Life is Noir

The apocalypse. You're soaking in it.
                                           -- Lindsey MacDonald


I know I've said this before,but I'm the world's biggest sucker for atmosphere. The more and the darker the atmosphere, the better. For just this reason I've often found the noir films of the 40s and the 50s to be irresistible. There's just something about unshaven, neon-lit private detectives, sitting at their desks in the dark, crushing out Lucky Strikes in dirty ashtrays while nursing straight whiskey, that appeals to me. And while this type of movie is largely finished as an active subgenre of film, it does make the occasional and glorious reappearance. Angel Heart was onesuch cinematic moment; Se7en was another.

I originally watched Se7en with only a vague understanding of exactly what it was about, but I do remember that I knew that the plot as I understood it -- cops on the trail of some fiendishly clever and inventive serial killer -- was already showing signs of fatigue even in 1995. I also knew that it was directed by David Fincher, who I wrongly held responsible for the shovefulful of shit that was Alien 3, and was understandably wary. Sure, there were a few moments in Alien 3 that showed an understanding of stylistic principles, but that didn't make up for what I regarded as the ham-fisted butchery of a beloved franchise. So I guess you could say that I was prepared for disappointment.

When I emerged from the theater a few hours later, I felt as if I'd been struck over the head with a stainless steel meat mallet. Not only had I just emerged, gasping, from a stormy lake of glorious noir cliche, not only had I been thrashed senseless by a diabolically clever plot, I had also been subjected to that most brutal of Hollywood treatments -- I'd been made to care about characters and then forced to watch them suffer agonies I'd scarcely wish on my worst enemy. Some movies are so forgettable that within hours of seeing them, you literally don't remember being in the theater (Hideaway, a 1995 horror flick with Jeff Goldblum and Alicia Silverstone, was like this). Others stay with you like the imprint of a red-hot brand. Se7en was one of these.

If I had to sum up why I liked it so much, I would point to one seemingly nondescript sequence which occurs between Detective Mills (Brad Pitt) and Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman) in a bar. The two men have been working together a short while at this point, and Mills has been trying fairly hard to ingratiate himself with his partner. Hence the drinks. But as they share a beer together on yet another rainy evening in the nameless city, it becomes clear that the philosophies of the two cops are irreconcilable, and Mills has had quite enough of this gloomy, defeatist, all-knowing man.

Somerset: I just don't think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was virtue.
Mills: You're no different. You're no better.
Somerset: I didn't say I was different or better. I'm not. Hell, I sympathize; I sympathize completely. Apathy is the solution. I mean, it's easier to lose yourself in drugs than it is to cope with life. It's easier to steal what you want than it is to earn it. It's easier to beat a child than it is to raise it. Hell, love costs: it takes effort and work.
Mills: I don't think you're quitting because you believe these things you say. I don't. I think you want to believe them, because you're quitting. And you want me to agree with you, and you want me to say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. It's all fucked up. It's a fucking mess. We should all go live in a fucking log cabin." But I won't. I don't agree with you. I do not. I can't.
Somerset: Oh, wait! You care?
Mills: Damn right.
Somerset: And you're going to make a difference?

I think it was at this point, during my original viewing of the film (Christ...was it sixteen years ago?), that I realized I was not in the safe and familiar land of buddy-cop convention. These two dicks, despite fitting on paper the same descriptions as, say, Riggs and Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon, were more like oil and water than peanut butter and jelly. Somerset viewed Mills as hardheaded and naive, unwilling to bow to his superior professional and life experience; Mills saw Somerset as a burnout and a quitter, someone who had confused his own personal decline with the decline of the world around him. And while they later warmed up to each other, thanks in large part to the efforts of Mills' wife, each retained their distinct philosophy right up to the end -- where, one imagines, Somerset's views were merely affirmed and Mills, insomuch as he was capable of anything at that point, had probably come to agree with him...but I'll come back to that in a moment, because it's at this point that I'd like to talk about why this movie resonated with me upon my more recent viewing in a distinctly different manner than it did back in good old 1995

At that time, I was quite on the other side of the majority of experiences which presently define me as a man, but there were a few essential similarities. Like Somerset, I had developed, thanks to what might be called an unhappy formative period, into something of a cynic about human nature, human behavior -- human beings generally, I suppose. And Se7en played to a certain extent into my notions of how the world worked. From the ages of roughly ten to fifteen, which have an influence grossly dispreportionate to their actual sum of days, life showed me no mercy. It seemed to me that the passage Orwell wrote about his school life in "Such, Such Were The Joys" was not so much an observation as an unalterable law:

"That was the pattern of school life  -- a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in winning. It consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people -- in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly."

Long after my life become enjoyable again I retained this view of existence, simply removing the word 'school' from the opening sentence. Like the character of Christopher Hart in Piece of Cake, I thought the world divided between bastards and suckers, and felt I had to make a choice between the two -- that there was no third option. I'm not sure I thought this so much as felt it instinctively, but the fact remained that while I had a burning desire, even a need, to see justice done, I did not actually believe justice was obtainable. Even when justice prevailed, when the good guys notched one, it always struck me as ultimately irrelevant. History, of which I was an avid student, was crammed too full of cases where the bad guys won. No matter how hard Howard Fast tried to uplift the ending of Spartacus, I could not escape the story's unwilling moral -- that being in the right is no guarantee and being utterly defeated.

Watching Se7en, my worldview was largely affirmed. David Mills struck me as the epitome of the good guy caught in the gears of the way the world works and left crushed, mangled, beaten and bleeding, with all his good intentions blown to smithereens. Steady old Somerset, on the other hand, who started his battle against life by surrendering and then choosing to continue the fight, was more in line with my Hemingwayesque take on reality. He knew it all had to be done, but he was actuely conscious of its futility.

Two years later I entered law enforcement. It was probably a gargantuan mistake for someone with such a cynical attitude to do such a thing, but I seemed to gravitate toward it naturally. And in all the years that came, I saw over and over again that Somerset's remark that "apathy is the solution" was by and large true. The firebrand-types around me, the naive yet purposeful men-and-women-on-missions, the folks that believed they could "make a difference" nearly always burned out, and with remarkable swiftness. Those that did not quit within a year or two often became profound cynics, or, to once again quoteth Orwell, "did their jobs without believing in them, like the Antionine Emperors." People who could do twenty or thirty years in the Satanic mills of law-enforcement while retaining their Academy zeal were not unknown, but they were few and very far between. A great deal of the philosophy of the movie is summed up by the exchange between Mills and the sleazebag who works the door at the massage parlor:

David Mills: Do you like what you do for a living? These things you see?
Man in Massage Parlour Booth: No, I don't. But that's life.

And yet, watching Se7en again after all these years, I have to wonder about the atmosphere of the film -- not its physical atmosphere, for which I will never have anything but affection, but its emotional atmosphere. It's moral surround, one might say. And despite everything else that happens in the film I keep coming back to that tete-a-tete in the bar, that little philosophical set-to between the young firebrand and the old stalwart. Why do I find it so compelling? Here, I think, is the answer. This is not an argument between two men or even between two disparite views on life. It is an argument between two points of view existing within all of us. On the one hand we have passion and zeal and naivete, and on the other apathy, weariness, wordly cynicism. On the left is the Bastard and and on the right, the Sucker, and as usual they are in a clinch, punching the shit out of each other until the canvas beneath them looks like the porcelain sink by a dentist's chair -- and in mid-root canal, no less. In most of us, no one gets the upper hand for too long. The most sarcastic of us can be moved to tears by the beauty that life offers, just as the most cheerful optimist can be driven to weep at the meaningless cruelty of it all. Just when we've got our boxing shoes set in one position, Life chuckles at our arrogance and throws us a liver shot.

In Se7en, the motivation of John Doe is exposed near then end, when he is provoked out of his cool killer's repose to respond to Mills' comment that he, Doe, is a murderer of ' innocent people.'

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 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.

You can call Doe what you want -- loony, psycho, serial killer, studendous egotist -- but you can't call him apathetic. The respect which Somerset shows his then sight-unseen antagonist as the story progresses is largely a reflection of this. It is interesting that Mills, who treast Doe with angry contempt, refusing to acknowledge his abilities and determination, is actually quite similar to him in basic motivation. Both men want to make a difference, and both men are willing to put their lives on the line to see that difference made. It is merely their choice of methods that differs. In Red Dragon, Hannibal Lecter insists that Will Graham caught him not because of any deductive genius on Graham's part, but because they are just alike. And at the end of that book, Graham, lying in his bed of pain, acknowledges this is partially true. He has the capacity to "make murder", but unlike Lecter, he has the capacity -- and the desire -- for mercy as well. Mills' decision to murder Doe at the end of the story is a victory for Doe's method, because, in the last analysis, it worked. He got what he wanted out of the entire scenario. But in another sense, not quite as completely as intended. For it is implied that Somerset's commitment to fighting evil on his own terms, which has burned down to embers as the story opens, is rekindled by this confrontation with a new type of evil. He has recognized that retiring will change nothing. Quoting Hemingway, he says that while he doesn't believe the world is a beautiful place, he does believe it is worth fighting for, and he will continue the fight -- alone.

But what about the argument? Who is right and who is wrong? I can't answer that question, of course, and neither can you. But in the original draft of the screenplay, the author, Andrew Kevin Walker, does attempt an answer. Mills, having blown John Doe's brains out, sends a note to Somerset from his holding cell which reads:

YOU WERE RIGHT.  YOU WERE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.