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Places of horror: Fincher's Seven and Fear of the City in recent Hollywood film
College Literature, Winter 1999 by Macek, Steve
I don't understand this place any longer. William Sommerset, Seven
Consider the following scene from director David Fincher's hugely successful and critically acclaimed 1995 thriller Seven1: It's nighttime and it's pouring rain. It is almost impenetrably dark. We see a seedy boulevard that looks vaguely as if it belongs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Detective William Sommerset (played by Morgan Freeman)-a dour, weary-looking man in his 60s wearing a trench coat and hat-is shown dashing from the door of his apartment building, past a couple of grubby homeless men sharing a bottle, to hail a cab. He sighs upon entering the vehicle and gazes out onto the street with a look of utter exhaustion on his face as the cab moves slowly into traffic. Through the backseat window we catch a passing glimpse-from Sommerset's point of view-of some uniformed cops dressed in clear plastic rain gear bending over what appears to be a corpse sprawled out on a glistening, crowded sidewalk. We hear a siren. On the opposite side of the cab, a police cruiser pulls into view, its lights flashing. "Where you going?" asks the driver glancing into the rear-view mirror. "Far away from here," responds Sommerset still staring out the window. And the camera lingers for two or three seconds more on his furrowed, bone-tired face before cutting away.
This particular sequence isn't especially central to the action of the film which follows Sommerset and his new 30-something partner from "upstate," Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt), as they track the perpetrator of a series of demented, Biblically-inspired murders through a murky, rain-soaked metropolis. In terms of the plot, the scene serves merely to convey the character of Sommerset from his apartment, where he restlessly ponders the exotic details of the killings, to the library where he does the research which eventually leads him to the murderer, Jonathan Doe (Kevin Spacey). Nor is the scene, drawing as it does on the well-worn conventions of film noir (tired trench coat-clad detective, slick streets, darkness, bleak tone etc.), especially interesting or innovative aesthetically. However, it is emblematic of the way Seven constructs its "big city" setting as an oppressive space of gloom and ambient violence, the kind of place any sane person would want to stay "far away from."
Since the early 1980s, Hollywood has produced a spate of enormously popular films that share Seven's nightmarish vision of the American urban landscape. Batman (1989), The Crow (1994), Darkman (1990), and Escape From New York (1981), along with their respective sequels, all cast their imagined cities (usually an iconic American metropolis like New York or Los Angeles whose current pattern of decline and dilapidation is extrapolated into the near future) as breeding grounds for rampant criminality, bloodshed and moral chaos. Desperate ghettos ruled by ruthless street gangs occupy center stage in New Jack City (1991), Colors (1988), Fresh (1995), Menace II Society (1993), Predator II (1992), Sugar Hill (1993) and any number of Stephen Segal pictures. Lean on Me (1988), Dangerous Minds (1996), The Substitute (1996) and 187 (1997) unfold against the graffiti-covered backdrop of violent, out of control urban schools. And in films like Trespass (1992), Falling Down (1993), and Judgment Night (1993) middle-class white guys get lost in and must fight their way out of inner-city neighborhoods infested with drugs and gun-toting criminals. As Douglas Muzzio notes, the dominant cinematic images of US cities in the 1980s and 1990s "have been grim, almost irrespective of genre, location and director" (1996, 196). Of course, dark, apprehensive portrayals of city life are hardly unique in the history of Hollywood film. Think, for example, of the mean streets and cutthroat gangland underworld of 30s gangster films like Little Caesar (1930) or Public Enemy (1931). Or, even better, think of the horrified vision of urban existence that pervades classic film noir. The noir thrillers of the 1940s and 50s-films like Scarlet Street (1946), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1948), The Big Sleep (1946), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955)-notoriously depicted the city as "a shadow realm of crime and dislocation in which benighted individuals do battle with implacable threats and temptations" (Krutnik 1997, 83). Such paranoid images are themselves not without cultural precedent. Since the colonial era, a strong and often dominant tendency in American intellectual life has equated the metropolis with vice, deviancy, alienation, social disorder, and the absence of authentic community (See White and White 1962). Thomas Jefferson, for instance, viewed giant urban centers such as New York as "cancers" on the body politic and as potential dangers to democracy. Ralph Waldo Emerson mistrusted the corrupting artificiality of big cities. Even Robert Park, the great sociologist and observer of Chicago's ethnic communities, once bluntly remarked that " [c]ities have been proverbially and quite properly described as `wicked"'" (White and White 1962, 167).
