Last night I was fortunate enough to attend a sneak preview of the new Will Smith film Seven Pounds (trailers). Going into it, I was intrigued by what I had seen thus far. The ad campaign has been pretty effective, engendering a palpable curiosity in the viewer: “What the heck is this movie about?”
Part of that curiosity is directly a result of Will Smith’s impressive turn as a mysterious figure engaged in some sort of enterprise involving several strangers; whether this enterprise is nefarious or benevolent in nature remains largely a mystery even until the end of the film’s first act.
It’s hard to address my reaction to the film without discussing specifics as I will do below; however for those of you who don’t like to know the details of a film, I’ll do a quick spoiler-free recounting. This movie is, to put it bluntly, morally repugnant. It is a sneak attack on the very foundations that lead to the ascendency of western society, and sadly many people are going to fall for it. If you are a church attender, you will most likely hear Smith’s character’s actions compared to the sacrificial actions of Jesus Christ. Don’t buy into it. Go into this movie with the knowledge that it puts a very attractive face on an insidious worldview. This deceptive message, prevalent in our culture, elevates individually perceived reality as dictated by emotion coupled with (an admittedly admirable) concern for life above any transcendant principles of ethical behavior.
The central question of the film: is Will Smith’s character a hero, or a fool? To answer that, I will delve into spoilers. Don’t read further if you don’t like them.
The movie is basically as follows. Will Smith’s remorse following his negiligence in an auto accident (in which 7 people including his wife die) leads him to decide that he is going to kill himself and donate all his organs, money, house, etc to 7 people to ostensibly make up for his mistake. Also important to note is that he is in a lot of emotional pain because of what happened, and this is made clear by Smith’s look-at-me-I-am-in-pain face (of which I grew somewhat tired of within the first 30 minutes). However he doesn’t want to help just anyone, but wants to choose those “who deserve it- good people.” Although he does just want to end it all, his desire is depicted as a noble one because he wants his death to mean something. In the process of picking the person who he wants to receive his heart (he is a very rare blood type), he ends up falling in love with a dying girl. Faced with the choice between living a short time with his new love (who is doomed to die) or allowing her to live on by sacrificing himself, he chooses the latter, and in the process also donates his corneas to a blind Woody Harrilson (who by the way probably delivered the best performance in the film), his beach house to a battered Hispanic woman and her children, bone marrow to a child, kidney(s?) to a token old white guy, pieces of his lung to his brother… the list probably goes on.
I hated it. And here is why. As I said above, the message is not merely morally questionable but a morally repugnant one: disdain for one’s own life is called virtue, and death is called life. His ultimate selfish act of suicide, we are emotionally manipulated to believe, was a heroic act because of what he did with all his worldly possessions (his body etc). This is bullshit. To understand why suicide is so morally reprehensible in almost every situation (I withhold judgment for people in egregious physical pain that can’t be alleviated- I don’t know what I’d do in that eventuality), I defer to GK Chesterton in the chapter “The Flag of the World” of the book Orthodoxy:
Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer’s suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man’s crime is different from other crimes — for it makes even crimes impossible.
Smith’s act is not heroic, it is cowardice. He is not unusually noble; he is atypically selfish. His pain-face makes something very clear: the real reason he is killing himself is because he doesn’t want to live. All of the other things he does in addition to taking his own life? Semantics. Rationalization. What about all the pain his suicide inflicts upon the rest of his family, and on the woman who he supposedly loves? What about all the other good he could have accomplished over the course of a long life? What about the fact that life is itself a gift given by God that is not ours to throw away? No, ultimately Smith is elevating his perception of reality through his emotional pain above any claims the world (his family, God, society) has on him, and as Chesterton makes clear, this is in a very real sense, a purely evil act.
Now you will hear Smith’s character compared to Jesus- I guarantee it. But
this is a lie. He was not a martyr, he is a suicide. Jesus was not a suicide, and the idea that he was a suicide is an ancient, thoroughly refuted heresy. As Chesterton goes on to note in his book, the line between suicide and martyrdom is one of the most important distinctions to make in Judeo-Christian ethic, and in fact in many ways it is THE defining difference between the moral codes of Christendom and all other moral frameworks, i.e., fraudulent moral systems. This movie is trying to blur those lines. I’m not falling for it, and neither should you.
