I thought about posting this in the thread below, but it seemed so long I thought no one would notice. Anyway…
I saw Se7en for the fourth or fifth time the other day and something dawned on me. The movie actually has a fairly big plot-hole. Well, maybe “hole” is the wrong word, but certainly a “weakness”.
Now, I love the movie and I love David Fincher. However, after thinking about it for a while it dawned on me that John Doe’s supposedly meticulous plan depends on pure coincidence for its finale. If John Doe had been planning his 7 murders for over a year (remember Sloth?) how does he account for the last two, Envy and Wrath, involving a cop and his wife who moved to town the previous week? Killing Brad Pitt’s wife couldn’t have been planned from the beginning. If so, what was if “original” Envy and Wrath? Two other people? The movie never addresses this.
Not that the movie doesn’t make sense–it does, and I happen to think it’s very well-written. But I think that it’s strange how they movie simply ignores the fact that a man as meticuolous as John Doe ends his scheme in a last-minute improvisation that he could not have possibly planned for. What if Brad Pitt hadn’t been married? What if he wasn’t on the case? What if he hadn’t moved there in the first place? Was John Doe planning on him being there? That would seem too hokey to me (more like the end of The Game, which I felt was fairly contrived), not to mention disappointing.
Anyway, I just thought that was interesting to point out. I wonder if the filmmakers thought of this and it just didn’t make the cut or if it just slipped their minds entirely.
-Matt
My guess is that he was going to go after any detective and parter that was tracking him. Brad Pitt popped up, with a convinient wife to provoke anger. I think that some of the murders were planned. However, how could he have planned Lust? Again, I think he was looking for anyone to fit the role.
I have to agree with Red-dragon60. I think John Doe would have persued any detective that was working the case. Now that still leaves the question “what if the detectives weren’t married?” Well I think if that was the case John Doe would have gone after a family member of the detective or perhaps a child if the detective had one. He was trying to show his sin as being jealous of the family that Brad Pitt had. If he hadn’t had a wife he still would have had parents and perhaps siblings. I think it was a jealousy of being part of any sort of family. Obviously someone as twisted as John Doe probably didn’t have a very stable family life, which was the root of his jealousy.
Maybe. That’s makes a decent amount of sense. It still seems like winging it more than John Doe’s otherwise coldly meticulous nature seems to suggest. Assuming that you could provoke someone to wrath by showing them the head of a loved one is a fair assumption, but how would you know you could get to the loved one at exactly the time needed for everything to fall into place so perfectly? Also, what if the cop(s) weren’t exploitable in that way? Had it been Moran Freeman only, his plan would not have worked. Also, even if it did work, he’d need to be sure that the person he provoked to kill him wouldn’t before he could explain that his sin was Envy. I dunno. I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense. I’m just saying that compared to the otherwise ruthless planning of John Doe his big finish seemed convinient. Not that that’s unbelievable, but it loses that cold logic, in my opinion. I’m just not sure if it’s supposed to seem like it does.
-Matt
I suspect John Doe had some kind of backup plan for Envy and Wrath, or an original plan that he discarded when the better opportunity came up. We never find out what was written in all of the notebooks in his house, so he might have worked out contigency plans for each sin. After all, sloth (the drug dealing pederast, correct?) might have died at any time.
I think a more obvious weakness was that John Doe was discovered through his library card. Would they have completely missed him if he had bought or stolen his books?
The fact that they found him through his library card, or at all really doesn’t matter. If you recall they never acctually caught him, he turned himself in. To be honest I think the only reason they found him at all was to allow for an opertunity in the movie to show his apartment so you get a better sense of who the guy was and how obsessed he was. If you think about it the movie would have worked out the same in the end if they had never found his apartment. Granted, it does seem a bit weak that they found him in this way but i don’t really think it was a significant weakness.
I agree with Ballybay that John Doe had a backup plan for Envy and Wrath that he discarded as soon as he studied Det. Mills (Pitt’s character). I’ll even say that Tracy Mills was what caused Doe to pair the two murders together-- the proverbial two birds with one stone bit. After all, Doe could have easily killed some unrelated schmuck’s pregnant wife for Envy, and then somehow severely pissed off some other law enforcement officer for the Wrath murder (or suicide, depending on how you see it). So there’s definite irony there, as Det. Mills and his wife made finishing the murders easier for Doe, and the final effect more mind-blowing.
One thing I liked about this movie is that John Doe remained a John Doe. We never found out about his life before the murders, if he had a family, or even his real name. Those things never mattered. I liked that the film left those details unfilled. I like to think that because they never found out those details, in a way, they never really caught him. Something remained elusive.
Now, I’m not too sure of this, but in the original ending to the film, doesn’t Morgan Freeman kill John Doe? If that’s the case, it could be that Envy and Wrath were more targeted towards his character instead of Pitt’s, Pitt was just the tool used to impliment it. Now that I write it out, it just sounds stupid. Hmmm…
I originally started to think that due to the fact that all of his other plans seemed to take a lot of time and effort in thinking them up, so it could be that he’d been stalking Freeman’s character since the begining, but looking back, only a few of Doe’s acts really took a lot of time (the custom made dildo and sloth bit, to be more specific), yet some of them could have been done in a matter of one night (“greed” and “pride”, for example, were a simple cut job for the most part, that could have taken at most, three hours or so, with the possibility of some victim scoping, but even that doesn’t require much given the two situations). It could be Doe just had an idea all along, but implimented it as he went on. His ultimate goal was to be murdered, so he set up an elaborate scheme to get his desired effect. Some plans just took more time to set up, but overall, most of them occurred in a rather short period of time, and seeing as how he was mocked up to be a reporter, he knew from the beginning of the crimes’ investigation who he would focus on.
I’ve only seen the movie once, so I could be way off base here, but:
At one point, John Doe had Brad Pitt’s character pretty much at his mercy. It could be that it was about that time that Doe realized that Pitt’s character was a hothead, so could probably easily be provoked into the “wrath” thing (he did chase after Doe after he had been shot at, after all).
Since John Doe obviously had to look around for a while to find the “right” victim in each case, I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to imagine after this incident, John Doe started following Pitt’s character around, looking for just the right method to invoke his Wrath. Pitt having an attractive wife may have just given John Doe the added bonus of throwing in some Envy.
For that matter, once he found the subject for his Wrath killing (that is, whomever would kill him in anger), he could probably rationalize anything he liked for Envy - he wasn’t exactly the picture of mental health, after all.
Not really convenient. Anyone can be made angry enough to kill, you just have to figure out how to push their buttons. If Brad Pitt’s character didn’t have a wife he loved above all else, he could have had a kid, or a best friend, or a dog, or an alcohol problem, whatever.
Is that so? When I saw the movie I thought that was the logical ending - world weary Somerset who only wants to retire and go away, does something noble to save Mills. He pulls out the knife he has made a big production of carrying and cuts John Doe’s throat. At least with that ending one character has learned something and changed.
I always thought the plot hole in that movie was that almost none of the deaths were caused by the deadly sin in question. The Pride one was really well done - the woman’s vanity did in fact kill her. But the Gluttony guy, for example, wasn’t killed by gluttony. He was killed by John Doe holding a gun to his head and forcing him to eat food that he would never voluntarily have eaten. Same for most of the others. The whole premise of the film was only half followed through.
I also have problems with the fact that it’s called ‘Sesevenen’, but that’s a different thread.
I don’t think the writer/director ever intended that the sin should literally cause the victim’s death. Of course no one would ever choose to eat until they burst or choose to be strapped to a bed for a year. John Doe was their cause of death - he was punishing them using methods which symbolized each sin. He believed he was doing God’s work in using extreme ways of turning the sin against the sinner.