Se7en- Setting, Lighting and Framing

The first meeting of Somerset and Mills (Fig.1)

David Fincher’s 1995 film Se7en, is the story of two detectives, William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and David Mills (Brad Pitt), searching for an anonymous serial killer who sadistically and patiently murders immoral people in an anonymous city in the style of the seven deadly sins. Se7en can be classified as a neo-noir crime film for a multitude of film form and film style reasons, although for this post I will only look at the anonymous setting, chiaroscuro lighting and framing.

The urban landscape, often cities like New York, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles have often played a large role in neo-noir films, their dark and gritty nature conveying isolation, apathy and danger. In Se7en the city remains anonymous, with a distinct lack of distinguishing landmarks and sign posts (Fig.2). 

Fig.2

 Kristen Thompson notes that this anonymity of setting “foregrounds social anxieties about urban crime and random violence”, with it’s pervasive darkness seeming to not only bleed into the streets of the city but into its apathetic residents as well. Thompson suggests that this anonymity traps the city in “an endless temporal loop of repetition in which corruption, violence and sin recur day after day, revealing a world of apathy, cynicism and hopelessness.” In Fig.3 Somerset questions the facts of a domestic murder, to which his Captain replies; “It’s always these questions with you…did the kid see it…who gives a fuck…it’s the way it’s always been.”

Fig.3

The setting is also often also obscured by rain, a common aspect of film neo-noir often used to emphasise the characters conflicted emotions, and create an atmosphere of hopelessness in which each day blends indistinguishably into another. The rain also serves to confuse the viewer, heightening the suspense and drama of a sequence, particularly in this climactic chase scene where John Doe presses a gun to Mill’s temple, the rain dripping forebodingly off it. The rain is also used to create reflections, a stylistic element of early noir, in which the image of a character, in this case John Doe, is distorted, giving them both a ominous and fantastical presence and making audiences unsure and wary of what or whom they are seeing.

Fig. 5

Darius Khondji, the cinematographer of Se7en, by applying a silver-retention process to the film negatives and combining it with deep chiaroscuro lighting created “a dark, moody and bleak mise-en-scene” in which the contrast of light and dark both obscures the audiences vision but also helps them to form an image of the horrifying world in which Se7en exists. (Thompson, 176). The combination of these stylistic elements, seen clearly in the previous clip and in fig.5 is used to direct the viewer in each shot, so that the mystery and full horror of the crime can be built up to a tension-filled climax. Often flashlights are the only source of light, heightening the fears of the audience of what exists in the dark corners that they can not see. 

As we can see in fig.6 chiaroscuro is often used in conjunction with obstructions such as bars or rails that help to frame the characters morality and foreshadow their fates.

Fig.6

In this scene a barrier obscures John Doe, entrapping him to communicate to the audience that he is the 'bad guy'. Detective Somerset is seen free of all confining devices, indicating he is the 'good guy'. However, where it becomes interesting is that Detective Mills is both, at times obstructed behind bars, at times not, is he a bad guy? Not that the audience has seen so far. These bars are used to show the 'grey area' of Mill's morality, as well as to foreshadow his fate, in which the tragedy of his wife's death at John Doe's hands results in Mill's revenge killing of him, making Mill's, in the eyes of the law the  'bad guy' as he becomes Wrath, the final sin.

References

Thompson, Kirsten Moana. Crime Films Investigating the Scene. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Print.

Corrigan, Tim and Patricia White. The Film Experience: An Introduction. Boston: St Martins, 2012. Print.

Se7en. Dir. David Fincher. Newline, 1995. Film.