Backseat Driver

Posted by sek8 at October 15th, 2009

Se7en and Violence as Art, 2005
by Shannon Kunath

What is the appeal of a movie in which the bad guy wins? At the end of the movie Se7en, the events have unfolded just as the antagonist planned them. There is no heroic saving of the innocent, the innocent (Tracy) die along with the sinful. I propose that the appeal of this movie is that of a perfected artistic statement, in this case through the medium of murder. In real life the events portrayed in the movie would be horrible, but in the context of the movie, when we know that we are in fact safe, the character Jon Doe, and the Director, David Fincher, both use violence to create art.
Doe goes to great lengths to conceal his identity. This obsession in the movie goes beyond his desire not to be caught by the police. He doesn’t simply wear gloves to keep from leaving fingerprints; he actually cuts off the skin on his fingertips. His legal name is Jonathan Doe. It is not clear in the movie that he changed his name from his given name but if we assume that he did, it shows the lengths that he has gone to erase any sort of identity from his person. When interpreted through the idea that Doe is an artist, it becomes clear why these lengths are necessary. Not only could capture keep him from finishing his masterpiece, but having an identity would take focus off of his work and put it on him. In many ways this invisible artist is similar to the role of the director of the movie, never actually seen but ever present. Beyond his measures of removing his fingertips and changing his name, Doe also does not draw attention to himself through any show of personality. He is polite to the police officers, he tells them that he admires and respects them, but his speech itself does not have any distinguishing features, he uses plain English devoid of slang or discernable dialect. When Somerset asks Doe who he is, he responds, “Who I am means absolutely nothing.” He wants his work to speak for itself, in fact he is so dedicated to his work that in the end he sacrifices himself to it, he becomes Envy.

The movie is also unconcerned with giving any background or personality to Doe beyond the monstrosity of his acts. In the opening credit sequence, we see a montage of very close up shots of books with pages being turned, pictures of parts of the body, razor blades cutting off the tips of fingers, hands writing meticulously small and neatly, and dozens of composition notebooks. His hands are visible but never his face or any other part of the body. This choice emphasizes his agency over his identity, making it more important (for both the viewers and Doe himself) what he does than who he is. This idea is also emphasized by two particular shots in the credits sequence, the first being a clearly shown picture of two hands not attached to the body, again the idea of action and agency are enforced, and then later first a picture of a boy’s head is shown as Doe draws a line with a black marker over his eyes. Then the picture cuts to a shot of the entire face being covered in black marker. This progression conveys again the idea of anonymity, the erasure of a face, the removal of fingertips, or any defining feature. The artist/murderer becomes defined by his art.

The credits sequence also emphasizes the amount of work that Doe has put into his preparation for the murders. The montage of the credits shows him painstakingly sewing together the pages of his diaries, and the fact that montage is used at all in this sequence suggests that all of this has happened over an extended period of time. He displays amazing self control and planning, shown by the fact that the cops investigating his crime scenes are at a loss for clues beyond those that Doe left intentionally for them to find. The art-like quality of the murders is also apparent by his choice of victims. The victims are not chosen for conventional murder or serial-murder motives. Doe doesn’t know his victims personally they are simply chosen for their personification of the sins that Doe wants to illustrate. Nor do the victims show a pattern usually found in serial murder movies. They do not represent sexual objects for Doe and they vary in age and gender. The only thing that they do have in common is that they are all white, like Doe himself.

In both of the scenes in which Doe appears in the movie before he turns himself in, the camera purposely avoids a clear shot of his face. The first time that Doe is seen, when the detectives are investigating the Sloth crime scene, they mistake Doe for a photojournalist. The setting is a dark corridor in the apartment building where Sloth (Victor) was found. The camera focuses on the interaction between Somerset and Mills in medium close up. Suddenly there is the flash and click of a camera and the picture cuts to a shot where the photographer (Doe) is see in close up from behind in the foreground, but the lighting is such that his outline is only a profile, out of focus, with no fill light to illuminate it. In the shot that follows, his face is seen but he is wearing thick-framed black glasses and Spacey (the actor portraying Doe) uses movement down the stairs, his hands, and his camera to avoid being identified by the audience. The effect on a first-time viewing is perfect. Not only do we not identify Spacey as the actor (at this point in the film, noticing a famous actor in such a small part would be a tip-off to the audience) but we see just enough of his face not to be disturbed by any sort of over-concealment (e.g. a mask). The effect is that the audience dismisses the photographer just as the detectives do, he is a “John Doe” in the world of the movie, exactly the intention of Doe (and Fincher) himself.

The second time that Doe appears, Somerset and Mills are outside of his apartment, again in a long corridor of an apartment building. In this scene, Fincher again uses the camera to avoid our identification of the antagonist. His outfit could not be less descript. A hat, a trench coat, black pants and shoes. The first time that we see him, he is at the far end of the corridor where Mills and Somerset are standing. In this deep focus shot down the corridor Doe is backlit by the window at the end of the hallway. In this shot and the shots that follow of the chase scene, our visuals of Doe purport to be point of view shots from the eyes of the detectives. In the next scene however, Mills has a sketch artist create a composite of Doe. It is therefore just the audience who is still in the dark about who exactly Doe is and what he looks like. After we see him at the end of the hallway in profile, he is seen in a number of shots as a disembodied hand reaching around corners to shoot at Mills. These shots are reminiscent of the credit sequence, for they again emphasize the antagonist’s agency by way of his hands. Later in the sequence, even when Doe is in full view running through a parking lot the camera is careful not to show his face. The most convincing shots in this sequence are at the very end where Doe and Mills are cornered in an alley. At this point, the camera is close to Doe but still finds ways to hide his face from the audience. He attacks Mills from above, Mills is between a garbage truck and the brick wall of the alley. We are not aware of Doe’s presence, he standing on the garbage truck, until his hand reaches into the frame from above and hits Mill on the head with a tire iron. Once Mills is on the ground, we see Doe’s feet, in close up, descending from the truck. This shot works the same way as the earlier shots of just his hands, it emphasizes his movement, but not who he is. Next we see Doe’s reflection in a puddle of water on the ground. Because he is backlit, only his profile is visible in this shot, upside down and blurred by the ripples in the puddle. We then see Mills in medium close up, on his hands and knees, and Does gun enters the frame from the upper right corner, and again all that is visible is his hand in a black glove. The next shot is a point of view shot from Mill’s perspective, with the muzzle of the gun in extreme close up on the left side of the screen, and Doe’s arm and head, in profile and out of focus on the left side of the screen, in the background. This is an ingenious use of the camera and lighting. For this shot the camera itself could not have been more than three feet from Doe’s face and yet he remains hidden. Through focus and lighting, the shot makes this a plausible reality, even though Doe is not wearing a mask, or anything to disguise his face except a hat.

Just as the film insists that the antagonist remains a true “John Doe,” it emphasizes that the crimes should be seen as art in a number of ways. One of the most apparent is that the murders are not portrayed as the occur until the very last two (Envy, Doe, and Wrath, Mills). The murder scenes are set up to be read as tableaus of violence, after the violence itself has taken place. This aspect is shown in the crime scenes of Gluttony, Greed, and Sloth in particular. The Gluttony crime scene is very dark. This use of lighting emphasizes that the investigators are in the dark as to what they are seeing. The police at this point do not know the serial nature of the crimes, and they know nothing of the motivation. The thick air inside of the house allows for a particularly eerie effect, the flashlights that Somerset and Mills are using cast rays of light that are visible as they pass through the air. The two beams of light are suggestive of there individual approaches to the crime scene, that in this first scene as well as the majority of the others, are vastly different from each other. Somerset’s approach to the murder scene is slow and methodical, while Mills quickly glances over details and draws inappropriate conclusions. This difference between the two investigators as well as the “artistic” nature of the gluttony crime scene is particularly evident in a shot that shows the enormous dead man from behind, perfectly centered, with Mills on the right side of the body without gloves and Somerset on the left wearing gloves. They walk different ways around the man, and have different approaches to solving his murder. Somerset is immediately suspicious, while Mill’s jokes that “if this isn’t a coronary, I don’t know.” That the police are meant to be confused about this murder is reinforced not only by the darkness of the crime scene but also that the murder’s characteristic “labeling” of the murder is hidden in this first case behind the refrigerator. It is only when Somerset returns to the crime scene after the Greed murder that he finds the word “Gluttony” written in grease, hidden behind the fridge along with a note that reads “Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.” This idea of a long road is foreshadowing of the chain of murders that the detectives will find, and is reinforced by the fact that the crime scene of this murder is completely dark, with only flashlights to light the way, and the scene of the final two “sins” Envy (Doe) and Wrath (Mills) could not be more brightly lit, in the desert in broad day light, for once without the rain that cloud the majority of the movie.

The second crime scene, Greed, is much more out in the open. The word Greed is written in blood across the beige carpet of the lawyer’s office. Fincher adds to the artistic nature of this crime scene by making the shots of the office completely symmetrical. In the middle of the scene as Mills enters the crime scene and asks the other police officers to leave so that he can look around there are two particularly symmetrical, alternating shots. The first is that of Mills centered in the shot behind a large desk (also centered) with a picture in the middle of the wall behind him. This shot is alternately cut with a point of view shot of what Mills is looking at, the opposing wall, that is also completely symmetrical with two pictures of exact size and similar design on either side of the vertical axis of the frame and then two televisions of exact size displaying the same channel are seen on the outer edges of the shot. The shot appears almost as if a mirror was held up on the vertical axis to replicate one side of the shot onto the other the symmetry is so precise. The symmetry and duality of this scene may be indicative that this is the second murder, and it is this murder, with its motivation so clearly displayed, that leads Somerset back to the first crime scene to discover that the two are linked. Only after this alternation of shots does the camera give us an establishing shot of the entire crime scene and the word “greed” is visible for the first time. At this crime scene the investigators are again at a loss for clues. Doe leaves at this murder the words “Help Me” written in fingerprints behind a painting. The painting is the clue that the detectives are unable to see on their own, they only look behind it because they learn that the painting has been hung upside down from Gould’s (Greed’s) wife. Doe’s use of the painting is another clue towards his artistic inclination. He trusts that eventually his clue will be found, but only by someone familiar with the art piece. Similarly, the murders can only be solved by someone who understands the artistic motives driving the murderer.

Of all of the crime scenes, the Sloth murder is the most reminiscent of formal art. The entire act took over a year to create, this fact is surmised by the detectives when they find a stack of pictures, one for each week of the month that document the decaying of the victim’s body. The pictures work as time-lapse photography, and they were specifically meant to be found by investigators. This murder in particular is important not for the act of killing the victim, but rather the final product that was created: a man who rotted while he was still alive and documentation of the whole process. In the filming of the crime scene, Fincher adds other artistic touches to enhance the performance-art quality of the scene. The room is full of air fresheners hanging from the ceiling, which create an artistic repetition of form. The body itself is so decayed that it creates an artistic effect in itself, similar to gluttony corpse. In fact, when viewed in the same terms as the image of the “fat man’s” obese corpse laid out on the autopsy slab, the artist (Doe) seems to be experimenting with extremes of the human body. In both cases, the bodies are seen as nude, the Gluttony corpse is repulsive but also interesting because it is so obese, while Sloth’s body is repulsive because he is so thin and the flesh is rotting off the bone. Much like the modernist movement of art, stretching art, and the body, to its extremes seems to be what the director is showcasing in this movie.

Somerset is the driving force in the investigation because he understands what Doe is doing. In the opening sequence of the film, Somerset is portrayed getting ready for work. Somerset is like Doe because he approaches his work with precision. In this opening sequence there is a close up shot that shows Somerset’s necessities for work all lined up on his dresser, presumably so that he wouldn’t forget anything. After he meticulously fixes his tie in the mirror, he picks up his badge, a switchblade, a pen, and his reading glasses one at a time. Noticeably absent from this ensemble of items is a gun, widely thought to be the policeman’s most important tool. Somerset however, is a character that uses his intellect to solve his crimes, not force. This aspect of his personality is emphasized by the presence of the pen and the reading glasses in his necessities. Somerset looks closely and remembers what he sees. His enquiring method is enforced in the next scene, where he is investigating a murder not committed by the film’s antagonist. He walks slowly through the crime scene, carefully taking everything in. He looks closely at children’s drawings held by magnets on the refrigerator, not focusing on the body in a pool of blood on the floor. In this scene, the director is setting up the Somerset character to be the inquiring mind within the police force that will understand Doe’s crimes. Somerset’s unique outlook is underlined by what the other detective at the crime scene says to him, “We will be really glad to get rid of you Somerset, always these questions with you.”

After Somerset and Mills discover the theme of the seven deadly sins, their approach is again shown to be drastically different. Somerset heads to the library, while Mills pores over photographs of the crime scene. This scene uses parallel montage to portray both of the detectives at the same time while highlighting their different approaches. Somerset approaches the crimes as a statement, as an ideological act. He therefore does research into grounding the acts in ideology, searching for references to the seven deadly sins in literature. He realizes that he needs to understand the killer’s frame of reference if he is going to understand these murders. This approach to the murders is reflected in the way that Somerset walks slowly through the library, gathering what he needs. His research is slow and thorough. His deep thinking on the subject is reinforced by the music that is playing in the background, a slow classical melody that is diegetic sound echoed through the stacks of the abandoned library. But non-diegetic during the cross cuts to Mills in his apartment. The use of this continuity of sound enforces that the two narratives should be read as the same scene, and also the ultimate superiority of Somerset’s approach. During this scene, Mills is shown sitting at home on the couch with pictures of the murders in front of him. While Somerset understands the killer as an ideological extremist, Mills simply sees a madman and a criminal. When the camera is in the library with Somerset, many of the shots portray his hands turning pages, and show him from a distance looking for books and reading. While the camera shows Mills however, it is mainly composed of close-ups on his face and the pictures that he is looking at. This technique implies that Mills is not looking beyond his own frame of reference in order to solve the crimes, he doesn’t see “the big picture” since he does not put the crimes into context. Somerset however, investigates the crimes in the largest frame of reference, the library, as symbolic as the sum of human artistic endeavors. Also we only see Mills as static, sitting on the couch, looking at the pictures not even moving his head. Alternately, we see Somerset moving around the library, his eyes moving over the page, and his hands moving, turning pages. This shows the productivity of Somerset’s approach as opposed to Mills’ futile attempt to gain anything from looking at the pictures. The end of this montage underlines this point when Somerset is shown finishing the night by putting his results on Mills’ desk while Mills is shown, defeated, watching television. Mills inability to understand is also emphasized in the next scene in which he is shown, frustrated, attempting to read Dante’s Inferno and then when he receives the Cliff’s Notes versions of the books that Somerset had pointed him to. It is this inability to comprehend the act that ultimately leads to Mills’ downfall at the end of the movie, and the completion of the act as such.

If violence and murder are the media of the art in the movie, what is the message? This is best understood through a conversation that Doe has with the detectives as they ride out to the scene of the final murders. The movie at this point becomes self referential when Mills accuses Doe of being the “movie of the week.” This line is ironic because the movie is itself a passing show of violence in our modern cinema. As Doe puts it, “We see a deadly sin on every street corner…and we tolerate it, we tolerate it because it’s common.” Isn’t this what cinema has become? All of our media is saturated in violence and it is tolerated because it is everywhere. What Se7en attempts to do however, is to transcend the violence itself, by not really gratifying the viewers’ tastes for explicitly shown violence on screen, and rather imposes a kind of imagined violence on the audience, by giving the murder scenes artistic qualities and meaning, in order to make something special out of the media of violence and murder on both the level within the movie, in which Doe is the artist, and the movie itself, of which Fincher is the artist. The audience must reconstruct the actual events in their minds, making them contemplate not only the horror of the violence itself, but the nature of each of the sins that Doe chooses to punish. The murder scenes become the canvases and the movie is the progression of the viewer’s exploration of the entire act that Fincher and Doe have created. It is this art of torturous implied violence that makes the movie so effective. The final thought that viewers are left with is that the Murderer/Artist is victorious, that sin wins, and therefore beware. This point is best enforced by the consideration of the ending. New Line, the production company of the movie, originally opposed the ending of the original script (and the final version) . They did not think that the audience would accept a film in which the antagonist “won.” Usually in the frame of cops chasing criminals the movie ends with the cops catching the murderer just in time to prevent further harm. The production company suggested endings in which Somerset and Mills saved Tracy (Mills’ wife) from the murderer and apprehended Doe. Another suggestion included that Somerset should be the one to kill Doe, therefore preventing Mills from fulfilling his role in Doe’s plan of becoming “wrath.” Fincher and Pitt opposed these changes and eventually prevailed, allowing for the film to end on a dark note. This choice further implies the importance that the artist/murderer finish his masterpiece, including all of the seven sins. If this had not been the case the composition of the whole “work” in both the sense of the movie and within the movie, would have been unbalanced and therefore ineffective. Having the work complete and intact allows for the full import of the act (and the film) to be visited on the audience. This is the artistic statement of the movie that serves as a warning to the audience, that even “acceptable” sins in our society can have dire consequences. Therefore the movie works as a grim set piece that warns of the degradation of our society.