more words

I feel the need to preface this entire entry with the following: I don’t like what I’ve written here, it meanders without making a cogent point, but I’m posting it anyway because, one, sunk-time fallacy, and two, I’m too lazy to “fix” it and have lost interest in doing so, and three, I don’t really care that much, although I do care enough to post this preface to “save face” with all three of my readers. Anyway, on with the 3443-word ramble.

Let’s say you’re a detective. You’re working a case involving a serial sex-trafficker murderer who has eluded capture for five years or something like that. The guy is always just barely slipping away, killing more people. He’s killed at least 15 people so far that you know of, according to the file. You’re tracking down a new lead for this case, a tip you got in your email last night, and this takes you to a house off the beaten path, a log cabin in the woods just outside town. The front door is cracked open; there’s a putrid smell coming from inside. You cover your nose with your collar and push into the house proper, removing your pistol from its holster and aiming it out like they taught you in training. In the kitchen, you notice mounds of meat, maybe animal, maybe human, lying in a mess of blood on the countertop. There is a trail of red leading to a door in the kitchen hallway. You radio for backup, then walk up to the door, noticing that the knob is wet with blood. You gag a little bit, lower your collar, and take a pair of plastic gloves, slipping them on, then twist the knob with your gloved hand. There is no light beyond the door, only a void pulsating with almost supernatural dread. You pull out your flashlight, turn it on, and hold it beside your pistol. The cone of light reveals a long, narrow stairwell, cement walls, and blood, smears and handprints of blood. You follow the blood down the steps into a small room where there is another door, a metal door with a latch that appears to be unlatched. You pull the door open to reveal a massive walk-in freezer room. There is a single bulb hanging from the middle of the room, swinging back and forth, casting a dim light on the bruised, battered bodies of once-living people dangling from meat hooks. There are dozens of them, missing arms, legs, faces, breasts, parts of faces, scrotums, and scalps. Strips of yellow-green flesh drip off some of the corpses, forming little piles below them. You feel bile rise in your throat; you swallow it, tighten your pistol grip, then notice something: a figure, a figure in the middle of the room. It’s a man, thin, balding, wearing a fur-collared jacket stained with blood. It’s him, the killer, the man you’ve been searching for. He’s on his knees, hunched over, making smacking and slurping noises. There’s something on the floor in front of him. It’s a human body. He’s hunched over the body. It’s missing an arm. You notice the man, whose back is turned to you, is holding something up to his mouth, something long and appendage-like. It’s the arm. He is eating flesh and drinking blood, making smacking and slurping noises. He has not noticed you. He is just there, on his knees, in the middle of the freezer room, hunched over, eating flesh off a human arm like some sort of storybook monster. You see the dead body below the feasting man, stiff-faced, young, stuck in its last look of wide-eyed horror. You don’t know what to do. It strikes you as almost ridiculous how blatantly evil this scene is. You know this monster has killed at least 15 people, more if you count the bodies on meat hooks. You know that if he gets out, he will do it again. He will find more victims. There’s no reform for this creature. He has thrown away his Human Race Membership Card. You lift your gun. You have a clear shot. It occurs to you that you could kill the beast right now, maybe even claim it was self-defense, that it was justified. Who’s going to know? Hell, who’s going to care? Wouldn’t you be doing everyone a favor, removing this vile creature from the world? Your finger inches toward the trigger. And then, well, I don’t know, then what?

Do you pull the trigger, thereby ridding the world of this monster, or do you arrest him, put him on trial, and hope that he’s found guilty? Maybe he’ll be thrown in prison for the rest of his life, or maybe he’ll be sentenced to death due to the heinous nature of his crimes.

All this begs the question: Do you, or does the state, have any right to take another human’s life, even if that person has basically thrown away their Human Race Membership Card? This is pretty much the core question behind any justice killing, whether it be capital punishment or vigilantism. Does anyone have the right? What does it even mean to “have the right?" Who bestows these rights? Are these rights God-given, or are they a construct of society, or are they something else entirely? Is it true what all the superheroes say, that if we kill the bad guys, we become like the bad guys? Is it really that simple, that black and white?

Well, spoilers for the rest of the entry, but I don’t actually know the answer to any of these questions. I just thought that, through rambling here, I might come to understand my own position better. But before I get into all that, I have a question for you.

Have you ever read The Crow, or maybe watched the movie?

The Crow is a comic book published in 1988, written and illustrated by James O’Barr. It’s about a young man, Eric Draven, who, after he and his wife are murdered by a group of thugs, comes back to life as an immortal avenger, possessed by the spirit of a mystical crow, to enact revenge. The whole appeal of The Crow is that it’s a violent revenge fantasy with a dark, beautiful aesthetic. The entire comic is drawn in this super moody black-and-white style, with lots of violence, blood, and gore, all presented without even the slightest hint of critical introspection. In fact, there’s such a lack of introspection that one can’t help but think that The Crow reveals something about the author, James O’Barr himself, who had to have been working through some seriously dark shit as he was writing and illustrating this book. It’s easy to assume that The Crow is some sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy on behalf of James O’Barr, and if true, his wishes are both violent as hell and superficial as hell, considering that The Crow himself is depicted as a gorgeous American bishonen, even as he’s brutally killing his victims. He’s got a chiseled jaw, dark shoulder-length hair, an Adonis-like physique drawn in near-perfect anatomical detail, and a penchant for black leather and goth makeup. James O’Barr even made it a point to add a number of full-page illustrations showing The Crow in hyper-sexualized poses reminiscent of Michelangelo’s David, portraying him as a sort of pinup girl of death, if that tells you anything about the author’s mental state. It’s also obvious that O’Barr was a mega goth in the 80s, as The Crow has to be one of the most goth-coded comic books ever created, both in its visuals and in the fact that it’s full of song lyrics from bands like Joy Division and The Cure, all plainly cited, which is one of the things that originally drew me to the comic book.

Back in the mid-2000s, when I was a teenager, The Crow was like a perfect match for me. It combined all my adolescent rage, all my musical tastes, all my woe-is-me bullshit, and my preference for violent, disturbing media into one irresistible package. I remember the first time I saw the comic. It was during summer break, and I was at the corporate bookstore. The Crow was pulled out of the row of graphic novels as if someone had just been looking at it but forgotten to slide it back into place on the shelf. I was immediately captivated, thumbing through its pages, awed by the unique art style, the tasteful violence, and the Joy Division quotes. I was so captivated that, before even purchasing it, I had decided it was my favorite comic book ever. That was pretty much how I decided what I liked back then, through style-over-substance snap judgments.

As a teenager, style over substance isn’t such a big deal; it’s actually kind of expected teenage behavior. But as an adult, this shortcoming is harder to ignore. It’s especially hard to ignore with The Crow, which is all style over substance to an irresponsible, arguably unethical degree, as it’s an unapologetic revenge fantasy promoting an ethical system that, if taken to its logical conclusion, probably produces an endless cycle of violence. I mean, The Crow comes back to life, kills the thugs, who I’m sure had kids of their own, and those kids are likely to seek revenge for the deaths of their thug parents, turning them into little avengers themselves, which will no doubt lead to more violence, which will only produce more little avengers, and so on and so forth. Such is the cycle of retribution, and you know what they say: an eye for an eye, no more eyes, or whatever.

Upon first read, it’s easy to think that the violence in The Crow is justified, especially when you’re an edgy teenager. After all, Eric Draven, The Crow, had been shot in the head by thugs before becoming The Crow, and this headshot didn’t kill him immediately, only paralyzed him, leaving him conscious enough to watch the thugs do awful things to his wife before finishing her off. Eric, with a hole in the back of his head, watched all this terrible shit happen to his wife, and it filled him with rage and despair. He becomes a hungry ghost, starving for revenge. The idea here is that Eric cannot go peacefully into that good night without first wreaking serious havoc on those who wronged him. And in some ways, he’s also like a karmic consequence made manifest, distilled to its purest form, that is, if you kill someone, The Crow will come back from the dead and kill you, like a cautionary tale of retribution, of getting what’s coming to you, of sleeping in the bed you made, all that stuff. So, again, it’s easy to think that the violence is justified. Eric goes out as The Crow and brutally murders all those who wronged him, and, reading it, it feels good, it feels right, like you yourself are the one getting the revenge. You are vicariously killing people through Eric Draven. Watching him torture remorseless thugs as The Crow appeals to some base, primordial urge deep inside, that shoulder-devil whisper to hurt people whenever they hurt you. The revenge feels justified, necessary almost. Certainly, you can’t have these evil thugs roaming the streets; someone has to put them down, and who better to do it than one of their own victims? The moment those thugs raped and killed Eric’s wife was the moment they threw away their Human Race Membership Cards, the moment that “human rights” might as well no longer apply to them because they are no longer part of the “human” category at all. So, you end up cheering Eric on as he’s killing these thugs because, well, these guys are bad dudes, obviously. They deserve it, right? They deserve to have their skulls repeatedly crushed with a hammer or their brains blown out all over the walls or whatever other heinous shit we can think of. And not only do they deserve it, we as readers demand it. We demand our pound of flesh, our revenge; we sit on the edge of our seats, quickly thumbing through pages, demanding violence, drooling as The Crow bashes some dude’s brains out with a hammer. We cannot get enough. The Crow, the comic book, does this to you. It makes you want it. And it delivers. Eric gets his revenge, and it feels great.

Well, it feels great until you close the book and start to think about it for more than two seconds.

By the end of the comic, after Eric kills all the thugs, it is implied that he stops being The Crow because his soul can finally rest or whatever, as if it’s just that simple, as if all you have to do to find peace is just kill all the dudes in your life who have wronged you. If we were to draw a moral from the story, it would be something like this: “Some people are just so bad that they deserve to die, and you might even deserve to be the one who kills them, and yes, killing them will probably make you feel better.” It quickly becomes apparent that one’s enjoyment of The Crow hinges entirely on not analyzing it too much, or at all.

Because when you start to analyze The Crow, you start to feel really weird and conflicted. The whole thing just seems wrong. But it’s hard to explain why it’s wrong. How can it be wrong when, while reading it, it just feels so right? It doesn’t make sense. The thugs deserved it. They raped and killed Eric’s wife, for God’s sake. They threw away their Human Race Membership Cards.

So now, in hindsight, why does killing them feel so wrong? Is it just me?

Take the long-winded hypothetical at the start of this journal entry, for example. I don’t think I could kill the monster, even though I recognize that the guy is a monster and probably shouldn’t be allowed to mingle with civilized people. I still wouldn’t kill him. I don’t know why not. Sometimes I think about Batman, or Spider-Man, or whoever, when they’re given the choice to kill the villain or let them live. This applies to Eric and the Thugs, too. There are many opportunities for Batman to just kill the Joker, for example, yet Batman never does, even though he would face literally no repercussions for doing so. In fact, by killing the Joker, Batman would probably be saving countless lives. So, if you think about it from that perspective, shouldn’t Batman kill the Joker? Would Batman not be at least a little bit culpable for the lives that the Joker takes if Batman were given the chance to kill the Joker but did not take it? I don’t know. Is it that black and white? Batman, after all, is not controlling the Joker. The Joker is his own man. He makes his own choices, and he chooses to kill people. Batman does not choose for the Joker to kill people; the Joker chooses for himself. So why would we ever consider Batman responsible for the Joker’s choices? Is it because we know, as readers of the comic books, that Batman is the only one capable of stopping the Joker, therefore Batman should use his great power to kill the Joker, because otherwise people are going to die, and since Batman knows that, he should therefore kill the Joker? If Batman is passive here, is he responsible for deaths the Joker causes, and by extension, is he responsible for the Joker’s own choices? If so, how far do we take that?

In the real world, couldn’t we apply this argument to all sorts of people? For example, in the case of a certain president, are we all culpable for the deaths of immigrants simply because we haven’t unalived the man ourselves? If we are passive, are we responsible for those deaths? Wouldn’t that make a lot of people responsible? How can so many people be responsible in this case? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s almost meaningless, these words like “culpable” and “responsible.” Semantics, really. I am not responsible for the choices of the president, just as Batman is not responsible for the choices of the Joker. We are only responsible for our own choices. That makes sense to me. But I don’t know. None of this makes any sense, actually. On the one hand, there are arguments for killing the Joker; on the other, there are arguments for not killing the Joker. It’s all a matter of philosophical perspective, I guess.

But perhaps that’s where the problem festers, in philosophical debate. There is a certain passivity in philosophical debate, a certain detachment, where both sides have strong stances on the subject of killing the Joker, for example, but neither side really does anything. Sometimes I think philosophy is less about making cogent points or convincing the other side and more about justifying your position to yourself, to make yourself feel better about a belief that, when you get right down to it, is purely emotional. I think that under all philosophy there is some raw emotion that we either don’t understand or can’t come to grips with for whatever reason. In the Joker example, or the thug example, there’s a raw hatred there, in the gut. You want to kill the Joker, you want to bash the thug’s skull in. There’s something a little gross about this feeling, isn’t there? Now you have to justify why you want to kill the Joker, not to others, but to yourself. And you justify it to yourself by turning the raw emotion into less of an “I want” statement and more of a “We need” statement: “I don’t want to kill the Joker, but we need to kill the Joker because, if not, he will kill lots of people.”

It may sound like a lot of judgment, but I’m just typing up whatever words come to mind here, some of which I might not even agree with tomorrow or in a week or whatever, so there’s no real judgment here. In fact, I think it’s almost impossible for me to say definitively whether we should kill the Joker or the thugs or whatever. What’s not impossible for me to say, however, is this: for me, personally, it feels wrong to kill anyone, even the Joker or the thugs.

In Buddhist mythology, there’s this term they use, “hungry ghost,” used to refer to the spirits of people who died with great jealousy, anger, or negativity in their hearts. In Japanese mythology, these hungry ghosts are doomed to wander the Earth, endlessly seeking sustenance for their insatiable negative-emotion appetites, often shown eating human excrement, sometimes even corpses, in a vain attempt to satiate themselves. These hungry ghosts can never escape samsara, the cyclical process of birth, death, and rebirth, because their souls are forever attached to the material world through their anger and jealousy. A core idea of Buddhism is to break the samsaric cycle by reaching a state of enlightenment, and you supposedly reach this state of enlightenment by eliminating suffering. You eliminate suffering by ridding yourself of desire and attachment, and you do this, supposedly, through focused meditation. Again, hungry ghosts cannot reach a state of enlightenment, because they are still attached to the material world, filled with negative emotions stemming from desire and attachment.

This is not meant to be a primer on Buddhist ideology. I only bring this up because I think it brings me closer to understanding why The Crow feels so wrong to me.

It feels so wrong because Eric Draven is a hungry ghost, filled with the negative desire for revenge, and yet the story implies that only through satiating this negative desire can Eric be at peace. But I don’t think peace, or any semblance of contentedness, can be achieved through fostering the negative emotions that produce a desire for revenge. I know, personally, that I have never felt content after giving in to anger, if anything, I’ve always felt worse after indulging those negative emotions. So I don’t buy for a minute that, by indulging his worst impulses, like bashing a thug’s head in with a hammer, Eric is somehow reaching some state of enlightenment. In fact, it feels like he’s moving away from enlightenment when he indulges these terrible urges. It seems to me that any decision born from negative emotion is a wrong decision. I get that Eric is full of anger and hatred because of all the terrible things that have happened to him, that makes sense, but I don’t think he gets a karmic free pass just because he had a terrible experience. The goal for Eric should be to move past the anger and the hatred, not give in to it. I am not convinced that simply killing all the thugs can satiate Eric’s desire for revenge, because his desire for revenge does not come from the material world, it comes from within.

Eric just needs to let it go, otherwise he’ll be a hungry ghost forever.