{"id":422,"date":"2010-04-12T12:06:06","date_gmt":"2010-04-12T16:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinemacrazed.wordpress.com\/?p=422"},"modified":"2010-04-12T12:06:06","modified_gmt":"2010-04-12T16:06:06","slug":"victims-arent-we-all-part-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/12\/victims-arent-we-all-part-three\/","title":{"rendered":"Victims. Aren't We All? Part Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unlike the film, Eric and Shelly are stranded on the side of the road after celebrating their engagement and happen across T-Bird and his cronies who basically taunt Eric. Knowing his fate he makes Shelly lock herself up in their car, and he is shot in the head twice in spite of humiliating himself and begging the guys to leave them alone. About to die he is forced to watch as Shelly is torn from the car and gang raped by each of them very slowly. She then has her face stomped in after she screams, and is also shot in the head. To make things all the more disgusting, Tin Tin proceeds to continue raping Shelly even with half of her head missing. To add pure insult to injury the surgeons who take Eric in make jokes at his expense while trying to bring him back to life on the surgery table. Shelly has long been dead and Eric survives only to live a brief moment as a vegetable forced to endure jokes and mocks from surgeons unwilling to sympathize with his pain. Speaking as someone who knows what it’s like to have loved deeply and lost greatly, “The Crow” manages to speak to someone like me.<\/p>\n

Sure now it’s become some sort of bad “Hot Topic” clich\u00e9, but if you can get past all of the poseurs, you’ll find a really touching and heart wrenching tale that can speak to anyone who has lost a child, or a mother, or a lover. O’Barr puts greater emphasis on the relationship between Eric and Shelly than he does on the carnage wreaked by Eric a la the Crow. Their bond is touching most times and Shelly is a sympathetic character who gets it horribly for no real reason. When we do follow Eric he’s basically a shell of his former self, a puppet for the crow to carry out his own misdeeds and desires. He’s pure evil incarnate taking his time in breaking down these monsters and murdering them miserably. During the course of the graphic novel he’s often asked if he’s a demon, but it’s not that easy. Was Eric always this demonic? Or is he simply a product of the brutality given to him by his murderers years before? Of course Eric is not all bad.<\/p>\n

\"\"In the course of the story he manages to befriend a cat named Gabriel he keeps as a gift to Shelly on their anniversary she’s sadly not able to join in on, and he comes across a lost soul named Sherri whose mother is found with Tin Tin before Eric sends him off to die. The exchanges between Eric and Sherri is absolutely heartbreaking as she’s just as much a wandering spirit as he is, a small child begging for love and attention and finds it in a man who is long dead and takes pity on her after clearly failing to wake her mother up. Even after watching this dead man destroy Tin Tin and send him home running she just is not smart enough to realize that she has to show Sherri some love.<\/p>\n

In spite of being able to accomplish much, Eric ultimately fails as well. It becomes evident upon their second meeting that not even he can help her and he may know all too well what her future will entail and he can do nothing about it. Maybe his meeting with her changes her life. Maybe it doesn’t and she’s doomed to be sucked in to the abyss of the city with the murderers and drug dealers. For me this character is a sign of O’Barr saying to the readers “Sometimes there’s just nothing either of us can do to change things, and not even I could change things for my loved ones.” In the end the ultimate bleak message behind “The Crow” is that even though sometimes you can fix things in small portions, you can’t drastically affect the environment either.<\/p>\n

Evil is evil no matter what either of us can do, and fate will play out the way it’s supposed to. This is O’Barr’s echoing sentiment. Nevertheless the character of Sherri eventually became Sarah in the film; another lost soul searching for guidance and love and only finds it when Eric returns from the grave. Unlike the comics, Sarah had a special relationship with Eric and Shelly possessing likely the only stable friendship in her life, and Eric is able to change Sarah’s mother after witnessing him kill Tin Tin and sap the morphine from her veins in front of her eyes.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile in the comic books you can sense O’Barr begging for some form of answer to his burning questions. Eric must console Sherri and he tells her “Someday all things will be fair and there will be wonderful surprises.” Which to me sounds like O’Barr is screaming “I don’t know if there is a heaven, but there must be something more than this shit we call life. There must be somewhere where good souls who died horrible deaths get repaid in full. There just has to be.” With that you tend to feel bad for the man whose own work is a plea for something more than this suffering and pain and misery and torment. There has to be something out there more than living through so much loss. And with Brandon’s death, I’m sure many people were asking the same thing. Why? Why is this it? There must be something else out there where Brandon is happy and living a life where his dreams and wishes are fulfilled.<\/p>\n

As for Officer Albrecht who plays a large role in the film, here he is only a minor character who tries to stop Eric after he kills Gideon but is spared and merely plays the messenger to the police and the chief of police Captain Hook. Like everyone, his reaction to Eric’s invincibility and anarchic glee frightens him to the point where he goes from ordering him to put his weapons down to begging in a low whisper. What I would have liked to see in the feature film that was explored in the graphic novel are the cats. In the graphic novel whenever Eric walks around he’s followed by an eerie group of cats following him around which signals his presence. In the film there’s not really any indication of that character trait. In the end there’s no real explanation of what happened to Eric. Did he go to heaven? Did his acts earn him a trip to hell? Is he just a lone spirit doomed to wander the Earth? Or did he find his peace with Shelly in the after life? That’s considerably ambiguous as Eric arrives at his cemetery which then cuts to a statue looming over the cemetery that is kneeling down and crying. What this symbolizes is left for us to interpret.<\/p>\n

Either way O’Barr doesn’t answer any questions about what is after death, so he doesn’t really seek to give us a definite resolution. When asked the question of which I prefer, I don’t know whether I like the graphic novel better than the movie or vice versa. They’re both rather excellent and both men behind the creative property do rather fantastically with this material. They just have to be appreciated on their own terms as their own entities. While the film does get the point of the graphic novel and enlists many of the plot points and characters, it’s not an exact adaptation to be honest. So, I think they’re both stellar in their right and the pair carry their own messages about loss and death and incidentally are their own tributes to someone taken too soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unlike the film, Eric and Shelly are stranded on the side of the road after celebrating their engagement and happen across T-Bird and his cronies who basically taunt Eric. Knowing his fate he makes Shelly lock herself up in their car, and he is shot in the head twice in spite of humiliating himself and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[58,155,221,420,477,637,922,1055,1087],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pcthugs","tag-action","tag-brandon-lee","tag-comic-book","tag-gothic","tag-horror","tag-masterpiece","tag-sequel","tag-the-crow","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}