Apathy is the driving force in David Fincher’s detective thriller Se7en, as hero and villain alike lash out at this perceived blight on civilization. Retiring gumshoe William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) decries it by name in a barroom conversation with his brash, young partner David Mills (Brad Pitt), describing the source of his disillusionment as a result of not wanting to “continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was virtue.” Mills’ out-of-work schoolteacher wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), finds the unnamed city they’ve recently moved to from upstate disturbing and disorienting in its squalor and inhumanity. Cops sell info to parasitic paparazzi and pay off junkies to fabricate stories that justify warrantless actions. Amid it all, deranged serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) sees “a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home,” lamenting that, “We tolerate it because it’s common, it’s trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon and night.”
The ugly remains of horrifically tortured and elaborately murdered victims are steadily discovered over the course of one week, each meticulously orchestrated crime scene serving as a macabre display of one of the “seven deadly sins” from classic Christian literature, with words like “gluttony” scrawled in grease and “greed” in blood. A lustful victim is killed with a custom-made bladed sex toy. A prideful young woman with her face carved up chooses death from a bottle of sleeping pills glued to one hand rather than enduring a disfigured life by calling for help on a phone glued to the other. A slothful drug dealer is tied to a bed and pumped full of substances to keep his desiccated body barely alive for exactly one year. But in John Doe’s Christo-sadist view of society, these flawed people are anything but victims. “Only in a world this shitty,” he pontificates in the backseat of a police cruiser en route to the film’s famous final scene, “Could you even try to say these are innocent people and keep a straight face.”
Fincher’s breakthrough film may hyperbolize the malignancy of apathy, but it aesthetically supports both the grizzled detective’s and the serial killer’s grim views of the city in which they reluctantly dwell. Noisy, filthy, perpetually rain-drenched and crawling with literal and figurative vermin, this is an urban landscape of grime and rot, a fetid cesspool of human indifference. Fincher utilizes a sickly yellow color palette throughout a film rife with dingy corridors, seedy alleys and bouncing flashlight beams. Even cheerier spaces, such as the Mills’ new apartment where Tracy invites Somerset to dinner, are riddled with deceit, as the young couple reveal they were swindled into unwittingly buying a flat that shakes with the clamor of each passing subway car. Fincher takes the unrelenting dreariness of this grimy, soggy city throughout the film’s first two acts and contrasts it with the unforgiving clarity found on sunbaked desert roads at the film’s conclusion as the machinations of John Doe’s full plan come into focus, brutal work that he grandiosely asserts will be “puzzled over and studied and followed, forever.”
Se7en acts as an homage to classic noir films married to sophisticated-serial-killer shock value expected in the wake of The Silence of the Lambs. Its 1995 release occurred within a liminal space between eras. Freeman’s thoughtful Somerset is an old-school detective who actually cares about people, and who takes his time connecting the dots when others on the force choose the path of least resistance. When he deduces the seven-deadly-sins theme after the second murder, Somerset ventures to the police library to read Chaucer, Dante and Milton in an effort to better understand the twisted but moralistically methodical mind of this killer. On the brink of the internet age, there’s only paper and ink to turn to for this type of research, after all. John Doe’s lair is found packed with filled notebooks rather than the kind of online rantings and manifestos that emerge from far more chaotic, gun-toting mass murderers on today’s social media and message boards. His plan is also nearly foiled when an FBI search of classic books that have been checked out recently reveals his address, one of the film’s least plausible and most dated elements that feels almost cozily quaint. Appearing just four years after film audiences were exposed to Hannibal Lecter’s murderous genius and Buffalo Bill’s sartorial deviance, Se7en premiered in a nation still reeling from the elaborately depraved nature of Jeffrey Dahmer’s real-life crimes. All this made the mid-‘90s perhaps the last gasp of a late 20th-century era where serial killers rose to the status of infamous celebrities ‒ before terrorism and mass shootings upped the body count and blurred human carnage into frightening banality.
Fincher strikes a pitch perfect balance between displaying the film’s considerable grimy gore and not reveling in it. Early on, we may see the discolored corpse of a bound, morbidly obese shut-in who was forced to eat himself to death at gunpoint. But other gruesome murders, such as the aftermath of a man forced into intercourse with a specially designed knife strapped to groin, are wisely and mercifully obscured from view, Fincher instead relying on the pulverizing impact of the profoundly traumatized man’s frenzied pleas and subsequent recollections of the act to drive home the absolute horror of such a scenario. Most crucially, we do not see the head in that cardboard box, but rather Somerset’s stricken reaction to what he finds there. What’s more, Fincher deftly paces his film so as not to overwhelm the viewer in grisliness. Miraculously, for all its lurid subject matter, Se7en is often driven by punchy detective-film dialogue and even flashes of humor amid the growing camaraderie between Somerset and Mills in their timeless art of deduction.
Deception and manipulation pervade Fincher’s subsequent films. Se7en allowed Fincher to first delve into bold, murderous subject matter, and in doing so he was able to flex a penchant for subverting audience’s expectations and pulling the rug out from under them. He would return to serial killer subject matter in Zodiac (2007) and his English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). Murderous machinations can be found most recently in Gone Girl (2014) and The Killer (2023). Se7en also showcases his knack for plot twists ‒ perhaps most showcased in the fabricated conspiracy found in The Game (1997) and the split personality reveal of Fight Club (1999) ‒ as the decapitated Tracy is already dead and cannot be saved as John Doe continues to pull the strings even while handcuffed.
That Fincher found his way to Se7en at all is a stroke of fortune, and one that would shape and inform his gritty filmography that followed. He’d nearly sworn off directing features after his experience with his middling debut, Alien 3 (1992), a film he’s since disowned. Meanwhile, incredibly, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation director Jeremiah S. Chechik was initially tapped to helm Se7en, but he objected to Andrew Kevin Walker’s script, particularly the devastating ending, and demanded rewrites. After Chechik left the project when the original studio, Penta Film, dissolved before shooting began, New Line Cinema pick up the project and mistakenly sent Walker’s original script to Fincher. He loved the bleak ending, as John Doe orchestrates the delivery of Tracy’s severed head as a catalyst for the full manifestation of his septet of sin-themed atrocities, compelling an enraged Mills to “become wrath” by shooting him dead for John Doe’s “envy” of Mills’ life. This horrific conclusion may open the film’s greatest plot hole ‒ how in the world was John Doe able to accomplish all of this within a single week, with his master plan’s coup de grâce incorporating a detective whose existence he’d only known about for a handful of days? ‒ but it gave Se7en one of the more iconic third acts in ‘90s cinema.
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