game over

thoughts on 'Saw X' and the misunderstood legacy of torture porn.

Is Saw pro-torture?

In Saw, dying serial killer John Kramer traps tough-as-nails addict Amanda Young in a jerryrigged reverse bear-trap contraption. She escapes, and later credits Kramer with ‘saving’ her.

In Saw II, Amanda is kidnapped and tortured by Kramer again – until we realize that she’s since been groomed into being Kramer’s accomplice. She survives a pit of syringes to continue her role as his loyal assistant, and successfully guides victims through their games.

But in Saw III, we see the tragic ends of her loyalty. Amanda loses faith in John’s methods, and starts to rig unwinnable games. From her perspective, John isn’t actually ‘rehabilitating’ people anymore. The only way to fix society, she’s convinced, is to selectively put people down like sick animals. Their conflicting tensions result in a terse stand-off that leaves both of them – and all of their victims of III – dead in a haunting final shot.

So – is Saw pro-torture?

You can’t divorce Saw from the time period it was released in, it’s true. Plenty of folks have drawn parallels between Gitmo and Saw, Abu Ghraib and Saw, so on and so forth and Saw. But speaking frankly – as somebody who’s spent some of 2023 doing a research series on ‘torture porn’ – these conversations are boring and tend to be had by ‘horror community’ folks. (The intellectual dregs.) Their assessments tend to fail at basic media literacy, as they fail to address the ‘how,’ the ‘what,’ the ‘why’ of what they’re saying. As if it’s enough to say, “Saw is about the Iraq War, bottom text,” and get viral engagement with little to no follow-through.

Saw – as a franchise – espouses that America’s failing infrastructure breeds an inherent callousness and disregard for human life. Our militaristic police state robs of us of empathy, as we choke on capitalism’s poison in plutocrats’ concrete prisons. (We call them “cities.”) This culture radicalizes the most vulnerable into barbary, because barbary is the only language this country has ever truly known after stomping on indigneous nations in the name of Manifest Destiny. Is there truly a cure for this sickness? Or are we caught in the biggest trap of all: capital, the pursuit of it, and the punishment meted out to uphold it?

But is Saw, “pro-torture”?

Saw X is an interquel – set between the first and second entry. It’s an important time period, as it’s the murkiest in the whole lot. How did Amanda get in on John’s games? When did their disagreements start? And how did John get even more vindictive after the first film, before his self-inflicted downfall? Saw X finds its answer – as VI did – in America’s systemic brokeness. John can’t be operated on, can’t be medicated, can’t scrounge together enough money to live. His only agency is through his dalliances in murderous fantasy, but even that withers on the vine in the face of his sickness.

But then – a potential cure. John catches a plane to Mexico in the name of pseudo-science – a promised operation and ‘drug cocktail’ that will cure him once and for all. At first, all goes according to plan. John feels a newfound love for life – he can’t even come up with new death traps anymore. Then he revisits the clinic to thank them with a primo bottle of booze. It’s all a sham, a fly by night operation concocted to scam vulnerable, dying people out of their money. Furious, and filled with a renewed sense of purpose, John seeks out the pack of grifters for his most personal game yet.

Saw X is an ugly, tragic picture with no good sides, no good ends, and no good characters. We’re locked in a warehouse with craven predators and their guilt-striken accomplices, some of whom are vulnerable addicts and street sex workers. They’re taken advantage of by a pseudo-pharmseutical arch-bitch, who’s own machinations got them all trapped here. Now, they’re forced to play a game – and prove their own will to live.

Where Saw X succeeds is where some of the lesser entries fail: giving a rationale for this chaos. After the initial trilogy, the law of diminishing returns began to set in. Saw VI and Spiral feel like the only ones of the post III lot with any sense of purpose – a clear and pointed vision. While I’m a fan of Saw IV, and the alternate cut of Saw V is a solid picture, they join the dreadful Saw 3D and the entertaining but middling Jigsaw in feeling largely non-essential.

The same cannot be said of Saw X. Where the rubber hits the road on this one is in its interrogation of John’s self-righteous stylings. Through in-script dialogue and visual metaphor alike, this entry scrutinizes John’s rationale perhaps more thoroughly than any prior film. Where later entries would trade in light apologia, X avoids these mistakes and – conversely – gives a character as fraught as John Kramer the nuanced examination he deserves. Much to-do has been made of whether or not John is justified in his actions over the year, but these conversations miss the point. He’s Calvin and Hobbes (the philosophers and the cartoon characters alike.) Part moral absolutist, part humanist, constantly at war with himself.

A particularly salient scene shows John forcing one of the grifters – an inexperienced veternarian – to give himself a lobotomy to ‘correct’ certain personality defenciences. As any reasonable person would tell you, this practice has been used time and time again – especially pre-21st century – to maim and kill perfectly healthy people. But it’s also a visual metaphor, much in the way Flower of Flesh & Blood – one of the obvious inspirations for Saw – is a visual critique of fascist aesthetics. Here, we see John forcing a man to damage his brain enough to strip away facets of his personality. Of course, he removes the wrong parts and runs down his timer as a paralyzed, blubbering mess who likely can’t remember who he is or reckon with what’s happening to him. It’s chilling, and one of the film’s most effective sequences.

It’s fascinating, then, to examine John from this perspective. This torture is a visual metaphor for what John is experiencing. Brain cancer doesn’t exactly leave one with full mental facilities and capacities. Especially in its advanced stages, it eats away at facets of your personality, memory, reasoning. This is what is happening to John in real time, and it explains his own sense of twisted logic better than he or any of his acolytes can. If you understand that Jigsaw is the nom de plume of a man whose own brain is killing him, the contradictions of his character make perfect sense. As if the film is trying to tell every YouTuber and listicle hack who’s ever pointed out a ‘gotcha’ about John’s inherent hypocrisy, “no, you actually don’t get it.” A lobotomy, of sorts, on that ultimately meaningless and shallow avenue of crit.

This is just one scene. One dynamite sequence of excessive brutality in a film chocked full of them. Where Saw X succeeds is in the near biblical nature of its punishments, and the weights it loads on them. Blood-boarding is a particular highlight, as John Kramer is forced to bear the brunt of something Dick Cheney once said wasn’t torture. Not only does Greutert understand that waterboarding is very much torture, he also understands that John has been torturing folks. On top of this, he understands that the architect of so much suffering ought to be put in the same helpless position he’s put dozens in by this point.

So… is Saw X pro-torture?

Amanda is not to be overlooked. Shawnee Smith is given more to do and more to feel in this entry than any prior. We glean insight into her belief in John, but most vitally, we see the cracks in the foundation of her support. On some level, she recognizes John’s vile hypocrisies – how they serve to exploit and harm people who deserve help. However, she’s in an addled and co-dependent state that she ultimately defers to when faced with strong opposition. John has fostered a reliance in her that he uses to get what he wants. He does care about her, and perhaps even love her. But John Kramer’s love at this point is more of a curse, because for him to love you, he has to view you through the same reductive and didactic lense he does the rest of the world.

Smith plays this role with eager aplomb. She’s clearly excited to be back in the part after a time away, from subtle mannerisms to grounded, raw line reads. Few characters have been as wronged by John as much as Amanda; she never truly escapes his torture, as it just takes on a new, more deeply rooted form. Yet Saw X assesses – somewhat bleakly – that her involvement partly comes from a place of concern. Concern that John is going to punish the wrong people, and that she can serve as a helpful foil and successor. You can see this in subtle stares, questioning ‘hms,’ and in-script conflicts that serve to strengthen both characters.

Saw X then pits her and John both against a crueler, more insidious evil than even them. A violent sociopath who’s able to hide behind generational wealth and status to exploit dying folks. She’s a clear stand-in for medi-capitalist grifters like Elizabeth Holmes, and really, who better to antagonize John? Cecilia is the same type of monster as John, just with more money and more resources. John thinks he’s better than her; Amanda isn’t sure. But Cecilia recognizes the commonality between them. Understands that at the end of the day, they both torture people – she just gets rich off it. This clash is the intersection of the film’s most salient themes.

Yet the question still remains – is Saw pro-torture?

Much to-do can be had about X’s Mexico setting, and what the subtext of it might be. Certainly, I think it’s worth scrutinizing a horror film that primarily tortures Mexican victims for extended periods of time. But I also think that tripping up on that is to not see the forest for the trees. Who, exactly, is hurting these characters? Two white people – a rich con artist and a dying serial killer. Even as the latter’s accomplice displays mixed affection and care for the hurt she’s inflicting, we know that she’s still enabling a deep and racist evil. Some point to the film’s release during Mexican Heritage Month as belying some ill intent, but… I mean, it’s a reach, right? These movies have always released this time of year.

Further, the film’s excellent script is laced with double speak and veiled commentary. It’s clear that Cecilia is exploiting at-risk and otherwise marginalized folks within the global South for her grift. It’s also clear that John is willing to call his cop buddy (yes, Hoffman is back) and groomed girlfriend to kidnap sex workers and addicts instead of… y’know… just targeting Cecilia? Both of these characters are evil, make no mistake. I think reading sympathetic intent into John is fine right up until the point where people treat him like an anti-hero as opposed to, well, a serial killer.

Because he is a serial killer. That’s the point. John isn’t a great guy, to say the least. But Saw X wants to interrogate that further. How does a serial killer’s self-righteous creed hold up to a venture capitalist’s own warped mentality? This is what the film is about, ultimately, and it makes good on that fascinating premise. I think people have this prescriptivist view of this franchise’s morality, and it’s always bothered me.

I think wanting to watch people get tortured is a fine impulse to explore. If I were to doubt that, I’d be giving shrift to hacks like Edelstein and Ebert, who insist that showing The Thing is to encourage The Thing. For me, it comes down to why they’re being tortured and how we’re made to feel about it. Yes, the Saw films clearly get their jollies from coming up with new, exciting ways to butcher people. But where I think they’re more empathetic and interesting pictures than your average slasher is, well, there’s the illusion of choice. There’s a game that – even at its most threadbare – tests the willpower and patience of the victim. It’s an inherently more interesting mechanism for killing people on camera, to me, than just having a masked murderer stalk topless teenagers and butcher them.

Further, I just think there’s more fun to be had with practical gore when it comes to torture. Saw IV has one of the most personally memorable on-screen deaths in a film – a Machivellian hell by way of Kant’s most violent impulses. A rapist gets bound to a bed, two devices in his hands. In order to escape, he must push the buttons on the devices and gouge his eyes out to escape. If he fails, the straps yank his limbs right off his torso. Of course, he fails. Of course, we get to watch the rapist torn apart. Of course, it feels great.

(It makes sense this screenwriter would go on to write the exceptionally cruel, exceptionally sad, just plain exceptional I Spit On Your Grave 2.)

Should we feel bad about watching another human being get tortured? Certainly, the global anger at America’s heinous cruelty in Abu Gharib is where the rubber hits the road on that front. Rightfully so – the unspeakable evil done to innocent civilians and potential accomplices alike transgresses the boundaries of what one person ought to do to another. Done in the name of nationalist colonizer ‘justice.’

But Saw IV is a film. So are the other entries. So are Hostel, Captivity, and Turistas. These aren’t real. Further, if torture is something that we do to one another, it’s something we ought to show earnestly – heightened or not. Without the unpleasant slog of something like, say, Girl Encased In Concrete, we wouldn’t get to see the depravity human beings are capable of up close and personally outside of LiveLeak archives.

We need to see this cruelty, in all its forms. It reminds us of our own humanity. It’s a prism – a lens through which to view torture and capital punishment. If somebody thinks that John Kramer is righteous in his crusade, it says more about them than it does the films. Saw trades in the sort of morally ambiguous ‘we’re not condoning it’ gore that Devil’s Experiment does, even if it does manage more pseudo-moralism than just showing raw uncut footage of torture. Chalk that up to American norms, plus the hyper-caffeinated, hyper-traumatized MTV2 kids that were raised by these films. They were made for them – made to speak their language and convey deeper truths through kinetic camerawork and jarring cuts. It’s why I respect the series more than high-effort, pseudo-philosophical fakery like Funny Games or Salo – films that ultimately talk down to the audience from a place of perceived intellectual righteousness.

Saw – and Saw X, by proxy – speaks the language of populism to ellicit reactions. It’s meant to shock, upset, offend, yes. But above all, it’s supposed to spark discussion. Is this right? Wrong? Justified? Misguided? It tees off moral discussions among people who might not have them otherwise. Discussions usually left for ethics professor and politicians, world leaders trying to justify their inherent lack of empathy. That conversation gets turned over to the public, to be litigated and interrogated. To question the legitimacy and efficacy of. The only way to do that is to make it into a spectacle that even the youngest can understand the raw mechanics of.

Which brings us to Saw X. There’s plenty of fun violence to be had here – scenes that involve a wire saw and pipe bombs are two particular highlights. And a bit where Cecilia guts a dead sex worker’s corpse to use her intestines as a make-shift rope has to be seen to be believed. That latter bit, I think, speaks to the intentionality of this film more than anything. It makes it clear who’s being hurt most in this power struggle between a megalomaniac and, well, a megalomaniac with money. All the while, it gives you the jolly old thrill of some grand guigol, grindhouse-style carnage to admire and pick apart. (Like a brain.) It’s supported by that dynamite script – never letting us believe for a second that John is a better or worse person than Cecilia until the very end. A thrilling, sobering climax that gives just enough credence to John’s work as moral arbitor without turning it into a cheap vigilante yarn.

So – is Saw X pro-torture?

Pick up the scalpel and dig around in your own brain. I'm not finding the answer for you. You have all the tools you need right there. Let the games begin.

My Final Saw Rankings

10. Saw VII

9. Saw V

8. Jigsaw

7. Saw II

6. Saw IV

5. Saw VI

4. Saw

3. Spiral

2. Saw III

1. Saw X