How Seven reflected concerns in the US in the 1980s

On the other hand, President Reagan’s criminal justice reforms—tightening penalties, expanding law enforcement powers, and increasing incarceration rates—were cloaked in relentless rhetoric. “The American people want their government to get tough and go on the offensive,” the president said in 1986, when he signed an anti-drug bill into law. “And that is exactly what we intend, with greater ferocity than ever before.”

The character of John Doe in Seven portrays this position, although Andrew Hartman, an academic historian and expert on the culture wars of the late 20th century, tells the BBC that it would be wrong to suggest that the film sided with right-wing or left-wing political parties. “Seven by itself does not give speeches,” he says, noting that when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was first lady in the 1990s, she “wore the mantle of fighting crime.” In 1994, Clinton declared: “We need more police, and we need tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders… We need as many prisons to hold violent offenders as it takes to keep them off the streets.” Clinton was not associated with the Reaganite right. “These ideas about criminality ebb and flow across political parties,” says Hartmann.

In creating John Doe in Seven, Walker drew on concepts of sin, damnation, and divine punishment that were becoming increasingly common in the public sphere. Prominent evangelicals like Jerry Falwell Sr., for example, a Baptist minister and founder of the Moral Majority, have criticized “pornographers, hucksters, and those who corrupt our youth.” At the same time, James Dobson, founder of the global Christian ministry Family Focus, sought to restore obedience to the fear of God in children through corporal punishment on the theory of “pain in wondrous purification.” Television preacher Pat Robertson predicted the approach of Armageddon based on “certain signs or evidence indicating the approach of his coming.”

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Hartman sees parallels between this language and the language in the novel Seven – as exaggerated and distorted as it is when coming from John Doe. “As the Religious Right reasserted itself at the center of American culture and soul, it blamed an indulgent hedonistic culture for shattering families, igniting the AIDS crisis, and unleashing delinquency,” he says.