One Key Detail Just Might Change the Way You Watch Se7en

I’m allergic to faux confrontational, clickbait-y headlines in the vein of You’ve Been Watching This Movie Wrong the Whole Time, so it truly pains me to suggest that, in fact, we may indeed have been watching David Fincher’s Se7en wrong for a quarter century.

John Doe might suggest that this is a terrible take, a take that, if you saw someone utter it on the street, you’d point out the speaker to your friends so that they could join you in mocking him; a take that, if you heard it while you were eating, you wouldn’t be able to finish your meal.

But hear me out. This isn’t noisy fan-theory fantasia like the Reddit thread suggesting that Morgan Freeman’s Detective Somerset was actually the killer all along, and that he framed John Doe (Kevin Spacey). It does hinge on the relationship between Somerset and John Doe, and it’s based on a small but significant piece of evidence. This theory also helps spackle over some extant plot holes; Se7en is a neo-noir masterpiece, but, like Raymond Chandler’s foundational noir novel The Big Sleep, it’s both tightly plotted and a slightly rickety upon closer inspection.

And, as Detective Somerset would appreciate, the critical clue can be found in the library.

The tiny but essential detail is revealed about halfway through the movie, just after Somerset pays off an informant to access a secret government database of library records to aid in the search for the mystery killer. Detective Mills (Brad Pitt) reads Somerset the list of library books John Doe has checked out that implicate him as the potential suspect. Among the texts on the list—Dante’s Inferno, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and true-crime classics Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood—Mills blows right past a seemingly extraneous one: Of Human Bondage.

Of Human Bondage certainly sounds like the title of the kind of bleak, sordid tome that would fit neatly into John Doe’s reading list. Human bondage, right? Freaky. Except Of Human Bondage is a romantic, semi-autobiographical novel about the pursuit of art and love. It’s a novel rife with tragedy but devoid of murder and mayhem, in which the protagonist’s final epiphany is that “the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect.” Of Human Bondage is a total non sequitur on this list, save for one key detail: the novel’s author, W. Somerset Maugham. The W. is short for William.

Why, among all the others books, would John Doe have checked out the most famous novel written by the only other Somerset you’ve ever heard of outside 19th Century European Lit class and this movie? Because John Doe was obsessing over Detective William Somerset. He was studying the detective so closely that he inevitably gravitated toward a book by the detective’s obvious namesake, despite it having no other relevance to his macabre project.

Detective Somerset, not the ill-fated Detective Mills, is and always was John Doe’s true target.
Se7en is nominally a film with dual protagonists. Despite the fact Somerset is both the first and last of the two detectives onscreen, it’s easy to lapse into the assumption that Mills is the more significant of the two characters. Somerset is clearly the leading force of the investigation, Mills is the one who is most directly targeted by John Doe. In the movie’s iconic climax, it’s Mills who is given the terrible opportunity to commit his own revenge-driven sin, to become Wrath. Mills certainly has the most precipitous character arc, while Somerset, whose subtle transformation is to go from bleak to dark, is also the audience surrogate character, doomed to serve as a witness to the atrocity.

But Mills’ centrality doesn’t track with Se7en’s overall timeline, which begins in earnest a full year before the events of the film, when John Doe first imprisons and immobilizes the Sloth victim. It’s an elaborate equation, fever-dreamed by the maniacal John Doe over what must have been months or years before he set the plan into motion. Mills becomes the instrument of John Doe’s final murderous act, but there’s literally no way John Doe could have anticipated Mills’ presence, since the younger detective only transferred to the city in the final, bombastic week of the murder plot.

Somerset, on the other hand, has been working in the city for decades. John Doe has a grandiose message to deliver, but for it to be properly understood, he needs the right audience. That’s Detective Somerset.

Detective Mills—along with poor Mrs. Tracy Mills (Gwyneth Paltrow)—simply has the terrible misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Specifically, that’s in William Somerset’s orbit. To hammer home his final point, John Doe needed to target someone in proximity to Somerset. But, as as Somerset himself reveals in his conversation with the soon-to-be-headless Tracy, he has no family or close friends to attack. His would-be wife aborted their baby at his request, and she herself is long since out of the picture. The most obvious, best way to get to Somerset is through his partner.

The obvious quibble here: Why would Doe leave such an important component of his plan up to chance? That’s a difficult square to circle, regardless. But it’s much more logical that the plan was always to target someone in Somerset’s life—perhaps it could have been one of the other cops — and that Mills was chosen in the final days entirely because of his unfortunately timed arrival to the city.

How would Doe have so much access to information about Somerset? Somerset inadvertently explains it himself, in a line of dialogue when Mills grouses over the fact that a reporter—who turns out to be John Doe—has arrived so early to a crime scene. Somerset explains, “They pay police for the information, and they pay well.” John Doe will later suggest that’s exactly the way he was able to learn how to get to Tracy. That same inside source would have allowed John Doe to track Somerset over the preceding months.

It’s helpful here to consider the underlying parallels between Se7en and the Sherlock Holmes stories. Arthur Conan Doyle’s archetype is the underlying basis for the characters. Somerset, of course, is the brilliant but distant detective, and Mills is his (sometimes begrudgingly) trusty sidekick. John Doe is the master criminal, a la Professor Moriarty. And, as we know from the Holmes stories, Moriarty is not pathologically obsessed with Dr. Watson, but with his perceived counterpart, Holmes.

This also explains another familiar quibble about Se7en’s plot. John Doe’s entire, elaborate scheme hinges on someone rapidly uncovering and decoding the clues in the Gluttony killing, which are elaborately disguised—bits of wood found in the dead man’s stomach that correspond to grooves in the floor that point to a message hidden behind a refrigerator. Similarly, the Greed murder requires someone to solve a complex riddle to discover an absolutely essential clue written behind a painting in invisible fingerprints, which is the only way for the police to then discover the Sloth victim. It’s far-fetched to assume any investigator would notice all these tiny clues, much less put them together—unless, of course, you’re taunting the ultimate master detective, a true Sherlock Holmes type. The fact that only Somerset could have solved this mystery indicates that he was both a cog in the machine and the intended audience all along.

This theory doesn’t so much change our understanding of Se7en as deepens it. It renders John Doe’s plot more logically cohesive, and it also adds another eerie layer to the story. Even when Somerset thinks he’s fully unraveled the case, there’s still one more dimension to the mystery that he never comprehends: That’s he’s been watched, all this time, and that not only was he another instrument in John Doe’s machinations, he is both the target audience and, in a way, the eighth victim.