It Can't Rain All The Time
Lessons from the Alex Proyas film The Crow (1994) and the Lost episode 'The Constant' (2008)
A. ‘The Constant’ (Episode 5, Season 4 of Lost in 2008). Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof’s script combines several genres: action adventure sequences, military enlistment training, a romance thread, a Jack Sarfatti-like time travel oriented laboratory experiment, and an escalated confrontation on an isolated freighter. The story timeline switches back and forth between 1996 and 2004, as Desmond Hume (Henry Ian Cusick) attempts to make amends with his former lover Penny Widmore (Sonya Walger).
There is a discussion about dissociative fugues as the brain’s attempt to deal with time dislocation experiences. Not referenced in the script is that Arthur Koestler documented such radical subjectivity in real life in the 1950s and the 1960s as part of the Eranos Circle. Peter Moon’s Montauk Project took a different angle on this in the 1990s that directly influenced (in a Background IP sense) Thomas Pynchon’s novel Bleeding Edge (New York: Penguin Press, 2023) and the hit Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-2025). The episode also inspired an Anthrax song called ‘The Constant’ as part of their album Worship Music (2011) in which the classic era singer Joey Belladonna returned to the fold.
Cuse, Lindelof, and episode director Jack Bender play up Hume and Widmore’s reconnecting phone call in the 2004 timeline for its melodramatic worth: Hume’s male ego craves validation and dyadic acceptance. In reality if you try this with someone who has left and clearly rejected you in a “falling up” situation (where you are not their type, you are not good enough for them or have character flaws, and you got together by sheer accident), it is unlikely to work as the episode portrayed. You are more likely to get the dismissive reply “I think you have contacted the wrong person.” Time’s arrow goes only one way. You are now an unwanted ghost to them. Your well intentioned attempt to reconnect will be perceived and treated as a boundary violation. You will never get the positive, emotional, reflective response that Widmore gives Hume in the episode’s closing minutes.
‘The Constant’ in the end portrays wish fulfillment: the delusional belief that a fragment of the original “falling up” situation can survive many years later. In romance psychology this is called a positive illusion: see the 1988 influential paper by Shelley E. Taylor and Jonathan D. Brown that inspired this on-going, cumulative research program. Or as Alice In Chains once noted in “All Secrets Known” that opens the mournful, liturgical When Black Gives Way To Blue (2009): “There’s no going back | To the place | We started from.” Silence can also be metacommunication.
B. The Crow (1994) directed by Alex Proyas and starring Brandon Lee (whose on-set accidental death overshadowed the film’s initial release). This was one film that I didn’t see in the year that I took an unpaid writer / industry liaison position for the now former La Trobe University student newspaper Rabelais. I didn’t see Gettysburg, Speed, or Forrest Gump, either. This film adaptation of the James O’Barr comic series is filled with 1990s film tropes from its MTV influenced visual style to criminogenic narratives that the then Clinton administration legislated in its focus on an urban underclass.
The film opens and its narrative arc deals with Devils Night (arson and pyromania events) which we discover in the second act are orchestrated by crime boss “Top Dollar” (Michael Wincott), who quotes an underclass variation of the Wall Street elite financier Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987) - itself sourced from Drexel Burnham Lambert client and insider trader Ivan Boesky.
Much of the film deals with Eric Draven’s mission (Brandon Lee) to avenge his murdered fiancee Shelly Webster (Sofia Sinas) with the help of Sergeant Albrecht (Ernie Hudson), and to protect Sarah Mohr (Rochelle Davis). This quartet structure (a quintet with “Top Dollar” is from the Christopher Vogler school of scriptwriting. Co-scriptwriter John Shirley was on the cover of one of the final 21C Magazine issues, and we corresponded about The Crow and his other projects in 1998-2001. The rest of the cast are essentially gang members to be dispatched, although Mohr’s drug addicted mother Darla Mohr (Anna Levine) experiences the kind of familial redemption that the criminologist James Q. Wilson would perhaps have espoused (Albrecht’s character arc definitely fits a Wilson critique of then bureaucratic policing and urban crime contagion due to anomie and alienation).
The Draven-Webster romance is idyllic early love that is savagely ended on 30th October when the gang leader “T-Bird” (David Patrick Kelly) leads an assault that kills both victims. A year later when Draven returns in a post-death afterlife (suggestively vampiric) state as The Crow (complete with a familiar), Devils Night is now routine - there is even unauthorised merchandise that “Top Dollar” complains to his medium-like half-sister Myca (Bai Ling) the gang do not get to cash in on. The film - together with its iconic and now very influential soundtrack (and its various in-film band performances) - plays to Goth and Romanticist subcultures that in the mid-1990s were a growing consumer market for morbidly sad Generation Xers. The surface reading of Generation X by others (now both Baby Boomers and the subsequent Millennials / Generation Z cohorts) is of falling into the schema trap of depressive realism. This misperception fails to pierce the eudaimonic core of who Generation X actually is (and was at the time of the film’s initial release). You don’t really know us. We (still) really don’t care, either.
The Crow ultimately is an argument that the emotional transcendence of a Draven-Webster romance (the idyllic early love of courtship, prospective marriage, and starting a family together) will conquer all. Eros will defeat Chaos and Thanatos. Draven as The Crow - with the help of Sergeant Albrecht - is able to harness the Direct Action, Surgical Strike, and Strategic Surprise of utilising Special Forces modes to achieve relative superiority. The communicated “strategic effects” of this is that whilst Draven can’t bring Webster back to life, he can use his willed, focused intent (one of the major aims of the Vitalist school in the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom in 1900-1945) to avenge her and to wreak revenge on “T-Bird” and his gang.
The operative key to this is a traditionalist understanding of Troth (pledged faith, fealty, and loyalty to another - such as in both upholding and exalting the marriage oath with your betrothed to last beyond physical death) that energises and actualises the individual human psyche as a causal willed force. (The Troth state in suitably receptive, mindful individuals may create an empathetic sense of shared psycho-emotional attunement that is subjectively experienced as being dyadic - whilst such consent-based commitment lasts and is jointly honoured.) This is the deeper ritual (operative in the sense of linguist J.L. Austin’s speech act theory in which the mutual betrothed now have an ontologically changed identity) in a marriage vow that most people experience as a ceremony.
In retrospect The Crow (1994) cast the die for Proyas with Dark City (1998) and the Wachowski Brothers’ more well known The Matrix (1999). It also runs in parallel with the magical hyperstition of Grant Morrison’s iconic series The Invisibles (1994-2000) which influenced creative director Richard Metzger and the original, core team of the now former Disinformation website (and Magick.me founder and Disinformation alumnus Jason Louv). Hollywood producers attempted to turn The Crow into a franchise and a 2024 remake. These all largely failed because they all focused on stylised aesthetics and criminogenic revenge narratives. They all largely missed the Draven-Webster romance as the original film’s emotional core, and its Troth narrative for its then younger Generation X audience. This is also summed up in the original film’s repeated maxim: “It can’t rain all the time.”
Except if you live in Melbourne, Australia. It often rains here several times a day.