Voluntary Disability in John Wick 4

This is a big deal!

So, thanks for telling me, not a single one of you, that a major part of the John Wick franchise is voluntary disability; either you share my prior ignorance of this universe or you’re like all those people who told me they were really curious about my thoughts on Lady Gaga’s crutch-dancing in the “Papparazzi” video but didn’t want to offend me by asking my thoughts on it when it came out. Quick note: any time you see a physically disabled person in a pop-cultural anything, do ask me what I think (though it usually helps if you’ve got a sec.)

The reason I saw John Wick 4 yesterday is not because I’ve ever seen a movie with that name in the title but rather because I was intensely pissed off. I myself am not going to kill dozens of inferior fighters en masse but my enraged spirit had a primal need to watch Keanu do it for 3 hours (…and for a multitude of emotional and aesthetic reasons, wow no one does it better).

There’s very little dialogue in John Wick 4 and it turns out words are meaningless and they lie and we don’t actually need them so I’m out of both a job and a sense of purpose but that aside: what doesn’t lie are facial expressions, which communicate more eloquent dialogue than I’ve seen for ages really, and the body, which in this film is such a collectively balletic instrument that I basically did feel like I was watching ballet through every fight scene.

Visually, this is a film that has not forgotten what the immersive cinematic experience is for. It’s not a series of close-ups: director Chad Stahelski, like the classical Hollywood visionaries of old, never forgets the body, the full body, and if we’re zooming in on someone’s face we’re doing it for a reason. The sensory realm is so central to this movie that a shot of carefully-stirred Turkish coffee is one of the most erotic series of shots I’ve ever seen. But look at me, gushing from a non-cerebral place: let’s talk about how these badass action hero-villians prove their alliance with The Table through voluntary diability. (Don’t get distracted if you don’t know who The Table are or why they’re called The Table because I’m not the one to ask.)

Initiation is a knife through the back of your hand at a moment that you’re not expecting it. “You have a choice,” a menacing voice says. “You can pull the knife out or pull your hand out. One shows you’re only for yourself, another shows that you’re with The Cause.” Worthy people pull their hand out, inevitably removing a part of their finger in the slice that precipitates the brutal handshake.

Being, again, knew to this high-intensity world, I had never met Caine and only knew him as a thoroughly unfuckwithable blind fighter. But in a sober exchange between Caine and a new itiatiate, the new guy, metaphorically feeling his way around, says (I can’t remember the word-for-world line), “It’s a shame that they took your eyes, though.”

Caine says, “They didn’t take them, I gave them.”

This line got to me so hard that it’s still in the process of getting all the way down as I write this. I don’t know anyone who’s voluntarily disabled and I’m not even sure that I want to, but I know they exist. I tried to explain this severe body-modification culture to a friend and she immediately said, “oh yeah I know people who’ve gone to lengths to get health insurance” (or something of that sort) and I had to say, “No, this is not utilitarian. These are people who are already pierced and tattooed (usually) and have decided that that’s not enough.”

She had trouble wrapping her head around that and the activist in me has to stop myself from saying, YOU THINK NO ONE WANTS A BODY LIKE MINE?! sure it’s more complicated than that blah blah blah but I’m actually just adding that as a caveat so you don’t think I’m crazy. The Crazed Activist reaction is my reaction.

I don’t think I’m spoiling too much if I say that when John Wick: Dark Hero for the Ages heads to the Sacré Cour to meet his diabolical duel partner he runs into some issues on the way there. The film makes sure we know that there are 300 steps leading to the Sacré-Coeur and you know that when he makes it up after defying death an endless number of times he’s going to get pushed back down.

By the time he’s at the bottom, his body visibly can’t take anymore. It’s wild to see any action-protagonist this way, limping. Limping like he’s got a body like mine. And no less badass or hot for it which SHOULD BE A SHOCK TO NO ONE. Anyway. Caine has been set against him for reasons beyond either of their control, but the last thing he wants no matter where they stand is for John Wick to die an undignified death by execution because he didn’t make the set dueling place by sunrise.

“I need you to get up those stairs, John,” he says.

This line is also staying with me. The emotion in it, while even-keeled, because that’s Caine’s way, is also urgent. We’re talking life-or-death. There are all sorts of issues with discourses around what we can will our bodies to do, but I’ve learned from working out, and, in experiences I’d rather not repeat, from hiking, that sometimes we really do have to simply will our bodies to move beyond our peceptions of what feels possible. You can’t? Oh sure, you can’t. But the thing is, you can.

I didn’t used to know this because a disproportionate amount of my life was formed around learned helplessness. But ultimately I’m coming around to the understanding that percieved limits are made to be broken. There do exist actual physical limits, of course, and we can best accomidate them by understanding which ones are real — are objectively there — and which ones simply go against our comfortable notions of what’s possible.

I don’t envision a situation where my personal trainer has to say, “I need you to get this last row, Sarah,” in the grave everything-depends-on-this tone of Caine. But if ever there were such a circumstance, I’d want to know that I could do it. John Wick is not a role model, that’s his draw: he’s an orphan who snapped — abandonment issues taking their unaddressed unmitigated course — when he lost his wife. He never learned to deal with grief in the same way that he was never safe to learn to deal with being alone, and so all he knows how to do now is fight and kill. But he’s also a loyal, devoted friend. And the man loves dogs to a truly heroic degree.

It’s my dad’s birthday today and he would’ve been 67, so with him in the back of my mind through all this I’m going to bring up the brief dialogue exchange that ignited me months ago when I saw the trailer. John Wick, in one of the most beautiful churches in the world, the night before the duel he might not survive.

“Coming to say goodbye?” Caine asks.

“To say hello,” he says. It might be the closest thing to optimism we’ve ever heard John Wick express. He prays, silently.

“Do you believe your wife can hear you?” Caine asks.

“No,” John says, without audible sadness or resignation.

“Then why bother?”

“Because,” and there’s that subtle note of optimism again, the one that might have defined his nature if he weren’t so severely traumatized. “I might be wrong.”

I believe my dad can hear me, and sometimes I argue with him. I fight with him about all the things he didn’t see. I also believe that we can send messages to fellow living beings if we’re really, really focused on it. Why am I telling you all this?

Because voluntary disability is ultimately a test of what you can do. (I am not championing the practice, merely having fun with it philisophically. Philosophy is not an endorsement.) A sacrifice cannot exist as an isolated act, it’s connected to a larger purpose. John Wick found The Table when he was impossibly alone, and, like so many young people who join gangs, he found a sense of foundation there that he never had. He later realized, like many of those same young people do, that this is not bringing him peace, that there is so much more to him than the “ability,” if it is one, to kill. He wants out.

And, unlike those young people, he is not young. Which, itself, is inspiring to watch. Grief has permanently hunched his shoulders and he looks like he hasn’t slept through the night twice in one year. This itself is unbearably hot for reasons I don’t want to analyze too deeply here but suffice to say, John Wick’s appeal, and, I assume, the enduring nature of this francheise, is in his humanity, the viseral ways he’s defined by everything most of us take pains to hide.

(Apologies for the lack of photos in this entry. I can’t find the image of John Wick on the motorcycle in the suit and tie which is all that will do. In lieu of the shot, you get my confession that I instinctually said “oh YES” out loud when he jumped on that bike. This makes me the best or worst movie companion depending on how you live, so propose your plans accordingly.)