John Doe Knows
Taking religion by the book
One of my favourite movies of all time is Se7en. I can’t even begin to tell you how great this film is. If you haven’t seen it, go see it — there will probably be some spoilers somewhere here. The 1995 David Fincher masterpiece is not only one of the finest works of cinema this past century, it also carries strong themes of religion and morality.
The story goes like this: two cops — one a veteran, the other a rookie — are on the hunt for a serial killer who claims his victims in accordance to the biblical seven sins. We never actually see the killer until the final act of the film, where Detectives Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and Mills (Brad Pitt) apprehend John Doe (Kevin Spacey). We do not even get to witness his acts of violence — instead, we are left to fill in the blanks with grotesquely abused victims. Throughout a viewing of Se7en, it becomes easy to dismiss the movie as just another thriller designed to shock the audience. But there is much more at play here than just withered corpses.
Se7en throws us into a nameless world — an ambiguous city where there is seemingly no God, akin to real-life urban centres. The supposed depravity that John Doe witnesses becomes motivation for him to act out the word of the Old Testament and punish his carefully selected batch of sinners. When we finally do see Doe, he is represented as an emotionless, dead-pan psychopath as only Spacey can portray. In committing these crimes, Spacey’s character sees himself as the only do-gooder, righting the wrongs in a society where individuals are no longer guided by Christian values. The in-film crimes of Doe serves as a perversion of those values —taking a strictly by-the-book approach to religion.
But is John Doe wrong? It really is all up to interpretation. This is what happens when organized religion plays to a highly personalized angle — leaving too much room for interpretation, or misinterpretation, and springing forth extremism on both ends of the spectrum. On one end, we have a generation of young Christians who are very lax with the traditional values of the faith, and on the other you have people like the Westboro Baptist Church.
These folks have been protesting at rights movements and military funerals for the good part of a decade. What Doe and the WBC have in common is that they both believe they are performing a righteous service for the Christian God, but in reality they are redefining and distorting the values of Christianity in the eyes of popular culture.
Se7en is commentary on the modern condition of faith and our own religious frailty. It serves as an examination into society’s relationship with the values of organized religion. We live in a society where Church is separate from State, and the meaning behind religion and faith is all up to how you interpret it. Gone are the days where governments would tell you what was considered immoral — what’s right or wrong is really up for us to decide. This personalized approach taken by organized religion has essentially freed us from a set definition of sin. You can be as flexible as you want, or you can take it literally like John Doe.
