Se7en (1995)
Se7en
(1995)
Much of this essay is praise, I don’t deny
the power of Director David
Fincher’s filmmaking, but the first time I saw
this movie, recognizing the potency of the telling didn’t make me dislike it
any less. I’m a fan of dark films, but I found something off-putting in this
one’s self-indulgence. When I thought of the darkest cinema that entranced me,
for example “Les Diaboliques” (1955) or “The Vanishing” (1988), I saw cleverly-constructed
misanthropic cinema had something to say about the human condition, while
“Se7en” only used its cleverness to disguise the emptiness of its vessel
“Se7evn” seemed (and still seems) all
condiment and no meat, and perhaps I tolerate that in an old MGM musical with
bright colors and smiling faces, but not in a film that suggests that our existence
no more than a sentence to hell and that even in death there is no reprieve
from how demeaning it all is.
My opinion of the movie has softened
over time, it is a remarkably well-made thriller with great set-pieces and
stellar performances, but those first negative opinions still stick with me.
It’s a shallow entertainment that preaches the gospel of nihilism, maybe
there’s something wrong with me that that doesn’t bother me so much anymore.
It's set in an unnamed city, filmed in
Los Angeles, looks like New York, and quite-consciously evoking the hyper-chiaroscuro
of Basin City, the fictional setting of Frank Miller’s “Sin City” comics (first
published in 1991). It follows two detectives, William Somerset (Morgan
Freeman) and David Mills (Brad
Pitt) hunting a Serial Killer who
progressively proves to be among most contrived creations in the history of
cinema.
And they do it in the rain, because it
is always raining. Wrote Roger Ebert, “Somerset, the veteran detective, wears a
hat and raincoat. Mills, the kid who has just been transferred into the
district, walks bare-headed in the rain as if he'll be young forever.” Maybe
the soaking of the power-grids wires is why the lights are rarely working in
any of the apartments they visit.
Not
only is the city unnamed, dark, and rainy, it is also subtly shifted out of
time. The fashion reflects several different decades. William
works on a
typewriter while the rest of the squad use computers (he also reads printed
books and goes to the library; these prove to be plot points). There are no
pop-culture references or product placements.
William is world-weary, ready to
retire, and a hell of a lot smarter than the short-tempered but also more
idealistic David. Both performances are dead-on perfect, giving individual
identities to a pretty stock partnership in Crime Fiction. David also has a
beautiful wife, Tracy (Gwyneth
Paltrow) whose lack of development and wholly
improbable behavior is nicely smoothed over by the Actress’ skills.
This will be William’s last case and David’s
first big one; it starts at a Crime Scene where an obese man is force-fed pasta
and then kicked in the side, leading to death by internal bleeding. There’s a scrawled
message left for police, “Gluttony.”
It wasn’t hard to make connections to
the next killing, even though the MO was radically different, because again
there’s a scrawled message. This time the victim is a prominent Attorney known for
his defense of Pedophiles and was forced to cut out a pound of his own flesh
and bleed out. The message this time reads, “Greed.” There were also clues
deliberately left by the Killer, hidden-well but findable, if only by the smartest
of Cops. The Killer wants to play a game, but it’s only playable by the
worthiest of opponents, I wonder what he would done if mere mediocrities had
caught the case instead?
These clues lead to not the Killer,
but the third victim, who has been slowly dying for a year. He’s a convicted Drug
Dealer and a Pederast and has been tied to a bed and receiving a sub-minimal
amount of nutrition through an IV. As it happens, he’s alive, but too insane
and too fragile to identify his oppressor. Here the message reads, “Sloth.” (Ummm…just
how did pedophilia become “Sloth”? The guy had to have had a job, because he previously
paid for the high-priced Attorney who died for “Greed.”)
It’s not hard to figure out that the Killer
sees himself as a Moral Avenger as the three messages are from the list of the Seven
Deadly sins of Christian doctrine. By the way, there are also seven Cardinal
Virtues, but they don’t come up in this film.
It’s also clear that the killer is
toying with the police, and the Detectives pursuit of him are frustrated
because they can’t seem to get ahead of his spree. There’s some very creative Detective
work by William, and the heroes get close, but still the killer eludes them.
The treatment of violence is
interesting because there are no on-screen killings, only glimpses
of the corpses at the crime scenes, the morgue and in black-and-white police
photographs; the worst grotesqueries are shared with us as part of the
Detective’s matter-of-fact dialogue. That was deft, it allowed the film’s
sickness to play on the imagination, and it is pretty sick, especially when the
Killer switches to a female victim.
After
the fifth killing, the Killer, listed on the cast as John Doe (Kevin Spacey),
turns himself in. Spacey’s is the finest performance in a film held together
with fine performances, he doesn’t exude rage all, he’s revealed as a creature defined by how much his
hatred has simmered with him from all of his personal disappointments, leading
him to re-invent himself as the weirdly detached wrath of God. Instead of being
wild-eyes, he’s calm, polite, and self-satisfied, moreover, he knows his game
isn’t over yet and he’s still running it. The performance is less-like Spacey as the Villain in
“Swimming with Sharks” (1994) and more like
Spacey’s role in “The Usual Suspects” (1995) except in this case Roger Kint isn’t
hiding the fact that he’s also Kaiser Söze, Joe Doe is pleased with himself. When
David tells John Doe that his crimes will soon be forgotten with the next news
cycle, John responds that they will be remembered forever, he is an Artist and
these killings are his masterpiece.
There’s a tension in that, because the
end game promises to be horrific -- and it is. John doesn’t just leave seven
dead behind, he also leaves the moral ruin of the living.
Wrote Mark
Salisbury, “[The film] creates
an overwhelming sense of unease, presenting a world of irredeemable ugliness, a
grim, melancholic, depressing, decaying society from which there is no escape.”
Yes, it does, and that should be enough, but I
can’t help but ask, “But why?”
The film “Se7en” is most similar to is “The
Hitcher” (1986), both concerned game-playing Serial Killers manipulating the Hero
into a final confrontation which is the greatest fulfillment of the Killer’s own
twisted fantasies. There were even behind-the-scenes similarities, the studios’
hesitation about such dark material, the original script being passed from hand-to-hand
in a pre-production purgatory, and especially fierce battles to preserve the
full monstrousness of the penultimate savagery. But “The Hitcher” was austere
in its visuals and the ambiguous central relationship between Hunter and Hunted
had deeper emotional resonance. Though “The Hitcher’s” view of life was pretty
dark, it was not devoid of respect for those whose view is not so bleak. “The
Hitcher’s” Villain was a perversion, while in “Se7en,” John Doe is treated as
if he is a Prophet of some great truth.
Director Fincher
admits he’s a cynic, and most of his films not only reflect that, but how he
was willing to push it to extremes like no other. His first feature, “Alien 3”
(1992), was, as Critic Jack Nicholls put it, “submerged in the bewildering,
monochrome intensity of pain and dereliction, photographed in claustrophobic
close-up throughout, that is the whole of this film. All else –
including narrative tension and indeed the very idea of story – is subjugated
to this grim motif. This (probably bad) film is almost admirable in its refusal
to give the audience any solace or entertainment at all.”
In an interview, Fincher describes how he got
a attracted to the project, and specifically addresses the penultimate killing,
“So I read it, and got to the end, with the head in the box, and I
called him and said, ‘This is fantastic, this is so great because I had thought
it was a police procedural; now it’s this meditation on evil and how evil gets
on you and you can’t get it off.’ And he [Fincher’s agent] said, ‘What are you
talking about?’ And I talked about the whole head-in-the-box thing, she’s been
dead for hours and there’s no bullshit chase across town and the guy driving on
sidewalks to get to the woman, who’s drawing a bath while the serial killer
sneaks in the back window. And he goes, ‘Oh, they sent you the wrong draft.’
[audience laughs] And he sent me the right draft, and there was a guy driving
across town on sidewalks, serial killer sneaking in the back window.”
In the end, they
went with the head-in-the-box.
“Se7en” was not only hugely successful, but
hugely influential. As mentioned about, the film-makers were open about trying
to evoke the look of “Sin City,” and that is what most of the industry took
from this film, introducing a string of Hyper-Noir thrillers which climaxed in the
cinema adaptation of “Sin City” (2005).
Fincher’s films would remain dark and cynical,
but he cut back on the stylization and contrivances as he started grappling
with more realistic Character studies. The turning point was probably “Zodiac”
(2007), another film about a game-playing Serial Killer, but explored the
consequentialism of Evil in admirable depth. This time it was based on a true
story, and credited as an unusually accurate recreation. Though one Suspect is given
a lot of attention, the case is left unsolved in the film just as it was in Real
Life, and the focus is on Detectives and Newspapermen who get sucked into a
dark place because they can’t let the unsolvable crime go. The film makes it
clear that San Francisco was a pretty violent place in the 1970s, and the Real-World
Zodiac killer’s Victims were a mere drop in the city’s Homicide bucket, yet
this taunting Killer warped the lives of several who couldn’t be called his Victims
in any traditional sense.
Though “Zodiac” is superior to “Se7en” in all
measures except for “Se7en’s” captivating hyper-stylization, “Zodiac” barely
turned a profit.
I hope there’s no lesson in that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4YV2_TcCoE
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