JOHN WICK: Capitalism Dressed In Religious Clothes

The John Wick franchise is more than the story of a boy and his dog.

Starring action hero Keanu Reeves and famous for its epic scenes of stylized violence, the series’ spectacular killings are meticulously orchestrated as if part of a grand ballet. The aesthetic thrill the murders produce comes from their precise choreography in perfect syncopation with the films’ soundtracks. Yet all of the action is structured by the franchise’s heavy engagement with mythology (“what impossible task?” “why is the hotel desk clerk named Charon?”). Grand narratives lurk below every blood-soaked surface in these movies.

This obsession with large-scale organization even pours into the movies’ establishing shots and transitions, which repeatedly give us gliding views of the city from above. From these vantage points, we see the grid-like streets that limit and enable the movements of the people drawn into John Wick’s elaborate revenge. It is as if the filmmakers offer us, through plot and visuals, God-like glimpses at the massive structure that is invisible to those on the ground.

Over the course of the trilogy, the story slowly reveals an all-powerful organizing authority, the criminal network of The High Table, that dominates the actions and motivations of everyone on screen. Seemingly no one is exempt from the rigid code established and overseen by the High Table. “Rules,” claims Ian McShane’s suave and ruthless manager Winston, “are what keep us from living among the animals” in John Wick Chapter 2. Perhaps, but these very rules keep everyone living like animals in this Darwinian world.

In the original John Wick, we are offered brief, mysterious glimpses of this organization. There are the gold coins, the code words, the stunning execution of Ms. Perkins for breaking house rules. By the end of the third film, however, these glimpses of the High Table’s insidious power become the focus of Wick’s epic tale. We begin the journey immersed in a personal story of individual revenge and gradually zoom out to an overhead view of the systems that structure power in the world. And all of it, incidentally, revolves around money and power.

Taken as a whole (with part 4 coming in 2021), the series can be read as an allegory for the coercive nature of capitalism. For all the claims about its capacity for promoting individual liberty, one salient critique of capitalism is that those supposedly free individuals cannot simply opt out by force of their will. Everyone is placed in a position in which they must sell their labor for the sake of creating value and profit for those who own the means of production.

Their very survival depends on it. In the Wickerverse, the High Table stands in for Capital which repeatedly wrenches Wick out of his private life and into the service of its profiteering enterprises. He is cursed to compete in an arena of endless competition for survival, with money being the substance that greases the machine.

Yet despite capital’s dominance in this world, there is another grand narrative at work here. Despite the atheism and pure materialism of the High Table world, the organization wields its power using the language of religion. In fact, I argue that the High Table actively employs religion’s capacity to organize society at a massive level to accomplish the material ends of its profit-making machine.

Story Arc

To very briefly recap the franchise’s plot, John Wick opens with the former assassin mourning his recently deceased wife. Before her death, she arranged to have a (very cute) puppy delivered to John to help him mourn. The son of a Russian crime boss, Viggo (Michael Nyqvist), with whom Wick had previously worked, breaks into his house, beats him, kills his puppy, and steals his classic muscle car. Wick embarks on a bloody quest for vengeance, ultimately killing everyone all the way up to Viggo himself. He then acquires a new dog.

John Wick, Chapter 2 picks up in the aftermath of the original with another former employer, Santonio D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio), forcing Wick back into service to kill his sister for her seat at the High Table. D’Antonio betrays Wick and places a bounty on his head, leading Wick to hunt him down first. The film’s climax has Wick deciding to break a cardinal High Table rule and murder D’Antonio in the Continental Hotel, a sacred space in the world of the High Table, where no “business” may be conducted.

This leads directly to John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, which follows Wick as he has been declared “excommunicato” with a $14 million bounty on his head for his apostasy. In this film, the entire weight of the High Table bears down upon Wick as he navigates his way through a Kafkaesque bureaucracy of spectacular murder.

Individuality Under Capitalism’s Thumb

The most obvious sign of capital’s fingerprints on the franchise are the gold coins. The large, shiny objects are the primary means of exchange in the world controlled by the High Table. They provide access to special places; they are the exchange unit for guns and other goods, and they can be used for the efficient disposal of the bodies one may leave in one’s wake in this free market world.

For instance, in the film’s first major action sequence, Wick disposes of a dozen assassins in his home, then puts in a call for a “dinner reservation for 12” to Charlie (David Patrick Kelly), who shows up with his crew and removes all traces of the mayhem, all for 12 shiny coins. The dead humans are entirely anonymous and become fully replaced in the system by coins that serve as currency within the profit-producing machine.

The individual identities of the dead are converted into currency, just as capital reduces humans to their value in the labor market. Individuality is dissolved into the system. Likewise, by the end of the first film, Wick himself loses distinction from the system he navigates. By the time he achieves his individual revenge, his individuality dissolves away.

In the climactic battle between Wick and Viggo, the Russian gangster insists on hand-to-hand combat. “No more guns, John. No more bullets.” Wick tosses his gun aside and repeats, “no more bullets.” Viggo then states, “Just you and me, John,” to which Wick simply states, “you and me.” Finally, after John has delivered the killing blow, a knife to the neck, Viggo grimaces “be seeing you John,” to which John can only reply, “yea. Be seeing you.”

What’s notable about this sequence is how, by the end of his individual journey, there is no individual John Wick left. He can literally only reproduce the words that members of the system say to him. He is a kind of zombie, an automaton. His imagination has been completely colonized by the system. The High Table has entered into Wick’s being and made him, once again, a servant of its desires.

Mark Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, describes how capitalism brings people, ideas, and institutions into its fold and “incorporates” them. But Fisher’s main concern is with “their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture” (9). Before Wick is fully drawn back into the High Table world by D’Antonio, his mind has already been “precorporated” by Viggo and his values, preparing him for full re-initiation by the Italian.

Action Film Libertarianism

This is rather new material for action movies. Libertarian fantasies of powerful individual agents are a persistent trope in American action films. Death Wish, Die Hard, and Dirty Harry all celebrate the skillful, determined individual agent who expels bad actors from the system. John Wick may be the pinnacle of such ideology. The number of bodies he leaves behind him is a staggering symbol of his ability to compete in the marketplace established by the High Table. He is more than “the Boogeyman.” He is a god in the marketplace of free actors, a figure born straight from the head of Ayn Rand.

Yet Chapter 2 of the saga undermines the ideological assumptions of this threadbare mythology. Having re-retired to his home with his new dog. Wick is visited by D’Antonio, who insists that Wick murder his sister Gianna (Claudia Gerini) so he can take her place at the High Table. D’Antonio produces a “marker” an elaborate amulet marked with Wick’s own bloody fingerprint, that binds Wick to his will. Wick refuses to honor the marker and insists on his own freedom from the world of the High Table. He will stay retired, alone with his dog in his home.

Empowered by the marker, however, D’Antonio uses a rocket launcher to destroy Wick’s home, compelling him to honor his obligation to the rules of the High Table. In short, despite his skill, Wick is not free. His private home is destroyed, his individual liberty is ignored, and he is coerced back into the mechanisms of the High Table’s organization. His only real agency is as an agent of the system.

Furthermore, there is no redemptive aspect to this system. It cannot in any way be considered “good” and the problem is not individual bad actors who must be dispatched by ethical ones. The system itself is rotten and Wick can navigate it with all the thrilling savvy imaginable, but its only redemption will be in its destruction.

Until the High Table is dismantled, Wick, like all of us, can only labor to survive it. And his full re-immersion into the system looks depressingly familiar. He goes shopping.

In order to accomplish the task D’Antonio sets before him, the murder of a High Table member, he must equip himself and his good standing with the Table opens numerous specialty shops for his purposes. From the purchase of firearms to the tailoring of impeccably stylish, bulletproof suits, there is a glamour to his shopping excursion that evokes the same pleasures we each experience as consumers in a capitalist system.

With his new equipment, Wick successfully locates Gianna D’Antonio in her lavish bathroom. His very appearance signals to her that her life is over and she peacefully accepts this fate. The conversation they have before her death is telling, pertaining to the dehumanizing nature of High Table capital. It is very clear that each considers the other to be a friend. This human relationship is irrelevant under the weight of business, however. Both are coerced into choosing the professional over the personal. After all, the hit on Gianna was put out by her own brother. Human companionship has no role in this world.

In the end, John allows Gianna to slit her own wrists and to die in her luxurious tub on her own terms. In the world of High Table Capital, the only true individual agency one has is to die.

The Power Of Religion

The machinery of the High Table completely dominates the world with immanent power. A chilling example of this power occurs at the end of the second film when Winston brings Wick to Central Park to inform him of his excommunicato status. The men speak at the park’s fountain, surrounded by a typically bustling crowd. With a snap of his fingers, Winston brings everyone in the scene, literally hundreds of people, to a halt as a demonstration of the power he wields on behalf of the system. Such power survives on dogmatic devotion and its power, therefore, resembles that of organized religion.

In fact, the only actual images of organized religion we get in the series paint the Church as decidedly subservient to the High Table. In the original film, a church is used as a repository for Viggo’s fortune and leverage over the city, and it is guarded as such. Heavily armed by Russian mafioso, the treasure contained in this temple’s Holy of Holies is not transcendent or spiritual, but purely material. The Church in this film is completely de-consecrated and reduced to the service of the High Table economy.

Likewise, in the second film, just before Wick takes her life, Gianna greets luminaries at a party she hosts in Rome and one of them is clearly a high-ranking member of the Catholic Church, clothed in official garb. His condescension to her greater authority is clear and she accepts his fealty before moving on to another guest.

Finally, this motif is continued into the third film, when Wick seeks out “The One Who Sits Above the Table” in a Middle-Eastern desert. There is a decidedly mystical tone to this sequence and one expects to find a Muhammad-like religious figure to whom even the High Table must defer. What Wick finds, however, is simply another powerful figure who forces Wick to cut off his own ring finger, turn over his wedding ring, and pledge ultimate service to the High Table. The transcendent simply does not exist in this world and even those figures who wear sacred garb are contained within the secular authority of the system.

Wolves In Sheep’s Clothing

Despite its dismantling of religion however, the High Table nonetheless employs religious imagery and language in the construction and maintenance of its own omnipresent power. John Wick’s violence against a seat-holding member of the High Table makes him “excommunicato,” for instance. He is not only a target of the system now, he is such because he has been excommunicated from its holy order. He is hunted as if he were an agent of Satan.

Furthermore, his offense took place in the New York Continental hotel, a sacred place where the system protects itself from the consequences of its own violence. Just as the bankers who caused the 2007 financial crisis could not be made to suffer the consequences of their actions, the power brokers of the High Table will be protected from the violence of their system. Wick’s violation of the sacredness of that space, by conducting “business” must be met with a public and stunning retribution.

The Continental is sacred, but its caretakers must remain orthodox. When Winston’s actions displease the High Table in the third film, his hotel is deemed “deconsecrated,” meaning that the system can bring its violence into the space and eradicate the apostates. Likewise, when Winston earns the Table’s goodwill again at the end, the space is promptly “re-consecrated.”

Religious Discipline

The employment of sacred imagery by the secular High Table extends to the punishments it imposes on its wayward adherents. When “The Adjudicator” (Asia Kate Dillon) appears in the third film, she immediately investigates how Wick was able to escape his violation of the Continental in the second film, and she imposes punishment on those who helped him along the way. Her cruel punishments employ startlingly religious iconography.

The Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), for instance, is forced to re-pledge fealty to the Table and his pledge is sealed with seven cuts with a sword over various parts of his body (corresponding to the seven bullets he gave Wick to begin his hunt for D’Antonio), leaving him scarred in a way that resembles a victim of Christological lashing.

Likewise, driven by familial obligation, “The Director” (Anjelica Huston) helped Wick escape to Casablanca and is made to place her hands in front of her as in a prayerful pose before promptly having them pierced with a sword. Her wounds clearly evoke the stigmata, and her return to the fold is thus completed.

The repeated appeal to religious imagery and terminology by the High Table, cannot be ignored, and the implication is clear. This entirely materialistic power structure only functions by the assent of its subjects. And since human beings are worshiping creatures, the hold of religious fervor is a powerful way to maintain power over the long haul.

It’s Kafka’s World

By the end of the third film, the franchise has constructed a broad survey of the system existing under the High Table, and it can be adequately described as nothing less than Kafkaesque. The mechanisms of the High Table strongly evoke the nightmarish world imagined by Franz Kafka in his fiction.

The analog and digitally primitive communication center, staffed by heavily tattooed, nameless functionaries stuffed into tiny work-spaces and constantly filing notes is a setting right out of The Trial.  The characters whose only identity is that of their function in the system are also straight from Kafka’s imagination; the Adjudicator could have been a character in “In the Penal Colony,” and “The Director” might have appeared to slow K’s progress in The Castle.

Kafka is, of course, a perfect choice for inspiration in constructing a dehumanizing world dominated by cruel, faceless systems. Kafka was obsessed with how systems and legal machinery dominate and even obliterate the individual, warping us into shapes that fit into and serve those systems. This is exactly how the High Table functions in creating a world that forms John Wick into a preternaturally skilled murderer. In addition, Kafka’s worlds were also powerfully secular. There is no sense of a metaphysical world in Kafka, just as it is absent in John Wick. In both worlds, there is only a system without borders.

Toward An Apocalypse Of The Proletariat

However, one distinction between the John Wick franchise and Kafka is a sense of the eschatological in the former. From the opening lines of The Trial, it is clear that Joseph K. is doomed. Kafka creates worlds in which there is no narrative movement, only circular wandering through the all-powerful system.

The Wick saga, conversely, seems to be building toward something. The gradual revealing of the system also reveals its cracks. John Wick’s celebrity in the world is a chip that the system fears for instance. Also, his alliance with The Bowery at the end of part three is important as it seems to open up the possibility of a truly proletarian power that has to this point been untapped. By the end of the third film, the expansion of the High Table’s power has made desperate enemies and one sees Marx and Engels’ Workers of the World Uniting toward some apocalyptic end.

A return to Mark Fisher is in order here. The Bowery King and his minions represent a real opportunity for revolution against the High Table. Once the King has accepted that he indeed operates under the High Table, a real challenge to its power is possible. Fisher writes, “To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital” (15). This is the position that Wick himself was in between the first and second films.

The Bowery King comes to this acceptance by the end of Parabellum. Fisher goes on, writing “What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation” (15). What the ending of Parabellum seems to set up is a story in which Wick and the Bowery King cease acting as individual agents within the system and bring their agency down to bear upon the system.

If this is the case, then the High Table’s repeated use of religious imagery in service of a secular materialist power structure will be indeed ironic as it may ultimately face its own Armageddon. See you in 2021.

What are some other ways John Wick explores power, money, and human relationships? Discuss in the comments below!