When I was a kid, one of the urban legends that matriculated through the schoolyard told of a cunning test by the Japanese of their opponents in the Pacific war. They would take a prisoner, legend had it, and nail his penis to a table in a hut, hand him a cleaver, and then set fire to the hut. The infantile imagination was asked to ponder the soldier choosing between his manhood and his life, although it’s really a choice between one kind of death and another. This is popular among kids aspiring to philosophical grandiosity, as well as among slumming college students giggling between tokes.

The Saw series is built on a foundation of such predicaments. Now in its annual fourth October edition, the Saw film series has reached the level of the Friday the 13th reiterations or the Halloween duplications, and probably come off to most people like them–that is, a cynical exploitation of a once-attractive core idea that squeezes as much money as it can from a steadily diminishing audience. However, the fourth Saw made an astounding $33 million dollars this last weekend, more than thrice its (nearly invisible) budget of $10 million, so an audience made up of who knows whom is still hot for the topic.

As Matt Hills points out in an essay in the new anthology Sleaze Artists, people tend to assume that Friday the 13th is made up of films of mirror-like similarity, nothing but a hulking brute tramping through the woods in pursuit of yet another nubile college girl, but in fact the films, in the experience, have an unexpected diversity. Indeed, the ostensible villain, Jason Voorhees, isn’t even in all of them. Hills warns us against dismissing the films too quickly and complains that even within a culture that increasingly celebrates bad art, exploitation, and vulgarity, even the Friday the 13th films are deemed beyond the pale.

Saws share a similar diversity. They are not of uniform cookie cutter dimensions. The first Saw was simply the latest straightforward serial killer film with a twist, and shot on a budget of excruciatingly obvious poverty. Its surprise popularity in relation to its cost dictated a slightly more lavish sequel, one that confined its effects to one large dark abode and had a new surprise twist to add, i.e., that this time the serial killer had a confederate implanted into the old dark house. The third film was almost more like a medical thriller, as the serial killer used his entrapping wiles to compel a doctor to operate on him. The fourth chronicles his tricks enacted from beyond the grave and adds yet another surprise.

The serial killer at the heart of the Saw series is nicknamed Jigsaw by the police, but is really named John Tuck, and is played by character actor Tobin Bell in a gruff monotone. In the first film he turned out to be a janitor or orderly in the hospital where one of his victims practiced; from that lowly position, he could observe almost invisibly the cruelty of people toward each other. It was not explained how a mere janitor could afford the lavish digs in which he enacted his rituals, but in fact an explanation was forthcoming, only three films later. It is also worth pointing out that Jigsaw doesn’t technically kill his victims. He leaves them in a situation that requires that they choose either their own death via the grisly Rube Goldberg devices they wake up to find themselves in, or to murder someone else who is imprisoned in tandem with them. Communicating via closed circuit TV or by cassette tapes, Jigsaw, in the disguise of a ghastly marionette, lectures, cajoles, or taunts his victims. Jigsaw’s contraptions and set-ups are elaborate moral lessons, and in this regard he is in line with modern cinematic serial killers, who are often presented as dispensers of justice. Jigsaw’s roots, so to speak, go back to the unnamed serial killer in se7en, who punished hedonists for their sins. What is little known is that Saw started as a short film that offered a variation on one of the final film’s elaborate deaths. The short film, made to attract money to the project, appears on one of the Saw DVDs.

I can’t remember how Jigsaw escaped justice in the first film, but the madmen in these kinds of films often do in order to justify a potential sequel. Jigsaw had struck a chord with the audience, probably because of his elaborate contraptions but possibly also because of his moral fervor, and as it happened a sequel was inevitable. The second film takes place about six months after the first one; along with the subsequent two films they make up a trilogy of sorts that is actually one big epic horror story about 270 minutes in length and 500 gallons in blood. Here, Donnie Wahlberg is the cop on his trail, his predecessor, Dina Meyer, ending up one of Jigsaw’s victims. Jigsaw has a hold over the cop, his son, who is in the house with the other strangers. Shawnee Smith, as Amanda, is another carry over from the first film, where she was one of Jigsaw’s few survivors, and she proves to be a ready acolyte to his worldview. Jigsaw needs an heir, as he is dying of cancer, we learn.

Original director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell have created a closed universe, not just in the series of dank chambers their characters find themselves in, but also in the continual re-appearance of people from earlier films who are dispensed with quickly by Jigsaw or who are revealed to have additional identities (Wan dropped out as director after the first, and neither participated in No. 4). Among the recurring characters appearing in No. 4 are Donnie Wahlberg (again, to meet a dire end), Costas Mandylor as cop Hoffman, Betsy Russell (she of the ’80s exploitation cycle such as Avenging Angel ) as Jigsaw’s ex-wife Jill, and Lyriq Bent as Rigg, another troubled cop. New are Gilmour Girls’s Scott Patterson as FBI agent Strahm and Athena Karkanis as his partner Perez. This closed universe means that no character will evade a dire fate and that they will be re-imagined from picture to picture.

If 3 was a long medical drama, then 4 is an “origin story.” In frequent and sometimes confusing flashbacks that are shuffled into the “now” narrative, we learn what drove Jigsaw to be judge, jury, and manipulator. Jigsaw always plays fair. His victims can get out of their traps if they want. It doesn’t mean they will be free of damage, or that he doesn’t have a few tricks up his sleeve. After all, he introduces his tableau as “games” he wants to play. But he is driven by both a sense of justice and a sense that his victims are squandering the gift of their lives. Like Dexter on Showtime, he has become a complex agent of justice in a squalid world.

As with the Friday the 13th films, critics sit in front of the Saw movies but they don’t see them. They also tend to review the audience rather than the movie, fret over the demise of the culture, and attempt to figuratively cleanse themselves after the experience by making sure we know that they garnered no pleasure from watching people being tortured. But any film series this popular demands more serious consideration. Sadly, the sobriquet “torture porn” doesn’t accurately reflect what happens in these films, as the characters aren’t tortured per se but put in excruciating situations and asked to make a choice. Be it Hobson’s or not, it is a choice. And it must reflect something of the weird culture we find ourselves living in.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.