Pop example: Saw film cycle, I-VII
Problematic critical reception: “The Problem of Saw: ‘Torture Porn’ and the Conservatism of Contemporary Horror” by Christopher Sharrett – excerpts:
“Most important, [in the 1960’s] the horror film began to eschew the supernatural in favor of the psychological, as the genre looked to horror as the product of middleclass life, not caused by external demons or a mad scientist's freak accident. The genre investigated the neurosis that is basic, as the heirs of Freud inform us, to the creation of notions of normality and otherness.”
“The psychological themes of the horror film, with their adjacent social criticism, became grossly transmogrified into the misogynist teen-kill "slasher" films of the Eighties, the most degraded example being the Friday the 13th cycle.”
What redeems it: Oh, how sad for us. All the “good” horror happened in the 1960’s and had socially liberal messages. And now all we have is this unreasonable, meaningless Saw cycle and its subgeneric cohort to watch.
Anyone who cannot see a reason for a horror film or, even worse, a series of horror films, is not thinking creatively enough or is too elitist to see the truth. Christopher Sharrett seems to be both: calling a horror subgenre “misogynist teen-kill ‘slasher films of the Eighties” and then citing its ‘most degraded example,” the Friday the 13th movies, implies that those films weren’t expressing a real fear felt by people (perhaps particularly teens) at the time they were produced…and implying that there are fears that are somehow more worthy of expression.
Really? Fears that become ‘worthy’ of horror flicks? How does that work, exactly?
Acting as though certain types of fear are somehow more civilized than others, perhaps even assuming that on viewing these movies we’ll all instantly give in to our ids and become serial killers (assuming also that we’re all, at heart, serial killers minus opportunity), is acting as if we are all basically evil and must, even in our expressions of primal fear, strive to “rise above.”
We, the horror viewers, are not children. We know that this is make believe but also that it in some way reflects our reality. If there is misogyny in our horror films, that’s probably because misogyny exists and has to be dealt with. Showing women tortured may titillate as well as horrify, but if it does so, that’s because the problem of torturing women being sexy already existed. The job of horror is not to pretend these issues don’t exist, but to draw them out and resolve them.
This is not a problem, because horror isn’t an Aesop fable. Horror films are not normalizing. We do not learn how to be by watching horror films, not directly. Everyone knows you go to a scary movie to be scared and confront yourself and fears, not to figure out how to function properly in society.
Horror is a subversive genre, and while Sharrett says “the subversive component nearly vanished, as the genre was relegated to a lowbrow vehicle for shouting "boo!" that its snobbish attackers accused it of being since its inception” way back in 1980, I say this in reference not only to the “great” horror movies of the 1960’s (some of which are definitely great: Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, for instance. Watch them), but even to the “torture porn” we’ve been seeing recently.
Horror is about showing the unshowable truths that comedy and drama reign in. Our bodies degrade. We die. Time never returns us to where we think now we probably were happiest. And when we were there/then, we weren’t as happy as now we think we must have been. The things we love flee from us, somehow or other. We don’t get beautiful monologues on our deathbeds, declaring “the rest is silence” – it just is. Saying so subverts those narrative myths and the politenesses that allow us to live narrated lives.
Horror is unruly, and that should make analysis of it that much more rich. There are narratives that “don’t work,” that don’t function as they should, because those are controlled accounts of our lives (or the lives of characters), but horror films that terrify – ones that are popular being the best guess as to which ones definitely do terrify us – do “work.” They obviously work. They’re meant to scare us, and if they do, they’re working.
So this brings me to my defense of the Saw movies, which I believe this reviewer has completely – perhaps willfully – misunderstood. The premise of the cycle of films is, more or less, that a serial killer called Jigsaw has begun setting traps for his victims that end up with most of those victims murdering themselves, mainly through failure to adhere to the extremely rigid rules set by Jigsaw, or by being physically incapable of fulfilling them. (Spoilers to follow) Each movie reveals more about the previous movie’s events as well as furthering the torture in what becomes a smorgasbord of physical torture; Russian doll style, these films nest together such that layers of information filter down through the viewer’s understanding of each previous movie to change “what you know” to “what you thought you knew.” Jigsaw’s original intent, the one he repeats throughout, seems to be to teach people to “truly live,” in a needlessly complex set of Raymond-K.-Essel scenarios. What took Fight Club thirty seconds takes the Saw franchise seven movies.
Sometimes this seems ridiculous. And young teen boys, which over and over again I see listed as the supposed audience for these films, probably do have a stake in proving their nascent manliness by being “less scared” or “less grossed-out” than their friends at the extremely torturous traps set by Jigsaw, making the torture for them an end in itself. But set those imaginary boys aside for a second, and set aside the visceral gruesomeness of the movies, and take a look at what’s going on with Jigsaw’s supposed motivations, an “inane morality” that Sharrett dismisses without even bothering to interrogate it. You’ve missed the point, fellow reviewer. This statement of motivation, and Jigsaw’s moral system, is the point of these movies. The torture is about the morality, not the other way around.
Specifically, the torture is the effect of the stringent and extremely specific morality of Jigsaw. He creates these traps assuring the audience, whatever audience he can get, that if they play by the rules, his victims will emerge victorious and more full of life than they ever were. Most don’t survive, which he sees as weakness deserving of death.
But here’s the kicker, and for my part the whole meaning of the cycle (and a major spoiler): some appear to survive the torture. Some appear to go on living after their ordeals. But none of them do.
In the end, the Russian dolls, so brilliant in their constant re-framing of the events of previous movies, reveal the truth about Jigsaw’s hard-ass morality, which is that nobody ever survives it. Ever.
Jigsaw doesn’t survive, obviously, because he had cancer when he started his escapades. But every single victim he puts through “a test” or “a game,” as he likes to call them, either becomes one of his cohort, putting others to constant tests and being tested themselves, committing the same atrocities he does, in fact; or they die. Once you have started down the path of an absolutist morality that “takes no prisoners” and shows no mercy, you have already sealed your doom. You are already either also evil or dead by your own hand.
The fact that his victims die by machines, or die by their own hands in some way or another, or that they’re willing to kill others once they’ve been traumatized by their own horrible experiences, supports my hypothesis that the films are about the personal standards we hold ourselves and others to...and in fact the horror of believing that (in this modern, machine-filled, medically supported world) we have the choice to be perfect, but somehow can never make that choice, can never achieve it. If we could, somehow we could have lived forever.
No killer needs to lay a hand on us for us to “die” psychologically in this way. This level of stringent morality, this perspective on life, is suicide.
Jigsaw fails. He fails every single time to produce the effect he says he seeks, which is the production of a fully alive, grateful, absolutely moral human being. His failures betray the principle he adheres to. They show that such mercilessness cannot help but destroy.
And from that perspective, I can see the point of the torture. It’s a physical manifestation of a psychological reality – a physical inducement of that psychological reality, in fact. The physicality is not the point. “Mortify the flesh”: that is the point. "Mind over matter" is the point. The point is the psychological and metaphorical link between the body and “the flesh,” the parts of us that keep requiring critique, that keep failing at perfection, and the supposed liberation of the mind from that flesh that can only/supposedly be achieved through torture.
But then we torture ourselves, and the torture always fails.
My point, here, is that this is to me a revolutionary message for a horror film to be sending, that a judgmental eye will always end up gouging itself out. And it does not, definitely does not, read as a conservative message to me, something that Sharrett accuses it of doing.
In fact, to the contrary: I'd say Saw is one of the most effectively liberal cycles of film I have seen in a long time – more effective even (perhaps) than bleeding-heart documentary because, like a good bleeding-heart documentary, it gets us mad, but unlike many of those documentaries, it also makes us fear for our lives in our guts and not just in our brains.
What could be more internal and psychologically basic than that?
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