Abstract

The Seven seems just to show the world：the degeneration of human nature, and the guilty will be punished. The director David Fincher spent more than ten months to carefully arrange each evolution of the story so that our soul suffers a catastrophe in 127 minites. “Sin”, “atonement” and “purgation” all are heavy words, dark atmosphere in this film makes the audience have a feeling of escaping all the time. This kind of film is a kind of moral exhortation that makes us to introspect ourselves whether we are guilty or not.

In the West, Enlightenment in Italy brought out rationality. From then on, rationality was gradually pushed to a position of unchallengeable supremacy. It fully affirmed the rationality, so people’s self-consciousness continued to expand. In modern times, the rationality based on the science and technology destroyed the spirit of religion. Human, who thought science and technology were omnipotent, believed rationality could achieve all. There is no doubt that this kind of rationality definitely made a great contribution to promoting social a rapid progress and also promoting complete the process of modernization in Western. However, the rationality became the fetters of ourselves.

Seven is not just a suspense crime movie, the religious concept of Seven is also far from the only a publicity gimmick. The movie will provoke us to think deeply about human nature.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the film Seven deeply, expand the discussion of human nature taking the film as the background, and base on Mencius, Marx, Simmel and Lacan’s basic theory about human nature, as well as to analyze the seven deadly sins one by one, and at the same time analyze the film’s plot arrangement and the specific content. So that we will know what the essence of humanity is, and understand what kind of attitude we should take to face the weakness of human nature.

Key words: guilt, human nature, rationality, religion, seven sins