SE7EN re7isited

[nutmegalomaniac]

This is from an email I sent on Thursday. But it turned into a mini-essay I liked. So I'm posting it here.

*******

In my mission to get through my stack of unwatched DVDs, I put on Seven last night. I hadn't seen it since probably the 90s, and it was a good way to prepare for Zodiac, which I'm pretty excited for.

When I saw Seven at the age of

Comments

[r_lex]

S'all good dude, we're grown ups here. I know some peeps have been giving you guff for your opinions of late, but I'm not about to.

Well, she wasn't just raped, she was brutally murdered. I've watched the movie a lot of times, and although it doesn't flinch from that aspect of the crime, I don't think it plays it up more than the fact that she was also beat up and killed. I know that seems like weird grounds to defend it on, but I think perhaps your distance from the film has made the rape aspect of the story more lurid than it's actual treatment. I agree with you intellectually that no crime makes a brutal response morally acceptable, but from my gut, if something god forbid were to happen to Lisa I would want to see the perpetrators harmed, preferably in the most violent fashion possible.

At any rate, the story was written by James O'Barr, who's girlfriend was raped and murdered, although obviously in somewhat different circumstances than the film. Presumably writing and drawing The Crow was a kind of cathartic act for him, a kind of wish fulfillment. Now admittedly it does try to dress up acts of vigilante justice as acts of love which is problematic for me on a lot of levels, but I can understand where it comes from, and I find it hard to fault it on that level.