Seven
A vicious, unflinching, uncompromising, brutal masterpiece
Directed By: David Fincher
Other Notable Films From Fincher: Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network
Starring: Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin Spacey, the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket, Shaft from Shaft
Screenplay By: Andrew Kevin Walker
Movie Synopsis: An old detective and a young detective hunt a serial killer who is using the seven deadly sins as the inspiration for a series of murders.
Signature Line: “What’s in the box?! What’s in the fucking box?!”
THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context
Here’s the story of how Seven, perhaps the darkest major studio movie that's ever been made, came to be:
In 1986, an aspiring screenwriter named Andrew Kevin Walker moved from a suburb of Pennsylvania to New York City. At the time, the city was reeling from the seismic reverberations of the crack epidemic. Crime—murder, in particular—was rampant. There were nearly 1,600 homicides in NYC the year Walker arrived. In 1987, that number ballooned up to 1,672.1 In 1988, it hit 1,896. In 1989, it rose again, up to 1,905. And then in 1990, it peaked, with New York registering a catastrophic 2,245 murders.2
In response to the despairing sights he saw, Walker wrote a movie about a serial killer in an unnamed major metropolitan committing a series of murders based on the seven deadly sins. The script was eventually optioned, but deemed too dark for mass market consumption (nobody was all that interested in making a movie that ended with a pregnant woman’s head in a box). It stalled in development for years, undergoing a series of massive rewrites as concerned producers tried to make it into something they felt would be more audience-friendly. Walker rewrote the script 13 times. And 13 times, it didn’t work. And that's when kismet happened.
During the studio’s search for a director, a copy of the original version was accidentally sent to David Fincher. Fincher today is often cited as one of America’s greatest living movie directors, but by that point, he’d only directed 1992’s Alien 3, and had done so to great disappointment. Following what he felt was excessive meddling by the studio, he disowned the project entirely, famously telling film magazine Sight & Sound that he would rather die of colon cancer than direct another movie.
But the Seven script grabbed a hold of Fincher. There was something intriguing about the bleakness of it; about the unrelenting cruelty of it; about the way it presented moral decay as the impetus for something truly depraved. Whereas others were turned away by the barbarity of the world Walker had imagined, Fincher was inspired by it. So he decided to direct the film, this time resolving to not fall victim again to studio interference or creative compromise.
Fincher secured himself the script, then secured himself a cast—the indomitable Morgan Freeman, who was molten hot at the time;3 a hungry Brad Pitt, who was on the precipice of true movie stardom and looking to book a role counter to the “pretty boy” typecasting that had come to define his early career;4 a pre-controversy Kevin Spacey, who’d just become one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood after his performance in The Usual Suspects;5 and a young Gwyneth Paltrow, three years before she would win the most coveted individual acting award in Hollywood.6 And then they got to work.
A little under a year later, there it was.
Seven.
Up on theater screens.
As envisioned by Walker and Fincher.
A vicious, unflinching, uncompromising, brutal masterpiece.
THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Seven
0:34: The movie opens on Morgan Freeman. He plays William Somerset, a veteran homicide detective who is one week away from retiring. He lives alone in a small, tidy apartment with seemingly only a handful of possessions (chessboard, switchblade knife, twin bed, books, metronome, etc). He hasn’t said anything or done anything beyond getting ready for work, but it’s pretty clear that he is a deeply unhappy person. I hope his day turns brighter soon.
1:03: Nope. It didn’t. He’s investigating a dead body in a pool of blood.7 A wife killed her husband in their home. (We never hear anything else about this murder in the movie so I can’t speak to any details of it, but what I can offer you is this: Despite the fact that I know nothing about the circumstances that led to this man being shot to death, I’ve spent enough time in the true crime wing of Netflix documentaries to know that the husband deserved it.)
1:51: Brad Pitt’s just shown up. He plays David Mills, a fresh-faced homicide detective new to the city. He’s been partnered with Somerset. They have a walk and talk down the city street. One of the things that makes rewatching David Fincher movies so much fun is that everything he puts on screen is there for a reason, either advancing the plot, or deepening the characters, or enriching the atmosphere. Right here, for example, as Mills and Somerset walk, Somerset does so unencumbered. He walks in a perfectly straight line, never once anything interrupting his path. He knows the city. He knows its rhythms and its patterns. But as Mills walks, his path is interrupted multiple times. Pedestrians bump him; workers redirect him; he has to sidestep an open door. He’s out of place. And unaware. And out of tune. The subtext is clear: Somerset belongs there. Mills does not.
3:40: Somerset sleeps upright. I wonder if Morgan Freeman sleeps like that in real life? How do you sleep in real life? I can only fall asleep if I’m (a) on my side; (b) with my head on a pillow that's no more than three inches thick; (c) and the pillow can’t be a goose down pillow; and also (d) my face has to be on the palm of my hand so that it isn’t directly touching the pillow. That's the recipe for me to get to sleep. (It’s also, I’ve been told, the recipe for me to sound like an asshole whenever I tell people about all the things I need in place for me to fall asleep.)
6:21: It’s Monday. Mills is in bed with his wife Tracy (played by Gwyneth Paltrow). Somerset sleeps upright, Mills sleeps with a watch on. I’m not sure which of those two things is worse, but I know that I hate both of them.
7:23: A fun little thing: As Mills is getting ready to leave, he says to Tracy, “Serpico’s gotta go.” Serpico is the title character of a wonderful 1973 movie starring Al Pacino as a New York City cop. It’s noteworthy here because Al Pacino was actually originally offered the part of Somerset. I love Al Pacino, and it’s a fun exercise imagining him in this world, but Morgan Freeman is perfect as Somerset. No other actor on the planet could’ve done with this role what he did with it.
8:38: Mills and Somerset are working their first crime scene together: An obese man found dead at a kitchen table (we’ll find out later that he’s the GLUTTONY victim in John Doe’s string of sin-related deaths). His hands and feet are tied together. Bugs are everywhere because the house is unbelievably unkempt. There's a bucket of vomit on the floor. It’s raining outside. Everything is dark and gloomy and miserable. This movie is so incredibly bleak. You always think you remember how bleak it is, but then you start watching it again and you’re like, “Oh right, it’s 25 times more bleak than I remembered.”
14:09: The coroner explains that whoever killed the GLUTTONY victim made him eat until he was on the verge of bursting and then kicked him in the stomach. Right here is where Mills should’ve been like, “You know what? Never mind. This transfer was a bad idea. I’m gonna go ahead and pack up my stuff and get outta here. Good luck with the horribleness of where y’all live, though.”
15:00: We’re at the police precinct. Somerset says he wants to be reassigned. He says that the nature of the GLUTTONY murder is too egregious for it to just be a simple case. He says that whoever did it is at the beginning of something and he does not want to be around for the end of it. He says that Mills should be reassigned, too. The police captain (the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket) tells Somerset nope, that he’s stuck with it. Tough break here. Mills and Somerset were one bureaucratic decision away from their lives not being completely and utterly fucked.
17:14: It’s Tuesday. A high-powered defense attorney is dead. Wild start to the work week for these detectives.
17:26: Shaft! I forgot Shaft is in this movie!8
18:55: Let me tell you how unserious Detective Mills is, and this is a thing I’d not noticed until right this very moment: Mills is assigned to investigate the murder of the district attorney. It’s a solo case for Mills. He’s the guy in charge. He’s the alpha on it. There's nobody above him. And, again, this is the murder OF A PROMINENT DEFENSE ATTORNEY, which is presumably a very high profile case. And Mills showed up to the crime scene wearing a tie WITH FUCKING CARTOON BASKETBALLS on it. Look at this shit:
Unbelievable.9
20:01: The drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket is telling Somerset that he doesn’t believe he’ll really retire. Somerset responds by telling him a story about how a guy got mugged recently and the attacker, after having taken the guy’s wallet and watch and beaten the guy up, decided he also needed to stab the guy in both of his eyeballs. The drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket’s response: “That’s the way it’s always been.” THAT'S THE WAY IT’S ALWAYS BEEN?!?!?!?! Bitch, what?! What the fuck is going on in this city?????
23:05: Somerset just found the GLUTTONY message written in grease on the wall behind the refrigerator while revisiting the crime scene. You know what I wonder? John Doe obviously was a very prepared, very intelligent, very deliberate killer. He seemed to know basically everything that was going to happen before it happened. That being the case, I wonder if he anticipated that Somerset, a brilliant detective, was going to be working the GLUTTONY murder, which is why he hid the clue for that one in a place that only the most discerning detective would find it. And if he did that on purpose, then I wonder if that means he also anticipated that Mills, a dunderhead detective, was going to be working the GREED murder, and so John Doe said to himself, “That guy’s kind of an idiot, and I don’t want him to miss what’s happening here and screw this all up, so let me go ahead and make this one a little easier to find,” and then literally wrote the word GREED out in giant blood letters on the carpet in the middle of the room.
23:58: Another DAVID FINCHER DID THIS ON PURPOSE thing: Somerset, Mills, and the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket are in the bullpen area of the police station, where Somerset is explaining how he believes the killer is framing his murders through the seven deadly sins. As Somerset lists the first six sins, he stays focused on the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket. When he arrives at the final sin—ENVY, the one that later leads to Mills’s wife being decapitated—he turns and says it directly to Mills.
24:27: Somerset is alone in his apartment playing darts, except instead of throwing darts at the dartboard he’s throwing a knife at the dartboard. This is the saddest guy I’ve ever seen in my life.
29:29: It’s Wednesday. And it’s still raining. It’s rained every single day of this movie so far. That's how I know the unnamed city isn’t Houston. Because if it rains for more than ten minutes in Houston, half of the city is underwater.
35:47: Mills and Tracy are having dinner with Somerset at their apartment. This, I would argue, is the most important scene in the movie. It’s Fincher parceling out juuuuuust enough hope and light and joy that it plants the idea into the audience’s head that, despite how terrible things have been thus far, ultimately everything’s going to be okay. It’s an irresistible delusion. You watch the three of them sitting there together, drinking and laughing and being charming, finally away from the unrelenting rain and finally away from all the dead bodies, and you start to think to yourself, “Okay, you know what? Yes, there’s a lot of bad stuff happening in this movie. But it’s all gonna turn out fine. It has to. Because look at these three. Look how beautiful and perfect they all are. It’s gonna be fine. It’s all gonna be fine.”
38:54: Somerset and Mills are looking at the crime scene photos now that they’re done with dinner. They discuss the grisly details of the district attorney’s murder: John Doe held him at gunpoint and forced him to try to slice a pound of flesh off his own body. A really great thing about Seven is that, despite the brutality of the movie, the only murder we ever actually see is when John Doe gets shot in the head. Everything else else happens off screen.
38:55: By the way, if for whatever reason you’re curious and wanna know what it looks like when someone tries to cut a pound of flesh off their body, there's a part in 2009’s Saw VI where two people have to do exactly that. It’s really, really gross. I do not recommend watching it.
45:51: While revisiting the GREED murder scene, Somerset and Mills find the next clue: fingerprints behind a painting on the wall. More specifically: fingerprints that spell out the phrase “HELP ME.” Fucking hell, man.
47:43: Another DAVID FINCHER DID THIS ON PURPOSE thing: Mills and Somerset dozed off on a couch in the hallway while they were waiting for the fingerprint analysis machine to find a match. The shot of them asleep is wonderfully efficient character development. Somerset: still sitting upright, his fingers interlaced, his mouth closed, in total control; Mills: body out of whack, mouth open, looking very much like a toddler who’s fallen asleep on the car ride home from a day spent at a waterpark. Neither one of them do anything or say anything and yet still you come away knowing each of them a little bit better.
48:18: John C. McGinley! I forgot he’s in this, too! He plays the leader of the S.W.A.T. team that gets sent in to apprehend the guy whose fingerprints matched with the ones on the wall (a drug-dealing pedophile who we later find out is John Doe’s next victim). What a great run of movies McGinley had during this time period. Just to name a few, he was in: Platoon, Wall Street, Point Break, Surviving the Game, The Rock, and Set it Off. There must’ve been, like, a seven-year stretch in Hollywood where any time someone said “We need a really manly guy for this role,” John C. McGinley’s agent would zipline down from the ceiling screaming his name.
52:12: The S.W.A.T. team found the SLOTH victim. John Doe strapped him to a bed, kept him there (and alive!!!) FOR A WHOLE FUCKING YEAR as he deteriorated into goop, cut the guy’s hand off and healed the amputation himself, and then used the hand to lead the police to him. Fucking hell, man.
52:15: By the way: The SLOTH guy got the worst of all the deaths, right? Like, if all the options were laid out in front of you and you had to pick one of the deaths from Seven to suffer through, this is your last pick, right? I think the top four go: this one, then the butcher knife dildo, then the force-feeding stomach kick, then the pound of flesh.
54:40: Mills is beginning to spin out a little because of how extremely fucked up this case has become. Somerset, hoping to impart some well-earned wisdom, pleads with Mills, “We have to divorce ourselves from emotion here. No matter how hard it is, we have to focus on the details.” Mills, in response, snipes, “Man, I feed off my emotions!” And right as that conversation is happening, a reporter (who we’ll find out later is John Doe) shows up and begins snapping pictures of them, which prompts Mills to yell and curse at him. It's literally the exact same sequence that happens at the end of the movie: Somerset tries to get Mills to divorce himself from the emotion of the moment, Mills teeters on the edge between restraint and rage, and John Doe tosses the ember that causes Mills to combust. Fincher told us all exactly how he was going to end Seven halfway into the movie and we missed it.
55:36: Mills and Somerset ask the doctor who’s tending to the SLOTH victim if he’s tried to speak. The doctor offers a grim assessment: “Even if his brain were not mush, which it is, he chewed off his own tongue long ago.” Fucking hell, man.
57:42: Friday. Tracy meets with Somerset because she recently found out she’s pregnant and isn’t sure what to do. Gwyneth Paltrow is so unbelievably good here. Every look, every line delivery, every moment of guarded emotion; she’s an actor in complete control. I know I mentioned earlier that she’d eventually go on to win the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Shakespeare in Love (which she was also obviously outstanding in), but if I had to pick one four-minute clip to convince someone who’d never seen her movies that she belongs in the uppermost tier of actors, this is the one I’d go with. Masterful stuff.
1:01:43: The movie cuts right from Tracy thanking Somerset for his counsel to a shot of a chalkboard that has the seven deadly sins listed out. And the layout of the sins on the chalkboard is yet another DAVID FINCHER DID THIS ON PURPOSE thing. Of the seven deadly sins, three of them are already crossed off (GLUTTONY, GREED, SLOTH). The next two sins we see written out, right after spending time with Tracy: ENVY (the sin that John Doe ends up being guilty of because he coveted Mills and Tracy’s relationship) and WRATH (the sin Mills ends up being guilty of after he finds out John Doe cut Tracy’s head off and then mailed it to him). Fincher is a fucking madman.10
1:09:08: Mills and Somerset used illegal library records information to find John Doe’s apartment. They’re chasing him now. Two great little tricks to point out here: (1) It was such a smart decision to have Mills, who is in direct pursuit of John Doe, slow down and peek around each corner rather than having him run full speed with no care or concern for getting shot. It makes the scene feel even more dangerous. (2) Nearly all of Seven has the same stabilized, steadicam camerawork. (Picture, for example, the walk and talk from the beginning of the movie that I called out earlier. That's a camera that's on a tracking dolly.) The chase, though, is mostly handheld camerawork. After we’ve spent the previous hour of the movie getting used to one style, the shift here to the handheld camera stuff causes everything to feel like it’s in disarray, and like everything is mayhem.
1:14:12: Going straight from the handheld camera stuff into this shot: I love David Fincher so much.
1:18:16: They’re investigating John Doe’s apartment. I wonder how mad Larami would get if she came home one day and saw that I installed a giant, glowing, red cross like this above our bed?
1:27:42: New victim. The LUST murder. John Doe had a leather shop build him a strap-on sex device, except but in place of the dildo they fitted it with a butcher’s knife. He then put the barrel of a gun into a man’s mouth and forced him to rape a sex worker while wearing the strap-on butcher knife dildo. I’d like to point out right here that this movie was in theaters at the same time as Toy Story.
1:28:17: A thing Somerset just said to Mills: “You know, this isn’t gonna have a happy ending. It’s not possible.” Yeah, I’ll say.
1:33:18: Sunday. The PRIDE murder. John Doe cut a model’s nose off her face, then glued a bottle of sleeping pills to one of her hands and a telephone to the other. She had the option of calling for help and living with her new disfigurement or swallowing all the sleeping pills. She took the sleeping pills.
1:33:19: Of note: the rain finally stopped. It stopped on, duh, the seventh day. (There’s a ton of numbers-related things to analyze in Seven, if you want to. For example, all the address numbers during the walk and talk at the start of the movie begin with the number seven. So does Somerset’s office number and the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket’s office number, for a second example. And for a final and more hidden example, Mills mentions that he’s only shot his gun one time in his career, but then the movie ends with him shooting John Doe six times, meaning he’s now fired his gun seven times in his career.)
1:34:55: John Doe just turned himself in. One of the things that makes Seven so discombobulating is that it continuously disabuses you of the conclusions you think it’s headed toward. You never think for one second that the killer is gonna walk into the police station and turn himself in. You think, “Okay so the killer’s gonna keep killing, but whoever his last victim is, Mills and Somerset are gonna get there in time to save that person, probably a kid or a nun or somebody very innocent.” But nope. He turns himself in with half an hour left to go. The movie keeps you off balance the whole time you’re watching it.
1:39:25: John Doe’s lawyer has successfully negotiated him signing a full confession—but only after Mills and Somerset drive Doe out to a designated area to find the two remaining murder victims. As always, the only one smart enough to suspect that this is a very bad idea is Somerset.
1:40:41: Another sneaky little bit of foreshadowing: As Somerset and Mills prepare for the drive, they get dressed together. Mills, for the first time in the movie, wears a non-idiot tie. It’s a solid black one. One a person might wear to, say, a funeral. (Meanwhile, the tie he was wearing when John Doe turned himself in had a cartoon fish on it.)
1:43:00: “I’m not special. I’ve never been exceptional. This is, though. What I’m doing. My work.” John Doe just said that to Mills and Somerset. Coincidentally, that’s the same thing I said to Larami when I told her I was starting GOOD MOVIE.
1:45:18: This scene here where Somerset, Mills, and Doe are riding out to wherever it is that they’re riding out to is fucking wild. I’ve probably seen this movie 15-20 times in my life. And this part has only ever gotten better, and more impressive, and more surreal with each subsequent rewatch. Every single person gives an A+ performance.
1:49:38: “You’re no messiah. You’re a… you’re a movie of the week. You’re a fucking t-shirt at best.” Great line.
1:49:50: By the way: There’s a small moment after Mills yells at John Doe here where Doe gives a small, soft smile. I think that’s him realizing in the moment that his plan to eventually get Mills angry enough to kill him later is actually, really, truly gonna work.
1:52:19: The three arrive where Doe wants them (a remote location outside of city limits). Somerset and Mills scan the area for potential threats or clues. Somerset sees the carcass of a dead dog lying near the road. John Doe looks at Somerset, waits a beat, then calmly responds, “I didn’t do that.” Seven is absolutely not a funny movie, but there are absolutely some funny parts in it.
1:53:31: Oh no. The van is approaching… the music is building… the tension is growing… I already know what’s gonna happen and I’m still like, “WHAT THE FUCK IS GONNA HAPPEN?????????” And to that point…
1:56:24: Somerset is opening the box. The fundamental brilliance of Seven—and, really, of David Fincher’s work on it—is that by the time we get to this moment, we’ve been shoved and yanked and pushed and pulled in so many unexpected directions that it has become impossible to guess what’s going to happen. And that's the best possible place for a director to take an audience. You have to just give yourself up to the movie, and to the story, and to the moment. You’re completely at its mercy. You’re not guessing, you’re not hypothesizing, you’re not theorizing. You’re just watching. Seven made $327.3 million dollars at the box office. And movie tickets in 1996 were about $5 a pop. That means about 65 million people watched Seven at the theater. And I would guess that not one single person had any fucking clue what was inside that box.
1:57:15: The line that always stuck with me from Seven comes after Somerset opens the box, sees what’s in it, and realizes what John Doe’s plan is. He starts telling the team on standby not to approach, to stay away. He ends his warning by exclaiming, “John Doe has the upper hand!” JOHN. DOE. HAS. THE. UPPER HAND. John Doe is weaponless, on his knees in handcuffs and leg cuffs in the middle of a barren field, being held at gunpoint by a police detective, and watched from the sky by a helicopter with several members of a S.W.A.T. team on it. And he still HAS THE UPPER HAND. That's a devastating line for Somerset to say there.
1:57:56: John Doe, talking to Mills, who’s trying to figure out why Somerset is suddenly sprinting toward him: “I visited your home this morning… after you’d left. I tried to play husband. I tried to… taste the life of a simple man. It didn’t work out. So… I took a souvenir: Her pretty head.”
1:59:00: Somehow, it gets worse:
John Doe: She begged for her life, detective. She begged for her life, and for the life of the baby inside of her.
[Somerset slaps Doe and tells him to shut up.]
[Doe, noticing the expression on Mills’s face, realizes that Mills was unaware that Tracy was pregnant. Doe laughs a small laugh to himself, then looks at Somerset and, with the most perverse joy possible, says…]
John Doe: Oh. He didn’t know.
Fucking hell, man.
1:59:01: There's a theory floating around on the internet that John Doe was actually in the diner with Tracy and Somerset when she told Somerset about the pregnancy. (If you search on YouTube, you’ll find a clip where someone zooms in on a guy in the background at the beginning of the scene. The guy, who vaguely resembles John Doe, appears to look directly at Tracy and Somerset as he walks by.) I’m not sure if I fully believe that it’s him, but the way he delivers that last line to Somerset would seem to imply that John Doe knows that Somerset knew Tracy was pregnant, which would give a little bit of credence to the theory that he was there when Tracy talked with Somerset.
2:00:09: Mills not wanting to cry but also not being able to stop himself from crying—fucking hell, man.
2:00:12: As Mills wrestles with whether or not to shoot John Doe, a quick flash of Tracy shoots across the screen. It’s Mills seeing her in his head, and ultimately it’s what causes him to shoot John Doe. Just a truly wonderful touch.
2:00:13: Bang! Bang, bang, bang! Bang! Bang!
2:00:27: John Doe is dead. (THANK FUCKING GOD.) Mills looks like he’s been hit by a titanium 18 wheeler going 200 miles per hour. Somerset can’t do anything but stare at the ground. What a disaster.
2:00:28: According to various interviews that Fincher and the cast members have done since the movie’s release, there were apparently several different endings that could’ve happened here—one where Mills doesn’t shoot Doe; one where Somerset kills Doe to sacrifice himself and save Mills; one where there was never even a head in a box. I’m so glad they went with this one. It’s the darkest of all of the outcomes, sure, but it’s also the one that feels the most true to what the movie is, and what it was trying to say. An incredible finish. An incredible ending.
2:01:41: The aftermath. Mills is being driven off in the back of a police car while Somerset and the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket watch. In voiceover, we hear Somerset: “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.” Fucking hell, man.
2:01:56: The movie’s over. Good movie.
THE LAST BITS
Things that I Googled while watching Seven
Ties that Brad Pitt wears in Seven. Not including the final black funeral one, he has four. The one with the cartoon basketballs on it, one with cartoon footballs on it, and two with cartoon fish on them. And just as a reminder: he’s a man who investigates murders for a living, not a middle school social studies teacher.
What are the seven cardinal virtues? Somerset mentions when he and Mills are talking through one of the cases that there are seven cardinal virtues that counterbalance the seven deadly sins. I’d had no idea before that moment that the seven cardinal virtues were even a thing. But they are. They’re real. As listed, they’re: Prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and charity. Way less cool than the seven deadly sins.
Can you cut off a pound of your own flesh without dying? I never found a good and certain answer for this. I did, however, find a company called A Pound of Flesh that sells chunks of synthetic skin for tattoo artists to practice tattooing on. They even make them in the shape of human hands and arms to make things feel really real. (They also sell full baby models so you can practice tattooing on a baby, which is hilarious and horrifying.)
What happens if you lay in bed for a year? Basically everything that happened in the movie, it turns out. Your body rots and your brain rots and everything rots.
Next week’s movie: Kill Bill (2003)
You can stream it on Peacock or rent it from all the places you rent movies from.
This essay was edited by Hannah Giorgis. The FOOTNOTES video was produced by Richie Bozek.
All these stats are per the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data.
The most in New York City’s history, then and still today.
He’d just come off a Best Actor nomination for his performance in 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption.
Thelma & Louise in 1991, A River Runs Through It in 1992, True Romance in 1993, and Interview With a Vampire and Legends of the Fall in 1994, among other projects.
In 2017, Spacey was accused of several instances of sexual assault and sexual harassment. And as I’m typing this footnote out, I’m realizing that Pitt and Freeman have also since been accused of misconduct. Pitt was accused of being physically and verbally abusive to Angelina Jolie and at least two of their children in a lawsuit in 2022, and in 2018, Freeman was accused of, per CNN, “what some called harassment and others called inappropriate behavior.” (All three men deny the allegations against them.)
She won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in Shakespeare in Love (1998).
The body on the floor is actually played by Andrew Kevin Walker, the writer of the film.
Shaft’s real name is Richard Roundtree, which is somehow even cooler than the name Shaft.
I went back and looked at what tie Mills was wearing when he met with Somerset the first time when he arrived to the movie and it’s the same one (but, important to mention, not his only one). The cartoon basketball tie is apparently the tie he puts on when he wants to make a good impression.
Lest you think this was merely a coincidence, I’d like to mention that Fincher held the camera on the chalkboard FOR NINE STRAIGHT SECONDS. He was begging us to notice it.
Aaannnddd this is why I blindly give Shea my money. What a great thing this is, I hope it goes on for a very long time.
I knew this was going to be incredible and somehow it was even better than that. YAY, SHEA!!