Originating from the pulpy crime paperbacks of the early 20th century, noir films had their heyday in the ’40s, with classics like The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), The Big Sleep (1946) and Out of the Past (1947) delighting and scandalizing audiences worldwide. These films helped create many of the iconic crime movie tropes that still pervade modern film and television. Alcoholic hardboiled detectives with troubled pasts, oppressive cityscapes full of steamy alleyways and rain-soaked streets, beautiful damsels in distress, gambling dens full of cigarette smoke and shady characters, and sleazy politicians with easily-greased palms and lots of skeletons in their closets.
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These ideas provided fodder for hundreds of films throughout the classic noir period in the ’40s and ’50s, and many of them carried over into the genre that would become known as the psychological thriller. This evolution was of course expanded upon by the legendary director Alfred Hitchcock, with thrillers like Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958). The mysteries got deeper, the murders got more violent, and the detective cases got trickier to solve.
Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, the crime thriller genre slowly split into a variety of subgenres: action-packed cop thrillers like The French Connection (1971); mystery thrillers like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), and great political thrillers like The Parallax View (1974), to name a few. In the ’80s, the work of director Brian De Palma helped establish what would become known as the erotic thriller, with steamy pictures like Dressed to Kill (1980) and Body Double (1984). All of these converging threads pointed to a proliferation of crime thrillers in the ’90s. Cape Fear (1991), Point Break (1991), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991) kicked off the decade. Basic Instinct (1992) and Reservoir Dogs followed soon after. Some more action-driven, some more erotic, these thrillers slowly began to dominate the decade.
In 1995, former music video director David Fincher took a stab at the genre with Se7en (1995), pairing Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman together for a crime thriller that would rise above the rest as a truly consummate masterwork of the style. It both harkened back to the iconic noir genre from which it derived, and updated form with the visual and musical aesthetic of the era. It also leaned into the horror elements, creating a handful of truly unforgettable scenes.
Rookie Cop, Veteran Cop
New Line Cinema
Another important influence that cannot be overlooked is that of international crime films. Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (1949) is especially relevant here, as it helped popularize the concept of a rookie cop pairing up with a seasoned cop to solve a case. That trope is borrowed in Se7en, with Morgan Freeman stepping into the role of Detective Somerset, who’s a week away from retirement, and Brad Pitt assuming the role of Detective Mills, a much younger, less experienced detective who’s new in town. The pair is quickly assigned to their first case, finding an overweight man who has been force-fed until his insides ruptured.
The case quickly becomes much deeper than Somerset anticipated, and he tries to back out. But the murders keep piling up: a greedy lawyer is found dead in his office, and a slothful drug dealer is found brain-dead in his apartment. Mills’ wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow) invites the detectives over for dinner and the viewer gets a glimpse of Mills’ strained home life. Somerset can’t help but go to the library and continue to research the cases. He hits the books in a lamplit library, another classic detective trope, and figures out that each kill represents one of the seven deadly sins.
In classic noir fashion, the setting of the film is a nameless gray city where it’s always raining. It’s a corrupt city full of apathetic people, as Somerset sees it, and each kill targets another seedy citizen. The detectives find a suspect called John Doe (Kevin Spacey) by using an FBI connection who can track library book rentals for certain flagged books. At his apartment building a confrontation ensues, but Doe gets away. This doesn’t stop Mills, however, from busting into the apartment to look for clues without a warrant. The next victim is a prostitute, murdered violently for her sin of lust. And soon after, a model is found disfigured and dead, having mutilated her own face in an act of pride.
Before the final two sins can be committed, the killer turns himself in at the police station. He makes a deal with them; he’ll confess, so long as he can show them where the final two victims are buried. They escort Doe out to the desert to play out the final scene, which has become one of the biggest twist endings of all time. A cargo van shows up out of the blue and drops off a box. Somerset opens the box, revealing what the viewer can only presume is Tracy’s head. Doe explains that his sin is envy, as he somewhat envied Mills normal domestic life. But it’s too much and, in an act of vengeance, Mills murders Doe.
An Update for a New Era
The tropes are all on display: the grimy urban landscape, the hardboiled detectives, the sex workers, drug dealers, and seedy politicians. And even though the ending is a killer twist, it’s not too big of a leap from classic noir trappings. Of course Mills’ wife was in danger – there had to be a damsel in distress. What’s unique to Se7en and effectively time stamps the film in a fun way, however, is its stark ’90s aesthetic. The title sequence song, a remix of Nine Inch Nails’ song “Closer,” sets the tone right away. The experimental, industrial rock places the film firmly in the ’90s, as does the kind of grimy, grunge aesthetic of the images over which the song plays. In addition to the film’s packaging, the underlying themes of urban decay and cultural disillusionment in the film undoubtedly resonated with ’90s audiences as well. One of Somerset’s reasons for retiring, in addition to his age, is a feeling of hopelessness. ”I just don’t think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was virtue.” He feels that the hopeless citizens of this nameless city have turned to drugs and crime as a means of coping with the struggle of life. He feels empathy for them, but he’s not sure his efforts amount to much anymore.
This same logic is also John Doe’s rationale for committing these heinous acts. He’s killing these criminals and morally-repugnant people because he sees apathy all around him, and he wants to send a message. As the detectives drive him out to the desert in the finale of the film, he explains himself. “We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it’s common, it’s trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not anymore. I’m setting the example.” Perhaps also unique to the era is just how violently these murders are portrayed. Viewers are subjected to a full range of grotesqueries: the poor obese man is found headfirst in a bowl of spaghetti, his limbs bound.
The seedy lawyer is forced to cut off his own love handles until he produces a pound of flesh. The sex worker is sexually assaulted to death by a man wearing a knife-tipped strap-on. These horrors are never shown on screen, but the viewers are subjected to the grisly aftermath as the detectives investigate each crime scene. No crime thriller had ever gone so dark except maybe Silence of the Lambs. But even then, Clarice Starling never found a drug addict who’d been chained to a bed for a year, injected with heroin until he chewed his own tongue off.
An Unforgettable Entry in the Genre
Distributed by New Line Cinema
The film was a huge hit, launching David Fincher’s career in a big way and legitimizing Brad Pitt as a leading man. And looking back, it represents a high watermark of ’90s crime thrillers and ’90s filmmaking in general. While many of the themes present in the film are inherent to the genre dating back to the ’40s, Fincher found a way to connect them to the cultural angst of the new era. The youth counterculture of the era was essentially a reaction to the failures of the ’60s hippie movement. In these kids’ eyes, the promise of universal peace and love had slowly given way to capitalistic greed during the Reagan administration. The misguided war in Vietnam didn’t help, and neither did the political scandals and economic instability.
When the cocaine glam of the ’80s crashed and burned, the youth of the ’90s emerged as a cynical bunch. Released smack dab in the middle of the decade, Se7en cemented its place in the zeitgeist almost immediately. Crime thrillers were already dynamite at this point, and Fincher found a way to capitalize. By showing just a smidge more of the implied horror and packaging the film in the visual aesthetic of the time, he crafted a powder keg crime thriller for the ages.
