The Crow

            The film we’re going to look at tonight, The Crow (1994), is one of a whole generation of movies inspired by comic books. This trend dates back to the late ‘70s, with the first wave consisting of blockbusters like the Superman movies and Flash Gordon. Throughout the 1990s we’ve had more and more big productions based on comic books, cartoon characters, old movie serials, old radio serials, every area of pop-culture narrative trivia anybody could think of. It would be easy to moralize about this whole process is just another evidence of dumbing-down, and how production studios and moviegoers alike are regressing further and further into a childish unwillingness to look at anything even close to real life. I’ll resist the temptation, though, because the point I want to make here is actually kind of an opposite one. Of course there’s no doubt the whole phenomenon is a kind of reflection of nostalgia for a real or imagined time of innocence when things were simpler, and also a symptom of the fact that for most people the world has become so completely opaque that you might as well use ultra-simplified comic-book characters and plots since any kind of meaningful representation is going to be inadequate.

            But—and this is highly characteristic of our age—as mainstream middle-class culture has advanced towards what were formerly the most unrespectable shallows of lumpen-culture, so the previously lowest forms of culture have been moving upscale. Academic histories of recent visual culture all point out how the abstract, fragmented, modernist techniques of the cinematic avant-garde—stuff that was considered so arty and impenetrable that only 6 people in the world could stand it—have all since been adopted with hardly any change for commercials, music videos, and the most stylish gestures of prime-time drama series from Miami Vice onwards. Every rule that was developed in older Hollywood storytelling to make the visual and narrative world clear and orderly is ostentatiously broken in pieces and thrown away. Fractured space, jumping around in time, moving from objective to imaginary, optical distortion, garish colour—everything that disrupts the orderly and transparent flow of the story is pushed right in your face. On the comic-book front, if you’re as middle-aged as I am, and if it happens that you haven’t looked at a comic book for a coupla three decades, you’ll probably be amazed at what you’ll find in the current generation. Not only are the graphics stylized and artified out of recognition, but the storytelling is so fragmented, subjectivized and metaphorical that it’s like trying to read late James Joyce. So commerce, popular music, action movies and comic books now all use the language of high art—or again what used to be high art before these distinctions began to get impossible to make any more.

            To my mind the most striking feature of all in the realm of arty comic-books, and the movie culture that has grown up next to it, is that crucial features of it are amazingly black and negative. By far the biggest movies of this kind, the Batman films, are not, I think, as morally complex and tortured as they like to make out; but visually the world they inhabit is dark, oppressive, full of inner-city garbage in the streets and towered over by tyrannical monstrous skyscrapers on high. It’s dirty and polluted and the infrastructure (as you might say) shows depressing signs of ageing and dysfunction. These movies have revived the Gothic style: a style evoking an original stereotype of medieval superstition and barbarism and bubonic plague, and more recently German Expressionism and its Hollywood offspring in Universal Studios horror movies of the 30s with Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi. But of course when Tim Burton does Gothic in Batman the result, far from being old fashioned, is the coolest thing imaginable.

            Now two more intersections that are relevant to The Crow (yes, I am going to get around to that eventually). First, the terrific escalation of what I at least regard as the truly horrific in children’s Halloween costumes and the whole iconography of Halloween in general. Decayed corpse-heads oozing brains, severed limbs graphically rendered in latex, eyeballs trailing nerve ends, whatever; also the popularization of monstrous serial killers from the movies; literally the ugliest things you can imagine—it’s all jolly good fun for the kids at this favourite holiday time. In terms of children’s movies I think especially of The Nightmare Before Christmas, a jamboree of physical butchery, atrocious deformity and rotting flesh in the service of a sweet greeting-card-type sentimental moral.

            Second, the punk and heavy-metal style in youth culture. Coming from rock ’n roll and immediately expressing a boundless angry rebelliousness and cynicism, its style has permeated many a junior-high dress code. At its most fully realized it features chains, leather, steel spikes, blinding searchlights, the suppression or dulling of colour, altogether an iconography of violence and brutality—and music whose style is the same. Where symbolic resistance to an oppressive materialist world ends and sadistic fantasy begins is kind of hard to say.

            Anyway, what all this ugliness and violence and death nominally signify is suffering and hopelessness, both social and personal, for their consumers. There’s a key word, though, “consumers.” How does this stuff get converted into popular entertainments? how do they get converted into style? And how much, if any, substance is left in it in the form of Batman or The Nightmare Before Christmas?

            Instead of answering that question I’ll turn at last to The Crow, a movie which not only exemplifies all the things I’ve been talking about but actually thematises them at certain points. A more stylish, visually high-tech movie doesn’t exist, broadly speaking. It’s a compliment to it to say that it looks like a giant music video: gliding stedicam shots, superslick editing, weird lenses, lots of colour stylization. More impressive still—amazing actually—is the design and general look of the film. The city in which it takes place is one big, black, decaying garbage heap from end to end, deluged with rain pouring endlessly from the skies and making everything look uglier still, if such a thing is possible. Then half the buildings are on fire because it is “Devil’s Night,” the eve of Halloween which has turned into a festival of arson. Motifs of dereliction and chaos, of garbage and pollution, of endless misery and mindless violence, are the outstanding features of this popular film, adapted from comic books and aimed at a youthful audience. Like cherries on top of this cake we have drug addiction, sexual perversity, and the total invisibility of any social institutions whatever except the police. (Well, there is a church, but it is a blackened empty husk, only there to provide the proper ultra-Gothic setting for some key scenes.)

            The story is quickly described. A gang of drooling sadistic criminals, under the guidance of a sadistic mastermind who does not drool, have atrociously killed, on the eve of their wedding, a beautiful, perfectly happy young couple. The woman was violated and endured a 30-hour death-agony in the hospital, her fiancé was shot, crashed through a window, and fell to his death. But, as a voiceover tells us, under certain circumstances of extreme pain and unhappiness, the crow who takes souls to the land of the dead may bring them back so they can “put things right” and then rest in peace. Cue Brandon Lee, the fiancé, rising out of the rain-sogged earth of his grave, painting his face white like Marcel Marceau, and walking around the city wiping out one gang member after the other in systematic and grisly fashion, aided by the fact that bullets and knives cannot hurt him since he is basically a ghost.

            The violence here is extreme, and so are the examples of evil sadistic pleasure indulged in by the long-haired, flowing-shirted, high-booted Very Bad Guy and his really sicko oriental female companion, who likes to carve out the eyeballs of naive innocents and serve them up as snacks. This Very Bad Guy is at one point upset because he keeps trying to produce chaos, violence and suffering, but his arson-sprees have become so institutionalized that you can get Devil’s Night Greeting Cards. Eric the avenging ghost, although in his real life evidently the nicest sweetest guy ever, was a rock musician who dressed all in black, took the figure of a skeleton his trademark, and called his last album “The Hangman’s Joke.” Criminal headquarters are on top of a heavy-metal club called The Pit, where the most brutal symbolic violence invests the shows—until an actual deadly firefight comes crashing through the ceiling to send the patrons into a panic stampede. In yet another scene the protagonist, who’s feeling more than usually anguished, sees a group of hideous monsters coming down the street—but it’s only a bunch of kids in Halloween costumes, who in turn acknowledge that he has a really neat costume himself. In all of these cases the movie fixes on the difference between the popular adoption of images of violence and death for entertainment, and the true horror of “real” violence and death. On the other hand, there isn’t any “real” violence and death here either, this is just another movie for popular entertainment. So what happens to the distinction now? The movie may get punctured by the very paradoxes it seeks to demonstrate, but at least it’s doing something to raise the phenomenon at least one level of consciousness. Whether this is intelligence or just more high style is a question I won’t try to address. Still, the movie is so relentless in its gothic urban-hell oppressiveness that you have to take notice.

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            One of the most characteristic things about this movie—characteristic, that is, of the way pop culture often domesticates itself even as it is trying to be most angry and transgressive—is the ultra-sweet and sticky nature of this perfect bliss the tragic couple were supposed to have been robbed of. Luckily we don’t get to see much of it, just a few flashback shots, but what there is is totally sentimentalized and conventional. Yet it’s in the name of this lost perfect happiness that all the violence and horror which actually make up the movie occurs. The sad dead soul can return to “put things right.” This sounds like something healing and spiritual, but here putting things right simply means killing all the bad guys, in graphic detail. From this orgy of violence eternal peace and heavenly contentment will follow. What’s wrong with this picture?

            Actually this utopian goal of ideal peace, serenity, happiness, is the necessary opposite of the ugliness, squalor and violence. The more extreme and traumatic the suffering gets, the dirtier and more irredeemable the world, the more pure and transcendental has to be the goodness which is needed to counterbalance it. This is a ruling economy at a certain level of popular culture. And the comic-book level, whatever its newfound complexity and harshness, still gravitates to this kind of sentimental simplicity of graphic opposites. When you look at The Crow, though, you get a pretty good idea of what the movie is really interested in: it’s the violence and the ugliness, and also the poetry of the violence and the ugliness. Those high-art qualities I was talking about at the beginning of the show are reflected not just in the sophisticated visual style, but in the search for a demented poetry of suffering. Still, the poetry is naive and sentimental. And the style, complete with cinematic references to Metropolis, Citizen Kane and Vertigo, really is sophisticated. In this respect The Crow is characteristic of so much Hollywood right now: too naive and too sophisticated all at once.