"When someone's dead, they can't come back, can they?"1

The Crow begins with a death, and then tells the story of coming back. It is a messy film; difficult to describe. Probably the best way to interpret it is to look at it in terms of its border crossings, both the ones it's hero, Eric Draven makes and the ones the film's narrative makes. One of the film's distinguishing characteristics is its tendency to stray from the normal, expected conventions of a vigilante/superhero film. The border crossings create the tension(s) of the film, but are not always as radical or transcendental as they seem.

In The Crow, a person can come back from the dead. It is the story of an undead afterlife and the horrible scenario that led to it. Beginning with this rise from the dead, categories and polarities are challenged (and reinscribed) throughout the film. Eric Draven crosses the borders between dead/alive, male/female, counterculture/mainstream, good/bad.

Eric Draven comes back to avenge his murder and the rape/murder of his girlfriend. This is perhaps the most significant border crossing in the film. Eric Draven crosses over from the land of the dead to the land of the living, becoming a being from neither realm. His crossing from dead to alive is the vehicle for the other changes to manifest themselves. It is a change that is not new to film, but it is combined with other transformations that make it stand out from the others (namely Batman, a movie The Crow was compared to in pre-release promotional materials).

"Well, well, it does seem to me that your life has undergone a rather significant change..."2

Eric Draven undergoes many changes in The Crow. Eric does not know what he is. In fact, at first, he does not know how he died. But a transcendental scene after his rise from the grave brings the past into contact with the present, crossing the present/past border. He relives his murder in the present and reacts to the violence as if it were happening all over again--as if his mind were in the past and his body in the present. This raises questions of what history is, considering his apparent position within both past and present. As Ermarth points out, "...history itself is a construct" (214), and this construct is questioned as Draven lives in both realms simultaneously.

The "historical convention" (214) can help identify someone; in place, time, in purpose. Through a visit to the past, Draven becomes aware of the circumstances of his death, of the horrible torture his girlfriend died from. Through crossing the past/present border, by reliving the past in the time of the present, by challenging the dichotomy, Eric sees his purpose: To seek vengeance for his and Shelly's demise. But living in the past and present at once also serves to support the purpose of the "historical convention" (214)--The visit to the past gives the viewer a subject; Eric Draven, a man who was wronged, rather than an object; a vigilante, a common movie entity.

Existing as neither dead nor alive, in neither the present nor the past, Eric Draven begins to create a new history -- not one of life or death, but one of riding the line between the two, existing to fulfill a singular purpose. He crosses the human/unhuman border.

As a human body inhabited by an inhuman (dead) identity, Draven incorporates what he needs from human subjects/objects. He crosses the male/female barrier almost immediately. After he trips back to the past and recollects his and Shelly's deaths, he sits down at Shelly's vanity mirror to meditate. In a rage he smashes the mirror, shattering it in its frame; creating a myriad of Eric Dravens in the reflection. It is a visual representation of the condition of his existence--fractured, multifaceted, confused.

One of the many Eric Dravens forms--physically, as Draven uses Shelly's makeup to paint himself in the image of the sad faced theater mask he once entertained her with. He appropriates some of her clothing and sets out for his destiny. His destiny brings him to Albrecht, the cop who originally discovered the crimes committed against him and Shelly.

"All the power in the world resides in the eyes"3

Using Albrecht's eyes/memory as another device to transcend the past/present boundary, Eric sees what Shelly went through. "I saw her through your eyes" he tells Albrecht as he reels from the mind-meld. He experiences her rape; her violation, in a way no male could normally experience it.

This is a major transition: He can "feel" what it is like to be a female, but only in terms of rape and torture and death. It is as if it were he the bad guys had raped and killed--he crosses the border between male and female--incorporates Shelly's experience into his own. He has the experience of a female rape victim, and the anger of a helpless boyfriend unable to save her. Feeling Shelly's pain serves to deepen his anger as the powerless boyfriend. So even with a female experience incorporated into his own, he falls back on the male side of the male/female dichotomy in that his revenge is needed to sooth his male soul--to recapture the power stolen from him.

Being a victim both as himself and as Shelly gives him resolve (and anger) to seek vengeance. It is a power that he relies on to extract justice from his/Shelly's violators. All of his power does reside in the eyes; Shelly's, Albrecht's, and finally his own. The eyes record history, and history is what Draven uses as his justification for vigilante tactics. History is what creates the need to use vigilante tactics. He uses this power against those who created the scenario for him to gain it.

Draven's revenge is not ideological; it is carnal and visceral. His transformations from dead to alive, from human to unhuman, from past to present are not ones of ideas and theory: they are greater transformation from victim to aggressor. "Victims, aren't we all?", he asks of his first victim, as he kills him with his own weapons. Irony. Draven is an ironic creature. He considers himself a victim as he ends the life of Tin Tin. He uses the victimization of himself and Shelly to justify the killing of a criminal, as he turns the tables and becomes the victimizer.

The border between victim and aggressor is blurred: Is Draven a victim or a victimizer? Is he a force for good or evil? He kills without conscience, but he kills those who raped his girlfriend and threw him out a sixth story window. Like Batman or Mantis he can be seen as a vigilante force that disregards law and order, or he can be seen as dark justice picking up the reigns of order where the official enforcers drop them.

Questions of Draven being dead or alive, male or female, good or bad, all arise from his being supernaturally resurrected; embodied. Living in a body is the only way he can right the wrongs done him and Shelly. And his embodied experience hinges on what he sees, what Albrecht sees, what Shelly sees.

"The idea has become the institution..."4

Much of what Draven sees in the movie is emphasized by the soundtrack and the characterization. Punk(ish) music and characters give actions, images, words more power--surficially make the movie countercultural; a rock and roll, or even a Punk film.

But this is a problematic device. There is little that is countercultural about rock and roll or punk anymore. Especially in the way The Crow uses the conventions. The authenticity of the film's "outsideness" is at risk by the way it portrays a rock and roll/punk world.

For starters, the film tries to contrast rock/punk to religion. Religious references and settings abound in The Crow. Gabriel, the white archangel cat; multiple scenes at a church; the crosses and candlelit rooms everyone seems to wear/enjoy. But even when set against a rock/punk soundtrack, with long haired men perpetrating violent acts and music, religion/religious artifacts do not pose much of a dichotomy. They once did: Punks wearing crosses once interrupted the dichotomy between rock's excesses and immorality and the moderation and serene morality of the church. But bands have been using crosses and candles and Biblical references for a long time.

Long hair once meant rebellion and nonconformity. But this is an old trick; as Top Dollar says "it's been done before". Nothing is gained or appropriated by reinscribing the gothic/religious appropriations of rockers/punkers, or of men wearing their hair long. It's nothing new; it is not radical or unusual. But an interesting border crossing concerning long hair and rock imagery is in the hero, Eric Draven, having long hair and being a rock star. They posit him as the good guy, but he looks like the bad guys. Still, however, his long hair is used to make his darkness and violence seem authentic--which is exactly what they do with the bad guy's long hair.

The placement of the soundtrack in The Crow does little to give the film an "outside" status. In Repo Man, the punk music is in the background--it is a wy of showing where Otto is coming from. But the punk music stays in the background; it is not the central theme nor does it speak for all the characters in the film. In The Crow, the soundtrack is in the foreground. It tells the viewer not only where the characters are coming from, but where they are. The punk(ish) music in The Crow is not a device for defining a part of one character's personality, but is the defining element of all the character's personas. These are rockers/punkers--these are bad people from the underground (underworld). Instead of using music as a device to tell a story, the soundtrack is the story in The Crow. But it does not ring true. Punk has been done before. Not all punks are criminals. Punk is not underground; it is one of the most popular artforms on the market today. The Crow tries too hard to be rock/punk. If it were a person, I would say it was a poser.

And then there is the soundtrack itself. Hard-driving rock/punk is not a risk, but rather a guarantee that something will sell. When Repo Man was made, a punk soundtrack in the foreground of the film may have hurt the film's broad appeal. In The Crow, it guarantees broad appeal. As an outside-the-system narrative, rock/punk is ineffective. Lots of people like that kind of music now; it has been assimilated into mainstream culture.

Howe and Strauss explain this by saying that authenticity is damaged by salability/actual sales. They state that "By the time a band hits platinum, they're already history" (190). The soundtrack for The Crow sold millions, went on the charts--so how can it be authentic underground/countercultural? And the individual bands on the soundtrack are mostly ones that have already enjoyed commercial success. Doomed authenticity from the start? "The only possible claim to authenticity is derived from the knowledge and admission of your inauthenticity", (206) says Grossberg, and The Crow takes itself and its music very seriously. Too seriously.

The characters personified by the rock/punk soundtrack are also trying too hard to be countercultural. By portraying the bad guys as rockers/punks with long hair or leather, the film reaffirms bad guy stereotypes from countless other films. For one thing, it has bad guys, with one token bad gal as the villains. Nothing new there; villains are men. The Crow tries another strategy to challenge established conventions: The multicultural terrorist chairmeeting. But what is so different about a mixed-race gang with a white man as the leader?

And then there is Eric Draven--vigilante, superhero. He kills people without conscience. He is lawless and aggressive. He is similar to other movie superheroes. The film tries to make him different by positioning him as a rocker, a long haired outsider, but as I have already illustrated, that does not make him countercultural or unconventional. Another way the film tries to make him different from earlier film superheroes is by challenging the secret identity paradigm. Everyone sees right through Draven's disguise--there is no mild-mannered version of him that passes as a "regular" guy. But he is still a movie superhero, and as such has a very tired and old mission--to kill the people that don't conform to society's mores. Draven's mission is as conservative as it gets--no matter how different he tries to be.

"...this is the really real world, you can't come back!"5

While the soundtrack weakens rather than strengthens The Crow's counter-conventional status, the border crossing in The Crow from fiction to reality outweighs the failed border crossings in the film. Real/not real is questioned. The breakdown of the real/not real dichotomy situates the whole film (soundtrack and all) as something more than the average superhero comic book gone hollywood. The character Eric Draven is killed the day before his marriage to Shelly is supposed to occur. Brandon Lee was killed one week before his "real world" marriage. Both Draven and Lee are killed in the sixth story loft from the film. In fact, Lee was killed during the filming of the scene where Draven is murdered. The fictional death crossed the border and became a real one. The life of Draven and Lee intersect and end together. The internal and external narratives of the film are shrouded in death.

The parallels are striking, and not a little spooky. Lee is killed while filming a death scene; his character and he are both about to get married. The last on-camera interview with Brandon Lee, shot during the making of The Crow, is all about death. Lee discusses the death of the character he plays and makes the connection between fiction and reality himself. He says that doing a film about death made him realize the importance of accepting death in his off-camera ("real") life. He said he lived one day at a time--accepting the idea the death could come at any time.

The Crow, aided by Brandon Lee's death on the set, is an authentic narrative on death. Draven comes back from the grave. So does Lee in a sense--he is preserved as Draven on film forever. But the link is pulled out--the scene where Lee is killed while pretending to be Draven being murdered was burned and refilmed with a stand-in. Certain segments of the film had to be digitally enhanced to compensate for the absence of the actor to play the part. Real/not real is questioned in a new way--the character on the screen is not always played by Brandon Lee, but it is difficult to tell where the crossing (Lee/not Lee) occurs. The intersection of the deaths of Draven and Lee is erased and a new death filmed with someone else--taking away its original authenticity and making the death a simulation once more. The film acknowledges it's own inauthenticity by stating that these changes were made--just as Grossberg would have an authentic entity do to prove its authenticity.

Eric Draven/Brandon Lee is a cyborg. Border crossing and convention-questioning are common traits of cyborg, and the fact that Draven and Lee are linked by more than an image on celluloid is a testament to the convincing nature of his/their crossing(s). Donna Haraway says that "The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence" (151). I think this perfectly describes the mixture of Draven and Lee, and even the film itself: If it were a person, I would say it was a cyborg.

"Disorder, chaos, anarchy: Now that's fun!"6

The Crow is a messy text. But it is somehow soothing and fun at the same time. Eric Draven is one of the most convincing film superheroes I have ever witnessed, and the film does a wonderful job to give him life (which is ironic and somewhat perverse) and personality that other dark heroes rarely possess. The Crow works hard to be countercultural and different, and ends up replaying conventions other films used to reach the same ends, but it still comes across as its own entity--an original work. The vigilante killings Draven perpetrates, and the rock/punk soundtrack bludgeoning the viewer (listener) over the head with "alternativeness" combine not to make a cliched and tired film but rather a fresh and enjoyable movie. A chance mixture of several different elements (both in the narrative of the film and without) come together to make what might have been something rather mainstream and boring into something refreshing, entertaining, and fun.
 
1 -- Sarah
2,3,4,6 -- Top Dollar
5 -- T-Bird

The Crow. Dir. Alex Proyas. Miramax, 1993.

Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. "The Crisis of Realism in Postmodern Time." Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture. Ed. George Levine. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. 214.

Grossberg, Lawrence. "The Media Economy of Rock Culture: Cinema, Post-Modernity, and Authenticity." Sound & Vision: The Music Video Reader. Eds. Frith, Goodwin, Grossberg. London: Routledge, 1993. 206.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1985, 1991. 151.

Howe, Neil, and Bill Strauss. The 13ing of America. 13th Gen: Abort? Retry? Fail? New York. Vintage, 1993.

Repo Man. Dir. Alex Cox. Edge City, 1984.
 

back