Sushi Western: A Cowboy Fan's View Of Trigun
by Lee Zurda
A friend of mine -- call him Sensei -- is a huge fan of anime, Japanese animated film. He showed me a few of his favorites. They were very beautiful, very meaningful, and very dull. For me, it was like watching paint dry or corn grow. Too slow, too ponderous, too boring.
Then came Trigun.
I love western films. Cowboy pictures, we called them when I was growing up. They were a leading genre on television as well as in the cinema. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood were the heroes we loved, Lee Marvin and Jack Palance the villains we loved to hate. "Gunsmoke, starring James Arness as Matt Dillon" was a Saturday night ritual in my grandfather"s house. Even the Marlboro TV commercial, featuring rugged cowboys, wild mustangs, and the galloping theme from "The Magnificent Seven" had us glued to the tube.
The politics of the 1970s doomed all that. Folks like me can only rent and re-rent the old classics now, pictures like Stagecoach and Rio Bravo. New live-action Westerns are rare, usually bad, and never a box office hit.
Then came Trigun.
This animated series includes the images, characters, and conflicts of the traditional Western. Set in the future. On a different planet. With spaceships. Mutants. Dialogue in Japanese (English subtitles). Yet it's more like a real cowboy picture than anything new I've seen in years.
Evocative guitar music, reminiscent of Ry Cooder"s theme to "Paris, Texas" sets the mood.
Expansive vistas of big sky desert terrain (two suns instead of one) resemble the American southwest of John Ford's masterpieces.
The lone wolf wanderer, Vash the Stampede, incarnates the larger than life mythical hero played in the past by John Wayne or Gary Cooper.
Trigun is not without some contraditions and confusion for the Western fan new to it.
The characters look Caucasian -- Vash has blond hair and green, round eyes -- but speak Japanese. Japanese with a liberal splash of English words. Past and future exist incongruously side by side. People ride not ponies but 'thomases,' an animal resembling a large anteater, as they cross the barren landscape.
In one episode, "The Peacemaker," Marlon the gunsmith fixes a revolver that appears to be an old-time Colt six-shooter, while Vash's enemies fire mammoth futuristic bazookas.
Still, galloping anteaters or not, Trigun portrays the West that was, at least according to Hollywood. Snippets of the old classics I had nearly memorized over the years show up time and again in this picaresque series. Vash the Stampede, in his long, red duster, becomes Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, John Wayne's Ethan Edwards, and Alan Ladd's Shane, rolled into one. Like Gary Cooper in High Noon, Vash stands alone against the bad guys while the townspeople cower and hide. Then strides off toward the huge horizon, saying, "My work is done here (ma'am)." Classic.
The episode, "Love and Peace," includes standard images like a buzzard landing on a windmill as two men face each other in the empty street.
In one scene, Vash stands framed in a doorway. Shot from behind as he peers out at desert mesas, he's John Wayne again, in a pose before Monument Valley from The Searchers, Wayne's own favorite.
"It's hard to have a past you can't bury." Vash's comment echoes every Western hero or villain ever filmed.
As in most any Western, Vash moseys into in the tiny dusty town in the middle of nowhere. The style seems to be Mexican -- adobe houses, arched entries, cactus plants with no trees or grass around. How, you find yourself wondering, can this be Japanese? It's not Japanese terrain, or architecture. Do the Japanese have a longing, parhaps, for a larger, more expansive world than their island?
So who is Vash the Stampede? An enigma whose personal story unfolds slowly throughout the series. But not a bore. He is fun to watch, as he devours donuts, slugs down beers, and drools over pretty girls. His raucous laugh and bullet-dodging antics "are embarassing." Yet in a heartbeat, his looks and demeanor can turn split-second sharp and serious.
Vash's enemies vary from mechanical monsters to lovely maidens to stereotypical western bad guys, obviously my favorite. I've seen animated re-incarnations of Lee Van Cleef (aka 'Ruth Loose'!) with signature sneer and squinting eyes. A fat Ernest Borgnine flashes his gap-toothed grin, John Carradine takes a bullet for a beloved daughter. Even John Russell shows up as a duplicitous sheriff.
But Trigun differs sharply from the old cowboy pictures in one way -- its women. Women in western films were wimps. They cried. They screamed. They fainted. With very few exceptions, like Mattie Ross in True Grit, women were there to be rescued, a raison d'etre for the hero to be a hero.
But Trigun's women, villainous or virtuous, are protagonists right on a par with the men. Strong, multi-faceted individuals. Milly Thompson and Meryl Stryfe, employees of the Bernardelli Insurance Society, trail Vash the Stampede in a (vain) attempt to reduce the property damage claims that result from his apocalyptic presense.
But vain attempt or not, Milly and Meryl shoot guns, ride thomases, and never shirk from their duties on behalf of the Bernardelli Insurance Society, even when faced with kidnappers, explosions, and beating desert sun. In some cases, they align themselves with Vash as well as try to restrain him. They don't just help the heroes. They are heroes.
Somewhere along the way, the Christian imagery in Trigun grows stronger. Crosses appear in the two suns, on the reflection of a gun barrel, or the shadow of a rock formation. The desert becomes a religious motif as a place for spiritual quest. The Trigun cast wanders like Moses or John the Baptist, anime desert fathers crossing into the solitude of the desert to find the Truth.
The Hollywood western tradition of vengeance and justice comes up against the concept of Christian mercy and forgiveness. Vash says, "Love and peace," and Clint Eastwood explored that same clash in two of his best films, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (a reference to the book of Revelations) and Unforgiven. Like them, Trigun deepens, to become more thoughtful, more provocative, in later episodes.
Anime will never replace the Western for folks like me. After all, there'll never be another John Wayne. But it's better than nothing, by a long shot. And until they start making real shoot-em-up cowboy pictures again, it's the best we got.
Most anime fans are too young to remember the golden era of The Western. They may catch a old TV re-run, or a film on the Classic Movie channel. But the genre as such, John Wayne and Gary Cooper, mean nothing to them. When they view Trigun, the huge horizons, red mesas, and vast terrain evoke post-nuclear landscapes, not a mythical period in American history, and American film. Trigun is nothing more to them than a modern, new, futuristic story set on another planet.
But it is to some of us. And it's good to know young anime fans are absorbing the values and virtues, as well as the exquisite imagery, of the past. Who knows? Maybe it'll give them a taste for more, and, like Vash, they'll venture into what they thought was a desert, and find an oasis.
