Barry (2018–2023) is a television series that follows the trials and tribulations of its titular character, a professional killer. Its popular and critical success shows how the series engages with pressing issues such as war trauma and the media-driven manipulation of reality. Yet, among the many elements that drew audiences in, the fascination with professional killers, hired guns, and assassins—the very premise that buoyed the show’s popularity—may have been too easily taken for granted. What underlies this cultural infatuation with characters defined by heartless killing?
Cinematic history offers a wide range of killer figures, from accidental killers who take lives for incidental reasons to professionals who kill as an occupation. Traditionally, when such figures appear on screen, their actions are evaluated against prevailing moral standards, rendering their killings reproachable, comprehensible, acceptable, or even beneficial to a greater good. In Yojimbo (1961), for instance—referenced in Barry by a police officer describing gangland rivalry—a wandering ronin saves a village by playing two rival gangs against each other before eliminating them through sheer force.
This form of killing, framed as serving a communal good, lies in sharp contrast to portrayals such as Silver Samurai in The Wolverine (2013), a professional criminal devoid of any ethical compass. Against this tradition of killers defined by their moral orientation, Barry resists categorization. The series shifts attention away from ethical evaluation toward the rules and terms of engagement that structure the assassin’s world. Rather than depicting a heartless, psychopathic serial killer, Barry presents the story of a man for whom killing functions as a job, stripped of moral justification but deeply embedded in codes of practice.
Within the series, the killer’s world is defined less by abstract morality than by pragmatic codes of conduct. Barry’s handler Fuches, for instance, treats assassination as a business governed by efficiency, loyalty, and profit. The Chechen gang, led by NoHo Hank, operates through a mixture of bureaucratic order and absurd camaraderie, revealing how violence is normalized within organizational structures. Even Barry himself approaches killing with the detachment of routine labor, often attempting to compartmentalize it from his personal aspirations as an actor. What emerges is a world in which murder is not framed as evil or redemptive, but as a form of work embedded within networks of rules, hierarchies, and transactions. The tension in Barry arises not from questions of whether killing is justified, but from the friction between this pragmatic order of assassination and Barry’s search for a different life through performance, art, and emotional connection.
A Killer’s Shopping Mall – A New Cultural Logic
The emergence of Barry coincides with a broader cultural interest in narratives that foreground the assassin’s world as a structured environment rather than a backdrop for individual morality. The John Wick franchise (2014–) constructs a meticulously detailed universe of assassins governed by rituals, currencies, and institutions, while David Fincher’s The Killer (2023), starring Michael Fassbender, emphasizes the solitary discipline and procedural routines of a contract killer. These works, alongside Barry, reflect a shift away from earlier depictions of killers as isolated figures of good or evil, and toward an exploration of the systems, rules, and infrastructures that organize their lives. Such representations resonate with the contemporary global order, where networks of corporations and financial flows operate across borders with little regard for the traditional mechanisms of nation-states or other regulatory systems. By concentrating on the minutiae of codes, transactions, and procedures rather than on overarching moral or political narratives, these works capture a new cultural logic: one in which attention is absorbed by the details of survival within opaque systems, while the larger structures that shape them recede from view.
A Killer’s Shopping Mall (2023) offers a striking example of this detail-oriented cultural logic. The film reimagines the assassin’s world through the infrastructure of digital commerce, where life and death are mediated by interfaces, inventories, and logistical flows. In this world, assassination operates much like online shopping: transactions are itemized, progress is tracked, and results are delivered with seamless efficiency. Yet, as with digital marketplaces more broadly, the visibility of minute operations obscures the larger structures that enable them—the global circuits of labor, capital, and exploitation that remain hidden from view. By aligning killing with the mechanisms of e-commerce, the film makes explicit how contemporary culture privileges attention to operational detail while allowing systemic forces to recede into the background.
How to Handle the New World Order
Taken together, Barry and A Killer’s Shopping Mall illuminate how contemporary screen culture reimagines the assassin’s world as a space structured less by morality than by the codes, transactions, and procedures of survival. Whether through Barry’s negotiation of acting and killing as parallel forms of labor, or through the drama’s fusion of assassination with digital commerce, both works highlight a cultural logic that privileges detail, efficiency, and adaptability within opaque systems. The erosion of traditional borders—geographical, political, and even moral—under the pressures of digital capitalism suggests the emergence of a new world order in which individuals are left to navigate survival on their own terms. What is urgently needed, however, is a recognition that these struggles are not merely isolated or individual but shared, and that the effort to see ourselves as situated together within the same condition may open possibilities for collective reflection and response.
Assassins go digital: A Killer’s Shopping Mall turns life-and-death work into a bizarrely efficient online marketplace.
But not everyone is persuaded by this line of analysis. Enter Horace Quibble, our ever-sceptical AI-powered critic, who delights in puncturing the pretensions of such theorizing:
Eliot, your earnest talk about Barry and A Killer’s Shopping Mall, with their “codes,” “transactions,” and digital-commerce metaphors, is the cinematic equivalent of wearing a monocle to watch cartoons. Take, for instance, NoHo Hank’s triumphant announcement that he’s “the happiest gangster alive” while casually negotiating a murder-for-hire deal—any claim that this is a glimpse into the invisible mechanisms of late capitalism collapses under the sheer absurdity of the moment. The series is a dark comedy, a farce, not a treatise on procedural survival within global networks. To interpret assassins as avatars of systemic logic, or to insist that audiences are now trained to admire the minutiae of operational detail over the “big picture,” is to mistake comic invention for sociological insight. These films are meticulously staged entertainments, not ethnographies of digital-age labor. They thrive on spectacle, irony, and human absurdity,
not on the revelation of some hidden, orderly world.