The economics of killing

Hitman movies themselves are now a growth industry. John Wick may have fired his last bullet but Hollywood studios and streamers are busy tweaking their algorithms to find the killing alchemy that can beat the gun-fu hangover. Pretenders like Bullet Train, The Gray Man and The Beekeepers have missed more than they have hit. On-target entries have come from proven sharpshooters like David Fincher and Richard Linklater. Their latest films The Killer and Hit Man mark an altogether different kind of addition to the pantheon. Even so, both get plenty of mileage from the method and mystique that have made hitmen a pop culture staple.

Pop culture has iconised those who kill for love, for revenge, for ideology, for power, for the sheer sadistic thrill. What separates serial killers and hitmen at the very core is the motive. The nature of their respective enterprises is a question of compulsion vs commerce. For serial killers, killing is a pleasure. For hitmen, it is work. Serial killers choose their victims. Hitmen don’t do the choosing; the targets are chosen for them to kill. To put it another way, a hitman is the ultimate agent and servant of predatory capitalism. To him, murder is a job delegated by the ruling class to protect their interests. To the ruling class, a hitman is a yes-man with a gun. He is more a man of action than words. He is an unquestioning gig worker who has no allegiances other than to the person paying his invoice. He is the means governments, corporations and individuals hire to distance themselves from self-justified ends. He must finish the job without leaving a trail. He must improvise when necessary. Martin Q Blank is said to have killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. John Wick is said to have killed three men in a bar with a pencil. Their adaptability becomes part of their legend.

Based on a French comic book, The Killer jettisons the glamourisation to investigate the hitman as a pathological figure of neoliberalism. Michael Fassbender’s nameless assassin operates in a global market place where just about everything can be outsourced, murder included. When we meet him, he is in the middle of a downright tedious stakeout for an assignment in Paris. He has set up shop in an abandoned WeWork across from the high-rise hotel where his target is expected to check in. He waits. For days. With each day, the enforced idleness and methodical prepping become so dreary we feel his frustration of waiting. It is a frustration familiar to all of us gig workers who are on the clock even when not working. It strikes much harder in this particular moment when well-paid, long-term jobs are so hard to come by. While the killer waits, he cleans his sniper rifle, eats Egg McMuffins, practices yoga, listens to The Smiths, and monologues about the demands of his working life as a professional killer. “Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability,” he repeats like a personal mantra. Despite all the mantras, prep and routine, when the time comes to execute, he misses his mark — a single slip he will spend the rest of the film trying to rectify.

A hitman cannot build a long productive career if his methods are hit-or-miss. Not when you have chosen a profession where your first job could end up becoming your last. No wonder the crimes are planned and executed with great precision. The routine becoming ritual is essential to maintain efficiency, to survive even. If a hitman wants to remain gainfully employed, he must live in anonymity, move in the shadows and not ask too many questions, lest he suffer the same fate as his victims. It is a profession that calls for a high boredom threshold and a low profile. The Killer blends in by dressing “like a German tourist” with aloha shirts, off-white khakis, a beige coat and a bucket hat. Discretion is the name of the game. Unless you are John Wick. Or a Bible-quoting enforcer or a katana-bearing, jumpsuit-wearing blonde operating in the hyperreal worlds of Quentin Tarantino.

The idea of the professional killer, as proposed by formative texts and preserved by Fincher, is shot full of holes by Hit Man. Such a specimen is a Hollywood invention, Linklater’s film argues while acknowledging their stardom within pop culture. Glenn Powell arms his charm offensive as Gary, a bookish college professor who works part-time as a fake hitman to catch desperate partners and scorned lovers with murderous designs. Linklater and Powell co-wrote the comedy inspired by the incredible but true story of Gary Johnson and his undercover work for the Houston police. The fictionalised Gary is quite the dork, the kind who would name his cats Id and Ego. When the opportunity presents itself to be someone else, he is reluctant at first but soon welcomes it with enthusiasm. Each sting operation sees him try on different accents, mannerisms and costumes, customising the persona according to the requirements of his marks. It is quite the bespoke service. For a client who wishes for a nice clean job, he channels his inner yuppie as a Patrick Bateman-type wearing a wide grin and slicked back hair. For a teenage boy who wants his mom killed, he poses as a figure right out of a video game, wearing a leather jacket and a scar on his face. For a man who orders a hit on his estranged wife, he does what can only be described as an exaggerated impression of Tilda Swinton doing an exaggerated impression of Edward Fox’s Jackal (from Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 thriller The Day of the Jackal).

It is while assuming a false identity — of the sexy smooth-talker Ron — that Gary meets Madison (Adria Arjona), an attractive client he ends up falling for. Madison wishes to escape an abusive marriage. So she attempts to solicit the services of Gary (as Ron). Mid-entrapment, guilt forces a change of heart. The two become entangled in a passionate romance. Gary and his many personas are definitely a drawcard, but it is the intense chemistry between Powell and Arjona that grips us in a headlock. The two project a deep intimacy just by locking eyes or even saying the opposite of what they feel, as witnessed in a glorious dance of deception. Complications inescapably arise when Madison’s husband ends up dead in an apparent drug deal gone wrong. The police suspect Madison to be the killer. When Gary is ordered to go to her house in order to get a confession, he finds himself in a bind. For how does he inform Madison that he is wearing a wire without incriminating himself? As he walks up to her door, he types on his phone that the police are listening in so she is mindful of what she says. Next, he asks his questions out loud while typing up a script so they can put on a convincing show for the police. In effect, he is speaking to her as Gary and typing as Ron. The words spoken and their tone are meant to sell the police on her innocence. The words written and the accompanying facial expressions are meant to help deflect the suspicion away from her. He takes the lead. She plays along. The back-and-forth volley makes for a playful but tense exchange, while also serving as a pledge of allegiance to each other.

If being a killer becomes a private prison of sorts in The Killer, pretending to be one breaks Gary out of his shell in Hit Man. The thrill of being Ron becomes so intense the performance starts to supplant the person. Gary’s identity grows to fit the mask he wears. In terms of putting on performances, Gary is the inverse of Barry. In the HBO series, Bill Hader’s ex-marine turned contract killer is not a good guy, but convinces himself he can fake it till he makes it. In search of purpose, connection and redemption, he joins an acting class. After four seasons of killing for self-preservation, the show’s greatest triumph was to underline Barry’s moral bankruptcy, instead of giving him an unearned redemption arc. With the rise of the antihero, on-screen hitmen have started to operate more and more in moral grey areas. As the shades grow darker, they are now the stars of black comedies.

Considering his single-minded rigour and obsession to detail, Fassbender’s nameless killer could just as easily be an alter-ego for Fincher himself. The director builds on the blueprint drawn up decades ago by Jean Pierre-Melville in Le Samouraï, the 1967 neo-noir which transformed the hitman into a mythic figure. Alain Delon is Jef Costello, a lone wolf who lives by his own self-serving version of bushido (the code of the samurai). Shortly after he is arrested and released by the Parisian police, his employers decide to get rid of him. From the double-cross plot to its hostile world drained of warmth right down to its taciturn main character’s fedora and trenchcoat, Le Samouraï pays homage to This Gun for Hire (1942), a classic noir featuring Alan Ladd as the steely-eyed hitman Philip Raven.

This Gun for Hire was based on what can be considered the urtext for hitman films: the novel A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene. The English writer cast the hitman as an average worker. “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven. It was just a new job,” he wrote. “He carried an attaché case. He looked like any other youngish man going home after work; his dark overcoat had a clerical air.” In the novel, Raven is commissioned by a British steel company to kill a European government minister to provoke a profitable war. The film relocates the action from London to California; the steel company is replaced by a traitorous chemicals manufacturer looking to sell poison gas to the Japanese, America’s Enemy No. 1 post-Pearl Harbour; a cleft lip that served to physicalize Raven’s moral deformity is changed to a broken wrist so it wouldn’t weaken the potency of Ladd’s sculpted features. The film made Ladd a star and his “angelic killer” a template for on-screen hitmen of the future.

Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal was another formative text. The political thriller fictionalised the tale of a hitman (codenamed the Jackal) hired to do what Jean Bastien-Thiry failed to do in real-life: kill the French president Charles de Gaulle. If This Gun for Hire and Le Samouraï prototyped the hitman as a laconic antihero on a collision course with his personal destiny, The Day of the Jackal prototyped the hitman as a stone-cold and calculating professional. The Jackal is a master of disguises and weapons. For the de Gaulle job, he commissions a gunsmith to build a custom sniper rifle that can be hidden in a set of crutches. That the press dubbed the real-life Venezuelan militant Ilich Ramírez Sánchez as Carlos the Jackal after Forsyth’s creation speaks to the impression he made on the public.

In terms of routine and planning to a T, Fassbender’s Killer takes his cues from the Jackal. In terms of the existential detachment and the isolation the profession demands, he recalls Jef. Being a 21st century gig worker, our McDonalds-loving hitman is also tech-savvy. Popular apps and gadgets take on a sinister undertone given the nature of his work. A Fitbit helps him keep his pulse in check. Google Maps helps him evade those in pursuit. An Amazon Prime subscription’s next-day delivery benefit comes in handy when he orders a key fob copier to break into a target’s penthouse. Airbnb was his app of choice to book rentals during “business trips.” But “not anymore” as “those Superhosts love their nanny cams.” Technology makes his job easier, but also aggravates his feelings of loneliness and displacement. “I’ve actually grown to appreciate proximity work,” he says. “Staged accidents, gradual poisonings. Anything with a little creativity. When was my last nice, quiet drowning?”

The Killer remains nameless. The Jackal’s true identity remains undiscovered. It is their anonymity that allows them to be everyone and no one. In the curious case of John Wick, almost everyone seems to know who he is. As he scurries through moody neonscapes, it doesn’t take long for someone to recognise him. In its shadowy underworld of hitmen, gangsters, arms dealers and homeless spies, Wick is a mythopoeic figure. He is played with such exquisite cool by Keanu Reeves, he has become a yardstick for it in our cultural lexicon. The story begins simple enough: when Russian gangsters invade the home of a grieving widower and kill his beagle puppy (a parting gift from his wife), he goes a vengeful rampage that pulls him back into the life he had given up. With each entry, the franchise zoomed out to map a formalised system of powerful institutions operating above the law, with its own currency, hierarchy, and code of honour. Chief among the labourers in this capitalist enterprise are assassins doomed to protect the very system that has them fight each other to the death. Survival depends on the value they create. Trapped, they have no other option but to adhere to the perverse logic of a winner-takes-all marketplace.

We might not have got John Wick without John Woo, the father of gun fu. A remorseful hitman is elevated to a heroic figure in 1989’s The Killer, a bullet opera that owed as much to Le Samouraï as wuxia and martial arts films. After a shootout accidentally blinds a nightclub singer, hitman Ah Jong (Chow Yun-fat) takes on one final job to pay for her surgery. The paradoxical nature of a killer aspiring to become a saviour abstracts the duality of its setting, Hong Kong, with its East-meets-West heritage and its Chinese-capitalist economy. Dialling down the violence for a meditative inquiry into duty and morality, Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao Hsien took the opposite approach in The Assassin (2015), a revenge story staged in the wuxia tradition with Shu Qi as the eponymous character.

Speaking of on-screen hitwomen, the first to come out with a bang was Nikita. The 1990 French thriller of the same name from Luc Besson told the story of a junkie (played by Anne Parillaud) on death row who is trained to become an operative by a secret government agency. Luke Jennings’s Villanelle novellas (made into the TV series Killing Eve) followed in Nikita’s footsteps. The hitwoman codenamed Villanelle too is rescued from prison and trained as an assassin by a shadowy group. A life of freewheeling crime sets her on a globetrotting journey that puts her at odds with MI5 agent Eve Polastri. Jodie Comer’s stellar turn as Villanelle inspires at once dread and desire, an ambivalence central to the killer allure, same as with Gary’s Ron and Delon’s Jef. Or even Tom Cruise in Michael Mann’s 2004 neo-noir Collateral. Cruise leverages his disarming matinee idol looks to play the ash-haired hitman Vincent whose services are hired by a criminal kingpin (Javier Bardem) to eliminate witnesses in a federal grand jury indicting him the next day. Meaning Vincent must get to his targets over the course of one night. For Jamie Foxx’s helpless cab driver Max Durocher, driving a hitman from one target to another proves to be a nightmare fare.

One of America’s premier chroniclers of the abyss and a keen student of the nature of evil, Cormac McCarthy gave readers a walking-stalking nightmare of death named Anton Chigurh in his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men. Hired to retrieve a cache of drug money, Chigurh wreaks violence wherever he goes. His weapon of choice — a cattle gun — tells us exactly what he thinks of his victims. His hitman philosophy revolves around a coin flip. A self-proclaimed agent of fate, Chigurh distances himself from the horror he unleashes by allowing chance to determine if a victim lives or die. The Coen brothers topped up the nightmare fuel by giving their screen version of Chigurh a bad hairdo. Javier Bardem’s killer bob, dead-eyed stare and chilling smile are enough to send one’s soul into a shivering frenzy. In the process of reinventing the Coens’ landmark 1996 feature Fargo as an anthology series, creator Noah Hawley introduced viewers to two seemingly unstoppable killing machines of the Chigurh mould. Season 1’s Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton) is a hitman who thinks people are either predator or prey. Season 5’s Ole Munch (Sam Spruell) is a centuries-old sin-eater with a silly haircut. Between just the three of them, you have got a hotshot squad of death dispensers. Rest assured, no one is shooting blanks.

It is said you can’t put a price tag on human life. These hitmen beg to differ. Going freelance, for a hitman, bears the same appeal as going freelance does for a journalist: the fantasy if not always the reality of being your own boss, making your own hours, and monetising your skills. It is no surprise that the hitman has emerged as a symbol of disillusionment in this gig economy. His evolution from a psychopath to an antihero has captured our imagination because it has coincided with the rise in existential anxiety of working, in particular freelancing, in a system that offers no security or stability. Leave it to Martin Q Blank to explain the difference. “A psychopath kills for no reason. I kill for money. It’s a job.”

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore