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The Magnificent Seven


 
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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