Let's Finish It - in praise of Se7en
'Become Wrath' - John Doe
obviously, this review contains many spoilers
‘Its bleak climax is much too hard on viewers, depriving them even of the final comfort they fully deserve;’ this was Barry Norman’s indignant criticism of the brutally perfect conclusion to Se7en, a film that belongs as much to its writer Andrew Kevin Walker, as it does to David Fincher.
If you haven’t seen Se7en, the premise sounds pretty hackneyed. Rational, reserved and soon-to-be retired black cop joins forces with cocky, impulsive, confrontational white cop for the seven-day handover. So far, so Lethal Weapon. Then uh-oh, some crazy serial killer appears to be murdering people using the seven deadly sins for inspiration. Cue predictable close-ups on black cop painstakingly rooting through Chaucer, Dante and Milton to the strains of Air on a G String, scary neon crucifixes in serial killer’s bedroom, Nine Inch Nails opening credits and plenty of blood. It’s very dark in Fincher’s LA, and it is always raining. Everybody lives in white, cream, black, brown and ochre, and everyday is made up of dawn, dusk and night. Even with the beautifully sombre, vaguely underground Fincher touch, Se7en could be just another cop/serial killer blood-letting, and had we been served the ending favoured by the studio, that’s exactly what it would have been. Imagine it: Morgan Freeman’s Somerset and Brad Pitts’ Mills in a race-against-time dash to save the angelic Tracy (played by an admittedly radiant Gwyneth Paltrow) from the deranged clutches of the extraordinarily ordinary psycho, Kevin Spacey. Big shoot out, the blonde is saved, Freeman takes a bullet for Mills, the bad guy dies, the good will out. But as we all know, thankfully, this is not what happens.
Se7en’s central conceit is simple. Seven deadly sins forming the basis for seven murders, taking place over seven days. These seven days happen to coincide with the seven-day crossover period in the careers of Somerset (Freeman) and Mills (Pitt).
As the mellow, older, wiser cop, Freeman exudes his trademark integrity and control. Morgan “Shawshank” Freeman provides our moral and intellectual compass for the film, imposing order on a chaotic and sinful LA as he sets the rhythmic ticking of the metronome by his bedside, starting the film’s countdown to its bleak ending. The unsettling (ok, slightly clichéd) thing about Se7en is how close John Doe (Kevin Spacey) and Somerset (Morgan Freeman) really are. Take this excerpt from Doe’s justification of his own special way of carrying out the good Lord’s work;
Only in a world this shitty could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face. But that’s the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every house, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it’s common, it’s trivial, we tolerate it morning, noon and night.
There’s only one other point in the film where this issue is raised, and that’s in Somerset’s discussion with Mills on the infection of apathy. In both cases, Mills argues for the innocence of Doe’s victims, defending a society where apathy reigns. Significantly, in not recognising and tackling his predilection for sin, it is Mills who completes Doe’s great plan by becoming Wrath.
The first time we see Pitt in the film, he is every inch the twitchy, smirking upstart, rolling gum around in his mouth, speaking in his impatient staccato. And yet, he is also wise-cracking Mr Cool – he’s Brad Pitt, Mr Gorgeous, our screen hero - and so you forgive him, perhaps more than you should, leaving Morgan Freeman to come across as Mr Uptight, Mr Smug. It’s a great set-up for the film’s fire and brimstone ending.
While Se7en delivers the complete closure found in the discovery and capture of the crime and criminal, satisfying our expectations of a traditional cop/serial killer thriller, it simultaneously rids us of our box office star, murdering the only symbol of good in the film (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the one hope the film offers – her unborn baby.
When Doe leads Somerset and Mills to the two remaining victims out in the desert, we as viewers are willing the protagonists to the scene of these two deaths. It is the seventh hour, of the seventh day in a film called Se7en, centred round murders motivated by the seven deadly sins. Failure to deliver seven bodies would lead to a failure in the narrative’s structure. We are gagging for the discovery of these two bodies, and therefore become co-conspirators in Doe’s plan.
Andrew Kevin Walker intensifies our need for such a tidy completion by teasing us with so many red herrings in the plot. The discovery of the ‘Help Me’ message behind the painting in the scene of the Greed murder leads both us and the detectives to interpret the message as a cry from help from the killer. The only traditionally heroic act of the police - storming a building, guns at the ready - is given to us in the middle of the film with the discovery of the Sloth victim. The shock of learning that the ‘Help Me’ message comes from the severed fingertips of the victim, not the perpetrator of the crime, teamed with the grotesque and alarming realization that the Sloth victim is alive, is both energizing and disconcerting.
We are also, however, slightly comforted by the fact that the murderer has not been discovered so early into the script. After all, we are only at the scene of the third sin – to have stopped the serial killer so swiftly would be cheating us of the price of our admission ticket. Similarly, despite the fact that Mills and Somerset track Doe down to his apartment halfway through the film, we are not permitted to see Kevin Spacey until after Lust and Pride have been discovered. It is also probably worth noting that, when commenting on the film, the natural thing to do when speaking of the crimes is to refer to both them and the victim as their sin. This carefully prepares us for Mills’ final transformation into the personification of Wrath, shooting a helpless, dead John Doe multiple times in the desert as Somerset watches, despairing and powerless to intervene.
Many viewers claim they could predict the contents of Doe’s gruesome delivery at the film’s finale. Although I can’t say I knew what was coming, I believe them, as the film is peppered with references to the conspicuously absent Tracy in the lead-up to her death. Aside the none-too-subtle splice of a close-up on Tracy’s angelic face prior to Mills shooting Doe, we are told that she has tried to call Mills earlier that day at his office prior to Doe’s bloody appearance. Later, Mills flippantly jokes that although Doe will enjoy cable TV in prison, even his wife cannot share in that luxury. Finally, the last time we see Tracy and Mills together, on the night of the sixth day, Mills curls up to his wife’s reclining form and tells her how much he loves her. She answers simply, ‘I know’. We rapidly cut to Somerset, restless and unable to sleep, channelling his own rage by throwing his switchblade into a dartboard with disarming accuracy. Maddened by the incessant tick-tock of the metronome by his bed, in a fit of rage he dashes the object against the floor. With the destruction of the metronome, we implicitly have both the destruction of Somerset’s attempt to control the film’s course, and the end of the plot’s time-keeper. The metronome’s motion begins with the start of Somerset’s final seven days, and is disrupted at the same point that Mills’ and Tracy’s relationship, and implicitly the future of their child, is presented to us for the last time. Their demise is inevitable.
By tying up the narrative and completing the serial killer’s intended Se7en murders with the destruction of Mills, Andrew Kevin Walker disrupts our expectations of the classic detective story by transforming the resolution of both the crime and the story’s structure into the death of the detective. Contrary to Barry Norman’s assessment, I believe we are given precisely the ending we deserve. In exposing the pervasive sin present in all humanity, Doe has no choice but to engineer his own death as part of his plan, whilst also exposing Mills’ propensity to sin. When Mills defiantly argues for following Doe into the desert to find his two remaining victims, Mills unwittingly signs his own death warrant whilst simultaneously satisfying his hungry audience; ‘Let’s finish it,’ he says.
Left by Doe at the scene of Gluttony, Milton’s line from Paradise Lost; ‘Long is the way and hard that out of hell leads up to light’ encapsulates the route taken by Walker, Fincher and their audience in Se7en. In a film where darkness is pervasive, we are given soft lighting at the Mills’ apartment as Tracy strives for something approaching friendship with Somerset, dingy daylight in the café where Tracy confides that she is pregnant to Somerset, and scorching but strangely bleak brightness when Tracy’s head is delivered to Somerset in a box. In the eye-watering light of the desert dusk, Doe’s plan is finally visible to all. Mills becomes Wrath, and with his transformation comes the perfect completion of Doe’s seven symbolic murders, and with this, comes the perfect conclusion to the film. It’s a nasty, terrible story that Walker and Fincher, in implicit alliance with their serial killer John Doe, have chosen to tell, but you can’t quibble with its execution.
Labels: Andrew Kevin Walker, Brad Pitt, David Fincher, Gwyneth Paltrow, Morgan Freeman, Se7en, Seven Deadly Sins
aww shucks, why i can't i be humphrey bogart?
i always suspected i'd never make a very macho man, and i'm no where near roguish enough. but hell, i get my pick of my three favourite dames, so maybe it's not all bad.
Your Score: Cary Grant
you scored 9% Tough, 4% Roguish, 42% Friendly, and 42% Charming!
You are the epitome of charm and style, the smooth operator who steals the show with your sophisticated wit, quiet confidence and flirty sense of humor. You are able to catch any woman you want just by flashing that disarming smile, even if you're flashing it at a kindly aunt or engaging child at the time. When you walk into a room, women are instantly intrigued and even the men are impressed, but you're too nice a guy to steal anyone else's girl...unless the guy deserves it. You're stylish, yes, but you can also be a little bit nutty. However, you're primarily seen as dashing, suave and romantic. Your co-stars include Katharine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, and Grace Kelly, stylish women with a sense of fun.
The Classic Leading Man Test
Labels: classic leading man test
the classic dames test
i could hardly be anyone else...although my mother would be mortified by the (fair) score of 0% class. just think though, my little sister monkey 2 has the whole
what ever happened to baby jane nightmare to look forward to. wahahaha!
Your Score: Bette Davis
You scored 30% grit, 38% wit, 47% flair, and 0% class!
You're one smart cookie, and you know it. You also know how to let everyone else know it. You are in charge and keep everyone in line with your biting wit and cutting remarks. You're charming when you need to be, and the light sparkles behind your eyes. But when cornered, you can act, but quick, and you'll do anything necessary. You're always ready with just the right come-back, and you can be wilting. You go your own way and have your own, unique way of tackling life, which sometimes includes illegal activity. It's not a great idea to cross you; you can cut down the competition with one well-chosen line, although that's not all you have in your arsenal. Your leading mean include Errol Flynn and Paul Henreid, men who like a feisty gal.
Who are you?Labels: bette davis, classic dames test
the great fondant fancy debate
more vital reseach from www.pimpthatsnack.com
okay, having eaten a box of fondant fancies carefully and with great thought, i can now confirm that they
do taste different (lemon, chocolate, general sweet gooey pink stuff).
when i die i want to wake up on a giant fondant fancy. hmmmn. sugar rushes are the best thing ever.
plus they're so inanely cute...eating them makes me feel like marie antoinette crossed with miss piggy.
Labels: fondant fancy, pimp that snack
Nine Horses by Billy Collins: self-help for writers
It isn’t fashionable, or indeed, especially wise, to admit to loving Billy Collins amongst poetry aficionados. My borrowed library copy of
Nine Horses bears the recommendation
‘Billy Collins is one of my favourite poets in the world’ from Carol Ann Duffy, and we all know what the poetry elite think of her. They sniff at Collins’ accessibility, his open references and narrative focus, his eternally marketable, populist brand of ‘comforting melancholy’. Poetry is a hallowed ground, where only the smartest, most beautiful people dare enter, and yet Collins has been handing out free trials and day passes to anybody who cares to take one.
I like
Nine Horses, very much. It has touches of the sentimental, yes, and I guess it can be a bit mawkish, but its immediacy has continued to grab me in those snatched moments, brushing my teeth or waiting for the computer to reboot, over the last two months. Focusing on the conflict inherit in capturing the ephemeral, it is a delicately funny and painful tour through the anxieties of all writers.
In
Nine Horses, Collins envisages people carrying out the most mundane daily tasks, surrounded by invisible speed lines, whisking them, silently, to their inevitable death. He entertains paranoid fantasies of losing everything, all because of one careless omission. He basks in the buzz of waking up to a fresh day and a blank piece of paper, and then agonises over the gap between the cold, concrete, nuts and bolts of making art, against what it comes to represent. Speaking of Whistler’s portrait of his mother,
Arrangement in Gray and Black, all Collins can do is berate the artist, as he;
…imagines how the woman’s heart
Could have broken
By being demoted from mother
To mere arrangement, a composition without color...
...Like Botticelli calling The Birth of Venus
‘Composition on Blue, Ocher, Green, and Pink,’
or the other way around,
Like Rothko labeling one of his sandwiches of color
‘Fishing Boats Leaving Falmouth Harbor at Dawn’.
I always fear that we all sell our integrity when we tell our stories, prostituting our romantic failures or serious fears in exchange for a laugh or a bit of sympathy.
In Tipping Point, Collins idly wonders on the 36th anniversary of Eric Dolphy’s death, aged 36;
did anyone sense something
when another Eric Dolphy lifetime
was added to the span of his life,
when we all took another
full Dolphy step forward in time,
flipped over the Eric Dolphy yardsick once again?
Although you could argue this highlights the arbitrary nature of time, Tipping Point is still a desperately anxious poem, with Collins’ own anxieties, about how much he has achieved against how much time he has left to achieve more, hovering above each word. I always promised myself that I would have written my first book by the time I was 25, and each day I sweat a little more when I realise I have less time to hold me now. For some reason, I measure my life backwards to my fourteenth birthday – 14 is my Eric Dolphy time. Likewise, in Birthday, Collins calculates how much time he may have left, ‘a small box of Octobers, a handful of Aprils’, time enough to reach the last of the 1533 pages of Clarissa, a life eaten away by so many words.
Although I love writing, I view it as a necessary evil, like smoking or drinking – an addiction I would like to shake, yet I would feel disappointed if I actually succeeded. I become restless and irritable if I don’t have space or time to write and although I love my friends and family, they get in the way of my pen and paper. I hate few things more than the phone ringing, or realising the house is dirty when I haven’t written that day. It feels like life is interfering with the stuff that matters. I also hate writing – the hand-wringing, the embarrassing mistakes, the rushed drafts and the knowledge that you have thrown away another day when you could have been in the world instead of writing about it. I’m sure it is a profound waste of time, and that it is inhibiting my abilities to be a smarter, more generous and less selfish person. But I still don’t want to stop yet.
I’m hopeful that one day I will no longer indulge this adolescent habit, else I’m pretty sure I will spend a significant part of my life miserable, either because I can’t write or because I can’t stop writing. Collins’ Writing in the Afterlife is my purgatory;
I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulphurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.
Many have pictured a river here,
but no one mentioned all the boats,
their benches crowded with naked passengers,
each bent over a writing tablet.
I knewI would not always be a child
with a model train and a model tunnel,
and I knew I would not live forever,
jumping all day through the hoop of myself.
I had heard about the journey to the other side
and the clink of the final coin
in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,
but how could anyone have guessed
that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe this place
and to include as much detail as possible—
not just the water, he insists,
rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles—
and that our next assignment would be
to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead,
not really an assignment,
the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—
think of it more as an exercise, he groans,
think of writing as a process,
a never-ending, infernal process,
and now the boats have become jammed together,
bow against stern, stern locked to bow,
and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.
Yet still, I tell myself after squandering another day on useless words, at least I am writing, still trying, still working, still interested, still contributing to the endless stacks of unpublished and unpublishable writing for no other reason than trying makes me happy, or at the very least, less sad. As Billy Collins writes;
I was a single monkey
Trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet,
Often doing nothing more
Than ironing pieces of paper in the platen
Then wrinkling them into balls
To flick into the wicker basket
Still, at least I was making noise,
Adding to the great secretarial din,
That chorus of clacking and bells,
Thousands of desks receding into the past.
articulate
I recently went to see my aunt and uncle for the day. My grandmother is staying with them, and another uncle had recently flown in from
Australia for a business conference. It was the perfect opportunity to see everybody. My little sister and I joined them for a gigantic Sunday lunch in one of those pseudo-pubs with mock Tudor beams and fake hollow books. It was lush back at home, sitting in the warm, hearing the rain batter against the flat roof, drowsy from too many
Yorkshire puddings. And then somebody thought it would be a good idea to play
Articulate. Articulate is a board game, where, rather like Pictionary, things are categorised (people, place, action etc), and it is your job to describe them, without actually saying the word. The more items you successfully describe before the sand in the wobbly plastic egg-timer runs out, the quicker your progress around the board. So far so good.
We drew lots. My younger sister, my aunt and her husband were all in the same team. I was in a team with my uncle from Australia and my grandmother. So far, so good right?
Well, kind of. But although I can tell my grandmother I’m okay, that I love her, and she can tell me if she needs anything, we cannot have a conversation with each other without somebody continually translating because we cannot speak the same language. I can tell my grandmother I am happy, but if I tell her why, somebody else must be there to translate for me, inevitably one of the many matriarchs in my life, who I suspect may sometimes add their own spin on my responses, judging from the sideways looks and spontaneous outbursts of laughter they often exchange. Of course, I will never know, because my mother never taught me, or my sister, her mother tongue.
My visiting uncle from Australia basically speaks the same language as my mum, aunt and grandma. Ish. But his is a purer version, as my mum’s family are third generation immigrants in their home country, and therefore they speak a bizarre mixture of languages that is perfectly understood in their country, but less so in my uncle’s. This means that even he does not speak the same language as the rest of my family, including his wife, yet another of my many aunts.
This makes playing a game based entirely on language, where the only available translator, my aunt, is on the opposing team, slightly frustrating. A quarter of the way around the board, after my grandmother had escaped from the table without a word’s notice, we universally admitted defeat.
My aunt, living in England and married to a very English Englishman rues my mum’s decision not to teach us how to speak to her. We talk plenty, too much perhaps, in English. But it would be great to tell her something more than ‘please sit down’ or ‘you’re a puppy-dog’ (an endearment) in her tongue. Somehow, I think it would bring us closer, even though we’re joined at the telephone already.
My mum always maintained that it would be too confusing to teach my sister and me how to speak her language, steeped as we were in half-hearted French and pretty good Spanish. But I would gladly swap the ability to understand the swear words in La Haine or order octopus in Madrid (which is about all I can do now) for the chance to speak to my grandmother on my own terms, to be able to at least try to explain who 'Liv Tyler' (people) is or what it means to be 'captivating' (action/adj), so we could make it round that damned Articulate board together.
why i despise katie off the apprentice
"I would like to secure Adam's exit back to the north where, I do feel, he rather belongs"
I would like to secure Katie's exit back to a luxury skiing resort in the Swiss Alps where, I do feel, she rather belongs. And then I'd like her to fall off the chairlift.
he do the police in different voices
In his 1960 essay on Image and Experience, Graham Hough argues against the presence of a single consciousness in The Waste Land, asserting that for a poem to exist as a unity, we need the sense of one voice speaking. Assessing the collation of images in the poem as the negation of method, Hough’s evaluation of one of the great 1922 literary mysteries finds its echo, and enemy, in Martin Rowson’s smartarse but relentlessly funny comic strip The Waste Land. By reinventing Eliot’s poem as a giant murder mystery investigated by his narrator Marlowe, a composite of Raymond Chandler’s toughest detectives, Rowson is able to give the impression of a single consciousness in his retelling, whilst admitting the presence of the multiple ghosts that haunt The Waste Land.
The diverse voices within Eliot’s Waste Land function like a greek chorus, echoing the poem’s themes of social, sexual and communicative collapse and creating a platform for the prophetic voice of the absent, unnamed protagonist. Eliot’s use of literary quotation, allusion, free, indirect and direct speech facilitates the compression and simultaneity necessary for the communication of the depersonalised but universal experience of The Waste Land. By re-shaping Eliot’s nameless, rootless teller in the poem into that of a frustrated detective, (the role more often assumed by the baffled reader) Rowson physically presents the disembodied voices of the poem as a cast of grotesquely familiar characters in a weird comic-strip. It quite literally turns the poem inside out (and it looks pretty good too)
As with Eliot’s poem, Rowson’s comic starts with a corpse, only Rowson gives the reader DIC Marlowe to guide them through the poem’s allusions, acting as a hard-boiled trench-coated replacement for Eliot’s Tiresias, casting Eliot-biographer and all-round-London-expert Peter Ackroyd as his cab-driver. Similarly, Rowson’s Game of Chess starts with Marlowe revisiting an old flame. Remembering the first time they met, he drawls ‘She’d looked like a million dollars, and I’d felt like a bent dime. Then again, looks ain’t everything…she still had a mind like a marshmallow.’ His ex is, of course, that neurotic crazy lady from Eliot’s poem with her nutso neurasthenic fixation on the ‘wind under the door’.
Eliot’s original ventriloquist pub scene from A Game of Chess contains no fewer than fifteen repetitions of ‘I said’ as his gossipy speaker retells a conversation she had with ‘Lil’. Touching on many of the poem’s themes in its allusions to infidelity, abortion, death by childbirth, decay and war, the dialogue in the pub is delivered almost entirely in reported speech, removing the sense of Lil’s own voice in the conversation, implicitly linking sexual sterility with the loss of speech. By beginning with modernism's version of Eastenders and ending with Shakespeare’s Ophelia, no word spoken in the pub scene belongs to the speaker. Thus, it makes odd sense that when Marlowe steps into the same boozer, he sits and drinks with Rowson’s Where’s Wally-type composite of modernist movers and shakers, including William Carlos Williams, W.B. Yeats, Henri Gaudier Brezska, Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot. These comic book faces are just a handful of the many conflicting spectres that hover over any consideration of Eliot's poem, whilst also being just some of the literary and visual puppeteers choreographing Rowson's structure.
Eliot's collapsing towers and resurfacing corpses reappear in Rowson’s noir-thriller as drowned bodies and strip clubs. Seurat's Parisian picnic turns into a Thames-sewer nightmare (see above) Eliot’s physically and psychologically fragmented Thames-daughters reappear as Rowson's sullen whores on a break from their twice-nightly floor show as The Water Babes. They are played by Dorothy Comingore, Lauren Bacall and Marlene Dietrich. Where Eliot spreads the body parts of his Thames daughters across London, surfacing in Richmond, Kew and Moorgate, Rowson’s Dietrich draws on a cigarette and hisses through the smoke ‘Nah ‘e’s ended us up in Margate. On the beach we done it. Id’ve rather ‘ad a manicure.’
In Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot stresses the importance of a poet’s own sense of history, asserting that it is this that will compel one to write ‘with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order’. By choosing not to elevate Shakespeare with quotation marks in the Game of Chess, Eliot strives for this ‘simultaneous existence’ and ‘simultaneous order’ that he felt was necessary for good poetry in which a writer is ‘most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity’. By translating this idea into a series of comic book panels and populating his work with pop-culture and high-art phantoms, cinematic and literary corpses, burnt-out critics and blockbuster sellers, Rowson continues Eliot’s line of thought. However, unlike Eliot's expectations on his intellectual superstar of a perfect reader, Rowson doesn't even expect Marlowe, his own creation, to solve the poem's crimes.
As Marlowe comes to the end of his investigation followed by Eliot’s Buddhist chants, pictured as a tambourine-slapping bunch of Hari-Krishnas, he is left with no recourse but to interrogate Pound and Eliot themselves. They are no help at all, wittering in Latin about vegetation myths against backdrops of vorticist masterpieces. It would apoear they also have a pretty half-arsed idea of what they're trying to achieve. Marlowe’s response? “Vegetation myths? The only vegetation myth I ever heard was that you can sit on your ass behind a desk in the D.A.’s office for twenty years and call it work…”
Consequently it should come as no surprise that instead of Eliot’s unifying ‘Shantih, shantih, shantih’ (the peace that passeth all understanding) that closes his poem and goes some way to piecing together ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’, Rowson gives us Warner Bros’ budgie-baiting Slyvester the cat lisping ‘Thantih, Thantih, Thantih, Thuckers’.
It made me laugh. Lots. Even though I think I understand this even less than I do The Waste Land.
