A Slice of Justice

Change has come to America. In just a few short weeks, we will cast out the administration that has brought economic, military, and personal ruin to this country and welcome a vision of hope, our first black president, into the White House.

Hallelujah, blah blah blah. I want to talk about “Saw.”

The fifth “Saw” movie debuted a few weeks ago to $30.5 million in box office receipts, which earned it the number two spot in the country behind “High School Musical 3.” (No pasty-faced moralizing psychopath stands a chance against golden-boy Zac Efron and his thousand-watt tan.) That’s five “Saw” movies in five years, each (after the first) debuting in the $30 million dollar range with the number one or number two slot at the box office.

A disturbing trend? Maybe. Is our appetite for the “torture porn” that the “Saw” franchise provides so insatiable? Do we, the dispossessed and bitter, really crave our yearly pound of flesh from the power-wielding pretty people? Is that what we’re after?

I don’t think so. So much of the coverage of the torture porn phenomenon ignores the fact that senseless violence has been franchising itself for decades—2003’s “Freddy v. Jason,” for instance, was simultaneously the eighth installment of “Nightmare on Elm Street” and the 11th of “Friday the 13th.”

No, what we crave—and “Saw” provides—is justice: quick, painful, and cheap.

The story of the first “Saw” (the root of the phenomenon) proceeds thusly: Two guys are locked in a bathroom. First they have to figure out why, and then they have to figure out how to escape. Meanwhile, a group of detectives are out looking for a sadistic freak they call Jigsaw because of the puzzle pieces he leaves at all of his crime scenes. Rather than kill anyone, Jigsaw devises elaborate ways for people to kill themselves, and in the process we learn to value life. So it’s a positive message: Love it or lose it. Jigsaw just wants everyone to be happy.

There’s an odd sort of integrity, a sui generis moral code in the movie that in no way corresponds with its quality. Most of the dialogue amounts to unimaginative and unnecessary narration delivered by actors who couldn’t convince you to buy toothpaste, let alone their performances. As for production values, half the film takes place in a bathroom. There are no frills, no flourishes, no showy fountains of blood or heart-pounding chase sequences with the camera trained on the victim’s bouncing bosoms.

Each movie takes only three weeks to shoot, and costs under $11 million—the “Saw” that started it all was made on a mere $1.2 million. To put that in perspective, “HSM3” cost $17 million, which is still not a whole lot, and the film that came in just behind “Saw V” at the box office, the Mark Wahlberg action vehicle “Max Payne,” cost $35 million, so far has a total domestic gross of only $38.6 million, four weeks into its theatrical run.

But “Saw” is no grindhouse B-movie slash-a-thon, either. It all comes back to integrity: The films don’t need all of that money, and their creators know it. True, the budgets have gone up since the original, but so has inflation, and they haven’t risen at the rate of, say, the “Hostel” franchise, which more than doubled its budget from one to two, even though the sequel brought in less than half the cash of the original.

Where this particular franchise is concerned, it’s not the filmmakers who have the credibility. It’s Jigsaw. Nowhere in “Saw” is there one shred of doubt that every single one of Jigsaw’s victims deserves what he gets. We don’t delight in their distress per se, but there is a wholesome schadenfreude in seeing the guilty squirm.

The trouble is, we want that in the real world, too. As the “Saw” franchise really started to heat up with the third release, the media responded with a flurry of articles about how torture porn raises our appetite for actual torture—quick, painful, cheap justice. President Bush tried to sell us his own Jigsaw level of certitude, marketing himself as the decider, the protector of the homeland, the banisher of the evil-doers, and we elected him—twice. Last week proved that we’ve learned our lesson: Absolute justice may be attractive, but it isn’t real.

So maybe I don’t just want to talk about “Saw.” Maybe I want to talk about President-elect Obama, and faith in leadership, and keeping fantasy where fantasy belongs—in the movie house, not in the White House. Absolute justice may not exist, but watching Bush wave goodbye to Washington sure will come close.


Jillian J. Goodman ’09, a Crimson arts writer, is an English concentrator living in Quincy House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.