Saw: Cutting Off Limbs For The Wrong Reason

Being older than 30 and without cable or satelite TV, there are many things of which I am ingnorant (and happily so!). But since I teach in a public high school, some things reach me anyway. One of them is movies I would never know about or see. Today, a few students came into class talking about the Saw movies and, interestingly, reflected on what the moral of the series is. After they talked about it for a few minutes, one student asked me if I liked them. I said that I had not seen any of them, but that I knew they involved graphic, gratuitous violence and gore, and were a collection of psychological horror plots. Having said that, I then said, "I don't care for the Saw movies." To which they remonstrated and asked, "Why not?" Then it hit me: I wasn't sure.

As I stood there in front of them, I knew it wasn't just the blood and bones, nor was it the obligatory foul language so common today meant to cover for our stunted public vocabulary. And then as one student began to speak, it hit me. She gave what she believed to be the moral of the stories: if you love your life enough, there exists a way to keep it and you'll be able to find it, as in the key placed in the tub (Saw) or in the tattooed numbers on the back the neck (Saw II). And then the words of Jesus came immediately to mind: "If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake shall find it." (Matt. 16:25-26) What struck me was not the blood and gore and screams and evil of the movies, but that, in the words of my student, "If you love your life enough, you'll do anything to live." This is only a paraphrase of Jigsaw's (the movie's serial killer) own moral: learn to appreciate the life you have, even if it means taking others'. In other words, there is no virtue or beauty or loveliness greater than the preservation of one's own life.

In the world of Saw, self-preservation is the highest virtue, which is directly opposed to the world that Jesus rules. Therefore, the gory and bloody scenes are not the biggest problem with the films: it's the lie that there's nothing worth laying one's life down for. The result is that the world that Jesus made begins to seem dream-like and fake, and what is most deadly of all, not worth taking seriously. I know that movies are not mainly a source for learning worldviews, but no one can deny that every movie has its own worldview, and that it is only from such a perspective that it can portray that which it sets up as good, virtuous, and noble, or evil, vicious, and ignoble. And when a person immerses himself in enough of them, its not very long before all perspectives begin to compete and seem equally valid, and believing Jesus becomes a matter of preference instead of obligation.

Only slightly less disturbing than this is the fact that in such films we are entertained by the hell that real people face elsewhere in the world. Between soldiers cutting off genitalia in Indthe tribal slaughters of Rwanda and the persecutions in Indonesia and India, or cutting holes in upper and lower lips to padlock a woman's mouth shut after raping her, I'm not sure why seeing similar brutality and evil is worth watching to pass the time, let alone pay money for. Only in America could we be nauseated by what we see on the news only to turn around and pay someone else to show us the same in a theater. This is moral confusion of the worst kind. People who live in a world in which we can be entertained, on the one hand, and then nauseated, on the other hand, by the same behavior are in a very dangerous world, one in which one hardly knows where to turn for true goodness and beauty.

The bottom line is this: Saw breeds moral confusion by celebrating and selling the kind of hell that we ought to loathe but that is real for too many people in the underdeveloped or impoverished places of the world today (not to mention the physical and psychological hell that sex-trafficking, rape, or child molestation inflicts on many today in the "modern" world). But more than this, the world of Saw offers nothing more than self-preservation and no hope of happiness beyond it. Cutting off one's leg may bring in the money at the box office, but it far from inspires emulation. Jesus, on the other hand, offered heaven, not disability, in exchange for one's limbs and eyes: "It is better for you that one of the parts of your body perish, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." (Matt. 5:30) And the spirit in which he calls us to do so is not one of desperation or pathetic begging but one of sober and decisive love. Christians are called to give up their lives and their limbs, not merely to keep their present life but to get rid of that which would get in the way of eternal life, and to show the world that life and limb are not too high a price to pay for joy.