And I alone am escaped to tell thee
Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.
These are Detective Lieutenant William Somerset's final words in SE7EN.
To the unblemished mind, they may ring hollow, a bleak consolation in light of the events that have transpired. Having witnessed the murder of five innocent people, we watch, with bated breath, as the serial killer lures our heroes — the jaded Somerset and his idealistic partner David Mills — out into an open field. There, he reveals that he had, prior to his arrest, paid a visit to Mill’s young bride and left a “souvenir” of her in a box…
As the hot-blooded cop guns him down, avenging his wife and unborn child, we do not cheer; we do not clap; we hold our breath. In this scene, we have not watched good triumph over evil. We have witnessed an execution, an act of vengeance…Wrath.
Mills, who had earlier refuted Somerset's cynicism — arguing that he is no better than the apathetic city that he condemns — is taken away by his peers and charged with the same crime that he had relentlessly pursued this unrepentant psychopath for.
The horror of what has just transpired has left him catatonic.
Somerset, shaken, looks on, speechless, seemingly unsure of what to make of the situation until his captain approaches him and asks where he’ll be.” In a daze, Somerset replies, “[he] will be around,” before affirming it, implying that he will not retire as he had originally planned when we were first introduced to him.
What his words mean is left vague.
Is he staying on because he feels obligated to take on his partner’s crusade, or is he so terrified of the monster he just encountered that he fears leaving the city to its own devices?
There’s no way to tell….until the voiceover kicks in with Somerset’s final words.
And they’re comforting. Not because the hero refuses to succumb to the same nihilism that twisted his opponent and destroyed his partner, but because these words acknowledge that the world around us is fundamentally broken, and yet, we can still get back up and fight for it.
Detective Somerset in the final scene of SE7EN
Growing up in Beirut in the aftermath of the brutal Lebanese Civil War, the reconstruction era promised us a future that returned us to a Golden Age that never was. Even as war seemed inevitable, this Golden Age, we were told — always told — was only a couple of years away. And, when you’re young enough to believe that, you start to have these grand notions that one day you’ll grow up and join these respectable men in custom-made suits to rebuild the city they themselves turned to rubble.
This may seem naive, foolish even. And to those around me, it did. But where others resigned themselves to the inevitable, I gave in to the dream, losing myself in the fantasy. It was simple, really. All we had to do was build on the idealism sold to us by our elders and their esteemed institutions i.e., to study, learn, grow into, and achieve what they wanted, what we all wanted. Slowly, however — as is the case with all things that are too good to be true — that idealism was eroded by the unrelenting reality that we would soon find ourselves in. And I was not alone.
But, unlike my overeager peers, I never found an outlet in sex, alcohol, or drugs. That was all beneath me, I thought. I was an artist, after all. Art is my life. It can only be my outlet.
You would assume that I would consume the most saccharine trifles — fiction sugary enough to rot your mind — but something strange happened, so much so that I couldn’t understand it myself. I had developed an obsessive indulgence in the bleakest and bitterest fiction I could uncover. That, inevitably, led me down the dark hallways of media where artists gleefully indulge in the worst humankind has to offer.
And I have to say, as you’re maturing, there’s something almost cathartic about this nihilistic expression. As you’re grappling with the fact that the world around you isn’t what you were told it was, watching monsters, both literal and figurative, act on our worst impulses to affirm your worst intuitions about life is…purging.
Because, in a way, you’re vindicated. And that vindication curses you with a cynicism that, as you get older, is not only tolerated less and less by those around you, isolating you, but that wears you down psychologically — inevitably leaving you in a state of emotional paralysis when you’re are finally confronted by the horrors that have tormented your psyche all these years.
After the Beirut Blast, violence in cinema never felt the same for me. Once you’ve experienced this kind of horror first-hand, the cheap thrills you find in fiction that exploits death and destruction will lose all their appeal. Seeing what violence was capable of doing to the city I had spent my entire life in was terrifying; watching friends and family come to terms with the fact that the situation in Lebanon could get even worse was heartbreaking.
Beirut had returned to the rubble it once was rebuilt from. Ostensibly, this shouldn’t have been a shock. War always seemed to loom over the horizon for Lebanon. I had lived through the July War in 2006, but, at that age, I could scarcely understand what was happening, and, surprisingly, as an adult, I could grapple with it less so. In the following months, my behavior became erratic. I had no way of processing what had happened. I did not know how to move forward. Dark fiction, my outlet, used to give my troubled mind release, but now it seemed to exacerbate them. I could no longer tolerate the kind of wicked art I once reveled in, nor understand why I was drawn to it in the first place.
What exactly had me transfixed to the screen when I watched a father kill his only son before finding out that his salvation was only moments away? How could I have been enthralled by a waking nightmare where eldritch abominations consumed the heroes, forcing the protagonist to cut off his own arm to escape? Why was I so captivated by the end of the world brought on by spite?
I couldn’t tell anymore….How could I?
Now that I was a victim of the circumstances I had spent my childhood dreading, I couldn’t bear to have it play out in fiction anymore.
What use did I have in the affirmation these films and books once offered me when I was now living proof of it?
As if I were one of their protagonists, I was being dragged down, kicking and screaming, into a bottomless pitch-black pit, where death was the most merciful option.
After a period in which I could barely force myself to watch or read anything, I started looking elsewhere for my fix. I thought I had to get my mind off things. But the feel-good media diet didn’t do it for me. It’s a distraction. What I needed was catharsis. I had gone to Hell, and now I needed to watch someone go to Hell and back. I needed Pazuzu exorcized. I needed the xenomorph ejected out to space. I needed the lambs to finally stop screaming. Only then could I finally start healing — when the hero has fought tooth and nail for their life as I had and come out the other side, bruised and battered, but alive, having pulled through, not by surviving danger, but by vanquishing it, prevailing and earning that happy ending.
We look down on fiction made to make us feel better, deeming it childish for trying to appeal to something other than our most cynical sentiments. No doubt, it’s in short supply in these trying times, even in the genres you’d typically have found it in. A finale where the hero earns his happy ending even more so.
These are fantasies, yes. Power fantasies even. But fantasies can become realities if we believe in them. And during that time—in that state of mind—I needed to.
Now that I was drawn to the happy endings that I once snubbed my nose at, I found myself enjoying and even being comforted by stories where the protagonists fought back and defeated the unrelenting menace that tormented them. These films showed me that I could cope, that I could rise up again, and when confronted with inexplicable tragedy, I had the means to fight back and take matters into my own hands.
And that’s why I always return to Somerset’s final words.
What was a compromise between a filmmaker and a studio transforms the film into something more than a rejection of cynicism. No longer does a jaded cop relent on the pessimism that overwhelmed him. Now, he reaffirms his will to fight in the aftermath of an inexplicable tragedy.
After the horror we’ve witnessed, Somerset acknowledges the world around him for what it really is and chooses to carry on.
That may seem unfathomable, even impossible, but this gives me hope. Because it took me years to understand this:
The world is not a fine place, but it is worth fighting—for it and for yourself….
