BY ANDREW MOODY
“Ernest Hemingway once wrote: ‘the world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”
I first saw David Fincher’s Se7en when I was a precocious teenager, addicted to movies, very aware of the indie revolution bolstered by Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute and Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax that was ongoing in the 1990s, instantly proclaiming it a masterpiece.
Around this time, the concept of the alchemical original screenplay, like Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Kevin Williamson’s Scream, or Joe Eszterhaz’s Basic Instinct put forward the thesis that any unknown, wannabe writer could pen a classic script, make a fortune, and crack Hollywood. The cinematic culture was open-minded and able to indulge creative artists (whoever they were) to knuckle down and do their best work. It was very much the decade of grand ideas.
Now, years and years later, many beloved films from the 90s have lost their lustre. For me, Pulp Fiction (1994) and Trainspotting (1996) no longer work in the age of post-digital technology, and seem both uneasily racist and too morally ambiguous regarding their depictions of violent crime, hard drug use and transgressive behaviour.
Scream (1995) and Se7en (1995) on the other hand, get more intriguing and impressive as works of cinematic art, the more distant their cultural origins become as the 21st century narrative progresses, fuelled by the split second world of social media. Back in the paranoid mid 90s, Se7en touched a nerve with audiences worldwide, featuring the most downbeat ending since The Exorcist (1973) and being almost instantly absorbed into the global subconscious just as William Friedkin’s shocking possession epic had done just over 20 years before. It was serial killer horror filmed as high art. The grunge movement, as big as London Punk in America (at least in the 90s) had seen the catastrophic, suspicious double deaths of their two most adored stars, River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain in 1994. Interestingly, Se7en starred Brad Pitt, fresh from the success of Interview With the Vampire (1994), obviously the most deliberately homoerotic Hollywood film until Ang Lee’s notorious Oscar winner Brokeback Mountain (2005). Interview was set to feature River Phoenix (as the Interviewer) before he died suspiciously at Johnny Depp’s L.A nightclub The Viper Room. Christian Slater replaced him, reportedly giving his salary to charity. Hauntingly, Interview was co-produced by David Geffen, who had signed Nirvana, its closing caption in the end credits is a dedication to River Phoenix. From these uneasy variables, in a culture now both obsessed and terrified (not only with Hannibal Lecter and the American Psycho Patrick Bateman, but by their next door neighbours) Se7en was in 1995 (and remains in 2023) a massively enjoyable film. The doomed tale of Somerset and Mills, (Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt), on the hunt for a killer basing his crimes on the Seven Deadly Sins, have now become classic archetypes of a form of screenwriting utilised to great effect all through the 1990s. Hollywood’s quite public admiration for (and absorption of) Robert McKee’s Story seminars on the critical craft of writing for cinema, which sustained a new era of digital filmmaking and solid, clever screenplays, nowhere better seen than in Se7en. Fincher went on to make a film about the investigation into 60’s serial killer Zodiac (2007) which had emotionally scarred him as a child, given the Zodiac was never caught. It was this case, he told Empire magazine in 1995, that resulted in the type of film they made in Se7en.
It’s so enormously widely seen by now that Morgan Freeman’s haunting final meeting with his police chief (Full Metal Jacket legend) R. Lee Ermey, has the same emotional impact on millennial audiences as Casablanca (1942) would have held for the World War Two Generation, and one of the saddest, and most beautiful final lines in American cinema.