THE CROW
***/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, FKA twigs, Sami Bouajila, Danny Huston
screenplay by Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider, based on the comic book series by James O’Barr
directed by Rupert Sanders
BLINK TWICE
***/****
starring Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Christian Slater, Alia Shawkat
written by Zoë Kravitz & E.T. Feigenbaum
directed by Zoë Kravitz
by Walter Chaw “Eric, I had this dark dream,” she says. She doesn’t know these are their last moments together, here and for eternity–that she’s been dead and that her lover has bartered his life for hers, and that whatever there is of mercy in this blighted place has briefly reunited them as they pass each other in purgatory. It certainly doesn’t feel like mercy. It feels cruel. Cruelty is all there is. When I was a depressed, moony kid, I believed in my heart there was a grand melodrama in which I had a part to play. A delusion of grandeur, a symptom of narcissism (should one fail to outgrow it): you dressed the part with eyeliner and black trenchcoats, Doc Martens and clove cigarettes–the borrowed identity, the illusion of disaffection in language affected by quotes pulled from Shakespeare, Wilde, and our patron saint Morrissey. Most of my childhood and adolescence was a dark dream. I lived in a fugue. I lived in the spaces where my brain needed to mature, and I didn’t know what I was doing from one moment to the next, not really. I believed I was responsible for not only the feelings but also the fate of others. I was always performing. I was never performative.
When Alex Proyas’s The Crow was released in 1994, I was a hot mess in college obsessed with DC’s Vertigo line, an imprint that included titles like Animal Man, Shade: The Changing Man, Doom Patrol, and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, of course, which somehow manifested the self-image of a Byronic hero I had constructed through an “Endless” hero I’d been trying to look and dress like for ten years. Recent allegations against Gaiman feel like an indictment of the person I used to imagine myself to be. I wonder if people stop evolving when they stop needing to. I will never stop evolving. It’s not a moral victory; it’s a by-product of my broken hardwiring. The Crow was based on the J. O’Barr indie comic of the same name, distributed as a four-issue series sometime in 1989. There was a buzz around the title; I read it when it first came out. O’Barr had written this story of a harlequin-painted avenger to deal with the death, via drunk driver, of his fiance. I was 16 when it debuted, and by the end of its first run, I had about a month or so to go before my suicide attempt. Every slash of O’Barr’s jet-black ink, every hard-boiled turn of phrase he spat onto the page, betrayed florid, purple catharsis. Proyas’s film was more of the same, and I loved it–and its soundtrack–ferociously. I internalized it as proof of my heritage: the goth, the survivor, the moment an Asian-American kid was about to hit the big time.
In the comic, undead avenging angel the Crow says stuff like, “I see kindness in your eyes, and a deep sadness in your heart.” It’s not good writing, we can agree, but it is grandiose in the best, bleeding, pounding-heart-on-the-sleeve, Wagnerian way. The death of Brandon Lee on set of The Crow only added to its Stygian Romanticism for me. Through the haze of my unearned fatalism, this unspeakable tragedy dovetailed with my own sense of the world as doom-laden, onerous, oneiric. Beautiful things died while ugliness persisted. Each issue of O’Barr’s book bore a title: “Pain,” “Fear,” “Irony,” and “Despair.” It’s impossible, yet I have no memories of experiencing any emotions other than these in adolescence. Happiness? Happiness was the reminder that you could lose happiness. Love, too. How can you trust a thing that devastates both when you have it and when you lose it? How can you trust a monster like that? I can’t separate the quality of Proyas’s The Crow from its troubled production or my internalizing of elements of it as confirmation of my worldview. I spent a few days in my twenty-first year, in other words, learning how to leap onto a table in a criss-cross-applesauce position because of Brandon Lee and The Crow. I have a scar on my shin to prove it. I bought an electric guitar because of that film. I sampled lines from it for the mixtapes I gave to girls I liked, just like the Crow does from William Thackeray as he’s draining the heroin from a wayward mother’s stigmata. Is it good? Is John Keats good? The answer to that doesn’t mean anything to me at all. In other words, I couldn’t begin to tell you.
I can tell you, though, that Rupert Sanders’s The Crow is quite good. It reminds a great deal of Matthew Lewis’s 18th-century gothic horror The Monk, in which monk Ambrosio, an orphan raised in the order, falls in love with another monk who, it turns out, is his sister Miranda, who disguised herself to be near him. A deadly snake bites Ambrosio, and Miranda saves him through witchcraft. He sleeps with her, tires of her, and convinces her to help him rape the virtuous young daughter of one of the monastery’s parishioners. Satan helps, too. Where Brandon Lee plays the Crow with lissome grace and an athlete’s physical confidence, Bill Skarsgård plays him as a hulking lunk still settling into his oversized frame. All angles and joints, he’s instantly relatable as that friend you love who’s failed to launch in a lot of ways and drives an ATV in unwise wildernesses on PBR-drowned weekends. Proyas’s The Crow is Byron, Sanders’s The Crow is Wuthering Heights–and, accordingly, Brandon Lee’s version has him as a prancing harlequin, a deadly Oscar Wilde, while Skarsgård’s is a brooding, heavy-lidded Heathcliff–the Orpheus of this Orpheus & Eurydice parable sans music.
I’m realizing belatedly that not everyone knows what this film is about. Eric Draven (Skarsgård) falls in love with Shelly (FKA twigs). Bad guys murder them, but Eric briefly comes back from the dead to exact vengeance against the malefactors. That’s it. Where this new iteration diverges narratively from the Proyas film is in the elimination of an orphan street kid (an element I always found distracting, I confess, neither needing nor wanting a child conduit into this world); the reintroduction of a spiritual guide, the “Skull Cowboy” of the comic, in the character of Kronos (Simon Bouajila; Michael Berryman played him in the original but Lee’s passing led to his role being cut); and the brilliant creation of a villain, Roeg (Danny Huston), a Mephistophlean figure capable, The Shadow-like, of clouding men’s minds. Roeg and his henchperson, Marion (Laura Birn), are complicated figures with equally obscure motives. I thought for a while they were some kind of vampire, then demon, then I don’t know what, but Roeg, by his own words, has been “around for centuries” and killed hundreds of innocents in that time for reasons only he knows or needs to know. In previous incarnations of The Crow, Eric and Shelly fell afoul of street thugs and circumstance. Here, they cross an actual monster that can only, in many ways literal, be defeated by true love. If the idea of that makes you groan, you are too cool for The Crow. As it turns out, and as my kids probably could’ve told you, I am terminally uncool. I still swoon over Catherine’s ghost tapping on Heathcliff’s window at the Heights, over how his love for her will forever be unrequited and increasingly perverted by time and memory the longer he lives his pillaged life. Terminally. Uncool.
Eric and Shelly meet in a drug rehab cum mental institution. I spent three days in one, mandatorily held, after trying to kill myself. It wasn’t much like the one in The Crow, but the tentative connection Eric and Shelly try to form under the eyes of administrators, doctors, and pages of physical restrictions rings startlingly true. I made a couple of friends during my 72 hours in lockdown. One I bootlegged audiotapes of Tim Burton’s Batman for and snuck back in to him; the other I dated for a little while when she was released later that summer. Mostly, we compared scars and watched the sun go down listening to a series of sad songs. When Eric and Shelly first decide to be together, Sanders blares Joy Division’s “Disorder” on the soundtrack, and I travelled on a straight line, shocked and raw, back to 1989 and the end of the world as we know it. Eric and Shelly fall in love with a desperate, fugitive neediness. It’s like they know their time together is limited. All of our time together is limited. The monster comes and kills them. Kronos awakens Eric and tells him that so long as he loves Shelly purely, he will be granted life and a variety of invulnerability (he heals rapidly, although he still suffers pain) that he can use to avenge their deaths. Should he succeed, he will win Shelly back from the underworld. Orpheus & Eurydice, n’est-ce pas? Like that doomed pair, the entirety of Eric and Shelly’s relationship is prologue to the tragedy of their separation. You can complain about that, or you can slide into it like a memory of when how a piece felt mattered more than whether it followed a convention.
It sounds like I’m making apologies and excuses for a movie that lacks a strong plot but really it’s more that I’m wondering whether the point is missed if you don’t approach The Crow like an opera. Operas aren’t known for their carefully constructed narratives. Operas are known for their outsized emotions, their exaggerated, hyperbolic representations of our foibles and fires. Eric and Shelly spend a day at a quarry swimming and reading to each other from Rimbaud. I recognize them as broken children, abandoned, confused, existing in a fugue state and lucking upon another soul in the maelstrom with whom they are in complete rhythm. Time is short, and their rapture is more furious for its inevitable brevity. “Do you think angsty teens will build little shrines for us?” asks Shelly as she contemplates suicide from a winter bridge. The Crow knows who they are and the universality of the story it’s telling about that exact place in a person’s development when they are coming to terms with the capriciousness of the universe and how cruel it can be to expressions of joy and authenticity. Eric tries to catch Shelly as she sinks into a metaphorical deep, and Sanders shows their fingertips close but never touching, like God’s and Adam’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. (I’ve always found that painting to be existentially horrifying: a rendition of eternal abeyance.) The idea of spending forever mere inches from touch recurs in the second canto of Dante’s Inferno, in which the lovers Paolo and Francisca are buffeted by a ceaseless storm in sight of one another but incapable of embracing. When Kronos sends Eric back to the living, Eric falls backwards like Dante does upon learning of God’s punishment for lust. That is to say, like a dead man.
I’m crediting The Crow ’24 not with making all of these allusions (though why not?), but instead with the sense to locate The Crow in a tradition of primal texts meant, especially for sad young men, to help deal with the insupportable pain of loss, the incomprehensible finality of death, and the unsolvable puzzle of a moral universe where immoral things are allowed to happen. Lean and angry, the picture’s last thirty minutes feature Eric, now a supernatural being, slaughtering–vivisecting, really–a parade of meatbags on his way to a final confrontation with Roeg. It is as violent a film as I’ve seen. The Crow is armed with edged weapons he barely knows how to use, but because he’s unkillable, he keeps hacking, stabbing, and slashing maniacally, a blind butcher gripped by a night terror. After all of it, a martyr’s lament: “Our love will live on in everything she does. Some day, I know, our souls will find each other again. ‘Til then, I will have just the memory: that perfect sensation of loving her. And that’s enough. Almost enough.” The final needle-drop? The Foals‘ “What Went Down.” If you know the band and the track, there’s a part of you dancing to this movie’s beat. If you know the band and the track, you probably like this movie already and don’t even know it.
Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice is another broad, unofficial, probably accidental adaptation of The Monk, improbably opening on the same day as The Crow. Wage-slave buddies Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat) crash the private party of tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) and get themselves invited to his private island, where cellphones are confiscated in the name of having a relaxing time away from civilization. Wined, dined, and doted upon by Slater’s assistant Stacy (Geena Davis), the two meet other pretty-girl partiers and wealthy men-children (Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osment, and Kyle Maclachlan among the actors playing them) for a never-ending bacchanal of drugs, booze, gourmet food, and…wait, how long have we been here? Does the sun ever set? Blink Twice is a horror movie of a different kind in which a serpent’s bite, as in The Monk, indicates not corruption but freedom from ignorance. The forbidden fruit is the fruit of knowledge, you’ll recall, and what Satan offered mankind is sentience. Jess, wandering around in blissful ecstasy on this island Eden, is bitten bad one night and starts remembering things she isn’t supposed to remember. But who gives permission in matters of memory, of trauma and its repression? It turns out that, again like The Monk, the lustful master of a monastic cult is encouraged to indulge in anything his heart can imagine with the help of the Devil in impact, if not name. I won’t spoil Blink Twice, but if you read The Monk, you’ve been spoiled.
Once again, I’m not saying Blink Twice is pretentious. Rather, it keenly understands the darker aspects of human behaviour. The Crow and Blink Twice suggest the product of a parallel evolution using the same observations about how men are vile, predatory animals who see themselves as the victim, often of their uncontrollable desires. The performances in Blink Twice are to a one exceptional. Tatum’s charm just tips over into menacing; Davis is unpredictably sharp beneath a cloud of dotty maternal affectation; and Ackie is incredible in her ability to switch from carefree to terrified on a dime. The breakout star, however, is Adria Arjona, who, if Hit Man didn’t already fill her dance card for the foreseeable future, should find herself booked solid after Blink Twice. All this to say, I expected to like The Crow at least somewhat, given my history with the property, and fully expected Blink Twice to be a ponderous vanity piece produced by a power couple (Kravitz/Tatum). I did not expect to see the two films as products of the same Gothic tradition in literature–one male, the other female–that dealt so beautifully, so cunningly, with gender issues, madness, and repressed histories. With all the ghosts that haunt us from childhood and the avenging angels we imagine ourselves to be, we reconstitute. We create Byzantine tableaux vivant from them. We turn them into sanguineous fantasies in which we are the hero–bishops enacting cathartic gouts of bloodletting. It’s how we slay our dragons when caught in the throes of our smallness. The Crow and Blink Twice don’t take me back to a happy time, but they do take me back.
