The episode Pierrot le Fou is the most frightening hour of Cowboy Bebop. Its villain, credited as Tongpu and known as Mad Pierrot, is a round, bearded man in a clown-like outfit and a top hat who smiles constantly, floats through the air and stops bullets with an energy shield. As Jet's informant Bob puts it, nobody who has seen his face has lived to tell about it: he appears with a smile and leaves with a smile. Spike stumbles on him after a night of drinking, watching him finish off an official and his bodyguards, and barely survives. The rematch takes place in an empty amusement park, Space Land, among parading robots. And then the episode turns. Hit in the leg by Spike's knife, seeing his own blood for the first time, the invincible assassin collapses into a childlike tantrum and cries for his mother, until a giant robot from the parade steps on him. The horror of Mad Pierrot is not his power. It is that there is a small child inside it.
// The theoryNobody is born knowing the rules
Deficient socialization starts from an idea that is almost too obvious to state: self-control, empathy and the restraint of aggression are not innate; they are learned, mostly in the first years of life and mostly from caregivers. Gerald Patterson, at the Oregon Social Learning Center, documented how it fails in ordinary families. In what he called coercive family processes, parents and children train each other in aggression: the child escalates, the parent gives in, and both learn that coercion works. Children raised that way arrive at school without the skills to get what they want any other way. At the far end of the spectrum are children who receive no upbringing at all. The English and Romanian Adoptees study, led by Michael Rutter, followed children adopted from Romanian orphanages of the 1980s, where they had spent their early years with minimal human contact. Many recovered remarkably once placed in families; but those who had spent longer in deprivation showed lasting difficulties in attachment, attention and social understanding.
Gerald Patterson's coercion theory
Children learn coercion in the family because it works.
Development as something that can be replaced
What makes Mad Pierrot so precise a case is that his story replaces upbringing with something else entirely. According to the episode, Tongpu was held in a medical facility and subjected to numerous experiments that gave him superhuman abilities. The experiment was judged a failure and he was kept in isolation, quarantined indefinitely. The agony of the experiments warped his psyche and he regressed into a childlike mental state. He has the body and weapons of an adult and the emotional development of a small child who has known only pain and confinement. The figure he associates with his suffering is not a person but the scientists' cat, which watched him during the experiments; the meow of a cat is enough to throw him into terror in the middle of a fight. There is no caregiver anywhere in his history. The only adults he knew were the ones hurting him, and the only lesson available was that the strong do what they want to the weak.
// The subjectRevenge with a child's logic
Seen through the theory, Tongpu's violence has two layers. The first is almost rational. After escaping, slaughtering the guards and staff of the facility, he sets out to kill the high-ranking officials of the ISSP, the solar system police, who authorized the experiments. That is revenge with a clear target, and the episode makes it hard not to see the logic: the state created him and the state is what he hunts. The second layer is what makes him monstrous. He also kills anyone who sees him, indiscriminately, and he does it smiling, with the gleeful, boundless aggression of a child who has never learned that others are real. He has no capacity to negotiate, no brake, no sense of proportion; he invites Spike to an amusement park for a "party" in which the game is to kill him. When the game hurts him, he does what a toddler does. Everything adults normally build in a child between the ages of two and ten—frustration tolerance, empathy, the idea that other people feel—is simply absent.
Mad Pierrot
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// The crackThe missing childhood was a crime
Deficient socialization is often criticized for putting the blame on families—above all on mothers—and for ignoring the poverty, stress and lack of support that make good parenting hard. Mad Pierrot sidesteps that criticism in an instructive way: there is no family to blame. His upbringing was replaced by an institution, and that institution was the state. Seen this way, the most important crime in his story happened before he killed anyone. The officials he hunts authorized experiments on a human being that destroyed his development, then sealed him away when the results were inconvenient. Criminology has a name for that too—state crime—and the episode is clear about it. The theory explains what was produced; it does not let us forget who produced it.
The second limit is the risk of determinism. The Romanian adoptee studies are hopeful as much as they are sobering: most children recovered substantially when placed in caring families, and deprivation predicted difficulties, not destinies. Tongpu never had that chance; he was kept in isolation until he broke out with an arsenal. The people he killed for having seen his face were innocent, and understanding the laboratory does not change that. But his last moments say something the theory has always insisted on. Under the shield, the flight and the weapons, the thing that remained was a child who wanted his mother, and had never had one.
What early care builds
Mad Pierrot matters because the science behind him has shaped real policy. The evidence from studies of institutional deprivation is one of the main reasons many countries moved away from large orphanages towards foster care and adoption, and why early-intervention programs that support parents in the first years of life are among the best-evidenced crime-prevention investments that exist. Patterson's work led directly to parent-training programs that reduce aggressive behavior in children. The lesson is simple and expensive: the capacities that keep people from hurting each other are built, not born, and they are built by someone. Tongpu was built by people who wanted a weapon. They got one.
Three key ideas
- Deficient socialization holds that restraint and empathy are learned through upbringing. Patterson showed how coercive family processes train aggression; Rutter's English and Romanian Adoptees study showed the lasting effects of growing up in severe institutional deprivation.
- Tongpu, Mad Pierrot, was raised in a laboratory, subjected to agonizing experiments and isolated, regressing into a childlike mind. He kills the officials who authorized the experiments and anyone who sees him, with a child's gleeful, boundless aggression, and cries for his mother when wounded.
- The crack: here there is no family to blame; the missing childhood was a state crime. And deprivation predicts difficulties, not destinies: most deprived children recover with care, a chance Tongpu never had.
Sources · further reading
- Patterson, G. R. (1982). Coercive Family Process. Castalia.
- Rutter, M. and the English and Romanian Adoptees Study Team (1998). "Developmental Catch-up, and Deficit, Following Adoption after Severe Global Early Privation". Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 39(4), 465-476.
- Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Basic Books.
- Watanabe, S. (dir.) (1998). Cowboy Bebop, session 20: "Pierrot le Fou". Sunrise.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Mad Pierrot?
Mad Pierrot (“Tongpu”) is a villain from Cowboy Bebop, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He was raised in a laboratory, subjected to experiments that gave him powers and left him with the mind of a child.
Why does Mad Pierrot (Tongpu) become a villain?
Mad Pierrot and deficient socialization: Cowboy Bebop's top-hatted assassin is almost invulnerable, he can fly, and nobody who has seen his face is still alive. And when a knife grazes his leg, he throws himself to the ground and cries like a toddler. What he lacked was not strength, but a childhood.
Which criminological theory explains Mad Pierrot?
Mad Pierrot's case is analysed through Deficient socialization. Deficient socialization theory holds that nobody is born knowing the rules: they are learned through upbringing, and when upbringing fails the child does not internalize restraint or empathy. Gerald Patterson studied it in families; studies of children raised in extreme institutions, such as the Romanian orphanages, showed what happens when there is no upbringing at all. Tongpu, Mad Pierrot, is that limit case: a human being whose only developmental environment was a laboratory, with pain in place of care. His violence is that of a child with an arsenal.
