For one of my other classes, I needed to write a paper on a shot within a movie. For the assignment, I chose the movie Se7en, a dark thriller about a serial killer who's murders are based on the seven deadly sins. While working on the assignment, I got thinking about the depictions of madness that Hollywood portrays.
Se7en does a fantastic job of showing off how mad someone can be. John Doe, the killer, is a full blown psychopath. He kills people in horrific ways, going to great lengths to get the message he wishes to share across to the general public, and the entire time, he believes that he is in the right in doing so. He even defends his convictions to the two detectives that he has turned himself in to during the car trip to the location of his final victim, going into an enraged state as Mills taunts him and tries to reveal that he is insane.
Doe's madness, I feel, is amplifies by how calm his demeanor is most of the time. In some movies, insanity is shown by people going on massive killing sprees. In this movie, there are only 6 victims, but the impact of each death carries a lot of weight. The impact of Doe's actions would have been reduced if he had killed more people, and was not as exact in his actions.
The human mind does a good job of creating fear when there are holes that can be filled in. The fact that Doe was almost impossible to read the first time watching the movie made him that much scarier, and I think Hollywood would do well to follow that kind of formula instead of using bloodbath films to depict madness.
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