The Neoliberalism of Saw
The neighbor's brother came home in a box
But he wanted to go so maybe it was his fault
Another red heart taken by the American dream
— Ethel Cain, “American Teenager”
I’m sure we’re all aware of the trolley problem, a hypothetical thought experiment—or gedankenexperiment if you happen to be Albert Einstein—used for superficial assesement of ethical theories and moral dilemmas.
The trolley problem was, as claimed by the Encyclopedia Britannica, originally conceptualized by British philosopher Philippa Foot, and later popularized by Judas Jarvis Thompson in 1976. [1]
The premise of the trolley problem is simple: There is a trolley, and the rail which it rides on can be split into two seperate tracks, one having, say, five people tied to it, and the other one person. You are placed into the role of either the rail operator, or the conductor of the trolley, and the “problem” is having to decide which track to send the trolley over—i.e. deciding who to damn.
There have been countless variations of the trolley problem, all proving briefly amusing to dwell over. What if the one person is your mother? What if they will eventually go on to cure cancer? What if one of the five is Hitler?When it comes to trolley problems, it usually boils down to the fact that most people will never find themselves in such a rediculous scenario, so what’s the point?
However, I’ve been thinking a lot about the trolley problem lately, and not for any particularly scholarly reasons. In fact, it has been on my mind because my partner and I have recently been watching all of the Saw movies, which, to those unfamiliar, are gory, pulpy horror films whose DNA owes a ton to the trolley problem.
SAW
James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s Saw is often credited with being somewhat of a horror revival in the early aughts, featuring the first instance of the franchise’s now iconic grungy, green, gross aesthetic.
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Saw (2004) made waves when it came out, netting a nice 104 million against a budget of one million, making it the most profitable horror film since Scream eight years prior. With over a 100x return rate on investment, it’s not hard to see why Lionsgate went on to make eight more films with the IP, with a tenth slated for October 2023.
For those unfamiliar with the premise of Saw, I’ll provide a brief recap (spoiler warning).
The progenitor film begins with a man, Adam, waking up in some sort of rotten bathroom, chained to the radiator. On the floor is a dead man with a tape recorder, and across from him is another chained man, Dr. Lawrence Gordon. They both happen to have a tape in their pockets, which they use the dead man’s recorder to play. Adam’s tape urges him to survive, while Lawrence’s tells him to kill Adam before six o’clock, lest his family be murdered.
We learn that Lawrence was the doctor of a terminal cancer patient by the name of John Kramer, a now infamous serial killer who goes by the name of Jigsaw. Through Jigsaw’s “games”, and many unfortunate turns, both men end up dead. At the end of the film the “corpse” gets up, revealing itself to be Jigsaw himself the whole time.
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Most of the films follow this basic formula. There’s a group of people Jigsaw has chosen for his games, all seemingly from different walks of life, but eventually it’s revealed they are all connected in some way. Jigsaw’s motives are quite clear, and he expresses them liberally. He wants to instill in people the will to survive—so he says.
Jigsaw’s logic is what I find so fascinating about these films, because it constantly contradicts itself. In fact, it’s a logic that feels quite familiar.
Jigsaw is Neoliberalism Incarnate
One can easily see how the trolley problem finds itself in the Saw universe. The games that Jigsaw plays—the diabolical traps, the existential dilemmas—are themselves versions of the trolley problem.
Furthermore, I think it’s useful to think of Jigsaw as the one orchestrating the scenarios themselves, the one bringing the trolley problem into being. When we do this, and when we take note of Jigsaw’s reasoning for constructing the traps and how he chooses his victims, we get a uncanny metaphor between Jigsaw, the trolley problem, and neoliberal ideology.
Jigsaw, even though he is the mastermind behind numerous deaths at the hands of his games, considers himself staunchly unculpable for his crimes. When called a monstrous murderer for the “games” he plays, he calmly replies that he’s innocent, and moreso that he “hates murderers.”
Let’s take a look at his methodology. John Kramer, a.k.a Jigsaw, was a civil engineer, explaining his aptitude for creating meticulous murder traps. After a terminal cancer prognosis, and a workplace incident that caused his wife to lose her late pregnancy, John attempted suicide. Surviving the attempt, he undergwent an epihphany, leading to a new found appreciation for life, and a mission to inspire the same appreciation in others by way of—you guessed it—his games.
Therein lies his modus operandi. But some (most?) of the victims he chooses—those he claims have “abused the gift” given to them (that gift being life)—are undeserving of the degree of punishment he bestows upon them.
Examples of his victims’ crimes include: mislabeling Kramer’s x-ray, insurance fraud, attempting suicide, drug addiction, etc. Many of his victims are simply victims of the broken institutions of society; but Jigsaw doesn’t see it that way. He thinks their flaws and failures are brought about by their own choice, that they’re solely responsible for them, that if they just had the same will to live that he had, then they’d be cured.
We can easily draw a connection to the bootstraps mentality of neo-liberal capitalist society here. Neoliberalism purports to provide an equality of opportunity, that two people, given the same degrees of opportunity, have equal advantages to success. This assumes that there is a level playing field, that there are no handicaps. But this premise is provingly false: those born into wealth tend to aggregate wealth, and those born poor tend to stay poor. Yet, those in power claim that if you lose in life, it’s because you just didn’t want to win enough, didn’t try hard enough, didn’t hustle. It’s a tactic used to defer culpability, to defer critical analysis of our institutions—and it’s a tactic Jigsaw deploys liberally.
Jigsaw claims to be guilty of nothing but providing a choice, in the same way neoliberalism provides the “choice” of success. However, a choice made at the end of a gun isn’t a choice, it’s the illusion of one, a fabrication meant to make you believe you have agency of outcome. Jigsaw’s games make its victims become disciplinaries, forced to either punish others or themselves much in the way of modern society. You either participate, delimb and degrade yourself/others, or you die.
As with anything to do with discipline, Foucault is helpful here. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault outlines the means in which a disciplinary society creates automatic discipline through internalization. Foucault theorized that discipline had shifted from a public spectacle to an infiltrative organism, sprouting filaments within all of our day to day relationships. This internalized discipline, the knowledge of what happens if you refuse to participate in society, is reflected in Saw. In a sense, we can think of the films as a near one-to-one recreation of power relations, with Jigsaw being the infamous panopticon, its theoretical omniscience ever present within the minds of its victims, forcing them to enact unspeakable cruelty on themselves and others without ever coming into contact with them.
I don’t mean to give the writer’s of the Saw franchise too much credit. Do I think they devised Jigsaw and their films to represent the horrors of late capitalism and its phantasm of freedom? Probably not. As many have remarked, they were likely just capitalizing off of post 9/11 and the traumatizing imagery of the war on terror. But I do think, maybe through coincidence or perhaps someone’s vision, the series and Jigsaw’s ideology function as an apt allegory, revealing how the minutia of coercion work to conceal true moral perpetrators, and turn blame inwards onto its victims.