The Crow by J. O’Barr. Kitchen Sink Press, 1994. $15.95. ISBN 0-87816-221-6.
The Crow, written by David A. Schow. Directed by Alex Proyas. Starring Brandon Lee, Rochelle Davis, and Ernie Hudson. Lionsgate, 1994. 102 minutes. Rated R.
Recently, I serendipitous stumbled upon a copy of the graphic novel collecting the original series of The Crow, and immediately devoured it. I then followed it up with the film adaptation, which I had not previously seen.
The comic, which began as a short tale but turned into a long-running series, reads like a primal scream. Overwrought, pretentious, and sometimes sloppy, it is the brainchild of one James O’Barr, who created it as a means of dealing with a personal tragedy—the exact nature of which I have not learned and assume is none of my business. Although decidedly undisciplined as art of either the visual or storytelling variety, it is emotionally raw, so it is no surprise that it struck a chord with many readers and found a devoted fan following.
The interest in the graphic novel was enough to lead, in 1994, to a film adaptation. The movie takes a lot of liberty with its source material, turning O’Barr’s visceral cry of pain into a structured story with more character development, higher stakes, and a markedly different tone. Although well received by critics (and I can say it holds up over time), it is a cult classic in large part because of its star: Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, took the titular role as the bird-themed goth-punk antihero but—with only eight days left to the production—died during filming from an improperly cleaned gun. His performance, though lacking the gravitas the role requires, has charisma and suggests a talent that might have developed had his life not been cut short.
Given this morbidly poetic on-set tragedy, to criticize the movie harshly almost seems sacrilegious.
The Comic
And indeed, this is a title marked by tragedy. As already mentioned, it was tragedy that inspired the title in the first place, and tragedy followed it into a new medium.
Synopsis
The story of the comic is simple, so simple that many of its details are left to the reader’s imagination and guesswork. The protagonist is a man named Eric, occupation unknown. He was in love with a woman named Shelly, and they were soon to wed, but their car broke down by the side of the road, where a group of drugged-up gang-bangers found them. The gangsters shot Eric twice, leaving him mostly dead, before they gang-raped and murdered Shelly.
By means unclear, Eric comes back as an emo-punk spirit of vengeance. Dressed in black (except when shirtless), he hunts down the murderous tweakers before returning to his grave.
There is very little plot besides this. A heartstring-tugging little girl and some aggravatingly ineffective cops show up for extremely brief subplots, but aside from them, the story focuses on Eric and the gangsters. The men he kills are almost entirely unsympathetic murderers and drug addicts, though Eric at one point forms a peculiar bond with a man called Fun Boy and sometimes shows an ironical sympathy with the men he’s eviscerating.
Analysis
Through it all, Eric experiences surreal visions of the afterlife as well as memories of his time with Shelly before his and her senseless deaths. He also has a talking crow who accompanies him, though the crow’s role is unclear. (Later in the series, it’s fleshed out that the crow resurrects people to take vengeance on murderers). The crow does very little besides give Eric occasional advice. At one point, Eric calls himself “The Crow,” suggesting that he is a kind of anti-superhero, a Punisher-like exacter of vengeance.
Writing
Eric dresses in black leather and paints his face white with dark-rimmed eyes and upturned lips suggestive of Batman’s Joker (more on that comparison in a bit). Although he looks—as the movie adaptation dubs him—like a “mime from hell,” he is a surprisingly talkative antihero. He lectures the men he murders and makes deadpan jokes, and the comic is shot through with overwritten narration, apparently in Eric’s voice. Here’s a sample:
So, night slips over the city, like a whore to her knees, and the buildings stoop like empty syringes. Here, here evil centrifuges into a whirlpool of cruelty and the only breath drawn is by …
Dead Souls.
Yeah. Pretty much the whole comic reads like that.
Although I don’t question the personal pain from which Mr. O’Barr is writing, his prose (and occasional doggerel) feels decidedly try-hard, and the end result is unfortunately silly. In that short passage I’ve quoted, there is much to criticize and much to wince at: I mean, do empty syringes stoop?
plot
In addition to the stilted narration and dialogue, the comic suffers from a few fundamental storytelling flaws.
The first is that the villains, while certainly nasty, are never terribly threatening. All of them are drug-addicted, small-time losers. Eric and Shelly got killed because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The men who killed them, killed them senselessly and then went on about their senseless lives, hardly remembering what they’d done. When Eric, undead and superpowered, comes after them for vengeance, he finds them all easy prey. A few of them are so high they can barely fight back. There are no serious enemies for him to take down.
The second and more serious problem is that Eric has no weaknesses. This is a story of him going around and blowing away the men who raped and killed his fiancée, and though it’s not hard to sympathize with his thirst for vengeance, it’s difficult to feel for him because he has no vulnerability. He is emotionally tortured to be sure, but when he confronts the gangsters and addicts, there is very little tension because he cannot be hurt. Knives and bullets simply go through him and accomplish nothing.
The end result of this is that there are no stakes, the hero is a Gary Stu, and the comic ends up feeling like little more than a puerile revenge fantasy, like the high-school nerd daydreaming about beating up the jocks. You can almost hear O’Barr shaking his fist and screaming, “If only I had some guns and Kung fu, I’d show those guys!”
Yeah, man. Sure you would.
In fact, while reading this, I sat back and mulled to myself that the antidote to The Crow might be Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, which happens to have a similar goth-punk aesthetic. At one point in Gaiman’s career-defining comic-book series, the Sandman stands up in front of a room full of serial killers—a darkly comical parody of a comic-book convention—and tells them all that they are not the revolutionaries, oppressed outcasts, and unappreciated geniuses they think they are. They are, in fact, total losers, just like the football team told them they were back in high school.
That being said, what the comic does have is emotional intensity. Yes, it strains too hard to achieve it, but the sense of loss, of loneliness, of anger, of pain, definitely comes through. As The Crow, Eric talks too much—and talks too much gibberish—but he convincingly presents the sense of a tortured soul. His surreal flashbacks, particularly the images of him embracing Shelly shortly before she dies horribly, carry exactly the impact they should.
The Movie
By contrast, Eric as portrayed by the regrettably late Brandon Lee does not, unfortunately, seem very tortured. Lee is too cheerful, too nice, to capture the rage and despair of O’Barr’s antihero. Although his performance doesn’t have the weight it should, he is aided by a strong supporting cast, a script that builds well on the foundation of the comic, some memorable visuals, and his own charms, which as already mentioned, suggest a promising acting career cut short.
The movie has brooding, noirish visuals. Both the comic and the film are ostensibly set in Detroit, but even though the real-life Detroit is a legendary example of urban decay, the movie opts for models to capture the stark, gothic visuals. The emo-goth attitude and comic-book look of the movie suggest the influence of Tim Burton, and it is probably worth remembering that The Crow appeared only five years after Burton’s Batman. Indeed, with his clown-like makeup, weird sense of humor, and bloodthirsty sense of justice, the Crow is almost like a combination of Batman and the Joker.
Improvements
Much of the film’s rewriting appears to be based around the problems I noted above. In the comic, the final villain that Eric kills is a drugee named T-Bird, but the movie adds a Big Bad, a more formidable enemy called Top Dollar—played with scenery-chewing aplomb by Michael Wincott—who is a murderous, katana-wielding psychopath in an incestuous relationship with his half-Asian half-sister Myca (Bai Ling).
Furthermore, Eric and Shelly’s deaths are no longer random and senseless. Top Dollar, among his other nefarious schemes, is a slum lord who ordered Shelly’s murder after she gathered a group of renters to protest Top Dollar’s immoral practices in the housing market.
Supporting characters get a much larger role here. Sarah, the sympathetically portrayed young daughter of a prostitute who appears in two scenes in the comic, becomes a major character. Played by the pretty young Rochelle Davis, who also lends her pleasantly scratchy voice to the film’s narration, Sarah is the movie’s cute mascot character but also provides a point of focus and empathy. In the climax, she helps raise the stakes: She is Eric’s surrogate daughter, and he finds he must protect her even as he avenges his dead fiancée.
Similarly, the all-but-useless cop Albrecht gets fleshed out by Ernie Hudson into a considerably more likable and important character. Investigating gangland murders, he discovers the resurrected Eric and helps him in his vengeful quest, first reluctantly and later wholeheartedly.
Perhaps most importantly, the film realizes that Eric needs to be vulnerable, not just emotionally but physically. Although much of the movie has the same low stakes as the comic, at the climax, Top Dollar and his sister-moll discover Eric’s one weakness, his kryptonite, and they use it to their advantage even as they capture and threaten Sarah. So during the final scene, Eric both has someone he needs to rescue and a real chance of failure. These are two important things the comic lacks.
Deficiencies
Eric himself is also fleshed out slightly, or at least we now know what he does for a living: The movie makes him a rock star, specifically the front man for a band called (appropriately) Hangman’s Joke. This is largely used as an excuse for the film’s bumpin’ soundtrack, which includes numbers from such bands as Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, and Pantera. We sometimes see Eric rocking out on his guitar, moments that add to the head-banginess of the movie but fail to capture the emotional intensity of the comic.
On the other hand, the movie realizes when Eric needs to shut the hell up. He isn’t nearly as prone to spouting monologues in the film as he is in the comic, though the movie judiciously borrows some of his best lines (“Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children”—originally from William Makepeace Thackeray) while rejecting his more unintelligible ones.
And that brings me to what the movie lacks. It is a decent story, but it simply does not have that raw intensity the comic has. The comic reads like a glimpse into the soul of a man kneeling in the mud and screaming into the rain. With its starkly colored visuals, scenery-munching arch-villain, and general campiness, the movie is a comic-book film that often feels more like a comic book than the comic book does. The graphic novel cries out, “I hurt!” whereas the movie says with a smirk, “Look at how like a graphic novel I can be!”
As a result of this, however, the movie has a markedly different point from the comic that is arguably morally superior. The comic is purely a revenge fantasy, but the movie softens this in order to end with a simple and profound message: True love lasts forever.
Conclusion
With that said, I can’t say which version I prefer. Both have their issues, but both are competent in their own way. What I can say is that I eagerly read the comic and then turned around and watched the movie with much interest. They differ enough from each other that it is possible to enjoy them independently. There are certainly reasons to love the original comic with its festering wounds, but the movie feels like a later, more mature reflection on the comic—like a look back after the wounds have healed.
The film finds meaning in the comic book’s expression of pain.
