Revisiting the Crow After October 7
"A Year Ago...A Cold October Night...A Broken Down Car On A Dirt Road...A Man...A Girl...Madness...Pain...And Shadows...My God, The Shadows!!"
I haven't watched the new Crow remake and don't plan to, but its needless, pathetic existence reminded me of why the graphic novel is a masterpiece and why the 1994 movie is great and why both hit different after October 7.
"All he wants is pain. Pain and hate. Yes, hate. But never fear. Fear is for the enemy. Fear and bullets."
The most important thing about the graphic novel is that the crime is meaningless. The criminals are meaningless. Just a bunch of junkies who barely understand what they were doing. Half of them don't understand why they're being killed. Some don't even understand they're being killed. They're nonpersons who did a terrible, unforgivable thing not to promote some evil masterplan but because they're utterly devoid of humanity. And not in some dark and epic sense.
They're just garbage.
The Crow is a superior being capable of destroying them easily, but there's no satisfaction in his victories like you'd get from a superhero defeating a supervillain. His foes are just too empty.
For me, this is the main source of the devastating power of the story, what made it so formative for me when I first read it. After the terrible thing has happened, you have to kill the ones responsible, but it won't be satisfying. It won’t be awesome like in a Marvel comic. It will be a chore. Nothing more. Like cleaning your room, only awful.
The enemy is simply too pathetic, too degraded, too devoid of humanity to be satisfying to defeat. It's literally taking out the trash only with memories of all the beautiful things you’ve lost before your eyes.
"Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is... and felt how awful goodness is."
I felt that by having a main villain and an evil plan, the movie, despite being gorgeous, missed the point of the graphic novel. However, it too taught me a valuable lesson.
Goodness is meaningless if it's not awful. Goodness isn't nice or cute. Goodness doesn’t try to keep everyone happy. Good fierce and destructive and ruthless and it burns. By God, it burns!
This is a profoundly moral message in an era of toxic fake morality.
And now, it seems, we're all living it.
Very astute. The Crow truly illustrates that what has been taken cannot be returned. The act of eliminating evil is a necessity to fix a cosmic wrong that they have wrought on the world, that the world is out of balance like the world before the flood. But god is not here to do all the work, virtuous people are tasked with throwing out the trash.
Good has got to be ferocious. It's forces should be furious and angry and let the loss fuel the fight. It might feel that the vanquishing of the perpetrators is a hollow duty because evil should have not been allowed to take what they did. But if we look to the future, a world is so much better after disposing of the agents of evil.
A bleak take, and one I never really considered, but pretty much spot on.