Topic and Intro

Topic:
Essayist Wendy Doniger suggests in “Many masks, many selves” that people impersonate others, hoping to change themselves, but they ultimately fail and revert back to their normal self. Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film Seven Samurai challenges this claim by suggesting that impersonators can change permanently through its portrayal of one of the main protagonists’ transformation.

Introduction:
In Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film Seven Samurai, one of the main protagonists, a son of a farmer named Kikuchiyo pretends that he is from a noble class of samurai. Despite his humble origins, Kikuchiyo bears an oversized katana and an air of bravado to make others think that he is a samurai. The other six samurai hired to protect a village from bandits view him as nothing more than a wannabe. In fact, when one of the samurai, Heihachi, creates a war banner for the group, he draws six circles to represent the samurai, and a triangle for ‘Lord Kikuchiyo.’ Despite being the odd one out, Kikuchiyo manages to prove himself worthy of the title samurai by the end of the film. One of the main points of the movie is that we can choose who we want to be; external factors such as society and class shouldn’t rigidly confine us to a default persona. However, Wendy Doniger takes a different view in her essay “Many masks, many selves.” She believes that people impersonating others out of a desire to change themselves will ultimately fail. Seven Samurai rejects Doniger’s stance on change and declares that we are not hopelessly trapped inside our self.