By Will Ross
When responding to a remake, it’s tempting to judge it on a binary comparative: is it better, worse, or as good as its source? While I’d never try to dissuade someone from thinking of, say, Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla remake as abominable, it’s not exactly instructive to stop there. Even disappointing remakes can reveal major ideological shifts or differences across times and cultures.
Take, for instance, Akira Kurosawa’s classic jidaigeki (period drama), Seven Samurai (1954), and its American western remake counterpart, The Magnificent Seven (1960). The plot is easy to adapt: A starving village of farmers is about to be raided by bandits, and the villagers hire seven samurai/cowboys to protect themselves. As they plan their defense, the tension between the farmers and their protectors rises. The seventh member of the ronin/gunslingers further complicates things: he was once a farmer himself and now loathes and resents his former ilk for their weakness. His fellow warriors regard him as an outsider. The films end with the bandits defeated and four of the hired swords/guns dead. Their leader remarks, “Only the farmers won. We will always lose.”
Both films are studies in class divisions. In Samurai, the warrior class — ronin and bandits — are society’s wandering, entrepreneurial opportunists, and the farmers are oppressed workers driven to dishonesty and murder by the warrior class’s greed. Magnificent adds a racial component by casting both the villagers and the bandits who terrorize them as Mexicans and the cowboys as white — save for the ‘outsider’ cowboy, Chico, who is Mexican. Consequently, Samurai’s focus is economic discord and Magnificent’s is ethnic.
One of the only significantly differing plot points between the films comes when the Mexican villagers help the bandits to drive out the seven cowboys. Whereas the farmers in Samurai always acknowledge the ronin as a necessary evil until the final siege by bandits, in the American version they banish their defenders, recognizing that the threat of violence has only increased. At Samurai’s end, Kurosawa’s ronin sacrifice themselves to rescue the oppressed villagers from devastation; in the final battle of Magnificent, it is the ‘protectors’ who invade the village, imposing their moral judgment on the farmers. Before the battle of the western version has ended, the dying bandit leader surveys the carnage on both sides and asks Chris, the cowboy leader, why he would come back. Chris cannot think of an answer. The real marauders of The Magnificent Seven are the cowboys.
When Samurai ends, the outsider has been killed, and a young survivor ronin is rejected by a farmer girl with whom he has fallen in love. The class lines cannot be crossed. The farmers retain their lands and families while, for their compassion for the feudal proletariat, the ronin pay with graves and partake in nothing. Magnificent combines the ‘outsider’ and ‘young lover’ into Chico; he survives and chooses to return to his life as a farmer with the girl of his affections, a conclusion often seen as a typical Hollywood-happy-ending cop out. That’s only the case if you consider the complete division of race that accompanies it to be a ‘happy’ outcome: neither the Mexican villagers nor the European cowboys can reconcile their cultures. Inevitably, they must retreat from one another.
Wear the shoes of a farmer, or cowboy, or ronin, and ask yourself: in our climate of wealth disparity and the multiculturalism that comes with immigration, exactly whose economic cultural interests does one protect? Can economic hardship be stopped by the sacrifice of one’s own interests? Or one culture’s values respected without undoing another’s? Who is responsible to whom? Can we live not next to, but among each other?
