A Sight for Saw Eyes

The not-very-long-awaited Saw 3D is to appear in cinemas next week. Lionsgate Pictures will be hoping to recapture some of the audience they lost last year for the sixth and possibly best of the franchise so far, and if all goes to plan the prospect of severed body parts and impressively baroque instruments of torture flying out of the silver screen will be enough to galvanise gore-fatigued horror fans. It’s been a long seven years since Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) woke up to find himself in the inopportune position of being chained to a pipe in a disused public toilet shared with a bloody corpse, a tape recorder, a rusty hacksaw, a ticking clock counting off the seconds before his family are killed, and a mysterious, similarly confined man he’s never met. ‘Jigsaw’ is the deranged serial killing philosopher responsible for forcing Mr. Elwes and innumerable other B-listers into racing against the clock to make horrifying choices relating to their perceived moral failings (to a bitter, grieving father: ‘Forgive the man that ran over your son or watch his head get slowly twisted off!’ To a police informant: ‘Cut out your eye with a scalpel or spikes go through your face!’ To a drug addict: ‘Cut open a comatose junkie’s stomach or your jaw is ripped off!’, and so forth). He has in subsequent years been unmasked, re-unmasked, killed, multiplied, re-killed and re-multiplied, all without invoking supernatural forces, leaving enormous plot holes or breaking the rules of the original setup – quite an accomplishment, considering a new Saw movie has been rushed out every year since the 2004 original.

Despite its flaws – hammy acting, awkward lines of dialogue, occasionally confused presentation - the Saw franchise stands out among horror film series in having made a genuine effort to expand and explore the plot of its original instalment, while still offering up the grisly, visceral thrills craved by its fans. The extent to which the strands of each movie connect and interlink with those of the others makes the series feel like a unified whole, a single story told chapter by chapter. What’s the meaning of that weird puppet thing that appears to pass on Jigsaw’s cryptic instructions to his victims? Watch Saw IV and it’s all explained. How did Jigsaw stay completely motionless for hours on that bathroom floor? Saw III gives you the answer. The guy trapped in razor wire in the first one? We see how the infirm Jigsaw managed to abduct him in Saw V. Compare this approach to the Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13^th and Halloween sequels, which, despite being intermittently watchable, did almost nothing to augment the ideas of the originals and swiftly degraded into tedious disconnected variations within their respective formats, often introducing narrative contradictions in the process. Saw on the other hand has grown self-consciously into an impressively substantial assemblage of plot threads, delicately but decisively sown together. Each instalment demands more of its audience’s ability to bring it all together, rather like rising through the levels of a video game, though this is inevitably at the cost of excluding newcomers. Saw IV would be utterly incomprehensible to someone who hadn’t seen the three previous films, but this is a sign of the franchise’s strength, not its weakness: it has marked itself out as a series episodically depicting a single story, sidestepping the path to redundancy down which most horror sequels stagger.

Indeed, critics have objected that with each new instalment, the story arc has become so labyrinthine and implausible that it is no longer possible to take it seriously - to which it can only be pointed out that the first film by itself was so labyrinthine and implausible that it was impossible to take seriously. That’s why it was so much fun. The sombre mood, gloomy set design and graphic depictions of suffering are just the dressing for what is essentially a delightfully tricksy whodunit/whydunit mystery, a jigsaw puzzle gradually pieced together through the mostly verbal interaction of its two shackled protagonists. The deceptive minimalism of its central setup suggests a stage play; from here numerous flashbacks and reveals spiral out in an intriguing if somewhat contrived fashion. (Images of jigsaw pieces, spirals and mazes recur throughout the series: cut out of bodies, painted on doors, embodied in buildings, built into the killing machines.) As the standalone brutal crime thriller it was originally intended to be, the original Saw is interesting in its construction and well enough made, but compares unfavourably to its two most obvious influences, Seven and The Silence of the Lambs, which had similarly ingenious and curiously moralistic psychopaths providing the inciting incident and inspiring morbid fascination, along with grim, bloody set-pieces (although for some reason these drew a great deal less flak from ‘torture porn!’-shrieking hysterics than did the Saw films). Notwithstanding the standard (and justified) opinion of sequels as generally furnishing diminishing returns, Saw actually came into its own with the annual appearance of fresh progeny. As it did so it adopted an approach more characteristic of clever television serials than of cinema by supplying as many questions as answers about what we have seen by the end of each movie - yet pains were evidently taken to make each solution sufficiently elegant to avoid inducing the frustration we know and hate from certain other exemplars of narrative hypercomplexity: Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Lost et al. The heart-poundingly tense reveals before the close of each movie, always accompanied by the final rising bars of Charlie Clouser’s score, are immensely satisfying even as you wonder how various strands are going to be picked up next time around.

And then there are the notoriously grotesque body-mangling machines. Given the puritanical frenzy that Saw along with Hostel and many lesser recent films has generated since growing in popularity, it hardly needs pointing out that it’s often nasty, sadistic and difficult to watch. But in the interests of balance (and of a pretentious digression), it’s worth remembering that its antagonist’s unpalatable conviction that meaning can be conferred onto life through bodily distress is hardly a filmmaker’s tasteless fantasy; it’s celebrated in the story of the crucifixion, for one thing, and is a recurring Christian theme (flagellation and hair shirts come to mind). The notion of ironic physical punishment also has precedents, not only in other horrors and thrillers but in more respectable sources, such as Franz Kafka’s brilliant short story In the Penal Colony, in which a condemned criminal is to be tortured by a machine that cuts a description of his sentence into his flesh, inducing a kind of religious awakening before it kills him. Other precedents are not hard to find in the history of legal punishment. Oddball French theorist Michel Foucault argued that in pre-revolutionary France the legal torture of suspected criminals embodied “the regulated mechanism of an ordeal”, was indeed a “game [in which] the victim was subjected to a series of trials… in which he succeeded if he ‘held out’”, a la Jigsaw’s nefarious contraptions. But the decisive justification for all of Saw’s carnage is that after decades of seeing mechanised walls slowly closing in and threatening to squash the heroes of Star Wars, Batman, Army of Darkness and the rest, only to have them escape in some tiresomely implausible fashion, we finally get to see a shrinking room built to a decent standard. Only a Saw movie has ever had the nuts to completely squash its doomed hero between a pair of moving walls, and for that the moviegoing public should be forever grateful.