The Year's Work: Studies in Fan Culture and Cultural Theory

The Year's Work at the Continental Hotel

Caitlin G. Watt, Stephen Watt

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780253062437
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique du cinéma

Each John Wick film has earned more money and recognition than its predecessor, defying the conventional wisdom about the box office's action movie landscape, normally dominated by superhero movies and science fiction epics.

As The Worlds of John Wick explores, the worldbuilding of John Wick offers thrills that you simply can't find anywhere else. The franchise's plot combines familiar elements of the revenge thriller and crime film with seamlessly coordinated action. One of its most distinctive appeals, however, is the detailed and multifaceted fictional world—or rather, worlds—it constructs. The contributors to this volume consider everything from fight sequences, action aesthetics, and stunts to grief, cinematic space and time, and gender performance to map these worlds and explore how their range and depth make John Wick a hit.

A deep dive into this popular neo-noir franchise, The Worlds of John Wick celebrates and complicates the cult phenomenon that is John Wick.

PART I

JOHN WICK AND ACTION CINEMA

1

RED CIRCLE OF REVENGE

ANATOMY OF THE FIGHT SEQUENCE IN JOHN WICK

LISA COULTHARD & LINDSAY STEENBERG

Introduction

From the OK Corral to the Colosseum, the fight sequence is one of the primary building blocks of Hollywood cinema. Despite its ubiquity, it has received little critical attention as a discrete unit of cinema. This chapter begins to address this gap by turning to the John Wick franchise (Chad Stahelski, 2014–2019), a series of films that might be best understood as a succession of interlocking fights. In fact, it may be more accurate to say that John Wick does not have fight sequences; it is a fight sequence.

Written through bodies and architecture, fighting in John Wick draws audiovisual attention to surfaces. The films are defined by a slick aesthetic of expensive cars, tailored suits, and elaborate hyperreal spaces. Characterized by cinematic formalism oriented around mobile camera framing, the fight scenes foreground bodies moving through byzantine spaces dominated by reflective surfaces, filmed in medium and long shots, and scored with energizing rock, trance, and ethereal electropop beats. Eschewing the rapid-fire editing, intensified continuity, and shaky cameras made ubiquitous with the “run and gun” style of the Bourne series (2002–2016), Wick’s action is perceptible and palpable on a human scale, tied to the body and star persona of Keanu Reeves as John Wick.¹

Reeves’s body in action becomes a kind of compressed celebrity symbol that enmeshes John Wick with Keanu Reeves, endowing the film character with the mixed-race background, tragic romantic past, single-minded athleticism, professionalism, and understated likeability associated with Reeves’s star persona. These factors play a key role in the perceived authenticity and skill associated with the Wick series’ fight choreography, which foregrounds Reeves’s physical adeptness and highlights his dance-like movements as he fights his way through impressive gothic, neoclassical, and modernist spaces.

This perception of Reeves holds sway even though the films make extensive use of stunt work and sophisticated CGI. Fans and critics alike stress the authenticity of the action, Reeves’s skills, and the realism of the violence. The fight sequences are repeatedly lauded as “fresh,” “raw,” and “brutal.” A particularly effusive LA Times review of John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum, praising its “mesmeric synchronicity” and “balletic ballistics,” suggests that the film asks us to take action cinema as seriously as a Caravaggio painting, a Tarkovsky film, or a Greco-Roman sculpture—three of many references to high art in the film.² The Wick series, however, does not just elevate low cultural objects (such as action cinema); instead, it treats Roman classicism, Caravaggio’s paintings, and martial action as parallel and equally significant aesthetic objects, each crystallizing as cool surface shimmers in the film settings. Both high art and populist action in Wick become attractive patterns of color and texture. Highlighting this attention to surface, Wick’s fight sequences are filmed with elaborate mobile framing augmented by pulsing rhythms of sound, music, and violence. John himself can be read as a polished surface, as the sleek athleticism of Reeves’s kinetic body, fashionably armored in bespoke protective suits, is more significant to the films than any dialogue. This Wickian mise-en-surface focuses on the architectural features of the set piece and spectacle of John Wick strutting and striding through hyperreal spaces—dynamic action that is reflected in the rock, pop, and techno music that drives John’s kineticism and the affective action of the films.

Between Blood and Data

The John Wick films oscillate between what we term blood and data—that is, between visceral authenticity and digital augmentation. These two dominant strains shape the franchise’s fight scenes, which are grounded in the realism of corporal violence while simultaneously celebrating the reality-bending possibilities of digital effects. We suggest that this central tension is a feature of the contemporary big-budget fight scene that tarries between physicality and digitality, authenticity and effects, and realism and hyperreality. This tension is echoed in the labor practices of the franchise, particularly its use of stunt performers who are simultaneously celebrated and effaced, revealing the ways in which the Wickverse can claim authenticity and realism (for example, Reeves’s fight skills and the stunt performer as director) while also experimenting with sophisticated digital effects. The films dazzle with special effects (including sound effects and computer-generated visual effects), elaborate sets (the glass house and the weapons museum), electronic throbbing music, and visually enhanced spectacular kineticism. In addition, through its fight scenes, the franchise draws heavily from cultural texts and icons, whether action cinema and its hitman subgenre or neoclassical ideals and iconography. Like their shiny surfaces, the films are reflective and refractive of their genre and the cinematic history of fight scenes (see fig. 1.1). They shine back to the viewer a dazzling and accelerated compendium of film fighting in the digital era.

Focusing on a single significant fight scene (the seven-minute, thirty-one-second Red Circle Club sequence in John Wick) as an illustrative example, this chapter anatomizes and analyzes Wick’s fight aesthetics in order to interrogate their mise-en-surface. Wick’s fight scenes do not depart from established norms so much as build on and exaggerate current trends; therefore, we use this sequence as a deep dive into the operations of the cinematic fight. We break down the ways in which bodies and spaces, sound and vision, and blood and data work to create a kinetic action sequence of entertaining and exaggerated physical violence. We focus this inquiry on how audiovisual aesthetics and schematics articulate the “impact aesthetic” and balletic ballistics associated with action cinema’s fight scenes.³

1.1. Fight statistics for the John Wick films.

The multilevel fight at the Red Circle nightclub reveals an established pattern in the fight scenes across the John Wick franchise and, indeed, postmillennial action cinema more widely. In looking at this fight, we approach violence as a language-reinforced architectural orchestration of the set piece, the ludic logic of its narration, and the suturing to the body and perspective of John in a way that parallels the dance sequence in the musical.⁴

The Red Circle Fight

The fight at the Red Circle nightclub is the second of eight fights in the first John Wick film. The sequence follows the eponymous John Wick as he tracks his target, Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), into a glitzy nightclub. He first encounters the doorman, Francis (Kevin Nash), whom he spares out of professional courtesy. John then sneaks into the club and kills one of Iosef’s main protectors, Victor (Toby Leonard Moore). After stalking and killing several bodyguards, John finds Iosef in an opulent subterranean bathhouse, where he fights several underlings. Iosef flees onto the busy dance floor with John in pursuit. Following Iosef relentlessly up the stairs and into a VIP room, John shoots multiple assailants, who are identically dressed in black jackets and red shirts. The shoot-out spills onto a mezzanine, where he must fight at closer range and engage with more skilled guards, including their leader, Kirill (Daniel Bernhardt), who throws John from the balcony onto the emptying dance floor, where he lands with a visceral thud, signaling the end of the fight itself. The scene follows John and the hysterical crowds as they rush out of the club.

Across the 187-shot sequence, John kills twenty-seven people. His kinetic chase across five interior locations (changeroom, bathhouse, dance floor, VIP room, and mezzanine) is punctuated by several shoot-outs and can be further subdivided into nine significant hand-to-hand altercations between him and the adversaries blocking his target. The Red Circle fight is typical of the way the John Wick franchise arranges its fight sequences as multilevel, ludically informed, hyperreal, dynamic, and highly aestheticized set pieces that insist on violent authenticity through mediated stylistic gestures. Like the other fights, it focalizes John as the prime agent, tying his movement to music and rhythm and highlighting his point of view and point of audition.

While we argue that the fight sequences in the John Wick series are not radical departures from the established style and choreography of similar sequences in other action films, they share a collection of distinguishing characteristics that have become unique selling points of John Wick as a brand. First, the John Wick action sequences lavish attention on the minute preparations for the fight, which we label the “para-action” sequence. For example, in John Wick 2, John visits the “gun sommelier” at the Continental Hotel in Rome and has his tactical/bulletproof suit tailor-made; in John Wick, he calls for “dinner reservations” when he needs the corpses cleared from his house. In advance of the Red Circle fight, as with the earlier home invasion sequence, he dresses and accessorizes in ritualized detail. Once John engages in violence, the films mix wide shots and longer takes with detailed close-ups to insist on the authenticity of the fight and to allow the spectator to admire the mise-en-scène of the set piece, thus reinforcing the architectural nature of the violence. This is further bolstered by the use of a mobile but not overly shaky or unstable camera. Such framing and cinematography are ideally suited to the smooth but economical movements of gun fu, a practice of close-range armed combat informed by Hong Kong action cinema and filmmakers such as John Woo, which is augmented by digital special effects across the John Wick films.

The John Wick series engineers fight scenes that play with proximity, range, and movement across multiple axes, using all available dimensions of space to showcase multiple participants, weapons, and levels. This renders the fight both dance-like and game-like. Danijela Kulezic-Wilson has noted that there has long been a connection between music and movement, and the cinematic fight sequence combines this musical kinesis with audiovisual action. As she notes, these elements have come together in a unique way in action cinema since the release of The Matrix, which blends “the musical elegance of martial arts choreography” with Hollywood big-budget spectacle and uses “expressive gestures, choreographed actions, rapid editing, amplified sound effects and music to produce a new type of audio-visual kinesis.”⁵ The Red Circle sequence heightens and accelerates this kinesis through cinematic formalism, propulsive music, and John’s spectacularized athleticism and skill. Enhanced and driven by audiovisual aesthetics, the athletic spectacle of John’s kinetic violence also highlights the importance of Keanu Reeves’s star persona to the John Wick fight scenes, as the success of the franchise spurred Reeves’s surge in popularity, particularly on social media, where he gained a reputation as “the internet’s boyfriend.” The Red Circle fight showcases all of these features and is illustrative of the franchise fight design as a whole. Compared with other fight scenes in the film, this sequence is particularly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Worlds of John Wick
• Part I: John Wick and Action Cinema
• Part II: The Economies and Phenomenology of the Wickverse
• Part III: John Wick: Other Cultural Forms and Genres
• Part IV: John Wick’s Matrix: Space and Time
• Part V: Gender and the Body in John Wick
• Bibliography
• Index