John Wick, the Nashville Shooting and American Numbness

There’s an irony to this nod to video games, since they have been frequently (and inaccurately) blamed for the rise of violence in general and school shootings in particular. But it’s more than just these video game elements that makes the Wick world so familiar, one where death coats front pages and social media feeds but is quickly swept aside by the next tragedy.

As someone who’s been working as a culture critic since 2009, I’m always wary of talking about fictional violence in terms of real-life violence. It runs the risk of both cheapening real events and giving fiction more power than it actually possesses. Yet the past playbook of blaming acts of violence on violent pop culture seems to have lost its punch in recent years, if only because violent pop culture feels like it’s trying to keep up with reality, rather than the reverse. Certainly, there are no real-world John Wicks, but there’s plenty of violence in the world that many of us turn a blind eye to. When bad things are always happening, horror starts to become just another part of the background of day-to-day life.

It is fascinating to look at ultra-violent yet ultra-popular cultural artifacts like the Wick films and try to suss out what in them speaks to us subconsciously. After all, lots of John Wick imitators have popped up in the wake of the first film’s successful 2014 release, and none of them have come close to approaching Wick’s cultural footprint. So why did these movies take off so boldly and so bloodily?

To me, the answer lies in all of those scenes with innocent bystanders who don’t seem to realize they’re bystanders to begin with. Many action movies exist as a kind of wish-fulfillment for audience members. In some other world, they suggest, you might move as skillfully and as balletically as John Wick and, thus, murder people with tremendous efficiency. But the best action movies usually also add in an audience surrogate or two, a character who exists mostly to reflect the audience’s awe at seeing the action hero do their thing.

The many extras who populate an action movie’s world are audience surrogates too. The people running away from a monster’s foot as it stomps down on city streets, the cars swerving to avoid the big car chase, the people ducking for cover during a gun battle – those are all important characters in their own right. They help the audience think about how woefully unprepared we would be to enter a situation like this.

Yet in the John Wick films, what do these extras do? They just keep dancing. There is a whole world of death, destruction and mayhem erupting around them, and that world supposedly lives right next door to our world of mundane concerns. But not only do the extras not notice that world, we don’t either. There is death happening all over, but it feels like such an abstraction that a man can shoot multiple people right in front of you, and you might not even blink an eye. It will just keep happening, and so long as it doesn’t directly interrupt your fun, you might not even look at it.

It’s an eerie world to imagine living in, and yet every new mass shooting seems to be met with a cascading apathy. Some politicians have even given up the guise of caring enough to come up with faux solutions: “We’re not gonna fix it,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said on Tuesday after a school shooting in his home state left three children dead. “Criminals are gonna be criminals.” In a world that is indifferent to death, even the boilerplate pablum of “thoughts and prayers” starts to sound like too much effort. In our apathy, we become incapable or even uninterested in preventing tragedies.

These unaffected extras work as a metaphor for so many ways we’ve become increasingly numb to massive death in the modern world, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the ways in which climate change is already disproportionately affecting people who live in the global South. But in a series that so fetishizes guns and shooting them, to the degree that every film pauses the action for a character to lovingly describe the firearms they will be outfitting Wick with, and in a series produced in the United States, it’s not hard to see gun violence as sitting at the very center of the films’ uncanny valley.

The foremost political worldview of the Wick movies is still “It’s cool when cool things happen.” Yet, their evocation of a world in which death lurks around every corner and we don’t care so long as it’s not happening to us rings eerily true. Is it any wonder each film in the franchise is more popular than the one before it? Even if the world is ending, so many of us would rather keep dancing.