The Idea of How a Murder Affects a Community in The Short Film "Seven Seconds"

All throughout history many authors and directors have focused on the idea of racism and use it as the basis of their literature in order to raise ethical questions and concerns. What was one day science fiction throughout the years has became real.

“Seven Seconds” is a short film on Netflix that takes the idea of how a murder affects a community. Racism and all its problems like injustice, inequality, discrimination, and so on, have become an interestingly never-ending topic to be discussed along the history. Even in America, a country which is so rich with its fighters of racial discrimination and injustice, this problem still occurs here and there. No matter how hard these heroes speak up their voices, this problem remains unsolved, or, at least, not entirely solved. “Seven Seconds” The title describes the span of the time in which Jersey City police officer ran over a teenager cyclist in a park while rushing to attend the birth of his child. Instead of officially reporting the accident he calls his supervisor and they agreed on covering up the accident. While the supervisor gets to the police officer head by asking him how would he feel raising his newborn behind bars and how can he look up to his father.

The man will later argue that they thought the boy was already dead and that they couldn’t do anything else for him but the truth is that he wasn’t dead he was still fighting at the hospital while his family was praying for him. An assistant prosecutor and a alcoholic screwup partners up to solve the crime. Their investigation leads up to a witness, a school girl who is addicted to heroin was at the crime scene inside a house near the park and saw everything that happened. The mother of the teenager starts going crazy looking for answers and she remembers that when her son was in the hospital she saw someone in the room, which was the cop who ran over her son, but as soon as she approached him he decided to leave without speaking to her.

Later on in the story she sees him again and follows him to his house and knocks on the door and his wife answers and she asked her to reach out to her husband and ask him if he could give her some answers this whole time she’s thinking he’s the witness but he is the one who committed the crime. The story becomes more intriguing the further away it wanders from the criminal investigation. The crime doesn’t just ignite the black community’s range but puts the police the notice. Through out the film we don’t understand a lot of things but as the story continues we realize several things, for example, we don’t understand why Brenton was at the park while he was supposed to be at school, and why he is riding his bicycle the reason behind is, because he was going home from his boyfriends house and then we understand why his father was so hurt and so hard on him because he didn’t approved his relationship.

Another example is the prosecutor is underrated and she thinks alcohol is going to help her get away from the problems, from her work but she doesn’t understand that it’s affecting her job, personal life because she is late to her meetings, she falls asleep in the car, drives drunk and no one can take her serious.In this film we can see the use of semiotics which is the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation for example the color red which is used a lot in the film symbolizes pain, love, blood.

Works Cited

1. Listyani Listyani. “Obama’s Remarks on Trayvon Martin’s Death Seen from Cda Viewpoints: An Example of Authentic Academic Writing Material.” LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Teaching, Vol 21, Iss Suppl, Pp 1-11 (2018), no. Suppl, 2018, p. 1.