“The Crow is a 1994 American superhero film directed by Alex Proyas, written by David J. Schow and John Shirley.The film stars Brandon Lee in his final film appearance. The film is based on James O'Barr's comic book of the same name, and tells the story of Eric Draven (Lee), a rock musician who is revived to avenge the rape and murder of his fiancée, as well as his own death.” (imdb)
This is the whole film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9kX3ADKzIc
There were a series of “Crow” movies, though the sequels never equalled the original. Here’s a trailer so you can get a notion without watching the whole thing. There are elements of Batman, the Joker, and the Raven Cycle of “Broken Boys.” This is a serious, lasting trope.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5uPZ7ocsqA
I would argue that the socio-economic forces that created this set of imagery and values comes from several sources. In my youth these boys would be in the military — some getting the draft out of the way, some because a judge advised them it was either jail or the service, some in order to escape a painful home, and some because they had no home or were ejected — often from a home that had no father or a demon father.
Humans are always working from a biological base. Our evolution from our past is never complete and if we go far enough back, we are not just animals, but also inhuman. Domestic animals always produce too many males. In most places they are eaten, maybe castrated first. In some places and times males are separated from females and shot at the edge of mass graves. Don’t think about it. The corvids — crows and ravens, even magpies — would say that exceptional males must make their own way in an unjust world. Being “gay” might be a way of being exceptional.
In the decaying old industrial cities and in the hills where there used to be coal mines, boys find their ways to niches of ruins and do whatever they must to stay alive, even if they must take drugs to tolerate it. Suicide is rational. The crows and dogs hang around to see if there might be something for them, even if it’s carrion. That’s my darkest take on this trope and not at all attuned to the times when even teddy bears are assumed to have feelings and to love.
“When the Legends Die,” by Hal Borland, which I have read out loud to classes maybe a half-dozen times, was about such a boy — he had a grizzly bear as his companion. His problem was rage, anger so hot it would make matches flare into fire at ten feet away. He rode killer broncs to death. They made a movie of it, but it’s not a patch on the book.
Borland was not an “Indian” nor was he broken, but his Wikipedia is worth reading. His pseudonym when he wrote Westerns was Ward West but he was not a cowboy. Some have a theory of fiction is that it can only be written by the fictional characters portrayed, which is impossible. I don’t know how Borland wrote such a powerful book that spoke to this kind of boy, but he was a journalist, a naturalist, and a good observer. Maybe there’s a bit of this in every boy and even some girls.
Decades ago when I was teaching on the rez, there was a boy too fierce and full of transgressions. He ended up in the pen for a decade. His favorite movie was “The Crow” so I watched it several times. (He also liked vampire movies.) It’s the trope, a whole syndrome about the wronged person who finds incredible powers and pursues a cross between revenge and justice. The result depends upon the skills of the writer or cinematographer or superhero cartoonist. Some are moving, nearly Shakespearean. I’d hoped this boy would write his story.
There are boys actually living out these stories. If their lives are reported, we hardly know whether to believe them. (“We” being middle-class educated people.) For the most part they try to stay secret, partly because they are doing illegal things or — like sexwork — at least things that society pretends to frown on, even as they look for the next dangerous hero. The scent of these boys-to-men, often like smoke, brings predators on their trail, hoping to get inside their boundaries.
They are necessarily narcissists which naturally attracts people who want to cross that boundary, to get inside. Maybe they are looking for love or maybe for control or maybe they can’t tell the difference. This shrink jargon slips around inside Arthurian plots or maybe it’s “Game of Thrones” or maybe it’s just Harry Potter again. It’s not just an alternative world like “Dungeons and Dragons”, but also a particular shared paradigm of what life is about.
This includes the belief in unseen lives of a mystical nature, which means that either it has a lot to do with the way we interpret Christianity these days, or else Christianity is at the back of these stories in the first place. Whether it is “true” or not in the sense of take-it-to-court facts or in the sense of faith declarations has nothing to do with the validity of the construct.
But there ARE other ways of looking at life. Name three. Um. The early European nature-based systems that the Romans over-ran. The Buddhist interpretation of a system of recurring life which finally transcends. And the newest understanding of how everything is code: atoms and molecules, viruses and bacteria, reptiles and mammals, corvids and all those other birds, elements and isotopes. And everything is in motion. Part of what keeps it moving is this vital but often hidden trope.
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