90's Watch: Se7en (1995)

Watched:  02/05/2025

Format:  Alamo

Viewing:  3rd or 4th

Director:  David Fincher

I hadn't seen this movie since VHS, I don't think.  It kind of fell into the category of "a very well-crafted movie I never need see again".  But, it had been a while since I had a hang with Simon, and this was where we wound up.

Se7en (1995) is fascinating as a movie that happened at a very specific time, with stars on the rise, stars at the height of their power, during a particular wave of movies passing through the world.  And, certainly, a look brought to film that was different from everything else on the screen at that moment thanks to director David Fincher.

Pitt had been skyrocketing since 1991's Thelma & Louise, and co-starred with Tom Cruise the year prior in Interview With a Vampire.  He was on the forefront of the new Hollywood of the era.  I'd seen Paltrow in Hook and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, but didn't know who she was until this movie.  Kevin Spacey, who had been around for a minute, had just exploded with The Usual Suspects, and was about to take off on a huge career.  And Morgan Freeman, a veteran of the screen, finally blew up in 1989's Lean on Me, and seemed like the established star of the cast to my young eyes.  

Other players include John C. McGinley, R. Lee Ermey and a barely used Richard Roundtree.

Silence of the Lambs had arrived in 1991 and ushered in Serial Killer-sploitation.  I'm not sure it's not still around, and certainly director David Fincher has enjoyed a career of touching the topic with Mindhunter and Zodiac.   And for a good chunk of the 90's, we were inundated with movies about all flavors of serial killers, sometimes mixing genres to give us sci-fi serial killers or whatever, but plenty of movies about a guy who was up to no good and the haggard cop(s) who would catch them.  I think Copycat was the one where I just felt sad watching another one of these and thinking "Sigourney Weaver, you're too good for this".  

Meanwhile, David Fincher was making cool-ass videos, starting with Rick Springfield's sci-fi laden "Bop Til You Drop". In or world, he was also responsible for a trio of videos that had a deep impact on the psyche of a young The League: Paula Abdul's "Cold Hearted", Madonna's classic "Express Yourself", and George Michael's "Freedom '90".  He'd also done Alien3 which I absolutely hated for a number of reasons (and still hate for those same reasons) while I also thought it kicked ass as a stand-alone film, bringing fresh visuals and ideas to what I knew as sci-fi.  

While Fincher's work is/ was wildly stylized and stylistic, he seemed able to jump from visual language to visual language, to the point where I don't know if I thought of Fincher of having a particular look - but an eye for how to visually tell a story.*

While folks will always remember the plot of Se7en once they've seen it, I'm fairly certain most folks who've seen it just once would consider the visuals fairly indelible.  

The film itself feels like 1970's urban decay that's experienced roof damage and is leaking everywhere.  It's always raining.  The city itself is a cesspool, a mix of 1970's Times Square and LA's Skid Row, and probably what certain cable news watchers think the city is like and why they won't go there.  It's not exactly Anytown, USA, but it's also an unnamed urban corridor that fell on hard times fifty years ago and just kept falling.  It's the end of the 20th century in buildings built at the beginning of the century and last painted in maybe 1959.  A real mood.  The New York of Basketcase seems cheery by comparison.

Plot-wise, Se7en is an odd mix of very 1990's serial killer stuff, with a super-genius killer two steps ahead of our heroes, working out some pattern that needs to be discovered, anticipated and stopped.  The cops are fairly normal Joes.  This is just before super-science-cops infiltrated TV (ironically starring Manhunter's William Peterson as the lead).

Someone is out there committing murders that reflect the seven deadly sins (something, sadly, I know more from Captain Marvel/ Shazam! than I know from literature).  They're brutally torturing people, leading the cops to them.  The visuals here felt unique when I first saw the movie, and they still, to this day, work just fine.  Especially in Fincher's hellscape city.

But I think what sets it apart isn't just the cruelty of the crimes - because holy shit, there is that.  It's the careful construction of the cop who can't do this anymore in Freeman and what he sees in the world - his own loathing of man's endless sin, and the cop who wants to do good and be the kind of hero Freeman's character knows can't survive, at least not in spirit.  With the killer's obsession regarding man's sin, they're three sides of a triangle.  

And, of course, the other triangle of Pitt, Freeman and Paltrow and good fellowship is inverted.

The weariness of the older cop and the easily redirected passion of the optimistic, brash young cop is fascinatingly well done and runs deeper than I think I'd previously given it credit.  Heck, even Morgan Freeman is dressed as a traditional gumshoe and Pitt is dressed as a hip 90's movie cop to drive the point home.

SPOILERS on a 30 year old movie that's been meme'd to death

But the movie is also a super @#$%ing bummer, which is why I don't watch it over and over.  No matter how well constructed, once the mousetrap of the ending is sprung the first time, you know what's coming on a second viewing, and it makes my skin crawl (and Howard Shore's music cues sure as hell indicate that Paltrow is doomed, even if there's nothing in the text to say it outright til too late).  

The movie is ripe with pathos, but it can feel like one or two notes, never really letting up.  YMMV.

It's a wildly effective ending, and the kind of horror that sticks with you (like, say, The Mist).  And definitely something I'd point the kids to if they wanted to see what it means to go for the dark ending, and how to get there.  

So, yeah, all-in-all, it works.  I dig it for that.  But the slow march to that point is maybe not the most fun movie you're going to watch.  Fortunately, I don't *think* (and argue with me here) that this is necessarily just dark because it can be, and just to be cruel.  It's almost as much a deconstruction of our ideas about sins, sinners, cops and killers and innocence - in the world and in movies.  

*But I'll always criticize the movie for basically lifting Mark Romanek's video for Closer for the titles in tone and editing style and not hiring him for the job.