peace was never an option

i. snowpiercer

Snowpiercer is a movie about revolution. The survivors of the climate apocalypse live on this train. Nothing outside - we are informed - can withstand the cold. All of human culture has been compressed into this single, linear civilization, like one those of thought experiments from the 90’s - you know, if the world were a village of 1000, only 70 would own cars, but some of them would have two? The have-mores live up front near the engine and the have-nots back towards the caboose.

Curtis Everett is the reluctant leader of the coachclass’ uprising, as he and his compatriots fight their way forward trying to take the engine. For eighteen years, they have lived in squalor, subjected to violence and starvation, and, with each successive car they take, they see how their betters have lived, how much wealth and plenty has been hoarded by the few.

At the end of his journey, Curtis confronts Wilford, the train’s designer, who lives a life of luxury in the front car where he maintains the engine. Wilford reveals that Curtis’ revolution has, in fact, been planned by Wilford in collaboration with Curtis’ mentor, Gilliam. Every few years, the head and the tail work together to foment an uprising as a means of population control. The train can only sustain so many people, and a failed coup is a fine pretext for killing off a bunch of poors.

Wilford then offers Curtis his role as keeper of the engine and the train’s de facto ruler, though he makes it clear: the Snowpiercer’s very nature - its construction and available resources - necessitates the very things Curtis is rebelling against. While he might, presumably, distribute things a bit different, there is no future version of the train that is free from mass starvation, child labor, and periodic kill-offs of the excess population. It will not function without these things.

Confronted with this, Curtis chooses to blow the train off its rails and let the survivors take their chances in the frozen wastes.

Snowpiercer is Bong Joon-Ho’s most savage takedown of capitalism.

ii. high-rise

If you took the train from Snowpiercer and rotated it 90 degrees along the z-axis, you would get High-Rise, a movie about societal collapse. Robert Laing has just moved into the titular high-rise apartment complex, a forty-floor tower-of-the-future with all the amenities of a functional society: he shops in the tower’s supermarket, works out in its gym, plays squash with the building’s architect, Royal, who lives in the penthouse. The floors of the complex are, once again, stratified by wealth and social standing, with the working classes near the bottom and the rich up top. Being a doctor with some upwardly aspirations, Laing gets an apartment around the upper-middle, and starts an affair with a woman above - but not too far above - him.

Being so self-contained, the longer people live in the high-rise, the less they venture into the outside world, even as the high-rise begins to fail, with disruptions to its power, water, mechanics, supply chain, and eventually its very architecture. It even appears abandoned by police. To the denizens who live there, who have long-ceased going to their jobs, this is the fall of civilization. As there is, to them, no longer anything outside the high-rise, the inside falls into chaos. People indulge in violence, theft, and hedonism. 

Despite this, the social order is somewhat maintained: people continue having water-cooler conversations and dressing for jobs they don’t go to; they speak as though power will come back on any day now and things will revert to normal, as if this localized reign-of-terror is a rager that’s gotten out of hand; the vertical class-stratification is more-or-less respected.

The one major exception is Laing’s friend Richard Wilder, a working class man who repeatedly transgresses the social order, doing violence, theft, and hedonism to people above him. Fearing this behavior will catch on, the penthouse tasks Laing - a neurosurgeon - with lobotomizing Wilder, which Laing ultimately refuses to do, declaring Wilder the only sane man in the building. Wilder ultimately confronts Royal, which results in both their deaths, and Laing watches the total collapse of the society, choosing to sit back and embrace barbarism.

Now, if you took the train from Snowpiercer and rotated it so it was heading straight towards you, massive, deadly, and utterly unstoppable, you would have John. Fucking. Wick.

john 1

We first meet John as a sad-eyed man who just buried his wife and took ownership of an unbearably adorable dog, living a life of hazy grief in what I’m told is New Jersey. One night, a Russian gangster, Iosef, and his friends break into John’s house to steal his car, and, while they’re at it, beat him senseless and… pet the dog too hard. Unbeknownst to them, John is a retired assassin and former associate of Iosef’s father, Viggo. John’s reputation in the criminal underworld is that of the most dangerous and unrelenting killer the Earth has ever seen, called in fearful whispers the Baba Yaga by the Russian mob, a death-dealing horror Iosef just awoke from five years’ slumber.

The rest of the movie is John’s hunt for revenge against Iosef, in which he kills everybody. [“EVERYONE” “EVERYTHING” “EVERYBODIES”]

presumption 1

Iosef, knowing nothing of John’s history, is flippant about being suddenly in possession of his car, and shocked at the reprisals that follow. Given that no one seems much to care until they realize it was, specifically, John Wick’s car he stole, John Wick’s dog he killed, I think we can deduce that, normally, Iosef could beat and rob a stranger without consequence. That is a privilege the son of a mob boss enjoys, and likely has enjoyed in the past. Not that it’s necessarily approved behavior, but accepted without consequence. Had Iosef robbed an actual nobody, that nobody could’ve never gotten close to him.

john 2

The underworld of the John Wick franchise less resembles the mafia than the Knights Templar. Its customs border on ritual, it has codes and talismans and its own secret currency. John is not only unique in that he has the skills to seek revenge: he has the access. He knows the rules, knows to book a room at The Continental with a special coin, ask for the manager by name, and never conduct business on hotel grounds. He has connections who owe him favors and has banked years of respect and good will. Iosef is not unreachable to a man like John.

He is able to declare the killing of his dog an injustice. “I don’t have to take this.”

The question put to him, again and again, on his revisitation to the underworld, is, “John: does this mean you’re back? Are you back, John? Are you working again? Have you returned to us? Are you one of us again? John, are you back?”

civility

Viggo’s second course of action to protect his son is to try and kill John Wick, which goes… poorly. But his first course is to appeal to John’s better nature, to ask that he behave in a “civilized” fashion. Civility, here, means not killing Iosef, but… what is the alternative? In later films, “contrition” takes the form of accepting seven cuts or amputating a finger, but Viggo offers nothing of the kind, doesn’t suggest a “more constructive” justice. Viggo’s “civilized option” is the one where John does nothing, where he behaves like the nobody Iosef thought he was robbing. In a civilized society, Iosef’s behavior was poor, but a killing spree is downright unacceptable.

“Civility” means to let the injustice stand.

presumption 2

It’s not that, in this world, violence is an unacceptable means of redress. In later films, we see mobsters and assassins open contracts on each other quite casually, meet officials like The Adjudicator and The Harbinger whose primary function is to resolve disputes with knives and pistols. So I think we can assume that John’s killing spree is “uncivil” not because it is violent, but because it is unsanctioned. John is retired. He doesn’t even go here anymore! Everyone asking, “John, are you back?” Viggo is here to say, no. John is a civilian, he needs to act like one. And sometimes this is what happens to civilians. It may not seem fair, but them’s the rules.

elevated action 1

The overall plot of John Wick sounds, in summary, unremarkable. It is a straightforward revenge plot: criminals do wrong by a retired killing machine, punchy punchy bang bang. Viggo puts Iosef in increasingly secure locations and throws larger and larger goon squadrons at John; John kills the goons, then John kills Iosef, then John kills Viggo, then John gets a new dog, the end. It’s got two twists on formula: instead of thugs killing his wife, his wife dies of natural causes and then thugs kill a dog who represents his wife; and the Masonic nature of the assassin world. These are cool, but not deep, structural changes; the general shape is the same as a Scott Adkins or Michael Jai White movie that went straight-to-DVD in the 2010’s. In bullet-points, this is Ninja: Shadow of a Tear. Even the emphasis on stuntwork: that’s generally what these no-budget movies had going for them: no money for special effects or crane shots, just guys who can actually fight.

What makes John Wick special is that it doesn’t look or feel like Ninja: Shadow of a Tear. Partly that’s because they landed Keanu Reeves, which means they got ten times the budget of Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, but ten times the budget of Ninja: Shadow of a Tear doesn’t usually look like John Wick, either - it looks like Jiu Jitsu. And Jiu Jitsu does not have three sequels, a spin-off, a TV series, and two video games. Jiu Jitsu is not in Fortnite.

John Wick is gorgeous to look at. It looks classy. It is cast with thespians. It is scored with Swan Lake. John Wick is to its genre what The VVitch is to horror. John Wick is elevated action. John Wick… is pretentious.

Oddly, this is the aspect of John Wick that has failed to catch on amongst its imitators. A lot of films have tried to be “the next John Wick,” and they borrow its practical effects and stuntwork, they borrow its slightly higher-concept assassinry, they usually find a MacGuffin that isn’t a dead wife, but none of them shoot for the tone. These films lean hard on the grindhouse scuzziness of the old direct-to-DVD fare or embrace a 90’s junk food aesthetic of video games and pop rocks. The tone is, if anything, camp. And far be it for me to say John Wick is not camp, or that it has no sense sense of humor, but they are not comedies. None of these pretenders are half this fuckin’ sad.

suits 1

When John “comes out of retirement,” he puts on the uniform of his trade: an exquisitely-tailored three-piece suit. Slim-notch lapels, single-breasted suit jacket - I think double-vented - with a low-fasten, four-button waistcoat, shirt, and tie. Tapered slacks. Lovely silhouette. Black, black, black, black, and black.

Now this is, technically, sartorially, a faux pas. As a rule, one’s tie should always be darker than one’s shirt, and therefore a black shirt should be worn without a tie. But of course you can’t be wearing no three-piece suit without a tie. (I mean, maybe if you’re a Tong, in San Francisco, in the 1870’s but…) The rule can be broken - allegedly. Some mid-2000’s aesthetics inverted the “lighter shirt, darker tie” proviso, and we’ve seemingly agreed they got away with it. And black shirt/black tie is not unprecedented, so I’m prepared to say John Wick gets away with it. Are you gonna tell him otherwise? (Especially when he adds that collar pin in Chapter 2 for a hint of contrast. Smashing.)

This is all to say: John Wick is a rule breaker.

presumption 3

I would posit that the question of whether or not John is “back” will, after a certain point, cease to be his decision. He is moving in the assassin world, using their resources and amenities. He can call this a “visit” if he wants, but assassin is as assassin does. This is, pointedly, the premise of the second film.

If we stretch this assumption a little further, we may read John’s being declared “back” as the underworld’s solution to a problem. In the course of the film, John stays at The Continental, burns a safe full of mob money to flush out the head of a major crime family, whom he will, by the end, stab in the neck until dead. And the punishment for a civilian so brazenly transgressing the rules is probably trying to kill John Wick, but… good luck with that.

If, however, the assassin world were to declare that, yes, John is back in the fold, then all of this can be framed as retroactively “legal.” Iosef’s robbery is now the transgression, and, with the death of Viggo, there’s no one left to challenge that idea.

Deciding John is an assassin again can be read as a judgment call, bending the rules such that they were never actually broken, and an excuse to not go to war with the Baba Yaga. It buys them the length of one additional movie.

rules 1

If John Wick: Chapter 1 is a revenge film, Chapter 2 is a one-last-job movie. After the events of the first film, former associate Santino comes to visit John with a request. Santino holds a marker, given him by John before he retired. Because John is “back,” he is once again beholden to the rules of the marker, which entitles its holder to a favor. Santino asks John to kill his sister, Gianna.

This is the first place we hear the phrase “High Table.” Santino wants Gianna dead so he may take her place on the High Table, the shadowy group running the secret world of assassins, the writers of the rules, the ones who imbue coins and markers with meaning and regulate their circulation, the ones who declare things like “no killing on Continental grounds” and enforce the consequences of defiance. The arbiters of civilized death.

And their rules place John in an unwinnable situation. If John does not honor the marker, Santino can have John killed with the High Table’s blessing. If John fulfills the request, and kills a member of the D’Antonio crime family who sits on the High Table, Santino can have John killed with the High Table’s blessing.

John’s death is now the only “civilized” option.

commerce of relationships 1

Santino makes his request by appealing to John’s honor, pointing at the marker and the blood oath it signifies as a thing that must, must be upheld. But what Santino is asking of John is something deeply dishonorable. The symbology of the marker allows him to abstract what is happening, to say “I want you to kill my sister and your own personal friend so that I may defy my father’s wishes and take over her political position for my own enrichment” without having to use any of those words; to frame such an act of treachery as morally necessary, the way economists can say “adjust interest rates to stabilize the market” rather than “intentionally provoke a recession to raise the unemployment rate because it’s bad for the economy if not enough people live in poverty.”

From the right perspective, an evil thing may be framed as good. One of the rulemakers’ jobs is to invent that perspective.

elevated action 2

Here’s a list of things we see in the John Wick franchise:

Exclusive hotels, jazz bars, and night clubs with VIP sections. Tailors and bespoke suits. Sommeliers. Jewelers. Upscale New York apartments. Vintage cars. Silk robes. Antiques. Dressage. Ballet. Dante. Vegetius. Tchaikovsky. The New Modern NYC. Roman catacombs. Casablanca. The Arc de Triomphe. The Sacre Coeur. And the fucking Louvre.

This world of assassins is cultured. Where many action movies take you on a tour through a seedy criminal underbelly, John Wick is a tour of the creme de la creme. The criminals smelt gold coins instead of packing heroin, run ballet schools instead of brothels. And all of this, and the customs and the secret codes, serve to make this profession dignified. This is what separates them from common thugs.

[“Rules. Without them, we live with the animals.”]

It’s an interesting argument, that there are respectable ways to murder. Maybe it’s that I’ve been a vegetarian for 29 years and I look askance at people who eat meat but won’t wear fur. Like there is a moral superiority in killing an animal for food rather than fashion. I’m like, “Let’s poll the animal on that! Would you rather be killed for your meat, or for your pelt?” “I WANT TO LIVE!!”

I mean, if it’s you? If you’re getting shot in the head, does it make you feel better to know, well, at least they went through the proper channels? At least someone got paid? At least they speak Latin and listen to Bartok? Does that make you feel your death is fair? Just? Who are these rules for? Whom do these customs benefit? Whose dignity do they preserve? Is it yours? Can a suit make murder honorable?

The rules don’t separate us from the animals. They tell us whom we can be animals to.

leadership

[Snowpiercer scene where Wilford says the masses need leadership or they’ll resort to violence]

This man just finished explaining that all the film’s violence was planned by the leaders.

suits 2

After agreeing to kill Gianna, John meets with a tailor who introduces us to the concept of Tactical Menswear: the bulletproof suits that will become a series mainstay. John orders two suits: a black-on-white two-piece, and a black-on-black three-piece; “one for day, and one for night.”

He wears the night suit as he infiltrates Gianna’s compound through the catacombs, when he meets her in her chambers and is greeted as “death’s very emissary," as he shoots his way out of her coronation party, as he confronts Santino’s goons “tying up loose ends,” on the streets of Rome as he fights Gianna’s bodyguard Cassian, all the way to the steps of the Roman Continental, Mission Accomplished. And at this point, you’re asking: “What did he need the day suit for?” This is One Last Job and then he’s out, right? He wasn’t wearing suits on the daily last time he was out, certainly not bulletproof ones. But that’s what he wears on his return to New York; John knows he isn’t free.

This establishes a costuming language that will hold for the remaining films: John is wearing the black-on-white when he finds Santino has put a bounty on his head and every assassin in New York is out to collect. He is still wearing the black-on-white at the start of Chapter 3, in which he is running for his life after being excommunicated from the assassin order. After two acts of, just, really fucking good fight scenes, John meets with The Elder, who says the excommunicado can be lifted if John agrees to rejoin the assassin order and kill the head of the New York Continental, his friend Winston, and the High Table symbolizes his return to the fold with a black-on-black three-piece. He wears the black-on-black on his mission to kill Winston for the High Table, and after he chooses to defend Winston from the High Table. Chapter 4 opens with the Bowery King offering John a black-on-black as he declares all-out war on the High Table. This is what he wears when executing the new Elder, while defending the Osaka Continental, while meeting with Winston, when returning to the Ruska Roma, while hunting Killa Harkan in a wet German nightclub (probably best if you don’t ask), and during his parlay with the Marquis. But, before making his way to the duel where he will, one hopes, secure his freedom, John is once again offered a suit by the Bowery King, this time a black-on-white.

John wears the black-on-black when operating in the role of death’s emissary, and the black-on-white when trying to escape it. One for the Baba Yaga, and one for John Wick, loving husband. One for hunting, and one for being hunted. One you would wear to a wake, and one you would wear to a wedding.

Even going back to Chapter 1: black-on-black is what he puts on before his first shooting spree, though, it grinds me to say, not his second at the Red Circle Club! It’s his first shot at Iosef and he’s wearing the black-on-white! It doesn’t fit the pattern because they hadn’t established the pattern yet, but it’s like the only exception!

But, you know? John Wick is a rule breaker.

consequences

The plot of Chapter 2, if everyone does what they’re supposed to, everyone follows the rules, the plot of Chapter 2 is foretold from the opening scene; really, is foretold from the inciting incident of the previous movie. John has to become an assassin again, has to honor the marker, has to kill Gianna, and Cassian has to take revenge, and Santino has to open a contract.

John chases Santino across half of Manhattan, from the New Museum to the Continental, where Santino holes up, protected by the rule that no business can be done on hotel grounds. And when John, in defiance of those rules, shoots him in his smug fuckin face, it is the only act of true agency in the entire film.

wilder

Wilder’s greatest debasement is when he rapes Charlotte, the woman living one floor above Laing. (I want to stress: while I am analyzing this movie and discussing its themes, I hate this plot beat. Male Writers Show Depravity Without Resorting To Sexual Assault Challenge 2026.) The penthouse’s problem with Wilder is not that he is a rapist; it’s [“now he’s raping people he’s not supposed to…”]. It would not be a problem, for them, if someone from the penthouse raped Charlotte; it would not be a problem if Wilder raped someone of his own station. The film’s position is that civilization does not reduce violence, it merely directs it downward. That’s what it’s for. Everyone in the high-rise is breaking the “official” rules, but respecting the unspoken ones: robbing and beating only their peers and inferiors.

Wilder is a foil for Laing because Laing has spent his upwardly-mobile life moving against this flow in the gradual, incremental way you’re “supposed to” (driven home rather bluntly by his repeat use of a rowing machine), and it’s something he finds he’s not altogether good at and does not enjoy [find that line about “going against the current”]. He respects Wilder for bucking authority in ways he never could.

Wilder is a threat because his violence moves up. Curtis is a threat because his violence moves forward; John becomes a threat when his violence moves outward. Laing is asked to lobotomize Wilder to restore violence to its traditional, downward flow. Laing’s refusal is a rejection of civility and an embrace of omnidirectional brutalism: violence should belong to everyone and move in every direction!

the high table 1

If John Wick: Chapter 2 is a one-last-job movie, Chapter 3 is a man-on-the-run film. It opens on the immediate aftermath of John’s excommunicado, and all of acts one and two are John fighting his way through every assassin on the planet en route to the one man who can grant him clemency. He is pursued, primarily, by The Adjudicator, sent by The Table to mop up the the previous film’s events, and to punish John and everyone who aided him. And, at the end of his quest, John meets The Elder, The One Who Sits Above The Table, the only person who can overrule the excommunicado.

In the next film, we will meet The Marquis, a man invested with The Table’s power to hunt and kill John, and The Harbinger, a man sent by The Table to settle disputes. In this series, Winston gets a lot of phone calls announcing, “Sir, a Proper Noun has arrived.” What stands out is, none of these people sit on The Table itself. One sits above, the rest serve below. They are its representatives. We meet Gianna on the day she is to take her place at The Table, but John kills her. He kills Santino on his coronation as well. Unlike Wilford in the engine car or Royal in his penthouse, The Table itself never shows its face

commerce of relationships 2

The assassin world is full of tokens and talismans that, in theory, represent relationships: debts of gratitude, oaths of allegiance, favors owed and promises kept. In practice, these are used to replace the relationships; they are regulated by the High Table, who can declare which asks are mandatory and which relationships are void.

In Chapter 3, John carries two with him: a ticket, and a marker, one entitling him to passage from the Ruska Roma and, the other, a favor from his friend Sofia. Each of these is met with the same response [“you think your ticket is valid?” “that marker doesn’t mean shit.”], and each time John insists that the relationships themselves, the deeds the tokens represent, matter more than the tokens. [“I am a child of the Ruska Roma and I am owed.” “When you needed help, I was there.”] If John did something for you, then you owe him, whether a governing body agrees or not. The Table can invalidate the marker, but they cannot erase the deed: Sofia’s daughter is alive because of John. And The Table can invalidate his ticket, but John is still a child of the Ruska Roma; you cannot litigate family.

By the same shorthand that declares the marker means “honor” and therefore any favor is honorable, The Table claims signifier and signified are one and the same, and whoever controls the symbol controls its meaning. That, if someone does you wrong, but the rules disagree… no they didn’t! John’s existence, as a man who defied the rules because they bade him to either suffer injustice or die, refutes this.

sofia

I used to not like the Halle Berry fight. I mean, it’s a great fight, but also the first in the series that seemed unnecessary. Sofia’s only function in the story is to put John in a room with someone who knows where The Elder is; really, everything after the unrelenting first half hour, after which John escapes New York, is just moving chess pieces for his eventual, unrelenting return, and it’s like the filmmakers realized that’s forty-odd minutes without a shootout, and just… put one in. It felt endemic to the increasing self-indulgence that would - I’m sorry - beleaguer Chapter 4. On first watch, Sofia was a bit character with too much screen time, all this buildup of setting and backstory and ensemble, like a backdoor pilot for a spinoff, like it’s that one episode of, ahhhh, [Stranger Things?] Gilmore Girls.

And I still think all of that, but I see now the scene serves a purpose: someone needed to agree with John. So far everyone who’s helped him has helped out of loyalty or necessity. It hasn’t mattered what he needs or what his reasons are, only that it’s John who’s asking. His actual reasons are kind of a running joke among his allies [“all this for a puppy.”]

Sofia is John’s most reluctant ally, but she is put in the same position as him: someone protected by the High Table shoots her dog. And she reacts the same: she says, “No. You can’t just shoot my dog and ask me to live with it. This will not stand.” She is the first, in her actions if not out loud, to agree that John is right. If this is sanctioned by the rules, then the rules are shit! You can’t just do that. They’re good dogs, Bronn!

wounds 1

John experiences a lot of pain, but surprisingly few injuries. This is partly just genre convention: action protagonists shake their damage off so the mayhem can continue. Throughout the series, John is shot, stabbed, thrown from buildings, and hit by cars, and he’s always back in action by the next morning.

He has suffered only a soup spoon’s worth of permanent wounds: In Chapter 3, he is scarred and loses a finger, and, by the end of Chapter 4, he will be scarred again and (massive air quotes) “mortally wounded.” All are harms he takes on willingly: the scars are Ruska Roma brands he asks for, the finger is an offering to the Elder to symbolize his return to the fold, and the gunshot that [scoff] “kills” him is one he allows in order to drop the Marquis’ defenses. These are all, to varying degrees, self-inflicted.

The only person who can meaningfully harm John is John.

zero

In each film, John is given a foil, a fellow assassin tasked with killing John Wick, the Baba Yaga, the most unkillable man on earth. There’s Chapter 1’s Marcus, who secretly protects John, Chapter 2’s Cassian, out for revenge, Chapter 4 gives us Caine, who must kill John to protect his child. In Chapter 3, The Adjudicator hires Zero, a John Wick fanboy.

See, The Adjudicator does not simply kill John’s allies; their role is to bring John’s allies to heel. The respect John commands is what is most dangerous to The Table: it compels people to break rules on his behalf. So The Adjudicator arrives to offer them a pathway back into The Table’s good graces: accept your punishment, renounce your allegiance, and you can respect John all you want; just don’t help him again,

Zero is the most explicit recuperation of respect: tasking someone who admires John Wick with taking him out. Zero wants to be the version of John that is useful to The Table, what John promises the Elder he will become but then renounces. Zero wants to prove he is every bit as good as John while being of the system. The Pray for the Wicked to John’s Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. The irreconcilable difference is: Zero wants to be John Wick, and John Wick does not.

suits 3

Laing’s suit is a symbol of his complacency. He keeps it on even as he stops going to his job, even as the world crumbles around him. Laing’s usefulness to the higher-ups is: he is not going to disrupt the system himself. He is going to continue his rituals and pantomimes to the very end. He is not a threat. But he’s also not an asset. He is no longer trying to better his situation, to climb the floors of the high-rise. Where his suit was once a uniform he wore to his upwardly-mobile career and shed in… other contexts, a thing that marked his place, too posh for the lower floors and not posh enough for the penthouse, now he keeps it on at all times. He is no longer trying to change. He accepts himself. He is a cog in a machine that will fail, and, when it does, he will be free.

the high table 2

If John Wick: Chapter 3 is a man-on-the-run film, Chapter 4 is man-against-the-world. John, betrayed by his friend as an offering to The Table, declares war on The Table.

But the reason The High Table is never seen is because The High Table doesn’t, itself, exist. John meets The One Who Sits Above the Table in Chapter 3, and in Chapter 4 meets a new One Above the Table; someone else now fills that position. John’s first act of war is to shoot this man in the head, but what he cannot shoot is the role.

Any action film wrestling with ideas runs into the problem that ideas are infamously difficult to punch in the face, which is traditionally how these things climax. Rather than personify an idea in a Big Bad John can kill, the series acknowledges the problem head-on: every Big Bad John kills just creates the consequences for the next film. The High Table persists because it isn’t corporeal. It is real because people believe in it, and will exist as long as it is respected.

John’s true threat to The Table, and the reason its new avatar, The Marquis, absolutely must kill him, is that, by film four, John has also become an idea. But, so long as that idea does not spread, it can die with John.

rules 2

Namgoog Minsoo is imprisoned for being a kronole addict. Kronole is seemingly the one remaining illicit substance, industrial waste you can sniff for a quick high. But, as Curtis and crew move forward, they find that clubgoers near the front of the train just… have kronole out in the open. Kronole has to be traded in secret in the tail section, but, here, they flaunt the degree to which rules do not constrain them. Similarly, the penthouse is a nonstop orgy of impropriety. For all the talk of order, it’s clear who is and isn’t expected to be orderly.

I see this on Chidi’s face in John Wick: Chapter Four when he comes to the Osaka Continental. Koji says, by all means, search the premises, but please surrender your weapons. This is the Continental, there are rules. And just… just look at this guy. Look at him! Look at that face! He knows those rules don’t apply to him! He’s working for the High Table! He’ll just deconsecrate the hotel so he can kill people. Yes, he’s correct - the man he’s looking for is on the premises - but that verdict comes before any evidence is gathered. Due process? In my action movie? The “rules separate us from the animals” unless they’re in your way, and you have the power to do what you want. Then, the authorities will back you up. Suddenly the thing that defines our humanity is just a cumbersome detail.

When John meets with Winston - newly, ah, soured on The Table despite his generous offering - he tells John to rejoin a crime family so he can exploit an old High Table tradition and legally confront The Marquis, to “use The Table’s rules against them” instead of pulling a Santino on another smug, white European. And this face [Chidi] is why I do not believe this plot point. You cannot use the rules against the rulemakers! They will simply not be enforced! The rules exist to serve The Table’s interests! They ain’t no friggin monument to justice! This is not a place of honor! Three straight movies about how the rules will only ever keep you down if they don’t kill you, and we’re gonna end on a loophole?

I don’t buy it.

rules 3

There is a wildcard running through Chapter 4, and that is Tracker, an outsider to the assassin order who’s taken it on himself to kill John Wick but only after the bounty gets high enough. The longer John is a thorn in The High Table’s paw, the more his head is worth; Tracker will keep him alive until he hits a certain number. The Marquis recognizes the value of a man who can successfully track John Wick, and offers him a more official, Table-approved position in a bugfuck scene where he stabs Tracker in the hand and is like “you could pull the knife out of your hand, but a real man would pull his hand through the knife!” which he’s acting like is another High Table tradition but I’d bet good money he’s making up. Yes, prove that you are civilized, prove you are worthy of our grace, by injuring yourself for no reason!

But Tracker accepts the Marquis’ bargain - simply follow John Wick, report his whereabouts, and get paid - and then learns the rules about the rules very bluntly when he finds that bargain changed on the fly [“kill John Wick, then you’ll get your money”]. The Marquis has been invested with the full power of The Table; he will change the rules as he pleases.

And Tracker clocks the real truth immediately: the economy relationships is not measured in tokens, or laws, or agreements, it is measured in leverage. The High Table presides over an order of assassins but is comprised of criminal bureaucrats, “cultured” men, women, and more, who do not pull the triggers themselves. Just as Wilford cannot personally cull the tail section, just as Royal cannot himself perform a lobotomy, their power comes from directing men like Curtis, like Laing, like John. The rules are used to constrain the people with genuine power. This is why The High Table cannot simply let John go, as has been an option since at least Morocco. They cannot risk an assassin breaking the rules and getting away with it. Acknowledging that honor, loyalty, and community matter irrespective of their talismans. They cannot expose that The High Table has no power without the quiescence of its killers.

The longer The Marquis fails to kill John Wick, the greater the chance that John or The Table will kill the Marquis. The Marquis needs Tracker. That’s leverage. And Tracker turns it against him.

suits 4

It is significant that Tracker never gets a suit.

dogs

The moviegoing audience is, at this point, cinematically desensitized to action movie wives getting merc’d; it's not that we don't mind, but it's hardly shocking. John Wick understands: we are not desensitized to people killing dogs. You can't mess with dogs. You especially can't mess with that dog.

Harm done to a dog is the series' shorthand for unforgivable inhumanity. It's what gets us onboard with John's killing spree, Sofia's dog getting shot is what gets her on John's side, John defending Tracker's dog is what convinces Tracker to abandon the bounty and let John live. And, remember, that everyone who hurts a dog in these movies is one of the "civilized" people. ["Do I look civilized to you?!"]

High-Rise also depicts inhumanity in Wilder killing a dog early in the film for... no real reason at all, just because he can, because it bucks the system that says he shouldn't, and because it's one of the only things lower than him in the social hierarchy. But High-Rise more or less accepts Winston and Wilford's framing that social rules and human ethics are the same; that to reject one is to reject both. Where, in John Wick, it is the uncivil who show the most humanity; like, it is not incorrect to describe the John Wick franchise as people violently rebelling against a civil society for not respecting dogs. Where Wilder is framed as the most human for being the most beastly. And the movie ends - and, because it ends where it begins, opens - with Laing killing and eating a dog. He has become like Wilder. The collapse of society is the collapse of human morals. He is with the animals.

There isn't a perfect corollary for this in Snowpiercer. The closest is this: ["You know what I hate about myself? I know what people taste like."] Which isn't really the same, I mean, they were starving in the early days, so it's understandable- ["I know that babies taste best."] Fffffffffffffffff holy shi-

wounds 2

The High Table is an idea, a social order, and, because John cannot kill the social order, Chapter 4 ends with John sacrificing himself, dying on his own terms and for his own reasons. Because, to paraphrase Žižek, it is easier to imagine the death of John Wick than the end of the High Table.

But should we also consider that no it fucking isn’t? No one believes John is actually dead at the end of Chapter 4. They’ve set John up as the most unkillable person in history, we all know Chapter 5 is coming. It’s already been announced! Hell, John couldn’t fake his death without making it look like his choice. The only person who could kill John Wick is John Wick, and he failed! God made a rock He couldn’t lift!

This is the corner into which they’ve painted themselves: it is not realistic for John to win, and it is not plausible for John to lose.

recuperation

Snowpiercer is a movie about revolution. High-Rise is a movie about collapse.

I would say Laing’s position is accelerationist. (Which is funny - the one set on a speeding train is not about acceleration.) Laing stands back and watches as the powerful lose control, allowing the chaos to happen, and, where possible, fanning its flames. He sees the corruption of civility as inevitable, and waits for the neighboring high-rises to fall so he can welcome them into this new future.

Curtis’ position remains revolutionary. He is offered immense power within the system but is told that his fair society cannot exist - he can live in the head or in the tail, but there will always be a head and tail, a powerful few and a deprived many. And he refuses both. He is tempted by power, but chooses his humanity, chooses his community, and destroys the entire corrupted system. He does not wait for the train to crash; like a Build Engine protagonist, he crashes it.

As it stands now, I would say John Wick’s position is… reformist. He declares war on the High Table in Chapter 3, but, at the end of Chapter 4, he sacrifices himself to the system: giving up his life, neutralizing himself as a threat, and allowing the system to carry on in exchange for protection of people he loves. It is… the same ending as Matrix: Revolutions. (Which is also funny, that Matrix: Revolutions does not end in revolution, but reform. Snowpiercer is the one about revolution. The train even literally makes one revolution around the Earth every year. Lefties were all hot on Parasite, but, y’all: Snowpiercer!)

Now… that’s not actually the end. Nothing ends. John has shown The High Table is vulnerable. He’s inspired a number of people. And he’s very obviously not actually dead. So who knows? The High Table is undefeated because, more than John himself, they and the society they represent are the hook. They are what make this universe interesting, what differentiate this from a hundred other revenge stories, what allow for John-free spinoffs. His rebellion can neither win nor lose, John will fight and fail and recover and rally for as long as it makes money. Permanent revolution has been folded into capitalism - never thought I’d see the day!