Guilty pleasure confession: I have been watching the John Wick series of films, about a fantasy world in which an assassin's guild lives by a code of ethics which includes not trying to kill each other within the doors of a "Continental" hotel chain. Somehow, in the two movies I have seen so far, the assassins never seem to be hired to kill a civilian, but are either retained to kill gangsters or each other. Generally, the only person ever tormented or bullied by anyone is John Wick himself.
I had made a decision some time ago to stop watching movies about hitmen, precisely because of the insincerity of the story-telling. An assassin (usually one who sincerely wants to quit) is hired to kill someone's inconvenient, but otherwise normal and nice wife, as she walks from her car to the house with groceries. A small subset of particularly sadistic entries in the genre simply don't care, and will portray a killer-protagonist whacking a completely innocent person, without any consequences (he is just doing his job). More often, there is some dishonest adjustment, some fidgeting, in the story-telling. In a soon to be canceled comedic series a few years ago, about a repentant killer and a con woman trying to help him stop, his first target pulled a weapon on him, so naturally he had to kill her. Later he murdered another target whom we had seen in several prior scenes as a rather nagging, annoying person, so that it was a slight relief when he killed her (also, he had I think just decided not to, and then she saw something she shouldn't). In many of these stories, there is at least a slight tinge of "well, she had it coming". I remember, in a much earlier entree in the genre, a funny assassin saying something like, "If I come to your door, you must have done something". Hitman movies, like vampire films, are therefore sadistic monuments to inequality: there is a class of killers, and a class of people they are allowed to kill, world without end, amen.
But, enjoying the rather calm, Zen world of John Wick, there was a moment in the second film I was not prepared for. We are
introduced to a woman Mafia boss,Gianna, whom John Wick is hired by her own brother to kill. An
otherwise gratuitously talky scene, in which Gianna sociopathically narrates to another gangster her method of taking over his
territory by threatening his associates' children, sets up that "she has it coming". Gianna
is beautiful, very attentive to dress and make up, carries no gun, and foolishly sends her body guard away when
entering the bathroom for a mirror check and touch-up. This itself seems a throw-back to the early 1960's, in which a beautiful professional in a James Bond
movie is there to be eye candy, and fall into bed with the hero, like any other female character. Another essay Shimmers about the
question of when women professionals in Hollywood movies are meant to be believable, and whether our failure to
think they are really doctors, lawyers etc. is intentional or a failure in the competence of the work.
In the final season of the otherwise
decent Netfix series, Bosch, there was also female leader of a drug gang, who in appearance
and behavior was also obviously a civilian; when she was jailed after an arrest, even I would have known to hire
a tough prisoner for protection (from watching shows like The Wire)--but she was clueless and was shanked
seemingly in minutes.
Nothing in the cool, Zen, supposedly ethical world of John Wick has justified Gianna's last tableau, which would be better
suited to a serial killer movie. If the film was actually following its own rules, there would have been another
way to play this: the scene
could have been handled like the assassination of Stringer Bell in The Wire, in a
very low-key and businesslike way (and without any kind of artistic tableau). It is perfectly possible,
men being who they are and Hollywood what it is, that the director and of course the cinematographer could
not bypass an opportunity to show Gianna aesthetically expiring in a pool of blood. There has been some
interesting writing the past year or two about otherwise feminist thrillers, and even ones directed
by women, that pause for the dead-girl-on-display scene, like this year's Mare of Easttown
and The Undoing.
Since, as I get older, everything seems to connect to absolutely everything else, I mention
another instance of a movie trying to have something both ways: The Europa Report
is ostensibly a worlds-of-wonder sci-fi movie, yet with every scene phrased in
horror movie tropes, up to the classic final shot in which the last surviving crew member
sees the innocent alien life form in its entirety--then drowns.
A few minutes after Gianna dies, John Wick Chapter 2 makes another choice which seems to confirm that it
has intentionally cruel and misogynistic overtones. We are introduced to a pretty, slight, subway violinist,
who calm, ethical John Wick brutally kills, beating her, slamming her
to the concrete, and then breaking her neck. Oh, yes, of course, she was a member of the assassin's
guild, and drew a weapon on him first, so She Had it Coming. On a similar note, I remember
an early Star Trek movie, in which
ordinarily chivalrous William Shatner
punched a beautiful, thin African American model in the mouth (which seems almost nonviolent, compared to
what happens to Gianna): the "reveal" a moment later was that she wasn't a woman at all,
but a Dangerous Shapeshifter, so She Had It Coming. This all seems a little more intentional than
the casual violence against women which has always been portrayed
on film by oblivious male auteurs. In The Searchers, which I believed for decades
was one of the best American movies ever made, our hero Martin Pauley kicks an Indian woman, Wild Goose, so
hard she rolls down a hill. Men slap
women in movies to cure their hysteria, or physically wrangle them in a way which looks particularly
like an assault--witness the end of Luc Besson's Angel-A, in which the comedy is derived from
pairing a tiny North African man with a Nordic model who towers over him, and yet he still all but slaps
her around as she cries.
If your knee-jerk reaction is to tell me I am overreacting (after a similar criticism back in the day
of Interview With The Vampire, I got scores of iterations of that admonition), try this thought
experiment. Jews exist in John Wick's world--in Chapter 2 an Orthodox man puts in an appearance as
one of John Wick's suppliers. Will we ever see a scene in which a Hasid, or someone dressed as one,
is a member of the Guild, who attacks John Wick and is disposed of by being thrown into an oven?
There is no moral or other qualitative difference between that scene and John Wick's attack on
the violinist. There is a violent
misogynistic strand which has run through hundreds of years of American culture:
there's stuff we would never do to a male character, but you know, its Ok if its a woman.
Some of the particularly disturbing and iconic violence in films is affected by another consideration, of
diversity in casting. In the 1960's, it became customary to cast an African American actor or two in
cop movies, for example, but they usually received the role of the team member who died first. This
same trend in horror movies resulted in the very amusing "black guy dies first" meta-cinematic moments
in Scream. But when sociopathic Gene Hackman fatally whipped Morgan Freeman to death in Unforgiven,
the film's ostensible diversity, and equal opportunity-ism (Equal Opportunism), could not elide the fact that
we were watching a white man whip a black man to death in the nineteenth century. Movies can't avoid context,
even when they officially claim to (and mostly they don't really want to). Whoever she was and whatever
she did, John Wick is still brutally portrayed as murdering a young woman who is much smaller and slighter than he is
(and Keanu Reeves the actor ironically has the reputation of being unusually respectful to and careful
with female fans).
Of course, all this must be viewed against the background of what we now know about Harvey Weinstein's
treatment of women. There was a lot of surprised commentary when the story (which everyone in Hollywood had known for years)
came out: But he made films about strong women! He gave such great opportunities to actresses! But there is really no contradiction:
Weinstein apparently wanted to build up strong women (or images of them anyway)
whom he could dominate and assault. Gianna's "arc" in John Wick Chapter 2, from Mafia boss to naked murder victim, is a case study
of this pathology.