It's more comfortable for you to label me as insane

Rating: Null/10 (19 March 2010)

"I just don't think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was a virtue." – Detective Somerset
David Fincher's "Seven" sees rookie cop Brad Pitt hooking up with veteran detective Morgan Freeman. In typical cop movie fashion, Freeman is due to retire in a week, but a spate of violent killings pulls him back on the job, the serial killer committing ritualistic murders inspired by the seven deadly sins.
The first act of "Seven" is rife with clichés: a hotshot rookie paired off with a wise old timer, a serial killer who loves toying with cops, a narrative which bounces from one lavishly decorated crime scene to the next etc etc. Throw in the obligatory foot chase, library scene, motor mouthed police captain (Lee Ermey) and an aesthetic which owes a little too much to both "The Silence of the Lambs" and "The X Files", and you'd think you had a fairly routine serial killer movie on your hands. Only you don't.
Fincher creates a festering world, dank, putrid and forever bathed in rain. More interestingly, his narrative goes to great pains to reverse the trend found in most serial killer movies. Whilst most genre films treat their killers as monsters, deformed and different from us, "Seven" challenges our view of monstrosity and paints a world in which the monster is us. "We see a deadly sin on every street corner," John Doe, our serial killer states, "and we tolerate it! We tolerate it because it's common, it's trivial!"
Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Envy, Wrath, Pride and Lust are everywhere, even in Morgan Freeman's wise detective hero, the moral centre of the film. "We're no worse than he is," Freeman says, sympathising with John Doe and chastising others for labelling him insane. Both men are teachers in their own way, both trying to fix the world, Freeman by arresting the guilty, Doe by killing them outright. Doe, without history, family or fingerprints, thus becomes a kind of symbol for man's collective guilt, trying desperate to shock the world out of apathy.
These themes are summed up best in a throwaway bit of dialogue when Pitt asks the owner of a prostitution parlour whether he likes the things he sees around him. "That's life," the guy shrugs.
Ultimately, the message is not only that we are all guilty, but that in creating "relative" versions of guilt, society only degenerates into a kind of mass indifference. "It's easier to lose yourself in drugs than it is to cope with life," Freeman says at one point. "It's easier to beat a child than it is to raise it. Hell, love costs: it takes effort and work."
The film ends with Freeman quoting a line by Ernest Hemingway – "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." – and then stating that he agrees only with the second part. The world's cesspit, but it's worth fighting for.
Fighting for a better world is, in a sense, what Fincher's "Fight Club" is about. Released at the tail end of the 1990s, the film belongs to a group of films ("Magnolia", "Safe", "The Ice Storm", "American Beauty", "Fight Club", "Being John Malkovich", "Fear and Loathing", "Far From Heaven", "The Savages", "Happiness" etc) which sought to explore middle class resentment, each seeing American life as being empty, mundane or a suicidally dull bore.
Post-war cinema had long worked out its existential issues with a variety of masterpieces (cf Antonioni, Bergman, Ray, Minnelli, Sirk etc), but then came two decades of excess and so stupor. When American cinema finally re-woke up to its deep rooted malaise, it tended to skirt around the issue. Fulfilment thus became a sexual problem, all these films revolving around white males who seek empty flings and biochemical bliss. "Fight Club" belongs to this group, though here sex becomes a kind of bare-backed man-on-man homo-erotic violence. Elsewhere Fincher attacks rampant consumerism, and highlights a perceived loss of masculinity in our modern society by having his hero, a wimpy Edward Norton, gradually becomes his alter ego, the animalistic Tyler Durden. Tyler represents Norton's repressed animal nature and sense of rebellion. It is through Tyler that Norton – who spends the film drifting from one support and rehabilitation group to the next – learns to lash out, creating a underground boxing club which eventually evolves into "Project Mayhem", a terrorist group which seeks to tear down modern civilisation.
But the great joke of "Fight Club" is that the film subtly mocks the fantasy image of Tyler Durden. Durden, the manly anarchist and poster-boy for raging male hormones, is ultimately just another ineffectual support group. Another product to buy into.
What's offensive is that, whilst the film acknowledges that reactionary forms of rebellion don't work – capitalism absorbs and internalises all attacks - and that raging against the usual figureheads are empty gestures (Norton wants to blow up credit card data-banks and beat up his boss), it's unable to point to either any real solution, or any actual "cause". This would require artists who are actual geniuses.
8.5/10 - Worth multiple viewings.