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(OPINION) There are scientific reasons that everyone loves Hollywood’s bad guys, like John Wick — but it’s Jesus who actually meets those needs better than these amoral, violent characters do.

Today’s Hollywood action heroes are as popular as ever with audiences — each John Wick movie making more money than the last — and are spawning a plethora of imitators, from “Nobody” to “Bullet Train” to “Gunpowder Milkshake.” This popularity has also extended to characters not directly inspired by John Wick, such as David Fincher’s Netflix film “The Killer.”

What’s interesting about these characters is that they don’t have the heroic nature of previous eras of action heroes. Classic heroes like Indiana Jones, John McClane, James Bond and Ethan Hunt all killed lots of people to beat the bad guys and protect innocent people. But this wave of Hollywood bad guys don’t kill people for good reasons — rather selfish ones, like revenge. Often, they continue their lives of murder even at the end of the film.

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This is interesting in any context, but it’s particularly curious in a country where the majority describe themselves as Christians who admire Jesus as great. Jesus, who regularly called upon us to love our enemies and do good toward them, seems to be in sharp contrast with our love affair with killers. 

I am a Christian, but I still love characters like John Wick. Earlier this year, I endured a painful, week-long depression. Due to lack of rest and some difficult personal events, I felt small, weak, insecure and generally bad about myself. I couldn’t shake myself out of it. I tried praying. I read the Bible. None of that worked very much. What did work? Watching “John Wick: Chapter 3.” In fact, watching John Wick fight and murder his way through all his enemies all over the world somehow made me feel strong, powerful and confident. 

My problems no longer seemed as big. I felt far more capable of handling it. And I did. 

Why do we love killers who aren't obviously heroes? What is it about being a killer that we find intrinsically attractive and admirable? And for Christians, what is it that we love about them that we don’t get from Jesus?  

The first — and most obvious — reason people love killers is that they make us feel safe and powerful. We live in a world of danger, where we often feel weak and small. A killer is someone strong enough to confront and defeat things in the world that try to harm and overcome them. They make the world feel safer.  

Surveys show people have far higher opinions of police and the military than pretty much any other American institution — the two places where people are allowed to kill to keep us safe. Moreover, when we imagine ourselves as the person able to kill, it doesn’t just make us feel safe but powerful because we are the ones that are making ourselves safe.  

Why do these killers still make us feel safe when they aren’t good guys? The answer is because of a tricky way our brains tell us who the “good guys” are. Studies like those referenced in The Atlantic piece “Why It Pays To Be A Jerk” show that when people break rules in ways that benefit themselves or other people, we see them as jerks. When they break them in ways that benefit us, we see them as leaders. In other words, we think of people as “good guys” who do things that benefit us. That’s why when a politician in the party we agree with does something bad, we justify it. When it’s in the opposite party, we are eager to condemn it.

So how do these Hollywood action movies hack our brains to make us see the killer protagonists as being on “our side”? By having us spend time with them and watching them suffer. 

Studies show that we empathize most deeply with whoever we spend most time with and know the most details about their story. When the person we empathize with most deeply suffers, we are very likely to hurt an innocent person in order to elevate the suffering of the person we know. So all these Hollywood movies have to do is have us spend time with them while they endure suffering, and we immediately root for them. This is why Paul Bloom, author of “Against Empathy,” thought having such feelings was a bad basis for making ethical decisions. 

But the reason we love such protagonists — specifically those who are not heroes — is that true killers can resist social pressure. This was a surprising conclusion my co-host and I came to on our podcast “The Overthinkers.” Most of us deeply feel how much of a prisoner we are of social expectations. We don’t do what we truly want to do; we do what other people expect of us for fear of social rejection. Therefore, we admire people who are able to resist such pressures. 

Since violence is one of the biggest social taboos, killers feel like they are the ultimate self-determining individuals. This is, in fact, at least partly true. As Richard Tremblay has shown in his research on children, people are most violent at the age of 2 and are socialized out of it. Serial killers are — at least in part — people who were simply able to resist such social programming. 

Many often attempt to dismiss or explain away the reasons that people love killers as the result of sin or societal brainwashing, oftentimes citing what’s called the “myth of redemptive violence” from Walter Mink’s book “The Powers That Be.” They describe the belief that violence is necessary as propaganda by the ruling class to defend the status quo and say that violent means are used to maintain such power. 

And yet, the psychology suggests that it’s more innate than that. People don’t believe that violence is sometimes necessary because they’ve been tricked into it by authority figures, but because they’ve seen it. War was necessary to stop the Nazis. Guns were necessary to enforce desegregation. Many of us have personal stories or ones from our friends who are safe because someone was able to stand up and physically defend them from violence or the threat of violence.

Jesus Christ: Kindness star?

This all makes sense of why we might find more confidence and comfort in someone like John Wick over Jesus. Jesus is a man of kindness and love who never killed anyone and commanded His followers to follow His example. He isn’t on our side in particular but the side of all mankind.

Since Jesus instructs us to be meek and gentle the way our authority figures have always instilled in us, following Jesus can feel like giving into more social conformity. Jesus does not seem to be either able or willing to protect us when we need it or to give us a model for how to protect ourselves and those we love.

This is not the only way Jesus has historically been understood by His followers. As Nancy Pearcey points out in “The Toxic War On Masculinity,” prior to the Industrial Revolution, Jesus was most commonly portrayed as the sovereign God-King of the universe who reigns over the earth and empowers His followers. The “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” who is all sweetness and tenderness came about when Western romanticism reinterpreted virtue as feminine and therefore Jesus had to be portrayed as stereotypically feminine in order to be virtuous rather than an integration of the two.

Historically, Christians have seen Jesus as the God of the universe — and specifically God of the Bible as laid out in the Old and New Testaments. This God spent centuries committing violence on behalf of his people in order to care for and protect them. Psalm 3 and Psalm 44 are written in praise to this God for just these reasons. Jesus affirmed His ability to save Himself and that His death was by His choice (Matthew 26:53-54). His followers affirmed that the faith they had in Jesus was the same as their forefathers who conquered nations (Hebrews 11: 32-34). The ultimate sign of protection is that He promised eternal life for His followers.

While many in the West are uncomfortable with the idea of God doing violence, as author and scholar Dru Johnson points out, people outside the West typically are not. For them, the fact that God promises to avenge on their behalf is one of the reasons they trust Him, including when He tells them to love their enemies. While there isn’t enough time to debate that theologically, what is interesting to me is that, as the idea of Jesus as a God capable of violence waned in the West, heroes like John Wayne and John Wick stepped in to fill that psychological gap for so many Christians. 

This Jesus still diverges from John Wick. After all, John Wick’s project is one of destroying his enemies. As a result, his project is satisfied when his enemies are dead. Jesus’ project is to save those He loves — which is us — and therefore His project fails if those He loves are dead.  

This is why Jesus corrects His disciples when they ask if they can call down fire from heaven to destroy people who rejected them. He says He’s “not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them” (Luke 9:56). That’s why He dies rather than kills. 

In doing this, Jesus was also the ultimate resister of social pressure and conformity. All four Gospels are filled with people telling Jesus who they wanted Him to be — whether that was a conquering king, a “yes man” to religious authorities, a magic trick to those who wanted a constant supply of loaves and fishes or whatever else. Jesus never bowed to any of those pressures. Repeatedly, when people demanded Jesus be something He didn’t want to be, Jesus told them no — even when that meant His followers abandoned him. 

Wick flames out

Honestly, he makes John Wick — a man who is constantly manipulated and used by the people around him — look like a tool by comparison. 

We can see that Jesus’ project to restore the world is a better one than John Wick’s plan to burn it down just by looking at the world around us. Crime was rampant in New York City in the 1970s until authorities implemented tough-on-crime policies that got criminals off the streets. Because of that, New York became far safer for lots of people. As Anthony Bradley wrote in “Overcriminalization and Mass Incarceration,” it put poor people at a higher risk of being targeted by prosecutors. The increased incarceration rates perpetuate a cycle of dysfunction. That doesn’t necessarily mean that tough-on-crime policies are always bad, but they are merely a first step in helping to create an environment of safety. Unfortunately, too often people get rid of the bad guys and then don’t care about solving the rest of the problem because they feel safe. Here’s an example where they’ve embraced John Wick rather than Jesus.

One of the movies that best illustrates this is “The Fighter.” In it, the hero, Micky Ward (played by Mark Wahlberg), has a toxic family who controls and manipulates him because he doesn’t have the confidence to stand up to them. He only gets free of them because his girlfriend (played by Amy Adams) gives him that confidence to cut them out of his life. But the story doesn’t end there. 

As he grows in confidence, he realizes that he doesn’t need to cut his family off in order to set boundaries with them. He can still have a relationship with them while standing up to them — and stand up to his girlfriend, too. This is the project that Jesus came to create for all of us.

Even John Wick realizes his reign of violence hasn’t made the world better. After watching “John Wick: Chapter 3,” I felt better, but continued to pray for my situation and my heart to improve. 

In the end, things worked out for the good in ways that I could not control, but only God could. John Wick made me feel better, but God ultimately served as better protection. My hope and prayer is that I learn to know and love Jesus so much that thinking of Him gives me more confidence than watching John Wick ever could.

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Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.