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Non-place is Still Someplace: Seven’s Failure to Surmount Mass Culture
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“Nothing remains true for very long. That’s why writers are brave.” – Inez Baranay David Fincher’s film Seven is an attempt to critique mass culture in the spirit of Theodor Adorno, specifically in his essay, “The Culture Industry.” While masquerading as an unforgiving and unflinching meditation on mass culture’s assault on our national mental life, Seven is unwittingly incarnated as mere residue of the culture industry and hence, supportive of the things it is trying so fiercely to overturn or at least present in an unflattering light. The film employs numerous innovative techniques and treads upon seemingly new ground with regard to elements of plot, character and setting. At first glance, both stylistically and to some degree, topically, the film appears deficient of the typically all-encompassing, creativity-obliterating qualities that mark products of the culture industry as such. Some of the more original aspects of the film include the silver-skipping process performed on the film stock that gives Seven an invariably gritty, grainy, dark and unique appearance in addition to the story’s departure from the routine and predictable, such as the deeply pessimistic ending. Despite or in spite of these distinctions, Seven resorts to committing the sins characteristic of all works produced in and by mass culture, practices raised and identified by Adorno. It is in these failures by the director that the lasting pertinence of Adorno’s writing can be recognized. While many of his ideas have been overturned by more recent theorists as well as by technological innovations, there are key elements of his work that ring true even now and Fincher’s efforts, although ending in failure, reflect Adorno’s intelligence and foresight. By employing a new technique that gives his film a distinctive look, Fincher is only perpetuating the inevitable cycle of mimicry and subsequent mass reproduction of his innovation in the public sphere. Silver-skipping becomes part of the popular domain; its specific style, as it is copied, becomes the negation of style by representing the culture industry like Adorno prophesies (36). All cultural production becomes homogenized for the mass audience. Seven is a film that launched a thousand imitations and while the process and look may be new, the story is regrettably old. The conventional dichotomies and archetypes of characters are presented in their brightest and most ironic glory. There is the brilliant, ambiguously sexual, fetishizing serial killer, the sometimes dramatic, sometimes comedic interplay between the subtle old pro and loose-cannon rookie cop, and the representation of the other law enforcement officers as mildly inept and complacent to the prevention or halting of the killings. Each of these characters has noticeable quirks, but overall, adherence to the formula of mass culture style is fairly strict. Where Seven takes one of its few marked risks is in its ending. The film’s ending is, by no means, uplifting and optimistic. At Seven’s close, the audience is left with no sense of redemption or hope for renewal. In mainstream film, produced in and by mass culture within the framework of the culture industry, this is a rare happening. When the credits roll, the world is unchanged, dark as ever, perhaps even darker than before, now that John Doe’s sinister vision has been actualized. Detective Mills has been destroyed and Morgan Freeman’s character of Detective Somerset is returning back to place he loathes. Even the rural, quasi-naturalized country setting cannot redeem or make light of the parting circumstances. Technology and signs of the enemy city scar the landscape, both visually and aurally, by the massive whirring high voltage towers. Their presence destroys any aura of the natural or good. With the exception of the ending, in terms of plot elements and structure, Seven offers few twists and, for the most part, relies on convention. What makes the film different is how the setting is presented and used almost as another primary character in the diegesis. Here, the city is portrayed as a place so corrupted and sinister; it pollutes the hearts and souls of its inhabitants. The characters of John Doe and Detective Somerset are made by the environment; they see the ruinous nature of their world and its affect on humanity and act on it, albeit in strikingly disparate ways. In this sense, Fincher does make a bit of a critique on mass culture along Adorno lines. The city and its industrial base are presented as evil entities, capable of corrupting even the most common of men. Fincher attempts to remove his audience from a clearly identifiable and logical space by constantly anchoring the narrative in non-places, through a series of disorienting flashes of spaces that we are unable to make linkages to. It can be argued that Seven is one of the first attempts at a new kind of cultural production, a kind of super-modern entity that cannot be tied to any one place, but rather contains elements of every place. In this picture world of fractured and incomplete skylines, anonymous alleyways, highways and road signs and a contradictory representation of seasonality, the setting for Seven is all at once anywhere, everywhere and nowhere. By dislocating the logistics and landmarks of place, Seven almost achieves autonomy from classification and thus, the culture industry, if only in regard to the setting.
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