A Life Through Film #002: Se7en
Just like that, we have a classic on our hands
Release Date: 9/22/1995
First Weekend At Number One: 9/22/1995
Weeks at Number One: 4
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here.
In 1992, political philosopher Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man. The book posited that with the collapse of the USSR and the rise of liberal democracy in more and more nations around the world, humanity had reached the end of its social evolution. Fukuyama argued that, as liberal democracy proliferated, there would be no weakening of it as the best, most civilized version of civilization.
There must have been such a feeling of relief in just making it to the early 90s. With the Cold War over and Gorbachev getting ready to star in Pizza Hut commercials, some of the art of the time reflected an idea that it was the end of worrying over war, nuclear annihilation, and the rise of any more fascist governments.
On the pop charts, Jesus Jones’s “Right Here, Right Now” engaged directly with this in its lyrics (“Watching the world wake up from history” is a bitterly funny line, looking back). Forrest Gump [4/5] provided Baby Boomers with the cinematic version of a victory lap. “Look at all the stuff we went through,” it seems to say over a soundtrack of Skynrd and Creedence. “Now we can relax and enjoy life without all of that Cold War paranoia.”
Retrospect has proven this to be philosophy to be short sighted. Horrible wars continued, not just with other nations but against terror groups and other non-nation actors. The internet reared its ugly head and convinced many people that fascism was the way forward, not liberal democracy. History did not end. It did not even pause.
The End of History did not necessarily denote an end of all violence, of course, and the films of the early-to-mid 90s were not devoid of violent conflict. What changed was the tone. Pulp Fiction [5/5] had been a critical and commercial smash in 1994, the same year as Forrest Gump. But Pulp Fiction has a lot of fun with its violence, its shootings, beatings, and katana slashes closer to campy slapstick than realistic antiwar depictions of death.
Looking at the top weekend box office for a full calendar year before September 22, 1995, I didn’t see anything with particularly gnarly violence topping it. People went to go see Natural Born Killers in ‘94, but not so en masse that it was much more than a blip on the commercial radar. Something changed, though, that late September weekend. People decided they wanted to see some horrific violence. They wanted misery.
They wanted Se7en.
Following detectives Mills (Brad Pitt) and Somerset (Morgan Freeman) as they attempt to track down a serial killer torturing and killing his victims in accordance with the Seven Deadly Sins, Se7en was David Fincher’s attempt to save his own career.
After an 80s spent as one of the most in-demand music video and commercial directors working in America, Fincher had his first opportunity at a narrative feature when he was brought into the troubled production of 1993’s Alien3. Without a complete script on set, Fincher went back and forth with the producers from 20th Century Fox, each party having a different idea of what the scifi tentpole should look like.
The struggle behind the scenes is reflected in the end result. A sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien [4.5/5] and James Cameron’s Aliens [4/5], Alien3 is a messy movie. Fincher’s film is a bleak, nihilistic piece of big budget science fiction that attempts to reground the franchise to its isolating horror roots. Ultimately, though, the movie doesn’t give us much reason to care about its large cast of victims for the iconic Xenomorph to work through. It has some interesting ideas, particularly at the beginning and end, but a lot of the middle just does not work for me. Ultimately, it’s a movie I can’t really recommend unless you’re a megafan of the franchise or a completionist for its director [I give it a 2.5/5].
Fincher walked away from Alien3 feeling frustrated and not sure if he’d ever work within the Hollywood system again. Some strange serendipity, however, made sure that the auteur found his way back into the cinematic limelight. While shopping around the script for a new crime thriller, New Line Cinema accidentally sent Fincher a darker, bleaker, and more violent earlier draft of the screenplay. Before they could tell him to disregard the package, he had read it, loved it, and signed on.
The version of Se7en that Fincher received was screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker’s original vision of the story. Writing it part time between shifts at Tower Records, Walker pulled inspiration from the violent, seedy streets of New York City in the late 80s and early 90s, a shocking sight for a young man fresh from the rural suburbs of Pennsylvania. He saw myriad sins on every street corner, mirroring the killer that he would eventually put to the page.
The script for Se7en was originally attached to Penta, an Italian production company, with Jeremiah Chechik, director of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation [2/5], set to direct. Chechik sent the script back to Walker, telling him to lighten the tone, making it less grim and violent.
I literally cannot start to think what this version of the movie would look like. Se7en with less violence, more levity, and directed by the man famous for an extremely mediocre Christmas comedy could be any number of generic buddy cop movies made in the 80s and 90s, so indistinct as to be unimaginable.
Walker gave Chechik his rewrite, but the project was poached by New Line Cinema, who began searching for a new director using the rewritten script. By some miraculous accident, Fincher was sent the original version of the screenplay instead. He jumped onboard immediately, and wouldn’t hear of adapting the Chechik version of the story at all.
Once Fincher was on set, he exhibited his infamous perfectionism to full effect. Honestly, between Brad Pitt tearing a tendon in his hand while filming, constant rain, and Fincher’s singular focus on what the movie should be, the set of Se7en didn’t seem like a super fun place to be. First AD Michael Alan Kahn had this to say about it:
I went up to Fincher and I said, ‘Look at this! Look! It’s here! We’re here! You did it! We’re shooting a movie! There’s Morgan Freeman. There Brad [Pitt]… Isn’t this amazing? Isn’t this wonderful? This is what you wanted.’ And he looked at me as though I were from outer space and said, ‘No, it’s awful.’ And I looked at him and I said, ‘Why is it awful?’ And he said… ‘Because now I have to get what’s in my head out of all you cretins.’”
Heavy spoilers below for Se7en. If you haven’t seen the movie I heartily recommend it, especially if you don’t know any of the twists the story takes. Last chance to scroll really fast down to the rating.
One of the main differences between the rewritten version of the Se7en script and the original was the ending. As Chechik would have filmed it, Gwyneth Paltrow’s head wouldn’t have been cut off by the killer, John Doe, and shockingly delivered in a cardboard box at the climax. All the New Line Cinema producers loved the core concept of the story but felt that having the one ray of sunshine in the entire movie killed and decapitated made the ending too bitter and antisocial.
Fincher recognized that this was the point of Walker’s story and wanted to preserve it. To this end, he rushed to production six weeks after signing onto the project so that the studio couldn’t meddle further and get him to make a more compromised version of the movie. Fincher and Walker staunchly refused to change the ending. Once the principal cast was set, Pitt, Freeman, and Paltrow joined the writer and director in pushing back against the producers.
The result is one of the best endings in movie history, shot brilliantly, and acted to perfection. Everything about it works. The change in setting from rainy city to arid desert, the switching from handheld camera to steady tripod shots, the line “John Doe has the upper hand,” everything! I wouldn’t be surprised if the craziness of this finale alone kept Se7en on top of the box office for an extra couple of weekends.
Last week’s subject, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, was a movie that I had never seen before this project, and one that has been somewhat forgotten by the general public despite its success at the time. Se7en, in contrast, is a film I’ve seen a number of times before this most recent viewing, and is still highly regarded by many to this day. I am not here to offer a counter opinion to the mainstream idea that this movie is excellent, and if someone told me they thought it was a perfect movie, I don’t know if I could adequately debate them down from their opinion.
The movie looks incredible, distinctly dark and with perfectly designed sets and costumes. Fincher refused to compromise on his vision after the Alien3 fiasco, and so everything drips with his specific touch. The sets are perfectly constructed and the lighting vacillates between dim darkness and overwhelming brightness. The unnamed city that the movie takes place in is a character in its own right, and it feels horribly lived in with every glimpse of it that we get.
Fincher himself describes it best on the DVD commentary:
I look at Se7en and I see something that was trying to be very realistic. It may be incredibly stylized but it was always in the tension. The thing that was forefront of my mind: how to make it rotting and how to make it real.
Every actor in the cast brings their A-game. Pitt took the role of Detective Mills as a way to break from his reputation as a heartthrob actor. His failure to do that is the only flaw in his performance. Freeman and Paltrow are excellent as well, with the two sharing the most touching scene of the whole film at about the halfway point. Though the supporting cast is very much on the sidelines, bit players like R. Lee Ermey and John McGinley shine with what they’re given.
There is, of course, one other major actor in this movie. I will get to him.
Se7en is handily a classic, a movie that has been talked about and dissected by analytical minds more experienced than mine at this sort of thing. Instead, then, of connecting symbols to metaphors and trying to theorize if all the characters were really in Hell the whole time, I will simply offer some thoughts on the movie that popped into my head as I was watching it this time around.
The pacing of Se7en’s first half is much stranger than I remember. Within the starting ten minutes, we have been introduced to our two leads and shown the first of our seven murder scenes, Gluttony. The image of the massively obese victim face down in spaghetti in a derelict apartment has become one of many iconic visuals from this movie, and both Fincher and the detectives take their time here.
The crime scene is pored over by both the actors and the camera. We feel as trapped in the space as the victim must have, unable to escape the meticulously laid out kill box crafted by John Doe.
Then, some police station squabbling happens, and it’s the next day at the Greed crime scene. Quickly after that, Morgan Freeman has a library montage, and then, oh wait, Gwyneth Paltrow is in this! We gotta have her, Pitt, and Freeman share an awkward dinner together! Finally, just as you’re forgetting the details of the case, our detectives decide to work together again and do some investigating.
It is extremely jarring for the movie to have such a hot start before slowing things way down, glossing over one of the film’s major crimes in the process. Thankfully, once the Sloth victim is found (and an all-time great jumpscare happens), we’re off to the races for the rest of the film.
The darkness on display in Se7en doesn’t feel like it’s just going for shock value (for the most part, anyway). In addition to reflecting the screenwriter’s horror at the most dangerous time in recent New York City history, the writing of the movie feels like a twisted mirror on the whole subgenre of police procedurals.
The 80s and 90s were full of buddy cop movies, mostly spawned from the success of Lethal Weapon in 1987. Tango & Cash, Turner & Hooch, even Die Hard with a Vengeance, which mixed up the formula of its own series by pairing the usually solitary Bruce Willis with Samuel L. Jackson, played into the trope of two firebrand cops butting heads, kicking butt and saving the day. By starting with the same framework of two clashing detectives working to catch a criminal, Se7en twists that formula and takes all the fun out of objectionable policework.
The character of Detective Mills is at the center of this reading. He’s brash, quippy even, and ready to bust any heads necessary to catch John Doe. He even stars in the movie’s only real action scene, a dynamic chase through dreary slums after the killer. Mills is the only optimist in a city surrounded by misery, and is anchored by his loving yet anxious wife, Tracy (Paltrow).
In the end, her head is in a box and Mills has succumbed to the misery and loathing for humanity that everyone else in the movie committed to long ago. A world with the kind of debauched crime we see in Se7en is not one with space for your average supercop. This contrast to a common trope of the time offers yet another point of interest for your average theater-goer in 1995, especially if they were getting tired of that subgenre.
It isn’t just with Pitt’s character that the script interrogates your Lethal Weapons and Die Hards either. Both Somerset and Mills use a number of illegal practices to get closer to their killer. The former enlists a secret FBI program that tracks the library activity of everyday citizens, the latter kicks a door in without due cause and then bribes a drug addict to provide false testimony.
The movie only takes a little time to interrogate the ethics of such practices, which other movies may have glossed over as badass or ingenious. Personally, I feel they could have been explored a bit more. This is especially in retrospect; now, questions over police brutality and the government’s ability to spy on its own citizens have been asked with much more frequency.
My two biggest complaints about Se7en after watching it again are entirely different from one another. The first is something the filmmakers could have accounted for and done differently. The second, as far as I can tell, isn’t something any decision maker behind the camera could have seen coming. Let’s start with the first one.
There have been many pieces of fiction that use characterized depictions of the seven deadly sins (Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Lust, Vanity, Wrath, and Envy) as a storytelling device. I have enjoyed a good handful of stories that do this, like Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. But Se7en, like so many of these other works, errs in its depiction of one sin in particular.
Most of the sins are depicted by a perpetrator of that vice: an obese person for gluttony, an avaricious rake for greed, etc. But Lust gets special treatment. In stories like these, Lust is frequently depicted as simply a sexually attractive woman. Not necessarily one who has a higher libido or is more willing to act as a sexual predator, just a woman who is appealing to the characters around her.
In Se7en, John Doe fixates on a prostitute and has her killed in an extremely disturbing method, which is saying something given the events of the movie. Perhaps this is a hot take, but I personally don’t find this to be punishing someone who has committed the sin of lust. It feels more akin to punishing someone who has inspired lustful feelings.
John Doe doesn’t torture and kill a fast food worker because they made him eat more, or a blackjack dealer because they inspired him to want more and more money. But he does kill a nameless prostitute horrifically because he found himself drawn to her and disgusted by her in the same breath. All the other murders feel like apt metaphors for the sins they represent. The Lust murder just feels exploitative and shocking for the sake of it.
That’s something that could have been altered during rewrites in the mid 1990s. Unfortunately, another part of the movie, one of its best parts in fact, is something that has only become an issue in hindsight.
The reveal of Kevin Spacey as John Doe is one of my favorite scenes in any movie ever, and a true twist, since the actor appeared in none of the marketing material. The way he screams out for the detectives who have been chasing him for the entire movie, annoyed that they would ignore the man they’ve been desperate to catch even a hint of for days, is permanently etched into my brain. Everything from this twist until the film rolls credits is far and away the best part of the movie.
There’s no getting around this, though. Kevin Spacey is a creep and allegedly a criminal sexual predator. Starting in 2017, he faced mass accusations of sexual misconduct and assault towards young men with some claims dating as far back as the 1980s. During multiple decades as one of the most acclaimed actors working in Hollywood, Spacey was allegedly preying on young men in and out of the industry.
Spacey has never been convicted for any sexual crime, and has recently been pitching a comeback tour after years of mostly silence. He’s not someone I enjoy seeing in films from yesteryear anymore, despite the fact that he often gives incredible performances in them. I will have to deal with this moving forward, unfortunately. But if anyone ever said that they were uncomfortable watching a movie of his ever again, I wouldn’t blame them in the slightest.
Despite these issues, Se7en remains outstanding. Though not quite as groundbreaking as contemporary works such as Pulp Fiction or The Matrix, the film presents to the world an auteur director with a fully developed style and world view, ready to gather acclaim and box office figures for years to come. Its principal cast solidify their place in the pantheon of stars with killer performances of a mostly excellent script.
If Fincher’s goal was to erase the disappointment of Alien3 from cultural memory, then mission accomplished. Critics at the time and in the decades since have consistently rated Se7en highly; it still sits at an 83% on Rotten Tomatoes. In a positive review for Entertainment Weekly at the time, Owen Gleiberman rolls his eyes a bit at the central premise but admits the execution more than makes up for it. In a retrospective review, Roger Ebert puts Se7en right up there with The Exorcist [5/5] in terms of horror thrillers. I disagree personally, but I’d only put Fincher’s film a step or two down from Friedkin’s masterpiece.
Even when you consider the darkness of its content, it isn’t a mystery as to why this movie did so well at the box office in late ‘95. The core concept of tracking down a serial killer with a compelling motif is interesting in and of itself, especially as Halloween looms. When compounded with a hot young lead, strong marketing, and positive pre-release reviews, this movie was shoe-in to replace the stale To Wong Foo at the top of the weekend box office.
Of course, current events may have helped increase the average American’s interest in bloody murder. Se7en was released during the tail end of the OJ Simpson trial, the gory details of which kept America on edge for nearly a year of court proceedings. In fact, it was the biggest movie in America when the Not Guilty verdict was announced. I like to think the quality of the movie would have made it a success even without this timing, but Americans were certainly primed for stories of brutal murder by the time of its release.
Does Se7en’s extended box office success reflect a boredom with the End of History? It’s certainly a movie that takes you out of your everyday life and makes you consider that maybe humanity isn’t so socially evolved after all. On the other hand, considering that the actual level of on screen violence is very low in Se7en, I don’t think it’s necessarily a one-to-one argument. At no point is any graphic torture or murder depicted as it happens, and the amount of visual gore is surprisingly light, considering the movie’s reputation.
Se7en also doesn’t necessarily feel like an indictment on the moment it was released either; the claims that its characters make on human nature feel more generally tied to post-industrial cities in general, not America in the 1990s. Fincher would later make Fight Club, which actually does comment on the American ‘90s, and will appear in this series.
Still, the content of Se7en makes it an outlier in terms of the popular movies of the time. Maybe ‘90s theatergoers saw the events of the movie as a safe way to dabble in the grotesque in a somewhat highbrow way. They could take in a nightmarish vision of humanity, one at odds with the general optimism of the time. Then, outside the theater, a return to the End of History.
Maybe that grimness has helped Se7en hold up as well as it has. I anticipate the content of this movie and the presence of Kevin Spacey will make it a tough watch for some, and I don’t blame them. But for those willing to sit down and absorb the misery of Se7en, you’ll more than likely see what kept audiences coming back to it almost 30 years ago, especially once you get to the third act. I love this movie.
Rating: 4.5/5
What Else Was At the Theater?
Paul Verhoeven’s cynical, bombastic, NC-17 exploration of the American Dream, Showgirls, premiered the same day as Se7en and peaked at Number 2. It’s a 4/5.
Empire Records, a contender for Most ‘90s Movie of All Time, also debuted that day. It bombed hard, peaking at 37th place before slipping out of theaters entirely in four weeks. It’s also a 4/5.
Next Week: Wow, that was a bummer! Next week though, we have some fun examining the strange career of a strange man as we discuss Get Shorty.
See you then!
-Will