And It was Good?

Or, the Theological Implications of Seven




Let me begin as I often do, apologizing for my absence and vowing to do better. I've been taken up with my beloved, camping, and sick with a cold in the seven days since last I wrote. I plan to spend the rest of the week reviewing before I return to work and thence explore the wider world again. Normally I review music. This week, I will be reviewing film. I start with a grisly favorite.


Seven was the kind of film that was very popular among my age group when I was in college: it trafficked in stylish gloom, in an almost Nietzschean contempt for the human animal. It doesn't have a happy ending; in fact, it posits the notion that happy endings are false, an impossible dream (I wonder if Charlie Kauffman took the straw man he unravels in Adaptation from this film). In the world of this film, human nature is too weak and vacillating to obtain real virtue, and evil is too powerful to be stopped. Love is but Tragedy-in-Waiting. For other examples, see Swimming With Sharks, The Usual Suspects, Fight Club and the third Alien movie (Incidentally, if you haven't seen any of these movies, there will be spoilers ahead. Fair warning).


Movie buffs will note the common threads these films share with Seven: two of them also feature Kevin Spacey in the heavy role, and the two that don't were directed, as Seven was, by David Fincher.


Kevin Spacey may not be, as critics are wont to say, the greatest actor of his generation, but he's still pretty damn good. He hasn't done anything really interesting since American Beauty, so it's really too early to tell at this point. The body of work leading up to his Oscar turn fairly screamed "type-casting," but Spacey worked the material he was given. Buddy Ackerman, Keyser Soze, and John Doe are all different men, with different motivations, and Spacey plays them all differently. That they all, in the end, come down on the side of the devils, is not relevant: there are seven deadly sins, not one, and of the three bad guys Spacey plays in Swimming With Sharks, The Usual Suspects, and Seven, only one of them is truly conscious of the fact that he is evil.


As to Fincher, he too hasn't surfaced with anything impressive in the new millenium (2002's Panic Room is merely watchable). But he is a skilled director who knows how to use darkness and light, who is equally comfortable with the sardonic, frenetic MTV-style and the grander, more sedate mode of cinema storytelling. I am sure that when he finds a new kind of story to tell (and Panic Room may have been the beginning of such a search), he will tell it well.


He might consider looking back at Seven, which, though it might be far less popular than Fight Club, is a deeper film, far more nuanced, and in the end, far more humane, once one scratches the surface.


The premise is one that doubtless had sociopaths the world over slapping themselves on the forehead for not having thought of it first: a serial killing that takes the Seven Deadly Sins (Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Lust, Pride, Envy, and Wrath) as its modus operandi. Each victim is forced at gunpoint to engage in an activity to which they already show inclination, to the point of death (for the first crime, an obese shut-in is forced to gorge himself until his stomach literally bursts). The Sin is turned upon the sinner, and as the teaching goes, the wages of sin is death.


But, as Ford Prefect would say, that isn't the clever bit. The clever bit is the relationship that the killer, called, in a surfeit of irony, John Doe, develops with the two detectives assigned to capture him. At first, the two cops are police-movie stock characters: the cynical, hard-bitten, about-to-retire veteran William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), and the idealistic, loose-cannon rookie David Mills (Brad Pitt). And naturally, the two go through the don't-like-each-other/learn-to-deal-with-each-other/come-to-esteem-each-other character arc, with a few key variations. The first such variation is that what first comes to bind the two men together is the Mills' wife, played by Gwenyth Paltrow. She invites Somerset to dinner and strikes up a friendship with him, albeit out of lonliness. The relationship is completely platonic by any reasonable standard; Somerset dispenses fatherly advice and shares her discuss for the urban environment that Mills has moved her to.


Contempt for the City (which appears to be New York, but is never expressly states as such. It represents every-City, the City of Man) is a dominant theme in Somerset's conversation, and is the reason for his impending retirement. He tells Mrs. Mills, when she confesses that she is carrying David's baby, but is terrified to raise a child in the city, that he, in a similar situation, convinced his lover to abort the child. He is regretful, of course, but feels positively that his course of action was the correct one. The City of Man is too corrupt even to raise human children in it.


Mills, on the other hand, expressly begged to be transferred to the City. When pressed for a reason, he said that he hoped to "do some good," and while this answer is not articulate, his subsequent behavior in the film does not render it as shallow. Mills demonstrates every characteristic of a Crusader, a Templar Knight. He is volatile, contemptuous of legal niceties, and clings to a vision of reality that many, Somerset included, would view as simplistic. Bad guys are malignant worms, "crazies," not worth any more attention that it takes to stomp on them, and certainly undeserving of human respect (when John Doe is in custody, Mills seems to delight in playing Bad Cop, snidely asking the killer if insane people are aware that they're nuts).


As I said, eventually the two put their differences aside to catche John Doe. But they never become friends, as Cop Movie Tradition would have it; there remains a gulf between them. In between the fourth and fifth murders of the seven, the Lust and Pride killings, the men sit at a bar and consider their options. Somerset tries to convince Mills not to get his hopes up, tries to explain that the City will wear down his moral underpinnings, that the Apathy which rules it scours such neat categories as good and evil. Somerset tries to tell Mills he is naive, Mills responds that Somerset is spiritually weak:

I don't believe that you're quitting because you think these things. I think you want to think these things, because you're quitting. You want me to agree with you, to say 'yeah, it's all fucked up, we should all go live in a log cabin somewhere.' But I won't say that. I won't. I can't.

To this, Somerset has no reply.


No, Arthur, that isn't the clever bit either. The clever bit come after the Pride killing, when John Doe, bald and bloody, strides into the police station and gives himself up. He claims that the remaining two bodies of the seven are buried somewhere, and that he will sign a full confession if Somerset and Mills, and only Somerset and Mills, accompany him to recover them. Both detectives are skeptical, but agree that the case must be finished. They don wires, and, with a lone SWAT helicopter for backup, drive John Doe out of the city.


It's a ruse, of course. They stop in an open field full of high-tenstion power lines and are met by a delivery van with a package. Somerset intercepts the van and opens the package, while Mills guards John Doe, who confesses to Mills that he has become envious of Mills and the fruits of domestic bliss that Mills enjoys with his wife. So much so, in fact, that he condemns himself of the Deadly Sin of Envy. Somerset discovers, with horror, "what's in the box," and tries to get Mills to put his gun down. Mills figures out what's in the box (his wife's head) and, as John Doe requests, becomes Wrath. Somerset pleads with Mills not to play John Doe's game. Mills struggles with his shock and anger, and gives in, gunning John Doe down in full view of the SWAT guys in the helicopter. The film ends with Mills sitting, like a sated beast, in the back of a police car, while Somerset tells the captain that he won't be retiring after all. Cue the closing quote:

Earnest Hemingway once wrote that the world is a fine place, and worth fighting for. I agree with the latter part.

Cut to black.


As I said, a gloomy story, almost Presbyterian in it's condemnation of the wicked Sons of Adam, and the inevitability of Judgement. And, as I said, a film happily recieved by the Tragically Hip of its time, feeding Hip Despair: The worlds f-ed up, the Titanic's going down, and there's nothing you can do about it, so drink up and dance merry. But a few years beyond the initial rush of the film's twist, and a few viewings on DVD, and more becomes apparent. To wit:




1. Most of the Seven Deadly Sins involve the excessive or disordered love of something which in itself is good, but becomes perverted by idolation. Gluttony, for example, is the disordered love of food and comfort, Lust the disordered love of sexual pleasure, Pride the disordered love of self, etc. The exception to this rule is Sloth, which is not founded on a surfeit of love, nor on a lack of it. Sloth, usually defined as laziness, is in reality Spiritual Despair, the lack of Hope. In the film, John Doe's Sloth victim is the only one who is not dead when the police find him.


Instead, he's all but a vegetable, having been strapped to a bed and fed a steady diet of narcotics and antibiotics. He has been reduced to the level of a beast, unable to communicate, hardly even able to move. Yet despite what the M.E. says, it seems that Sloth has suffered the least amount of actual pain, that he has in fact been drifting on a sea of drug-induced mindlessness. Of all John Doe's victims, he is the only one that is unaware of what has been done to him.




2. Before his discovery, Sloth is believed by the police to be John Doe himself. Only when the SWAT team invades Sloth's appartment to they discover another victim instead of the perp. The confluence of these facts is interesting, especially in the face of John Doe's rant on the nature of human sinfulness and the purpose of his murderous spree:

Only in a world this shitty, could you even try to call these people innocent and keep a straight face. But that's the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, and in every living room, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it's common. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not anymore. I'm setting the example.

3. John Doe claims to be Envy, because he wants David's simple life and pretty wife. But this theme his utterly absent from the rest of the film, and pretty easy to see through as a means to convict David of Wrath. Indeed, based on the above speech, would it not be truer to say that he suffers from Spiritual Pride, an unshakeable belief in his own superiority and the vileness of those around him. We are quick, in this day and age, to denounce this sin, and so is the film. The victim of the Pride killing is a model, who, after John Doe slices offer her nose, is given the choice, call for help and live deformed, or swallow sleeping pills and die. She chooses the latter, and even the detectives have difficulty summoning sympathy for her. She is then shuffled off, as John Doe turns himself in.


But it seems as though John Doe is the true victim of Pride, and is typically unaware of it, choosing to engage in an act of projection in victimizing the model. Pride is usually given pride of place among the sins, as the one "by which the angels fell." Satan's overmastering sin, blotting out and corrupting all his supposed origonal virtues, was his pride. Is it not be appropriate that the murderer in the film is motivated by the same sin?




4. Wrath is the excessive response to a wrong done to one. For a police officer to gun down an unarmed man, even though that man has been discovered to have murdered the officer's wife, is excessive, however much we sympathize with the officer, however easily we would do the same thing in the same circumstance (I cannot, in good faith, protest that I would be above such a thing). As an officer of the law, Mills is expected to allow the law to take it's course (which would be easy, as John Doe confesses to his crime). And as Children of God, we are expected to allow God to punish the wicked.


But there is that sympathy. Who would do other than David? Who would be able to resist the urge to save the law its trouble? Who, presented with a firearm and the man who had slaughtered one's spouse, could refrain from giving that man justice?


And that is the nature of Wrath: the excessive or disordered love of Justice. What sin is more transparently present in our image of the crusading cop? Dirty Harry is Wrath personified, killing those that do wrong and apologizing to none for it, indeed sneering at all who do not do as he does as weak. We sympathize with Dirty Harry, we silently give assent to his way of doing things, because we long for justice, and will have Dirty Harry's justice rather than none at all.




5. Where does this leave Envy? To us, Envy seems a silly, almost laughable offense, "the green-eyed monster that doth mock the meat it feeds on." Envy seems the little brother of Pride, the father of Theft. Dangerous, perhaps, but a gateway sin, not really Deadly.


Perhaps not. Envy can also be construed as an excessive love of Justice, or an excessive love of an ill-concieved Justice. The elder brother of the prodigal son is Envy: why do I not have what my brother gets? Why am I not getting what I should have. Did that brother ever dream of having a fatted calf killed in a feast for his sake, before his father ordered that the lost son should get one? Probably not. Envy is the belief that others should have nothing that one deems them undeserving of having. It is holding to Justice as one narrowly percieves it, not as Justice truly is. It is easy to imagine John Doe asking himself why should all these sinners live, even prosper more greatly than John himself does? This line of thought may prove barren (John is apparently independently wealthy, and chooses to fester in the slime of the city), but it does show a possible way to classify the villain as he classifies himself.




6. So Mills is Wrath, and Doe might be Pride or Envy, but what is Somerset? Why is he in this movie, beyond the banal necessities of Crime Drama? He does not become Mills' friend, the two barely function as partners. He may vow at the end of the film to give Mills "whatever he needs" but the promise rings hollow: what can the old man do for the fallen Wrath? What purpose does he serve in the film?


There are two lines of thought, as I see them. One is that Somerset is to Mills what Intelligence is to Will, the one who should be master of the other, but often is not. Despite Somerset's wisdom and intellectual gifts, he often has a hard time convincing Mills of anything. Mills acts out of certitude, he labels a person or a situation, and acts accordingly, head down, fearing nothing. Somerset can get inside John Doe's head, can listen to him and appreciate the deviousness of his mind. But he is unable to restrain his young partner from taking the quick and easy path. How common it is that the Mind cannot restrain the Passions that burn within the hearts of humans.


The other possibility is darker yet, and refers back to some of my earlier points. First, Sloth's victim is first beleived to be the killer. Second, John Doe justifies his rampage by condemning our Apathy, our unwillingness to confront sinfulness, our despair of living in a clean world. In effect, the Sloth of the world is what caused these people to die. Jesus said that those who sin will be forgiven, but those who blaspheme against the Spirit will not be forgiven. In other words, those that refuse the gift of resurrection, either by refusing to believe they are sinners or refusing to believe they can be saved, will not be saved. Sloth is the real spiritual monster.


Now who's the character who doesn't believe that good can be done, that evil can be withstood?


Ironically, if this line of thought is followed, it is the only one that shows even a glimmer of hope. This is in a way appropriate, as the earliest words of John Doe, found with the Gluttony victim are "Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up into light" (Milton, Paradise Lost). Somerset's Sloth is most obviously illustrated in his insistence on retiring, despite his captain's cajoling that being a cop is what his purpose is. He despairs of defeating evil, and thus will not try any longer. But at the end of the film, he changes his mind. Mills' fall has apparently convinced him that he must continue. That the world may not be fine, but it is worth fighting for. Sloth is repudiated.


And if Sloth is repudiated, then the sermon has been preached, and heard. But this opens the path to whether John Doe is truly an instrument of God. And even asking such a question is an act I will not, at this time of night, dare.