Jigsaw, John Kramer’s Jigsaw specifically, is a wonderfully controversial character.
Opinions on him are heavily polarized: you either think he’s a complete crackpot with a flawed moral compass and horrible methods (hey, that’s me!), or you think he’s a justified if not profoundly broken person who targets flawed individuals and genuinely believes he’s doing the right thing (hey, maybe that’s you!). Either way, as horror fans you still kind of love him, and you still definitely love the Saw movies.
You might wonder how a guy plans out, gets the materials for, and constructs a chair that scalps you to death and still believes he’s doing the right thing over the course of the 2 months it would take to do that; you might also wonder why you still like him for it. But Jigsaw, his origins and motivations, are something American horror audiences have been taught to engage with positively for years now, not just from when they started watching horror movies, but from a very young age. I believe their philosophy and approach to justice is why the Saw movies make up the most politically American franchise in all of horror.
Through its view of a flawed America, to the man who thinks he can solve it by tying people to killing machines, to his disciples, to the very origins of the series itself and the political climate it came out in. Through and through, Saw is an excessive, torturous vision of American political ideology and the concept of the American man (or American woman, or American corrupt cop who basically turns into the Terminator by Saw 3D depending on what you identify as).
And I don’t mean this in the sense of that old joke that the Saw movies couldn’t happen in Europe because Jigsaw’s preventative healthcare would have caught the cancer early, and his wife wouldn’t have miscarried in that clinic robbery because she would have been on extended maternity leave. When I say the Saw movies are about American political ideology and the potential of the American person, I’m talking about the sense of American individualism we are all taught to identify with; and more specifically, Jigsaw’s individualistic philosophy as a response to a broken America.
THE POST-9/11 HORROR OF SAW
To talk about Saw, we have to start at the spawning ground of the political climate that Saw came out of and why people identify with it so much. Isaac Feldberg of Paste Magazine, among many other film scholars, posits that the Saw movies were an artistic release of distress in the face of the 9/11 terror attacks and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ the Bush administration and its political cohorts waged in the Middle East. It saw an unprecedented paradigm shift in the media, including publicizing images of torture out of Abu Ghraib and associated sites, that may have made fictional torture palatable in comparison to the real suffering audiences were now being exposed to by a 24/7 media cycle intent on shocking you to the core and capitalizing on your fears.
The Saw films became laughably more insane as things went on so it’s easy to forget, but the first film was mostly grounded (if you ignore a terminal cancer patient laying on the ground shock still for more than a day). It focused on unrelenting psychological and physical torture and, more importantly, on the idea of being surveilled by an unseen force and monitored closely, all in the name of making the world a better place and improving the lives of its citizens no matter how brutal you had to be to do that.
For many of us growing up and finding our sense of self in a post-9/11, post-Patriot Act world where that sense of surveillance heightened to another level, our identity as Americans became much more challenging to grapple with than previous generations. Saw ended up being weirdly poignant on a thematic level when it wasn’t busy making people chop off their own hands to fill a meat bucket to unlock a door. It resonates even today as bipartisan politics do little to elevate the most disenfranchised among us.
So, with all of this resonance and as fun as the films were on a surface level, its often yearly release became a beloved Halloween pastime, and the creation of James Wan and Leigh Whannell quickly became a genre staple. But this still doesn’t answer: it is entertaining and close to home, but why are Jigsaw’s motives so compelling to so many people outside of that entertainment?
NEW: JIGSAW BRAND AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM!
The Saw series is in many ways an offshoot of one of my favorite film subgenres, despite not being an action film. I’m talking about the vigilante films of the 70s and 80s, films like Death Wish, the crux of which intersects critiquing the American legal system’s failures with a literally and figuratively violent sense of individualism. The idea that any one person, no matter what walk of life you come from or political party you identify with, can do what the system isn’t willing to do. You are special! You can take out the morally wrong scum one bullet at a time! If you are sad and have a gun, you are ontologically good! Kill your sadness with firearms!
This message is of course far from intersectional, or logical, or even acknowledging of how the world actually works; it doesn’t address the systemic issues that cause random acts of violence and the destruction of low-income communities that allows violent and unstable individuals to be formed as people. It is all about using violence to solve the world’s ills, trying to force simple solutions onto complex issues. And they’re just films, but films can do two major things: popularize ideas, and impact other films.
Stefan Kriek, a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, writes about the political liberalism of the Saw films in terms of the rampant individualism running through these movies. He touches in his article, “Saw: Liberalism’s Favorite Franchise”, on how the various Jigsaws have had a pretty unfortunately consistent record of targeting drug addicts, reducing the impetus of their addiction to unfortunate personal choice and moral failings on the individual level. The most famous example is Amanda Young, the second and arguably favorite of all the Jigsaws. Not only someone struggling with addiction, but with self-harm, who dies as a result of breaking her promises to John Kramer and rigging the tests to fail in Saw 3. She jumps ship on the individualistic ideas of Jigsaw, and is punished for it.
On an actual, textual, in-universe level, Jigsaw’s philosophy is a panacea that makes its users better. Jigsaw is the antidote to the ills of bad individuals because the ones who take up the mantle and follow the rules of the game are the “best” individuals: they possess almost unlimited funds to operate, have near superhuman prowess with machinery and medicine, and some even display raw physical capability. Most importantly, they employ a sense of uniquely punitive American justice that considers extreme physical and mental trauma as the one-size-fits-all rehabilitation program. It even works, considering Saw 3D heavily implies that a bunch of trap survivors become apprentices to Doctor Gordon, donning pig masks and becoming Jigsaws themselves. They conquer their demons, and can now help spread Jigsaw brand American individualism to others, one trap at a time.
Consider then the most hated character in the Saw franchise. Not Hoffman, the murderous cop boogeyman who disgraces the legacy of Jigsaw and eventually gets punished for it (a fitting example of how it’s not John Kramer’s ethos that ruins things, but people failing to live up to the code that do so). No, the most hated is Jeff Denlon from Saw III. He is everything the Jigsaws are not: mindlessly angry and ungrateful, failing to save others, impulsive, and depicted as slovenly even by trap victim standards. Fans of the franchise hate Jeff, mostly because by the third film, Jigsaw hits a turning point and begins to be coded as an anti-hero by the filmmakers, and by proxy the audience.
Jeff is the most unlikable character because he is portrayed as a villain against the power of Jigsaw the individual, despite being understandable in his misery. And by the time Jeff kills John, it is ultimately a meaningless effort; Jigsaw has ascended to immortality, through his apprentices and his worldview. John Kramer becomes a household name, with a considerable number of civilian fans as seen in Jigsaw.
Though Saw X is chronologically the second film in the franchise, it is the teleological endpoint of the series as the latest film; it’s a full-on vigilante chase into Mexico where Jigsaw constructs his most elaborate ruse yet to punish a ring of medical scammers with brain surgery puzzles and giant radiation machines. He even walks off into the sunset like a cowboy riding out of the western, with a kind of found family. Jigsaw and company go on to take on abusers, cheaters, racists, scammers, the entire privatized healthcare system, other corrupt cops, and anyone and everyone who opposes their specific cure-all or fails their tests. Nothing is too big for the individual to tackle when they live and die by John Kramer’s (saw)blade.
THE POLITICAL MYTH OF JIGSAW
So ultimately, what is Jigsaw when all is said and done? Political scientist and author Alex Zakaras extensively writes about the origins of American individualism, and he views the growth of the ideology as being tied to political myths. Political myths, he says, are how we decipher and simplify the diverse nature of modern politics. One such myth, Zakaras sites, is “the self-made man”:
“For over two hundred years, this myth has taught us that our country is uniquely fluid and classless and that individuals invariably get ahead through hard work, ingenuity, and perseverance. It tells us, moreover, that Americans are a bold and enterprising people with the resolve and self-discipline to chart their own course in the world.”
Jigsaw is the fictional extension of the self-made man myth, but taken to the extreme. He says you can singlehandedly escape not only your circumstances, but take down all opposition, no matter how large. It’s not false that people can make something great of themselves through perseverance, but Jigsaw is a warped embodiment of this idea. It is the kind of thing you imagine as a child, one person saving the world from itself, ignoring all the circumstantial factors and context you operate in.
In a nation where most people are sick of being disappointed by systems with feet of clay, run by disappointing politicians around them (ones who are sometimes flawed and other times outright dangerous), it isn’t hard to understand why the idea of Jigsaw can be entertaining or empathized with. Jigsaw can be captivating philosophically when you’ve been taught that the individual, not the collective, is the solution to your problems. And if you find yourself unlearning that instinct, Jigsaw as an idea becomes more absurd than any traps or surface-level motivations you ascribe to him.
No one person, not even yourself, is going to save you.
In unprecedented times like these, you need to find community and help one another. You need to put your faith in mutual aid and learning from one another, because the system is certainly not set up for one vigilante to knock it down. Under this lens, the Saw movies really have become something more than the “torture porn” early critics derided them as: they have become, whether intentionally or accidentally, pure cinematic Americana. And in that Americana, an accidental lesson on putting your faith in others instead of ideas.