Appears in: Se7en (1995)
Setting: The City of Destruction, 1990s.
Villain type: Religious fanatic and depraved killer, diabolical schemer.
From one of the most memorably-executed villain defeats ever, to one of the most memorably-executed villain victories ever. The effectiveness of John Doe lies in how sparingly he is used; the detective protagonists spend most of the film tailing in his wake, only ever seeing the aftermath of his horrific crimes, until he makes a mockery of their detective work by simply turning himself in (Kevin Spacey kept his name out of the opening credits, to increase the impact of the reveal). He oversees religiously-themed atrocities, forcing his victims (selected for supposedly embodying various unpleasant vices) to do terrible things to themselves at gunpoint, usually involving extreme mutilation. The film classily leaves the most grisly details of these set-pieces to the viewer’s imagination, but this only adds to the demoniacal creepiness of the investigation.
John Doe is a faceless terror for the bulk of the film’s running time, a shadow flitting around a sprawling metropolis leached of virtue, where civic pride, community spirit and everyday decency have withered away and left only pettiness, apathy, and passionless, selfish hungers behind. Spectacular disgust at the banality of this bleak place prompted an unassuming man with a blank past (and oozing meat where his fingerprints should be) to begin a meticulously-planned mission to shake things up. His evil acts are jet-black exclamation marks of satanic violence, slashed across the grey back-drop of the city’s everyday wickedness.
Spacey plays John Doe as smugly confident and strangely collected; the eye of the legal storm that swirls around him. Watch his measured movements in the police station while everyone else explodes in fear and rage. Focus on the faint smile and the steady gaze, and forget the blood soaking into his bland shirt, and the deformed fingertips. And the endless diaries full of hatred for the human race. And the torn-up bodies, swollen and shrivelled with calculated sadism.
Yes, the crimes are wildly over the top. Yet part of the reason why the film’s violence works, while being played utterly straight, is Spacey’s performance. Both the dialogue and his physical mannerisms emphasise that John Doe isn’t some pantomime Lucifer, but a cipher, deliberately self-effacing, obviously hiding massive reserves of sadism behind a composed mask and a sing-song voice, only creeping out for a moment as his voice quivers with misery and rage at the wretched state of the world; the existential horror his acts of physical horror were intended to highlight. Earlier in the film, Morgan Freeman’s character comments how the killer being revealed as anyone less than Satan would be an anticlimax. The John Doe character cleverly evades this problem by being anti-climactic by design, flipping the depressing real-life phenomenon of the infamous, narcissistic killer and the forgotten victims. He is an enigma, who lets the gory tableau of his victims do most of the speaking for him. Which was his demented point, all along.
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