The narrative of the threatened village reminds me of the classic Akira Kurosawa film The Seven Samurai, possibly the most influential action movie ever made. Of course George Lucas based Star Wars on another Kurosawa film, The Hidden Fortress. I have watched The Seven Samurai many times, and have used it to teach in high school because it is so great in so many ways. The story is of a farming village regularly attacked by bandits, who hires a group of masterless Samurai to destroy the threat once and for all. First of all, the hired samurai are not the heroes. They are each undertaking this mission that ends up being fatal to most of them for their own unique individual reasons, but none of them have the best interests of the villagers at heart since they are not one of them. They are mercenaries plain and simple, warriors making war since that’s what they do, or at least aspire to do.

So who is the hero of the story since there definitely is one? It’s one of the villagers named Rikichi, a mere supporting character in the movie, who insists that the village hire the fighters when everyone else waffles. He goes to town to search for them, hires them despite many difficulties, and then returns to the village with the seven warriors. Through the villagers’ training for the fight with the 40 bandits he is steadfast in supporting the samurai’s methods, and when the fighting starts he is a savage and relentless fighter. When the samurai launch a pre-emptive attack on the bandit’s fortified hideout, we see why Rikichi is so driven to defeat the bandits. It is not because he cares about the village or the other villagers. We see that Rikichi’s wife has been kidnapped and turned into a sex slave by the bandits, and during the attack on the hideout she kills herself out of shame rather than face her husband. One of the samurai is also senselessly killed while stopping Rikichi from joining her in death. Yes, Rikichi is the hero of the film, but what drives him is not altruism or fellowship but personal vengeance. At the end of the film it is Rikichi who stands above the other villagers cheerfully banging the drum that directs the others to work in the rice paddies, because he has won since the bandits that stole his wife are all dead, and of course the other farmers benefit from that.

We need to examine why individual heroes do what they do. More often than not, it is completely out of self interest.