Posted Apr 27, 09 02:10 PM
Letters from John Doe
"This city is the River Styx and I see people drowning who refuse to tread water. Drowning, drowning, drowning, when any body's instinct of self-preservation will flail arms and legs about rather than fill their pathetic lungs with fluid. But then their brains are already drowning, locked away inside their craniums with no escape. Yet they refuse to even escape their selfish sullenness, their moronic sadness, their tired listlessness in an attempt to find no meaning amid our meaninglessness."
- John Doe, excerpt from the notebook narrative, Se7en prequel
That paragraph was the writing sample I'd submitted to Zenescope Entertainment. Joe Brusha and Ralph Tedesco -- company pres and VP, respectively -- had already tapped me as an eleventh hour replacement to pen the "Sloth" installment of the film's seven issue back-story (an assignment for which I secretly salivated).
But I also shared with the Philly boys a reverence for David Fincher's modern classic. To me, the Morgan Freeman-Brad Pitt tale ranks as one of the most profoundly spiritual films I've seen, a dying struggle to retain goodness in a world wallowing in decay. Considering such hell-kissed subject matter (serial killer mercilessly dispatching victims via the Seven Deadly Sins), the movie is an earth-breaking exercise in artistic restraint. If ever there was a precious time to respect the power of the audience's imagination, this production strikes an indelible, echoing midnight.
A unifying element of each puzzle piece of the comic book septet would be the notebook pages Kevin Spacey's character famously wrote during his hermitage. Even though we had completed - at the time - our sixth (now 18th) title together, Joe & Ralph wanted to be extremely certain that this telltale detail absolutely fit with each writer. Each issue would be created by seven separate teams - including diabolical turns by friends Raven ("Gluttony") Gregory and Christian ("Lust") Beranek.
After reading the submitted paragraph, Joe nervously laughed long distance, "... Are you sure you're not a serial killer?" Ralph went one further, offering me a second job as John Doe's notebook "voice" for the entire series.
It would be my favorite work to-date in this format, and my greatest challenge, because prequelizing/sequelizing a seminal work is a looming task: anything less than greatness would be dwarfed in the limelight. It's what separates The Godfather, Part II from The Godfather, Part III.
Se7en (1995), admittedly, belongs distinctly in the thriller genre. Suspense pics are a second cousin to horror that can - with the right vision - feel far more terrifying than first cousin titles. But the journal entries were, unquestionably, works of horror... and evil. This was unfathomable pure evil, for it believed itself to be goodness. No generic wannabe psychobabble would do. The challenge would be to create an intellectual, impassioned being operating wholly without compassion, to understand the coldest of sensibilities without filtering it through judgment or censorship. To match the intricacies of Andrew Kevin Walker's poison pen world - connecting the secrets while creating new metaphors. To understand John Doe and what he was after.
Luckily, I owned the deluxe two-disc collector's edition. I scoured the film for days, picking up on each commentary/featurette/footnote/cranny: The pommel horse the set decorator put in Doe's apartment, the possible musings of deleted scenes. Howard Shore's brooding score lived on my iPod. Search engines revealed the clay of research on the Seven Deadly Sins. Did you know that they are color-coded? Animal-coded? Planet-coded? Or that, in earlier incarnations, Sloth was often labeled Sadness? Fascinating. I downloaded the underworld maps from The Divine Comedy and familiarized myself with the fates of the souls of each region. Heck, I even picked up on a little bit of Latin.
Then came the free writing. Very stream of consciousness. The research elements at my disposal, Kevin Spacey's rambling voice in my head, Andrew Kevin Walker's universe spilling out through my pen. Here's what came out, writing through the darkest of characters:
"If Ayn Rand took breath into her lungs today, I'd lop her like the frail violet she is, her head announcing its inflated decadence of self, but her stem limp, unable to support the burgeoning sick blossom that ascends its ugly shaft, twisting against gravity that seeks to center it to the ground while writhing in hell wind."
"The body is the temple of the Lord and must be kept holy. It is sacrilege for John Wayne's colon to be sixty pounds on the cold slab when a normal adult colon should weigh nineteen pounds, and yet this is the icon our society celebrates as forthright!"
That one still bothers me. But it's spot-on characterization. Honestly, I'd have to take breaks after writing sessions as I was scaring myself. I was understanding Doe's thought processes. Applied to humanity, logic without emotion is a dangerous possibility.
Doe, I concluded, saw himself as more than a messenger of God, an Angel of Death. That's the safe answer. Beyond that, he was doing the Almighty's work as a Christ-like figure to justify a seat next to God in Heaven. His "divine" plan journey is his own road to Calvary. Very disturbing stuff... but it accords with the assignment. And this new interpretation, textured into viewings, deepens and expands in ways I'd love to discuss with Andrew Kevin Walker over a couple of rum and Cokes.
David Seidman - the artist for the incredibly realized interior panels for "Sloth" - did triple duty. He transformed my purposefully jumbled MS Word files into the decrepit, frequently repulsive, but always just-right notebook page layouts. David also did the series and trade paperback covers - two of which, life-size, are proudly framed in my room. When I look at them, I see grace. Much in the same way Morgan Freeman ended the film on Hemingway:
"'The world is a beautiful place, and worth fighting for.'
... I believe in the second part."
Posted by Mike Kalvoda at 02:10 PM