Out of curiosity, and because Netflix kept telling me the films were about to leave the site, I watched the first three (of four) John Wick films. That leaves me with two questions: 1) what’s the point of all the action, violence, and fights, and 2) what, specifically, is going on with it in these films?
The first question extends beyond the John Wick films. Action and violence occur in many, perhaps most (even all?) films. But some films are built around them. Why? More specifically, what’s the point of films in which minutes can go by, five, then, or perhaps more in a single continuous sequence, when nothing happens to advance the plot. We just have a continuous stream of violence. Even when the violence is over, for the moment, the plot may not have been advanced in an appreciable way. The protagonist has overcome another obstacle, which is something, but not much.
I suppose – and I’ve just realized this, though this question has been bugging me for a while – makes some presupposition about the proper time-lapse between (major) plot points in any film, not just action/adventure films. Thus, for example, we also have scenes where people may eat a meal, or a couple have sex, with nothing happening in the plot during the course of the scene, which make well take a couple of minutes. Still, in films like the John Wick films, the scenes of violence can be quite extended. The same is true of martial arts films.
True Lies is an interesting example. There are extended action/violence sequences. There’s the opening sequence, which accomplishes nothing to advance the plot since it transpires before the main plot begins. Most/all of the James Bond films open with such a sequence (& True Lies parodies them). The film ends with an extensive violence sequence. For the most part it simply demonstrates the ability of the good guys to finally defeat the bad guys. That’s one plot point, albeit a major one. I suppose the rescue of the daughter is another plot point. So we’ve got two plot points for that one extended bit of violence.
How would that work out for all of these films, that is, the ill-defined class of action/violence films? What about the Indiana Jones films, or the Jurassic Park series, the Rocky films, Die Hard, or Godzilla? And then we have all those film types I’ve never watched, the car films (Fast and Furious), the Transformer films. What’s the ratio of plot points per action/violence sequence? And then there’s the more general question about how much time elapses for each plot point. That will of course involve tricky questions of figuring out what the plot points are in the first place, and dividing them into major and minor, etc. In the end, it’s about the pace of a film, no?
But I asked specifically about action sequences, and specifically about fights. In the John Wick films we have fights that last several minutes, perhaps even ten minutes, in the course of which Wick deals with 10s of opponents, injuring and killing many of them, before the sequence ends. In how many such sequences does nothing change beyond the cumulative body count? I don’t know, and the Wick films certainly aren’t the only such films, but they’re the ones I’ve recently watched.
Obviously the mayhem itself is the point. It’s thrilling. What’s that appealing to? The aggression, mayhem, and death, why do we watch it? What need does it satisfy? I’m not sure. Nor are such films appealing to all people. They’re of no more than moderate interest to me, but they ARE that.
There’s also the artistry and craftsmanship involved. This operates on three levels. There’s the skill of fighters, and there’s the skill of the overall fight choreography, and there’s the skill with which it is all staged, filmed, and presented. Those skills vary considerably across films. And there’s our ability to follow the action, to keep up with it – here I’m thinking of a post a I wrote several weeks ago about play-by-play sports commentary. That’s pleasurable for the viewer. That is, on the one hand we have pleasure in our ability to keep up with the action and, on the other hand, our appreciation for the skill required to produce the action. These particular pleasures cannot happen in prose – though at the moment I’m thinking of Hemingway’s skill in writing about a bullfight – and only in a somewhat more limited way on stage.
And then we the overall mise-en-scène of the John Wick films. There’s the whole noir aesthetic, but what I have in mind are the features of the particular criminal underworld in which Wick exists. There’s the mysterious 12-member Table that presides over it all, with all the rules and rituals and paraphernalia, which gets developed over the course of the series.
In the first film – which apparently had not been conceived with sequels in mind – reveals the existence of the Table. We’ve also got the coin-like markers containing the thumb-prints in blood, and the Continental hotel, where denizens of this underworld can take rooms but cannot “conduct business” on the premises. This gets elaborated in subsequent films. In the second film we see the 1930s Art Deco administrative apparatus with the type-writer keyboards and the message tubes. Now Wick is tasked with killing a member of the ruling Table. In the third film Wick finds himself fighting the table, and meeting the mysterious Elder out in the middle of the desert. This Elder seems to have some authority over the Table. How’s that managed from the middle of the desert?
This mythology is developed through various specific objects, persons, places, rules and rituals, which are floating in an ever-expanding sea of mystery. What holds this world together? One can of course ask that of any imagined world, not to mention the real world in which we live, but the Wick films seem to bring this issue starkly to our attention in the contrast between all the specifics of the mind-numbing violence and the utter pointlessness and endlessness of it all.
Very clever.
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