The Crow: City of Angels

(Tim Pope, USA, 1996)

I like to get my “shocks of the new” (as art historian Robert Hughes called them) wherever I can find them – and, preferably, when I least expect them. One day, I stumbled across a statement by filmmaker-critic Olivier Assayas that summed up the spirit of what I like in the new and the modern. “The whole point is that the world is constantly changing, and that as an artist one must always invent new devices, new tools, to describe new feelings, new situations”. He added: “If we don’t invent our own values, our own syntax, we will fail at describing our own world”.

Those are stirring, heroic words. But they do not only express Assayas’ particular posture of heroism; he is speaking for the whole ethos, the heroic impetus behind just about every movement of 20th century Modernism in the arts. It is heroic to want to say something new, express something new, in a new language … as difficult and fraught as that goal is always going to be.

So, in search of some modern experience, one fine day, I finally relented to the tide of history and hooked myself up to the Internet. And, at about the same time, I saw The Crow: City of Angels, the sequel to that strange film, Alex Proyas’ The Crow (1994).

Not all these experiences were as modern and shockingly new as I wanted them to be. With the Internet, I started surfing around trying to find interesting discussion groups devoted to film. It was a pretty rude and depressing experience. There are many, very well-populated discussion groups on the Net, basically providing people with an outlet to express their most pinched, closed-minded and nerdish ideas about movies. I kept reading that such-and-such a movie – usually some movie I adore – was just no good, did not make sense, had continuity errors, was stupid, pretentious, blablabla.

Movies that take risks, all those “incredibly strange movies” (with reference to a RE/Search publication of 1986) that are unusual hybrids of topics and genres – many of which I choose to champion – were chalked down on these chat sites as just bad, bad movies. And modern movies of any persuasion – experimental movies or simply art movies – did not even seem to exist for many of these self-appointed cine-fans. I am afraid it amounts to the Revenge of the Nerds on Modernism and all of its fond heroes and heroines – maybe even a revenge on the very ideal of Art itself, particularly Film Art.

I am sure that not all the film talk is like this on the big, crazy Internet, and I am certain to find a few, flowering pockets of resistance in there somewhere, one day. But I found one thing that really annoyed me; it was a rude and disconcerting experience. I was scanning the discussion in a particular group for screenwriters. I had managed to forget, for a precious while, all those scriptwriting manuals in the bookstores, preaching models for how to write a good, successful script within rigidly conventional guidelines. I hate these books, almost down to the last one – unless they’re wild and free volumes genuinely devoted to alternative methods or breaking the rules, something subversive and inspiring.

On the Net, you get, in one great vomitous rush, every scriptwriting manual model condensed into a big gooey lump, and screenwriters are trying to ram it down your throat over and over. Let me quickly condense this sorry history for you. In the 1980s, how-to-write-a-script books by people such as Syd Field and Linda Seger became (very) popular. These books preached rules and models of craft, of narrative construction. The three-act structure, narrative drive, the role of a central conflict, the actions and motivations of the hero, character arcs and the correct placement of key plot points, revelations and resolutions … if you have ever dabbled in screenwriting, you probably know this hokey lingo well. Later, another layer was poured on top of all this craft advice. It came from Christopher Vogler, who preached that our favourite narrative models are in fact timeless mythic structures – ones that Joseph Campbell has apparently illuminated once and for all. It’s a travesty of the rich Jungian legacy.

Let me make a very simple observation about all this. To me, there is something obvious that undermines such earnest guff about timeless narrative structures. And it is this: 25 or 30 years ago, before Seger and Vogler and the rest of the crew, we weren’t all talking about “mythic stories” in exactly this way. We were (as a collective consciousness!) in some other space then, eulogising Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), Federico Fellini’s films, Wim Wenders, American road movies, and Luis Buñuel’s surrealist comedies. So, how timeless can these timeless stories be – did we just magically wake up, in a state of divine enlightenment, to their eternal universality?

I think we should have the courage to admit – and this does not have to be a put-down – that all this current screenwriting-formula stuff is a fad, a beat-up, an obsession that clearly responds to some current, desperate, cultural need or crisis. If you look at it like that, it is easier to extract from such how-to advice the fragments, pointers or tools that might work for you personally – that might work today, if not for All Time.

Getting to the core of my problem with the current model-screenplay craze: I am constantly astounded at how much of existing cinema is quite simply ignored, dismissed, left out or swept under the carpet in these unctuous, holistic accounts. Because, in essence, when we talk about these damn three-act, conflict-drive, central-hero, mythic stories, we are talking about Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, George Miller, and almost nothing/nobody else. Well, nobody except the army of poor, deluded imitators of Spielberg, Lucas and Miller – not to mention the paid studio executives, script doctors and lackeys who actually now evaluate projects on the basis of these formulae from the manuals.

What is left out? I’ll get dizzy trying to work out where to begin the comeback list. Left out are Altman and Cronenberg, Kieslowski and Ozu, and approximately a thousand other great names. Left out are stories without a single, central character, and there are plenty of those around; stories that are several or many stories in one; compulsive-repetitive stories, like Martin Scorsese’s films, or Claude Chabrol’s L’Enfer (1994); completely surreal stories that proceed by whimsy, association or contradiction; open-ended stories, suspended tales that are like shimmering “slices of life” that do not necessarily ‘”go anywhere” in the sense of progressing and resolving themselves, like the marvellous Georgia (1995). And all the different kinds of experimental stories - stories that go backwards; stories that are constructed on lists or inventories (like Peter Greenaway’s); deliberately minimal, plotless stories; stories where seven different actors play the main character, like in a Raúl Ruiz film. All those kinds of experiments that, as Australian artist-critic Robert Nery once said, do not shoot you out of the Indiana Jones cannon of narrative drive, but instead invite you to take a narrative drive – a browse, a stroll, or zap around among various features, events, scenery and rooms of a vast and infinite narrative landscape.

There is, however, one book of practical advice by a screenwriter that I think is worth reading. It is Jean-Claude Carrière’s book The Secret Language of Film (Faber and Faber, 1995). Carrière, who worked with Buñuel, Louis Malle and Jacques Tati, says very clearly in this book that a story can be anything. Anything you can tell, relate or narrate that intrigues, holds or captivates is a story. There are absolutely no rules that govern this process. I do not care what Seger and Vogler say about that. I do not care even what Aristotle said about it.

I would like now to contemplate one particular style of filmmaking and film narrative from that long-lost era of the 1980s. These were the years of Spielberg and Lucas, but there were also many other new and disconcerting things emerging in mainstream cinema in that period – like Scorsese, and Spike Lee. Lee’s films have very curious narrative forms. Like all stories, his have plottable graphs of ups and down, highs and lows. But these forms seem modelled on jazz music, or Abstract Expressionist painting, or some stream of modulating energies and intensities. Both Scorsese and Lee found ways to make films that are narrative drives – with long, leisurely sections and then sudden accelerations, plus a few timely crashes. And what they were doing in a high-profile way was reflected in many smaller, more modest films: teen movies, rap musicals, nutty comedies, and action or horror films, all my favourite popular genres.

One particular new strain of popular cinema that came up around this time was what was called, mostly derisively and dismissively, the MTV movie. In other words, films influenced heavily by rock video, and often made by people from that milieu. There are hundreds of fascinating MTV movies from the ‘80s, including Prince’s magnificent Purple Rain (Albert Magnoli, 1984) and John Hughes’ delightfully inventive Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986).

Then, in the ‘90s, along came the Crow movies. [2022 note: Beyond the two I discuss here, the franchise has extended to two further features and a TV series, with a reboot on the way.] Their aesthetic was not blindingly new – in fact, to me, the jarring, frenetic, MTV style was even a bit warm and cosy, like I was revisiting a long-lost friend. But the second Crow movie is still a challenge, or more simply, an affront, to most film reviewers – not only because of its blaring, full-on MTV vibe, but also because of its peculiar (in all senses) narrative form.

Both Crow films proudly adopt the model popularised by the splatter-horror movies of the late 1970s, such as Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) and the Friday the 13th series. They present a serial string of killings – and almost nothing else. Even more specifically, they borrow the revenge-killing structure from movies such as the notorious and indispensable B movie, Meir Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave (1978 [remade 2010 followed by two sequels, with Zarchi’s own, autonomous sequel in 2019]). In that movie, a woman (played by Camille Keaton, Buster’s “second or third cousin”) tracks down and gruesomely kills, one by men, the men who brutally raped her. In The Crow: City of Angels, the hero, Ashe Corven (Vincent Pérez), gets to do the same to the gang of decadent street toughs who murdered his son.

As in the original Crow film, this hero is a phantom avenger, a reincarnated creature who can withstand any bullet, flame or spike, and just get up off the floor and keep murdering. He is a mean, sadistic creature. I would be tempted to call Ashe an anti-hero, if I thought the film and its (mainly) music video director Tim Pope entertained the slightest moral qualm about his actions. In Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) – which City of Angels reminded me of at many points – or Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), there is usually something disquieting or chilling about a male warrior presented as an avenging angel or obsessive killing machine. But not in the Crow movies, no way.

As well as a modern narrative, there is a modern feeling or sensibility proposed by the Crow movies. It is a steely, alienated, very literal feeling – a numb, hypnotic enactment of certain passions and actions, a feeling very close to certain contemporary graphic novels. The Crow franchise in fact derives from one such comic book series by James O’Barr.

The endless killing and dying in City of Angels has a cold, literal edge to it, but everything else on every other layer of the film has an extraordinarily heightened, stylised air. The world of both Crow movies has a fascinating texture. It is that texture of the look, art direction and architecture that kept me interested even when the serial structure of the plot became rather weak and taxing.

This textured world of the Crow films is a heady mixture of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Tim Burton’s Batman entries (1989, 1992) and Francis Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). The dystopian ruins of the future are crossed with ghosts, pageants and rituals from the medieval past. There is also a touch of the grunge aesthetic: that clash of the filthy gutter and an impossible romance associated with stars in the night sky.

The Crow movies are not grunge, however, but Gothic, in a particular mode popularised by music, fashion and comic books. The real world is reduced to an elegant diagram of dark, wind-blown streets, sleazy bars, decadent sex clubs and decaying mansions. The sublime, supernatural realm of spirits, phantom lovers and psychopomps – the realm from which Ashe comes flying – is rendered in the most voluptuous, florid and quasi-religious terms. Our avenging hero leaves his trademark signature at the scene of his murders in ash, in blood, and in rose petals. All the while, a doe-eyed girl (Mia Kirshner from Exotica [1994] as Sarah) follows him about. She could be an ex-junkie or a street urchin, but she is also radiant and pure like an angel. It could almost be Werner Schroeter’s The Rose King (1986)!

Much of City of Angels is pure Goth cornball, and it is not especially convincing or compelling even on that level. But there’s something inherent in this series that I respond to strongly, just as I responded to the A Nightmare on Elm Street films during the ‘80s. In their own modest way, these popular films, tapping into queer wavelengths of modern life and culture, link up for me to that heroic modernist impulse I mentioned at the outset.

This impulse was summed up for me when I read the following words by the American critic Kent Jones: “If the cinema lives, it will be thanks to those directors who violate every norm and cherished notion, who feel their way through their process only to arrive at a moment of revelatory terror, who challenge their viewers to follow them instead of inviting them to sit down and get a massage”. (Not that there’s anything wrong with getting massages!)

The Crow: City of Angels gave me the ephemeral frisson of that heroically terrifying feeling. In its own stuttering, strangled, necessarily compromised voice, it’s struggling to describe a New World.

© Adrian Martin November 1996