Scary Movie Season
Se7ven still terrifies, after all these years. But it's also an incredibly hopeful film, too.
I recently read a NYTimes piece that argued that one of the inspirations for the…weirdly morally serious?…Saw movies was David Fincher’s 1995 serial killer thriller Se7en. So last night I decided to take it in again as part of my usual dorky Halloween movie fest.
To my surprise, I found Se7en even scarier than I did when I first saw it. But also more hopeful.
The scary part? That some people can’t learn or change, even when presented with abundant reasons to do so.
Like, you know, being made the coup de grace in a serial killer’s vengeance plot.
The hopeful part?
That even at a relatively advanced age, some people can keep learning and growing, and overcome their natural cynicism and regret.
[Spoilers ahoy.]
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Se7en contains exactly one real jump scare, when a supposed dessicated corpse associated with the sin of sloth that’s been kept alive for a year, decaying in its own rot, turns out to be alive. There’s also a tense chase scene in which Brad Pitt’s character, Detective Mills, is almost killed but spared for (then) unknown reasons by the killer. The serial killer is played to his usual standards of creepy villainous perfection by Kevin Spacey, who is off-stage for most of the film but incredibly memorable when he finally appears in the last 20 minutes. If you were watching movies in the 90s, and Kevin Spacey showed up, you could pretty much depend on a high body count.
But in the traditional scare department, that’s about it.
Nevertheless, it’s a movie that stuck with me for many years after I first viewed it. The setup—a serial killer chooses the last week of a genteel, well-educated homicide detective’s career before retirement to start revealing a series of murders based on the seven deadly sins of Catholic theology—is memorably weird, as is the scene at the end when the serial killer monologues, and it turns out that he shares a lot of the lead homicide detective’s critiques of the corruption and decay of the city and world around him. Moral rot is the reason that Morgan Freeman’s character, Detective William Somerset, gives for his decision to retire at the beginning of the movie. He can’t take it anymore. The rot is highlighted visually in several ways during the movie—from the horrifying tableaux vivants in which they find the victims (which usually have to do with the victim’s living conditions before they’re killed and not with the depredations of the crime itself) to the constant drip of mucky rain in whatever city this is. (I’m not sure what to do with the fact that it’s never named, and at times seems to be New York, but might also be Los Angeles or Seattle. Maybe it could be anywhere, and that’s the point.) But perhaps the corruption and inversion of standards is most beautifully portrayed in the scene where Somerset gets the public library to open up for him so that he can browse the classics that he believes are inspiring the serial killer. While the dignified and scholarly Somerset makes a list for his young colleague of works like Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost (after recognizing a quotation from the latter by memory when it appears at a crime scene), the library’s security guards play poker on the loggia and mock Somerset’s superiority by playing him Bach’s “Air on the G string” while he takes books off the shelves in the elegant library stacks, oblivious to their taunts. He sits on the floor below the loggia, his clear social and cultural inferiors looking down at him from the balcony above. This world is chaotically reversed, the director is telling us, and perverse in its values.
The movie at its most essential is a character study of these three men—Mills, Somerset, and “John Doe,” the serial killer—and how they face the rot and evil in the world around them. Somerset at the beginning of the story is poised to lose his soul to his despair and horror at what his world has become. He’s held himself together through his rituals—when we first meet him, he’s completing his immaculate morning routine, and he falls asleep to the regular ticking of a metronome—but these rituals have failed him in his quest against chaos, and he’s ready to retreat. He’s meant to train his rookie replacement, Mills, before the end of the week, but that’s when John Doe steps up to the plate. Somerset stays on the case because gets Doe in a way that nobody else can. He sees in Doe’s killings a kind of moral quest to reassert justice and order in the universe, based on a classical Christian set of rules and catechism technique. Where others (including Mills) stubbornly keep seeing insanity and chaos, Somerset perceives the real aspirations to justice and order apparent in the killings. The serial killer is in fact a kind of dark double of Somerset: the direction points this out in the chase scene, where, for at least a few moments, the similarly dressed Doe and Somerset appear interchangeable.
Mills’ character (vintage tousle-haired, insouciant late 90s Pitt), meanwhile, is primarily interesting for what he can’t learn. Although he’s Somerset’s trainee, he’s a notably bad student, acquiring the CliffsNotes of the theological works that Somerset recommends after getting extremely and inexplicably angry with a copy of the Divine Comedy. Despite all of the time he spends with Somerset, by the end of the movie, he’s still convinced that Doe is a garden variety maniac—which is exactly the opposite of what Doe is, at least in the way that Mills means it. Even in the final scenes of the movie, as they ride in the car with Doe out to a place where he says he’ll reveal the last two victims of his meticulously planned and executed seven-part murder, Mills is asserting that Doe “dances around the house with his grandmother’s underwear on his head.”
His stubbornness to truth and learning is what kills him in the end, in one of the most psychologically horrifying and tense movie scenes…maybe ever. While Mills covers Doe out in the middle of a field, Somerset opens a mysterious package that’s just been delivered. We never see it (one of the great underutilized cinematic tricks) but we find out a beat later from Doe that it’s probably the head of Mills’ wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), who was pregnant with Mills’ child. She’d told Somerset but not Mills about the baby, and apparently told Doe by way of begging him not to kill her and the child. It’s then that Doe reveals his final victims: himself (for envying Mills his wife and family) and Mills, whom he is baiting to wrath and murder, thus concluding the cycle with Mills’ total psychological ruin. He’ll end the movie in the back of the police car, defeated and with a corpse-like stare as he contemplates what he’s done. Somerset calls Doe’s serial murders a “sermon” at various points in the movie. A sermon requires living auditors. This is why Doe spared Mills’ life earlier in the movie, it turns out. But Mills learns nothing, and is his unchanging self until the end of the movie.
One of the most frightening aspects of Mills’ decision at the end of the movie really is his inability to learn or see the right action when Doe presents it to him in no uncertain terms. Somehow, despite his closeness to the case, he’s learned nothing about Doe up until this point. Even when Doe lays out his scheme and how Mills will participate in it in the plainest terms, Mills is not able to resist putting a gun to Doe’s head and pulling the trigger. In a heartrending moment (and one that entails real acting chops on Pitt’s part), Mills hesitates at least two or three times before he decides that despite everything he now knows about how he’ll fulfill this man’s evil plan if he pulls the trigger, he can’t help doing it. He can’t overcome himself and his own worst impulses.
But the final twist of a movie that’s full of them is Somerset’s transformation. Despite his age, despite the fact that he was close to retirement and giving it all up, he’s the one who undergoes real moral transformation by the end. Even before Doe surrenders himself, Somerset tells Mills that he’s going to stay on after all, to see the case through. At the end of the movie, he tells this to his boss again, when the boss asks him where he’ll be. “Around,” he says. He’s realized now that retreating to a farm and his nihilism isn’t going to save him.
How does he come to this realization? In the car, I think, when he’s interrogating John Doe. When Mills asks Doe why he doesn’t pity his innocent victims, Doe delivers a bitter, hateful diatribe:
Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny? An obese man... a disgusting man who could barely stand up; a man who if you saw him on the street, you'd point him out to your friends so that they could join you in mocking him; a man, who if you saw him while you were eating, you wouldn't be able to finish your meal. After him, I picked the lawyer and I know you both must have been secretly thanking me for that one. This is a man who dedicated his life to making money by lying with every breath that he could muster to keeping murderers and rapists on the streets!…
A woman... so ugly on the inside she couldn't bear to go on living if she couldn't be beautiful on the outside. A drug dealer, a drug dealing pederast, actually! And let's not forget the disease-spreading whore! Only in a world this shitty could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face. But that's the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it's common, it's trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not anymore. I'm setting the example. What I've done is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed... forever.
When Mills interrupts him to point out that he’s a murderer preaching against murderers, Doe responds that he’s not a murderer, but an instrument of justice, in his eyes, at least. A cynic might agree with Doe that there’s a fine line between Doe’s vigilante justice and the justice administered by a police force, but in that moment, Somerset sees something. He sees that there is a difference, and I think he sees that if he doesn’t stay with the police force, he could very well end up like Doe, and responding to rot with more rot. Their similarities have been accumulating over the course of the movie, but finally, he’s going to break free of them. He could end up like Doe, boiling in his own cynicism and disdain for the corruption and the world’s moral nihilism—but Doe’s example has warned him away from that path.
All of this points to the movie’s strangely hopeful and poignant final line, Somerset’s internal monologue (where we haven’t been yet for the whole of the movie, curiously).
Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world’s a fine place, and worth fighting for.” I agree with the second part.
Most critics of the movie cite this as an example of its pervasive cynicism, but read correctly and in context, it’s an escape from the moral threat that presented itself to Somerset at the beginning of the film. Somerset’s entire trajectory is a turning away from the cynical disgust that was prompting his decision to retreat from the battle. The fact that he can say that the world is worth fighting for after he’s just seen his young trainee commit an act of vigilante justice to avenge the murder of his pregnant wife is a statement of incredible hope balanced with realism. The world isn’t always a good place. But that’s not a reason to give up; that’s why it’s worth fighting for. It needs Somerset and others like him, who really look at it, understand it, and learn from it—and still want to defend it. It doesn’t need the ritualized, religiously dogmatic vigilantism of Doe, which ends up contributing to rot, not fighting it. It needs people like Somerset, who have a relationship with literature, clarity, and truth, but also and in the end a kind of gruff kindness and understanding even for people like Mills and Doe. It requires us not to turn away.
Is it too much to propose that Se7en is the It’s a Wonderful Life of the Halloween season, when the world starts to darken? Maybe I’m making the suggestion a little provocatively, but I think I believe it. I think it’s about Somerset’s moral salvation, which makes him the real auditor of Doe’s sermon—even if he takes a very different meaning from it than Doe intends.