Cybergothic Rot and the deaths of John Wick

________________________________________________________________________________

When i think cybergothic i think John Wick.

And when i think about the many themes of John Wick i think of the productivity and aesthetic of rot. There are others of course, some of which have been well discussed among cinema enthusiasts. We will look at them first in order to understand how they compliment not contradict with the central theme of cybergothic rot in the wider field of what Mark Fisher termed »gothic materialism« and in context of our foul present.

Videogames as the new flesh

John Wick is entangled in the now established cultural influence of video games, which have left the undergrowth of greasy teenage rooms and male coded adolescence to become a more mature medium. A new medium sooner or later affects how we relate to older media. Think how movies, invented in the late 19th century, have become not only another form to communicate but another way to understand, articulate and relate to our lives.

Like painting reacted to the invention of the camera, movies now react to the evolution of video game popularity. Thus the world of John Wick is populated with headshots and neon lights, with level inspired vignettes of places defined by their recognizability and characters that are trimmed to be memorable and unique within seconds, even if they have no names or back stories or even narrative relevance beyond being an encounter. Like blue signifies a water level, the nightclub becomes the underworld of the afterlife. Like video game character design establishes recognizability without words, even the most minute assassins crossing John Wicks path become memorable because of their exaggerated, viually inscribed significance. That exaggeration is a big part of making John Wicks world flow so effortlessly as an asthetic experience, even though there are plenty of jumps in time and space.

This is not an adaptation of videogame IP for cinema, but of videogame aesthetic techniques, ways of relation uncovered by video game design in film – only rivaled probably by masterpieces like Edgar Wrights Scott Pilgram vs. the World (2010) and Cronenbergs eXistenZ (1999) who reach similar heights of inspired stylisation (the former in speed the latter in space). Like Scott Pilgrims titular Character the fighting skills of John Wick are meant to be read as both metaphorical and concrete: An immanent mythology of subjectivated fate, where the nihilist coincidences and meaningful connections of the network can at any time flare up in violent and humorous significance. Matter is defined by intensities, becoming rather than having weight or lightness, sincerity or ease. Speed in the flow of forms. Matter accelerated to a vector-borne rhythm of meaning. On the other hand, like in Cronenbergs eXistenZ, space is effortlessly amorphous. It can be (down-)loaded in an establishing transition. Even if the landscape contains contradictions of continuity, breaks in style and raptures in time, space will move like fluid. It again oscillates in intensities of crowded cities, concentrated events, the eerie, but vivid weirdness of a dancing, uncaring landscape and the apparition of urban connectivity. The new flesh of flow.

The Stuntman’s Haunted Castle

Moreover John Wick embodies love for an important art form, Hollywood heavily relies on, but seldom acknowledges with respect: The craftmanship of stunts. There still is no Oscar for Stunts, even though stuntmen and women risk their lives daily for the perfect shot in action movies since the very beginning of the movie industry. It is the original ghost work of Hollywood. John Wick is directed by Chad Stahelski, whose passion as a stuntman for choreography shines through every composition. And that is what we get: reflections on milestones from the history of stunt-craftmanship from Buster Keaton in Sherlock Holmes Jr. projected on a skyscraper at the start of John Wick 2 to Hongkong-style-action cinematography with its indulgent and beautiful urban violence. It appears eerie, because it is a celebration of ghosts, ghosts that are under normal circumstances meant to be impercivable. Now they celebrate in their haunted castle, hosting a ghostly banquet in their masters halls. The core principles of choreography fuse with martial arts and Ballett, with the colours of city lights and night clubs, the sounds of machines and voices in a spectacular dance of death and life, unburdened by screen writers, studio executives or focus group streamlining. It thus can also be read as a crafty rebellion against the absence of recognition at such central spectacles of actor self masturbation as the Oscars. They might even feel assassinated by those whose bodies they are hired to resemble. While on-screen violence is seldom real, it can always result in life threatening injury. So who is the real hero? The body switched or the mask attributed?

They don’t need vision applied to their bodies, their bodies speak for themselves.

Like Hamlets ghostly Fathers apparition, cloaked in armor, they move and insist.

The Vampire’s new Sincerity

The John Wick series can also be described as a metamodern movie, a symptom of a wider social yearning not only for recognition but meaning as in sincerity. The floating world of capital and the arbitariness of pleasure districts feel empty and are replaced by an often hypocritical, yet nonetheless real yearning for structure as can be seen in the adaption of a streamlined lifestyle catholicism from german leftwing micro celebrities like movie critic Wolfgang M. Schmitt, who loved the John-Wick-films, to the angloamerican new right and politicians like J.D. Vance und silicon valley mobster Peter Thiel.

As you might detect within the snarky subtone inbetween these lines here, i am not a fan. Full Disclaimer, but this desire of meaning, mislocated within the old, also contextualises the »gentleman’s« desire for encountering oppressive, nihilist structure with so called honest structure (»settle your conflict the oldfashioned way like gentlemen should«), the embrace of guilt and redemption as central themes (John Wick fears damnation as much as he maintains hope), the yearning for honour among thieves and immaterial values beyond the social contract, yet not escaping it.

This is why Dantes trilogy of ultimate italian catholicism - Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso - becomes such an important inspiration and not merely a nod to classical scholarship. The sequels of John Wick are an unofficial adaptation of the narrators journey down through hell and up again to heaven in penance. Care, as one might paraphrase anthropologist David Graeber, has vanished in loveless, meaningless alienation. John Wick cultivates as much remembrance of mutual care (now gone, in the past) as it indulges in revenge fantasies.

However, those who know that David Graeber did not embrace care as a moral category but as human constant, know that hierarchies and monarchies depend on a toxified interpretation of care as well. It might be a problem that our capitalist societies lack respect for institutions of care, but that does not mean, that care itself does not have no dark side. Nietzsche here, is a better guide than everything the catholic church has produced. Cassian is pitched against John Wick in the second movie of the series, because he cared too much for his ward (John Wicks target) Gianna, a high ranking mobster and sister to the power hungry Santino, who forces John Wick to become an assassin again:

»No one comes back without repercussions.«

In nature commensurabilism always exists on a spectrum between symbiosis and parasitism, which means a mutual beneficial relationship can turn sour and vice versa. People help John Wick not necessarily because they like him, but because they feel obligated to care.Often this ruins them as much as it ruins the systems of power, John Wick brings death upon. The violence of a (play) king is always codified in calcified care – servants, oathsworn knights and other sycophants. The good structure then is the structure of friendship or, where that is lost, of honour among thieves. But – to return to Dante, whose major, personal motivation to write his epic were grievances with backstabbing, careless politicians of Machiavellis city states in northern italy – the question if there really existed a good structure among such old institutions as the church – always a centre of autocratic morality (its the divine, not secular right of kings after all) – remains, to me, highly questionable.

Where this »new sincerity« has lead so far, does not seem to be a road to paradise, more a fall back into the embrace of grifters and autocrats from Trump to Putin to Xi under the umbrella of honour among thieves – at our costs and our risks, not theirs. Toxic, not real care. We should keep in mind that both monarchies and democracies center care, just in different ways. Most utopias also center an improvement in care. As such i weigh the death of God in the form of the arrogant, greedy and hypocritical Marquis in John Wick 4 as a better omen for better futures in the future.

Yet like Martin Luther, preparing the path for burgeois modernity and at the same time spewing antisemitic bullshit and condemning peasent uprisings, the character of John Wick stays a medieval ideologue.

His legacy ambivalent (put a pin in that).

John Wick, Reanimator of Objects

Another but connected and familiar aspect of the movies is its modern desire space of proxy tourism and luxury. The assassin world is not a world of dirty slums and rust belt architecture. Moreover the central hub of assassin activity is not coincidently a hotel: The Continental, modified for localised desire, or for what appears to be localized desire in stereotyped cultural shortcuts. This ofcourse is nothing new for action movies or wider retromania at large. I have talked about the cybergothic in a recent german video essay about the stitching together of retromania within architecture, citing the Humboldtforum in Berlin as a prominent example.

But this is also a major force in cinema.

Like James Bond John Wick travels the world and indulges as much in luxuries as in violence. This however is not only a boring postcolonial problematic. Moreover it highlights how these imaginative structures become objects themselves. The movies effortlessly switch between classical culture and heritage, slick modern architecture and urban non places. John Wick is the man of focus, of commitment who traverses these environments, scavenging for resources and animating objects. He has no problem with switching languages, he does not judge other cultures. He rejects being kept in a cultural cage, be it defined by postcolonial or western supremicist logic. He adapts and modifies. Culture belongs to no one. Its only reality is change and that change should only serve us, animate our desires. Tradition is peer pressure from the dead. In the third film John Wick is chased by gangsters through what seems to be a store of antiquities or a museum. Desperate for weapons he smashes display cases, defending himself by breathing deadly new life into them.

The prominence of neon lights and downtown tokio orientalism also connects the series to the cyberpunk genre, where objects from the past routinely linger in the background of the metropolis, both in form and content. There are no science fiction elements in John Wick ofcourse. But John Wick takes (and enforces) a different path by reading his environment and animating as material for his own expression. Objects, weapons, machines, animals, people. Meaning becomes breath, transforms into weapons against enemies who have become so codified they have forgotten how to breath.

His enemies don’t understand this. Museums and exhibitions feature heavily as scenary, but the bad guys only traverse them. They don’t understand what they mean or what could still be done with them. They only what to own, they don’t care. They don’t pay attention to detail and then become dazzled by what murdurous deeds a pencil can accomplish. They no longer breath. Where the titular hero is struggling with the nihilism of predatory decadence and unleashed capitalism embodied by the crime lords sitting at and under that mysterious table – he invokes similar movies like Drive (2011) as much as video games like Hotline Miami (2012). Wealth made the winners of history just as weak as Iossef Tarassow, who kickstarted it all by not knowing (or caring) whose car he stole and whose dog he killed. Negligence made them blind not only to what can be done with focus and commitment, but also what should be done. Money as an anonymous, alienating force connecting this corporate crime syndicate and codifying it with value, but not meaning, is both the pillar of their power and their doom.

Meaning became structure and structure became meaningless. There is a particular interesting conversation taking place in the third movie featuring Berrada, who oversees the minting of the assassin currency in assassin world.

»Mr. Wick, do you know where the word „assassin“ comes from? People argue. „Assassin.“ Hashhashin, followers of Hassan-i… eaters of hashish. No, thank you. But others contend it comes from asasiyyun. Meaning, „men who are faithful and who abide by their beliefs.“«, Berrada pontificates, pointing at a coin and a marker displayed behind glass and continueing with: »You see that coin? The first coin ever minted in this facility. Next to it, the first Marker. Not easy to track down, believe me. Now this coin, of course, it does not represent the monetary value. It represents the commerce of relationships. A social contract in which you agree to partake. Order and rules.«

The commerce of relationships, with or without money, is care. But Berrada mislocates care in mere exchange and subsequently gets punished. He is a reductionist, yet reveals the calcification of a display case in display cases. That is toxified care. It also reveals itself to be blind in another way: Since a market is always restrained by order and rules, those who do no longer care about order and rules within that system gain a form of power, the system no longer can control, even though the rogue agents still acknowledges the incentive of the social contract he may or may not have agreed with.

Here, like in Bioshock where anarcho monarchist and walking contradiction Andrew Ryan could only have been put down by the ruthlessness of his own ideology gone rogue in the smuggler and industrialist Frank Fontaine, who cheekily smuggles meaning back into the underwater fortress of rapture, cold commercial rationalism as an institution then is swallowed by a starving mobilised force of counter hegemony. In the awakening of an non-sustainable excess of the system, the system itself now falls victim to its own unleashed hunger (as it has victimised countless others within „order“ and „rules“).

By this virtue of becoming death John Wick becomes myth. An apocalypse. At the beginning of John Wick 4 he literally appears as one of the four apocalyptic riders against a desert sun. Is he death by tyranny, war, hunger or pestilence? Or, since he kills the other riders, is he death combined? A death that reimagines life?

Rot

And with this we finally arrive at the gates of the cybergothic, in what Natalie Wrynn from Contrapoints dubbed ruined opulence. All of these various themes are connected by the hyphen of rot for reasons that should appear obvious by now. Rot necessitates death, but it is not reducible to death.

Rot produces as much as it destroys. It is, with Schumpeter, creative destruction. But what rots also embodies a (losing) struggle to remain. Undeath in fiction makes processes of rot visible but like an abandoned castle or an abbey, a ghost or a zombie, it persists in unholy ways. Unholy persistance insists, cursing the future and plaguing the present. It insists on history as weight, on guilt as lingering, on dependence throughout the ages, sucking the blood of the living only to sustain itself like a tumor or a vampire. A structure preserved by such unholy means can not make room for new structures, but it becomes a trap for those attracted to decay. A carcass for flies. To remember thus acquires a dual valence. Persisting and overcoming.

The monstrous crossbreed of both is embodied by John Wick. That is what predestinates his story for a cybergothic reading.

His focus lies on remembrance (his wife a digitized ghost), his commitment is to insist (not to persist). These drivers enable him to become an angel of death for an entire world order. Is it therefore fate when remembrance itself splits into two via a smartphone video? 0 and 1. A hallucination that does not decay (in the way Platons world of forms does not decay but repeats itself away from perfect reproduction), yet loops indefinitely even after the surface becomes cracked. Stephen Kings book The Shining describes the haunted Overlook-Hotel like a dried up vampiric entity activated by a little boys magic lifeblood (the boy Danny literally turns a key halfway through to fully activate the hotel and his fathers madness). Vanquishing the reawakening vigor of consumption, anarchived in history and then forgotten, splits into two parthways of redemption. The book chooses the cleansing fire, while Stanley Kubricks film version chooses the re-immobilization in ice.

One timeline thus leads through the lingering weight and insistance of strength in display for the sake of strength frozen in time, looping over a glitched surface of persistence: The toxic male cyborg body described by Klaus Theweleit as a fragmented body, for which the alt rights ideologues have designated the greek letters alpha and sigma.

Stuck in endless war, yet continously missing the mark, the real cause of suffering.

The other timeline burns dead matter in a heraclitean transformation. The dead matter was already dead. It was only forced to move, a structure of dead labour and calcified relations, a structure of death. But, in nietzschean terms, what is already dead, should not be rescued but pushed over. The understanding and the necessity of looped revolution, the return of difference enabling another world not by concession but fracture. In Marcusian terms: The spectre of a world that could be free starting within a great refusal. From the ashes: A new humanity. A new seeing. A new thinking. A new loving. As Mark Fisher wrote:

»Acid Communism is the name I have given to this spectre. The concept of acid communism is a provocation and a promise. It is a joke of sorts, but one with very serious purpose. It points to something that, at one point, seemed inevitable, but which now appears impossible: the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticisation of everyday life.«

[K-Punk. The Collected and unpublished writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016). Edited by Darren Ambrose. Foreward by Simon Reynolds (752-770), S 757/758]

That is decay as bloom, since a cheeky double pun within the word acid refers to dissolving something as well as experimenting with psychedelics, who not coincidently also have a dionysian, fungal origin. The psychedelic limit experience is not an outer world, but an experience of the sensory apparatus becoming torn apart and reassembled. A vision digests the boundaries of the present into something different, into difference as a primary. The tragedy of course is that this vision never materialised, like the book it was killed in its infancy as Mark Fisher succumbed to depression and ended his own life.

That was not history. Silicon Valley, the counter culture is misrembering. Difference became the eternal regurgitation and paranoia of the same. Enlightenment stuck within the Manson Familiy. The dionysian limit experience after all has no inscribed direction. It can be both progression and regression. It is, nonetheless, potent with potential. The cybergothic visceroids (infected by capitalist Berlusconium) after all spread through every state at every level of power and threaten to consume the world in a new fascism, making a mockery out of everyone who claimed we have learned. The sixties turned out to be a myth. Real history can not be transcribed into grand narratives. Like John Wicks broken phone myth is a flatline construct, a clone of signs. The failed loop exacerbates decay while supposedly fighting it. It acts. It drives. It thirsts not for bloom but annihilation of the other. In this way all nostalgia (including romantizing sowjet aesthetics) becomes fundamentally fascist, decorated by AI-Slop with these desires and hillbilly biomutants in pop-up-dioramas of consumer products from the, 1950s, 80s and 90s. All fascism does this. It is suicidal decadence. It does not imagine a future for life, it imagines future ruins of a „great“ civilization.

But the other could also be embraced though that necessitates the rejection not of some but all identity, all fenced in bodies fragmented or not – that is rot embraced as an instrument of the loop itself. John Wick can be both and this will best be illustrated by looking at its cultural variations. Thus i would like to end with the short discussion of two derivatives of the John Wick series that caught my eye. One is of fire. One is of ice. You decide which one is which.

Berlin Postcards vs. Monkey Masks

The first movie is Atomic Blonde (2017) by David Leitch: A nostalgic cold war spy thriller heavily inspired by the aesthetic of John Wick but switching the setting from imaginary crime syndicates to Berlin at the dusk of the cold war, literally days away from the opening of the Berlin Wall. There are visceral fighting choreographies that hook you in, there are bright and saturated neon lights straight out of a [insert x]-wave_image.jpg assembled from digitized 80s nostalgia. The ensemble is littered with character masks (one might say ghosts) of that past: Double agents, rebelling subcultures, eastern bloc militaria and rogue stasi officials having to learn how to not look like stasi officers (in order to, in a dual valence, pass as a refugee and look like one).

The framing of subcultures in their conflict with the authorities is particularly interesting here. There is a scene where east german military police captures and belittles young punks who were illegally listening to western music, the implication being that in the dark grey east no fun was allowed - although in reality west german postfascist consensus society did not fare much better in conformism points. But in this version of history there was no crackdown on student protests in the west. Diffamation of cultural innovation as popcultural noise only (stupid) teenagers could waste their life with did not take place.

The movie however doesn’t care. It is an empire of signs, not history. Even reunited Germany today suffers from that structural conservatism of retromaniac curator identities, which is one the reasons why the country of Goethe and Brecht has not produced anything of cultural relevance that was not derivative in decades. Of course Goethe is still put on display as an example of german grandiosity, but precisely as designed and encircled high(est) culture put under police protection by gentriatic hillbillys as much as urban hipsters. The curator identity people, however, are barely able to see art and artist beyond the pedestal they are put on. A culture industry for self-declared people of so called good taste. The questions why something is good is already answered by its integration into a museum. The question how could it be put to better use is ignored, any augmentations or implants to intensify attraction and cultivation, in short: desirability, polish. No knife throwing in this facility, sir… It is therefore hardly surprising when the curator identity engagement with „highculture“ involves only interplay with surfaces of what has been trademarked as good by virtue of being old.

Don’t think. Everything has already been thought. Exit through the gift shop.

Just remember communism is evil and they are on their way out (in case you forgot: The movie literally situates itself at the dusk of the cold war era). Thus the floating, radiating cultural fallout mixes into the snow and neon lights, accumulating in entropy, but marked for death in the roaring 90s of supposed global commercial freedom. The bodies of the gay women at the centre of plot are displayed accordingly in luxury bedrooms and expensively impractical lingerie.

What carries over however are the narratives of heroism of the single, double, triple agents, the audience can imagine themselves as encountering in delightful, wet and cold, but sanatized neon dreams of dirt – that is of Cyberpunk without Punk (but with punk simulacra you can rescue as happy little NPCs!). It is a giftshop experience of cold war memorabilia, put on coffee mugs and fridge magnets. You can find those at every tourist corner in Berlin, as well as in other designated history areas locked behind ticket-booths, partaking in an unilateral social contract you obviously agreed to, silly. Everything else belongs in a museum. Just remember the communists are evil and they are on their way out, so buy the merch they left behind.

Exit through the Gift shop.

The second movie i want to discuss is Monkey Man (2024) by Dev Patel. It also is heavily inspired by John Wick both in style and tone, down to one of the main protagonists namedropping the character in a gun shop. But the movie is not simple pastiche like Atomic Blonde, nor historistic masturbation to old surfaces polished and eroticized, sanatized and put in lingarie to die. Monkey Man melts the source material into a pathway of future life. John Wicks cybergothic rebellion is transplanted to India, where we do not simply fight an imagined past in cycles of othering and idolization.

The main character Kid deals with the very contemporary and real evil of Narendra Modi and his use of politicized religion against minorities - as if unified hinduism itself was not an invention by british colonialism in order to divide and conquer. Order and Rules, so useful … if they only were good ... Religion is »the most elegant weapon«, as Baba Shakti, the guru villain behind politics and crime, pontificates. His emerging nemesis Kids quest concerns not only learning and understanding something other, his loop of remembrance is one that escalates into the future, into liberation.

He is the titular monkey man, embraces as second face (a mask) the hindu monkey god Hanuman (you might know him by his chinese derivative: Wukong). The monkey king is as much of a dionysian trickster as he remains a herculean protector of the poor and the marginalized. This role makes him the ideal agent of rot in the sense of fungal bloom, fighting a calcified system of death and making room for a transition to a new living. An important faction in the movie is literal the transgender community of the hijra. Here at their temple Kid is rescued and nurtured back to health after a failed first attempt at rebellion, but he will only be rebuilt in so far as he is constructed for a better future. Alpha (in an ironic reversal of rightwing connotation of the term, Alpha returns a a beginning again) becomes his mentor, teaching him how to fight and how to see differently. Both processes are synomymous and they are acidic. It is literally and figuratively a psychedelic encounter, that is an experience of psychedelic reason, a dream of the possibility of acid communism: A spectre of a world that could be free.

Thus John Wicks adaptation of Dantes catholic grievances finds its analogy in Indias national epic of Ramayana, where the prince Rama (with the help of Hanuman) has to defeat the might of the demon king Ravana. While lutherean John Wick culminates with the Death of Marquis (or God) as the result of arrogance, the climax of Monkey Man is the revelation that God in the Form Baba Shakti has always been a demon king, hiding within the symbols of ascetism the dagger with which to mortally wound the real hero, once he has become too inconvenient to ignore, in order to prevent revolution from occuring.

Organised religion therefore has always been a quest for power not devotion. Overcoming myth therefore requires liberating it too with the help of its own ambivalence: That is the power of the monkey mask. The trickster that heralds the arrival of fungal bloom is the embodiment of agency, only trickery democratizes power and trickery requires letting go off identity, of being marked and inscribed by state, history and corporation. Funny how monotheism associates the trickster with the devil, with evil incarnate, as if they had something to hide …

In this way Dev Patel is far more radical than Chad Stahelski. There is no war of the good structure with the bad structure, there is only change. And sometimes change needs to be enforced. Choose not the loop of remembering what never was to begin with, but the loop in remembrance as the possibility and necessity of change. The Hyphen in the dirt. Bloom. Fungal Bloom. For immortality is a lie propagated by the already dead. The Katechon must die for Life to return from Death by death, in order to repeat the cycle of becoming.

Holy Stagnation dies by psychedelic reason and nothing else. Maybe the answer is not to zealously believe in a feature, in futurism, but reinstating a golden past won’t solve anything either. Who really wants to return to organic mud of the peasantry? A peasantry that is the world, not merely some urban gardening project? Since the past never existed as it is imagined the futurist ideology of progress just returns in another dusty (and less hygienic) coating. As romantic and misguided as ever. The only function a reanimated past can deliver is that of a tool kit and quarry. The museum, or more precisely what has grown under the museum, is your enemy, a panopticon of meaning encased in amber and frozen in time. It belongs to the mimics now, who build their nests in tax havens and free ports, stolen meaning and stolen wealth.

Smash in display cases und give deadened objects deadly significance. But don’t use them against the living, use them against the ghostly, ghastly prison of common sense to bring forth the commons of difference, reanimated.

See ya on the other side.

________________________________________________________________________________

Blind Sight – Cosmic Foolery – Speculation

Loki Estravens Kulturpoltergeistblog: Politics and Culture

For questions, cooperations or feedback, write me an Email to leotiresias@gmail.com or reach out to me on Social Media: Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, DeviantArt, Pinterest

IMPRESSUM DATENSCHUTZ