Politically Incorrect: The 2016 Magnificent Seven

I've already noticed that the Jason Bourne-Robert Ludlum trilogy of films goes against the Hollywood grain of woke-ing cultural history. Just the other night, I discovered another film of this type, the 2016 Magnificant Seven, which in some ways pays lip service to wokeness, but it reverts to the Western genre, which is older than superhero comics and perhaps less vulnerable to revisionism.

It follows a plot paradigm of the genre, the oppressive rancher who tries to force law-abiding settlers out of their town by hiring thugs to harass them. This is the situation we see addressed in classic films like Shane and historical episodes like the gunfight at the OK Corral. The hero is the man of integrity, bravery, and skill who stands up to bullies but, like George Washington, renounces power once he's done it.

The problm in the film is the nature of the bully. Somewhere in the American character, it's possible to see the government as the bully, and once this Pandora's box is opened, it won't go away. In the 2016 Magnificent Seven, the bullly is Bartholomew Bogue, not just a rancher but a corporate tycoon, who is trying to force the law-abiding citizens out of a town called Rose Creek so he can use the land for gold mining. A twist is that he operates out of Sacramento, the seat of California government, not just a ranch somewhere out of town.

This is a version of the political situation Ferdinand Lundberg outlines, the shadowy alliance bewteen government and private wealth, with private wealth in ultimate control.

The citizens hold a town meeting in the church to determine their course of action. Bogue interrupts the meeting to tell them their only choice is to sell out at a distress price or have their town destroyed. During a fight after the meetiing, Bogue shoots an uppity leader of the citizens, Matthew Cullen. Following this act, reminiscent of the hotheaded Frank "Stonewall" Torrey;s murder in Shane, Bogue and his men burn the church.

The bully clearly aims to destroy the community's basis in faith, as well as its natural rights to free exercise of religion, free speech, and peaceful assembly. With hired mercenaries, he means to impose a form of tyrannical government authority. The image of the burned-out church returns throughout the film. Cullen's widow, Emma, rides off looking for help wherever she can find it.

She finds and recruits Sam Chisholm, an African American US Marshal and bounty hunter, who then assembles a version of the cinematic "bomber crew", a one-of-each collection of varous races, ethnicities, and personal histories that includes an ex-Confederate Cajun, a Baptist, a Mexican, a Chinaman, a mountain man, and a Native American, all of whom are working for a woman.

On one hand, as a remake of the 1960 Magnificent Seven, the eponymous group of which were all white guys, the 2016 cast would seem to stand the first version on its head -- but it doesn't work out that way. When the 2016 group gets to Rose Creek, the sheriff there, clearly a Bogue retainer, informs Chisolm that he and his men must surrender their guns as part of Bogue's new political regime. This clearly is a reference to the desire for law-abiding citizens to retain their second amendment rights, and it leads to a gunfight that drives the sheriff back to Sacramento to report the threat to Bogue.

Bogue recruits a new, larger force of mercenaries whose weapons include a Gatling gun, a clear reference to the Clint Eastwood film The Outlaw Josey Wales. The scenes in which the mercenaries storm the town make truly disturbing references to the 1993 Waco massacre, in which federal agents' assault ended in a congflagration that killed men, women, and children huddled in fear -- in the film, the innocents are evacuated just in time.

The implication is not what Hollywood might mean, that the government is our friend that enforces equal opportunity via affirmative action -- the actual representative group is the one with the multiracial, mutli-ethnic, multi-opinion band of rebels. The enemy is almost exclusively white males (there's a token hireling Native American, and that's about it).

The picture is oddly similar to what we've come to see as Trump voters, the law-abidng townsfolk buttressed by a bomber-crew collection of misfits driven not by money but by a desire to do something good. That they should clearly be acting to defend natural rights outlined in the US First and Second Amendments against a paramilitary group loosely allied with government authority is truly astonishing.

Although the film was released in September 2016, the project must have begun well before Donald Trump was seen as even a long-shot vanity candidate for president. Like the Jason Bourne films, it's addressing something bigger in the audience.

Wikipedia says the 2016 film had mixed reviews. I can imagine. It's hard to figure out what Hollywood had in mind with this film, but it's plain that if you want to make a Western with traditional appeal, the nature of the audience and the nature of the genre won't tolerate much wokeness.