Dante Seven Video Project Script(S) PDF

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Dante Seven Video Project Script(S)...

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APATHY: THE TRUE EVIL INSIDE US

By Rachel Rose Kogan

Introduction After my first viewing of the film Se7en, I deduced that the discussion of older and classic texts such as Dante's Inferno yield more than just a mechanic as to how John Doe, the main serial killer of Se7en, is motivated to commit his crimes. As a result, I have made this video to analyze the parallels between Dante, his divine comedy and Se7en, as well as pose deeper questions about the implications of both works. Without further ado, let’s begin -- let’s explore Hell together…

Overview: Dante’s Inferno and Se7en David Fincher directed Se7en, which was released in 1995. It follows Detective Somerset, played by Morgan Freeman, and Detective Mills, played by Brad Pitt (Fincher, Kopelson, Carlyle, Pitt, Freeman, Paltrow, & Roundtree, 2000). Somerset is retiring in seven days while continuing to support his colleagues within a city known for an

outrageously high crime rate. One week before Somerset is meant to leave, a murder case arises, signaling the start of a seven-day spree of homicides. Kevin Spacey plays a serial killer known only by his moniker John Doe, who is responsible for the execution of these murders.

The Divine Comedy is an epic and narrative poem that was composed by Italian writer Dante Alighieri in the 14th century (Dante, Pinsky, Pinsky, & Poets Laureate Collection, 1994). He inserted himself into the plot as the protagonist who, directed by Roman poet and spirit Virgil, navigates the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso - stages of the afterlife as seen through Dante's eyes, as well as all three books making up the Divine Comedy. Initially, Dante's greatest desire is to reconcile with Beatrice, his former lover who died tragically young. Each stage of his journey is depicted in the poem as a separate section (or "canto"). However, it is Book 1 of the Divine Comedy, Dante's Inferno, that is best known for reimagining the nine circles of Hell located within the Earth. Thus, it is the Inferno I will concentrate on and discuss in this video, as well as the film Se7en, in how sin touches each one of us, and the implications presented by both the film and the book.

Intertextual Relations At first sight, comparing Se7en and the Inferno is more than obvious. In fact, the film itself makes direct references to this literature: The murders investigated by Mills and Somerset are stated explicitly to be based on the victims’ alleged indulgences in the seven deadly sins - Pride, Greed, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony and Sloth. Moreover, Somerset looks into the depiction of sin through the concept of Contrapasso (Allen, 2010). Specifically, Contrapasso is derived from Latin to refer to when one will “suffer the opposite'', or the idea of being punished for the sins committed in one’s life. In the Inferno, contrapasso occurs in the 4th Bolgia division of the eighth circle of Hell. Here, false prophets, astrologers, and sorcerers have their heads turned backwards on their bodies “because they could not see ahead of them (Inferno, XX, 13-15).” It’s also referenced in Canto XXVIII of the Inferno, in which Betran de Born, now decapitated, says, “Thus is observed in me the counterpoise (Inferno, XXVIII, 142).” The significance of this reference is that Dante believed De Born was in the 9th Bolgia for schismatics that caused Henry the Young King to rebel and undermine against his father, Henry II of England. For his supposed act of political ‘decapitation’ against a rightful head of state, Dante interpreted that De Born was to be decapitated in the afterlife as a “contrapasso”. The allusion demonstrates the consequences one would experience after predicting or influencing the future either with evil or false means. In other words, contrapasso is both divine revenge and a fulfillment of destiny that is chosen by every soul’s free will, while he or she is alive.

In Se7en, a prime example of contrapasso is the first murder we witness: The heavy-set, gluttonous man -- known by other tenets in his apartment as a shut-in -- who is tied up and forced to eat the food served to him by John Doe without stopping, until his stomach is kicked in and bursts, causing him to bleed out and die (Fincher, Kopelson, Carlyle, Pitt, Freeman, Paltrow, & Roundtree, 2000). Like the souls of fortune tellers doomed to have their heads

turned backwards or even the more violent souls doomed to fight one another aimless for eternity, John Doe enacts a punishment of hellish torment and turns his victim’s sin against them. For his excessive indulgence in food, the “Gluttony” murder victim dies from overindulgence. To extend this comparison, I will discuss the murders we as viewers see in Se7en correlate with the Inferno and the 9 circles of Hell, with which sinners’ punishments increase in severity and in accordance with the severity of their own sin.

A Deeper Dive: Hell on Earth - In the Film and In My Own Life

Let’s start with the Inferno: Dante describes the 9 circles of Hell and explains how each represents increasingly worse offenses against G-d in eyes of the poet; in descending order, the circles are divided into Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery (Dante, Pinsky, Pinsky, & Poets Laureate Collection, 1994). Seven follows a similar pattern where the serial killer punishes his victims, but in a reverse order. According to the sentence he deems appropriate, he commits a corresponding murder so the punishment will fit the crime. He uses the seven deadly sins as his base of divine karma -- essentially playing G-d.

Yes, the number seven is important in the film: There are seven murders over seven days, coinciding with Somerset’s last seven days on the job, and Mills’ first seven days. Most obviously, the film talks about the seven deadly sins, there also being seven virtues to oppose them while John Doe represents sin, virtue and repentance defines Somerset’s character. But what about the murder victims themselves, in relation to imagery and symbolism? How do they address any way in which the seven deadly sins may have impacted my own life?

Gluttony is a bloated-up body, face down in spaghetti, surrounded by buckers of vomit. If I were to recall a time in my life when I was gluttonous, I would describe a point in my mid-high school career: I was insecure and, like the murder victim, I was self-isolated to an extent. I was almost enclosed in a mental shell of my own making, and I used food to replace friends and other meaningful connections. It was almost a distraction for a time; when I look back on those years, I laugh and shake my head in disbelief at how much I relied on my fear of other people’s opinions on my appearance. I was overweight and felt miserable because I allowed myself to feel this way. Today, I feel more confident than ever, having learned how to take better care of myself physically, because I wanted to -- for myself and no one else. Only then, when I learned to respect myself and my body, was I able to stop being a sort of shut in. I was able to get out of the darkness and step into the light before it was too late.

Greed is a lawyer who has been bled to death after he agreed to defend a rapist. As someone who wants to be a lawyer in the future, there is a chance I may be faced with this dilemma as well: I may start out fresh-faced and idealistic but may be consumed with the idea of money and power. If I am honest with myself, I feel satisfied with my life and my belief in my convictions. I try not to be naive about the world, but I also understand that in doing what I want with my life, I cannot allow myself to think about money. Money, as my grandmother has always told

me, is the Devil. If you allow yourself to think of it, you will always be left chasing it, never satisfied. Don’t think of it, and it will come to you by nature. I try to utilize this motto especially now, when I am trying to build up an ecommerce business to help people with stress-induced anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) plan and manage their time better. If I’ve learned anything, it is that the most profitable things in the world start not with desire to make money and have power, but with the wish to create something new and do more for the world. Even if it may not always be the case for me in the future (wherein I wish to have a family, which is not a cheap endeavor), I know I must try and focus on what I am doing and how I feel about it, rather than how much I will be benefiting from it. Doing this now, as I am working on my business, is allowing me to make progress without becoming enraptured in the idea of making quick cash.

The victim of Sloth - a convicted child molester deemed useless and without purpose by John Doe - lies emaciated and tortured on his bed, a figure of life in death, the torture having lasted for a year. His tongue has been bitten off; his hand cut off: he is basically a corpse barely hanging on to life. I’ll admit, I’ve had bed days and sick days. The period I mentioned when I spoke about Gluttony - in the first half of my high school experience - I not only allowed food to become a substitute in my life, but I also stopped moving around more and going outside as much. I let myself sit in an indoor space all day during the summer and let myself get more isolated even from activities involving my own family - going shopping, going to the beach, and even just driving and sight-seeing for fun. As with gluttony, my sloth isolated me and sent me into a cycle -- one I almost became permanently trapped in. But, as with my former gluttony, I looked in the mirror one day and admitted to myself that I didn’t like what I saw and who I was becoming. That it was up to only me to decide what came next. I got up, stopped complaining, and tried to make more of an effort to socialize. And it paid off: Now I am busier than ever, and am heavily involved in my job, my classes, my friendships, and my extracurricular activities. Needless to say, I feel very much fulfilled.

The fate of Lust reveals a Bosch-like image of the penetration of a prostitute with an oversized razor used as a dildo; she has been cut open inside. It - Lust, that is - driven by biological urges, of course. I myself will not deny that I developed hormonal urges as a young girl growing up, just like everyone else. Many of the girls and boys I knew growing - especially as someone who attended a theater-specialized high school until my junior year, when

I moved from New York to Florida - most were exploring their sexuality and engaging in forms of sex from a very early age; I would guess many began when hitting puberty in the mid-to-late years of middle school, even. I was never involved, being almost scared of the act and of the consequences I observed around me. I also felt like I couldn’t be so intimate with someone without truly connecting with them emotionally -- so I just never had the opportunity or desire to have sex at that point, despite having had crushes. I knew some who let their desire for pleasure take over their lives completely, especially as they got older; I knew students who become sick with STDs and had their entire young lives upended completely as a result; I knew girls who became pregnant before marriage and chose to have abortions or sometimes to keep the child and either raise them or give them for adoption. That is also one of the reasons why scenes with Tracey in Se7en hit so close to my heart, as someone who hopes to get married and become a mother in the future.

Pride, a formerly beautiful woman who lives alone and surrounded by pictures of herself, has had her face hacked about, her nose cut off. Personally, when I see this scene, I am always reminded of how, every day, people I see from where I live to where I go to school - like to force their opinions on others, because their obsession with being right consumes them. Whether they are conscious of this or not, many people I’ve spoken with in my life family members and friends included - have derived pleasure from the alleged superiority of one’s personal skills and qualities. This is pride in essence. Experiencing this to an extreme seems pointless to me now, as I’ve come to understand that there will always be someone with things or characteristics of better quality than you. And that pride which manifests and festers, can isolate many people from you if you let it control you. I took pride - and still do - in the high quality of my schoolwork and productivity skills. This is something appreciated about me by others at college, but when I went to middle school and high school, I was relentlessly mocked and bullied. In turn, I focused more of my attention on my schoolwork and less on being around other kids, pride in my grades consuming me until it was all I could focus on. I am aware now that this was not healthy, as there should be a balance of social interaction and work in anyone’s life, for the benefit of mental health and one’s development. I learned and understood this, and now I have a great social life with my friends, my family and I still manage to find time to do well in school. The self-obsession is gone. The “Pride” murder victim was not so lucky.

Se7en’s very images of its victims are all suggestive of an underlying melancholy. The corpses and living deaths

are discovered in the dull, entropy, fragmented and ruinous atmosphere of a post-industrial city with rain falling perpetually, which recalls the rain that falls on the gluttonous in Dante's hell (Inferno VI). The mood of entropy, of a city in decay, turns to bodies in decay and beyond death -- all motifs showcasing urban life as a hell. The film's bleak color palette, which includes muddy shades of black, grey, and brown, only contributes to the sense of doom. Both the observers and the investigators find it difficult to comprehend what is going on. It’s as if we're all attempting to find our way in the dark. That we are all just trying to survive.

How Hell Plays with Our Main Story Figures One of the biggest overlapping comparisons of both stories that I noticed was between Somerset and Virgil. Characterizing Somerset as the guide archetype is expected; a muse for Mills, he's quite literally training him for the job of successfully navigating crime (in Dante’s case, sin) in a corrupt world (or the Inferno).

Virgil, the soul of an ancient Roman poet who died in 19 BC, first acts as Dante's guide in the afterlife in the first circle of hell, or “limbo” (Dante, Pinsky, Pinsky, & Poets Laureate Collection, 1994). This circle is designated for those who were born before Christ and are not baptized -- those considered to be virtuous pagans. Virgil explains to Dante what his role is in helping him, clarifying that he is to act as a guide through hell and aluminate the moral lessons of his journey.

And how does this description of Virgil and Dante play into Seven’s main protagonists? Once again, let’s break it down: Mills and Somerset are both detectives and Dante and Virgil are both poets. Virgil and Somerset have the upper hand of experience; they have both toured hell and abandoned all hope (Inferno III). This very inscription is directly on the gates of hell but could easily be the motto for the unnamed city both detectives are inhibiting -- its lack of name once again providing a feeling of otherworldliness and morbid mystery. It’s a city so tainted that even the people in the center of its central torment - the murder victims of John Doe, the UNNAMED killer - are all relatively unnamed as well, known to us mainly by the name of the sin which they are purported to have committed and to have been killed for. Moreover, Virgil's experience of hell is filled with trepidation, much like Somerset’s near defeatist attitude towards society.

Dante speaking on Virgil (while leading Dante through the 1st Circle - the “Limbo”) tells him of Christ’s harrowing of Hell and shows him the habitation of great men of antiquity: Down must we go, to that dark world and blind, the poet

said, turning on me a bleak blanched face... The anguish of the people. Who are below here in my face depicts. That pity which for terror thou hast taken (Inferno, IV, 13-23).

Somerset, in a seemingly self-righteous claim: I just don't think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was virtue (Fincher, Kopelson, Carlyle, Pitt, Freeman, Paltrow, & Roundtree, 2000).

Somerset ALSO states that: I didn't say I was different or better. I'm not. Hell, I sympathize; I sympathize completely. Apathy is the solution. I mean, 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 beat a child than it is to raise it. Hell, love costs: it takes effort and work (Fincher, Kopelson, Carlyle, Pitt, Freeman, Paltrow, & Roundtree, 2000).

Here, Somerset is not saying that he sympathizes with the people or their problem: He's saying that he sympathizes with the solution. He understands why people turn to apathy to cope with what goes on around them in the city, and openly admits that he's done the same. He is also pointing out that no one wins in his city, or the Inferno; that the only rational solution is to give up caring or putting in effort to find purpose. True, Virgil feels sympathy for those in limbo, but he also understands the need to keep moving. Like him, Somerset is a survivor a man clearly broken down by the city he works in. And yet, Somerset keeps serving his community, holding onto the small shred of hope that keeps evading him, but is never completely out of reach.

Like Virgil, Somerset also often feels the need to philosophically guide Mills through the moral and ethical dilemmas presented before them. In their line of work, the instinct to protect him from the horrors in a crimeridden city expands to openly trying to shield Mills from a case he feels is too difficult for him. He even tries to steer Mills (and the viewers) through the literary connections in the film, reading up on the Inferno and recognizing it as the model that John Doe replicates in his murders. As such, Virgil and Somerset have incredibly strong parallels to one another, which mainly revolve around the concepts of being a guide and a parental figure.

Let's move on to Mills and Dante now that we've got a decent grasp on this character comparison: Mills is frequently shown as obstinate and, as Somerset puts it, "a man feeding off his emotions" (Fincher, Kopelson, Carlyle, Pitt, Freeman, Paltrow, & Roundtree, 2000), foreshadowing his eventual descent into Hell as "Wrath". He

portrays himself as a good man capable of handling the horrors that surround him. This impulsiveness contrasts with Dante's reluctance in the face of the Inferno's flames; his resolve to break down the door to John Doe's apartment demonstrates his resolve, despite Somerset's advice not to do so due to police jurisdiction laws. The paradoxical stubbornness of Mills and Dante shows moral strength in one and moral weakness in the other: While Dante grows to follow Virgil's footsteps as a guide of morality, Mills unfortunately falls behind - especially when it comes to reading and interpreting the Divine Comedy’s text.

Note that Mills can see no pattern whatsoever in John Doe’s murder spree, before the last two murders are committed near the close of the film: He dismisses Dante as a “fucking faggot” (Fincher, Kopelson, Carlyle, Pitt, Freeman, Paltrow, & Roundtree, 2000). Somerset, however, can: He sees and asks questions. Somerset reads the text

while Mills reads the bare footnotes only, ignoring what is right in front of him because it’s easier, more comfortable. It helps him focus and be brave in the face of hell. In a somewhat similar manner, Dante puts on a brave face in Hell, claiming that “then I uprose, showing myself provided, Better with breath than I did feel myself, And said: "Go on, for I am ...