A Film Canon

It makes sense that one of the greatest Goth films should be directed as a music video, since the best Goth music videos were already nascent films, attempts to visualize and narrativize the murky, lurid perspective from beyond the grave. What makes The Crow so memorable is that this perspective is not merely celebrated as an index of morbidiy, but of sentimentality - a reminder that Goth subculture, like Gothic literature, is all about insisting on the existence of sensibility, and the redemptive effeminacy that it brings: "Mother is the name for God on the lips of all children." As a result, Alex Proyas' vision of latter-day Detroit brims with an almost unbearable lugubriosity, as every liquid gathers into the trembling, crystalline tear that brings Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) back from the grave to avenge the rape and murder of his Hallmark girlfriend. For the most part, Draven is accompanied by a daemonic crow - Goth accoutrement as perceptual accessory - and their shared, mobile, monocular vision is what specifies Proyas' extraordinary cityscape as the Goth fantasy of what it means to live in a metropolis. This is a city inhabited exclusively by policemen and musicians - Draven's calling card is sending out sheets of feedback, surfeits of sensibility, from the top of his building -  in which everything is shot through with musical flourish, continually taking place against a real or imagined soundtrack. In the future, the film seems to suggest, technocracies will spontaneously and epiphytically spring out from the few remaining pieces of (American) Gothic architecture, in a kind of architectural corollary to the musical migration from Goth to Industrial that was happening about this time - it's the motor city, after all - or, alternatively, the Americanisation of what had always been a distinctively British subculture.  What's striking, then, is that morbidity proves to be less resilient than sensibility - and, without the morbidity, Goth is presented largely as an over-identification with the norm, a desire to be normal that's so desperate and hallucinatory that it denatures normality. As Draven's face-paint might suggest, it's about white people desperate to pass for white, or a reminder that all skulls are white - and it's the absurdity of this gesture that gives the film, and Goth itself, its wry, mildly self-deprecating sense of humor. For all the comedy, though, it's a sublime tribute to "how awful goodness is" - emphasis on the awful - and has dated better than any dystopia since Blade Runner, largely because Alex Proyas' painstaking collage of real footage, CGI and scale models, composite of artificiality and virtuality, and conflation of comic book and computer game, elegantly inflects Goth through cyberpunk's tendency to pre-empt and forestall datedness.