Directrospective: THE CROW (1994)

Notes on the films of Australian director Alex Proyas.

Spirit of goth vengeance Eric Draven (Brandon Lee).

“Oh, shit, THE CROW. That’s the one where the guy died making it. It’s pretty fucked up, dude. It happened when they were filming a scene where his character gets shot and dies, but, like, somebody accidentally put a real bullet in the gun and so when the guy pretended to shoot him he actually shot him for real. I heard they actually used the footage of him getting shot for real in the movie. I don’t really believe that part but still. It’s so messed up, dude. Crazy. What’s even crazier is that his dad, the guy’s dad, the guy who died’s dad was Bruce Lee, and he died making a movie too. He got hit in the head too hard or something. I don’t know. Just so nuts that it happened to both of them. Like a family curse or something. Really messed up.” - some guy

THE CROW has no choice but to be the movie Brandon Lee died making. Lee plays Eric Draven, a rock star who is killed in a break-in only to come back from the grave one year later as an unkillable goth angel of vengeance. The production schedule happened to leave Draven’s death scene until the end of production, so Lee had filmed nearly all of his scenes when, due to a combination of improper gun safety protocols and poorly homemade fake bullets, the actor playing Draven’s killer pointed a prop gun at Lee, pulled the trigger, and actually shot him dead. Draven dies at the beginning of the movie, so in reanimating the character within the narrative the film also reanimates Brandon Lee, the real person who died. Most of it’s really him, but for some key shots they didn’t have, the filmmakers used CGI to paste in Lee’s image cut from unused footage or to superimpose his face onto stuntman Chad “the JOHN WICK guy” Stahelski’s body (Draven’s death scene was also rewritten and reshot in a more impressionistic, PSYCHO shower-scene way that’s both easier to fake without the lead actor and way more tasteful than using any footage from his last day alive). Because of some combination of effects technology at the time and what I think is preference on Proyas’s part for compositing that looks like layered paper cut-outs, many of the film’s shots look artificially plastered together. It’s not immediately obvious which shots are the Frankensteined ones. Even in the scenes Lee was clearly present for, Draven is often partly hidden in shadow or silhouetted against the jaundiced glow of a Detroit streetlamp, and I can’t help but wonder whose outline I’m staring at. Every shot is an invitation to scrutinize the image we’re presented and try to find its flaws. THE CROW becomes a much less gruesome and much more entertaining feature-length Zapruder film.

I suppose if you came across THE CROW on television and didn’t know anything about it, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell there was anything unusual about it. The final product is much smoother than in many other films with high-profile deaths midway through production - there’s no uncanny floating heads on stunt bodies like Oliver Reed’s in GLADIATOR or Nancy Marchand’s in that truly disturbing episode of The Sopranos, and no eerie scenes cobbled together from snippets of nonspecific dialogue cut out of footage they had, like the disastrous Carrie Fisher stuff in STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER. It’s absolutely nothing like Brandon Lee’s father Bruce Lee’s posthumous film GAME OF DEATH. Bruce Lee’s second directorial effort, THE GAME OF DEATH, was in production when Bruce got the chance to make ENTER THE DRAGON, so that film was put on hold. Shortly after DRAGON premiered but before he was able to resume shooting THE GAME OF DEATH, Bruce died of cerebral edema. The exact cause of the edema is still a matter of debate, but most sources attribute it at least partially to painkillers Bruce was taking due to his job where he was routinely punched and kicked. Five years later, DRAGON director Robert Clouse cobbled together a film called GAME OF DEATH (no “THE”) using some of the footage Bruce had shot and padding out the rest with fight doubles wearing Bruce Lee wigs, big sunglasses, and the famous yellow jumpsuit. These doubles are often very different in stature than Bruce was, and universally less impressive martial artists. At one point, a scene that called for Bruce’s character to look at his own reflection is “achieved” by having a double face a mirror just right so that his face is perfectly covered by a cut-out picture of Bruce Lee taped to the mirror. When the main character fakes his own death midway through the film, Clouse used real footage from Bruce Lee’s real funeral. The whole thing is ghoulish but above all else just a lousy movie. It’s worth watching only as an extremely morbid artifact.

THE CROW, on the other hand, would be perfectly worth watching had the star not been killed in a horrifying accident onset. Proyas adapts an independent comic book created by James O’Barr into a film that does for goths what Batman did for fascists with emotionally unavailable fathers: a ripped man in a shiny black costume stalks a rain-soaked German expressionist cityscape, using his near-superhuman agility and combat skills to destroy the people who ruined his life for their own gain. Batman, of course, spends his entire life beating the shit out of the mentally ill and petty criminals who had nothing to do with his parents’ murder (technically the Joker kills them in Tim Burton’s BATMAN, but that was a weird rewrite because it’s usually just a mugger named Joe Chill). That guy is dead or in jail or something, so Batman transfers his rage and grief onto people who are usually doing something bad, sure, but it’s rarely about Batman. The icky optics of a super-rich man savagely assaulting poor people whose job guarding Mr. Freeze’s lab or whatever pays better than working nights as a custodian at the piss store have been discussed to death, so I’ll give it rest. I do think it’s useful, though, to note that not only is Eric Draven’s vendetta explicitly toward the people who raped and killed his fiancée Shelly and literally killed him, they did so because Draven and Shelly stood in the way when their boss Top Dollar (Michael Wincott) decided to turn Draven’s apartment building into a more profitable venture. He’s not a trust fund vigilante, he’s an invincible warrior for tenants’ rights. Draven and Shelly just wanted to lay around their beautifully dingy loft listening to The Jesus and Mary Chain and making out next to some candles. They were exercising their goth-given rights as human beings, and Top Dollar killed them for it.

Undead Draven spends his extra time among the living both getting violent justice and helping Sarah, the young girl whom he and Shelly had befriended, come to terms with the fact that they wouldn’t be around anymore. Lee ends up delivering a lovely speech about grief and loss and memory that serves as his own eulogy. In this way the other posthumous release which THE CROW most closely resembles is FURIOUS 7. After Paul Walker’s death in an off-set car accident midway through filming, his character’s remaining scenes were put together with camera tricks and CGI, including Walker’s superimposed face on the bodies of his own real-life brothers, and at the end a ghostly-looking Paul Walker cut from an earlier film retires with his wife and child to live on a beautiful beach that looks like actual heaven while Vin Diesel delivers a moving monologue about brotherhood that by its final words is definitely not coming from his character Dominic Toretto anymore. It should be too morbid to work, but somehow it’s such a big-hearted, uncynical tribute that the film became a kind of public funeral for Walker. Nobody going to see FURIOUS 7 opening weekend didn’t know about Walker’s death, and every scene that feels weirdly unfinished or sequence where his character always has his back to the camera stands out clearly, but this palpable something-missing within the film helps us (or me, at least) to grapple with the actor’s very real absence. Draven’s deliberate murder is, if anything, a little bit less senseless and horrifying than Lee’s accidental death, so watching the way it bends the lives of everyone who knew him and Shelly and the way they begin to heal is comforting in its own strange way. When, at the end, Draven uses his magic crow powers to transfer the entirety of Shelly’s pain into Top Dollar, it’s a very literal taste of his own medicine. The agony causes him to fall off of a church roof and onto a gargoyle, impaling him through the heart. That’s some good catharsis. (For their part, it seems like everyone involved in Lee’s death was extremely fucked up by it, and I don’t think they need any additional pain transference.)

In addition to solidifying Proyas’s cartoonishly operatic visual style, of which there were hints in SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS, THE CROW fits neatly in with the central theme running through his career both within the films and without. Top Dollar persecutes Draven and Shelly for their refusal to obey his demands to leave their apartment, and Draven’s brutal vengeance is thus righteous. Proyas himself was similarly persecuted in the film’s making, first by fate when his lead actor was unexpectedly killed in a manner that mirrored the character’s death, then again when Paramount pulled out as the film’s distributor over both production delays and squeamishness about the whole death thing. This would become a trend with Proyas, who seems to have had a lot of trouble getting films made without major behind-the-scenes conflict. None would be so tragic as this, thankfully, but one starts to wonder at what point the guy who always gets stuck with the asshole studio execs is actually the problem himself.