Echoing Loss and Personifying Grief in ‘The Crow’
The Crow is one of the greatest comic book movies ever made. Even with the glut of comic adaptations we have seen since, even though it is sometimes derided for being very much a movie of its era, it is purely and simply one of the best. It is also a movie that has become almost impossible to talk about on its own merits, because the tragedy at the heart of the production is one of the most infamous in Hollywood history. That is the death of the movie’s lead actor, Brandon Lee, during the filming.
Thirty plus years later, people who have never seen the movie start talking about that devastating loss as soon as someone mentions the title. There were arguments before it was released in 1994 as to whether it even should be released, whether that was disrespectful to the memory of its star, or if it would have been more disrespectful to deny the world of a film he was so proud of, and his absolutely mesmerizing final performance. I agree with the latter.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to talk about The Crow without talking about the loss of Brandon Lee because the film is about death. It is about tragic loss. That heartache, however it is experienced, by anyone, is the fundamental core of the film. It is based on an independently published comic book from the late ’80s written and illustrated by James O’Barr. The author was inspired to write the story after the untimely death of his girlfriend. The rawness of that pain is felt on every single page, in a comic book so hauntingly tragic and vulnerable that at times it feels like reading someone’s personal journal, so raw that you wonder if you’re supposed to be seeing this.
That is part of the appeal of The Crow, part of the lightning in a bottle that led to such an incredible story and adaptation, is that it’s not simply about grief, it’s about the immediate grief, before your brain ever forms that first rational thought. It’s about feeling your way through it, about that pain and rage, and pushing all of that to the forefront to experience it honestly and openly. There are other stories that eulogize the dead thoughtfully, romantically, and The Crow does those things. But at its heart it is purely a guttural, primal scream.
The film rides this wave of emotion from beginning to end. It’s all a feeling, a tone, a chord played on a raw, exposed nerve. There’s rage in it, of course, because the crime at the center of the story is absurdly violent. The Crow is first and foremost a revenge movie. Eric Draven and his fiancé Shelly Webster are killed on the eve of their wedding. They’re tortured, beaten, she’s sexually assaulted, and all because they refused to vacate their apartment so that an anarchistic, nihilistic gang could blow it up as part of their Devil’s Night ritual. These people didn’t even know Eric or Shelly. They were just there.
Eric returns one year later to pick them off one by one, and Lee’s performance as the undead hero is so perfect because his rage and his poetic, overwhelming sadness are all the same thing, there is no distinguishing between the two. He’s back from the dead and the world has moved on another year, but he hasn’t. He looks exactly as he did the moment he died. The wounds on his body are fresh. This is a loss that, even dead, he is still living.
What’s truly incredible, though, is that in all of this anger and sadness there is still hope and perspective. Eric makes this clear in a moment with Sergeant Albrecht, when he tells him that he never understood how much beauty Shelly could find in the little things in life until now that he’s dead, conscious of the fact of every moment he’s ever wasted, telling Albrecht, “Believe me, nothing’s trivial.” That is, in part, a mission statement for the entire movie, and it informs Eric’s interactions with several characters. With Sarah’s mother, Darla, Eric kills her boyfriend but gets her clean, helps her, and gives her a second chance to be a mother to her daughter.
In Eric’s interactions with Sarah, he keeps her at a distance, but that’s because he is allowing her to see beyond his supernatural circumstances to accept the reality of his situation. Sarah was a young girl that Eric and Shelly looked out for because no one else would. When Sarah sees that Eric has returned, she naturally wants him to start taking care of her again, but he can’t do that. When she tells him by the end of the movie that he never said goodbye, giving him the opportunity to say it in that moment, he instead says, “You’re just going to have to forgive me for that.” That is a fascinating and crucial line, because he’s already gone. He’s dead, and whatever this is that he’s doing, it’s only temporary. He’s just back to balance the books and right a very wrong thing. But he’s not alive and he’s not sticking around. In that moment, he speaks to her in a way that allows her to still treat him as a memory.
Even in Eric’s final fight with Top Dollar, the man who leads the entire gang yet who initially Eric had no quarrel with because he was not actually party to the deaths of Shelly or himself, his final move is to transfer all of Shelly’s pain he’s held onto for so long into Top Dollar. That’s how he beats the villain. Granted, it’s not all empathy. Shelly took a long time to die in the hospital and those excruciating hours of physical pain are something that Eric has internalized since basically extracting it from Albrecht’s skull, and now he’s passing that along.
But the point stands nonetheless. Top Dollar is an outrageous psychopath who lives his life in full celebration of the destruction and death of absolutely anything and everything solely because it brings him joy to do it. The single worst punishment he could receive is to feel and finally understand, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the pain of another human being. It is a curse and a gift and an ultimate act of vengeance all rolled into one, and it is not something a man like Top Dollar could ever have survived. But this isn’t a movie where the bad guy lives, because this isn’t a movie where the hero lives. Eric balances his own death, as well as Shelly’s, with the deaths of everyone responsible.
It’s a kind of cosmic fairness, and there’s never a moment when he doubts that it is what he’s supposed to do. He is singular in his purpose. As he says early on, “He died a year ago, the moment he touched her. They’re all dead. They just don’t know it yet.” That’s the only difference between them and himself. Eric exists in the moment of loss. He is the raw, immediate grief, the act of dying personified. Stuck in the look on his lover’s face knowing he can’t save her, trapped in the inhale of a goodbye he will never get to say. And at the end of the day, what separates him from them is that they don’t know they’re dead and he does. He’s delivering them into a place he’s already been, and into a state he already exists in. And he knows better than anyone that it doesn’t mean he’s delivering his murderers into any sense of peace.
That’s the ultimate fantasy element of The Crow, the single most cathartic thing about it. Even as someone who by and large very much does not believe in “an eye for an eye,” there is something fantastic about seeing that depicted in a fantasy landscape. Death is not fair and that’s a universal truth. But for just one night, Eric Draven brings just a touch of a fairness to it. He’s not resurrecting himself, nor Shelly. They don’t get to come back. But the other people involved in their deaths get to know what it is to be where he is, to be dead, to be gone, and that is enough to put the wrong things right.
