Codes of honour in John Wick 3: Parabellum

Why do I like John Wick 3? To begin with, and one eventually does, the title pays attention to the word. The word, understood not merely in its stupidity, as some petrified object cast in stone, which has nothing to do with stone, but is a metaphor for how it is understood. Parabellum, I learn is from the second half of a Latin phrase ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum’ which translates to ‘if you want peace prepare for war’. I suppose one may hypothesise that there is something which happens when a word becomes a name, even if, as in this case - the name for a bullet. It looses some of the context from which it rises from and becomes a placeholder, a tag for something else whose relation to the utterance in question remains, for the most of it, completely arbitrary. John Wick 3 is a film that, while very much a gun-fu movie, does not facilitate such a procedure, or rather does not facilitate it as such.

Those of us who are familiar with the series will note that this is really not a work of art from the point of view of telling a story, though there is a narrative of note. The character that Wick plays, while not cardboard carries with himself none of the other facets of emotional and psychological depth that Reeves other avatar, Neo in the Matrix series seems to embody and convey to a now 30 something generation whom may once have been inspired by French post-structuralism. And, yet - and this is what I like about it, this is not a film about characters.

And this is refreshing, gloriously so, if I might add. When Wick visits the Ruska Roma Crime Syndicate, we learn that this may have once been his foster home. Boys wrestle, and a tall well formed girl practices a pirouette on the ballet stage, with the ‘director’ looking on harshly and barking commands. There is, over the course of the previous couple of movies, a sense of near nostalgia at such scenes, almost like a homecoming but where the home has very little to do with an Austinian domesticity.

A child who was once one among an orphanage seeks shelter, and brings with him a cross and rosary hidden in a book at the New York public library, where he had to kill a man to get it. As with the contemporary action movie, we are provided, almost without noticing it, a guided tour of the landmarks of the great metropolises of today, downtown NYC, the Grand Central subway station, whisk by amidst gunfights and it is only in retrospect that I can imagine the relief of the same actor in a very different role, perhaps meeting a stranger - gracing such venues.

There is, as with all beginnings, the invention of a tradition. At the Ruska Roma Crime Syndicate, Wick submits not merely his weapon at the front desk but his belt as well. A token of the time he was there, when the everyday article carried with it none of the paternal disciplinary functions associated with it, an association one might add - which may be more familiar to certain Asian audiences as apposed to north American ones, unless I am being presumptuous here.

The snatches of Russian which pass by are subtitled, with keywords stylised and coloured for emphasis, not unlike the old Kung Fu movies where a new fighting style adopted by a martial artist requires a screen freeze banner declaring its identity. And in this way, among others we learn of Jardani Jovonovich, born to Belurus who like a foreigner in a strange land seeks shelter in a place that once provided him with it.

An action movie, within the limitations of my mind can never be one about the unearthing of a past. There is a way in which we still feel history to be a dead weight, even in nostalgia, even in remembrance, and perhaps even when we seek shelter there. Yet, childhood and where and how one grows up, carries with it a kind of delicacy if only as a memory which can be suggestive of another present, of how things could have been otherwise. An action movie never can portray these things, and yet, this one does, even if ever so briefly - in the stills of the wrestling boys glaring at John, in the repeated collapses of the ballerina.

Architecture, always grander in the background does catch the eye - and the Ruska Roma Crime Syndicate’s establishment, dimply lit yellow and led leather sofas remind me of old restaurants which once imitated as sense that, perhaps, if only as a possibility - there may not be anything more beyond the passage of the hour or so that a couple, maybe a single person or a family were to come and sit at a table together for refreshments. It is easy to slip into nostalgia, particularly when the reverie is not there in history.

And yet, within the fiction of the movie, and perhaps within our own fictions which animate our lives - there is a sense of association, of loyalty and indeed, perhaps even fealty and submission which we feel to some bonds; in some bonds. We are introduced in this film to what may be described as an establishment which is not one, or rather - an administration which yet answers to a board so to speak - the high table. Their adjudicator, a short haired smart woman carries with her a special coin. A coin which as a token, extracts an act of fealty; a contract sworn in by the phrase “I have served, I will be of service”. And, as with administrations, a sense of the rules and their importance do appear. Even Winston, the manager of the New York Continental hotel, which tends to the work that Wick and his ilk do: providing a sort of safe haven for meetings, agrees with her, ‘that the rules are the only thing that separates us from the animals’.

In this sense, while cinematically villainous, the high table, through it’s emissary does remind us of an important civilising imperative, and the obligations via which they are secured, what Berarda, the former boss of Sophia, calls ‘the commerce of relations’ or the social contract. A fabric or mesh, which, as with that other great Keanu Reeves franchise, the protagonist is bound to tear, ironically.

I remember as an undergraduate, reading Homer’s Iliad - the graphic descriptions with which violence and gore were depicted; an arrow piercing an eye and coming out from the back of the skull, etc. In my memory of epics, such as my grandmother’s narration of them to me such facets were concealed, perhaps as only as I was a child, but in the classroom, discussing Homer, I was the little shit who raised the question of the ‘masses’. What were the rank and file up to while decisions were made from up on high?

Interestingly enough, this is a dimension that Parabellum does explore, or rather - as with any truly novel aesthetic experiment, opens gently. When in the Continental, Wick is fighting two karambit wielding Filipinos, and he is knocked down to the ground - we overhear them speak, remarking, in another tongue, that perhaps he is not as fast as he used to be; maybe he has slowed down a little, etc. An aspect in the genre of commentary, which to my eyes, or should I say ears is novel, but here I may be limited by my exposure to select genre. Worth noting, that after besting the two fighters, he honour’s their tongue before departing - saying something like “sowbhi chubha" which we are informed, translates to - be seeing you, though the language is unspecified, and I’d be happy if anyone could enlighten me here.

But it is remarkable, that unlike Guy Ritchie’s crime films from across the Atlantic - here, we see a sort of privileging of honour. An American nod of the hat at a moment in history where art from the ‘old world’ no longer seems to aspire for the same. When Wick and Zero fight for example, like an old world martial arts movie, the sword fighter acknowledges that the challenger has bested his students, and agrees to meet him in combat. There is, if I may be so bold as to suggest, an element of courtship here.

To the naked eye, the fight is almost over in the first few steps as John is caught with a wakizashi at his throat, yet for some reason, does not believe that he will be cut and advances. A fight unfolds. Zero, in a sense, is in awe of John, even indicating their similarity earlier in the film. He mentions that them two, are both master of death. John’s dog, whom he dropped off at the hotel at the beginning of the film came to greet him, and I find it to be the faintest of echoes, that this animal who loves John, who John has killed for - would sit and obey a command, not unlike zero who on the grounds of the Continental cannot kill John without risking ex-communication. The old lesson of the master being limited only by his position within that which he masters, i.e. the rules…and yet, this does reveal another face of rules, and what they may be for - for they are followed when once seeks acceptance into an order, along with its privileges and acknowledgements, and there is something of this which Zero sees in John.

In the fight itself, when Zero gets behind John, he doesn’t kill him but hits him with the but of his sword, only to reappear behind glass to reiterate his statement that they are the same. When he is maimed, the fingers of his left hand cut off, his write leg no longer serving him, John displays the length of the blade used to make the cuts. Before leaving he picks up his belt before making his way to the terrace, now dawning where the adjudicator, the concierge and the manager await.

A reminder, in perhaps prosaic words that the prose of relations, rather of sentiment, particularly that of honour have no place in the ‘commerce of relations’ - a point which Wick or at least his party seem to emphasise. In contrast we see the adjudicator, whose authority rests on this alone, but - with the sentiment subtracted, the position reduced to that of an overseer, who trades in a coin that demands a higher purchase, from a table whose authority she seeks to establish. A curious ensemble, and one where the sense that old ties may catch up seems to linger, not least because John seeks out the Elder who sits above the table to reverse his excommunication. Such matters may have to rest till the fourth instalment which I do await.

Not so much as an afterthought as in retrospect, I see that the price for the lifting of John’s excommunication and the open contract on his head is the death of Winston, as stated by the Elder, and in this sense, is it unjust that Winston, before learning of this, and in an act of fealty to the high table, shoots John before he can act on his bond - to kill Winston, who had forgotten his allegiances to the high table? Justice is such a fickle matter, but it appears as such in the fray where positions and relations seem defined, or rather determined - and in this sense, John Wick is not a film about politics even if it is case in its mesh.