Michael's Thriller Lase-O-Rama: Se7en (1996, Criterion)

Source: LDDB.com

---

In one of those quirks of coincidence that I love so very, very much, my best buttplug buddy @blewitt used a classic meme from this film just a few hours ago on his most recent post about buying comic collections. Now, whether or not he's using "comic books" as a code-word for the acquisition of marital aids, I don't really care. That's between him and Thanos. But suffice it to say I was shocked to see this...

...just as I sat down to pen my thoughts about the very film I had just finished watching. Well played, good sir, and may your wall of pleasure-enhancing devices "comic books" be filled to the brim and, heh, sextuple (see what I did there?) your investment!

---

I presume everybody already knows Se7en's plot, but just in case you grew up in another galaxy (welcome, benevolent alien overlords!), here's the synopsis:

David Mills (Brad Pitt) is new to the city, having specifically requested a transfer to their homicide division in the hopes of making a difference in peoples' lives. William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) has turned in his notice: after thirty-seven years on the force, he's retiring in the hopes of putting behind him the decades of human misery he's witnessed on the job. For the next week, Somerset has been assigned to help Mills integrate into his new position, his new precinct, and his new office. But Somerset is old school, while Mills is a hot-headed, "feed on my emotions" type of detective. The two wind up clashing on day one.

Then the worst case either man has ever seen is dropped square in their laps: a morbidly obese man, living as a shut-in, is found with his hands and feet bound to a chair, his face down in a plate of spaghetti. The autopsy indicates the man literally ate until his stomach ruptured. Behind the refrigerator, painted in grease, is the word 'Gluttony', along with a hand-written note containing a quote from Paradise Lost.

Later in the week, a second body turns up: a high-profile defense attorney, dead on the floor of his office, kneeling before a scale upon which he was instructed to place one pound of his own flesh. A horrifying wound cut in his own side, a bloody knife, and the word 'Greed' written in the deceased's blood tell the rest of the story. What started as a single murder now has all the signs of a serial killer. As Somerset tells his police captain, there are seven deadly sins: Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Lust, Wrath, Pride, and Envy. "You can expect five more of these."

Realizing they have to pool their talents, Mills and Somerset work to bring the case to a close, but with each new horrific crime scene they visit, they come up with only more questions and a distinct lack of clues. How can they track down a killer who leaves behind no evidence, no fingerprints, no connections between the victims, and no apparent motive for his actions?

---

I've long admired David Fincher. The guy went from directing music videos to feature films, and had a rough go of the original transition. Seriously, go watch one of the many, many documentaries about the making of Alien 3 just to see how badly this poor kid was abused by the studio heads on his first feature. After the fiasco of Alien 3, he declared he would rather die of colon cancer than make another film, and returned to his music video roots.

That changed when he read Andrew Kevin Walker's screenplay for Se7en, and was tapped by New Line Cinema to replace outgoing director Jeremiah Chechik. Fincher's sophomore outing in the director's chair earned him near-universal acclaim, as the picture became one of the top earners and most highly-praised feature films of 1995. Produced on a budget of $33 million, it went on to gross ten times that much in box office receipts, and put Fincher's career back on track.

I seriously cannot say enough good things about this movie: it's dark, gritty, and unrelenting in both its story and depiction of human cruelty, but it does so without resorting to cheap jump scares or spilling gallons of blood. Se7en works in much the same way Texas Chainsaw Massacre did, by hinting at more than showing the horrors and letting one's mind fill in the blanks. We don't watch serial killer John Doe track his victims, we don't see the crimes in progress. We only see what Mills and Somerset see when they reach the scene, already too late to do more than call the coroner. By the time we reach "Lust", we're shown only the legs of the deceased, and a Polaroid image of the murder weapon -- an enormous leather-crafted dildo with a sharp-bladed knife for a tip.

We don't need to see anything else. Our brains, our imaginations, fill in the details. Whether we want them to or not.

All we see is the aftermath, and that aftermath is more often than not bathed in shadows, penetrated by flashlights, leaving more in the gloom than what the detectives' pitiful police issue lamps can expose. As pointed out by better reviewers than myself, Fincher's use of lighting is more than just mood-setting -- he's directing the attention of his audience at specific points, specific places, on the screen, forcing us to look where he wants us to because there's nothing else to see. Somerset and Mills can't look away, but neither can we, sitting in the comfort of our own homes, and we are thereby involuntary witnesses. We can shut the movie off if we want to escape, but that's our only option. Walker's screenplay and Fincher's direction ensure we can make no other choice.

---

"Michael, why do you bother with LaserDiscs?" is a question I'm usually asked when people learn about my interest in the hobby. My answers vary depending on who I'm talking to, but I normally mutter something about "the best version of Star Wars" and go on about my way.

But the LaserDisc is an important format for many reasons not related to Star Wars, and for my money, "The Criterion Collection" is as good an answer as any. If you find yourself reaching for the multi-disc Special Edition form of the film on DVD/Blu-Ray instead of the bare-bones single-disc offering, if you've watched a film with the commentary track on more times than with it off, if you enjoy diving deep into the world of cinema and prying loose the secret whispers from the jaws which snap and speak at 23.976 frames per second (NTSC), then you owe a debt of gratitude to LaserDisc.

The Criterion Collection was created specifically for LaserDiscs, where the publisher worked directly with those responsible for creating the movie (when possible) to produce the definitive version of that movie for home viewing. The picture was produced from original film negatives, the sound remastered from the original source recordings, lovingly edited to remove defects and imperfections, and published in high-quality sleeves or boxes that any owner would be proud to display on their shelves. The end result is, ideally, the director's preferred presentation of a film, matching as close as possible the theatrical experience on a home viewing format.

The peeps at Criterion did not screw around, and their painstaking work on Se7en proves it. This boxed set is four discs, with seven (of course) sides' worth of material. It's big, it's heavy, it feels important, and it is. Sides one through six are each presented in the higher-quality CAV format, which comes at the expense of being able to hold only 30 minutes of video per side. The first five sides are taken up by the film, which has a run time of 131 minutes and is shown in the original theatrical 2.35:1 aspect ratio, with a rich, vibrant, uncompressed 5.1 Dolby Surround AC3 mix on one channel, and a digital Dolby Surround track on the other. Side six holds a variety of still images taken from behind-the-scenes shots, production images, prop creation, and filming. Side seven is the only one in CLV format, which is used to hold most of the video portions of the special features, which include the theatrical trailer, TV spots, deleted scenes, outtakes, a behind-the-scenes featurette, and an interview about the special effects with designer Rob Bottin. Also, let's not forget the commentary track, available on the Analog left channel featuring Fincher, Pitt, Freeman, Walker, Bottin, and production designer Arthur Max which runs the length of the film.

There are literally as many bonus goodies in this set as there are minutes in the film itself. If you purchased it back in 1996 and paid full retail for it, you shelled out $124.95. You had to truly love a movie to spring for the Criterion edition, but LaserDisc was always a cine-phile format, and cine-philes, like John Hammond, spare no expense.

"But Michael, I can already get all this on the New Line Cinema 2-disc DVD release, and I don't have to get up every thirty minutes to flip the movie. Why on earth would I fork out the roughly $35 asking price for this boxed set?"

Because Fincher, in my opinion, needs to be experienced on LaserDisc. He's one of the very, very few directors who uses light and shadow in such a way that viewing his films in a non-analog format means you aren't getting the full picture, and that goes doubly so for Se7en.

See, Se7en was originally developed for theatrical printing using a process known as 'silver retention'. Normally, the silver is bleached out of the film stock to create the final print, which results in an overall lightening of the final image. Fincher, however, wanted the film's world to be dark, the shadows thick and overwhelming, and bypassing the bleaching process allowed him to retain that dense black level which light just seems to fall into. Fincher spent weeks working with the film geeks at Criterion to perfect that look for this release. As the liner notes explain, "The process is so difficult, time-consuming, and expensive that directors and studios rarely consider using it. [...] Only a few hundred of the 2,500 prints of Seven released theatrically were ever produced by silver retention, which means that this laserdisc is a truer representation of the intended look of the film than many audiences saw in theaters."

Digital video processing cannot do this technique justice; you need an analog medium to appreciate its full potential. In my opinion, the only way to experience Se7en the way Fincher wanted audiences to experience it is via this release right here. I've talked about this sort of thing before when discussing Chris Carter's Millennium, but no other format provides the kind of deep, rich black levels like the LaserDisc. And if you know Fincher, you know he's all about those black levels.

---

Se7en came out twenty-four years ago, and it's still watched, analyzed, and discussed by film critics today. And with good reason: if any one of Fincher's films has the right to be called his masterpiece, it's this one. Brilliantly directed, brilliantly acted, brilliantly designed, brilliantly edited, and brilliantly presented, it's a one stop shop for all you need to know about respecting your audience while still managing to creep the hell out of them. Se7en demands and rewards repeat viewings. Each and every time I've spun this film up over the years, I've connected some previously-unrecognized dot that I didn't see before.

Very little in the movie is spelled out for audiences, because screenwriter Walker and director Fincher intended for audiences to put the pieces together with Somerset and Mills. The journey the story takes them, and us, on is literally the destination. Notice that we're never told exactly where this movie takes place, which means it could be any big city. It rains the whole time Mills and Somerset are investigating...up until the point where John Doe arrives at the police station to turn himself in, and the sun comes out. The crimes and the crime scenes are more alluded to than shoved in our faces, with the reactions of those exploring them showing us everything we need to know. Maybe we can make an exception for "Sloth", which should go down as one of the greatest shock reveals in history, but even then the bizarre interior of the room with its virtual forest of air fresheners hanging from the ceiling gives us a better idea of what the place smells like than half a dozen people grunting and covering their noses. Detective Mills's reaction to peeking into a bucket at the site of the "Gluttony" killing tells us everything we need to know about what's inside it -- we need not see the contents for ourselves. We're told the "Pride" victim had her nose sliced off, but all we see is a head covered in blood-soaked bandages. Our brains fill in the rest, far more lucidly and with more graphic detail and involuntary empathy than films like Saw or Hostel deliver when the camera leers at the predicament of its prisoners of pain.

The film's final reveal, referenced in that meme up there, is never shown on camera...only Morgan Freeman's reaction to it. And yet we all know the answer to Brad Pitt's question anyway.

Se7en even goes so far as to make us question our humanity. It's hard to argue with the SWAT officer who crouches close to the "Sloth" victim, a man who was a drug dealing, drug-using child molester, when he whispers, "You got what you deserved." How often have we compared the sentence a criminal receives to the crimes he or she committed and thought the scales of justice failed to properly weigh the verdict. How far is too far?

Our outrage is palpable when a rapist like Brock Turner is given a slap on the wrist because he was a great athlete and the judge felt it wasn't proper to ruin his life over "a simple little mistake", all the while ignoring the fact his victim will carry the scars of his assault for the rest of hers? But our outrage isn't always correct -- after all, outrage was enough to send a group of young men to prison for a crime they didn't commit in the case of the Central Park Jogger.

Nevertheless, our desire for punishment and expiation often match up with John Doe's. Doe gloats in the back of the police car towards the end of the movie that his actions will be discussed, talked about, written about, for years to come. Mills blows him off, saying his crimes will merit only a few weeks' interest from the public, and the odds are on his side: all but the most heinous crimes exit public consciousness soon after the conclusion of the trial. But then, Jack the Ripper has been taunting us for decades. The slaughter at Hinterkaifeck remains unsolved to this day. Zac Effron just played Ted Bundy in a new film this year. Colorado is talking about tearing down and rebuilding Columbine High School twenty years after the shooting which took place there, because it's become an attraction for morbid curiosity seekers and a symbol for those considering perpetrating a similar crime. Doe might have been talking to Mills and Somerset, but Andrew Kevin Walker was also making a prophetic statement to the audience.

And look at that: twenty-four years after its release, people are still discussing, talking about, and writing about Se7en. What that says about us as an audience, I'm not sure.

But it looks like Doe, and Fincher, and Walker, were right after all.

Five notebooks filled with rambling observations on life out of five.

You don't need this, but here's the trailer anyway.