What’s in The Box? A Love Letter to Se7en (1995)
Source: Screen Rant
Sometimes tragedy is what we need to appreciate life ahead. Se7en (1995) taught me about life, love, and horror all at once. Cinema has forever demanded a happy ending and has preached that people watch movies to escape real life. Although I agree and do find great escape in film, sometimes tragedy is necessary. When I first discovered the love of film, none other than A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) sparked my creativity. Watching Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) beat Freddy Kruger (Robert Englund) at his own game was like no other experience. It is also one of the first films I ever saw with a not-so-happy ending: Nancy continues to dream, and she’s whisked away in the car with the green and red striped hood, her mother pulled through the small window. The ending seems kind of comical to me now, but to my nine-year-old self, it was happily anxiety-inducing. Because, tragedy keeps us thinking and forces us to accept closure rather than wait for happily ever after.
Cut to me at fifteen years old watching Se7en for the first time on censored television. The film features a sad and gray city full of crime and a young rookie cop ready to battle it all. On the other side of the television screen was a young freshman terrified of high school ahead. Se7en has something that I will always envy, and that is a humbling sense of the world. The unnamed city that detective Mills (Brad Pitt) and Somerset (Morgan Freeman) live and work in is like Gotham, but with fewer bats. The environment itself is alive and creates woes everyone is now desensitized to, that is until John Doe (Kevin Spacey) begins his vicious, Christianity-inspired attacks on the community. I, for one, was not raised with restrictive religious values, but it was still a part of my life, a confusing one as a young queer individual.
Source: IMDB
Se7en displays the many imperfect truths that life brings and offers a twisted way of reevaluating our choices through the threatening use of religious ideology. Greed, lust, pride, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth all feel like threats to be feared and never something that can be had in moderation. I grew up in the internet age where there were quirky online quizzes to find out which sin you were most guilty of. Mine was sloth, and it just so happened to be my favorite animal, too. Destined for hell, I thought—a lazy lesbian. How damned I was. Comedy aside, Se7en made me realize that our character flaws are not a sin, but they are blinding. Mills’ wrath leads him not to recognize the danger ahead until it is too late.
We can become overwhelmed by our vices and commit crimes against ourselves like forgetting a date, not saying “I love you every day,” and taking small things for granted. Se7en led me to appreciate my sinful life and opened my eyes to appreciate things I never thought twice about, even in my lowest of lows, when I thought it would be best for everyone to rip myself from the world. My tragedies have shown me the better parts of this life, and as I continue to learn and grow out of my Mills’ state of mind and make mistakes, I remember the box. Of course, what’s inside the box is different for everyone, but Se7en proves that we are never in control, even when the result is tragic, and sometimes this lack of control is necessary.
