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Spiral: From the Book of Saw 

Working in the shadow of his father, Detective Ezekiel “Zeke” Banks and his rookie partner take charge of an investigation into grisly murders that are eerily reminiscent of the city’s gruesome past. Unwittingly entrapped in a deepening mystery, Zeke finds himself at the center of the killer’s morbid game.

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Spiral: Playing a Game with Structural Evil

The Saw franchise tends to remain compulsively insular in its scope and intrigue, preferring to center in on the selected characters we have followed throughout the series. The films became latent with self-referential lore and retcons. Though, 2021’s Spiral: From the Book of Saw sees the series unambiguously diverge from the tedium of the familiar to a novel concept. Spiral moves away from Jigsaw and into a thicket of modern characters and a notion that ranges beyond the acquainted narrow endeavors of John Kramer. Kramer’s Jigsaw was inclined to trap and torment singular reprobates for their perfidy, habitually it was a cast of targets that Kramer personally faced such as a depraved health insurance lawyer, an inattentive nurse, rapacious lenders, etc. The copycat killer in Spiral, however, sets out to unroot the venality infesting the town’s police department. There is a recognizable course the film intended to follow when the conclusion was made to dichotomize the structural violence of policing. Nevertheless, Spiralfails to make any sort of worthwhile or introspective argument in their undertaking.

The film follows Detective Zeke Banks, the son of former department chief Marcus Banks. Both characters are played by black actors. Detective Zeke and his partner, William Schenk are sent off to investigate a multitude of Jigsaw-like slaughters. The murderer, much like Kramer, crafts intricate death traps that compel the victims to deface and slay to survive. Though, this executioner has an explicit indignation for crooked police officers. The film attempts to be judicious in its assessment of police corruption, but it never tries to elaborate or even remark on the racial machinations of police and carceral violence. Race, as evident now as it has always been, is very much fundamental to the construction of policing and incarceration, let alone endemic to its depravity and ethical shortcomings.

The film tracks what we discussed in lecture as, a post-racial dogma, wherein racial prejudice is nonexistent in the maneuverings of modern society including its deficiencies. The film exposes that Chief Marcus Banks had an ignoble history with concealing police corruption, and the copycat-killer, William Schenk, is the son of a victim of one of the immoral cops. Banks is a fraudulent black police office, and William is the virtuous white killer seeking retaliation. Spiral is influenced and informed by the principles and messages made recognizable by the Black Lives Matter movement, yet it is empty of any of the racial criticisms that are integral to these political ideologies. Zaron Burnett III writes that the “saccharine lure of the Black cop trope is how it allows both its audience and creators to believe that not only is the Black cop a force for good, but that the system he’s fighting for is also good”. Spiral takes this further, trying to point out that Black cops may also revel in the perversion and wickedness of its explicitly non-racial structural violence and should therefore be held to the same moral posturing. If the film truly wanted to present a propitious message, it would critique policing as an entity of oppression and white supremacy, how every participant of the system is complicit the subjugation of the marginalized.

Reference:

Burnett III, Z. (2019, November 25). How the black cop trope sold the fantasy of post-racial america. MEL Magazine. https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/black-cop-trope-post-blm-america.

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saw iv (2007) dir. darren lynn bousman

you think it is over, but the games have just begun.

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American Realism in Saw

The American Dream is one of opulence and true equity. The prospect of wealth is so ingrainedly out of reach for many in this country, yet they will continue to tolerate mistreatment and subjugation in the hopes that it will be realized. Greed, then, is painted as the intoxicating ambition. The film, Us works to illustrate the gamble for wealth and conspicuous consumption, and how that can leave many anguishing the aftershocks of such insatiability (Walton). Whereas Us is a deconstruction of the American Dream, Saw works as a demonstration of American realism at its most depraved.

American realism demands that entities and groups, including nation-states, have an approbative right to take severe measures in defense of our foundational egalitarian principles: security and freedom (Ignatieff & Pham). Within this framework, torture, intimidation, and desecrations of human rights are the tools with which a democracy fights with to remain free. We do not delight in the viciousness, but it is an essential apparatus in maintaining our self-defense.

Jigsaw approaches his harrowing moral predicaments in the same context, wherein his death traps and gory games are purely tools executed to make his victims cognizant of the fragility of life. As John Kramer explicates in Saw II within his conversation with Eric Matthews, he gets no gratification from the travail of those caught in his traps, he believes rather that his approaches, though primitive, are necessitous to rid his victims of their wicked impurities, bringing him closer to a kind of libertine pragmatist than callous killer. Throughout Saw II, the police watch what they think is a livestream of Jigsaw’s torturous game unfold before them. Themes of reconnaissance and voyeurism are scattered throughout the film. This works in tandem to the civil landscape of the time, which was still absorbing and working against the shocking impact of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The attack devastated the artifice of security that many Americans had formerly considered inviolable. In the same manner, John Kramer’s life as a renowned civil engineer and devoted husband, was shattered with his diagnosis of terminal cancer. The impersonal War of Terror lurched America into an ineffective and dissipated conflict, where the administration sanctioned and readily allowed the use to torture against political prisoners. American government fronts tried to modulate the inhumaneness of torture as enhanced interrogation methods meant save American lives, a means to an end (Hajjar 165). Jigsaw works within an analogous moral ground, seeing his torturous game as a way to salvage those he sees as self-seeking and dishonest, ungracious of the life they are fortunate enough to relish in. We as the audience, perceive their battle to survive from the unchanging, inexpressive detachment of Jigsaw. Likewise, the American people were meant to view the tortured and chastened Abu Ghraib captives and Iraqi civilians impassively, as causalities of a virtuous undertaking.

Us and Saw both then set off to explore those left defenseless and devastated by a certain fruitless pursuit, whether it be consumerism or morality. Us sets forth to demonstrate how this quest for excess will eventually push many to fall into the edgings of society with nothing, represented in the film by the tethered. The survivors of Jigsaw’s excruciating game do not suddenly garner a new sense of vivacity once they subsist, rather the traumatic events lead them to much bleaker paths of obliteration. In Saw VI, Simone cuts off her arm to survive the trap and when asked if she learned any lessons, she retorts with “Look at my goddamn arm. What the fuck am I supposed to learn from this?”

References:

Hajjar, L. (2019). The Afterlives of Torture: The Global Implications of Reactionary US Politics. State Crime Journal, 8(2), 164. https://doi.org/10.13169/statecrime.8.2.0164

Ignatieff, M., & Pham, J. P. (2006). Law, Human Rights, Realism and the “War on Terror” . In The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror. essay, Penguin Canada.

Walton, A. (2019, March 27). How Jordan Peele's Us deconstructs the American dream & Capitalist Consumption [Spoilers]. Geek Appetite: Serving up geek goodies & good eats. https://geekappetite.com/2019/03/26/how-jordan-peeles-us-deconstructs-the-american-dream-capitalist-consumption/.

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James Wan, Saw (2004) ± Richard Siken, Snow and Dirty Rain (2004)

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Darren Lynn Bousman, Saw III (2006) ± Richard Siken, Snow and Dirty Rain (2004) 

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Queer Subtext and Possibility: Adam and Lawrence

Adam Stanheight and Dr. Lawrence Gordon are the first two targets of Jigsaw in Saw I. Dr. Lawrence Gordon is a medical oncologist, who was responsible for diagnosing John Kramer with this terminal colon cancer. Adam Stanheight was a self-employed photographer who followed Dr. Gordon at the behest of the police, who assumed Gordon was the perpetrator behind the Jigsaw murders. They are both seized and chained inside a singular room where they are tasked with several convoluted clues and predicaments to survive. They quarrel and reprimand one another continuously, until they ultimately garner a great reliance on each other. It is a dynamic of brusqueness and profound conviction, a despairing clinging to the only other human undergoing this horrendous suffering.

One of the most prominent ways in which homosexuality enters horror films is through subtextual or connotative possibilities. The years of despotic policies against queer media has condensed on-screen homosexuality to oblique at best, loitering amid the margins of text, character, and relationships rather than proclaiming itself candidly (Benshoff 99). This allusivity has rendered queer relationships abstract, but no less honest or formidable to queer audiences. It is within this space that I want to scrutinize this new phenomenon that I discovered amidst my research into the Saw franchise, which is the popularity of Adam Stanheight and Dr. Lawrence Gordon as gay. For me, this occurrence is part and parcel with the reclamation of the monstrous as queer. To reduce a certain type of bond completely absent from interpretation would then force those who seek such relationships into looking deeper for it (Stitch). While the monster or baddie can be professed as queer, so can the victims in the eyes of a queer audience. Any piece of media that is regarded by a queer spectator might then be contemplated as queer (Benshoff 99). The queer spectator is pursuing the potential detection of homosexuality within a culture that has vigorously stifled such perceptible demonstrations of it. When something is reckoned queer by a queer audience, it should not be seen as a sort of substitute or deliberate reading of the material rather it can be seen as acknowledgement of queer undercurrents and social relics. Saw has no outwardly gay characters, though it holds little care for the sanctity of any category of romance. Still, Adam Stanheight and Dr. Lawrence Gordon represent two individuals, experiencing a distinctive and unrivaled distress, with only each other. They are thrust into an environment that cares little for them and that pushes them to find innovative ways to endure and live. It is that unfathomable, compulsory bonding experience and steadfast trust that make the relationship disposed for queer construal and subtext. It is a sincerely unique and othering experience as that faced by queer folks. Keeping in line with queer proponents actively seeking to condemn orthodoxy and conformity, it is no surprise that many seek out these distinctively macabre and eccentric pairings rather than propagating much more quotidian and old-fashioned relations.

References:

Benshoff, H. M. (n.d.). The Monster and The Homosexual. In HORROR, THE FILM READER (pp. 91–99). essay.

Stitch. (2021, June 9). Lgbtq+ fans: We're here, queer, and remaking fandom in our own image. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/lgbtq-fans-remaking-fandom-in-our-own-image-stitch-fan-service.

[queerjigsaw]

when the two dudes you locked in a bathroom together are falling in love instead of playing by your strategically thought-out set of insane rules

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Reclaiming the Monster as Queer: Jigsaw

Queerness and monstrosity have long been interwoven in media, monstrous in its paucity and unconventionality. For decades, films have been absent of queer representation due to epochs of subjugation, exclusion, and involuntary suppression. The Hollywood of the thirties and forties forcibly prohibited any sort of queer or non-conforming stories from being told, excluding stories that tell of their terror, irregularity, and perversion. Thus, the villain or antagonist often assumed characteristics or conceptions of queerness, and as such queer individuals were to be seen as an anomalous, servile, and immoral other, a threat to heterosexual normality.

The adversary exists on the other side of morality, alone. The monster is distinctive in its forethought and principles from their unknowing, morally decent victims, they are then “dealing with the with being other in a world of (hetero)normativity” (Figueroa). Now, when we exist beyond the more unyielding antiquities of queer censorship and subjugation, it is anticipated that audiences would seek to rejoice in the abundance of truthful and thoughtful media representation. However, queer individuals deviate from the rather well-mannered integrated gays and lesbians, and choose to revel in “the loathsome, the outcast, the idiomatically proscribed position of same-sex desire” (Benshoff, 99). Their politicking is often rooted in condemning perceptions of traditionalism and conventionality, rather than seeking comprehensive acceptance (assimilation) into heteronormative society. This countermovement has led to the popular reclamation of monstrosities and baddies as queer iconography.

Herein, I raise the point to categorize Jigsaw as a reclamation of the monster-queer, right alongside Dracula and the Babadook. Throughout the Saw series, Jigsaw coordinates extravagant, almost theatrically convoluted death traps and torture mechanisms wherein his victims set off on a path of moral quandary. Jigsaw sets himself up as the all-pervading virtuous conscience, while his victims are considered lowly, besmirched members of society. He is angry at them for their failings and persecutions, his victims have included crooked cops, fraudulent bankers, self-seeking insurance workers. Queer activism in and of itself, if often disruptive, insolent, and furious (Benshoff, 94). Jigsaw, like queer advocates, wants to reorganize civilization by calling attention to and ultimately disassembling the oppressors. John Kramer, the architect behind Jigsaw and his elaborations, never divulges himself to his victims. He exists as an incorporeal figurehead, an apparition or otherworldly monster of sorts. Moreover, Jigsaw stands beyond the moralities and understandings of the victims, they wake up in a room with no recollection as to who put them there or why. Jigsaw, as the decider of destinies to those playing his game, also incarnates the defiance that queerness represents to the platonic limitations of living. He reaches beyond the borders of life and death.

References:

Benshoff, H. M. (n.d.). The Monster and The Homosexual. In HORROR, THE FILM READER (pp. 91–99). essay.

Figueroa, K. (2017, October 17). Haunted: The intersections of queer culture and horror movies. WUSSY MAG. https://www.wussymag.com/all/2017/10/6/haunted-the-intersections-of-queer-culture-and-horror-movies.

[queerjigsaw]

I’m standing right here!

Shawnee Smith in SAW III (2006) dir. Darren Lynn Bousman

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Amanda Young: A New Final Girl

The Final Girl, or the last remaining female character in a horror film, is meant to symbolize a fruitful liberation for girls and a forceful defense against misogynistic men. The horror genre is one of multifaceted implications and sophisticated dynamics of power, and thus is the perfect avenue through which to dichotomize the unconscious ego, sexual/gender variance, violence, and aspiration. This is to say, matters that are exceptionally germane to feminist works. Carol Clover writes that slasher films often embolden the audience into inhabiting numerous positions within the film’s dynamic of control, not just simply that of the male executioner (Clover). The Final Girl then works to make endurance tantamount to the female, “who alone looks death in the face, but…who finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued, or to kill him herself” (Clover). The figure embodies a much more intricate gender position as it urges male onlookers to experience the dread via association with the female body.

Amanda Young is introduced in Saw I as the sole person to have survived Jigsaw’s snare when she escaped the reverse bear trap that threatened to tear her jaw in half. Amanda states that her involvement within the torturesome trap made her cognize her life in novel, much richer way than she did before. In Saw II, Amanda is a part of the new assemblage of targets partaking in Jigsaw’s new ruse and as the audience, we are meant to deduce this as her degenerating back to self-annihilation. However, it is discovered that Amanda Young is working alongside Jigsaw in order to push more people into unearthing the deliverance and indebtedness for life afforded to her by Jigsaw. She comes to see John Kramer as a paternal figure of sorts, a rescuer and caretaker. Amanda Young works then to exemplify a new classification of Final Girl, wherein the arbitrator of cruelty is the persisting female. This works in a similar vein to Scream 4, which is credited for amending the slasher drama by making Ghost Face a sixteen-year-old girl.

Throughout Scream 4, Jill postures as an innocuous, honeyed, and bookish teenage girl, a victim of the brutalities of Ghost Face. However, it is revealed that Jill is in fact, the perpetrator of the killings of her friends in her attempts to gain the same disrepute as her cousin, Sidney. The film does not endeavor to quell or vindicate her cruelties, Jill is presented forthrightly as effortlessly capable of executing evil and barbarity. The same can be said of Amanda Young, who comes to see the participants of Jigsaw’s ploys as feckless pawns with which to use in her efforts to win the fatherly reverence of John Kramer. Gone is the petrified girl in the bear trap, and now she hunts and deceives at the bidding of Kramer with a murderous pig mask.

Viewers then begin to disidentify with Amanda, as they did with Jill, when they see the masochistic indulgence they revel in. This represents a sort of white girl power exhibited in viciousness and antagonism as it is used against other white people and non-white people (Cornelius). Both characters work to embody a philosophy that subsists within a post-feminist and post-racial space, validating a white neoliberal pursuit of a homicidal girl power as cathartic and innovative.

References:

Clover, Carol. “From Men, Women and Chainsaws.” Film Theory & Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 8th ed., Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 552–562.

Cornelius, J. (2012, October 22). The Final Girl Gone Wild: Post-Feminist Whiteness in Scream 4. Bitch Flicks. http://www.btchflcks.com/2012/10/horror-week-2012-the-final-girl-gone-wild-post-feminist-whiteness-in-scream-4.html.

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The SAW franchise (2004-2021)

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Theme and Summary of Saw

“Live or die, make your choice,” is the creed of John Kramer, the disreputable Jigsaw, and the all-encompassing dictum of the Saw franchise. John Kramer, the central adversary, is dying from terminal cancer. John decides he wants to spend his remaining days challenging the composition of human fortitude and their will to live by placing individuals he considers churlish and immoral, into an intricately excruciating game that serves as a punishment for their depravities and inadequacies. His short cut of life has allowed him to discover a unique and reflective appreciation for it, and he sets out to force others to experience that same revelation. This position, I would argue, is the foundational and emotional center of the franchise, even as it moves beyond Jigsaw as a villain. Siddhant Adlakha dichotomizes the distinctive themes of the film series into eras:

1. The Jigsaw Era: Saw, Saw II, Saw III

2. The Apprentice Era: Saw IV-VI, Saw 3D

3. The Post-Post-Jigsaw Era: Jigsaw, Spiral: From The Book Of Saw

Reference:

Adlakha, S. (2021, May 13). The best thing about the saw movies is their Sprawling continuity. Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/movies/22434679/saw-movies-franchise-explainer.