Detective Somerset's Restored Faith in the World: Se7en - Movie Review
David Fincher is a director who I admire immensely. His films such as Zodiac, The Social Network, and Gone Girl (as well as shows such as Mindhunter) are some of the most entertaining, thought-provoking, and beautiful pieces of media I’ve watched in my life. What’s more is that Fincher is one of the few mainstream directors I’ve come across who isn’t interested in providing the audience with easy answers or happy endings: he’s very comfortable leaving the theatres and living rooms with a sense of desolation that reminds us of the all-too familiar reality that life, often times, leaves us with more questions than answers.
Se7en is one of Fincher’s best efforts, one of my favourite films of all time. Starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as Detective Somerset and Mills respectively, the film is about the two detectives searching for a killer by the name of John Doe, who’s victims correspond with the seven deadly sins of scripture: greed, lust, envy, pride, sloth, gluttony, and wrath.
A movie that’s famed for its iconic box ending, Se7en has so many layers to it that I was compelled to rewatch it recently. And thank God I did because I picked up on another great aspect of the film, an aspect of the movie that I believe has real significance in demonstrating the power of evil in bringing someone back to life.
Understandably, many would assume that the point of Se7en is to explore the importance of the murderer’s motivations, to see why John Doe murders the people he does in the way he does. But what struck me when I rewatched the film was the role of Detective Somerset. The movie takes place over the course of seven - yeah, seven - days, days that are meant to be Somerset’s swansong on detective duty. Somerset happens to be the character who develops the strongest understanding of John Doe to begin with, since his clues are shrouded in literary references that only Somerset had a strong grasp of, allowing him to piece together Doe’s identity. With this in mind, upon closer inspection, Se7en is about how evil can reignite a good, apathetic man’s faith in the world.
Mills and Somerset are great protagonists: Pitt and Freeman kill it in their respective roles, with Pitt wonderfully portraying the hot-headedness and foolhardy nature of someone who’s intuitive, whereas Freeman brilliantly acts as the seasoned vet, the intellectual who’s deliberate, calculating, and very, very aware of the disappointments that life reliably serves people with.
Fincher does a great job in presenting the world that the film inhabits as a dreary one with the dark colour scheme - it presents the world as an evil, insufficient place accurately. The structure of the film is great too, since Somerset refuses to be fully involved in the case despite being the detective with the intellect to put the case together: it serves as a wonderful hook that makes the ending of the film that much more profound.
The Christian elements of Se7en really come through when Somerset begins to take the investigation very seriously: with each victim of the deadly sins, we see Somerset diving more into classic literature such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and reacquainting himself with the Bible despite Mills’s reluctance, since he’s more of a straight shooter, more gung ho when it comes to catching criminals. These scenes, though more low impact compared to much of the movie, nicely foreshadow Mills’s wrath that comes to ruin him at the end.
The mystery of John Doe is brilliant too because it’s that very mystery that keeps Somerset involved in the case. It’s almost as if Doe’s elusive nature is seductive to Somerset despite his reluctance to stay in the police force - perhaps revealing the kind-hearted man that Somerset really is despite his cold, intellectual demeanour.
This is very relevant because there are two scenes in the movie that I believe really reveal Somerset’s heart: the scene with Mills’s wife Tracy (played wonderfully by Gwenyth Paltrow) at the diner, and the scene with Mills at the bar. The former scene is concerning Tracy’s pregnancy that Mills isn’t aware of, and the latter is about people’s moral apathy.
The conversation between Somerset and Tracy is powerful because it reveals the crisis of conscience Somerset has regarding the world around him: he loathes the idea of bringing a baby into a fallen world, yet he recognises that children are fundamentally a manifestation of hope and joy in the face of such a world - consequently convincing Tracy to keep her baby. Somerset’s conversation with Mills has its own significance too: during this scene we see that despite Mills’s limits he is an optimist - he believes in the good in people, irrespective of how uninterested in ethics the average person appears to be in the eyes of Detective Somerset. We see Somerset’s more pessimistic view on human nature, and he’s unimpressed by Mills’s conclusion that he uses his pessimism as justification to quit his post.
The scenes really set up the best scene in the whole film - the scene where the detectives drive Doe up to his specified location. The scene is brilliant in many ways, but primarily it’s great because we see that Doe and Somerset are actually two sides of the same coin. Doe’s disgust and mistrust of the world causes him to seek vengeance: murdering people he believes represent the evil that’s rife in the world, whilst Somerset’s involvement in the force - we can infer - was born from that same sentiment but he sought to save lives not end them. Not only this, but at the point they were in the car together, their crusades were both coming to an end.
It’s telling that during the back-and-forth between Mills and Doe, Somerset didn’t disagree with Doe’s observations of the people he murdered like Mills does - he only objected to Doe’s idea that he was martyr for a higher power. As the scene unfolds, we notice that Mills is unashamedly human: he gets angry and very passionate as Doe turns the screw, showing off his superior intellect.
This thread proves to be decisive by the end. The ending is simply amazing: how Doe’s plan comes together is some of the greatest writing in film that I’ve seen. At this point, we see how Doe suffered with his own deadly sin because of what Mills represented: a genuine human being. In Doe’s words: “he wanted to taste the life of a simple man”.
Of course, Mills’s fate inspires Somerset to remain in the force. What Doe did to engender the completion of his plan was pure, unmitigated evil, and Mills, being as human as he was throughout the whole film, did what anyone would do in such a situation despite the more logical, effective outcome being screamed at his face by Somerset.
Despite the peverse nature of the ending, there is a beauty to it that can be teased out of it. In Mills succumbing to Doe’s plan, giving in to his human emotions, Somerset becomes reintegrated into the world, believing that the world’s worth fighting for. In other words, he becomes human. Somerset’s U-turn by the end of the film demonstrates the power evil can have in making apathetic people believers, believers in a better world, a world that’s worth fighting to make come into existence.