The Saw Trilogy: Horrifying with Theoretical Truth

1. Saw (2004)
2. Saw II (2005)
3. Saw III (2006)

In the Saw trilogy, victims wake up dazed and confused in a situation that contains a cruel challenge that will see them either failed corpses, or mutilated survivors. To survive, they must purify themselves by their own self-infliction of wounds and pain. This purification depends on the symbolic appropriateness of the challenge, which is meant to force victims to channel their will to live to overcome their jadedness and therefore unworthiness to live.

Another point of interest, in so far as it serves to symbolically strengthen the meaning of the murders, and therefore the films claim to meaning beyond senseless killings, is the identity of the killer himself. He is dubbed Jigsaw by the media, because of a jigsaw path of skin he etches out of his victims, but also because of the riddle-like nature of the challenges he sets. In reality, this murderer is a terminally ill cancer patient, who has decided that too many people are unworthy of their bodies and their lives. So in this light, his killings are meant to be read as a kind of salvation. Indeed, he goes as far as to personally investigate and select each of his victims, happening to know in precisely what way these people are unfulfilled so as to put them to the test.

In one such case, Amanda—a heroin addict—awakes to find herself carrying an odd metal helmet over her head and attached to her upper and lower jaw. She is in some grimy apartment, and immediately enters into a panic at finding herself in such precarious situation. The nearby television set flickers on to reveal a talking doll, its face horribly grotesque.

It speaks with a distorted demonic voice. It explains how it “wants to play a game.” That her helmet will go off after a certain time limit—“think of a bear-trap in reverse,” the doll says and laughs. The key that will allow her to take off the helmet, and prevent her head being ripped open is in the entrails of a body lying nearby. She has to cut into his body and find the key if she wants to live.

Gasping in horror, Amanda crawls towards the body of a man in a business suit lying on the floor. She has found a scalpel in a toolbox. As she looks to the body, before beginning the gruesome task, and as the incessant clock ticks on her helmet, she startles to see the man open his eyes and groan. He is still alive. She quickly overcomes the dread of it, and lifts the scalpel to plunge it onto his navel in desperation. She does this once, twice, many times, accompanied by the man’s screeches as he receives the stabs. She inspects the man’s bloodied flesh. Her fingers like blind tendrils, sliding across the tender shredded meat of a dying man.

She finds the key and escapes the trap, later telling police officers and detectives that “he [the killer] helped her.”

But what if no matter how much we dig into our flesh we will never find the key that will allow us to rid ourselves of the horrible suspicion, one that cuts despair into our brains, that there is an intrinsic hollowness to living and to the flesh. Is Saw not the movie that takes its premise from a fundamental truth—that the meaning and cause of living can be nothing but absent—and addresses the public’s sense of unease and despair by fictionalizing this conflict in the killings of a madman who tackles this unavoidable nihilism and dramatizes it in gruesome killings? Does the public not revel to see Amanda actually find, moved by her awful desire to live, through the guts of a dying man who she was capable of killing, the key that will not only allow her to survive, but also overcome her heroin addiction?