Tom Jodry
BBC culture
David Fincher's dark thriller is a commentary on the urban decay and religious conservatism of the Reagan era. But it also anticipated our obsession with true crime today.
Thirty years after its premiere, the film Seven David Fincher's is today celebrated as the zenith of neo-noir crime thrillers.
It grossed a whopping $327 million at the box office on a budget of $34 million and earned praise from most critics when it was released in 1995.
Yet a persistent argument against the film was that it relied too heavily on creepiness and the desire to shock and awe in order to divert attention from one-dimensional ideas and worn-out crime archetypes.
Washington Post critic he became an island na Seven for masking a "clichéd scenario" with explicit "bloodshed," while a New York Times reviewer regretted that "even body bags don't save him from boredom."
Warning: This article contains descriptions of violence that may be disturbing to some readers.
Three decades later, however, it is clear that some critics missed another layer of the film - the way it interpreted the crisis of American society in the 1980s.
At the beginning of that decade, there was a worldwide recession, which coincided with high crime rates in urban centers, a crack epidemic, and the spread of AIDS.
The new US President Ronald Reagan responded to these problems with a speech about "toughing on crime".
Among his prominent supporters were various influential Christian figures, leaders of what became known as the Christian Right or Religious Right, who preached the importance of traditional family values.
All of this influenced the film. Seven.
On the one hand, the film is an extremely skillfully crafted thriller about a psychopathic serial killer, but beneath that noirish brilliance lies a fascinating vision of the way America has responded to some of its most controversial social issues.
The film's seductive main premise can be easily unpacked.
Two detectives, jaded veteran William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and idealistic rookie David Mills (Brad Pitt), search for a classically trained serial killer known as John Doe (Kevin Spacey, deceptively absent from the opening credits) as he orchestrates murders in a symbolic parallel to the The seven deadly sins of early Christianity.
The trail begins with the corpse of an obese man, condemned for the sin of gluttony, whose stomach ruptured after he was forced to overeat at gunpoint.
As other murders pile up, the detectives fumble around without much real work until John Doe inexplicably turns himself in to them.
The twist comes when Mills discovers what's inside a cardboard box delivered to him by courier, the severed head of his wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), and in the now legendary final scene, he succumbs to the seventh sin of wrath by killing John Doe on the spot.
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Unlike the mysterious John Doe, the film has a real and clear origin story that can be traced.
Andrew Kevin Walker wrote the original screenplay for three years in the late 1980s, after moving to New York in 1986 and getting a job at Tower Records in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens.
For someone who grew up in the rolling hills of central Pennsylvania, arriving in the concrete jungle of New York, then ravaged by a crime wave and epidemics, was a crack i side, was a shock.
"Every time you went up the stairs, crack bottles would crunch under your feet," Walker tells the BBC.
"Trash was piling up on the sidewalk, and I realized that after a while I had become numb to the sounds of gunfire."
"During the week you would see an abandoned car, then its windows smashed, then its tires stolen, and by Sunday it would be a charred skeleton. You felt like the external rot was seeping into your soul and emptying you from the inside."
These could have just been Walker's personal impressions, but reports from the time show that urban crime was on the rise.
New York Times article from January 1987 It is pointed out that murders in some of the country's largest cities spiked in 1986.
And Walker's experiences were reflected in political speeches from that decade.
"Many of you have written to me about how afraid you are to walk the streets alone at night," Reagan said in a 1982 radio address.
"You have every right to be concerned. We live in the midst of a crime epidemic that claimed the lives of more than 22.000 people last year and touched nearly a third of American households."
To create an atmosphere for Seven, Walker and Fincher connected Walker's personal observations of chaos to the "broken windows" theory.
That was a criminological concept, elaborated in a 1982 issue of The Atlantic, who argued that visible signs of vandalism create a positive feedback loop that triggers more destruction and crime.
Seven is full of such signs in its dilapidated spaces, peeling paint, cracked plaster, rotting garbage, cockroach-infested apartments, and industrial atrophy of rusted metal and burnt brick walls.
But it was the human misery, Walker says, that made the biggest impression on him.
"Every morning on my way to work, I passed by a crowd of homeless people begging in desperation, too many for you to ever do any significant work for them, while their children lounged around beside them and peed in the street drain," he says.
"When you face it on a daily basis, you end up with an armor of apathy to defend yourself from feelings of guilt."
Serial killers and televangelists
Walker wanted to describe a world numbed by apathy, but also an antagonist, John Doe, who absorbs the suffering around him like a sponge.
He assigned this character to be a serial killer, which was again a choice inspired by reality.
A flurry of news reports about real-life serial killers throughout the 1980s turned people like Jeffrey Dahmer, the Golden State Killer, Richard Ramirez, and the Muskwell Hill Killer into in celebrities.
It turns out that the perception of an increase in serial killings was not mere media distortion, but a measurable reality.
Such murders skyrocketed in the late seventies, and reached its peak in the eighties, before declining again in the last decade of the 20th century.
In the meantime, President Reagan's criminal law reforms, stricter penalties, expanded powers of law enforcement agencies, and more often prison sanctions, arrived wrapped in uncompromising rhetoric.
"The American people want their government to get tough and go on the offensive," the president said in 1986, while signing the anti-drug law.
"And that is exactly what we intend to do, with greater zeal than ever before."
The character of John Doe is a caricature of this attitude, although Andrew Hartman, an academic historian and expert on culture wars from the late 20th century, tells the BBC that it would be wrong to suggest that the film aligned itself with right-wing or left-wing parties.
"The movie Seven "it never works," he says, noting that when Democrat Hillary Clinton was first lady in the 1990s, "she took up the baton of being tough on crime."
Clinton in 1994 posted: "We need more police, tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders... We need more prisons to keep violent offenders off the streets for as long as necessary."
And Clinton wasn't exactly associated with the Reaganite right.
"These ideas about crime come and go like the tide in both political parties," Hartman says.
By creating John Doe for Seven, Walker was inspired by the ideas of sin, damnation, and divine punishment that were extremely prevalent in public space.
Prominent evangelists such as Jerry Falwell Sr., for example, a Baptist minister and founder of the Moral Majority, he attacked "pornographers, petty traders and those who corrupt the youth."
During that time, James Dobson, founder of the worldwide Christian ministry 'Focus on the Family', sought to return back God-fearing obedience in children through physical punishment in the belief that "pain is a wonderful purifier."
The televangelist Pet Robertson he predicted the coming Armagedon based on "certain signs or clues that His coming is near."
Hartman sees parallels between this vocabulary and that in Seven, no matter how exaggerated and distorted it is when it comes from John Doe.
"When the religious right became entrenched at the center of American culture and ethos, it blamed a permissive culture of hedonism for destroying the family, triggering crisis with sid and causing delinquency," he says.
If the character of John Doe is inspired by the speeches of politicians and the theories of the evangelical right, Detective Somerset seeks answers from a different source: the library.
There he combs through volumes of Thomas Aquinas, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare for a better insight into the seven deadly sins.
Contrasting with his meticulous work are Mills's sloppy attempts to read retold versions of these works, an element introduced for humor but potently imbued with broader cultural significance.
A handful of bestsellers from the 1980s shared the same warning: that those essential texts that form the backbone of Western culture, the so-called "great books" reading, were being abandoned, with dire consequences.
Public intellectuals such as Alan Blum, ED Hirsch, Alasdair Mackintosh They argued that ignorance of these great books among the youth was the reason for the immorality of modern society.
Walker did not read these books firsthand, but the gravitational force of their messages spilled over into everyday cultural discourse.
"I have something to tell you: I'm Mills," he says.
"Bennett's Encyclopedia for Readers It allowed me to sift through relevant literary references, and then I found a way to translate the decoding of that research, similar to reading a retold text, into a script as a mild self-satire.
"It's funny, though: it wasn't until later that I started rallying around how looking things up online is no substitute for real learning."
Maybe so, given the way he commented on the eighties, Seven could be even more relevant to today's moment.
“His theater of cruelty is motivated by what you might call the eighth cardinal sin: obsession,” says Kevin Hagopian, a professor of media studies at Penn State University.
"John Doe is aware that he has set off a media circus that anticipates the obscene fascination of contemporary culture." bloody details from the true crime genre.
"In that sense, Seven was planted in the soil of the eighties, but the influences it spawned have only now reached full maturity in a media landscape that craves the most gory details of crime.
"That implication from Seven "could actually be the most disturbing," Hagopian adds.
"Not because we are inertly apathetic, but because, given the chance, we would all love to marinate in the same taboo pleasures and sadistic retaliations that fascinate John Doe."
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