#i cannot understand why people who refuse to be challenged or made uncomfortable view horror. why are you here

[doritofalls]

"if you hate women you'll love this movie" is genuinely the worst take about wolf creek I ever heard honestly chewing on glass in real life

[honourablejester]

Nathan: Dignity! You know, it takes a bold man to talk about dignity when he tryin’ to sell women off like they cattle.

Ezra: I’ll ignore that.

Nathan: Yeah, you better do that. How else you gonna get some sleep tonight?

Ezra *flatly*: Anything else?

Nathan: About making profit off the back of another human being? Hell yeah, I got a lot to say, but—It just be wasted on you.

--- Magnificent Seven, Ep 1x03, “Working Girls”

Watching a couple of episodes of Magnificent Seven (1998) again, and I’m remembering why the relationship between these two is probably the single most painful and heart-warming and fascinating on the show. Nathan Jackson and Ezra Standish are one of the most perfect examples of a pair of characters who have either no frame of reference for each other or else a completely wrong one. Or, well, an action-correct but motivation-wrong one. Hence why they keep tearing strips off each other for the whole show, though they soften some later. And this conversation here, very early on, is an excellent illustration as to why.

So the plot of this episode is that the Seven have helped liberate a group of prostitutes from an abusive camp and have to keep them safe over the course of the episode. This involves a lot of people (notably Mary Travis) facing a lot of fairly uncomfortable truths about the darker side of their society and how easy it is to slip up and wind up in a hell. And Ezra is definitely one of those too.

Ezra’s little subplot for the episode is that he decides he’s going to help some of these women win better lives by setting them up in a mail-order bride scheme, run by him, for naturally a small fee. When they react with natural scepticism, wondering how exactly that’s different from being a whore aside from not getting paid for it, he clarifies that he’ll set them up only with wealthy, gentlemanly men, screened by him. Leaving aside their suspicions on this, one of them asks what men like that would want with women like them, and Ezra responds that what the men don’t know won’t hurt them, and he can show them how to act like ‘ladies’. He then spends the rest of the episode trying (with Buck’s help and Josiah’s disdain) to do exactly this via an impromptu ‘charm school’. The above conversation happens when Nathan walks in on the middle of this.

Now. Leaving Nathan’s own background completely aside for a minute, you cannot for one second blame him for coming to this conclusion. Ezra straight-up called it a mail-order bride scam. He is … I mean, he kind of is selling them, he’s just doing so with their cooperation and, in his head, for the purposes of victimising the men, not the women. But he is selling them. He’s getting a cut from arranging marriages for them. That’s only a bit of semantics away from selling them. Add in Nathan’s background as a straight-up slave, and it is plainly obvious and completely understandable why this rubs him savagely the wrong way.

But the thing is, from Ezra’s point of view … the accusation baffles and deeply offends him. Like, really hurts and offends him. You can see it in his face and his stiff, flat tone. If Nathan had slapped him full across the face he could have gotten exactly the same effect. And some of that … Some of that is a lack of self-awareness on Ezra’s part. Some of it is that he’s never looked at things like this from someone like Nathan’s point of view, and there are times when he really, really should.

But it’s also a degree of Nathan missing things. Because in Ezra’s head he genuinely is not selling them. He is not setting them up to be victims. In Ezra’s head he’s setting them up to make their husbands victims. He’s teaching them a con. And, extremely specifically, as we find out later when we meet her, he’s teaching them Maude’s con. He’s teaching them how to act the part of a southern lady and disguise their socially inferior background long enough to string some rich man along and take him for all he’s got.

He’s trying to teach them how to act like his mother, in short. And he’s trying to teach them a lot of what Maude taught him. Failing to realise, maybe, that many of these women are not Maude Standish and may not be able to do what she does serially. Failing to realise that for a lot of women, marriage is exactly as close to slavery as Nathan makes it sound. Failing to realise that he might, in fact, be setting them up as badly as Nathan thinks he is.

I think to a large extent it just didn’t occur to Ezra … I don’t think he’s ever, a day in his life, thought of his mother as a potential victim. In his head, Maude is always the predator. Sure, cons go badly, and marks turn violent, and he probably knows full well that Maude’s probably gotten out of things by the skin of her teeth before, but in his head … that’s just their line of work? If you can’t scam them properly, then you deserve what you get. Nobody’s going to help you, so you better be able to get in and get out by yourself, and with whatever you came for clutched in your fist. I would lay odds that Maude taught him exactly this way himself. Taught him how to playact like his ‘betters’ in order to get close enough to swindle them.

Which probably has some impact on other aspects of his interactions with Nathan. Because the part Maude taught Ezra to play is the part of the Southern Gentleman. And Ezra absorbed a lot of that, with all the incidental horrors it entailed. You act the part, regardless of your true goals or opinions. You act like the people you want to fit in with.

And some of them might even have been Ezra’s own opinions. Their first meeting, when Ezra refuses to ride with the Seven because Nathan’s already there. That could have been genuine racism on Ezra’s part. Casual, not entrenched, because he’s a pragmatic man and he gets over it fairly quick once they start working together and he realises Nathan has his back no matter how much of a dickhead he is. But still. It could easily have been something he absorbed over years of playing this part, and until Nathan challenged it might have been a genuine part of his outlook.

(It could also have been a degree of pragmatism, in that he figured that Nathan as a black man and likely an ex-slave would be the sort to take personal offense to him should dynamics in the group go south, making him potentially a threat with a grudge when Ezra inevitably had to part ways from the goody-two-shoes. So, less conscious racism and more racially-profiled survivalism, but still)

(Or it could have been an excuse, a reason not to ride out suicidally with these morons for bugger-all money, and using racism and his old role as an excuse to get out of it – bit of a risky gambit though, considering he was already neck-deep in trouble as it stood)

The thing we see a lot in their interactions is that Nathan, while he warms up to Ezra slowly and cautiously and recognises him for a genuinely brave and semi-decent man, constantly struggles with two separate images Ezra presents to the world, both of which are triggering for Nathan, and neither of which is actually who Ezra is and wants to be.

The first is the role he learned for cons, the stereotypical Southern Gentleman, which grates on Nathan for obvious reasons and which tends to … the couple of times he’s genuinely flown off the handle at Ezra (here and in S2’s “Chinatown”), it’s been in circumstances where this image is combined with circumstances in which people are (potentially) being sold. Ezra just straight-up triggers everything about Nathan’s past in those circumstances, and he just struggles to see the present not the past. Entirely understandably, for all it hurts Ezra, and for all it isn’t all that true to who Ezra is, a love of erudition and fine furnishings aside.

But the other image Ezra presents, the one that is actually more true to him, at least in terms of upbringing and the frame of reference Ezra himself was raised with, is that of the conman and thief. And that is just as bad to Nathan. Just another means for a white man to take away from honest people, making his living off the backs of other people and not caring about what happens to them in the process. And he … isn’t entirely wrong. On this one, he has a lot of good points. Ezra was raised with a baseline predatory mindset, and he doesn’t always realise it. A lot of things he grew up thinking are perfectly fine and normal … aren’t. Here, Nathan often has, if not the moral high ground, at the very least some pretty good points.

But the thing is … the reason Ezra struggles so much with Maude is that Ezra is also bad at this mindset. It’s the thing he was raised to view as correct, the thing he was raised to aspire to, and he’s just bad at it. As he proved in the pilot when his conscience drove him back. He has some things that he genuinely doesn’t realise are bad, but also others that he knows full well and has to force himself to go through with. And the reason Maude is so against Ezra settling down with these people is that she knows it’s pushing him to make what she views as stupid choices, stupid risks. Things she genuinely thinks will cause him to come to harm (not without reason, although her methods of ‘helping him’ are arguably so much worse). Nathan is causing Ezra to be more honest and honourable, though Nathan doesn’t exactly realise that himself. Mostly because Nathan doesn’t realise what starting position Ezra is coming from in this regard, and admittedly doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for Ezra’s struggle in not being who he was raised to be. Nathan has no frame of reference for Maude, not until he falls afoul of her himself, and that’s not until much later, and she snows him completely for quite a large portion of it.

And on the other end, Ezra just … flat has no frame of reference for Nathan. He has never in his life been made to look at things the way Nathan looks at things. He’s constantly surprised and hurt and offended by how Nathan views his actions. Ezra, for all his bad luck and tendency to wind up in over his head, has never been brutalised the way Nathan has been, and has never realised just how vulnerable other people can be to brutalisation. It doesn’t occur to him that he might be lining up these women to be trapped, or if it does it isn’t something he thinks long on, because he looks at them like he looks at Maude, and Maude is never trapped. If you think you have control of her, it’s because you fell for the scam. But not every woman is Maude.

(And, quite possibly, Maude wasn’t always Maude. She had to start somewhere. Does she worry so much about him becoming an ‘honest’ victim because she’s looking at it from a predator’s point of view, or from ex-prey?)

Ezra looks at people like opponents. It’s the way he was raised. Everyone is out for themselves, and if you can’t take what you need, you’re going to get taken. He doesn’t want to look at them that way. He’s a closet romantic and wants to believe in honour the way the Seven sell it, but there’s always a part of him that cannot fully trust that (also a part of him that prefers the simplicity and comfort of want-take). Everyone you meet could be scamming you. Nobody is ever as innocent or helpless as they appear. The world is full of predators pretending to be prey the better to get close to people. It blinds him to how many ‘prey’ there actually are, and maybe gives him a bit of an opinion that even they partially deserve it? If you can’t get yourself out, maybe you don’t deserve to.

And for Nathan, if you have power and you don’t use it to help people, you’re using it to hurt people. Because that’s what he was raised witnessing. If you have the appearance of power, you have actual power. If you act like a good person, you are one. Actions speak louder than words, the proof is in the pudding. What you do is what matters, not why you do it. Lying, stealing, swindling, is baffling to him, and taking what honest people earn flies too close to what he spent his life enduring, blood, sweat and lives spent entirely for someone else. I think he honestly doesn’t understand why Ezra, who he knows can be an incredibly brave and decent man, doesn’t just commit to that all the time. And sometimes the things Ezra does, often in all innocence or at least a complete lack of understanding, just push him too far.

But they work at it. They get closer to each other. Ezra gradually becomes a more honest and trusting man. Nathan, aside from those times when he’s triggered too strongly to be rational, tries to be a bit gentler with him about it. They develop a respect and friendship for each other. They learn from each other. They make some incredible mistakes when it comes to each other, but they both realise that they’re not actually trying to hurt each other. Or anyone else, mostly, though their definitions of ‘hurt’ tend to vary a bit there. They’re just … easily the most fascinating relationship on the show, if often also one of the most painful.

Anywho. Thus endeth a random trip down memory-lane to an old fandom.