Magnificent Seven
There are two kinds of people in the world
universe of Magnificent Seven. There are breeders (the
townspeople) and there are livers (those like the seven). The breeders
don't quite exist for themselves but are valuable as part of a
continuum. The reason they are to be protected isn't because there is
value to each of their individual lives -- nothing about them
is intrinsically worth exploring: there is nothing but the mundane in
all their "art" of making and selling -- but more because somehow
there's a sense that if their flow is squelched, if one generation of them
becomes barren, the human line dies, and it'd be a failed cowboy who saw the
herd about him go to waste. So if you're not a breeder but rather a liver,
someone who you don't look at and see their parents nor any potential children,
but rather someone who lives large on their own within his/her own time, it's
important to keep the herd intact. You have the pleasure as you go about life
in a loose and uninhibited way of knowing also that you're guardians of
something in sum quite epic: the long swath of time and the miracle of constant
cellular rebirth of Life. It's a bit like knowing you're not just one equal to
the rolling hills, sunsets, and great stakes of trees, but the genesis in the
torrenting rivers as well. How do you like them apples.
Cognitively, then, we sense that the difference
between the villain and the heroes in this film is that the villain has erred
in misconstruing lesser people who nevertheless constitute the human background
for heroes to lean on when they will -- and definitely to effortlessly shine
amongst! -- for worthless miscreants to be wiped off the earth. Admit it,
he declares, we're better off with just plain dirt. We should see through
you as you clutch desperately to your kids (each and every one
of you, always clutching your quaking, quivering kids!), cleverly trying to
intimate that your slaughter would breach some kind of cosmically mandated
decorum and/or a loss of a metaphysically necessary category, and thus be both
daring the gods and risking a complete loss of psychic equilibrium. Nonsense!
You're parasites skilled only at poisoning the minds of hosts into thinking
they're necessary! They are not so much opposite to one another, as
rather that one has simply portioned even less worth to a category of people
the other still holds low as well.
One side would kill them all willy-nilly if they
don't take up the measly few dollars offered them for their property. The other
would poke fun at them, with their inclination to hide and their measly
ability to defend themselves, but hold back at hinting that they might be in
fact be worthless. In this film, the villain stakes out turf the
heroes' attitudes do beckon at: maybe we should take a try at not
caring for these people at all and simply defend their lives for the delight of
constant effective responsiveness in a volatile and dangerous apocalyptic
shootout. The emergence of the gatling gun at the end, not cause for
dismay, even as it would mow down most of the remaining townspeople and
leave the barest speck of human crop -- and ostensibly a mute point to their
whole effort: with only a few of them left, they'd surely have been better off
all moving elsewhere -- but for jubilation, as it'll gift an avenue for a great
poetic finish for one of the seven.
For
perhaps if one of the Valkyrie angels sees your brave finish and
lifts you up to be a hero in an afterlife realm... if another proud vista
before you opens up, what matters if the one behind gone dirt?
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