1. Happy Halloween! I love Halloween; the day of horror, macabre, the spooky and gothic.
2. For Halloween, I think it’s healthy to have this particular day to contemplate the darkness, the evil, the veil of life and death (not too closely or too realistically, of course). It’s the day of horror, the day of the grim spectre. It is the Inferno to tomorrow’s Paradiso, the descent before the ascent. I never seem to have the time or clarity to make that really work out for myself, but that seems to me the ideal structure for this particular mini-triduum.
3. Movie night last week was The Crow, a gorgeously gothic comic book movie starring Brandon Lee (who tragically was killed in an on-set accident), Ernie Hudson, and the inimitable Michael Wincott.
The story revolves around a rock star named Eric Draven, who is brutally murdered, along with his fiancee, on Devil’s Night – the night before Halloween – in a gang hit. A year later, he rises from the grave to take revenge on the men who murdered his beloved, guided by an ominous crow. Meanwhile, some of the people who knew him in life – the cop who investigated the murder and a young girl the couple semi-adopted – try to connect with him.
It’s a really good movie, beautifully stylish, brutally violent, and with a solid script anchored by strong characters. Draven’s reactions to being dead, ranging from single-minded vengeance to tentatively attempting closure with people from his life to bleak humor (“I said move and you’re dead!” “And I say I’m dead…and I move!”) are all excellent, balancing the line between showing him as an unstoppable horror and the good man he used to be. Brandon Lee has wonderful charisma and screen presence, and we can only lament that he never got to headline more films after this. The unintentional subtext of a story of a young man tragically cut down in his prime adds considerable weight to a film that’s already dripping with atmosphere.
He’s supported by a great cast of talented 90s character actors: Ernie Hudson, Michael Wincott (who is equal parts hammy and creepy), Bai Ling, and the great Tony Todd are the kind of cast that I’d watch in pretty much anything. I also appreciate the symmetry of Wincott and Ling as a dark reflection of Draven and his girlfriend, only where the latter was a wholesome relationship of true love that spreads and brightens their lives and the lives around them, the former is a twisted and incestuous connection that destroys everything around it.
4. Incidentally, what happened to movie gangsters? Bad guys these days feel very tame and limp compared the kind of utter psychos you got in films of the 80s and 90s; the kind of bad guys who hold absolutely nothing back, cross every line imaginable, and are utterly unpredictable to the point of feeling demonic. I feel like you almost never get villains like that anymore, unless it’s in some indie film.
(I also appreciate the bit where Wincott stabs one of his underlings through the neck with a sword, then gets impatient and shoots him when he doesn’t die immediately. It’s both darkly funny and sets a precedent for an element in the climax).
5. I really could talk at length about the film; it’s not perfect, but it is an excellent genre film.
Watching it also drove home just how trite and tame most films today tend to be. Here’s a movie that doesn’t hold back on anything and that really feels nothing like any of its contemporaries, coupled with a solid story structure.
6. The film is also surprisingly erudite (something else we’ve lost), quoting Thackeray and Milton at different points: “Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is.”
7. Re-posting this again
Serpent's Den 
I’m always struck by how obvious it is that Star Trek, the original series, was written by people familiar with (and maybe even written in) the classic theatrical tradition. The dramatic structure of the themes of each episode, the way so many scenes resemble something out of a play, the occasional attempts to reference Stoic and Platonic philosophy without letting on that it’s a reference… Anyone familiar with the source material behind the source material would recognise it easily enough (if perhaps begrudgingly at the time), underneath the mainstreaming of science fiction campiness.
There’s a fundamental difference between schlock and camp written by people who at least have read real literature and know history, and schlock and camp written by people who’ve only consumed schlock and camp. It feels as though we (America or her institutions, really) crossed some kind of invisible line between the two, collectively, at some point between our parents’ time and now. Which itself is an odd thing, because the institutions to do the educating are still here, the businesses that employ people to do the entertaining are still here, and – even if only in pockets of the better end of homeschool or religious culture – the audience for the classics is still here… What exactly changed that that line was crossed as far as the default of society goes?
I’m somewhat skeptical of purely cultural explanations, as opposed to structural ones (for instance, what’s the business strategy of the film industry then vs now, and why), when it comes to changes in society as a whole; culture doesn’t just disappear all on its own any more than real, substantive culture just emerges spontaneously in any timeframe short enough to see it happening. Still, it does not escape my notice that society used to be OK with “high culture”, with upper class people trying to model values and aesthetics in general for the rest of us, whereas now so many people – whole institutions even – celebrate “low culture”, pop trash and the right to not give two dams about appearance or good taste, etc. and that our upper class now is mostly a fancier and more expensive version of low tastes, that we elevate as our new role models uncouth celebrities who don’t set any good example.
(I realize I sound like the classic trope of old money, or someone who used to admire old money, complaining about the nouveau riche, which is a story as old as moderns can remember – not that that’s actually that far back. But I’m less concerned with the money than with the societal pattern.)
Anyhow, to tie it back to the theme, living in 21st Century America is like living in the ghost of a society somehow recently deceased that somehow is still up around and walking, undead.
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Fun fact for anyone listening in! A “dam” is (or was?) the Indian equivalent of a penny.
The original phrase is to “not care twopence”. During the colonial period, the British soldiers having been stationed in India preferred to “not care three dams” or “not care a dam”. This eventually switched to “not give a dam”, and somewhere along the line the “dam” that had been brought back to people who had never encountered Indian society was conflated with “damn” the curse (a reference to damnation). But technically, to “not give a dam” is not cursing – not if you know what it actually means, anyhow.
Of course, if you want to sound British you can just keep saying “I don’t care twopence.”
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