She may as well be talking about the whole world
I really like today's essay and I think you will too! Corey Atad writes about the 1995 David Fincher film Se7en, the fraught decision to have children or not in times like these, and whether the world is still worth fighting for.
"It’s said that Fincher wanted the film to end immediately after Mills shoots Doe, leaving the audience in a state of pure shock. That would have been a great ending, too, but I wonder if it would have been too easy in its nihilism. Instead, the ending offers something else. Not quite hope, but an expression of the value in the striving," he writes.
Sometimes I believe in that myself. Not always but sometimes.
Find it down below or go directly to it here.
Luke O’Neil
Atad previously wrote for Hell World about The Zone of Interest as well as The Bear, The Prisoner, Breaking Bad, Twin Peaks and the medium of television as an art form.
Luke O’Neil
You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read the whole thing. In honor of Capitalism Day here's a one day only 40% off coupon. What a deal!
How was your Thanksgiving? Mine was perfectly nice and normal. I spent a couple days at my in-laws, saw my own family, threw a ball to a dog that did not want to let go of the ball so I could throw it, and went to a party for old high school pals.
My mother unlocked a new level of South Shore accent even I couldn't translate by asking us at one point if we had “hot forced heater air" in our house.
Since I was on the South Shore I of course got some Mary Lou's and Mamma Mia's and went to the gym. Sorry about the old man gym selfie I don't know how to remove it.
Find me on Blusky lately if you are interested in reading my posts. This is the longest I've ever gone in 15 years without posting on Twitter. Aside from a Hell World link or two it's been eight days. That is insane for me. Then again I've posted about 5000 times on Blusky since then so who knows if that's any kind of progress. Sort of like quitting drinking moonshine all day and switching to vodka instead.
Here's a couple other family- and family dog-related pieces you may or may not have read previously that I'd like to recommend again.
Luke O’Neil
I had sort of become enamored with this idea that there was one day we all got together at the table and ate like a family and it was the last time that it happened and none of us knew it was happening and barely registered it as anything at all. Endings are easier to suffer through when you aren't aware they're transpiring.
Luke O’Neil
He asked me if I remembered so and so.
It’s never a good sign when your parents ask you if you remember so and so because that dude is a fucked.
Read this one if you're going to read any of them though. It's about a Thanksgiving from a couple years ago. The first one in my life I ever spent alone. It's also about the food-based anxiety that people often feel around the holidays. Especially me.
Luke O’Neil
On the morning of Thanksgiving I woke up feeling like a bowl of dog piss and it was negotiated that I would stay home instead of heading down to dine and commune with my beloved in-laws and I felt something like loss mingled with excitement at least in part on account of the potential Kevin McCallister scenarios.
More than any of that though I felt relieved of a burden considering how eating-based holidays like this are a driver of exceptional dread for people with my whole deal.
Every holiday is eating-based I suppose but this is the big one. The Super Bowl of binging.
The normal Super Bowl is also the Super Bowl of binging but you know what I mean.
So instead of feeling morose that I’d be spending the first Thanksgiving of my long life alone it felt like a reprieve in that I would not have to eat and eat and eat right there in front of my wife’s cousins and God and everyone.
One doesn’t have to but one does anyway you know? How you drink deeply and lustily when it’s an open bar.
Alright enough fucking around. Let's get to Atad on Se7en. Here's your song of the day. Thank you for being here it means a lot to me.
It’s hard to see a way forward
by Corey Atad
In the middle of everything, all the muck and the horror of the world, a woman sits down with a friend, someone she’s only recently met, looking to him for something, though she’s not sure what. Help maybe. Or advice. Reassurance more like. It’s raining outside, and the diner looks grim, but there’s humanity at this table, between these two people sharing their hearts with each other. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really bothering you, Tracy,” the man says. “David and I are gonna have a baby,” she responds. This is the most devastating moment in David Fincher’s Se7en, a film better remembered for its carnival of grotesqueries. Newly resettled in the film’s nameless metropolis, surrounded by its grungy, vile atmosphere, her husband hunting a serial killer, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Tracy is utterly trapped. So she reaches out to her husband’s new, retiring partner, Detective Somerset, played by Morgan Freeman. “I hate this city,” she tells him. The city’s overwhelming bleakness is so omnipresent in the film, so all-consuming, its borders so endless, she may as well be talking about the whole world.
Se7en opened in cinemas in the fall of 1995, nearly 30 years ago. Its impact was big at the time, and its influence wide. Genre imitators emerged aplenty—Kiss the Girls, The Bone Collector, Suspect Zero, Murder by Numbers, I could go on—and the visual style Fincher concocted with cinematographer Darius Khondji and production designer Arthur Max remains a point of reference decades later for films like 2022’s The Batman. The film is hardly lacking in the reputation department, though each time I watch it I come away thinking it’s not appreciated nearly enough.