First off, thanks for the response. It's very substantive and thoughtful.
Blade Runner taught audiences what it means to be human as a noir.
No Country for Old Men offers a lesson in hubris and contingency and self-judgment.
The Usual Suspects audaciously stands narrative expectations on their head.
Memento is a brilliant exploration of time, memory, self-delusion, and identity and has a formal device the performs its message.
All of these are films that will make you think and even transform you a little bit.
A film in any genre doesn't need to do any apart from share enough formal features to warrant inclusion in the classification. A great western, however, needs to be more than just a western. It must be a great film that belongs in that genre. The best films in a genre have a little something extra. They might even redefine the boundaries of the genre.
There is a difference, for example, between the most "typical" or "average" Beef Wellington and a Beef Wellington made by a master chef. A Beef Wellington doesn't need to blow your hair back to be a Beef Wellington, but it had better be to make a top 10 list for that list.
I agree with all this, but I also think this defines "teach you something" in a broad enough way that
Se7en qualifies. I suppose I took it for granted you were giving that phrase a positive connotation if you felt it didn't. I probably should have put something about that in my response preemptively, but since your response illuminates the distinction well, I'm kinda glad I didn't. Anyway, on to how/whether it qualifies:
True but the other films I mention do this, but also do a little more, don't they? I am just not sure why I "needed" to see Se7en, but I do know why I needed to see No Country for Old Men and Memento and Blade Runner.
Right, we agree that noir can still have a message/teach us things, just not in the happy or uplifting way. It can be a warning or a dark insight about human nature, etc. Cool. So...does
Se7en do that? I'll say yes, and I think it actually does some of the very same things you mention above. Specifically, the thing about
No Country for Old Men and playing with audience expectations. This is probably the thing
Se7en does best.
As a mystery, it subverts our expectation in that he's...just a guy. The audience and the detectives wonder the whole time:
who could do this? What happened to him? And the answers are: no one, and nothing. He's not somebody's dad or brother, and we don't hear of any personal trauma that made him into a monster. There is absolutely nothing satisfying about his identity, even though that's
the thing every mystery is building towards.
As a crime story, it messes with us in some really fiendish ways. Our expectation for a film like this, in addition to the killer's identity being meaningful somehow, is that he'll lose. He'll get caught, and specifically he'll be outsmarted by the very detectives he's taunting. He'll get his, and he'll usually lose in a way that's vaguely humiliating. Beaten at his own game and all that. And absolutely none of that happens here.
That first subversion, letting the bad guy "win," admittedly doesn't look as impressive now. But I think it was at the time (and between this and
The Usual Suspects, boy, what a year 1995 was for Kevin-Spacey-wins-as-the-bad-guy). Ditto for the "giving himself up" thing, which is a trope now but a total shock when I saw it. I'd file both these under "ahead of its time but oft-imitated since."
The second subversion is that they don't really outsmart him. They use a little extralegal surveillance database access to find him, and even if you want to call that ingenuity, it doesn't work! He just smashes one of them in the face and runs away. The detectives are living in a standard crime thriller, but John Doe isn't.
The third subversion, and my favorite, is that this confrontation happens too early in the film. We know the beats of these stories: they don't usually give us trials, or even interrogations. They get their lightbulb moment, confront him, and he forces them to kill him so we get our catharsis without the heroes having to off him in cold blood. But what's going on? They found him already? This is too soon. Something's not right. The movie doesn't feel over. And because of that, for the rest of the film, we're genuinely unsure of what happens next. It feels like we've got
past the end of a normal movie and we're in uncharted territory. This would never happen if the film's whole structure was unfamiliar. It only works if it's
largely familiar, largely follows the same beats, but then goes past them. And to be fair, up until this point, the film is just an exceptionally well-polished, clever/creative example of the genre. I think until this confrontation it's pretty much what you feel it is.
The biggest subversion of all, though, and the thing it has to teach us, is about our own capacity for hatred: for most of the film we're disgusted with these acts. We can't imagine who could do it, and we want to see them caught, drawn, and quartered...and that's the point. We're complicit. Even in the act of (ostensibly) wanting justice, we lapse into one of the deadly sins. We share John Doe's animalistic fury and disgust. We rationalize it by saying he's just
that bad...we want him to suffer because he caused others to suffer, whereas he did it for
lesser things. Even if that's true (and I think sin and vice are a lot more complicated than that), we have to admit that some version of him is inside us. We can feel that kind of spite, and the difference is what we direct it at, or a difference of circumstance, or a difference of degree...but not of kind. I imagine more than a few people in those theaters were every bit as conflicted as Mills was. And I'll bet more than a few wanted him to pull the trigger, but left the theater feeling guilty anyway.
Anyway, that's my time. Too many words already, but hopefully it helps explain why some people think of it so highly.
It doesn't show as much as some films, true. It is, however, rather disgusting and deeply misanthropic. Like the film Funny Games, it seemed to be a film that didn't like me or any other human being. And yet, I would even rate Funny Games higher as a film, because of it's novel method of saying "F**k you" to the audience.
The misanthropic part is tricky. On one level it's hard to disagree, for, uh, obvious reasons. But there's a lot pointing the other way. The closing voiceover is obviously giving us a positive takeaway: that the proper response to despair is to persevere. It doesn't tell us the world is
fine, and it doesn't tell us everything's hopeless. It simply tells us to keep going, which is arguably the most uplifting thing any noir can say while still remaining a noir.
That said, I'd probably be forced to agree if someone said that closing quote/voiceover is a little on the clumsy side.
A lot of people love this film, however, so they must be getting something out of it which is "there" to be had. I'll have to watch it again sometime and see if I can wring something more from it.
Yeah, fair enough, and I appreciate the response.