Se7en (David Fincher, 1995)

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

#26 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun May 17, 2009 8:27 pm

Sorry for keeping this going, and I promise this'll be my last one.
Sloper wrote:Sausage – your points are all reasonable enough, and of course it all comes down to taste in the end.
No point in arguing against taste, I feel, and by no means am I trying to get you to like the movie. I just feel I should stand up for its morality.
Sloper wrote:If Mills is indeed figured as a basically good character, and some sort of ray of hope in the film, John Doe’s victory at the end is to prove that even he is ultimately won over by his defining sin, wrath. His anger is so uncontrollable that he cannot stop himself from shooting the killer down,
As Dante well knew, sin is the inescapable fact of the fall, so Doe hasn't really proved anything except that humanity is by necessity flawed. In order to prove the point you've adumbrated, he has helped indulge and develop Mill's "sin" (a kind of anti-Purgatory), so we have to realize that any prophecies he has are self-fulfilling: he needs the world to confirm his beliefs in order for his life to have meaning, and wherever it doesn't, he will manipulate the world to better suit his conceptions. His attempts to show the world its own sin involves helping the world appear more like his vision of it. There is as much making as revealing, here.

One of the crucial and overlooked aspects of the movie is the way in which sin and morality is addressed only in very specific terms. John Doe is not interested with Sin in general, but only with a very specific tapestry of sin (the seven deadly ones), and commits major sins himself in order to pursue his work, sins which don't even register in his mind (in the car ride, when Mills brings up the contradiction that he is using the sin of murder to indict other sinners, John Doe shouts him down and talks over him). John Doe's special focus indicates the artificial quality of his work, the way in which it deals with the world only along exclusive structures (pilfered from Dante and other mediaeval sources) designed to order the world according to John Doe's sense of meaning. If Doe were concerned with the morality of sin in general, the movie would perhaps be immoral; but he's not concerned with how sin works, he's concerned with giving primacy to certain sins while ignoring others, giving his morality a very specific and exclusive focus. The artificial, esoteric quality of his murders remove us from their morality, most especially because, not being mediaeval Catholics, the seven deadly sins are going to seem as remote as witch burning.

When approaching Seven you have to deal with the deliberate artificiality and esoteric unnaturalness of Doe's "code" of morality, which distances you from Doe's point of view. What's interesting about Doe is how his crimes target, obliquely, human pleasure (the seven deadly sins are all sins of passion), which indicates something interesting about his psychology (that perhaps he loathes the things he cannot share and his murders are an elaborate revenge for his sociopathic emotional numbness). For me there are just too many qualifiers to believe the movie is encouraging you to approve of its villain (since any approval could only be done within the specific context of Doe's invented moral structure and not within the context of our own morality as viewers).
Sloper wrote:But even then, identifying himself with one of the sins would not discredit his work. Many of the best moralists - especially in the Middle Ages, which seems to be the period this film invokes most insistently - assert, at some point, that they are 'the worst sinner of all', to emphasise that they are humble teachers, and not attributing to themselves the power or authority of God, which of course John Doe might be said to have been doing up until the point where he turns the punishment back on himself.
Oh, no, I don't think it "discredits" his work (well, it's not really credible to begin with, but whatever), I just think his inclusion in his punishments is structural more than anything, a nice full circle.

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Re: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

#27 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun May 17, 2009 10:30 pm

You'll get no complaints from me. Nice to know an old thread of mine can get new legs :) It's funny though, because one of the last threads I can remember following somewhat that had this kind of inspired discussion was the Fight Club thread.

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Sloper
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Re: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

#28 Post by Sloper » Mon May 18, 2009 4:40 am

Suasage - that's a compelling psychological reading of John Doe, though I might find it more convincing if the part had been played by a different actor (like an unknown - now that really would have been interesting). At the time of release, Spacey was still an up-and-coming star - this was the same year as Swimming With Sharks and The Usual Suspects - and seeing him turn up at the end like that was sort of a pleasant shock. Now he just seems a little too pleased with himself, not really inhabiting the role. But anyway... At the very least you've persuaded me that the film's morality is more complex than I had given it credit for. I'm sure I'll revisit it again some day.

flyonthewall - I love surprise downbeat endings, but maybe Somerset doing the killing would have been a twist too far. It just seems out of character, whereas Mills has been heading that way all along.

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Re: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

#29 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon May 18, 2009 9:38 am

I don't think it would have been too out of character. The way it was storyboarded (it's on the DVD) was that Mills was literally one movement from pulling the trigger and Somerset sees this and draws his weapons and fires. It would have clearly been a move towards saving this young guy from throwing his career away.

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Re: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

#30 Post by Sloper » Mon May 18, 2009 10:36 am

Oh, I see... So then, I guess, Somerset would become a sort of Christ-like figure, sacrificing himself to redeem mankind from sin... It would make an interestingly weird happy ending, but I'm still not sure it would have worked dramatically.

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Re: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

#31 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon May 18, 2009 2:04 pm

Unfortunately, we'll never know since it never got past the storyboard phase. Apparently Brad said he would have quit if they went with that ending, but I can't confirm it. Thinking about it now, I can see how the ending as is appealed to Fincher. It's sort of the same line of thinking he did with Alien³ in the beginning, of killing off the survivng crew of the Sulaco sans Ripley. The first seven minutes of the movie, the segue from the previous film into this new story, was hands down the best part of the movie for me. But it's also a paradox for me, too because the rest of that film didn't deliver on the same level and I loved almost every other aspect of Se7en but have a problem with the ending.

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Re: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

#32 Post by Daniel B. » Wed Dec 23, 2009 2:22 pm

I rewatched Se7en last night and noticed it uses low angles a lot; that is to say, most often the camera is situated below the actors' faces, looking up at them. Does anyone know anything regarding the aesthetic or symbolic purpose for this motif? Has Fincher spoke on this?

It struck me as a very curious choice, especially for its consistency throughout the film.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

#33 Post by Mr Sausage » Wed Dec 23, 2009 4:06 pm

Daniel B. wrote:I rewatched Se7en last night and noticed it uses low angles a lot; that is to say, most often the camera is situated below the actors' faces, looking up at them. Does anyone know anything regarding the aesthetic or symbolic purpose for this motif? Has Fincher spoke on this?

It struck me as a very curious choice, especially for its consistency throughout the film.
Fincher talks about this in one of the commentary tracks, I believe the one with Pitt and Freeman.

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Re: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

#34 Post by Daniel B. » Wed Dec 23, 2009 4:46 pm

Sadly, I no longer have the DVD. Can you paraphrase what he said?

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

#35 Post by Mr Sausage » Wed Dec 23, 2009 5:55 pm

Daniel B. wrote:Sadly, I no longer have the DVD. Can you paraphrase what he said?
It's been too many years since I heard it so I've forgotten the answer, sorry.

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Re: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

#36 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon Dec 03, 2012 12:32 pm

I've been watching the Blu-ray over the last few days, and I have to say I like it better now than even in my previous posts about it. It's possibly indicative of a more cynical side coming out, but the themes of apathy versus the self-righteous need to make the world a better place is much more apparent and fluid to me now.

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DarkImbecile
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Re: Se7en (David Fincher, 1995)

#37 Post by DarkImbecile » Thu May 28, 2020 3:41 pm


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hearthesilence
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Re: Se7en (David Fincher, 1995)

#38 Post by hearthesilence » Thu May 28, 2020 4:21 pm

DarkImbecile wrote:
Thu May 28, 2020 3:41 pm
I chuckled more than expected
It probably should've been shorter, but it does become funny towards the end.

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Re: Se7en (David Fincher, 1995)

#39 Post by Ashley Pomeroy » Tue Aug 11, 2020 3:52 pm

I remember seeing this at the cinema when it was new, although sadly it wasn't one of the special bleach-bypass prints that were doing the rounds at the time. Or if it was the cinema didn't mention it. I've always been fascinated with the question of whether Doe would actually have become infamous, or not. He's motivated not just by horror at what he perceives to be an irredeemably perverse world but also his desire to be remembered for all time as a vigilante who stood up against it all.

But the film ends before we see whether he got his wish. I've always assumed that in the real world he would have been quickly forgotten and would have ended up on one of Cracked.com's "Five Insane Crime Stories You Probably Forgot" lists, or an in-depth post on r/unresolvedmysteries or similar. The film was written at a time when the media seemed to be fascinated with serial killers - there were a lot of them about in the 1980s and 1990s - and so I assume the screenwriters intended for Doe to become a mass media figure, but the kind of dark-and-edgy end-of-history New World Order milieu that was so popular in the 1990s didn't age well.

Looking at Wikipedia's list of serial killers it's truly weird that there were so many in the 1980s and 1990s, and so few since then. Leaded petrol, easy access to internet porn, security cameras, mobile phones, super-efficient police, or what?

Nonetheless I feel that Seven itself has aged a lot better than its competitors and imitators, largely because Morgan Freeman's character is genuinely likeable. A lesser film would have killed him off or made him an obnoxious jerk played by Jim Belushi. The title sequence is very much of its time. I'm not a cinematographer but I understand the film was shot before the modern use of digital colour grading, in which case the overall look is doubly impressive given that it was achieved with analogue means. From what I've read digital editing was state-of-the-art at the time so the title sequence must have taken ages. Nowadays a small child pumped full of Mountain Dew with a pirated copy of Final Cut can make up a convincing facsimile in just three and a half hours, and he probably could have done it quicker if I had insisted that he pee in a bucket.

Daniel B. up the page mentions the low angles - I remember noticing this during the chase in the rain and it stood out for the rest of the film. There's a fantastic shot where Mills is held at gunpoint by John Doe, but all we see of the killer is a blurred silhouette because the camera is focusing on the rain dripping off his Beretta. Looking at it again on Youtube I'm struck by how much it looks like Alien3, which had a different cinematographer, so obviously David Fincher had a specific look he was going for. In fact the publicity shot of Ripley being menaced by an alien is similar to the sequence in Seven where Doe holds the gun to Mills' head, but doesn't pull the trigger.

I've always liked Doe's line when he gives himself up. "What were you doing? Biding your time? Toying with me? Allowing five innocent people to die until you felt like springing your trap? Tell me, what was the indisputable evidence you were going to use on me right before I walked up to you and put my hands in the air?"

As for the pornography of violence I felt that the gluttony victim was too nasty to work on a "that was a cool kill" level. Ditto sloth. The other deaths felt too melodramatic for the film - it's an odd cross between the realism of something like Mark McManus-era Taggart and a conventional slasher film. I remember that it revitalised the buddy-cop genre although none of the imitators were nearly as good (e.g. 8mm, admittedly not a buddy cop film, but it seemed obviously like a chance for Joel Schumacher to "make his own Seven").

It's one of many films I saw one at the cinema when it came out and never again.

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Re: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

#40 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Wed Aug 12, 2020 4:24 pm

Sloper wrote:
Mon May 18, 2009 10:36 am
Oh, I see... So then, I guess, Somerset would become a sort of Christ-like figure, sacrificing himself to redeem mankind from sin... It would make an interestingly weird happy ending, but I'm still not sure it would have worked dramatically.
I've come around on it and I like the ending as it is now, but still think the alternate concept would have had some legs. It would have been somewhat satisfactory to see Doe get some sort of comeuppance by the other player in the scenario changing the script on him (I think Fincher even said as much on commentary the idea that we see could Doe upset or shocked when he is first shot in the chest before the final blow).
But the film ends before we see whether he got his wish. I've always assumed that in the real world he would have been quickly forgotten and would have ended up on one of Cracked.com's "Five Insane Crime Stories You Probably Forgot" lists, or an in-depth post on r/unresolvedmysteries or similar. The film was written at a time when the media seemed to be fascinated with serial killers - there were a lot of them about in the 1980s and 1990s - and so I assume the screenwriters intended for Doe to become a mass media figure, but the kind of dark-and-edgy end-of-history New World Order milieu that was so popular in the 1990s didn't age well.

Looking at Wikipedia's list of serial killers it's truly weird that there were so many in the 1980s and 1990s, and so few since then. Leaded petrol, easy access to internet porn, security cameras, mobile phones, super-efficient police, or what?
Terrorists replaced them writ large as the primary boogeymen of the new millennium after 9/11.

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Re: Se7en (David Fincher, 1995)

#41 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Aug 13, 2020 3:06 am

Probably best shown in the film of Hannibal where Lecter resurfacing and contacting Clarice again due to his annoyance at being bumped down the FBI's Most Wanted list in favour of bigger names such as Osama Bin Laden is one of the catalysts for the events of the story!

The serial killer theme has not really gone away, but it has moved away from the more 'entertaining' aspects (the Kiss The Girls and Along Came A Spiders. My favourite of all these has to be Copycat) and gotten more disturbingly uncomfortable with the focus on the terror and pain of the victims and sort of turned into the 'torture porn' genre. Wolf Creek comes to mind. Then there are the 'based on a true story' narratives that are more about abuse than killing like Michael or even Room. And the satirical black comedies of the Hostel series.

I think one of the key films in this turn was The Bone Collector, which still has Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie as the investigators (even the grizzled black cop and white rookie element, though with the disability twist and Jolie being a bit more competent and less prone to flying off the handle than Pitt's character was!), but has a rather bleak and depressing tone where the majority of the victims of the serial killer are not saved and then we follow the main characters (as in Se7en) investigating the horrible aftermath of the crime scenes as the first responders. It also features the amusing irony of the star of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Michael Rooker, in there are as one of the more straight and narrow cops who just doesn't get the attempts by the heroes to place themselves into the mindset of the killer to try and track them better!

Then Saw almost completely divorces the police doing the investigating into their own subplots paralleling but often completely isolated from the visceral here and now horror that the victims are going through (especially temporally, where there is often a big ironic twist when the cops turn out to be in a completely different location or their plotlines are taking place days, weeks or months either in the past or future compared to the victims suffering and dying in need all alone). Danny Glover's character is the first film is probably the most obvious as well as the last echo of the 90s 'cop tracking the serial killer' trend in the series, and indeed in Saw II and III the cops are relegated to very minor, ironic witness roles until they mostly return as actual collaborators with the maniac from Saw IV onwards.

That is why The Bone Collector stands out to me as a kind of fulcrum transitional film in the trend. There is a kind of detached callousness there which looks forward to something like the Saw series (and Hannibal Lecter becoming the primary figure of interest in Hannibal), and seems to be suggesting the somewhat depressing turn from the police being able (or even particularly bothered. In fact its better to have a fresh crime scene to survey, so in a way the killer is keeping the police in business by providing the victims) to save you from such figures, to trying to directly identify with the psychology of the victims, or killers, without any mediation from third parties.

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