Se7en/Headscratchers

• At the end of the movie, we learn that John Doe has killed Mills' wife and unborn daughter, and goads Mills into killing him, thereby becoming Wrath. Two problems:
  • Mills wasn't particularly wrathful before he killed John Doe. So if it weren't for Doe, he never would have committed the sin in the first place. Isn't that sort of unfair? He punished Mills before he'd even done anything wrong.
    • He was wrathful before, not to the point of murder, but he was angry and impulsive throughout. One establishing moment was when John Doe shows up at a crime scene disguised as a photographer, and Mills basically threatens to beat the hell out of him.
      • This may be when John chose Mills as his Wrath victim. In the ending scene Doe tells Mills how disturbing easily a man of the press could purchase information from the men in his precinct. This implies Doe went to the police station specifically to purchase information about Mills.
  • Since Doe actually committed two sins, wouldn't he technically have to die twice to be fully absolved? Or was absolution not his aim? If it wasn't, what was?
    • I seriously doubt absolution was Doe's concern. In his mind, he felt as though he was chosen by God to make an example out of humanity and himself as well and whether or not he went to Hell because of it was not up to him. If that's the case, chances are he probably didn't care if he himself had two sins to atone for instead of just the one.
    • Plus, John Doe is just insane. He wants to kill one person for each sin, but, uh oh, I don't have anyone for wrath. No problem, I'll just manufacture one, God would totally want that.
      • "It's more comfortable for you to label me 'insane.'"
  • But what if Doe wanted himself to be the Wrath victim, seeing how he, you know, is a serial killer?

• The deadly sin of Sloth generally means being a lazy bastard who couldn't get off his ass to save his life. Yet, the chosen victim for that sin was apparently a drug dealer and child rapist. Wouldn't that make him more guilty of Wrath, or possibly Greed?
  • Drug dealers might not be "lazy" so to speak, but they contribute to a lifestyle that encourages Sloth for everyone else. Also, as Topher Grace stated in Traffic, "You can go out on the street and make five-hundred dollars in two hours, come back and do whatever you want to do with the rest of your day." Given how fast money can be made through their "trade" drug dealers, especially very well connected middle-men, generally let their clients seek them out. We never got any indication that the victim was particularly wrathful or any greedier than any of the other drug dealers in the city, pederasty notwithstanding, but Doe more than likely chose him because of his connection to the Greed victim (a city attorney who got him absolved of said pederasty in court).
  • Also, sloth is not just laziness. Sloth is the sin of moral complacency and indifference. But yes, the drug-dealing pederast seems like an odd choice for that sin.
    • Not when you consider that drugs are often used to create complacency and indifference. People get addicted to things like heroin to give themselves a high that counters the low of their lives and the lives around them. It's a selfish addiction that changes nothing, and just urges people to forget and ignore instead of being active in change.

• The last two deaths don't fit in with the pattern of the others. In the first five, they were killed by an overabundance of their sins (although Greed is a little shaky in that regard.) If we count Mills' wife to be the sixth death, then she didn't die because she was envious. She died because someone was envious for her. That would be like saying that the victim of gluttony would be someone getting eaten to death. The same goes for John Doe. If he is the victim of wrath, he didn't die because he was wrathful, he died because he made someone else mad. This is solved somewhat if you consider John Doe the sixth death, and Mills the seventh death (assuming he dies from the death penalty), but it's still a leap.
  • The last two sins are Envy and Wrath, they don't have to be deaths, as seen with sloth, so they are Doe and Mills respectively.
  • The wife isn't killed for any sin, just a victim of Doe's envy, just to make sure no one is hanging on to the idea that Doe is virtuous in his killings.
  • Also, Mills would probably not get the death penalty. While he did murder a unarmed, handcuffed suspect, the dude was a serial killer who had just killed Mills' wife and shipped her dismembered head to him in a box. Under the circumstances, "extreme emotional disturbance" would be open-and-shut here, which means decades in a prison and/or mental institution, but not death. Unless, of course, Doe had meant to "kill" Mills' spirit, but maybe not his actual body. Then he succeeded without question.
  • Also, those would not be the only two killings that don't fit the supposed pattern: for lust, Doe forces a john to kill a prostitute by raping her with some sort of strap-on dagger-dildo. It's presumably not the prostitute who was committing the sin of lust, however, but the john. So it's really a pattern of four, out of seven, in which Doe kills the sinner in a manner appropriate to the sin, and three in which Doe engineers the killing of someone else, i.e., the prostitute, Tracy Mills, and himself, as a victim of the sin in question. So really, there are two patterns.