SE7EN: Sin and the City

Nihilism, religious zealotry and the horror of apathy: how David Fincher's thriller subverted the genre.

The serial killer sub-genre of the detective thriller presents the triumph of reason and virtue over Dionysian disorder. If the serial murderer is the one enslaved to his Id, then the detectives - those plucky agents of the superego - can explain, out-manoeuvre, and subject him to justice. The killer's bestial irrationality, his Luciferian attempt to usurp the throne, is trumped by the harmonious workings of virtuous reason, and he is forced back inside the moral order. The world is set back to rights with the chaos neutralised.

The basic lesson from these dualistic stories is that the savage aspect of human nature can always be subdued by the intellectual. Those rational agents are justified in using force, for their violence is preserving the civilised order, whilst the maniac only uses it for his own self-gratifying ends: the difference between duty and pleasure.

Detectives like Sherlock Holmes and all his descendants are the apogees of reason; cyphers for empirical analysis and passionless calculation. The killers are often caught through a failure of their own reasoning: they either overlooked some small detail (which is noticed by a more forensic mind) or they are betrayed by their emotions. More often than not, it is emotion overwhelming their reason that has led them to kill in the first place.

The notion that reason can slay the beast has become a comfort blanket for the scientific age. Whilst some place their faith in the divine, others place it in rationality and ineluctable progress. Either way, they both provide solace that we are not just another animal roaming the Earth. We are not. No other animal is as rapacious and self-destructive as the human species.

In films like Manhunter (1986; remade as Red Dragon in 2002) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the intelligent FBI agents - Will Graham and Clarice Starling, respectively - are helped by someone even more perceptive than they are, the cannibal-psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter. Lecter is handy too for explaining the killers they are seeking; our curiosity about the heart of darkness is satiated with an illuminating explanation of traumatic childhoods, narcissistic personalities and self-deifying fantasies. Once the killers have been stripped of their mystique, the detectives in both stories kill their quarries and justice is done. Reason has awoken and slayed the monsters. We can all sleep easy tonight.

To this, Se7en (1995) is a sharp contrast. The serial killer has a motivation, but is unmoored from any psychological explanation. The detectives fail to win by their own heroic reason and the villain, using a rational strategy of his own, seems to triumph. By its final scene, the world is not left a better place and we have not learnt any lessons to shield us from harm.

The staging ground is an anonymous city, where the denizens scurry between the rain-slicked streets and the filthy air. In this crime-ridden metropolis, apathy has become a way of life and it is against this that the three main characters are set: Detective William Somerset wreathed in weltschmerz; his enthusiastic new partner David Mills with his optimistic sense of duty; and the serial killer John Doe pursuing his own divine mission.

It is a city of the living dead, where its inhabitants perpetuate their own meaningless lives through the mechanical replication of their visceral appetites and self-obsession. The city is worldly, as the Desert Fathers would have defined it. It evokes the vestibule of Hell in Dante's Inferno. Here, the nameless hordes are punished for their apathy: "They no earned no infamy, and earned no praise [...] These people have no hope of dying/And their blind life is contemptible."

The damp, decomposing terrains - decaying tenements, vermin-infested apartments, the subterranean brothel - are, like its inhabitants, without a future, living only in a zombified present. Whatever passion they have is directed towards their own gratification, the compulsive stimulation of frayed nerve-endings and frazzled dopamine receptors, or in explosions of futile violence.

"Look at all the passion on that wall" Somerset says, looking wearily at a large blood splatter. This apathy is closer to acedie, sloth, than to the classical definition of apathy. The Stoics, early Christians, and philosophers like Immanuel Kant spoke of the importance of a duty of apathy, by which one restrains affects and passions within the reins of reason.

The apathy of Se7en is a solipsistic indifference towards others, to anything beyond personal satiation, let alone any ideas greater than the atomised individual. In Christian terms, it is the spiritual sloth towards the Good that underpins the other deadly sins; it prepares the ground for them.

Like the wretched Sloth victim, the city and its people are in a state of living rot. The stain of sin taints every corner, from the slums to the lawyer’s chintzy office and the sterile whitewashed walls of the Pride victim’s apartment.

There is a subtle oneiric quality to the city. The labyrinth of jumbled and bruised architecture, hazy through the rain as if it’s the memory of a dream. Each of the victims’ locations feel like yet another infernal zone, reflecting the very sin they were deemed guilty of. Their sins are not abstract notions but ways of life infecting their environments; the city is a symptom of the human disease.

It’s reminiscent of the sprawling cyberpunk metropolis of Blade Runner (1982) or the Composite City described by William Burroughs in Naked Lunch (1959), “where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.” Except in this city, a vast bio-mechanical organism, there is no future; the only potential is the replication of sin. It begets itself like an animal cycle of reproduction, never knowing why and never knowing any different.

The prevailing apathy is the nihilism that, to paraphrase Dorothy Sayers, "believes in nothing, cares for nothing...finds purpose in nothing...and only remains alive because there is nothing it could die for." The murder victims seem driven by a perpetual and blind will towards their sins; be it the obese man who cannot moderate his eating, the lawyer driven to accrue money without scruples, or the sex worker commodifying her body and the punter who is prepared to pay for it. Their repetitive actions and obsessions (such as the Pride victim's vanity) are appetites that only grow with consumption.

Five of the victims are coerced into a mortifying transformation, and then to physical or mental destruction: the Gluttony victim is forced to eat until he’s bleeding internally; Sloth is tied to a bed for a year and pumped with the drugs he was selling; with Lust, the two victims are punished together through a grotesque union; and Mills, becoming Wrath, goes from a wannabe-hero-cop to an extrajudicial murderer. With Greed and Pride, both must offer an oblation and are given the (unlikely) chance of surviving. Of course, John Doe too is driven by an incessant desire which has blinded him to the contradictions in his own theology.

Like the televangelists of the Christian Right, he is part of the problem he claims to solve. There is nothing more nihilistic than torturing others for your own pleasure and then locating its purpose to some fetishistic Big Other so you can continue without feeling any personal responsibility. Doe has outsourced his autonomy to the Great Call Centre in the Sky that can field his responsibility for him.

The sins themselves are not just a form of apathy to what is good (in Doe's schema, the love of God), but also a coping strategy for living in the tumultuous city. They either lose themselves in anaesthetizing compulsions or they attempt to reign over their own little island in this sea of troubles - such as obsessively controlling their looks or amorally profiting from the sins that surround them.

Doe, who like Somerset is acutely sensitive to the prevailing moral decay, has found his own way of coping - that of the puritanical fundamentalist who can judge sin whilst wallowing in his own. Surrounded by meaningless lives divorced from any grand narrative, his life alone has meaning within a cosmic drama. Unlike Somerset, Doe seems to believe he is doing good - or at least, he is on the right side of the divine narrative - which, purely coincidentally, is exactly the same thing that gives him pleasure.

Somerset, who is leaving the force in seven days and retiring to the country, can no longer labour under the belief that he is doing any good. Conversely, Mills has fought to be assigned to the city, believing that he can make his corner of the world a slightly better place. Mills fetishizes the very thing Somerset has lost; it is the former's unerring faith that he can make a difference that allows him to continue operating in the world. Somerset no longer possesses the will to live "in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was a virtue."

In the opening scene, Somerset's concern for a child who may have witnessed a murder is brushed off by his colleagues as irrelevant. Later, he tells Mills that women in crisis centres are advised, in its event, not to yell "Rape!" but "Fire!", as their fellow citizens won't come to their aid unless the danger also affects them. "In any major city," he intones, "minding your own business is a science."

To paraphrase Aldous Huxley on the subject of acedia, Somerset has slipped into "the black depths of despair and hopeless unbelief," he has surrendered and wants to be "anywhere, anywhere out of this world." Somerset echoes this when, asked by a cab driver for his destination, he says "Far away from here."

Somerset articulates one of the common fears of living in a metropolis. Despite living amongst millions, you are surrounded by strangers. They will not help you if you alone need it or, worse still, some actively mean you harm. In the anonymous city, the citizens are anonymous to each other. And somewhere amongst the millions, one man is festering, planning his furious revenge.

Whereas Mills is fizzing with enthusiasm, Somerset’s faith has fizzled out. "Wish I still thought the way you do" he tells his partner. As well as attempting to cure his naivety, Somerset wants Mills to validate his pessimism but the he refuses, saying "I won't say that. I don't agree with you. I do not. I can't." He will not join Somerset in his Slough of Despond, despite the latter’s warning that “people don’t want a champion” and his unsparing assessment of police work:

We’re picking up the pieces. We're collecting all the evidence. Taking all the pictures and samples. Writing everything down. Noting the time things happened. Putting it all in neat little piles and filing it away, on the off- chance that it will ever be needed in the courtroom. Picking up diamonds on a deserted island, saving them, in case we ever get rescued [,,,] So many corpses roll away unrevenged.

All the meticulous detection and bureaucracy often lead to nothing. Somerset feels the weight of all his failures and those of the system in which he has spent his life. But his despair does not mutate into disgust. Rather, he sympathises with the apathy of his fellow citizens:

Apathy is a solution. It's easier to lose yourself in drugs than it is to cope with life. It's easier to steal what you want than it is to earn it. It's easier to a beat a child than it is to raise it. Hell, love costs. It's take effort. Work.

He echoes the quote from Paradise Lost that Doe pins to the the first murder scene: "Long is the way and hard/That out of Hell leads up to light." He recognises the same indolence of will in himself; his purpose has petered out and his retreat is not from a lack of care, but of energy to keep on keeping on.

John Doe, however, does have a purpose and the will to see it through. He embodies Emil Cioran's definition of the fanatic:

He will not forgive your living on the wrong side of his truths...he wants you to share his hysteria, his fullness, wants to impose it on you and thereby disfigure you.

Somerset remarks on the will of a killer who can "keep a man bound for a full year" and whose methods are "exacting, methodical and worst of all, patient." If love costs, then the price Doe puts on the love of God is very high indeed. His sense of purpose - as an agent of divine will - stands in direct opposition to the city's indifference to any existential meaning. As he tells the cops, "We tolerate it [sin] because it's common, it's trivial."

It’s this apathy, the near-invisibility of the citizens to each other, that allows him to punish his victims with near impunity. The very indifference rife in "a world this shitty" makes his actions both necessary and unnoticed by most of its inhabitants. His hyperbolic cruelty is, he claims, to smash through this apathy.

Wanting people to listen, you can't just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you'll notice you've got their strict attention.

When Se7en was released in 1995, the US had experienced a surge in violence from extremists of the Christian Right. Deranged loners and groups like Army of God were targeting staff at abortion clinics. Their less militant fellow travellers were campaigning against the likes of Bill Clinton and Marilyn Manson. This had followed years of televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson using their TV-pulpits and political platforms to preach an apocalyptic premillennial theology. To keep their status and compete in the attention economy, their rhetoric became evermore provocative and bilious.

They all raged against the moral decay of America, typified by liberal attitudes towards issues like abortion, homosexuality and gender equality. Two days after 11 September 2001, Falwell and Robertson claimed God had suspended his protection of America for a host of ‘liberal’ sins. The deaths of nearly 3000 people were, effectively, divine punishment. Falwell’s logic was that as America had been “throwing God out of the public square,” he had “lift[ed] the curtain and allow[ed] the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”

In his notebooks, Doe writes that we are "sick, ridiculous puppets" who dance on a "gross little stage [...] not knowing we are nothing. We are not what was intended." It could be surmised that he believes in the Augustinian concept of concupiscentia carnis; that original sin has so distorted our wills that everything we do is directed away from God and towards ourselves.

John Calvin developed this into ‘total depravity’: even the good things we try to do still displease God. An outward upholding of the divine law is still marred by our internal stain. This inherent deformation has made us puppets of a fallen nature and thus the world we have created is similarly tainted; sin radiates from us like a penumbra. As Augustine noted "Man...has become antisocial by inner corrosion."

Thus, Doe does not exclude himself from this state of total depravity; he is as sinful as the rest and must be punished accordingly (in this world), even if God has chosen him for this mission. Like Somerset, Doe is aware of the failures of the justice system and how this too reflects an apathy towards the Good. Their idea of justice is a sick joke. This is later echoed when, when regarding his victims, Doe retorts “Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny?”

Victor, the Sloth victim, was a "drug-dealing pederast" who evaded justice thanks to his lawyer (the Greed victim). The latter is similarly unlikely to engender much sympathy; Doe describes him as "a man who dedicated his life to keeping murderers and rapists on the streets with every breath he could muster." Our own ethics are being toyed with.

Doe's morbid revulsion of worldly things has metastasised into a sadistic fetish of "turning each sin against the sinner." Like Somerset, he lives a secluded existence, cloistered in his sanctuary within the concrete hell. The cop meditatively uses a metronome at night to drown out the world; Doe paints over his windows to block it out. He practises a doctrine of separation, not just from the world but from himself. He gives himself the generic name for an unidentified corpse, shaves his head and slices off his fingerprints. The practical motive would be to evade detection, but he is also acknowledging himself as a nobody, just another lump of sin.

He rejects the particularised identity that would differentiate him from all the other sinners and with it, the vanity of striving to be and finding definition as an authentic individual. If our individuality is just another commodity, then Doe refuses to buy. "It doesn't matter who I am," he tells the cops, "Who I am means absolutely nothing. I've never been exceptional. But this is though. My work." And by his works, he believes, he shall set an example that will be imitated in perpetuity.

Doe's belief that he was chosen is manifested in his ability to use his divinely-graced but still sinful will to set about his works. Like Calvin's concept of predestination - which he developed from Augustine - the fact that one could find the will to do this would suggest that one is indeed blessed with divine grace. Thus, the very fact that one is capable of this is all the evidence one needs to feel chosen.

It is perhaps from this sensitivity to worldly horrors that he has derived his mission. His sensitivity leads to a separation from the world and a desire to block it out in his blacked-out apartment. Whether already a believer or not, he asks an existential question: Why am I like this? Is there a purpose to this sensitivity, this malfunction of, or modification to, my nature that necessitates this separation from the world? From this he could either filter it through his pre-existing religious belief or make a leap of faith that his nature has a divinely-guided purpose.

So if he believes that God has chosen him as His agent, then He has expressed this choice through making Doe the way he is - the only man in the city who seems to care about the ubiquity of sin and is tormented by the universal apathy towards it. He is the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. God has graced him with this painful awareness of sin in order to perform this mission. He is not necessarily disingenuous when he claims to be unexceptional in himself (though I doubt it). God could have chosen anyone to perform this work. He anonymises himself to become just a vessel. That he enjoyed torturing his victims is merely further proof to him that he is on the right path; it feels good to do good. Hence, "I did not choose. I was chosen."

Doe's actions contain an obscene sexuality - stripping his victims and photographing them; the obsessive and sadistic mortification of their flesh; his apartment like a televangelist’s sex dungeon; the medical pictures in his fanatically composed notebooks; the Lust murder; and the implication of assaulting Mills' wife. There is the giant neon cross that hovers over his filthy bed; the only light in this dirty world.

His whole existence is pornographic, solely focused on his fetishistic obsession. As pornography censors everything but sex, so Doe's perception has telescoped down to an obsession with the carnality of sin; it's all he sees and all he lives for. It is noted that he takes his time tormenting his victims, in scourging their flesh and making them see the error of their ways; a drawn-out revelling in his nostalgie de la boue.

Like a true martyr, he's willing to dedicate his life to his cause and suffer his fate at the hands of a degenerate world. A world that neither wants a “champion” like Mills nor to be subjected to any grand ideas above their own interests. Somerset’s high-minded assessment of his fellow citizens is a milder version of Doe’s misanthropy:

People don't want a champion. They want to eat cheeseburgers, play the lotto and watch television.

Doe wants to block out the world just like they do. But he lacks Somerset’s cognisance that he is not superior; the detective just has greater self-awareness. Somerset can’t stay in the city and Doe cannot adequately block it out, so he becomes not the hero they need but the coruscating champion-of-God they deserve.

Doe’s faith is validated precisely because the world reviles him and only a truly depraved world reject such a saint. He welcomes his fate, as if by racing towards it he confirms his faith; the zealot who must keep proving to himself how devoted he is in case doubt slips in.

Every inch of his apartment speaks to his obsession; the bathroom-cum-dark-room, the heaps of notebooks and research materials, the unkempt bed, the trophies from his victims, and the wood-working kit (for Christ was a carpenter). There appears to be no luxury, not even a kitchen, just a sanctuary from the world in which he can plan his revenge on it. As Albert Camus said of the Marquis de Sade, "Every ethic conceived in solitude implies the exercise of power."

Doe’s acute angle to the world is portrayed in a brief story from his notebooks. Doe recounts how a man on the subway tried to make small talk with him:

But my head began to hurt from his banality. I almost didn’t notice it had happened, but I suddenly threw up all over him. He was not pleased. And I could not stop laughing.

When Doe attempts to engage with the normal world, the normality he claims he envies, he suffers a violent physical reaction. This visceral antagonism is compounded by his lack of embarrassment or compassion; we could infer that he enjoys subjecting the world to his bile. It’s all the world deserves. Try as he might, his nature will not allow him to be ‘normal’, his dislocation is too profound.

His words echo the 4th century theologian St. Jerome. Like him, Doe is brimming both with the former's "holy arrogance" and a self-reflexive revulsion of sin. As Jerome wrote:

He whom we look down upon, whom we cannot bear to see, the very sight of whom causes us to vomit, is the same as we are, formed with us from the same clay...

Somerset observes "You enjoyed torturing those people" to which Doe replies "Nothing wrong with a man taking pleasure in his work." Somerset knows this. Investigating the first two murders, we see his forensic mind at work, gathering research at the library and exhausting the evidence until he finds a clue. Mills remarks that, despite his partner's despondent attitude, he stills feel the "buzz" of detective work.

Doe's pleasure evokes Tertullian gazing gleefully from Heaven on the suffering of sinners in Hell - except Doe couldn't wait. He brought Hell up to the surface and rejoices in this display of divine justice. Doe knows, and opines, that he is different from the rest of us, dislocated at some crucial joint. He takes pride in his mission, but regrets he couldn't live a normal life; a consubstantiation of blessing and curse.

But his envy for Mills’ normal life reveals a faux-humility concealing his grandiosity. He is like the lord of the manor telling the peasants on his land how he envies their simple life. What first appears to be diffidence is exposed as a reassertion of status.

If Doe has taken pleasure in his duty to punish the guilty, he reckons the same would be true of Mills. By this point, Doe has assaulted Mills and broken his arm. He tells the detective:

I doubt I enjoyed it any more than Detective Mills would enjoy some time alone with me in a room without windows […] How happy would it make you to hurt me, with impunity? […] You wouldn't only because you know there are consequences.

For Doe there are no moral limits and earthly consequences worth worrying about, whilst Mills presents himself as an agent of Caesar’s law but might enjoy stepping beyond those limits as a means to self-gratification. To Doe, the rules of a sinful world are worth nothing compared to the divine law; they are the hypocrisy of sinners turning away from God’s laws to create their own. Doe’s religion is entwined with his cynicism and Mills is merely just another sinner using the structures of the fallen world to glorify himself.

Doe is the cynic who believes he has seen through all-of-this - be that the sinful world, political and cultural conspiracies, or the matrix. He knows the price of sin but not the value of life. Like the fundamentalist who blends his cynicism with religious zealotry, he sees the world as infinitely inferior because whereas we live for nothing, he has to chosen to die for something. But he has no intention to drag us out of the cave of shadows into the light. His belief that he sees humans for what they really are is in reality just a reflection of what he really is: the nihilist. He cares for nothing except his own gratification and is happy to die as long as he can first make the world suffer.

Doe is taken aback when Somerset suggests that he has enjoyed his road to martyrdom. Just as Somerset is perhaps trying to convince himself, and Mills, that the world is irretrievably lost and this is why he is quitting, so Doe has confected a divine licence to justify his actions. Hence his cynicism in suggesting that Mills is as sadistic as he is; his petulant attempt to smear us all with his own shit. But don’t we all act and then justify our actions by what seem like perfectly rational motives? Aren’t we all involved in a special pleading? "The Lord works in mysterious ways," Doe says dreamily. Bearing the weight of his hypocrisy, his reasoning gives way to Sunday school mysticism.

Happily, there is no spiel about whatever conditions may have created him. Doe has no backstory in the film (the subsequent comic-books don't count). He is "John Doe by choice." The cops do not explain Doe; he explains the world to them and subjects them and his victims to his own form of justice. In a world ruled by the Id, he has become an agent of the Superego. There is no psychologist-character wheeled on to explain the kind of traumas that could have created him.

He is the trauma, the rupture in our world. The film subverts the very idea of a cliched backstory, as well as the audience's desire for righteous vengeance. Believing they have identified their killer, the cops are gearing up for a SWAT-led bust and some ass-kicking. The police captain intones that Victor has "got a long history of serious mental illness. His parents gave him a very strict Southern Baptist upbringing, but somewhere along the line they fell short." Police vans are bundled into, doors kicked down, guns drawn. But of course Victor turns out to be the next victim.

There is an eeriness to Kevin Spacey's performance as John Doe, a failure of presence to use Mark Fisher's term. It is not just the expected absence of common humanity, but the absence of agency too. Doe moves and speaks as if he is merely a vessel, or an automaton remote-controlled by God. He speaks almost entirely in a cold monotone, several yards removed from his own words.

But there is a flash of anger, of furious incredulity, when Mills describes his victims as innocent. Doe suddenly comes alive with a tirade against the sinful world which ends on a note of almost wounded sorrow, "Only in a world this shitty could you try to call those people innocent and keep a straight face." He is not gloating with superiority. It is closer to the pained assessment of the justice system and of the apathetic world expressed earlier by Somerset. Doe's regret concerning our state echoes Genesis 6:6, "The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in his Heart." Perhaps in Doe's mind it grieves God to use such a depraved agent as him to fulfil His will, but it's necessary nonetheless - all part of the plan.

As Mills and Somerset sink further into the Slough of Despond - the mire in which, in John Bunyan's words, "the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run" - their resources to counter it run dry. After the Lust murder, the two cops are sitting in separate interview rooms in silence, staring into the abyss Doe has ripped open. Somerset's metronome - which he used to drown out the world so he could fall asleep amidst the chaos - no longer gives him succour, so he smashes it. Mills crawls into bed and embraces his wife though, like the metronome, she too will be destroyed and he will be left with nothing to cushion him against him the horror.

Somerset practises, or attempts to, the Stoic (or indeed Kantian) duty of apathy. Here 'apathy' does not mean indifference, but a self-governing moderation of emotion, through which one becomes an agent of rational judgement. It is a beneficial state of apatheia, of lacking passions. Being subject to emotions and passions corrodes one's autonomy and causes a state of insensitivity to what it truly important. The passions have the power to distort perception and cause one to overreact and thus be unable to see the present situation for what it is. They are the enemies of a clear, rational judgement. Somerset's use of the metronome echoes Kant's line of the "Stoic remedy of fixing my thought forcibly on some neutral object."

Although restrained and methodical, Somerset is affected with a melancholy inclination that belies his rational judgement. Mills is dominated by his affective states; as his partner points out mockingly, "It's good to see a man feeding off his emotions." Doe uses this inclination to anger overriding rational action to complete his plan.

Having judged that Mills' sin is Wrath, Doe manipulates the cop into killing him for the murder of his pregnant wife. In one fell swoop, Doe punishes Mill for the sin of Wrath and himself for Envy. No one must escape Doe's logic, not even himself. But beyond that could be the belief that none of us have free will anyway. Original sin twists us ineluctably towards sin and if we are blessed with divine grace, which we are incapable of refusing, then we still don’t possess free will. We have just been given divine assistance in not always choosing sin. Thus, Doe had no freedom in his choices (as Somerset somewhat sceptically observes) and nor does Mills. We are condemned to act out our predestined roles; be it incorrigible sinner or one of the lucky elect.

At this point in the story, Doe seems more like Satan, tempting Mills into sin. But I daresay that in Doe’s logic, a martyr like him would seem a devil to degenerates like us. If only we could see the bigger picture.

Yet, despite his horrific crimes, there is no satisfaction in Doe's death. Any enjoyment of the villain getting his comeuppance is snatched away by the fact that his death is precisely what he wants. We are left with a void where the moral order should have been re-established. As Somerset says, Doe is preaching to the city and “these murders are his sermons.” After his death, we are left with the dreadful notion that he may have represented the true moral order. Or maybe his death is so unsatisfying because, through the course of the film, we have become so repulsed by violence and it’s supposedly righteous application.

Even the death of such a heinous villain - the only on-screen death - feels hollow. Between Mills’ sunny heroism and Doe’s puritanical brutality, Somerset is the temperate voice that shies away from both those extremes (although they can be seen as two sides of the same coin). They are both egoistic excesses, both in love with their own postures. But unlike Mills, Doe is a nihilist who has deferred his responsibility.

By the climax, we have left the worldly corruption of the city and entered a Biblical wasteland. The rains have stopped and John Doe is revealed by the brilliant sunshine in all his banal glory. The detectives’ feeble torch-lights which were barely able to illuminate the darkness have given way to a brighter light. Their thwarted reason has been usurped by divine revelation; Doe hands himself in.

A small gap is left open for us to hypothesise that Doe is right, that he is the agent of a wrathful god. He has outwitted the cops, even in the improvisations of his final acts; the success of his ad hoc adjustments perhaps indicate he really is under divine guidance. Everything lines up for him perfectly. From the moment he’s caught, he behaves as if the whole plan has already been played out in front of him.

Although he is described as "totally insane," he weaponizes a rational strategy that cannot be dismissed as madness - as Somerset acknowledges. Mills, unable to command his reason and moderate his emotions, gives way to his Phlegyan fury. Doe's cynical calculation pays off and he is, in his own mind, martyred. He has demonstrated that, to quote Kant, "[O]ut of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." Even Somerset loses his Stoical restraint and slaps the killer.

Doe may believe his crimes will be "puzzled over and studied and followed," but like the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist, he wants to engender despair. The despair of being nothing in the face of the divine everything or, really, to degrade and destroy all until it is nothing. To play God himself, just to show how powerless we are against his works. But Doe - this Walmart Ozymandias - ultimately fails. Doe may not care about the world, perhaps out of pure misanthropy or because he genuinely believes he is heading to a better place - or both.

If one really believed that this world is so hateful and there is a better world beyond, then burning it all down is no great cost. But Somerset seems only certain of this world’s existence. It may be the worst of all possible worlds, but there is no alternative. Although Doe’s plan succeeds, Somerset resists drowning in despair and he doesn't slink off to the country to lick his wounds.

If Doe wanted him to abandon all hope, he refuses. If he left, he would be repressing the trauma, vainly hoping to leave it behind in the city. He decides to stay and face it. It’s hinted he will carry on his police work. If Doe thinks he was made solely to fulfil his vocation, then perhaps Somerset comes to the same realisation about himself. The police captain tells him that he can't quit, "You do this work. You were made for it and I don't think you can deny that." And at the end, he doesn't leave despite there being every reason to. His pessimism has been validated and if any lesson has been learnt, it's that humans are even worse than he thought.

Somerset's last words are an anti-mission statement: "Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for'. I agree with the second part." Unlike Mills and Doe, he has no mission to save or to punish the world. There is no overarching narrative in which he finds meaning, no great calling that could valorise him. He stays to fight, not because the city is a bastion of fine things or that humans are fundamentally good - but because it is the only world we are guaranteed, and without it we have nothing.