John Wick as a Metaphor for PTSD

[NO SPOILERS]

As a PTSD survivor, I have found the character of John Wick (from the three eponymous films starring Keanu Reeves) to have great resonance with my own experiences. On the surface, my life is absolutely nothing like John Wick’s, and yet, the feeling the films evoke in me is a familiar one. John displays incredible survival skills and tenacity, but he ultimately expends a huge amount of physical and emotional energy, at great cost to himself and others, in order to essentially stay in the same place. He seems incapable of progress or forward motion. John is stuck in the past, unable to move beyond the loss of his wife, and remembering her is his sole motivation for staying alive. John no longer feels any connection with his old profession, and yearns to move beyond it, but he has not landed on a new purpose to replace the old toxic one. His impressive skillset serves only to keep him where he is and prevent him from being annihilated.

Many times I have felt as if I expend a huge amount of energy battling off more intangible enemies – negative thoughts, traumatic memories, feelings of helplessness and dread – just to be able to survive from one day to the next. These psychological forces can seem every bit as real and as threatening as an army of assassins sent to wipe me off the face of the earth. I have come to have a high degree of respect for my own tenacity and survival skills, and I’ve often identified (or rather, misidentified) these as resilience. Resilience, in fact, implies a capacity not just to survive, but to thrive; to grow and change and evolve. This is not to say that I haven’t displayed some of these qualities; indeed I have, and, however slowly, I’ve been able to move towards a new kind of life. But historically I have not made a clear distinction for myself between surviving and thriving, although I am gradually coming to grasp it. In contrast, John Wick remains in a place where he can’t even consider the possibility of thriving, or what that might mean for him, and that is a place that I know all too well; I lived there for years, and I still return often.

The feeling of being stuck in trauma, of constantly fighting hard simply to stay in place and lose no more ground, is something I feel to some degree every day. And that is OK; what’s important is that it’s not what I feel every minute of every day, and that over time, it has come to be less and less the predominant theme of my life. But my daily inner life continues to bear enough resemblance to John Wick’s outer life to remind me that I still have far to go. Those of us living with PTSD can look at John Wick as a potent metaphor for our experiences, one that can help us access pride and self-esteem for being able to live through external and internal challenges that might have defeated many others, while also serving as a stark reminder of the great danger of fixity and “stuckness”. Resilience most importantly implies flexibility, suppleness and the capacity to bounce back. These are characteristics that John Wick (and the John Wick living within the psyches of many PTSD survivors) lacks. Although it wouldn’t be very marketable for the film franchise, it’s possible to imagine a future in which John Wick is able to access a new purpose that encourages him to move towards growth and beyond mere survival. Perhaps one day John can apply his fearsome skillset towards more peaceful, or at least less overtly harmful, ends. John Wick the self-defense trainer, John Wick the triathlete, John Wick the stuntman or, who knows, even John Wick the life coach. Given his single-mindedness and aptitude for self-discipline and asceticism, it’s even possible to imagine John Wick the zen master. Perhaps writing fanfic detailing the evolution of a future John Wick towards a life of new, self-transcending purpose would be a useful therapeutic exercise for those of us who feel a strong resonance with the character as a metaphor for our experiences with PTSD.