The revenge genre is fraught territory for feminist film fans, because it virtually always begins with violence (often sexualized violence) against women. ‘John Wick’ sidesteps this problem by replacing the victimized woman with a dog: Keanu Reeves’s title character, a mild-mannered retired assassin, gets back into the criminal underworld and goes on a brutal rampage to avenge his killed dog. What follows is an extremely well-executed but completely non-innovative revenge flick, which is nevertheless probably my favorite since ‘Kill Bill Vol 1.,’ in no small part because the revenge isn’t inspired by the victimization of a woman.
The revenge genre is fraught territory for feminist film fans, because it virtually always begins with violence (often sexualized violence) against women. John Wick sidesteps this problem by replacing the victimized woman with a dog. Keanu Reeves’s title character, a mild-mannered retired assassin, gets back into the life and goes on a brutal rampage to avenge his puppy the way countless action heroes have avenged murdered wives and girlfriends. What follows is an extremely well-executed but completely non-innovative revenge flick, which is nevertheless probably my favorite since Kill Bill Vol 1., in no small part because the revenge isn’t inspired by the victimization of a woman.
Now don’t get me wrong, violence against dogs isn’t something I like seeing in a movie, it is just a refreshing change of pace from the normal female sacrifice at the top of these films. Unfortunately, there is in fact a dead woman in John Wick’s backstory, because Hollywood screenwriters seem incapable of giving their male action leads depth without some dead family. But John Wick’s wife, in a shocking twist, died of natural causes! Wick’s manly grief would have been limited to recklessly stunt driving his classic Mustang around an airfield, but Dead Wife left him an absurdly cute puppy so he would “have something to love.” And only days later, this absurdly cute puppy is brutally killed by Russian mobsters stealing his car. Cue onslaught of ultraviolent revenge!
John Wick and an aggressively cute puppy.
It doesn’t take much of an armchair psychologist to realize that John is not just avenging his dog as his pet, but as a symbol of his wife’s enduring love. Or to speculate that he’s using this revenge mission as an outlet for his grief for his wife. So the usual issues of women in refrigerators persist if you think about it too hard. I think I’d like John Wick even more if Dead Wife had just been left out of it.
Does this mean I’m advocating for the erasure of female characters? Or the cinematic sacrifice of adorable puppies? I hope the obvious answer to those questions is no, but I’m writing this from the moral dead zone of “I sure enjoyed this movie about dozens of people being violently murdered!” so I can’t exactly seek a lane on the high road.
Adrianne Palicki as Ms. Perkins in John Wick
John Wick‘s only real female character alive at the start of the film is Adrianne Palicki’s Ms. Perkins, a fellow assassin. Ms. Perkins is clearly an outsider in the complex subculture of John Wick‘s criminal underworld, perhaps inevitably as a function of her sex. She’s the only character who doesn’t buy into the legend of John Wick as the Scariest Sumbitch in all of Criminaldom, and she breaks “Hotel Rules” by going after Wick in Ian McShane’s sanctuary for wary criminals. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t work out very well for her. Fortunately, the violence Ms. Perkins suffers isn’t fetishized. And she’s presented as a worthy opponent in her big brawl with Wick. I can’t take too much beef with her not surviving to the end credits, because almost no one else does.
Other than Ms. Perkins and brief mentions of Dead Wife, John Wick is wall-to-wall dudes. Even the faceless goons John Wick guns down in droves are universally male. Cutting out most of the violence against women let me indulge in the perhaps unsavory pleasures of a well-made violent action movie. I’m reminded of one of the reasons gay male porn is appealing to many women: the absence of women also means the absence of anti-woman tropes. (John Wick certainly doesn’t avoid the comparison to gay porn by setting one of its main action pieces in a bathhouse with a bunch of hyperbuff shirtless dudes.)
Lets hear it for ultraviolence!
And like porn, John Wick‘s abundant appeal to the lizard brain shouldn’t be examined too closely by the forebrain (lest we sound like we’re fans of puppy murder). John Wick isn’t great cinema and it is a far cry from a triumph for women, but it is an extremely enjoyable action movie that doesn’t require too much feminist compromise, and that is something of a rarity.
Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh who watches John Wick like her two-year-old niece watches The Little Mermaid.
The fact that I need “cover” for watching this movie is not because it is a “chick flick.” I’m a feminist, so I don’t think things have less value when they are geared towards women. It’s not that its a lowbrow romcom. It’s 2014, and I try to pretend I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. It’s that this lowbrow romcom chick flick appears to presuppose that a woman could have too many sex partners. And I could pretend I watched this so I could tear it apart on this website, but the truth is I wanted to watch a romantic comedy and this one has Anna Faris and Chris Evans in it. Even though I was 90 percent sure it was going to be sexist. That, my friends, is a guilty pleasure.
Anna Faris in What’s Your Number?
Man, I wish I knew that What’s Your Number? had a wedding in it back when I was writing weekly wedding movie reviews, because that would have been the perfect excuse to watch it. The fact that I need “cover” for watching this movie is not because it is a “chick flick.” I’m a feminist, so I don’t think things have less value when they are geared toward women. It’s not that its a lowbrow romcom. It’s 2014, and I try to pretend I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. It’s that this lowbrow romcom chick flick appears to presuppose that a woman could have too many sex partners.
And I could pretend I watched this so I could tear it apart on this website, but the truth is I wanted to watch a romantic comedy and this one has Anna Faris and Chris Evans in it. Even though I was 90 percent sure it was going to be sexist. That, my friends, is a guilty pleasure.
Ally’s number is 19, which is allegedly a problem of some kind
Here’s the sexist premise in full: Anna Faris plays Ally Darling, who gets dumped and fired in the same morning, and then discovers an even bigger problem with her life: she has nearly twice the average American woman’s number of lifetime sex partners, and is one partner away from the scientifically determined unmarriagable boundary of 20. She decides she can’t have sex again until she meets “The One.” Oy.
But for about 90 seconds during the opening credits of What’s Your Number? I got really excited that this might be a stealth-feminist film. The camera pans over pages from women’s magazines, with headlines perfectly illustrating the judgment, shame, contradictory advice and demented priorities that populate those pages: “Change Too Much For Your Man?” “Decorating Your Bedroom *With Him in Mind,” “Does He Only Want You For Your Bod?” and my personal favorite:
“When Your Sister Is Just Plain Better Than You”
This movie gets it! Women’s magazines are sexist trash piles that primarily function to make women feel inferior. Ally is going to learn not to let a magazine define how many sexual partners she “should” have. Ally is going to learn to tell the slut shamers of the world to shove it and then she’ll go bone the hot guy across the hall.
Shirtless Chris Evans in What’s Your Number?
Well, spoiler alert: only the second part happens, and only after lots of get-together plot and mutual declarations of L-O-V-E, which she never would have found with this Chris Evans-shaped charmer who makes her laugh and gets her weird art and is shaped like Chris Evans had she just jumped his bones the first time she saw him mostly naked (which he is, in like, more than half of his scenes, adding another dimension of guilty pleasure. to this movie, because sexually objectifying people is wrong, but…):
I mean seriously. This happens in more than one scene.
Chris Evans-shaped Colin only has one night stands, you see, because he becomes paralyzed with fear of hurting women if he knows any humanizing details about them, such as “she once was a child.” So he loves ’em and leaves ’em to find their own way out of his apartment while he hides out in Ally’s. But there’s no article in GQ criticizing Colin’s sexual behavior, and neither he nor Ally really question it, even though her number teetering at less than one tenth of his has sent her life spiraling. This is one of many missed opportunities for What’s Your Number? to critically engage with its central premise.
Colin teaches Ally you can Google people.
The bulk of the plot is a High Fidelity-style tour of exes, as Ally figures out the loophole where she can get back with someone she’s already banged without adding to her number. [Colin helps her track down these guys with “cop family” secrets he has like being on Facebook.] So we get lots of amusing cameos and windows into different ways Ally has changed herself to get a man’s approval, from dressing like a senator’s wife to pretending to be British. And yes, yes, “You’ll be happiest with someone you can be yourself with” is a fine message, but movie, YOU ALREADY HAVE A MESSAGE, that no one should let a magazine tell them how many people they should have sex with. Right? RIGHT?
The caption of this gif is not “I’ll have sex with as many people as I want!”
Sigh, no. The “to hell with Marie Claire!” moment I was waiting for never came (I should have known that Marie Claire wouldn’t have agreed to product placement if that was coming). And worse, in the last scene of the movie, Ally gets a voice mail from one of the guys on the list clarifying their sexual history (they only did it “dry style”), and she can triumphantly declare that Colin “is my 20!” and their love is not doomed. Barf.
But, Hera help me, I still really liked this movie. Anna Faris is just so charming! Chris Evans wears nothing but a tea towel in multiple scenes! They have chemistry! Amusing cameos! Including Anthony Mackie miming handling four penises! No “my younger sister is getting married” panic! Said younger sister is Ari Graynor! Raunchy comedy geared toward the women in the audience and not just to appease their male dates! Sex positivity (yes, seriously, in the movie borne from slut shaming)!
“I’m like, super gay.”
Seriously, this would be a glowing review of an underappreciated gem if you could just cut out the bullshit last scene (although work the words “dry style” into some other part of the script, because that’s hilarious) and throw in some real talk about how ridiculous our obsession with “Numbers” is. We could have had it all, movie. Instead, What’s Your Number? only bumps up my number. My number of Antifeminist Guilty Pleasures. Which is way, way higher than 20.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town. Her number is somewhere between negative three and seventeen thousand.
