Seven

Richard Dyer

• Editorial: British Film Institute
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838718015
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Películas y vídeos

Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Lust, Pride, Envy, Wrath. A serial killer on a warped mission who turns his victims' 'sins' into the means of their murder. Seven (David Fincher, 1995) is one of the most acclaimed American films of the 1990s. Starring Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, and Kevin Spacey, Seven is the darkest of films. In it performance, cinematography, sound, and plot combine to create a harrowing account of a world beset by an all-encompassing, irremediable wickedness. Richard Dyer explores the film in terms of of sin, story, structure, seriality, sound, sight and salvation, analyzing how Seven both epitomizes and modifies the serial killer genre, which is such a feature of recent cinema.

1 Sin

‘It’s gonna go on and on and on.’

(Detective Somerset on learning of the first murder)

Seven is a study in sin. It is also a crime movie and a film of great formal rigour. The notion of sin connects these generic and stylistic qualities. Crime fiction deals by definition in matters of wrongdoing, but the specific resonance of sin is achieved in Seven by the single-mindedness of the film’s formal – structural, aural, visual – choices.

Seven asks to be seen in terms of sin. The title need not of itself indicate this. The seven deadly sins are only one of many significant sevens in Western culture: days of Creation and of the week, cardinal virtues, Christian sacraments, wonders of the world, pillars of wisdom, colours of the rainbow; the Book of Revelation has over fifty groupings of seven (including churches, candlesticks, angels, trumpets) in its vision of the Apocalypse. Nor is this exclusively Western: the Qur’àn and the Rig-Veda are full of sevens.¹ Seven draws attention to more: Dante’s seven terraces of purgation, a reference to seven children slain in something Detective Somerset reads. By being so starkly titled, Seven may want to evoke these quasi-cosmic (even New Age, X-Files) resonances, a vein subsequently mined in a serial killer context by the TV series Millennium. However, it explicitly refers only to sins and days.

The campaign for the film suggested that the former were the more important. As Chris Pula, head of marketing at the distributors New Line, put it,² the sins were the selling point of the film. Important as the drawing power of Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman was, still the ‘star of the movie was the crime. Brad and Morgan were the co-stars. Yes, their names were there. But we showcased the crime, the seven deadly sins.’ The most widely-used poster, in turn used for the video box, exemplifies this; a TV campaign flashed the names of the sins up one by one, while a web site gave their ‘more obscure details’.

This is good marketing because it understands the product. The film too insists on the primacy of sin. Its central conceit is that of the seven deadly sins used as the basis for seven murders over seven days. This is of course the killer’s conceit, but it also prompts, through the Morgan Freeman character, Detective Somerset, the wider perception of human frailty evoked by the notion of sin.

Somerset is the site of wisdom in the film. This is so in two senses. First, he is the character in this detective story who is best at detection: he is the first to perceive that the first murder will be one of a series and then its pattern; he tracks the killer down by ingeniously using the public library system (following up on people who draw out apocalyptic and sadistic titles). He is painstakingly methodical, a ‘great brain’, as his immediate superior says. This is established by his following up on apparently irrelevant clues in the first murder: bruises on the side of the victim’s head, grocery store receipts, lino strips found in the victim’s stomach. These clues baffle or are brushed aside by the other detectives involved: the pathologist, the captain in charge and, most significantly, Somerset’s new partner Mills (Brad Pitt). However, the importance he attaches to the clues and his interpretation are correct. In narrative terms, he is the one who knows.

His wisdom though is more than investigative acumen. It is in his whole being. He is quiet and still; he is an older man with a soft, saddened face and mellow, resigned voice; he is Morgan Freeman, Miss Daisy’s chauffeur, Robin Hood’s right-hand man, the Shawshank redemption. The film repeatedly cuts to him just looking on, listening, and what he sees and hears is not just clues to a sordid mystery but the world’s iniquity. In a pre-credits murder investigation, he asks whether a boy saw his mother shoot his father, and the detective on duty replies irritatedly:

What kind of fucking question is that? … It’s always these questions with you. Did the kid see it? Who gives a fuck? He’s dead. His wife killed him. Anything else has nothing to do with us.

But Somerset consistently sees that anything else – what it means for a child to see such violence in the family, for instance – does have to do with all of us. Again, this sets him apart from those he works with, not just this detective, but Mills with his chatter and restlessness and the cops at the library who would rather play cards than read books.

Somerset has knowledge and wisdom and thus functions as the intellectual and moral voice of the film. This makes all the more significant his relation to the killer, Jonathan Doe (Kevin Spacey). He is not like Doe but he does see the world in much the same way, and what both see is a world drenched in endless wickedness. When towards the end, Mills accuses Doe of killing innocent people, Doe delivers a speech detailing his victims’ lack of innocence, concluding:

Only in a world this shitty could you even try and 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 house, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it’s common, it’s trivial, we tolerate it morning, noon and night.

Somerset shares this sense of the absolute pervasiveness of sin and the world’s indifference to it, even though he does not use the word sin. In a conversation with the police captain, he refers to an incident ‘about four blocks from here’, in which a man is out walking his dog, is attacked, has his watch stolen and ‘while he’s lying there on the sidewalk helpless, his attacker stabs him in both eyes’; the captain shrugs it off as ‘the way it’s always been’. This though is Somerset’s point: an act of gratuitous cruelty is met with complacency. It’s really no better than the sleazy sex club owner who, asked by Mills if he likes what he does for a living, replies ‘No, I don’t. But that’s life isn’t it?’ and sits back resentful and defiant. This is why Somerset felt the fear he tells Tracy of, when he heard his partner was pregnant – ‘How can I bring a child into a world like this?’, a world, presumably, this shitty. Later still, in a bar after the ‘Lust’ murder, he tells Mills, ‘I just don’t think I can continue to live and work in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was a virtue’, the equivalent of Doe’s emphasis on the toleration of sin ‘morning, noon and night’.

Somerset’s detective superiority and his sense of the wickedness of the world are connected. Because he can enter Doe’s way of seeing the world, he understands the structure of his crimes and how to set about tracking him down. He already knows what to make of Doe’s scrawling of the words ‘Gluttony’ and ‘Greed’ at the murder scenes. Familiar with the same cultural reference points as Doe, he is able to use the public library system to trace Doe to his address.

It is not just that he is erudite, but that he approaches the crime in terms of meaning, a meaning for which he has a feeling. To research the crimes, he goes to a library, and in an extended montage sequence the film cross-cuts between him contemplating works on the seven deadly sins (including Dante’s Purgatory, Chaucer’s ‘Parson’s Tale’ and a Dictionary of Catholicism) and Mills at home poring over photos and reports of the scenes of the crimes. Though bound together in common endeavour, the difference is evident: Somerset seeks to grasp the sense of the murders, Mills wants direct clues to who done it. By the end of the sequence, Mills has given up and sits watching a basketball game on television, while Somerset delivers his findings to Mills’s desk, findings that we subsequently realise are accurate insights into the killer’s frame of reference.

In this sequence, we enter into Somerset’s process of understanding more than Mills’s. We see Mills looking at the material, with four shots of it clearly signalled as point-of-view shots, anchored in his baffled gaze. With Somerset, though we repeatedly have shots of him looking, we also get many more shots of the material, often dissolving from one to another and back to Somerset, the camera tracking round him in a way that does not fix the imagery so firmly in his gaze. He is mentally, but also in visual terms literally absorbed in the imagery. We also see him working on the material, photocopying it, folding the copies, making notes. All of this echoes the opening credits sequence (by Kyle Cooper), a montage of Doe’s work, mainly close-ups of items, with often his hands in view turning things, using scissors, sewing pages together, writing his notebooks, the film cutting or dissolving from shot to shot. Somerset and Doe are alike: intellectual, painstaking, absorbed; and both have a consciousness of sin.

The two sequences are in many ways different, of course. We never see Doe’s face, his sequence contains many more shots and, above all, the music is different. Doe’s work is accompanied by the Nine Inch Nails track ‘Closer’, itself a mix of reworked sounds, both from musical instruments and recorded noises, a form of ‘industrial rock’ evoking the alienation of the city, its prominent but jerky rhythms emphasising the fragmented quality of the imagery (short takes, double exposures, off centre, scratched).³ Somerset’s study is accompanied by Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’, the epitome of sad serenity, its smooth flow corresponding to the steady tracks, dissolves and unobtrusive cuts of the image.

The two montage sequences suggest both the affinity and difference between Somerset and Doe. The differences are clear enough. Somerset reacts to sin with sorrow, Doe with contempt; Somerset, even in the line of duty, has never killed anyone, Doe makes it his duty to kill. They have moreover a different perception of the nastiness of the world. Doe translates his into archaic categories of depravity, detailed in his sketch of the victims in response to Mills’s comment on their innocence:

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. And after him I picked the lawyer, … a man who dedicated his life to making money by lying with every breath he could muster to keep murderers and rapists on the street. A woman, a woman so ugly on the inside that 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.

Doe is mobilising widespread views, or rather, where you don’t share them, prejudices: against fatness, legal shenanigans, rape, murder, narcissism, drug dealing, paedophilia, prostitution. It is a rant. Of the wrongs he assembles in the speech, he does not in fact take vengeance on those most commonly now held to be wrongs: rape, murder and paedophilia.⁴ Equally, the sins he actually identifies by the acts of murder are now widely considered either mere faults – Gluttony is greediness, Sloth laziness – or even on the way to being virtues – Greed is ambition, Lust and Envy desire (which we should not repress), Wrath anger (which we should learn to express) and Pride pride. In contrast, what Somerset identifies as wickedness is violence, cruelty and indifference to them.

Yet Somerset’s and Doe’s are really only different ways of organising the deeper perception of a world beyond hope. When Somerset is on his way to the library in a cab, we see from his point of view a shot of random squalor and violence in the ceaseless dreary rain outside; the driver asks him where he is going and he replies, ‘far away from here’; the film then cuts to a long-held shot of him looking out of the cab, a doleful face, eyes full with the pitiable vileness of the world.

I have avoided using the word evil, for I want to make here a distinction between sin and evil, one not given by the words themselves. By evil I mean the notion of a malevolent force outside of human beings, though capable of possessing them; by sin, I mean the notion of badness being constitutive of humanity and the world we have made. In the most radical, and heretical, view of sin, t...