Films 2000s
(2004) Saw
Thursday, January 1st, 2015
Saw
Director: James Wan
Released: 2004
First, "Saw" is a gorgeous piece of narrative acrobatics. Like its namesake sociopath, Wan and Whannell's movie is constructed like a jigsaw puzzle - at first a jumble, but with time and effort the inevitable picture comes clear.
Second, its killer, Jigsaw, is right.
The essential pin around which "Saw" turns: Whannell's script defines its villain as not just creatively evil, but spiritually correct.
Jigsaw (aka John, played by Tobin Bell) is morally wrong. He is psychologically broken. He is ethically, legally, and socially abhorrent.
But he is, nonetheless, the conveyer of spiritual truth, however awful it is to consider.
"Saw" opens with two men chained to the pipes of a filthy industrial bathroom. Between them is a corpse and a very large pool of blood. Through tapes and photos and patience, they piece together the story of how they got there.
Adam (Leigh Whannell) and Lawrence (Carey Elwes) are men straddling a line between their work and their humanity.
In both cases -- and their cases are intertwined -- the men have left aside the basic necessities of living well. They avoid sleep, replace responsibility with obligation, and both are mildly reviled by their romantic partners for their selfishness.
Adam has been hired to spy on Lawrence by an obsessed ex-cop. The same former police officer, Danny Glover's Detective David Tapp, is certain he let a killer get away when he found no way to connect Lawrence to a grisly sequence of serial murders.
The three form a kind of twisted trinity: Lawrence has abdicated his heart (abandoning his wife and child for work and philandering), Adam traded in his soul to pay the rent (taking any photographic work, regardless of its potential repercussions), and Tapp has lost his health to the pursuit of Jigsaw.
Together they represent the ultimate target for a killer who focuses on those who've missed the point of their lives.
Jigsaw's complicated and pointed devices reiterate to his victims what they have forgotten about living -- victims meandering through existence without focus -- often killing them outright in the lesson.
Until the Adam/Lawrence/Tapp construct, Jigsaw has only tormented the bottom feeders in his environment - the suicidal, the addicted, the pathetic, and the weak. Now, he has a set of fully developed dysfunctional adults, a slice of higher life-form he can subject to his version of cleansing torture.
"Saw" is a simple film. It's plot, while a tricky narrative, is straightforward: Madman sets trap, madman springs trap, madman watches victims fail to escape trap.
The manifold component of Wan and Whannell's work is the ethereal landscape between audience and auteur.
Do we agree with Jigsaw? Do we abhor him? Are we ourselves trapped between the two extremes, forced to ask ourselves what we see and believe about his targets and the pre-trap monologues to which they are subjected?
By this mechanism, "Saw" is, in effect, a philosophical textbook. It is a study in free will versus determination. Jigsaw serves as a vicious Descartes, a brutal Socratic force that descends in full animalistic regalia upon those he's selected for relearning.
It's not a comfortable process, to watch "Saw," if one engages the film at this level.
"Saw" asks its viewer to suppose the role of perpetrator - to look, as it were, through the same peephole Jigsaw has cut into his torture chambers and evaluate if the victim is absorbing what they are meant to learn.
Each death in "Saw" is a juncture for the audience. Continue or disengage? Those are the only choices. Either way, by dint of exposure, viewers are salted with the aggravation of the true message in the story: We do what Jigsaw does anyways, all the time.
We consider the plight of the wretched via news, story, and social contact, and we judge their relative worthiness to the lives they lead.
"Saw" simply makes it vulgar, putting the human evaluative urge large upon the screen in a horrific fantasy setting.
At its halfway point, a single character is poised as the exclamation point to the story.
The only victim to escape Jigsaw's realm sits bloodied and shattered in Tapp's interrogation room. She tells the story of the jaw-splitting device she avoided -- claiming a life to do so -- and she explains the result of her journey.
"He helped me," Amanda, now clean of her heroin addiction, says.
The most frightening part of Wan and Whannell's "Saw" is that we know her truth. We know Jigsaw did help her.
And maybe we wish we could make her choice, too, for freedom.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Saw, 2004
By this mechanism, "Saw" is, in effect, a philosophical textbook. It is a study in free will versus determination. Jigsaw serves as a vicious Descartes, a brutal Socratic force that descends in full animalistic regalia upon those he's selected for relearning.
