Saw and the Gore of Girlhood
In 2004, I was eight years old with a silly brown bowl cut, much too young to watch Cary Elwes cut off his own foot in the movie Saw, which was basking in box-office success. While I was gluing googly eyes and pom-poms to little rocks I kept as pets in my pencil box, in theaters across the US, among sticky floors and worn upholstery, two men were on screen chained up at the ankles, waiting for me.
A description would have kept kid-me up at night: Two men wake up trapped in the most disgusting bathroom you’ve ever seen with no way out but to kill each other or hack through their own ankles with a rusty bone saw fished out from a toilet. They have been placed there by a notorious serial killer named Jigsaw whose sadistic “traps” bring a torturous death on his victims if they don’t solve his gruesome puzzle within the time limit. A man tunnels through razor wire to reach an exit before the room fills with poison, but he is cut so deep the police find stomach acid mixed up with the blood on the floor. His corpse is bloated and veiny, still draped over the razor wire, his hand in an unending reach for the door. Stinking and old, his rotting flesh draws a crowd of flies. This appears 15 minutes into the film.
Saw is often considered an early entry in the “torture porn” subgenre, a phrase coined by critic David Edelstein in his review of Hostel [2006]. Edelstein considers several possible explanations for the trend: a need to raise the stakes even higher, to shock even audiences desensitized to violence, and even to condemn torture by discomforting the viewer with their complicity. But regardless of the motivations or moral implications, one thing seemed certain—the viscera was piling up in mainstream multiplexes.
The later films in the Saw franchise lean deeper into this kind of excess: the torture scenes get longer, the deaths more brutal and ridiculous, the killer’s motives less important. In a particularly extravagant trap from the third entry a man is chained to the bottom of a vat that slowly fills with the pulverized remains of rotting pig carcasses (you can see the maggots crawling out of the pigs’ eyes as they are dropped over a rotating blade). But this is not to say the first film isn’t brutal in its own right—when I watched it for the first time at thirteen on my best friend Justine’s couch, still in the infancy of my horror obsession, it was the most vile and depraved thing I had ever laid eyes on.
Justine was a bigger horror fan than me, and even though or perhaps because I was a massive scaredy-cat, she would invite me over on the weekends to watch one of the scary movies she had on the DVDs stored in her mythically large entertainment console. When I said I hadn’t seen Saw, there was no contest. I knew the film by reputation and was terrified, but I agreed because I would saw off my own foot to please Justine. We were obsessed with one another in the way teen girls are, spending every waking second wondering what clothes the other would wear to school the next day, which BFF necklace to get from Claire’s to declare our love to the world.
Sometimes we pretended to be each other’s possessive boyfriends. Saw u talking to that boy after school, she’d text me. I was hiding in the bush, watching. I guess I have 2 beat him up with my big strong muscles now. u know how jealous I get. And I’d reply something like OMG I’m so sorry babe, there’s no one for me but u. make cookies l8r? And we’d make cookies with Betty Crocker mix and sit cross-legged eating them, watching as the people before our eyes got brutally murdered on her TV screen late into the night, so late that every dark place felt suddenly occupied by possibility—horrifying or otherwise. We lived in hyperbole like those victims in the movies, always screaming about something, always facing a matter of life and death. Our friendship and our lives were based in extremity, like a dramatic diary entry. A simple text from a boy or a fight with our parents could leave us in hysterics for hours.
Much like a teen girl, the first Saw movie takes its exaggeration seriously. Ridiculousness bubbles at the edges of the film—the overcomplicated traps, the little evil puppet on a tricycle, the serial killer’s den populated by horrible things shrouded in swaths of red velvet cloth—but the tone remains grim, unrelenting. There is no sheen of outright humor to separate you from the gore, to detach yourself from the brutality of the spliced-up bodies. This is where the kinship came from, I think. Despite the over the top elements, it remains a seriously intense film; Jigsaw is a horrifying force to be reckoned with, even with his silly puppet. And what does a teen girl need more than to be considered earnestly even in her melodrama? That intensity and absurdity could coexist was a comfort to me: just because something looked simple (like a text or a puppet) didn’t mean it lacked the power to make you feel tortured. My heart was a dim-lit lair with its contents obscured by velvet, and there was nothing tongue-in-cheek about it.
Edelstein, in fact, in his own (deeply sexist) way, makes room for this teen girl kinship in his original torture porn essay. “In the same way that some women cut themselves (they say) to feel something,” he writes, “maybe some moviegoers need to identify with people being cut to feel something, too.” Aside from the baffling assumption that only women self-harm and the minimizing parenthetical, there’s something here. The stereotype of the hysterical woman, whose pain is suspect or self-inflicted or exaggerated for attention, can find kinship with the brutal murderers. And I did. I was glad to inhabit a world where, much like the world of my teenage problems, everything was sincerely and deeply fucked up, without a hint of self-consciousness in declaring it so. I was glad to feel something.
While I still did find my teenage self reflected in the usual places, in Lizzie McGuire episodes and young adult romcoms, none of these really got me like that first Saw movie. They were too pristine, the girl’s hair too blonde and their boyfriends too perfect. When they tripped in the high school hallway, the laugh track played. I wasn’t laughing at myself or my troubles at thirteen; I was sobbing on the bathroom floor at every little thing, feeling every emotion dialed up to ten, feeling more like a tortured adult man holding a rusty bone saw than a quirky Disney star. Twisted as it was, Saw in its unabashed intensity showed me a clearer picture of my emotional reality better than any PG-13 fare deemed sleepover-appropriate.
Kellina Moore is a writer living in New York and attending the Nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University. You can find Kellina on twitter @_babyslasher
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