These opposing viewpoints are personified in the film in the characters of Detectives Mills and Somorset. Mills - young, idealistic, ambitious, and in many ways, naive - asks to be transferred to the homicide unit of a large city police department because "I thought I could do some good." He is all action and bravado, giving little thought to the consequences of his actions, and looking at events superficially, with what seems like little real understanding of human motivation. He is mentored by Somorset, who has been in the city too long and, we get the feeling, has seen too much. Though Somorset is involved in his work intellectually, emotionally he is world-weary, detached - he may understand the motivations of his fellow man only too well, it seems, but he no longer feels any power to change things for the better, no longer feels anything but regret. As the film begins, he is preparing to retire, perhaps to salvage what compassion he still has left, compassion apparently lacking in those around him.
The viewpoints represented by Mills and Somorset are contrasted in the context of a series of murders based on the seven deadly sins (gluttony, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and wrath), which unfold over the course of one week. Mills tells us the killer is insane, indicating his black-and-white world view. To Mills, insanity is something easily recognizable, like good and evil. He seems to feel the world would be a better place only if all the "crazies" could be locked up. Insanity, to Mills, is a concept incompatible with purpose or intellect. "Just because the fucker's got a library card", he says, "doesn't make him Yoda." For Somorset, on the other hand, the line between good and evil, or sanity and insanity, isn't so clear. Somorset tells us the killer is preaching, and in fact his whole approach in investigating the case and his interaction with the killer shows us he isn't as convinced as Mills about Doe's insanity, and in fact considers Doe to be quite rational. In this way, Somorset shows the audience the moral ambiguity of everyday life, and echoes our own confusion about psychosis and morality.
For Mills, good and evil, right and wrong, sane and insane are obvious, and the course of action when faced with evil is obvious. Somorset feels that this view is naive, that evil and corruption permeates everyday life, that the course of action is never as clear as Mills seems convinced of. Somorset does not see himself as an agent of change as Mills does, as evidenced by an exchange after the "greed" scene as they wait for the fingerprints found on the wall to be matched:
Somorset: "You meant what you said...about catching this guy. I wish I still thought the same as you."
Mills: "Why don't you tell me that the hell it is you think we're doing then?"
Somorset: "Picking up the pieces. We're collecting all the evidence, taking all the pictures and samples, writing everything down, noting the time things happened."
Mills: "That's all?"
Somorset: "That's all. Putting everything in a neat little pile and filing it away, on the off-chance it will ever be needed in a courtroom. Picking up diamonds on a deserted island, saving them....in case we get rescued."
Mills: "Bullshit."
Corruption in society's institutions is demonstrated in the film by the behavior of the police themselves, and this corruption only supports Somorset's world view. In tracking the killer, Somorset bribes an FBI contact to run a list of books against a library user database, with both the bribe and the very existence of such a database demonstrating institutional corruption and immorality. He and Doe also mention corruption in the police department regarding the purchase by members of the press of privileged information about police personnel, crime scenes, and investigations. Mills, though we would expect him to be above this kind of activity (given his finely honed sense of right and wrong), pays a homeless woman to make a false statement to the police to justify getting a search warrant for the killer's apartment. This is after he has already kicked the door in, obviously without much regard for the consequences, in response to having his ego damaged in a chase in which the killer assaults him. At the conclusion of the chase, with a gun pointed to Mills' head, the killer demonstrates the purpose that Mills is only beginning to understand, by deliberately pulling the gun away from Mills' temple and sparing his life.
An exchange in a bar after the Lust murder demonstrates the conflict between the two world views in even starker contrast:
Somorset: "You know this isn't going to have a happy ending."
Mills: "Hey, if we catch him, I'll be happy enough."
Somorset: "If we catch John Doe, and he turns out to be the Devil, I mean if he's Satan himself, that might live up to our expectations. But... he's not the Devil. He's just a man.....you want to be a champion, well let me tell you, people don't want a champion. They want to eat cheeseburgers and play the lotto and watch television."
Mills: "Hey, how did you get like this? I want to know."
Somorset: "It wasn't one thing, I can tell you that much."
Mills: "Go on."
Somorset: "I just don't think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was .... a virtue."
Mills: "You're no different, you're no better."
Somorset: "I didn't say I was different, or better. I'm not - hell, I sympathize. I sympathize completely. Apathy is a 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 time and work."
Mills: "We are talking about people who are mentally ill here, we are talking about people who are fucking crazy."
Somorset: "No, no. no - we're talking about everyday life here."
For Somorset, evil might be fuzzily be described as a series of poor decisions, what we do because it's easy, not because it's right, and again we are shown how the characters view themselves as agents of change.
Doe's character, in part, embodies the conflicting ways with which we view insanity. Is it possible to be insane but to also act with purpose and intelligence? It is easier to believe that those that are insane are out of control, unable to behave rationally....yet, we know of serial killers, for example, who are intelligent, who act with deliberation and purpose. "It's more comfortable for you to label me insane", Doe tells Mills. So what do we call this, then? If it isn't insanity, is it evil? Are those our only choices? The audience isn't let off this easily, as Doe mocks us with our own notions of what is good and what is evil by rationalizing his killings as punishment. For Doe, evil is again an easily identified quality, and like Mills, his course of action is clear to him:
Doe: "There's nothing wrong with a man taking pleasure in his work. I won't deny my own personal desire, to turn each sin against the sinner."
Mills: "Wait a minute....I thought all you did was kill innocent people."
Doe: "Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny? An obese man....a disgusting man who could barely stand up....a man who if you saw him on the street you would point him out to your friends so that they could join you in mocking him? A man who if you saw him while you were eating, you wouldn't be able to finish your meal? And after him I picked the laywer, and you both must have secretly been thanking me for that one...this is a man who dedicated his life to making money by lying with every breath that he could muster, to keeping murderers and rapists on the street...a woman so ugly on the inside that she couldn't bear to go on living if she couldn't be beautiful on the outside? A drug dealer - a drug dealing pedarast, actually - and let's not forget the disease-spreading whore! 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 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. And what I've done is going to be puzzled over, and studied, and followed...forever.....Don't ask me to pity those people; I don't mourn them any more than I do the thousands that died at Sodom and Gomorrah...."
In the film's resolution, the questions on the nature of right and wrong, good and evil, ultimately become irrelevant, or at least, are not answered for us. Somorset tells us, "Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for'. I agree with the second part." Though he is still weary of apathy and unsure of what evil is, Somorset has shown us that he still cares. As an audience, what we are finally left with is the suggestion that even if moral ambiguity is a fact of our lives, we can still resist becoming apathetic, that we don't have to accept the state of the world passively, that we can still be agents of change. And ultimately, this is what makes "Seven" a compelling film.
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