Salvation and Saw: Morality, Modernity and Malaise in a Contemporary American Horror Film

This essay was adapted from a lecture I gave at Depaul University on May 5, 2010 to Dr. Jeremy Biles’ Religion and Film class. Most would say that the modern horror film begins with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in 1960, which sets up the morality of the slasher film. The startling thing about Psycho is that the main character is murdered in the first act of the film. Why? Because she's a thief. This initial murder becomes boilerplate and is found in movies from Halloween to Jaws.

The morality of the slasher film can be summed up by Romans 6:23, "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." 

The morality lesson in Saw is quite different.

The movie begins with a scene that recalls Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit. I believe that James Wan wants us to think about this play and the existential dilemma it represents. And especially the play's famous line "Hell is other people."

What does this mean? The play is about four people locked in a room together in what they soon realize is Hell. As they wait for the torturers to come and talk to each other about their past lives, they soon realize that they are each others' torturers.

This is very much the situation in the first scene when we meet the two nameless men chained up in a room with a dead and decomposing body. Ten minutes in, we finally hear the voice of Jigsaw playing on a tape recorder:

Rise and shine, Adam. You’re probably wondering where you are. I’ll tell you where you might be. You might be in the room that you die in. Up until now, you simply sat in the shadows, watching others live out their lives. But what do voyeurs see when they look into the mirror? Now, I see you as a strange mix of someone angry and yet apathetic. But mostly just pathetic. So are you going to watch yourself die today, Adam? Or do something about it?

After this we get the scene of the tape recorder. Dr. Gordon wants Adam to throw him the tape player, but Adam refuses and demands that he throw the tape. This exchange introduces one of the recurring themes of the Saw movies and it can best be summed up by a well-known and anonymous old parable. Here's a version from the Internet.

A man spoke with the Lord about heaven and hell. The Lord said to the man, "Come, I will show you hell."They entered a room where a group of people sat around a huge pot of stew. Everyone was famished, desperate and starving. Each held a spoon that reached the pot, but each spoon had a handle so much longer than their own arm that it could not be used to get the stew into their own mouths. The suffering was terrible.

"Come, now I will show you heaven," the Lord said after a while. They entered another room, identical to the first -- the pot of stew, the group of people, the same long-handled spoons. But there everyone was happy and well-nourished. "I don't understand," said the man. "Why are they happy here when they were miserable in the other room and everything was the same?"

The Lord smiled, "Ah, it is simple," he said. "Here they have learned to feed each other."

What does Jigsaw say to Dr. Gordon?

Dr. Gordon, this is your wake up call. Every day of your working life, you have given people the news that they are going to die soon. Now you will be the cause of death. Your aim in this game is to kill Adam.) You have until six on the clock to do it. There’s a man in the room with you. When there’s that much poison in your blood the only thing left to do is shoot yourself. There are ways to win this hidden all around you. 

Just remember: X marks the spot for the treasure. If you do not kill Adam by 6:00, then Alison and Diana [wife and daughter] will die, Dr. Gordon. And I’ll leave you in this room to rot. Let the game begin. Follow your heart.

At about the 15 minute mark Dr. Gordon realizes that they are meant to saw through their legs and then that they are in the clutches of Jigsaw.

If I had to sum up the morality of Saw with a Bible verse, it would be Matt 5:30, "And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell."

Hell is other people, but in Saw it's the only way out of the real Hell, which is the alienation of modernity.

The nearest antecedent to Saw is the 1995 film Se7en, where Kevin Spacey tortures to death people who commit the seven deadly sins using their own sins against them in a way inspired by Dante's Inferno.

But in Saw, suffering is not punishment, but redemption. Jigsaw is ultimately out to help people.

As to the whodunit of who Jigsaw is, we see him over and over again. First as a corpse in the room with Adam and Dr. Gordon. Then as Dr. Gordon's unconscious patient with an inoperable brain tumor.

23 minutes in, we meet Amanda, a former junky who becomes a disciple and then a protégé of Jigsaw.

The salvation of Amanda represents what film theorists refers to as the partial de-acoustamatization of Jigsaw. He has only been a voice on a tape, then becomes for her the image of the puppet then the puppet itself.

Like God in the story of Abraham and Isaac, Dharma testing the wisdom of Yudhishthira in the Mahabharata, and The Wizard of Oz, Jigsaw is represented as an acousmetre. “Acousmetre” is a term first used by early 20^th century theorist and avant-garde composer Pierre Schaeffer (check out some of his musique concrete here) to describe a sound heard from an unseen source via some kind of mediator like a radio or a record player.

De-acousmatization is when the source is revealed, like when Dorothy pulls back the curtain to show the diminutive man behind the Great and Powerful Oz.

The voice of Jigsaw comes to us when characters in the movie play tapes marked “play me” (evoking images of Alice in Wonderland) or through his talking puppet avatar. The puppet, which is first seen by Amanda, represents a partial de-acousmatization. We see a source for the sound, and since the puppet is built like a ventriloquist’s dummy with a moving lower jaw, it even appears to be speaking in some way.

The real de-acoustamatization of Jigsaw comes at the end when he is revealed to be the corpse on the floor and comes dramatically to life. At the denouement, the one who has been dead is alive and every living person we have seen is dead (at least in Jigsaw’s judgment).

Ecce homo.