I will not apologize for the first time I walked into a Hot Topic, because I was there to
buy a T-shirt of the movie The Crow. For a pretty solid chunk of time, from
probably eighth grade to my first or second year of college, if you asked for
my favorite movie, that would be it. I don’t really have a “favorite” movie
anymore—because I am a terribly self-important entertainment writer now, I have
movies I “respect,” or movies I “love,” or even a top 10 list of movies I “like
a bunch”—but The Crow, despite no longer being No. 1, still falls into all
those categories. I respect the darkness of it. I love the sentimentality of
it. And yes, indeed, I do like it a bunch.
I think I knew things wouldn’t work out with one of
my first crushes in high school because I pulled the, “You should watch this movie, it’s great”
move, and his reaction was basically a shrug and a, “It was fine.” You do not
just say “It was fine” about The Crow, a movie steeped in sadness about Brandon
Lee’s death and, of course, conspiracy theories about Lee’s tragic and accidental
death during filming; a movie that has achieved significant cult status; a
movie that effectively showed off Alex Proyas’s somber, intense directing style
and the heartbreaking nature of the 1989 comic book by James O’Barr that it was
based on. You know how Boromir says in Fellowship of the Ring, “One does not
simply walk into Mordor”? Well, one does not simply say “It was fine” about The
Crow. You’re dumb and you’re wrong and, to quote stand-up comedian Hannibal
Buress, “I don’t want you in my life at all.”
Superficially, The Crow has all the necessary
Halloween elements. It takes place on Devil’s Night in Detroit, which for years
in that city was a free-for-all crime spree set the night before Halloween. Its
protagonist comes back from the dead, with a crow as his familiar. Said
protagonist dresses up in black clothes, paints his face, and disappears into
the night. He’s a ghost, back for vengeance, tortured by his sadness. All of
that stuff is pretty standard Halloween fare. But jeez, does this movie feel. It makes one of the strongest
cases for true, undying love that I’ve ever seen. It makes vigilante justice
look pretty damn appealing. And its ability to make very hokey lines like, “If the
people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never
stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever,” seem
like great art, like the truest thing ever said, is fucking impressive.
The plot of The Crow is basically this: Sensitive,
insanely hot guitarist Eric Draven (Lee, who happened to be Bruce Lee’s son)
and his fiancée Shelly are attacked by a group of hoodlums on Devil’s Night;
she was a community advocate, working to turn around the area’s crime problem,
and that didn't fly with gang boss Top Dollar (seriously, the names in this
movie are excellent) or his incestuous half-sister. Eric and Shelly both die, hours
before they were to be married on Halloween, a case that sticks with Sgt.
Albrecht, a put-upon cop, and devastates neighborhood kid Sarah, who the couple
was taking care of because her mother is a useless drug addict. Everything
seems wrong in the world; it never seems to stop raining.
A year passes. A crow flies over the couple’s
graves. Somehow, someway, Eric crawls out of his, invincible, ready for
vengeance. And over the course of a night he tracks down those thugs, makes
them feel his pain, tries to set things right. In a society where no one
cares—where Sarah’s mother is too busy prostituting herself and injecting
herself with drugs to take care of her
daughter; where the cops don’t do anything on Devil’s Night because looting and
burning is going to happen anyway; where Top Dollar’s thugs murder and rape
because “it’s fun and it’s easy”—Eric Draven is our one great hope.
That’s very Batman-like, sure, but as much as I love Bruce Wayne, I am convinced The Crow will cut
you deeper. On a day like Halloween, when you’re supposed to dress up like the
one thing you wish you were, Eric Draven just wants to be alive. He just wants
to be in love. And I’ll be damned if watching The Crow won’t make you want
those things, too.
(Oh, and just so it’s on the record: Fuck the remake
of The Crow. STOP REMAKING THINGS THAT ARE PERFECT ALREADY, HOLLYWOOD, YOU ARE
THE WORST.)
