John Wick is (Relatively) Well-Adjusted

I’m out of town again this weekend, with even less writing time, so hopefully I can get this out on time and you can read it.

To try something else, I started playing Stray on PS4. It’s fun so far! I’ve just caught up on book reviews/readings, but I should have a couple of really long books to get through soon (if I haven’t already).

John Wick is Remarkably Well-Adjusted

(Well, relatively speaking.)

Something that always struck me about John Wick is how popular he is. Not with fans–I mean in-universe. There’s a striking moment in the original John Wick film, where he travels to the speakeasy in The Continental (which we have never seen again?), and in that scene everyone there loves John. They’re happy to see him, express sincere condolences about his late wife, and hope he’s doing okay. And he’s friendly back at them! I mean, not overly so, because he’s got a lot going on, but he’s fairly polite to them.

And you know what? John seems to be a nice guy. I mean, yeah, he’s shooting up a lot of people, so he’s not perfect, but it’s clear that he’d rather just not be in these situations to begin with. The only reason there are four movies of John shooting people is because others keep dragging him back into it. Yeah, by the fourth movie he’s angry enough to actively go after his enemies, but that’s after repeated intrusions into his life and physical offenses against him.

Even then, though–again, he’s remarkably well-adjusted, considering he’s a fictional assassin?

I had this conversation over dinner recently with my parents (who I really don’t think cared much about this, but too bad). Compare John Wick to someone like, say, Frank Castle. Sure, Frank Castle doesn’t go out of his way to hurt civilians, but, uh… there are several scenes in which he isn’t exactly the most careful, either. I flash back to the scene on the rooftop in season two in Daredevil, in which he’s pretty close to shooting the civilian that comes onto the roof. He doesn’t, he’s able to talk him into leaving, but it seems like he would have actually shot the man if he didn’t leave him alone. It’s not a thing John Wick would do.

Or Deathstroke, in DC Comics? The man’s divorced, with an estranged relationship with his kids. Because he’s a great hired gun, he’s a terrible father! I don’t usually see Slade Wilson going out of his way to be a psychopath (unless you count the Teen Titans version, though he’s VERY different in that show). 

I suppose, in a sense, John Wick falls into that archetype of a man who wants to be normal, even though he’s an extraordinary person in an extraordinary world. This is a thing that comes up in fantasy all the time. Heck, Percy Jackson & the Olympians begins with Percy lamenting that he wished he had a normal life. I would call Wick a ‘wish fulfillment’ character, and in some ways he is, except that people are constantly trying to murder him for some nonsense reason and he’d rather just retire with his dog.

It does seem a little silly, though, if you think about it? “Yeah, he murders people for a living, but he’s nice to the waiter,” uh, okay. It’s not entirely unrealistic, but it does strain the believability of such a thing. Then again, it isn’t as if John Wick takes place in a realistic world–you apparently can’t swing a cat without hitting an assassin, so it isn’t as if you’re going to expect people to behave the same way as they do in the normal world.

I also really kind of like it? The idea of a polite assassin. I think it’d be annoying if we see too much of it, I just think it’s a neat reversal from what we usually see in fiction, in which we’re asked to sympathize with a violent character because of his wrecked home life (that he himself caused).

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