind of extreme ease and escapes into the online world, it also means disappearing from the world - of course, to a certain extent, it also means eternity. This is another topic. For Spike, at least for the moment, a life with a sense of weight—a heavy past—because only there is reality. What's more, the lightness itself is not so easy. The "lightness" in Calvino is to fight the heaviness of life itself. And a thoughtful "lightness" often means a heavy sense of reality behind it. After all, lightness is to relieve the heaviness of life, to keep a distance from reality while approaching reality, not to escape from reality.
This is also the regret in spike's choice - this cowboy, who is light and unrestrained on the surface, finally chose the heavy past and restored his authenticity. There is absolutely no lightness, no dexterity and mobility of wisdom. In the end, it's a hopeless reality that's doomed to nothing but destruction—a beauty as pure and deadly as the poppy.
But Spike still made that choice.
Life as a bounty hunter with Faye, Jet, and the others is beautiful, but it's a dream after all. Dreams always wake up. How to be more real in this world, instead of having beautiful and vulnerable dreams, is probably what spike is looking for.
Spike's last choice is for the woman he loves, but it's more than that. Facing the truth is the essence of his choice. This is what makes him extraordinary. Faye's final farewell shot was not an elegy, but a tribute. And at the moment when the seriously injured spike made the classic shooting action to the camera with a relaxed smile, I finally felt the lightness - the lightness after saying goodbye to the heavy past.
See you cowboy, somewhere, someday.
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