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:Sausage – your points are all reasonable enough, and of course it all comes down to taste in the end.
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.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,
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).
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.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.