In the movie Se7en, there’s a great scene near the end where the two cops, David Mills and William Somerset, are in a car with the serial killer John Doe. They have this conversation about Doe’s killings, with Doe believing it all to be justified. In his mind, all the people chosen for his murders and torture were sinners and deserving of death. Here’s a snippet of the conversation:

David Mills: Wait, I thought all you did was kill innocent people.

John Doe: Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny? An obese man… a disgusting man who could barely stand up; a man who if you saw him on the street, you’d point him out to your friends so that they could join you in mocking him; a man, who if you saw him while you were eating, you wouldn’t be able to finish your meal. After him, I picked the lawyer and I know you both must have been secretly thanking me for that one. This is a man who dedicated his life to making money by lying with every breath that he could muster to keeping murderers and rapists on the streets!

David Mills: Murderers?

John Doe: A woman…

David Mills: Murderers, John, like yourself?

John Doe: [interrupts] A woman… so ugly on the inside she couldn’t bear to go on living if she couldn’t be beautiful on the outside. A drug dealer, a drug dealing pederast, actually! And let’s not forget the disease-spreading whore! Only in a world this shitty could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face. But that’s the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it’s common, it’s trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not anymore. I’m setting the example. What I’ve done is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed… forever.

Doe almost makes you believe he’s a vigilante, doing a public service by killing off these dregs of the society. But if you go through his list of victims, you can say that some of them can be considered as innocents. Let’s look at “Sloth” for instance – Doe’s reason for killing him was because he was disgustingly obese, nothing else. This murder is very easy to condemn since the man’s only fault is being fat, and that’s it. Why Doe felt that he was doing the public a service by killing a man who kept to himself and didn’t do anything illegal is unexplainable.

Then there’s “Pride” – a woman whom Doe disfigured and left to choose whether to call for help or die. He justifies that she’s ugly on the inside and was probably proven right when she chose to die instead. Now I wonder how Doe determined the choice she’d make? Does he know her personally to make that judgement call? Did he stalk her first to make sure she’s the perfect candidate as Pride in his crime? For all we know, she could have chosen to call for help, then his grotesque tableau would have been incomplete. It meant he disfigured a woman for nothing.

And then there’s “Wrath”, now this is where it gets interesting. We think Mills is innocent and unjustly targeted by Doe, but Mills has shown repeated bursts of anger throughout the film, one I most remember is his barely controlled outrage during dinner as he recalls their realtor selling them a home near train tracks, he had to compose himself for a minute before continuing his story. Then there’s that line he said to Somerset:

David Mills: You’ve read my files, right? You’ve seen the things I’ve done?

William Somerset: No.

Did Mills do some bad shit out of anger in his old city, and Doe dug up all his previous work history? Perhaps Mills did deserve to be part of Doe’s collection of victims. Maybe he was already targeting Mills from the start and not just when he had that altercation with him in the stairs, while Doe was under disguise as a photographer. I actually believe Mills might have deserved to be chosen as one of the sins compared to the others.