Se7en - Directed by David Fincher
Wanting people to listen,” says John Doe (Kevin Spacey) to Detectives Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and Mills (Brad Pitt), “you can’t just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer. And then you’ll notice you’ve got their strict attention.”
I would argue this line of dialogue could stand in for David Fincher’s approach to directing his second feature film. Se7en is directed with a sledgehammer. That doesn’t mean however, that the film is clumsy. Though there is blood spattering the floors and walls in most of the film’s crime scenes that’s where the messiness ends. Se7en is a series of incredibly precise strokes. Its pace is finely calibrated. Its graphic murders carefully curated. David Fincher understands that excess in the right hands can be as fine as a scalpel’s incision. John Doe, the film’s killer, doesn’t know he exists within the confines of a film but the rest of us do and so it’s easy to understand why he swings for the fences with his grisly work. The film market is oversaturated with morbid images and ideas. Go big or go home.
Se7en’s success, I believe, lies in its approach to standard genre-filmmaking by using avant-garde artistry. At a glance it’s a thriller. Look closer and you’ll see a police procedural that harkens back to films of its kind from the 1970’s. A quiet moment between Mills and his wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow) even references Syndey Lumet’s Serpico. On the nose but accurate. More significantly, Se7en erects itself as a landmark in the history of serial-killer movies. The genre began in earnest in 1931 with Fritz Lang’s M, whose guilt-wracked criminal is played by Peter Lorre as a whining victim of his own unstoppable compulsions. The 1950’s brought us Psycho and Peeping Tom, two films about voyeurism. Then the 70’s saw Dirty Harry take on a Zodiac killer style narrative and bring “true crime” stories into the cinema. At the same time films like Last House on the Left and Texas Chainsaw Massacre made their mark by depicting murder as graphically as possible. The 80’s saw the birth of the artful intelligent killer in the form of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter who would quickly be adapted for the screen. 1991 saw one more evolution with Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho taking serial killing into the genre of satire. Each one of these movements can be seen in Se7en’s framework.
The film’s concept borders on pretentious but Fincher manages to steer the ship away from anything that would illicit eye rolls and instead keeps the film humming along disguised as pure pulp. Though nearly every moment of the story is soaked in scriptural and liturgical references, Fincher never lets the film get too heady. In fact some of the best visual gags come in the form of Detective Mills not having the attention span to do the necessary research to catch the killer by showing him reading cliff notes and “for dummies” style books on the works of Milton and Dante.
Much of the film’s runtime is used to demonstrate Mills and Somerset as a sort of odd couple. A veteran and a rookie cop (substitute cop for actor and the story is the same). Black and white. Bachelor and husband. Wise and impulsive. And most important to Se7en’s finale: pragmatism and idealism. The pair’s warring viewpoints ultimately converge in the work and words of John Doe, which frighteningly and ingeniously synthesizes Somerset’s nihilism with Mills’s impulsive idealism. Because the world in which Se7en takes place is tailor-made to John Doe’s (and Fincher’s) judgmental specifications, the detectives’ attempts to stop him can only be futile. When Somerset cries at a moment of truth that, “John Doe has the upper hand,” it confirms what we’ve feared all along. This ending was always inevitable.
The film’s twist ending, now infamous, is made so not because of the shock of what occurs on screen but because it challenges our very notion of how a story is supposed to be told. Se7en works because we’re following the story through all 7 deadly sins being acted out through murder. Even though the ending would have been happier if they’d kept “Envy” and “Wrath” from being being carried out we as viewers would feel like we’d been let down in some way. Se7en understands the human need for patterns to be resolved even if the result is horrific.
