Dirty Pair

Thankfully, it doesn’t take long for Dirty Pair to get back on its feet.

“Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New” is a proper farce, and one of the most memorable episodes in the series yet. The show’s rapid-fire humour and beat-perfect comic timing is the best it’s been since “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death”, a story which this outing is definitely in company with. This time, though, the show doesn’t need to evoke any external works to make its point: This episode works purely on Dirty Pair logic and Dirty Pair logic alone. And, if you can keep yourself together through the manic assault of comedy, you might just notice the series has gone and said something really profound about the nature of narrative and the roles of protagonists.

“Hah Hah Hah, Dresses and Men Should Always Be Brand New” is a story about Kei and Yuri trying to get ready for a party. It is also a story about Kei and Yuri being mistaken for 50-year old bank robbers, accidentally kidnapping a group of schoolchildren and being chased all over a city by planetary armed forces. Not only does this week’s episode intuitively understand what last week’s utterly failed to, it exaggerates it beyond infinity: Our poor girls are so chronically and ridiculously unlucky they can’t even go shopping without stumbling into some gigantic disaster. A farce is such a perfect match for Dirty Pair’s setting because this is the structure it operates under already: It’s either unfathomably tragic or unbelievably funny the amount of inconceivable destruction left in Kei and Yuri’s wake, and thankfully the show went with unbelievably funny because really it all just works better that way.

Speaking of humour, it’s maybe worth pointing out the jokes here are *extremely* bawdy and sexual, more so than I think the show’s ever been before. I could see that rubbing some people the wrong way, especially in the opening scene where the girls complain to Gooley about not being able to get dates and how their interest in the party basically boils down to them being able to chase men. However, as is the case with most things on this show, it becomes in my opinion extremely easy to explain away and forgive this once you realise Kei and Yuri are making fun of themselves. My absolute favourite bit comes near the end when a despondent and exhausted Kei and Yuri, having just outwitted an entire planet’s armed forces, escaped a mob of spoiled children and singlehandedly captured the real bad guys, are desperate to take off, fearing they’ll be late for their party. Naturally, they are promptly surrounded by reporters who all want exclusive interviews with the beloved duo, and their panicky excuses to get out of doing primetime TV are pure gold: “We already have plans for tonight! We hate kids! Look! A naked woman!”.

(Also note how in an additional bit of cynical self-deprecation, the pubic personas of the Lovely Angels are shown to be idolized by children, but the kids are horrible to the real Kei and Yuri.…

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Even the best of shows can have bad days. Yes, unfortunately, it is in fact possible for Dirty Pair to go off the rails, and this is a good example of what it looks like when it does. The streak is over: For the first time, we’ve come across an episode of this series that doesn’t really work.

The basic premise is a sound enough one. Throwing Kei and Yuri into a high fantasy story and seeing what happens is an entirely reasonable idea for a Dirty Pair episode, especially in the context of the way the genres of high fantasy and science fiction have evolved over time. Though the most famous iteration of it began as technophillic futurist speculative fiction about logic puzzles, sci-fi as of the 1980s is a profoundly different thing. This is in part due to Star Wars making it OK again to do sci-fi stories on a mass-market scale not in the US Golden Age Hard SF vein, but other ways of doing high-tech stories about starships and space travel and things like that have always existed. This secondary tradition is one Dirty Pair is very much a part of, in part because of the differences between US and Japanese Golden Age science fiction, but also because Dirty Pair is the kind of sci-fi that is able to divorce a futuristic setting from futurism: This is not a series that speculates about future technology, it uses its setting as metaphor and allegory for the issues it’s trying to look at. Again, this is a hallmark of Japanese science fiction in general, but Dirty Pair takes it to its logical endpoint.

(The crowning achievement in using sci-fi settings and imagery as narrative is, of course, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the film version of which it is quite clear to me that the writers of this episode had seen, if not actually understood. More on this later.)

Because of this, perhaps counterintuitively, science fiction is uniquely suited amongst genre fiction to looking at extremely ancient and esoteric themes: Look once again at, for example, BRIAN’s role in “How to Kill a Computer”, or indeed, the resolution of last week’s episode and the Lovely Angels themselves. The Dirty Pair Strike Again effortlessly tackled really complex and heady themes about spiritual enlightenment and material social progress. High fantasy (and by this I mean the kind of tradition that sprung up in the wake of people like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and that George R.R. Martin seems to be a part of), by contrast, tends to be very gritty and political, focusing on the nuts-and-bolts of human society and, due to its fixation on things like kings and queens and knights and princes, enjoys gossiping about the goings-on in the halls of power and nobility. Exploring the space between these two poles and the way the two traditions have developed the way they have is right in this show’s wheelhouse.…

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After spending the last two weeks firmly and confidently declaring what it is, what it’s about and what it can do, Dirty Pair is now free to go back to gleefully playing around with other shows. And it pulls a real doozy of a meta-romp this time: For my regular readers, one way to read “Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal” is as Dirty Pair’s interpretation of the “Gunfighters”/”Spectre of the Gun”/”Living in Harmony” trilogy we looked at *way* back in 1968.

A brief refresher: Long about the same time in the late 1960s, Star Trek, Doctor Who and The Prisoner all did essentially the same story where the show’s hero (or heroes) became trapped in the narrative of a Western movie where either circumstances or some external influence conspire to force them into becoming killers (well, The Prisoner didn’t really as “Living in Harmony” was hastily adapted from an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s other show Danger Man, but that’s beside the point). The crux of those stories was that while each show in some way acknowledged the performative nature of its existence, the logic of a Western was in some way anathema to all of them, that this was a role they were not meant to play, and doing so would be tantamount to narrative collapse. As the ever-astute Jack Graham, friend of the blog and frequent commenter, pointed out under the entry on “Spectre of the Gun”, it’s telling this is happening against the backdrop of the Cold War, such that the “foundational myth” of the United States is transformed into something horrific, symbolizing an inexorable predisposition towards violence and self-destruction.

Dirty Pair is, of course approaching this from a wildly different perspective. It’s not even indebted to Westernism itself as a fundamental ideology, let alone any cultural-specific manifestation of it in the United States. Furthermore, the key thing about Dirty Pair is that everything here is performative: Not only is the series itself recursively metafictional to a frankly silly degree, Kei and Yuri are professional wrestlers, so any violence we see is tacitly meant to be read as make-believe, which is an extremely good thing as an entire planet gets vaporized in this one. So clearly, any criticism this episode will be making of violence is going to be coming from the outside in and localized to the plot of the week instead of being depicted as a looming threat to the show itself. The first place this is obvious is the setting, which, far from cribbing the O.K. Corral shootout event from “Spectre of the Gun” and “The Gunfighters” or the Hollywood Western movie trappings of “Living in Harmony”, is actually doing Cowboy Bebop and Sukiyaki Western Django about two decades early.

Like in the former, we get a science fiction world that, while it is equal parts cyberpunk and old west cliches, is on the whole not actually all that removed from our own: There are street food vendors, boutique shops, Jeeps, semiautomatic weapons and the two rival gangs are both corporate political bodies.…

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You would think Dirty Pair would have a hard time topping that. I mean, we’ve been on a pretty unbelievable streak since episode 3, and that’s gotta be the pinnacle, right? No show, not even one this good, can keep that kind of momentum going for any longer, especially not after what we just saw. And, truth be known, “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode” is more low-key than “Love is Everything. Risk Your Life to Elope!!” was, though there’s more property damage this time if that’s your thing.

Yeah, but that doesn’t matter. No need to worry; this is another unabashed masterpiece.

And yet I have to be extremely careful with this one. This is a story that’s at least in part about the differences between Kei and Yuri, it’s altogether too easy to pass value judgments when doing this, and plenty of people have. Yuri is without question the most popular of the two Lovely Angels, especially in Japan, and I could see a loyal Yuri fan being royally pissed off at what happens here. In approaching this piece, I have hazards of my own to navigate: I’ve made a big deal in the past about how you can’t take one Angel without the other, but even I still have a deep and personal connection with one particular character here, and that definitely shapes not only how I read this episode, but how I react to Dirty Pair in general. I’ll elabourate on this later, but the short of it is my challenge for this post is to explain how this episode remains a classic and a prime example of Kei and Yuri’s undying and unbreakable bond that transcends metafiction while the story itself still quite clearly paints one of them doing something that on the surface seems irredeemable from the narrative’s perspective.

The dilemma Yuri faces in this episode is, in truth, uniquely hers. And it’s worth unpacking this extremely carefully, because the trap she falls into here is the exact same one Kaia tried to spring on Kei in “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys” and that (literally) blew up hilariously and spectacularly in his face. And it’s really, really hard to not let this reflect negatively on her: After all, she spends the majority of this story perfectly willing and eager to abandon her career and life up to this point, not to mention her actual life partner and soulmate, to run off with a boy she hasn’t seen since she was seven. And she’s utterly horrid to Kei, smugly brushing off her genuine concern and feelings of heartbreak by accusing her of being jealous. Kei even rightfully points out Yuri has no idea the kind of person Billy is now, in a nice callback to what we learned last week about how people change over time. Considering Kei just recently went through a similar experience and immediately saw through Kaia’s ham-fisted attempts to mobilize one of the corniest melodrama plots in the known universe and Yuri seems completely oblivious, this is absolutely gut-wrenching.…

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An artifice is a kind of symbol, in that it is meant to stand in for something else. An artifice is a symbol that is caricatured to emphasize certain truth-facets of the thing it represents. A spectacle is a kind of artifice, but a spectacle, following Debord, is an artifice that abandons truth in favour of the hollow simulacrum of truth, that is, falseness. Vacuousness. However, an artifice that knows itself, indeed, even a spectacle that knows itself, is an artifice that invokes truth and, in so doing, thus invokes its own true self.

Goddesses and ideas live on within words.

The pipe organ towers over Clicky Goldjeff’s wedding. It is, in fact, a literal “tower”, one and the same with a skyscraper that serves as yet another defining feature of Elenore City’s skyline. It appears to rise from the Earth itself, the blinding concrete and steel as much a part of the world as any natural object. Clicky, the son of a massively powerful cruise line mogul, is being married off to at least a dozen women, with the hope this will keep his “wandering eyes” at bay. The woman at the organ is Joanca, and it’s in truth only her who Clicky has eyes for, and she feels the same way. Joanca proceeds to demonstrate this by firing blindly into the wedding reception as the male model waitstaff, dressed in skintight bunny uniforms, look on in stunned silence. Joanca shoots apart the chains with which Clicky was escorting his brides out by and the two elope together in a blimp.

Kei and Yuri are called in by the elder Goldjeff to retrieve his son, whom he claims has been kidnapped in exchange for a substantial chunk of his fortune. The girls feign interest in the mogul, as this is what male viewers of a female-led science fiction show expect to see and this is what Goldjeff’s secretary, who is giving them a tour of the company headquarters, expects them to say. In truth, Kei and Yuri are making small talk and do not like homewreckers, as they confide to each other, and by extension us, when it’s revealed the secretary is also Goldjeff’s mistress. When Kei and Yuri speak to each other in private, we know they are expressing their true selves, as this has long since become a regular motif of Dirty Pair. The girls only act infatuated when they’re with a potential client, and Kei only teases Yuri when someone else is watching. Or rather, when someone else is watching diegetically-Kei and Yuri never actually speak in complete privacy, because there is a camera on them at all times. This is, after all, a television show. But it’s a television show written and produced by Kei and Yuri, so they write these scenes in as a form of textual metacommentary. Graffiti on the fourth wall. The Angels do this as an act of love, because they love each other.…

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As a genre, science fiction, especially science fiction that is in some way descended from Golden Age Hard SF, seems largely focused on the machinations and inner workings of giant, authoritarian, monolithic institutions. Be it some futuristic extrapolation of the army, the navy, the intelligence sector, the police or huge, sprawling technoscience corporations, science fiction seems one the whole unsettlingly comfortable with mulling about the halls of power, likely owing to the genre’s futurist roots. Remember, James Blish, a member of the influential group of sci-fi writers the Futurians and the guy who novelized the original Star Trek series, thought, somewhat bewilderingly, that Pfizer would usher in a Trotskyist revolution so long as we pledged support to them and bought their products.

This is, suffice to say, equal parts untenable and unacceptable.

There are exceptions to this trend. The first two Alien movies, arguably The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf, bits and pieces of Doctor Who at various points in its history. Star Trek itself tends to go back and forth on this: Though the point of the franchise is very much that the Federation is anything but an unambiguous group of good guys promoting a utopia and how our crews operate under that knowledge, this fact seems to have been lost on a worrying number of creative teams and this isn’t as emphasized as frequently or as strongly as it really needed to be. Raumpatrouille Orion is better, though that crew is still a bunch of ace pilots. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was anything but this, but invoking Nausicaä in this case does feel a bit like bringing a nuclear bomb to a knife fight.

Then there is, of course, Dirty Pair. Kei and Yuri may job for the 3WA and United Galactica, but they have a much higher calling than that and, by virtue of being professional wrestlers operating by cyberpunk logic and the way this show has been portraying them, we’re very much meant to read them as working class characters. Even so, the series hasn’t done a story overtly about this yet, and this is what “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys” is about.

In some ways, this episode is “The Case of the Backwoods Murder” for Kei, with the Angels taking a job that puts them in contact with a childhood friend of hers who gets mixed up in the mission in some form. What this allows us to do is get a rare look at Kei’s backstory: Though the Sunrise anime and the light novels are of course two separate continuities, we can assume Yuri’s backstory is roughly similar here to what was described in “The Case of the Backwoods Murder”. In this episode though, we learn that our suspicions regarding Kei were correct: She grew up on a more urbanized planet and probably lived off of the streets. After Kaia, the leader of a fleet of space pirates who are after the precious gem the girls are tasked with escorting, introduces himself as someone from Kei’s childhood, Yuri even openly supposes he’s one of Kei’s “delinquent friends” from “back in the day”.…

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And the first thing they do is completely torpedo each and every one of our expectations.

“Criados’ Heartbeat” is unbelievably subversive, even for this show. With its ominous countdowns, imposing and mysterious antagonist and seeming dramatic, game-changing plot twists, this is the kind of episode most shows would save for their season finale. And Dirty Pair casually tosses it at us five weeks in with another twenty to go. But we’ll get to all that later-This episode works on a multitude of different levels, so let’s take a look at the most obvious one first. One thing old school science fiction buffs like about Dirty Pair is its musing on trans/posthumanism, typically in the classic cyberpunk sense of body modification and upgrading or augmenting the human form through emergent biotechnology. This is the most visible in Adam Warren’s Dirty Pair adaptation for Dark Horse comics, but it’s a theme the franchise on the whole is known for, and, it’s worth noting, one it hasn’t actually looked at before now.

This manifests, obviously, in Criados himself, a literal mad scientist who, upon committing suicide two years prior to the events of this story, transplanted his consciousness into the computer core of a deep space automated hazardous waste processing facility. It doesn’t look like he did a particularly amazing job of it though, considering he’s become consumed by rage and has dedicated his existence to hunting down and killing Kei and Yuri, who he blames for his death after they shut down a drug smuggling ring he was involved in. And he’s brutal about it, tormenting them with horrific imagery via psychic projection and sending out entire starfleets to track them down and drag them to the space station, which is a meant for the disposal of dangerous toxic waste unfit for human exposure and actually called the Graveyard of Ships. Criados is clearly unhinged and evil and, given what we know about the loose cautionary tone pervading much of Dirty Pair, it’s possible to read this as a criticism of the kind of augmentation he attempted on himself.

But that’s not what I think this episode is actually trying to get at with this theme. As a character, Criados is, in fact, a revelation: It’s only mentioned very briefly when the girls are going over his biography, but Kei does state he had a particular fascination with the supernatural and life after death, which he, of course, managed to attain in the end through his transhumanist experiments. Combine this with his power of telepathy and his interest in hallucinogenics, which is what got him busted by the girls in the first place, and it starts to sound a lot more like Criados is a kind of futuristic shaman who was able to heighten and focus his own pre-existing power and abilities through technology. This alone is a breakthrough in speculative fiction: In the Blade Runner post I expressed concern about mainline transhumanism’s apparent ignorance and dismissal of humanity’s connection with the larger universe, meanwhile, in Dirty Pair, even Criados gets this, understanding transhumanism through his prior exploration of spirituality, and singlehandedly solving one of the biggest questions of mind and consciousness in the process.…

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It would be one thing if all Dirty Pair did was ramble through different film and literary genres parodying and riffing over them in the process. It’s reliance on Long 1980s postmodern cinematography notwithstanding, that would not be an especially novel concept. What Dirty Pair needs to do is to carve its own niche within the televisual landscape of the era: Not just making witty commentary, but delivering its own unique message about what science fiction means in this day and age. The books are very upfront about declaring that it’s Kei and Yuri’s purpose to usher humanity into a new era, by fire if necessary, but the anime does seem to prefer building to this ultimate revelation a bit more methodically.

We will, of course, eventually get there, and sooner rather than later. And while “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” at first seems like a complete romp, this episode is in truth another step towards that (I mean, it is a complete romp too, but it’s more than that). This is another great example of how postmodern cinematography and knowing constructed artifice can be used to emphasize different narrative truths, and be a bloody fantastic evening of entertainment to boot. The comparisons…Well, they’re obvious, aren’t they? There’s no way this is anything other than a knowingly wry and comprehensive send-up of The Blues Brothers. For those unaware of that particular movie (for shame), The Blues Brothers is a 1980 comedy film by John Landis, John Belushi and Dan Akroyd based on their Saturday Night Live sketch of the same name. Both concern the titular Blues Brothers, a blues revivalist band fronted by Belushi’s and Akroyd’s characters Jake and Elwood, who grew up in a Catholic orphanage and form a blood pact by cutting their fingers with a guitar string said to belong to Elmore James after being introduced to the genre by the orphanage’s janitor.

The film sees Jake and Elwood breaking parole to reunite their band to perform a benefit concert at the orphanage they grew up in, which is facing foreclosure. They go on a cross-country quest, which Jake constantly reminds us is “a mission from God”, to locate their old bandmates, all the while being hunted by the police as part of a ludicrous car chase that lasts essentially the entire movie. The climax is a thing to behold, with Jake and Elwood screaming through a downtown metropolitan area in the “Bluesmobile” trying to shake their pursuers, whose ranks have been bolstered by the addition of a Neo-Nazi group and a country band, whom the brothers somehow managed to also arouse the ire of.

And, true to form, “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” is about three-quarters car chases throughout the neon canyons of Elenore City, with Jake and Elwood replaced by Kei and Yuri and the Bluesmobile replaced by two slick motorcycles. Dirty Pair even manages to *one up* The Blues Brothers in this respect because the police here have futuristic hovercars and go after the girls in *three-dimensional traffic* before the epic showdown on an incomplete section of bridge held aloft by a helicopter.…

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The Dirty Pair anime is often seen to be heavily influenced by spy-fi, in particular James Bond. There’s been a whiff of gadgetry about the franchise from the beginning, of course, and the Angels certainly act, at least superficially, like what we’d commonly think of as high-tech secret agents. But the link is much clearer on the TV show, even down to the obvious lineage in its title card logo. But Dirty Pair doesn’t reference James Bond just to reference it: Just like its parent series, the anime is as much about its medium as it is a part of it, actively going out of its way to send up television genres, and, in this case, the show is taking TV spy-fi and turning into an experimental laboratory for postmodernism.

In this regard, the better point of comparison isn’t James Bond, but rather Danger Man and The Prisoner, which “Go Ahead, Fall in Love! Love is Russian Roulette” seems immediately reminiscent of. The opening moments are right out of a heist movie, with a super secret super spy breaking into a highly fortified vault to steal an important-looking doodad conveniently in the middle of the room on a pedestal which he reaches just in time to get laser-vaporized for his troubles. Then we cut to a shot of a TV monitor broadcasting our would-be hero’s untimely demise, with a bunch of visibly affluent gents looking on judgmentally. Then of course comes the first big joke, where Yuri gives us our exposition about this sacred poker chip that brings its owner artificially heightened luck that he’s using to monopolize business at the local casino planet while Kei grumps about being called away from vacation. So, in the space of three cuts, the narrative has jumped from heist movie to spy-fi thriller to Dirty Pair.

This also means that a premise a self-evidently overblown and ridiculous as sacred poker chips that control the fate of the universe has broken less capable action heroes, but is just overtime to the Lovely Angels.

First off, this episode is once again a laugh riot. After the mediocre, yet necessary, boundary-drawing of last week, the show is back to the rapid-fire exquisitely-timed humour that will become its hallmark. My favourite bits are near the beginning when Kei and Yuri are trying to navigate the confusing streets of the casino planet in their hovervan and multi-car pile-ups spring up around them, the girls’ banter in the bar, which also gives us another good display of Yuri’s Yamato Nadeshiko act, and when Sydney tries to drive them through King’s hedge maze and makes dramatic swerves every five seconds. But, speaking of King, he’s the most important thing about this episode. His name is, of course, symbolic: He’s obviously the “kingpin” of a gambling empire, but he’s more than that. It’s odd (yet savvy) how little this gets commented on in the episode itself, but King is clearly a media mogul as well.…

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After the giddy heights of “How to Kill a Computer”, Dirty Pair dials things back significantly for its second outing. Don’t let the name deceive you, “Do Lovely Angels Prefer Chest Hair?” is a far more straightforward outing than its predecessor. It is by no means my favourite episode, and I have a hard time imagining that it would be anybody’s favourite episode-It is, in fact, stultifyingly mediocre. That said, it’s not utterly terrible, and in many ways it’s the episode this show needed to do at this point in time for the audience it has.

What’s interesting about this episode from the vantage point of someone who owns the complete series on DVD is how unlike the rest of the show it is. For one thing, it is a direct sequel, picking up in the aftermath of the explosion in the Leaning Tower of Damocles and pretty much the entire 3WA hating Kei and Yuri’s guts. Weirdly, in spite of its sci-fi magazine heritage, Dirty Pair has never been much of a serial, even on this show, usually preferring to make its stories largely standalone, although set against the backdrop of a unified constructed world (and yes, this is a storytelling structure I tend to be in strong support of, at least for television). This episode, however, is explicitly dealing with the fallout from last time, and Gooley even assigns the girls a supervisor in the form of consultant Graves because he no longer trusts them. Even the case is low-key; a bog-standard example of corporate rivalry where an starline company sends undercover agents to sabotage their rival’s ships by planting bombs designed to emulate engine failure-Certainly not the kind of thing that would put the fate of humanity at stake.

It’s extremely trivial to explain why this episode exists. It is obviously about explaining to viewers of the anime who might not be familiar with the book series why we should sympathize with Kei and Yuri even though utter destruction follows them everywhere, and it needs to get this across in twenty minutes. Graves starts out as an utterly contemptible character, lounging around in Gooley’s office, throwing his weight around and treating the Angels like spoiled children, even making it absolutely clear he only wants them on the mission so the can check the women’s restrooms onboard the starliner and that he thinks they never do their jobs. He is a a truly repugnant combination of the worst aspects of the Western film noir antihero and traditional, outmoded Japanese conceptions of masculinity and the inherent superiority of elders. This is what Kei is mocking when she tells Yuri that she’s sure Graves must have chest hair, and that she hates men who do: She’s saying she has no tolerance for men who literally wear their manliness on their chest and flaunt it in front of everyone.

Because of course Kei and Yuri are consummate professionals and figure out what’s going on long before Graves does, it’s just we have to get through an extended zero-G firefight on the exterior hull and have the whole ship almost crash into a major metropolitan area to prove that.…

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