The un-fridging of Shelly

Warning: The following post contains spoilers for The Crow (2024).

Alex Proyas' The Crow, now 30 years old, may be dated in some respects, a fact I discovered when I watched it earlier this year for the first time in about a decade. (Of course, I also managed to retain a good 80 percent of my original affection for it. That's how these things tend to work.)

But the single element that dates it the most is its status as a textbook example of the woman who gets "fridged," who therefore spurs her vengeful lover (or in some cases, father) to kill anyone he can get his hands on.

If you are somehow not familiar with this concept, here is what Google's AI has to say about it:

"Fridging is a literary trope in which a character exists for the sole purpose of being killed, assaulted, or otherwise harmed in order to serve as an inciting incident that motivates another character's journey. Fridging is most common with female characters, but male characters can be 'fridged' too."

This was clearly the sole purpose of Shelly, Eric Draven's girlfriend in the original The Crow, who is seen only in flashback after her death at the hands of murderous creeps (who also rape her). There may be a very brief scene of her death in real time -- I can't be sure, even though I've seen this movie at least five times, and as recently as five months ago -- but if there is, it's brief indeed. She does actually get a last name, Webster, which is more than I thought they gave her when I went to look it up on IMDB. However, I had never had occasion to look up the name of the actress before. That's how little Sofia Shinas is in the movie -- just long enough for us to appreciate that she and Eric had the sort of intimacy that was passionate and fun, which is screenwriter shorthand that allows us to feel the pain of her demise despite getting to know her not at all.

This was not a complaint of mine about The Crow when I saw it. We did not yet know, then, that fridging was bad. In fact, we did not yet know what fridging was. If I have a complaint about that now, it's primarily because I know I'm supposed to think it's bad. 

Look, it's not that I exactly love the idea of a female character whose only purpose is to drive our hero to revenge. It's not great agency and it's not great representation, and it's as one-dimensional a use of a female character as another trope we've learned about since The Crow, the manic pixie dream girl, who exists only to jolt the protagonist out of his spiritual malaise and awaken his passion for life and capacity for love. 

But I am also a romantic, and I do consider a person seeking revenge for the death of his beloved to be pretty romantic. 

Anyway, Rupert Sanders' remake of The Crow knows that this cannot be the only dimension of Shelly Webster in 2024, any more than Shelly can exist only to be saved, or only to put on a quirky hat and dance in the rain.

The 2024 Shelly -- who gets no last name on IMDB this time, but then again, neither does he -- is played by FKA Twigs. Or that might actually be FKA twigs. I can't tell you how close I once came to writing a post called "Who or what is an FKA twigs," but saved myself at the last moment from seeming as old as that would have made me seem. In trying to remember her name a few days ago, though, I said to myself "It was something like Twirl Forks." I got most of the relevant consonants in there, with a few extra.

Anyway, Twigs has been around long enough for me to probably know who she is, but I've just missed crossing paths with her. She's only been in one other movie that I've seen, Shia LaBeouf's Honey Boy, though she's only credited as "Shy girl" there, so probably not someone I would have taken note of.

I don't think it's relevant that Twigs is more famous than Sofia Shinas was when she appeared, oh so briefly, in the original Crow, in terms of determining how much more screen time she gets. I just think it's a different time. And though you can't escape that her character has a fridging aspect to it, it's as unfridgelike of a fridging as you will see, especially when we really get into spoilers.

For starters, we meet her before we meet Eric (Bill Skarsgard), which itself is a significant change from the original in terms of determining whose story this might be. I mean, it's still Eric's -- he's the Crow and he's the one who is going to be around for most of the movie. But we learn from the start that she knows something that's going to get her killed, based on a video that her friend sent to her, and she needs to go on the run. And while she's on the run, she literally runs into a cop, dumps a bunch of pills on the sidewalk from the sheer force of the collision, and is summarily sent off to jail.

She gets rehab instead of prison, and there she meets Eric. And she and Eric exchange moony eyes there. They also eventually escape rehab, a sort of spur-of-the-moment decision that occurs out of desperation, when Shelly spots some bad people coming to see her, people she knows are connected to the video and also had her friend killed. So then there is also a section of the film when they are hanging out in a crash pad, further establishing their budding soul connection as they do some drugs and smoke some cigarettes and develop a relationship we are invested in.

And so it is that I checked the clock, and she is not killed -- suffocated with a bag around her face, as is Eric -- until the 35-minute mark of the movie. That's significant improvement on the offenses usually associated with a fridging. 

I have to say, though, that the useful thing about a fridging from a screenwriting perspective is that it's efficient. The screenwriter has a whole raft of ideas of what to do with the hero and his adversaries that occur only after he's resorted to vigilantism. The fridging is the necessary evil that gets us there, that makes us believe -- nearly instantly -- that any righteous revenge he exacts will be fully justified.

I did like the way we see this relationship form between Shelly and Eric in the new movie, but I don't know that it actually made me believe more in the righteousness of Eric's revenge. In fact, it's possible it made me believe less, and maybe that's a good thing even though it is probably not what they intended. When we don't really know someone, it is easy to believe that they are perfect, and we don't need to have spent 15 or 20 minutes getting sick of how perfect they might be and starting to disbelieve it. We just have the same idealized memory of perfection that the protagonist has.

This Shelly is far from perfect. In fact, she's done something that she believes will be disqualifying of Eric's love, so she has not told him what it is. (When we find out, it's something sort of silly that's related to the movie's main antagonist, played by Danny Huston, which is a big deviation from the original Crow and is one of the film's more puzzling and unsuccessful attempts at forging its own distinct identity.) So though we do know her now more as a person, we are maybe less inclined to believe that the death of this particular person could be the sort of heightened tragedy of a typical fridging scenario. Probably the right thing, I suppose, but a bit less primal in terms of the feelings we're supposed to be feeling in a movie like this.

Twigs continues to appear in one choice I did like in this movie, where her body is seen sinking through water toward the murky depths from which there is no return, and his is still buoyant enough to be between worlds. He'll swim down to try to reach her, but knows he cannot go too far or he can never return to complete the unfinished business in front of him. 

But then we start to learn about the ultimate un-fridging, which is that there is a chance to save Shelly.

Now, male heroes are not supposed to save their female love interests in 2024, either. But I suppose if the character is technically dead, the movie might get a pass. You can't have very much agency when you are already dead. 

But once the notion is introduced that it might be possible to save Shelly, well of course that's going to happen, just as sure as Chekov's gun is going to go off. I didn't really believe it, possibly because there was no saving the original Shelly, but indeed, Eric pulls off some kind of soul switch -- a deal he made in the process of trying to kill all the other people who had been in some way responsible for their deaths -- and she awakens, gasping for breath in the apartment where she was plastic bagged, as paramedics attend to her and Eric lies dead next to her. 

(The most fun part about this The Crow, though, is the scene at an opera that involves all those deaths, of seemingly 20 men in tuxedos with guns, many of whom buy it in fashions that are gruesome enough that I never thought this movie was going to go there. Never mind that no one in the opera can hear about six dozen gun shots occurring just outside where they are sitting.)

I suppose it was inevitable that the only way to fully un-fridge a character is not to have her end up being dead at all. If this movie had had the courage of its convictions, Eric's revenge would have been enough, would have allowed Shelly's soul to rest in peace over the carnage of a million bad guys. (You can sense some ambivalence in the snideness of this remark.)

But it's 2024, and all refrigerators are now going to be slapped with tariffs. The tariff for remaking The Crow in 2024 is that in the end, there is no one to avenge at all. 

July 26th is Crow Day

Because I happen to keep track of things that most people would consider useless -- like the dates when I rewatched movies -- I know that my last two viewings of Alex Proyas' The Crow were exactly 11 years apart.

To the day. 

When I watched the movie on July 26th, 2013, it was one of a handful I watched just after the rest of my family -- which was only two at that point -- left to go to Australia as the first stage of our move. I stayed back in Los Angeles for another three+ weeks to finish up at work, visit a friend in Chicago, say goodbye to LA friends and close up the house.

I don't specifically think the absence of others -- at that point it would have only been my wife who would be a meaningful factor, since my older so was not yet three -- was what gave me the go-ahead to watch The Crow, though I do think it's sort of a guilty pleasure. (And to confirm that notion, my wife actually sort of chuckled when she saw that I was watching it this past Friday night.) I think it just struck me as something I hadn't seen in a while and was eager to revisit, so I did, because I had no one else's viewing priorities to consider but my own.

Watching it Friday night -- July 26th, 2024 -- was an intended precursor to the release of the remake, which is scheduled for August 22nd here in Australia. 

The fact that both happened to come on July 26th was, of course, just one of those coincidences I love. 

The Crow was a movie I loved in my 20s. It was released in May 1994, so I would have seen it just a few months before I turned 21, when I was very susceptible to its angst and a couple other things we aren't so sold on these days (such as the woman who gets "fridged," thereby creating the seed for vengeance in our protagonist. It just so happens that in this case, he got fridged too, but was able to come back from that, at least temporarily.) I then watched it two or three more times in the 1990s. 

When I watched it in 2013, I started out feeling a bit wobbly toward it, then came around to the old feelings by the end.

I'd say it is continuing to hold up less and less well, as I found myself nitpicking this time. For example, how is it that Eric Draven returns from the dead a year after he was killed, and upon entering his old apartment, finds it in the exact same condition as it was on the night he was killed, including the yellow police tape? When both occupants of an apartment die, don't you clear out their stuff and rent it to someone else -- especially an awesome penthouse loft like this one?

Another undeniable factor in this viewing: Stan, the streaming service on which I watched it, was playing up. The copy wasn't very crisp to begin with, but the stream was also doing this thing -- not super often, but at least once every five minutes -- where it would loop back about a second of images on the screen to play them a second time, and then race forward to catch up with the dialogue. A minor but undeniable annoyance.

There's no doubt The Crow will always be a sentimental favorite, and will always carry extra poignancy for me due to the circumstances of Brandon Lee's death on the set, right at a time when he was coming into his own as a performer capable of some nuance. But my 2013 viewing had been a positive enough experience that it had crept all the way up to #156 on my Flickchart, and that is obviously too high for this movie.

Would I have been better off not having watched it at all and kept the feeling that it could be my 156th favorite movie of all time?

It's the age-old question, but I think the answer is no. In order to really be one of your favorites, a movie has to live and grow with you, and stand the test of time. If it's not going to, I suppose any day is as good a day to know that as any other.

Bill Skarsgard seems like a good Crow

I go through long periods of neglect of my ReelGood email account, such that I sometimes come back after a month and discover I've missed invites to ten screenings I might have otherwise liked to attend. These are inexcusable lapses in doing my due diligence as the editor of the site, but I have an excuse that's even less excusable: I just don't remember to check. 

Yesterday I checked, though, and one of the emails hyping an upcoming movie was about the remake of Alex Proyas' The Crow, which I vaguely remembered was a thing but had not thought about in ages. As it is releasing in a couple months, it happens to be timed -- or maybe was intentionally timed -- to the 30-year anniversary of the original, which was of course overshadowed by the on-set death of Brandon Lee.

The original film had huge significance for me in 1994, when I was 20 turning 21, and when I was transported by its triumvirate of primary strengths: the soundtrack, the action sequences and the overriding sense of melancholy, which exudes from the themes of the movie itself, and then is expanded exponentially by Lee's death of a gunshot wound from a prop gun.

I'd ordinarily bristle at the idea of remaking it, or maybe more accurately, of re-adapting the comic on which it was based. I know Alex Proyas bristles at that idea. And I think this was one of the reasons, other than its incredibly poor quality, that I disliked The Crow: City of Angels as much as I did.

But the casting of Bill Skarsgard gives me hope.

The trick Lee pulled off in the original film was to be both sympathetic and a little -- or maybe a lot -- insane. That describes Skarsgard's cinematic attributes to a T.

In fact, I would go so far as to describe Skarsgard as one of the top two creepy weirdos introduced to us in the last five to ten years, alongside Barry Keoghan. 

Surely this impression was cemented by his role as Pennywise the Clown in It and its sequel. Whatever you ultimately thought about those films, it is inconceivable to me that you weren't scared as fuck by Skarsgard. He is so demented, so sinister, and so giving his all that, if I remember correctly, you see involuntary ropes of spittle emanating from him on multiple occasions. Many actors play evil. In these movies, Skarsgard was evil.

The thing is, this is not Skarsgard's only mode. Not by a longshot.

One of the great fakeouts (SPOILER ALERT) about 2022's Barbarian was the fact that Skarsgard is not the creep. Oh, he seems like he would be/will be, and they are milking our preconceived notions of the actor for everything they're worth. But as we are watching this charming man be charming and kind, and just waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then realizing it isn't going to drop and we are just watching a charming man be charming and kind, it serves as a revelation about this actor and the things of which he is capable.

Well, I think he will get to use both modes in The Crow. At some point in this movie, Skarsgard will make you feel the pain of what has been taken from him, and then in the next moment do something with his eyes that will make you want to go run and hide in the corner. 

Another bit of hopefulness: Danny Huston is also in the cast, presumably as a villain. There's something alien in his aloofness, too, and I think the movie could use this to good effect.

Then again, The Crow is also directed by Rupert Sanders of Ghost in the Shell remake fame, which takes away a little of my hope.

Please drag Sanders, and this movie, to the finish line, won't you Bill?

The words of a ghost

It took until the very final moments of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky for me to sit bolt upright in my seat and get some real resonance from the film. It was not a resonance I could immediately place, though, making it all the more ethereal.

It’s some words spoken by the writer of the book on which the movie was based, who functions as the narrator in the film, though he only has about three short sections of “narration,” two of which are right near the start. That’s Paul Bowles. His last lines of the film, the last lines of the film, are:

“Because we don't know when we’re going to die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

For Bowles, they were particularly limited due to his already advanced age, as he was 80 when the movie was released. He did live nine more years, dying 50 years after the release of his book, and in that time I hope he watched the full moon rise as much as he could.

But the basic profundity of his words were not what struck me. Immediately I knew I had heard them before.

I raced to the internet to google them, thinking they must be from a movie. I mean, many of my references are from movies. Sure, I could have read the words somewhere, but I specifically remember them spoken, in a context I found very poignant. I doubt that happened in a TV show; even less likely, on stage.

So I googled them and got references to The Sheltering Sky, of course, and then references to some random interview with Brandon Lee –

Wait, that’s it. Brandon Lee.

I watched the little 24-second clip, which was from the last interview of Bruce’s son, the star of The Crow and a few (a depressingly few) other films. Lee had committed Bowles’ words to memory, and for some reason saw fit to produce them in this interview, almost as though he had a premonition of his own death.

This is where I’d seen Bowles’ memorable quotation. I’d watched Brandon Lee’s last interview on my Crow DVD. Or actually, at that time, it would have been my Crow VHS. I never got it on DVD.

They’d certainly seemed poignant to me at the time, which is why I remembered them. But it was likely more than 20 years since I last heard them, and of course did not remember their source, which was a movie that had only just come out three years previous at the time Lee invoked them. He might have gotten them from the book, but he references the movie in the clip. And it was a movie I’d picked up at the library for no other reason than that I was familiar with the title and remember it getting some awards buzz 30 years ago. I didn’t even know what it was about, and in fact, I tried to watch two other films on my DVD player first, landing on this one due to technical difficulties with the others that are too boring to get into now.

The thing is, The Sheltering Sky does not really seem to be about that quotation, per se – it doesn’t seem like a final encapsulation of the themes we’ve just been absorbing. The movie is about travellers seeking transcendent experiences, which was what Bowles was doing, which caused him to settle in Tangier for the remainder of his days. But it is not specifically sentimental about the finite quantity of life’s experiences, even as it deals with death and danger and great transformation. In fact, though I did like the movie, I think Bowles’ words would have fallen on deaf ears for me at that point, had I not drawn them up from the distant recesses of my own memory.

And so on a random night in February of 2020 I had occasion to again mourn Brandon Lee, who died on a random night in March of 1993. The point is, it’s all random, and we don’t know what things we should be appreciating because they may be the last times we do them.

Another reminder that we should live our lives to the fullest – I’d say a timely reminder, but we never have any idea how timely it may be.