Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Saw
2004 · James Wan · Saw on Sightlines
There is a body on the floor between them. Face down in its own blood, a revolver in one hand, a tape recorder in the other. For most of the film it is furniture. The camera steps over it, frames past it, uses it for depth. Adam and Dr. Lawrence Gordon, chained to pipes at opposite corners of a filthy bathroom, do everything a person does in a locked room. They argue, bargain, confess, panic. The body just lies there soaking up the runoff.
Then it sits up.
Everything worth saying about Saw is in that reversal, and not because it is a twist. James Wan and Leigh Whannell found something horror had not previously known how to do. They built a film in which the only character who can act is the one who never moves.
Deleuze split cinema in two. In the first regime, the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts on it, the act changes the situation, and the cutting serves that chain. In the second, the chain snaps. A character sees perfectly and can do nothing but watch and endure. Deleuze called the break the crisis of the action-image, and he found it in bombed European cities, in people picking through rubble with no adequate response available to them.
Wan builds that crisis out of a chain and a hacksaw.
The bathroom is the most complete sensory-motor amputation American genre cinema has staged. The plot is a function of what these two men can and cannot reach: everything they need is in the room, and every single thing sits just past arm's length. They can see it all. They can do none of it. Deleuze's name for an image with no action attached is the opsign, the pure optical situation, where all you can do is look. Gordon and Adam are reduced to looking at a room, and so are we. Wan's discovery is that this is worse than pursuit. A monster running at you down a hallway is an action-image, a problem with a motor solution. A bolt through your ankle is not a problem. It is a condition.
And the one action the film does offer runs against your own body. The circuit, cut off from the world, loops back and eats its own leg.
Deleuze's word for a character who can no longer act is the voyant, the seer, and it is normally a tender figure: paralysis opening someone to see too much. Wan does something obscene with it. He makes the seer the villain. Jigsaw murders nobody. He assembles a situation and watches it run, and for the length of this film he watches from the tile, playing dead, the stillest body in a movie full of thrashing ones. The film's only agent is its only corpse.
Before he sits up, he is a voice. Tape hiss, treated vocals, I want to play a game. Instructions arrive from a body nobody can see, and that split between the commanding voice and every visible body is the source of his authority. Deleuze distinguishes the relative out-of-field, the corridor next door you could walk to, from the absolute out-of-field, a beyond you feel but cannot locate anywhere in space. Jigsaw lives there for ninety minutes. He is God on cassette. Then the film collapses that absolute outside into the dead center of the composition. The unlocatable beyond has been in frame, in focus, on the floor, the whole time.
Which makes the corpse a perfect demark. Deleuze takes a pair of terms from Peirce. A mark means by habit, so you see a gun and expect a shot; a demark breaks the habit and forces you to read instead. In horror, a body on the floor is scenery. Wan detonates the most reliable piece of furniture the genre owns.
The room earns its reputation too. Julie Berghoff's tile and rust and effluent, David Armstrong's jaundiced greens and hard single-source shadow, usually get called a look. Deleuze would call it a derived milieu opening onto an originary world: a realistic setting revealed as the crust over something older and hungrier, a place of drives rather than manners, literally filthy and morally rotten at the same time. The camera then refuses to let you map it, lunging at a face with a snap zoom that never tells you where in the room the face is. What you get is an any-space-whatever, a space that has stopped serving as a setting for action and become disconnected affective fragments. Antonioni needed an emptied piazza for this. Wan gets it out of twelve square meters of tile.
Jigsaw's apparatus belongs to a different node. The tricycle puppet, the color-coded clues, the ritual of the tape: this is violence staged rather than performed. Deleuze puts a hinge between the action-image and the mental image, and one of its forms is the attraction-image, action transposed into spectacle, the deed figured instead of done. Eisenstein lifted "attraction" from the fairground. Jigsaw builds a fairground. He is the heir of The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), whose ornate coded devices made killing a liturgy, and of Se7en's John Doe, the moralist who leaves decodable tableaux for detectives. Doe with a workshop instead of a scripture. The confinement is Cube (1997), strangers reasoning out the rules of a lethal architecture, and the insert close-ups of gleaming mechanism come from Deep Red (1975).
The film's most notorious image is a gest, Deleuze's term for a posture that exposes an entire social relation. A physician holding a hacksaw. The oath and the amputation inside one gesture.
Then Kevin Greutert's last two minutes. Clouser's "Hello Zepp" enters, and shots you have already watched are recut against one another until they yield a meaning neither carried alone. That is the Soviet dialectical cut, collision producing a third term, arriving in a Lionsgate horror picture by way of The Usual Suspects, at the speed-ramped tempo Wan and Greutert took from Requiem for a Dream.
Notice what that montage does not do. The powers of the false, Deleuze's late category, makes truth undecidable and lets incompatible versions stand as equally true. Saw runs the other way, which is why it is a mystery and not a Welles film. The montage proves the picture never lied to you. Every frame was honest; you filed it as furniture. Somewhere in the second reel the image had quietly stopped being self-evident and turned into something to decipher, what Deleuze calls a lectosign, an image you read rather than simply see, and the finale hands you the key. That is the detective story's oldest contract, kept in horror's house. It is also why the film pays on a second viewing, the mind-game film's real currency.
What did it do to the art? It moved horror's engine from pursuit to consent. Before Saw, the horror situation is something is coming, run. After Saw, it is nothing is coming, and that is worse, so decide. The victim becomes the author of their own mutilation. The cost arrived fast: a decade of imitators copied the grime and the traps and left the structure behind, and Edelstein's "torture porn" label stuck to a film considerably less explicit than its reputation.
The question it opens and cannot close is whether a choice made under a countdown is a choice at all. Jigsaw's whole philosophy depends on saying yes. The film stages that argument with real force and settles nothing, a discourse-image posing a problem it has no power to resolve, which is precisely why people are still fighting about it.
Watch it again for the floor. Tobin Bell has nothing to do for ninety minutes but breathe shallowly in somebody else's blood and wait. It is the best performance in the picture, and it is almost entirely stillness.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Adam and Gordon chained at opposite corners with the whole plot 'a function of what they can and cannot reach' — total perception, no adequate response available.
- pure optical & sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns) — The confined bathroom: a body, a gun, a hacksaw and a tape recorder placed just past reach, so the men (and we) can only look and listen.
- the seer (voyant) — Jigsaw 'does not murder his victims' but builds games and watches — and the reveal is that he has been lying motionless on the bathroom floor as the corpse the entire running time.
- out-of-field-absolute — The tape hiss and treated voice give Jigsaw 'an aural presence long before he has a face' — an unlocatable beyond that the finale collapses into the dead center of the frame.
- audiovisual-disjunction — Jigsaw's cassette instructions ('I want to play a game') are a treated voice with no visible body attached, issuing commands from outside every image.
- demark — The corpse between the two men works as scenery — the camera frames past it for depth — until it stands up, breaking the genre's most habitual object-chain.
- originary world — Julie Berghoff's design of tile, rust and effluent 'reads as both literally filthy and morally rotten': the milieu as crust over a world of drives.
- any-space-whatever (disconnection) — Handheld coverage, canted framings and snap zooms make the room's geography 'deliberately hard to map' — the bathroom ceases to be a setting and becomes affective fragments.
- attraction-image — Billy the tricycle puppet, the cassette ritual and color-coded clues supply 'an iconography of ritual and game-playing' — violence staged and figured rather than performed. The Dr. Phibes inheritance.
- the gest — Dr. Gordon, the physician, turning the hacksaw on his own leg — staging that 'turns the room's props into instruments of choice and self-destruction'.
- dialectical (Soviet) montage — The climactic 'rapid recontextualizing montage set to Charlie Clouser's score' recuts already-seen shots into a third meaning neither carried alone — the Usual Suspects model.
- lectosign — The puzzle-box structure — withheld identity, planted details, color-coded clues — strips the image of sensory-motor self-evidence so that it must be deciphered rather than simply watched.
- discourse-image — The 'games' frame the drama as forced moral choices about complicity and will, grounding a philosophy in objects while resolving none of it — hence 'enduringly controversial'.
- mind-game film — The third-act reversal 'recodes the entire preceding narrative', building a film whose payoff is the re-watch. (Elsaesser's term, not Deleuze's.)