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.
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