WILD HORSE NINE

 Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. 

Lord Acton 

And this is where Wild Horse Nine becomes more interesting than mere political satire. McDonagh does not simply tell the story of power intervening in history: he tells the story of its ability to convince us that history is still ours. 

We vote. Someone decides. We choose. Someone selects the possibilities from which we can choose. We believe we are participating. Someone, somewhere, is already pulling the strings. 

Democracy thus becomes an extraordinary theatrical performance in which the audience is even allowed to applaud. 

The Chile of 1973 is the concrete ghost haunting the film: Allende’s electoral victory, the operations of destabilisation, the coup. But McDonagh does not make a historical film in the traditional sense. He uses that moment as a distorting lens through which to look at the present. And within that lens also enter Cold War paranoia, the shadow of the intelligence services, theories about the manipulation of world power and that terrible idea according to which the events that change the fate of millions of people are decided by a very small number of men whom nobody has ever elected. 

The question is no longer: who governs? But who really decides? And above all: how much of what we call freedom is merely the freedom to choose among options that have already been laid out for us? 

McDonagh does not answer. He does something more cruel: he makes us laugh. 

John Malkovich constructs Chris as a cynical, ruthless, razor-sharp and completely mad man. He is a professional assassin who seems finally to have reached an existential conclusion: he is terminally ill and therefore decides to go to Rapa Nui so that someone can kill him. 

Naturally, even dying becomes complicated. 

At one point Chris says that, once you have seen one head on Easter Island, they are all the same. Then he admits that he would rather die in Venice, thrown off a gondola. Lee looks at him in shock: he had never told him anything of the sort. And to get to Venice, he explains, it will take five flights. An hilarious scene. 

It is pure McDonagh: even suicide requires international logistical planning. 

And in that sublime stupidity there is something Beckettian. The men wait, talk, insult each other, misremember, forget, plan their own deaths. But the world keeps moving without them. 

Paranoia, then, is practically the only form of rationality left. 

When Chris tells Lee that he does not feel sufficiently paranoid about his own paranoias, his colleague replies: “No, I have established a great balance with my paranoias.” 

Because in a world in which trusting is naïve and not trusting is necessary, paranoia becomes almost a political position. There is no longer any need to know what is true: it is enough to know that almost anything might not be. 

And so the conspiracy becomes a philosophy of existence. 

McDonagh pushes this philosophy to the point of absurdity. His characters seem to live in a universe in which every piece of information could be false, every order could conceal another order, and every truth could simply be whatever someone has decided to let us know. 

It is a Kafkaesque world crossed by Camusian absurdity and Beckettian suspension, with one essential difference: here Godot might actually arrive. Only he would probably be a CIA official. 

The violence of power is not merely the violence of weapons. Above all, it is the violence of being able to decide the fate of others without having to answer for it. The individual, within this system, becomes an administrative detail. 

A country can be destabilised, a government overthrown, a population manipulated; and all of this can happen while the respectable surface of institutions remains intact. That is the most terrible thing: power does not need to appear monstrous. It can present itself wearing a suit, sitting in an office, making a phone call and offering a good reason. 

Wild Horse Nine thus throws the grand sweep of History into a collision with the small existence of its protagonists. 

Chris and Lee are two men who have spent their lives obeying power and who, paradoxically, became friends precisely within that machine. They are companions, accomplices, almost like an old married couple. They insult each other, irritate each other, put up with each other, and know each other to the point where knowing the other means also knowing just how unforgivable he can be. 

Theirs is an friendship that is both possible and impossible at the same time. 

Possible because there is a human loyalty that survives everything. 

Impossible because Lee still belongs to the institution, while Chris is already leaving life itself, but cannot do so by his own hand because an assassin like him is deeply Catholic. 

This is where Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich become indispensable. The former brings an almost unconscious vulnerability to the film; the latter a tired ferocity, a corrosive lucidity. They are two men who seem to know perfectly well that the world is absurd, but have found no way to change it. 

And perhaps this is precisely the film’s most bitter point. There are no signs of change on the horizon. The world goes on. Power goes on. 

History repeats itself, moving from tragedy to farce, with different names, different flags, different technologies. 

The means change; the logic does not necessarily. 

And Rapa Nui thus becomes a gigantic metaphor: the moai stand motionless, watching a world pass before them. They seem like monuments to a civilisation that believed it could control its own destiny and instead disappeared, leaving behind nothing but enormous stone faces. 

McDonagh places them beside two CIA men because the contrast is irresistible: on one side, statues that have stood motionless for centuries; on the other, men convinced that they can govern History. 

In the end, however, they are all spectators. 

And perhaps this is where Wild Horse Nine finds its most political form: in the awareness that the individual can be crushed by power, but can still tell its story, denounce it, ridicule it. 

As in The Banshees of Inisherin, McDonagh once again places his characters in a remote place, almost outside History, in order to speak instead about its most universal dimension: the impossibility of escaping violence, loneliness and the absurdity of human relationships. But if there isolation transformed a broken friendship into a tragedy of incommunicability, in Wild Horse Nine the friendship between Chris and Lee becomes the fragile residue of humanity within a machinery of power that has trained them in suspicion and violence. And as in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, here too individual anger ultimately becomes a form of denunciation against a system that does not answer, does not listen and does not grant justice. Only this time McDonagh expands the target dramatically: from the small American community to the great geopolitical theatre, from private revenge to the manipulation of History. In both cases, the same question remains: what is an individual still capable of doing when power seems to have already decided everything? 

Justice, in the real world, often seems to arrive too late or not at all. Truth can be manipulated, bought, concealed. Politics can turn into economics and economics into politics, while we continue dutifully filling out our ballot paper with the comforting feeling that we have finally decided something. 

McDonagh shows that cinema can inform through satire, laughter, history and art. 

He stages the absurd and calls it by its name: power. 

In this sense, Wild Horse Nine is also a film about the possibility, at least in theory and artistically, of resistance. If power can control politics, economics, information and even the perception of reality, there may still be something it cannot control: the gaze of an artist capable of transforming fear into sarcasm. 

And so laughter becomes a small form of disobedience. 

Perhaps not enough to change the world. 

But enough to remind us that the world, for at least one hour and fifty-eight minutes, can be looked at with enchanted and disenchanted eyes at the same time. 

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. 

George Orwell