John Wick is a Friend of Mine
This film franchise helped me grieve the death of my best friend.
“I want him back,” I cried as my dog’s lifeless body laid on the floor of our condo. “I want him back,” I said to the veterinarian who helped me let him go peacefully. Dusty’s one blue eye and one brown eye closed for good, and he stopped breathing. He was old and had been in pain, but no more.
I always felt Dusty understood me. My best friend was gone, and there was nothing I could do about it. Everything was calm and silent.
When I adopted my dog Dusty it was dumb luck. He had been abandoned twice. One woman brought him back to the pound because he followed her around the house, and barked at squirrels. I promised to never leave him, and there would be one movie night a week for him and me.
We split “people food”, snuggled, and shared time together; watching comic book movies, grindhouse flicks, and art house films. It was never the stories or genre I cared about; it was the time with my dog. Dusty gave me something bigger than myself to believe in.
I only had one rule with movie night: nothing with dog violence. This rule was more for me than Dusty. I can handle people karate chopping each other to ribbons or slicing off legs with laser swords, but I won’t do dog harm. This rule left out “Turner and Hooch”, John Carpenter’s “The Thing”, and even the Pixar classic “Up!” for its mention of so many dogs dying in the name of one man’s obsession.
And this rule left a trilogy of movies on the floor that all of my friends, colleagues, and students said I would like. A world baptized in color and silence with a hardboiled hero at the center.
Years before Dusty died I was out with a colleague only to return home finding our front door smashed in. The burglar destroyed posters, took what he wished, and I found my dog hiding behind our bed. I told my father if the burglar had hurt Dusty, I would have burned the City of Austin to the ground. The world would have to prepare for war, and they will know me by the trail of death.
Without realizing it, my almost rage was parallel to the main character in the same trilogy my peers had recommended.
On the morning Dusty died we ate people's food and watched one last comic book movie together. The veterinarian came to our home, shaved his leg, and injected him with poison. After his body was taken to a funeral home, I was a mess. I cried and paced my quiet home by myself.
I turned on the TV for a distraction, and with all the dumb luck the world could give, I saw a guy trying to buy a muscle car from Keanu Reeves. With my dog gone for only minutes, I sat on my lonely sofa and watched “John Wick” the master assassin, the movie my friends said I should see.
Russian mobsters call Wick ‘Baba Yaga’, the nightmarish creature you send to kill the Boogie Man (the movie got this Russian folklore wrong, but you don’t question John Wick), the man who once killed three men in a bar with a pencil. You send John Wick to kill what you fear most. The arrogant son of a mobster steals Wick’s car and murders his dog.
Some action movies are adjectives, but ‘John Wick’ is all verb. Wick buries his dog and becomes thunder wrapped in skin. His cathartic revenge is a ballet of blood and death, as the style of the film slides from genre to genre, part art-house, part action, all necessary to who he is.
Wick’s a Ronan drunk with revenge, a singular focus of shear will plowing his way through those who stand against him. The brooding Keanu Reeves needs few words to communicate who he is in a moment. When the mob boss calls him to talk peace, Wick says nothing, zilch, zero, nada, and in that his silence is just as deadly as any gun or pencil. John Wick filled my moment of silence without my dog.
Wick gave me a place to put my grief, my shattered love for my dog, and he did it with elegance and gusto. The over the top noir-ish comic book world became my therapy.
It is not that “Jonathan”, as his ally Winston calls him, was doing things that I wanted to do, in fact, quite the contrary. Wick became the visual embodiment of how I felt, and it felt good to let go. I watched the second John Wick, arguably better than the first. Then the third, Parabellum (Latin for ‘Prepare For War’), came to HBO, each installment more stylized than the previous one.
John Wick came to my living room to kill what I feared most. Life without my dog, life without Dusty. John Wick’s dog is a reminder of his humanity and his heart. It is not his rage we see on screen, it is his broken compassion. His silence when the world comes for him.
John Wick has tattoos and is a man of faith. Below his ‘Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat’ tattoo on his back (Latin for ‘Fortune Favors The Bold’) we see two hands cupped in prayer. Wick believes in something bigger than himself. I have tattoos as well, and as the one-year anniversary of my dog’s death is here I’ve been thinking about getting another. 30° 15’ 55’ N 97° 45’ 28’ W tattooed to my arm. That is the longitude and latitude of Dusty’s funeral. I planted flowers for him there.
My favorite line of the three movies comes from Winston. As the two prepare for ‘Parabellum’ Wick asks Winston what he should do. “Jonathan…” Winston says. “You do what you do best…hunt.” I cheer for John Wick not as his fan, but as his friend. I understand him. I get him, and I think he gets me too when it all fades to black.
