The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Fincher · a film · 1995 · about 127 minutes · written by Andrew Kevin Walker
Mode
Serial-killer thriller made as a moral design; police procedural, buddy picture and allegory in one film
Mythos
The seven deadly sins as the structure of the plot; the elder near retirement and the rash young hero; the dark prophet who makes himself one of his own figures
Phase
One week, the last before a detective’s retirement, marked by day cards and ending on a Sunday in the desert
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 127 minutes, in English; one release version; the killer in person only in the last third
Register
From a comic dinner in an apartment shaken by trains to an execution under pylons; rain and darkness lit by flashlights, then a white afternoon
Scale
Two detectives, one unnamed city, one scheme of seven
Governing Proposition
In the last week before an old detective retires, a killer stages one murder for each of the seven deadly sins, and completes his scheme with the help of the young detective sent to stop him. The wager of the film is that the righteous anger of a decent man is the instrument evil needs, and that a thriller can build its audience’s appetite for the next body into the design it is watching.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Detective Lieutenant William Somerset has a week left before he retires. Alone in his apartment, he sets a metronome ticking. Detective David Mills has just arrived in the city with his wife, Tracy. The city has no name. It rains on nearly every day of the film, and the film is the week: title cards name the days, and they end on a Sunday.
The titles come first: hand-scratched film and the pages of a killer’s notebooks, cut to a remix of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer”. Kyle Cooper designed them, and they changed what a film could open with. Then the first body, found by flashlight in a dark room. Gluttony. Then greed. The killer has begun a scheme of seven, and the detectives have begun inside it.
David Fincher made the film from a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, and New Line Cinema released it in the United States on 22 September 1995. Darius Khondji photographed it, Richard Francis-Bruce edited it, Arthur Max designed it, and Howard Shore wrote the music. Morgan Freeman plays Somerset, Brad Pitt plays Mills, Gwyneth Paltrow plays Tracy, and R. Lee Ermey the captain. Kevin Spacey plays the killer, John Doe, and is left out of the opening credits. The film runs about 127 minutes, and there is one release version.
Movement II
Somerset goes to the library at night. The guards play cards while Bach plays, and he walks alone among the books. It is the one scene of calm beauty in the film, and its key. Among the books are Dante, Chaucer and Aquinas, and in them the sins have an order, and the order is a plan. The film names its sources, and the myth it builds is drawn from a reading list.
Somerset comes to dinner at the Millses’ apartment. The evening is comic and warm, and each time a train passes the walls shake; that is why the apartment was cheap. The two men begin to work together. The old detective and the young wife find a bond.
Later Tracy meets Somerset alone for breakfast and tells him that she is pregnant and has not told her husband. The film has placed the hinge of its ending at breakfast, between the two people who will know least of what is coming.
Movement III
A police raid on an apartment finds the next victim in a bed, a man the killer has kept there and photographed over a year. The man is presumed dead, and then he coughs. The scene is the film’s first great shock, and it is a find, not a killing: of the seven murders, all but the last are seen as aftermath, in photographs or described.
Through a contact, Somerset buys the FBI’s records of library borrowing, and they hand the detectives a door. The killer is there, and runs. The chase goes through a tenement in the rain, and when the killer has Mills at his mercy he spares him. Inside the apartment are the notebooks.
Lust and pride follow, found as the others were. Five of the seven have been found by the detectives. The killer is still somewhere in the rain, and the scheme still has two places in it.
Movement IV
John Doe walks into the police station, bloody to the elbows, and calls out to the detectives. He gives himself up. The man the film has kept off screen for two thirds of its length is calm and polite, and he has come to finish his work.
Two places in his scheme are still to be filled, and Somerset and Mills drive him out of the city. In the back of the car he talks. He tells them why: a society too apathetic to see its own sins must be made to look. “You have to hit them with a sledgehammer.”
Outside the city there is no rain. The car comes out into a desert of dry white ground under power pylons. After a week of darkness the film moves into a light that hides nothing, and the only thing still hidden is about to arrive.
Movement V
A van comes over the flat, and with it a box. The film does not show what is in it. Somerset runs to stop what cannot now be stopped. The killer names his own sin, envy: he has made himself one of his figures.
Mills understands. Francis-Bruce cuts the van, the box and the men in a rhythm that cannot be borne, and holds on Mills’s face. Mills shoots Doe, and becomes wrath. It is the only killing in the film shown as it happens, and it is the detective’s own. The scheme is complete, and the man who wanted the world to be just has completed it.
Mills is taken away in the back of a car. Somerset stays. His last words are a half-refusal: “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.” The film has proved the killer’s sermon, and given its last line to the one man who will not quite accept it.
Act III · The Twelve
The seven days and the seven sins make most of the film compulsory: each murder is a station, and the last two can only be done once the detectives are close. The scenes that look like rest are required. The dinner at the Millses’ apartment, the train shaking the walls, gives the marriage and the city their measure and gives Somerset and Tracy their bond. Tracy’s breakfast with Somerset, where she tells him she is pregnant and has not told her husband, is the hinge of the ending. The library is the film’s key. What gives: the library records bought from the FBI are a contrivance that hands the detectives the killer’s door, the raid on the sloth victim’s room repeats the tension of the find, and the chase through the tenement is genre business longer than its use.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: the righteous anger of a decent man is the instrument evil needs, and a society too apathetic to see its own sins can be made to look only by atrocity. The killer says it himself: “You have to hit them with a sledgehammer.” The construction makes it hold: the detective who wants the world to be just becomes wrath, and the old detective’s despair is answered by the city producing what he feared. Two charges hold it below the gate. Much of the film’s force is the city as mood, rain, rot and indifference, and a mood ranks below a meaning. And the disclosure is voiced by the killer and largely accepted by the film; Somerset’s last line half refuses it, but the world is rigged in the killer’s favour, which makes the truth a thesis more than a finding.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The elevation is terror, and it recurs at intervals: the gluttony victim found by flashlight; the sloth victim, presumed dead, coughing in the bed after a year of photographs; the killer walking into the station bloody to the elbows, calling to the detectives; and the desert, one of the summits of its genre. The cut from a week of rain to a dry white afternoon under pylons, the van coming over the flat, the box, Somerset running to stop what cannot be stopped and Mills’s face as he understands: the film’s dread is released all at once, in light. Against these, one summit of another kind: the library at night, the guards at cards while Bach plays. Held below by frequency: the middle between the finds is procedure and chase, and much depends on the last twenty minutes.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built, not cited. The seven deadly sins are the film’s structure, each murder a sermon in flesh, and the scheme is completed only when the detective takes his place in it: Mills becomes wrath, and the particular becomes the archetype. That is load-bearing. Round it is a second pattern, the wise elder near retirement and the rash young hero arriving, the elder outliving the son he could not save. The killer is a dark prophet who makes himself one of his own figures, envy. What holds it below the gate: the myth arrives from a reading list, and the library scene names its sources, so it is a schema applied as much as a structure that grows; the sins are illustrated more than inhabited; and the victims, sins in human form, never become people.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance was the serial-killer thriller after The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and the buddy-cop picture, both of which promise a duel the detectives win. The turn: the killer wins, completes his design with the detectives’ help, and the hero ends destroyed in a car while the old man stays; the worst act is kept off screen, in a box the film never opens. The look is a swerve too, the grime and darkness of a nameless city brought from music video and advertising into a studio thriller. The stake was real, a downbeat ending for a studio genre picture with a rising star. Held below the gate because the city and its rain inherit openly from Blade Runner (1982) and the crime film of the 1970s, and because the genre machinery of the middle is followed, not turned.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The form is a countdown, and it knows what the film knows: that the detectives are inside someone else’s calendar. Day cards count down a week whose end, Somerset’s retirement, is fixed before the film begins, and whose plan is the killer’s. Days of rain and a last day of sun make the form a drama of revelation: the city that hid everything ends in a light that hides nothing, and the one thing still hidden is the box. The withholding is formal too: the murders are seen as aftermath and photograph until the last, so the only killing witnessed in the present is the detective’s own. Held at its figure because large parts of the form are the genre’s, not the film’s: the procedural finds, the chase, the briefing rooms. Change them for any thriller’s and the film would know the same.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Thirty-one years of evidence, so evidence and not promise. The first viewing is spent on what is in the box. On return the film yields craft and atmosphere richly, Darius Khondji’s darkness, the sound of the city, Morgan Freeman’s performance, and a few real questions: whether Somerset’s last line refuses the killer or concedes to him; whether the film shares the killer’s contempt for its city; whether its punishment of Tracy, the one wholly innocent figure, is its cruelty or its point. What holds it below the other axes: the formal pleasures are deep, but the yield in meaning is narrow, because the film’s meaning is a scheme that is complete once seen. Much of the long discussion it has sustained concerns the ending’s mechanics and its imitators rather than new meaning found in the film.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Released in 1995, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of its decade. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised the serial-killer thriller as a moral design in which the audience’s appetite for the next body is implicated, and set a look, darkness, rain, decay, the murder as tableau, new to the studio mainstream. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is very wide, the cycle of killer thrillers of the late 1990s; television in its image, from Millennium (1996) to the forensic procedurals of the 2000s; Saw (2004) and its sequels, built on a killer who designs his victims’ punishment; the vogue for the twist ending it shares with The Usual Suspects (1995); and Cooper’s titles, which remade their craft. Much of the reach is in lesser work: imitation is reach, but it is not the field raised.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Thirty-one years old, between the usual span of a quarter century and that of four decades. The form survives whole: there is one release version, complete and in circulation, and restorations are repair. Presence is among the widest of any American film of its decade, in continuous exhibition, broadcast, home video and streaming, with its ending and its box in common speech. The surface is charged. The grime and the rain were imitated so widely that they now read as a period style of the 1990s, and the library records, the payphones and the photographs fix the procedure to its decade. But the unnamed city was built to belong to no time, and the moral design has not dated. The charged surface cancels the widest presence, and the figure is the usual one for the span.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. The making bears weight. Khondji’s photography works the darkness to the edge of what can be seen and lights it by flashlight, so that every find is a discovery inside the frame. Arthur Max’s sets, the victims’ rooms and the killer’s apartment of notebooks, are built arguments. Richard Francis-Bruce’s cutting holds the desert sequence in an unbearable rhythm, and Howard Shore’s score lies over the city’s sound. Freeman’s Somerset is the performance of the film, a man whose weariness is a moral position; Kevin Spacey’s killer, calm and polite, is exact in his short time on screen. The costs: Brad Pitt’s Mills is played at one pitch until the last minutes, Tracy is written as a sacrifice, and the FBI device and the tenement chase are mechanism.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dinner at the Millses’, comic and warm, the apartment shaking each time the train passes, and the execution in the desert under the pylons. One law governs them: the city’s indifference has an architect, and everything ordinary is material for him. The apartment was cheap because of the train; the cheapness and the warmth are what the killer will use. The rain, the library, the photographs and the box obey the same law: the world is a design, and the detectives read it too late. The law strains in two places. The killer’s foresight exceeds what any man could arrange, so the design leans on the author’s luck; and the investigation runs on genre logic while the ending runs on allegory. The range is narrower than it looks: one week, one city, one scheme.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Several orders are present and partly held: the city as a moral and social order, its poverty, prostitution and indifference; the police as an institution, its weariness and its politics in the captain’s office; the marriage and the coming child; the sacred, in the scheme of sin and punishment and the books that carry it; the literary tradition, which the film quotes as its key. They are held together by the scheme, and that is what holds the axis lowest: every order is there to illustrate a sin or to be used by the killer, and none is held for itself. The victims are figures; the city has no inhabitants who are not police, killer or prey; Tracy is the family only as the instrument of the last sin. Consciousness is held well in Somerset, and only there.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.7, then Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.6. A making in which darkness, built rooms, cutting and one great performance carry the design; a reach as wide as any genre film of its decade had, from the killer thrillers and procedurals that followed to the craft of film titles; and a presence, thirty-one years on, among the widest of any American film of its time, with its ending in common speech.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: city, police, marriage, the sacred and the literary tradition are present, but every order is there to illustrate a sin or to be used by the killer, and none is held for itself. Above it, The Bottomless Well at 7.8, a scheme complete once seen that yields craft more than meaning on return, and The Unconcealment at 8.0, a truth about wrath that is real but is voiced by the killer in a world built to prove him right.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, The Swerve at 8.2 and The Unconcealment at 8.0 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.8, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. The summit is closed by three conditions, The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve and The Unconcealment against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by the aggregate, 8.2 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Se7en (often written Seven) as released in the United States by New Line Cinema on 22 September 1995, about 127 minutes, the one release version, from the title sequence to Somerset’s last words in the desert: directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, photographed by Darius Khondji, edited by Richard Francis-Bruce, designed by Arthur Max, with music by Howard Shore and a title sequence designed by Kyle Cooper. The unit is the film, not any print; restorations bear on survival only. No print, screenplay or recording was consulted. Two lines of dialogue are quoted, from memory, where their words are certain. Figures and details that could not be verified, among them the budget, the box-office returns, the scene count, the day on which each find falls, the processing of particular release prints, the exact remix used in the titles and the music of the closing credits, are not given.