Architectures of violence: the fight scenes of Hollywood’s luxury hotels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The hotel is a key setting for Hollywood’s fight sequences, which we argue are always determined, framed, and understood through spatial orientation and architectural setting. Offering both private and public spaces, the upscale hotel offers a compendium of the contemporary action film’s fight scenes in one locale. Foregrounding a compelling fantasy of extravagance and mobility, the luxury hotel fight is foundational to the resilience of action heroes such as John Wick or James Bond. John Wick is unimaginable without the fictional assassin hotel, the Continental. But the action hotel fight is not singular. For instance, the hotel room fight scene in Haywire plays with the erotic secrecy of the clandestine hotel room meeting, whereas the expansive lobby in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum becomes a multi-participant battlefield. We argue that the hotel fight is a notable, specific, and underexamined space in action cinema with a particular relation to kinetics, propulsion, and violent action anchored to concepts of luxury, erotics, and precarious service economies. Considering the concepts of luxury and class that shape both the service economies and the erotic charge of luxury hotels, we look at the fights that map and are mapped by these spaces. We consider the hotel fights in luxury hotels that play with liminal public/private spatiality to articulate the architecture of violent action. We focus throughout on John Wick’s Continental Hotel, but also draw on other key contemporary Hollywood action films and franchises that foreground luxury hotels as a character, setting, and choreographic element.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".