A class discussion in my daughter’s school centered on equal rights for women. As she described to me, it was a ridiculous flogging of boilerplate ideas about equal pay.
Ideas that have long since been discredited by a not too complex review of the factors that result in this disparity in the median wage between the sexes. Even the girls knew this was a spurious discussion but nevertheless it ended up centering on an elite concern that will effect nobody (statistically speaking) in this class, ever; the pay rates for professional soccer players.
What was obvious was that the boys were not going along with the narrative.
This makes sense. When this question of rights, as it’s framed by today’s discourse, seems to be all about giving girls an advantage; what’s in it for the boys? It doesn’t seem to be about acknowledging differences between the sexes and creating a cooperative world where both can flourish. It seems to be mainly about demoralising boys and paradoxically, defining girls empowerment as girls filling masculine roles while at the same time seeing the boys as somewhat defective girls.
It is in this world that the gravitation of boys towards outspoken masculine voices has caused a panicked reaction amongst the bien pensant. The most obvious of these voices is Andrew Tate, who is a forbidden name in practically every school in Ireland. The boys know this and so have sloganised his name to the absolute horror of teachers around the country, because since time immemorial, boys have liked to annoy their teachers. I don’t think much of Tate, but if you offer nothing to young boys but progressive nonsense, don’t be surprised if the vacuum isfilled by a countercultural figure whose main message is bravado.
It is strange though, that the antipathy for Tate is not stronger than the antipathy for Jordan Peterson, amongst the Diversity/Inclusion/Equality cohort that has taken over the left. That’s a story that deserves deeper explaining. Perhaps another day!
Now, I have watched enough of what my wife calls bubble gum movies for women, so after our kitchen discussion on the psychological differences between boys and girls, I suggested I pick a bubble gum boy’s film.
John Wick, Chapter 4 is crammed with ridiculous moments of Achilles-like martial prowess, and frankly bubble gum mentality levels of enemy vanquishing.
My wife commented at one stage that it was very considerate of the baddies to line up in single file to get killed by Wick. “Yes” I replied “very decent of them. There is a code of honour amongst thugs.”
And we both laughed.
There is more in the movie to slake the appetite for brainless bubble gum action. A shoot-em-up scene straight out of a video game has a bird eye perspective of an exploded view floor plan. Wick is offloading shots at an insane rate. Around every corner a bad guy pops up only to receive three or four gun shots and end up a crumpled mess and a splat on the wall.
This overindulgent shooting action surely cannot be anything but self-deprecation of the genre..
Another scene involves a car chase at the Arc de Triomphe. The cars are travelling counter flow and hoards of assassins are shooting from moving cars at Wick, who is caught in a pile up of crashed cars and circling traffic. The nod to the classic western action of pioneers circling the wagons and fending off a raging band of mounted “injuns” shooting rifles from circling horses, is hard not to notice.
In spite of all this, Keanu Reeves, is consistently brilliant in all the Wick franchise, and he makes the deeper themes shine above the bubble gum nonsense. In his demeanour he portrays one who carries a weight of deep suffering. He is the unwilling hero steered by the will of others, who cannot escape his past, try though he may. Like a hero of a Greek tragedy, he is compelled to action by forces he cannot control, though he knows that he must ultimately pay the ultimate price.
The sequence of revenge and blood-price begins with the murder of his wife in the first film of the franchise. We learn that Wick had tried to quit his life as an assassin but that this deed drew him back into this secretive world of an international assassins guild bound by arcane rules and governed by a secretive committee; “The Table.”
Wick, driven by the fury of vengeance, breaks the guild’s rules of sanctuary, and so is made an outlaw with a price on his head.
John Wick Chapter 4 digs deep into the world of mythology for archetypes of the tragic hero and his counterparts. The meddling Gods, maliciously directing the fate of the hero, are represented by “The Table”, the human face of which is represented by Marquis Vincent de Gramont (played by Bill Skarsgard).
This man exudes power and a heart poisonous as mercury. Always surrounded by opulence, he is presented in colour pallets that exude luxuriant panache and the sense of poised lethality.
The visuals are stunning – like a Caravaggio painting, suggestive of deep contrast and consequential action. We see him framed from a low angle in the stunning Red Room at the Louvre. Gramont is in a pale off white suit against the blood rich reds of the gallery wall, reviewing the magnificent deep hued painting of “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugene DelaCroix. There is a treatise in the symbolic significance of this picture in this scene, and it is all relayed in a few tense moments of dialogue.
The unfolding conversation is monumental, tense and balanced on a knife edge.
In a world governed by strength and violence the only constraint is a mythical archetype of heroic honour and the rules of “The Table”. There is always a contrast and a struggle between these two means of being, and they come together in the final epic scene of the film.
Caine (a very apt name) represents the archetypal trope of the blood brother tragically destined to fight his greatest friend in a duel to the death. Caine is an old friend of Wick but is coerced into fighting him in order to protect his daughter.
Like John Wick, Caine had tried to depart the world of assassins when a greater purpose came into his life. We first see him listening to his daughter playing violin, and we learn later that he inflicted blindness on himself at the birth of his daughter so that he could no longer be part of the world of assassins. However, the blind man can see what others do not. In the scene where he listens to his daughter’s violin, we get a sense that he had turned his gaze from the world and towards beauty.
Beauty is a recurring theme, and it is mostly a masculine perspective of beauty. The images in the gallery are of movement and purpose. Wick is motivated by the beauty of a noble purpose. The friendship between Caine and Wick is one of empathy and understanding overruled by duty. We see this in the church scene on the night before their duel.
The two men sit together and share their memories and affection knowing that they are destined to duel to the death at dawn. In a scene reminiscent of Ferdia and Cú Chulainn at the ford, they share their generosity in this moment and place of sanctuary, and part with words of kindness and the resolution to slaughter each other at dawn.
In the world of the assassins, messages are relayed by means of a radio broadcast in coded poetic form. We are shown only the mouth of this oracle; a disembodied voice speaking in equivocating rhyme. Like the oracle of Delphi or, the prophet Fidelm in The Táin relaying the visions of the gods, her words hint great reward but also, possibly, death.
We only see the moving lips. Is the prophet sightless? Like Caine, does she see with the second sight?
The duel at the Sacre Coeur is a piece of cinematic art. On the empty plaza before the church, the two protagonists face off at 30 yards. The first shot misses and they come to twenty yards. They both shoot again and receive grievous wounds. As with Cú Chulainn and Ferdia, they face off a third time and Caine’s third shot strikes Wick fatally.
At this stage the usually composed Marquis De Gramont, like a petty and vengeful Greek God, is overtaken by an urge for malicious vengeance and steps into the place of Caine. You see, Caine was standing as De Gramont’s second as the challenge had been delivered to the Marquis. In this moment he loses his mystique, and with a sneer he takes Caine’s dueling pistol and loads the final bullet.
However, the dying Wick had yet to fire his third bullet and so, according to the rules, Gramont had to stand at ten paces and receive Wick’s third shot. Like Prometheus, Wick tricks the masters of fate, and exacts revenge on “The Table”.
But Wick, Like Ferdia in his epic encounter with Cú Chulainn, was mortally wounded from his epic battles and Caine’s deathly shot, and so his death was imminent. Cú Chulainn carried Ferdia to the North bank of the ford, the hero’s bank, and built for him a cairn. Wick asked hisfriend and second to bring him home. He descended the steps of the Sacre Coeur, and half way down lay down to die with the temple raised above him like a cairn.
Slumped in a pose reminiscent of the Dying Gaul or the Pieta, we see him half way up the steps overlooked by the temple against the sky, and the nascent dawn flaring the sky in brilliant light. In that transcendent moment we see the heavens and earth combined. The temple above haloed by light, the earth below in the shadow of the dawn. The eternal and the sacred above, the profane below; and mortal man somewhere on the steps between; trying and failing.
There’s a lot to be said of this film. Of course, it’s not the only film or piece or cultural offering that delves masculine themes in a complex and nuanced way. Maybe if we want to reach boys and turn them into mature and flourishing adults we should consider discussions that delve the nuances of masculinity and the tradeoffs between the competing interests and obligations that cut across their lives.