President-elect Obama's selection of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff the other day got me thinking about The Magnificent Seven.
Not about the plot. No cheap comparisons there, please. Cool, quiet, dangerous man in black leads a band of heroes into town to save the peasants from the bandits who have been terrorizing them, that has no relation to...
Um...
Ok. Nevermind.
I really wasn't thinking about the plot. I was thinking about the characters, and not about them as specific individuals in a particular story so much as archetypes in an epic.
Try this.
Barack Obama is to Yul Brynner as Rahm Emanuel is to...?
Time's up.
James Coburn.
If you answered Steve McQueen you need to go back and watch the movie again.
In mythological terms, Brynner's character, Chris Adams---and you can spend all day unpacking the allegorical luggage loaded into that name---is the hero-king, the noble warrior who appears on the scene to defeat the forces of chaos and bring order and justice, and with luck peace, to the people. The hero-king usually appears out of nowhere, at least from the point of view of the people he's come to rescue. He's from somewhere far, far away, like the planet Krypton or Tattooine, or he arises from a background that's humble or otherwise unlikely for a king---Arthur is practically a servant in his foster father's house; Chris is a gunslinger, a hired killer---or he's just been away on another quest or adventure---Robin of Locksley returns from the Crusades to become Robin Hood; Aragorn has been off living among the elves, wandering with wizards, and hunting orcs with the Rangers. Sometimes the hero-king works alone, usually when it's not a whole village or kingdom that needs saving but one damsel in distress who needs rescuing, although rescuing her almost always rescues everybody else in the process. But more often than not, the hero-king arrives with or soon recruits a sidekick...or two...or three. And these sidekicks come in a variety of types.
Before I get going, let me apologize in advance for the preponderance of male pronouns coming up. Epics and their contemporary shadows, action-adventure tales, are very much phallocentric genres in which women, when they appear at all, are relegated to the roles of damsels in distress, mother-figures, sex objects, or witches, either good or bad. Since even when I'll be writing about sidekick types in general terms I'll actually be alluding to specific characters who are male, it would be inaccurate to go the he/she route or even to use the gender neutral plural.
The most common sidekick for the hero-king is the squire. His job is to serve the hero-king and back him up in a fight. He can be literally a servant or he can be an apprentice. In the first case his role is usually comic. Think of Sancho Panza as the prototype. In the second case, his role can be comic or serious, depending, and his role can change. Servants don't become masters, but students do become teachers. Students also reject their teachers. Obi-wan takes over the role of hero from the fallen Qui-gon. Anakin rebels against Obi-wan.
But in addition to a squire the hero-king will often have a lieutenant. The lieutenant is the hero-king's right-hand man. He doesn't take orders from the king as much as he simply anticipates them and carries them out. In a way, the lieutenant is an extension of the king's self. He is that part of the king that commands the army and does the actual fighting. He's there to let us know that even while in the foreground of the story the hero is busy wooing the princess, arguing with the local, lesser kings, mingling with the people to show he has the common touch and their love, dueling the chief villain, or wrestling with his private demons, he's also still in command. The king might look distracted, but we can rest assured that he still has the situation in hand because we know his lieutenant is somewhere there in the background making sure the king's orders and plans are carried out.
For this reason a lieutenant is often more a presence than he is a personality in his own right. Captain Kirk had a lieutenant in the earlier episodes of Star Trek and it wasn't Spock. It was Mr DeSalle. He was essentially a second Kirk and saved the Enterprise on a couple of occasions while Kirk was busy down on some planet wooing an alien maiden or fighting it out with this week's space villains. Eventually, DeSalle disappeared and the role of lieutenant would fall to Spock or Scotty, but the main character who was implicitly the lieutenant was Sulu and that's why it's no surprise in The Undiscovered Country when he turns out to be the one who gets his own command.
Scotty, by the way, was another kind of sidekick. The sergeant. These roles have nothing to do with actual military ranks. Generals and privates can be lieutenants and sergeants. The sergeant is a lieutenant with a personality, usually an irascible one. Sergeants are usually older because their job is to give the hero the benefit of experience the hero is too young or too much of high-born noble to have acquired on his own. Sergeants give advice; lieutenants take orders. When lieutenants argue with the hero, they are providing us with insight as to why the hero is doing what he's doing. The lieutenant gives a good reason why the hero should pursue another course of action and the king refutes it, either demonstrating his superior wisdom or his folly, depending on whether or not the story's a tragedy. The lieutenant's arguments are almost always rejected. The sergeant's advice is almost always followed. Lieutenants may know the whys, but sergeants always know the how. When the king rejects the sergeant's practical advice it's because the sergeant has inadvertently given him a better idea and then it's the sergeant's job to make that better idea work. Kirk routinely dismisses Scotty's doubts, but he is always dependent on Scotty's know-how.
Sergeants have another job as well. They're the voice of the people. Lieutenants are other nobles. They rank below the king in the chain of command, but they are on the same social standing as the king. Sergeants are made of more common stuff. Sergeants are the democratic principle in action. They get to talk back to the king and so remind him who he really works for. Squire-servants sometimes get to do this too.
In the Lord of the Rings movies, Legolas is Aragorn's first lieutenant, Gimli is his second, although he often talks and acts like a sergeant. Sam, of course, is Frodo's squire-servant. In the books, too. In the books, though, Aragorn is a more solitary figure and Legolas and Gimli often seem to be off in a story all their own.
In the Robin Hood tales, Little John's role can change, depending on the teller's inclinations or narrative needs. Sometimes Little John is Robin's chief lieutenant, sometimes he's the sergeant, and sometimes, as in the movie Robin and Marian, he's the squire-servant. In the Errol Flynn movie, Little John is the sergeant. Will Scarlet is Robin's lieutenant. And Much is the squire-servant. In the TV series currently running on BBC, Little John is the lieutenant but he has a sergeant's irascibility and habit of arguing. Much, again, is the squire-servant. Will is the sergeant in that he is chief engineer for the Merry Men and has the practical knowledge Robin lacks and he's the representative of the common men and women of Nottingham, but he has a lieutenant's innate nobility and reticence and he usually follows orders without question; he's also the youngest in the band and sergeants aren't usually younger than the hero-king. Sergeants aren't usually romantic leads either and Will gets the girl in the end. These roles aren't immutable.
Alan A-dale is something else again.
In many of tales of hero-kings and their adventures, the king is accompanied on his quest by another hero. This second hero's presence, if not accidental, is whimsical. The second hero has joined the king's cause but not necessarily because he agrees with the king or even sympathizes with him. The second hero comes along for reasons of his own, which may parallel the king's or may in fact be in opposition to them. He may like the king. He may hate him and actually want to see him fail. He may be there just for kicks. He may be a rival to the hero-king, like Boromir in Lord of the Rings, and, again, like Boromir, whose real mission is to save Gondor not protect Frodo and destroy the ring, it might be that this hero has more intensely personal reasons for signing on. A family member or a lady love who has been imprisoned by the villains. An estate or an inheritance that's been stolen from him. A reputation that needs to be restored. He may be motivated by idealism or by the need for revenge. " Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." He might be motivated by the most basic self-interest. There's money to be made.
Han Solo is basically a hired gun. So is Chris Adams, at the start, as are five of the other six of the Magnificent Seven. All of them, Han, Chris, and the other five are ennobled by their cause and discover other, better reasons for fighting. Come to think of it, so does the last of the Seven. Chico starts out wanting to be a hero to feel like a big man and ends up fighting for love and for the people. But the second hero in many of these adventures is a hired gun or a hired sword in his relationship to the hero-king. The king has to enlist his help with a promise of a reward. That reward might be crassly material or it might be transcendentally spiritual, but without the promise of it the second hero would not be there. He'd go his own way, which is where he was going to begin with and where he will probably continue to go when this adventure is over. He is an independent actor. A free spirit.
He's what I call a free-lance.
And it's not unusual for the free-lance to be more the actual hero of the tale than the hero king.
Agamemnon is far from the hero or even the main character in the Iliad. Achilles, the free-lance, has both those roles. Odysseus, by the way, is a mere lieutenant.
Jack Sparrow is the free-lance, Will is the hero-king in the making, but if the next two sequels were going to star Orlando Bloom instead of Johnny Depp, would anybody go see them?
Launcelot is the free-lance but it's a toss-up as to whether he or Arthur is the main hero of the tales of the Knights of the Round Table.
As a side note: the hero-king can himself be a free-lance, if not by trade or temperament, then by coincidence. It depends on whether or not the kingdom he's saving is own. He may have been called in or wandered in to another country and been prevailed upon to take on the local troubles as though they were his own. When he's done, he will leave, either to continue on the quest that was interrupted by this adventure or to go home to his own kingdom. Chris Adams does not stick around to become mayor of the village. That will be Chico's job when he's older. The hero-king may be free at the end to take his lance elsewhere, while it's the free-lance who winds up staying put to get married and take on the responsibilities of running the place.
This is the trick George Lucas plays on Han Solo.
By the end of Return of the Jedi, it's Han who has taken on the role of hero-king. He's a general in the Rebel Army with all the responsibilities and ties that come with that. All the sidekicks in the saga have gravitated to him. Luke, who had appeared to be the hero-king in the making, has detached himself from the cause of the Rebellion and is on a quest of his own. That in completing it he saves the Rebellion is a happy coincidence. When we last see him, Luke is all alone except for his ghosts. Restoring the Republic, bringing order and peace to the people, the hero-king's supposed task, is a job left to Han and Leia and their children.
Meanwhile, in the Star Trek universe. Kirk has the role of the hero-king, although he's only a king if you count the Enterprise as his kingdom. Within the Federation, he's very much a free-lance. But in his role as hero-king he is assisted by his sergeant, Scotty, a lieutenant who's invisible after the first few episodes and another, Sulu, who unfortunately wasn't given much of lieutenanting to do by the writers of the original series, and by Uhura, who is more or less a squire, sometimes a servant and sometimes something of an apprenctice.
Then there are the two free-lances.
Spock and McCoy.
Spock's commitment to Star Fleet is idiosyncratic and incomplete. McCoy doesn't consider himself a military man at all. Both are more loyal to Kirk than they are to "the cause," assuming that cause is the advancement of the interests of the Federation. But both are there for reasons of their own that don't necessarily coincide with Kirk's.
So, to get back to The Magnificent Seven, Steve McQueen's character, Vin, is the free-lance. Of course, as I mentioned, Chris and all the others except Chico are free-lances by profession too. But once the cause is joined, Chris is committed, and it's Coburn's character, Britt, who best and in the most useful ways subordinates himself to Chris, while Vin remains the most independent. If you look at the way the men are grouped in many of the shots, McQueen is often off by himself, occupying his own dominant spot of the screen, while Coburn is placed closer to Brynner but a few steps behind him, exactly where a good lieutenant belongs. Although Charles Bronson's character, Bernardo O'Reilly, finally surrenders himself heart and soul to the villagers' cause, we're given very good reasons to doubt that he and two of the other seven will stick it out to the end, and Vin's hanging around is always an open question. We're pretty sure he'll come through, and not just because he's played by Steve McQueen. The free-lance is a hero, after all. But we can always see that Vin's leaving his options open. Britt, though, never wavers, never openly questions Chris.
That's why it's: Barack Obama is to Chris Adams as I hope Rahm Emanuel will be to Britt.
I also hope that, metaphorically speaking, Emanuel's just as deadly with a knife.
_______________________
Again, I'm sorry about all the male pronouns. Times are changing though. Eventually there will be more stories where the hero-king is a woman, where grizzled old sergeants can be either male or female (or both or neither or whatever they want to be. See Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett), and where all these terms are gender-neutral. For example, on Stargate: SG-1. O'Neill and then Mitchell are the hero-kings. Teal'c is the lieutenant. Daniel is the free-lance. And Carter is the sergeant. She's the one with the practical experience, and the one with the freedom to actually question O'Neill's and Mitchell's judgments to the point that they have to doubt themselves. Teal'c will respectfully disagree, and occasionally disobey. Daniel is always arguing. But when Carter says something won't work, it won't work, and when she tells her commanding officers they're wrong, they usually are.
God be thanked for the infinitude of movie templates! Back around 2002 I recall musing about Godfather parallels with the Hussein family of Baghdad, & how Uday resembled Sonny and Qusay Michael.
Posted by: rmhitchens | Friday, November 07, 2008 at 03:16 PM
About King Arthur. In the original Welsh legends Arthur was mobile and had a lieutenant, Sir Kay. Keep in mind he gets the sword and deals with Uther Pendragon. Later, when the legend was modified to conform to the courtly love/chivalry model of the French, Arthur was stuck in Camelot and Sir Kay emasculated in the role of seneschal, keeper of the court. The adventures at that point were partitioned out to Lancelot (a good French name) and others. Monty Python had the good sense to re-unite the lads and king in their adventures.
Mallory's Le Mort D'Arthur is very much the chivilrous version of Arthur. The Welsh Mabinogion less so.
Posted by: Mudge | Monday, November 10, 2008 at 07:07 AM
Yet another place where the new Battlestar Galactica shines is how gender neutral all these roles are, off hand I'd say there are as many women as men in all the major archtypes.
Posted by: Eric k | Monday, November 10, 2008 at 02:06 PM
Hmm... in _True Grit_ Glen Campbell is a free-lance, but how do you classify John Wayne and Kim Darby?
Posted by: Dave MB | Monday, November 10, 2008 at 02:19 PM
I think you're misreading Chris. Chris is the zen warrior as is Legolas--the man who lives for honor and to perfect his skills. He is devoid of pride or ambition; his goal is spiritual.
Rahm Emmanuel is no zen warrior. He's more an Iago than he is a Chris; useful, even invaluable for his guile. But watch him carefully.
Posted by: Dave Schuler | Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 10:03 PM
OK, you need to re-write this, for those of us who know Seven Samurai by heart (I think, perhaps, that I saw Magnificient Seven once when I was a kind but don't remember).
Posted by: Coturnix | Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 12:19 AM