Considering the amount of
screentime devoted to raw violence, it may come as a surprise that The Crow (1994) is
actually about love. Not that the film is about an abusive romantic
relationship, for the respect that is necessary for love is instantly expunged as
soon as violence enters into the equation. The infliction of violence is a
manifestation of self-love in the sordid sense of self-idolatry, rather than of
love that is directed to other people. So, it may be difficult to fathom how violence
can serve love, and even be a manifestation of love, as The Crow illustrates.
The film’s plot hinges on a
horrific event that precedes when the film’s story begins. Eric Draven and
Shelly Webster have been brutally shot and serially raped (and beaten),
respectively, by a pathetic group of violent criminals who work for Top Dollar,
a psychopath criminal kingpin. The film begins when Eric, aided by a crow, makes
his way through the ground from his buried coffin to the world as an “undead”
avenging Shelly’s very painful death by killing each of the men who beat and
raped her. When Top Dollar has the crow shot, though still alive, Eric’s
supernatural ability to withstand being shot ends, even though he is still dead,
which is a curious combination as vampires, for example, do not bleed yet Eric
does when Top Dollar shots and stabs him in the climatic violent scene on a
roof between the main protagonist and antagonist, Eric and Top Dollar.
In fact, the supernatural condition
of Eric being undead, having climbed out of his grave, and Top Dollar’s
statement before Devil’s Night (the night before Halloween) to other criminal-heads
in the city that greed is for amateurs whereas he is interested in chaos, hints
at a religious element being in the film, rather than merely ethics.
Before Eric and Top Dollar
fight on the roof, they meet by accident in an abandoned Christian church,
which, considering all the violence in the city, says, in effect, that God is
dead, as Nietzsche avers in his philosophical writings. But Eric outsmarts Top
Dollar, whose greed ironically is his final undoing, as it gets him close
enough to Eric that he can grasp Top Dollar’s head to transfer all of Shelly’s pain
in the hospital that Eric has been holding onto; thirty hours of pain all at
once! Top Dollar, being a weak coward as all bullies are, can’t take the pain. The
kingpin falls and, on his way down, is impaled on one of three stone hooks being
held by a stone gargoyle extending from an outer wall of the abandoned church.
God is not dead after all,
for, as Paul and Augustine wrote, God is love, and Eric acts out of love first
for Shelly, and then, at the end of the film, for the girl Sarah, whom Top
Dollar has kidnapped in order to lure Eric to be murdered. Whereas violence out
of sheer hatred knows no bounds, avenging the pain of a loved one stops when
all of the perpetrators have been hurt or killed. Eric would not have gone
after Top Dollar had Sarah not been kidnapped, so Eric was acting out of love
in going after Eric. The church building may have been dilapidated from neglect,
but God as love lives even in Eric’s dead body. It is easy to view religion in
the supernatural element rather than where the spirit of God really manifests.
The film ends as a vindication of the power of love with Sarah narrating, “If people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.” She has loved Eric and Shelly, and they were stolen from her very violently. Interestingly, the young girl finds solace in the love she feels even though the couple are dead, rather than in the fact that Eric has avenged the beating, rape, and murder of the woman whom Eric loves, even beyond the grave.
