Whiteness on the Border by Lee Bebout

Author:Lee Bebout
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004050 Literary Criticism / American / Hispanic American
Publisher: NYU Press

White Benevolence and American Messianism in The Magnificent Seven

Even as the white saviorism of Giant and the Macario García case was inflected with nationalist impulses in the militaristic framing of the diner scene and the debate surrounding anti-Mexican discrimination and American ideals, white saviorism takes other nationalist forms as well. Consider the long-standing cinematic and political trope of (white) Americans intervening on behalf of oppressed communities abroad. For example, Clint Eastwood’s unnamed stranger in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) single-handedly liberates a Mexican town from rival gangs: one consisting of Mexicans and one of white Americans. Such a narrative takes the white saviorism epitomized in Giant and turns it outward, beyond the U.S. borders, and transforms it into a global posture. It is through such a maneuver that white saviorism intersects with and reinforces the impulses of U.S. interventionism. One of the most famous incarnations of this trope is John Sturges’s 1960 The Magnificent Seven.

Set in 1880s Mexico, The Magnificent Seven is a story of a Mexican farming village that lives under the threat of a bandit named Calvera and his forty men. As the film opens, the bandits rob the town, and the villagers of Ixcatlan debate what they should do. The village elder tells them to fight, go to the border where guns are “plentiful,” and purchase the weapons needed to drive off Calvera and his men. When three villagers travel across the border to the United States, they meet Chris (Yul Brynner), who convinces them it would be cheaper and smarter to hire gunmen. As they agree, Chris assembles a premier team of gunslingers to rid the town of the lawless bandits. The heroes travel to Mexico, arm and train the townsfolk, fight Calvera and his men, are betrayed by the villager Zotero, defeat the bandits, and importantly transform the village by giving the farmers the courage to fight for themselves.

This iconic Western is a revision of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Seven Samurai. The Magnificent Seven shares many elements of Kurosawa’s original where a village of Japanese farmers face starvation at the hands of a band of forty marauding bandits. The villagers’ only recourse is to hire a group of samurai to defend them. The Magnificent Seven’s shift from samurai to predominantly white U.S. gunfighters does more than transform a film about medieval Japan into a popular Western. This maneuver fundamentally alters the tale by overlaying a national-racial system of meaning onto a story that originally interrogated social caste. That is, the Western repositions the narrative in a different discursive context wherein a tale of courage and honor accrues racialized and nationalist dimensions as the mostly white embodiments of U.S. masculinity intervene abroad to allegedly ensure safety and spread freedom.

Here the dynamics of whiteness and U.S. nationalism converge again. As Steve Martinot has argued, white supremacy and American exceptionalism share a common cultural structure—both are charged with virtue and impunity. Together these attributes form the basis for the messianism that underwrites discriminatory treatment at home and imperialist actions abroad.

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