John Wick and violence in Hollywood

At the bottom are the two trailers, feel free to skip down and just watch the parody.

5 months ago John Wick 4 was released, and has made $400 million in revenue, and the popular series has no end in sight. However, this is only moderate success in 2023 dollars, but the series has a base of hard core fans. It's not a superhero movie, John Wick doesn't pretend to have good motives. The plotline of the whole series is nothing but hundreds of killings, assassinations really. This is not a movie with a sense of humor and it takes itself very seriously. Nonetheless, the cycle of violence is ignited when his employers, an international assassin agency like the Wagner group or Blackwater, wish to reprimand Keanu Reeves for some reason, and they kill his dog. In a fit of rage he then kills everyone in the gang, working his way up to the leader, hundreds of people. It might be hard for you to believe the movie maintains the tone of a Roman epic with such a plot, but that is what they do.

Just now, finally, a mock John Wick trailer has been made, using the foil of Steven Seagal as a contrast to Keanu Reeves. What's interesting to me is how it highlights how absurd Hollywood has become. Not so much a new low, not that at all, but now B movies are being made with A movie budgets, and they have of course taken on the persona of the A movies as well, in which each character speaks with the voice of a god, from somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, or perhaps in ancient Rome, "One man, two problems, three seconds to destruction, he must push himself beyond his limits... Women, trust, the largest criminal operation in history... BOOM... "We need more time!"... Can they do it?... "We cannot give up!" I just wrote this off the cuff, it's incredibly easy once you know the formula. So, they have an A level budget, and an A level persona, what makes them B movies? A third quality, which they cannot overcome. They are completely derivative schlock, such as my extemporaneous example of an imagined Hollywood 'trailer', their term for a tease of what's to come.

Going back to the John Wick trailer, after watching the Seagal parody, it now comes across as rather tame. The parody of course needed to double the gravitas and remove all meaning. However, the trailer for Wick is in reality fairly tame, hiding the fact this franchise is about 90% shooting, 10% talking, literally, whereas the trailer presents it the other way around. But that tone of gravitas, it needs to be maintained, it's a foundational trait of a Hollywood movie, and the aura must be maintained even when the words mean nothing. This is called "poetry". Well, another aspect that reveals this as a B movie is the casting of Keanu Reeves in the role of "the world's greatest assassin". He's a character actor who plays a stoner. In his middle age he has matured somewhat, and now plays middle aged men who are stoners, but successful. Some people push back against the 'stoner' label, and say this is merely how southern California people talk and act. This is ridiculous, they have never seen Bill and Ted's excellent adventure, still the defining movie of Keanu Reeves's career, in my view. In none of his movies is it clear what his success consists of. In the Matrix, if you pay attention to what you are watching, he never actually displays a single skill, instead he simply 'thinks', and then acts sometimes only milliseconds before the danger. Same with Bill and Ted, his skill in the movie is not actually playing a guitar, that's unrelated to the plot. His skill, I think you will find if you watch closely again, is to be a 'super chill dope dude', although I will need to watch again for an exact quote. Ah yes, 'totally dude', that was their signature phrase, displaying a can do go get em attitude, as southern California people always do. Basically, as sure as Native Americans are Red, so are southern Californians laid back stoners, it's just how they are, since they are people in touch with the land. With the one exception of the John Wick movies, where every time he fires his gun, hitting each person without a single miss, in a fast but low intensity ballet like choreography, his skill manifest in every trigger pull, surpassing even the most decorated Special Forces commando, reaching the level of a god. A man could not do those things. He is like the successful nerd, but he is a successful stoner. All we watch is his relentless and effortless success, "defeating hundreds of thousands single handed, all alone, no one to help him..." How far we have fallen from the Iliad, or hell, just World War II.

The John Wick parody trailer is a phenomenal mashup and exposition of all the tropes of Hollywood trailers, and the movies themselves of course, which use many of the same devices, such as the ever-present reverberant gong from deep within the Nibelungen horde. It makes the real trailer actually look very low key when watching it again afterwards, since the parody is such an amazing potpourri of 'tropes', cliches, B movies devices, all based on a maturing ironic legend of the screen personality of Steven Seagal, and they have dialed up the gravitas to 11, and free associated to the nth degree of plausibility.

Seagal was at his peak in the 80's, when he starred in a few top tier action movies, but it's been downhill from there and he is now making completely derivative B list movies in Thailand, where he puts his fake martial arts training to work. That's always a part of his characters in his movies, one of his unique features. He actually started out as the son of a man who started a Japanese dojo or karate studio, grew up in Japan, and then ran this dojo for a decade or so, before moving to the US and getting into Hollywood movies. I think that was his first time living in an English speaking country. Japanese is his second language, but he's completely fluent since he grew up there. Many of these martial arts, like these dojos, are more like yoga or tai-chi, completely unsuitable for actual fighting, which causes his acting, when he is using his martial arts, to be quite a strange sight. He also has no sense of humor and takes himself to be the most serious man in the world. "The first white man to run a Japanese dojo who was respected," as he says. This makes me wonder if I got his origen story correct, since he seems to be throwing his father under the bus. No doubt he also says he is "the first white man to run a dojo who then pivoted to Hollywood action star." But I don't want to be too hard on him. He plays a character, and I don't think the parody is making fun of him, it's making fun of Keanu Reeves, who really is an absurd actor, Seagal is a very normal actor.

These days Seagal has become a meme, the children of the people who watched Seagal in the 80's now use him as the representation of... anything Steven Seagallish, such as these geniuses realized was the perfect fit for their parody of John Wick and Keanu Reeves. They both play guitar, they both claim to “know kung fu”, they both have an absurd and crisp slurred speech. I never thought about them together, but they are like two peas in a pod.

In keeping with the complete superficiality of the John Wick character, the use of religious iconography is interesting. Christian imagery of this type has become bleached to a new degree of whiteness, and is in this movie completely devoid of meaning, moral or otherwise, and merely is a device representing 'gravitas', also death, which is a major component of 'gravitas', as is 'life', such are the ways of themes at the level of the Catholic Church. But as for death, John Wick is the hero, so it will never be his death, only the death of others. One unique feature of the John Wick fan community is their counting of all his kills in the movies, and they number in the hundreds, and they steadily increase in each movie, the producers must be really concerned with this number as well, for it to be steadily increasing in such even increments. 50% more per film. It now stands at 439. One interesting aspect of this is the need for the 439 extras who were the actors who got summarily executed. B movies use the same stunt guys in multiple roles, but this is an A budget movie, and each kill is really a different actor.

The trailers for movies are never a full reveal of the plot, merely a tease, although they often go through quite a bit of plot, nonetheless, they have their own simplified hero's journey for the trailer which is extremely abstract and intellectual. They only have 2 minutes. These are the 'full length trailers', the 30 second ones of course need even more compaction, although they can be assembled from the 2 minute version, which does the essential distillation.

Death is always a theme for the John Wick franchise, and the trailer begins with this in relation to his wife. His wife never appears in any of the movies, this is just talk by the way. She was dead at the beginning of John Wick 1. Every John Wick movie has scenes where the samurai takes a break in the middle of the vicious battle, death all around, and he gently grasps a broken flower, mentally composing a haiku on the nature of war and duty. He thinks of his wife, having sex with her, being happy, but now his life is nothing but killing. Keep in mind the murder of his dog is his primary motivation, the dead wife is merely a device to add the human element. "Goodbye my trusted friend", this means he will kill his employers because they betrayed him. None of this makes sense of course, like the aristocrat who says this game has "no rules", obviously a complete fiction, in the movies narrative I mean. It's all rule based. I'm not referring to the formulaic plot, but the narrative as depicted in the movie, his assassin code, the violation by his employers, an international assassin and mercenary agency. Nothing but rules. "Challenge him to single combat, win or lose, it's a way out".

This brings to mind The Battle of Kadesh, and Rameses as the sole man who kills millions of enemies. It's really very similar to John Wick, and is also the most hero journey like of the Egyptian stories. Of course Keanu Reeves is not filled with light by Amun, and the reason is that this is not really a hero's journey with John Wick, but an "ironic hero's journey", a feature of 21st century culture it seems, an emerging phenomenon, the ironic hero movie. These are not ironic movies of bad things, that was last century, like Apocalypse Now. Now we have Team America: World Police and John Wick, ironic movies about good men killing in the name of their code. The reason they need to be ironic is that otherwise they would come across as a bloodthirsty Blitzkrieg of imperial scorched earth war, which is bad, but since it's ironic, it's opposite, and therefore good.

So, John Wick is a 'twist' in the 'queer' direction, what we call 'irony', an increasingly expansive phenomenon which is harder and harder to define as one thing, but is most definitely a real phenomenon, like laughing, and mentioned by the ancient writers, always associated with decadence, or perhaps the result of fat times when people go soft, and like many things sinful, the pit can always be dug deeper. For instance, take the new genre of 'horror comedies', a very unusual phenomenon, not far removed from the Coliseum, their only redeeming feature is they are actors, and are not really being killed by squads of executioners.

This mock trailer must therefore be an irony on top of an irony. It's not the dog that began John Wicks rampage, now it's a chair which was destroyed by the international assassin agency. Since Seagal does nothing but sit in his chair, this is very important to him. The "running" scene is a meme from the Steven Seagal internet meme alternate universe, where they make fun of him for running "like a girl", which he really does do, and for some reason his exposed butt is a riff on this. The clip shows him running with his wrists limp, and they have added a CGI butt crack. The trailer has brilliant timing, this flat out ridiculous image, the only truly fake one, is followed by a cut which immediately puts you into serious mode. With these 'tropes' the trailers use, the electric bass thump, a ripping noise of some sort, and the deep melodic serious voice, "You run... you die", with an image of one of those ridiculous computer interfaces they have in the control rooms in John Wick and Star Trek movies.

It's hard to tell if these editing tactics have complete control over me, or whether I've been trained to have these reactions. Everyone knows intuitively what these sounds and images mean. This is not Bach or Wagner, these are single notes of extremely well crafted electrical fuzz, which burst with gravitas and weight. I think these movie techniques are actually intuitive, that's how they can be exported to foreign countries. This is much commented on, the Hollywood pandering to foreign markets has brought the meaning from very little to almost nothing. Like a cat watching a bird feeder video feed. The cat knows what they are looking at, a window with enticing treats, which as always prevents them from going outside and actually eating the delicious looking creature.

Both of these trailers are extremely dense and abstract narratives, a unique narrative that stands on it's own, giving a taste of the movie, which requires the crafting of a miniature heroes narrative. In the parody it's actually very clear. A syndicate of criminals destroys his chair, but he is the worlds greatest assassin. He slaughters these people while sitting in another chair. But then he gets serious, and stands up, which immediately leads to a terrible humiliation. It's actually very well planned out, the whole theme of 'sitting' and 'standing', words that are used in the John Wick movies, with their themes of Illuminati like corporate syndicalism, not actually very common words as far as movie cliches.

For the John Wick 4 trailer, the memory of his wife causes him anxiety, but he realizes he's alive and she's dead, so its up to him and she's irrelevant. This begins the hero's quest, like Odysseus petulantly turning tail after he was denied Helen as a wife. He never has any doubts whatsoever, this represents a subversion of the Orthodox hero journey narrative, a removal of the part of the hero's journey where he has a defeat and begins to doubt himself. This never happens, but it's still there to some degree, we become anxious as audience members because over 200 people are shooting at him, and many of the bullets pass within millimeters of him. Normally it's very hard to tell how close a bullet gets, but they show the bullets in ultra slow motion, and it's very alarming! But like Neo in the Matrix, all he needs to know is to remember that he already knows what to do. The final line causes me to worry that perhaps it means this 4th movie is the last sequel, but that's absurd. Keanu pulls this off with elan, he is a natural, showing very little expression, which is impressive for a superassassin, which from my perspective would be a situation I'm not sure I could function in. But that's why the hero does it for you. Because he has accomplished the job, we no longer need to work, like watching a game of football. They play, I drink beer, end of story.

Script for parody:

"I had it all man. Fast cars, best friends, extremely young women. But them thick skinned honkeys took the one thing that mattered most... my chair. "It's not what you did son, its who you did it to. The greatest assassin to ever live." I'm a professional killer. "Handsome, wise, and articulate." Once Abu Norma's confirmed to be in there, you can take him out, but wait for my word. He's also really good at guitar, and he did it all... sitting down. Old habits die hard. They gonna have to pay for what they done. "Have you returned to the fold?" My brother, if I get back in, I need resources. Let me tack up. "Wait, is he... standing!" Nah, I'm runnin. "You run, you die." You gotta tell me straight so I can know who's coming for us. "Our pleasure sir." It's like a monkey trying to fuck a football, nah, really. "What have you done?" We've just succeeded in burning these bitches to the ground. "You ahh, working again?" Yeah, I'm thinkin I'm Black. John Thick, the last stand."

Script for real trailer: John Wick 4

"Saying goodbyes?" Saying hello. "You think your wife can hear you?" No. "Then why bother?" Maybe I'm wrong. "You're going to die." Maybe not. Goodbye to you my trusted friend... "A new day is dawning. New ideas, no rules, no management." We've known each other since we were ninety two... Who is this? "The Marquis de Grammond. Challenge him to single combat. Win or lose, it's a way out." I don't sit at the table. "Your family does." Please pray for me, I was the black sheep of the family.... "A man has to look his best when it's time to get married, or buried." I'm going to need a gun. Goodbye my friend, its hard to die... "If you win, the table will honor it's word. You will have your freedom." It's hard to die... "Under the old laws, only one can survive. Failure to meet at sunrise will result in execution." Last words Winston? "Just have fun out there." No way back, one way out. We have done, we have fought, in the seasons, in the sun... "I want you to find your peace." "... a good death only comes after a good life." You and I left a good life behind a long time ago my friend. I start to die... John Wick chapter 4.