Film Theory: Jigsaw was RIGHT! (Saw Movies)

let's play a game your entire search and browsing history has been loaded into a bot that will send it to everyone in your contacts list in one hour every time you stalked your crush every time you googled your own name every time you asked webmd about that weird thing on your foot all of it will be exposed the only way to prevent this from happening is to find the secret message hidden somewhere in this video and then leave it down in the comments below five words stand between you and embarrassment for life all marked with this symbol the clock is ticking friends the choice is yours live or die happy hunting internet welcome to film theory the show that cuts straight to the truth like a hacksaw through an ankle today we're gonna be talking about the saw franchise which is something i view much differently now than i did when it first came out back then i was all like oh man i wonder if i'd be determined enough to saw off my own foot to survive nowadays i'm more like huh that saw's looking pretty rusty hope he got himself a tetanus booster in the last five years but i gotta admit i have a ton of respect for the saw movies doing things that no other horror movies do and i'm not just talking about crushing people's heads between blocks of ice friends i mean when i watch a horror movie there are plenty of things that i can expect again nightmares anxiety underwear stains but you know what i don't expect to get team building exercises seriously before the saw movies came out had anybody ever heard of an escape room not only did this franchise make me horrified of fluorescent lighted bathrooms in need of a good deep clean but it also doomed many people to the fate of solving lightly thematic puzzles with acquaintances from around the office the other rare thing that the saw franchise did was to give us a super villain with reasons behind what he's doing jigsaw's stated goal in the movies is to make people more appreciative for being alive and to motivate them to stop doing whatever terrible things that they're doing in their everyday life you see the knowledge of death changes everything if i were to tell you the exact date and time of your own death it would shatter your world completely you savor everything be it a glass of water or walk in the park but most people have the luxury of not knowing when that clock's gonna go off the irony of it is that that keeps them from really living their life which is weirdly admirable in a way certainly more admirable than michael myers who just wants to kill because he's crazy or freddy krueger who wants to kill you for fun or leatherface who wants to kill you because he needs your bones for furniture i mean don't get me wrong here what the jigsaw killer is doing is twisted and gross and seems like an engineering nightmare but i don't know he's like a motivational poster a bloody bloody murdery motivational poster i've never murdered anyone in my life the decisions are up to them alright john sure you didn't kill anyone saying you're not a murderer because the traps kill them is the same thing as shooting someone and claiming you didn't kill him the gun did nice try buddy rationalizing away your horrific murder spree aside the saw franchise does bring up an interesting point is jigsaw right is putting people into dangerous painful life-threatening and ethically paradoxical circumstances leaving them better off assuming that the players of the games actually live through them which is usually not the case well let me tell you after doing the research jigsaw isn't wrong and today i'm here to tell you why so sharpen your hacksaws stay away from pits full of needles and steer clear of any tricycle riding puppets cause today we're diving deep into whether jigsaw is through his own twisted psychology making the world a slightly better place now the first saw movie came out in 2004 when the most cutting-edge game you can get on a cell phone was snake so even if you're a fan of the franchise you might need a refresher on jigsaw aka john cramer's motivation so here's a recap in your official spoiler warning for the entire franchise in the original saw movie jigsaw kidnaps two men adam and dr gordon and give some cryptic clues on what they have to do in order to escape the grody bathroom that they awaken in but as the movie goes on we slowly learn why jigsaw chose these two for his game he finds them both morally objectionable adam spies on people and sells his photos to blackmailers and dr gordon appears to be ignoring his family to have an extramarital affair but it's when we see a flashback to one of jigsaw's surviving victims that we get the real motivation behind his games amanda a drug addict finds her head in a reverse bear trap that threatens to flip her skull inside out unless she finds a key to it in a dude's intestines remarkably she succeeds and is then given the creepiest end screen of any game ever congratulations you are still alive most people are so ungrateful to be alive but not you not anymore so jigsaw is teaching his victims little life lessons to help him realize that they are hashtag blessed and it works for amanda after this traumatic ordeal she overcomes her addiction telling the police he helped me jigsaw's goal is ultimately to help people turn their lives around which mirrors his own journey as we find out in later movies jigsaw is a guy named john cramer who got a double dose of bad news when his wife miscarried their unborn son and he was diagnosed with terminal cancer when he survives an attempt to end his own life he becomes determined to testing the fabric of human nature by teaching others that those who don't appreciate life do not deserve life in short he wants to almost kill people so that they'll snap out of their bad behavior or you know they just fail and die though to be fair john if this was truly your stated goal you would give them i don't know a little bit more than 60 seconds to dislodge the key that was surgically implanted behind their eye to remove them from the spiked iron maiden that's about to snap their head in two just saying obviously it's all a psychopathic idea right you can't play mousetrap with people's lives but for as crazy as jigsaw's logic is it's not without precedent throughout history many philosophers have seen trauma and suffering as a means of achieving personal growth such as schopenhauer kierkegaard and most notably friedrich nietzsche with his catchphrase that god is dead and that luxurious mustache nietzsche rode the line between emo and hipster better than any other 19th century german philosopher and he was famous for not being all sunshine and rainbows in his thinking in his 1886 work beyond good and evil nietzsche presents a couple of philosophies that jigsaw would likely retweet on twitter nietzsche claimed that society evaluates actions based on intention rather than consequence and he's right about that because society's laws are generally based on intention let's say that there's a burglar roaming around your neighborhood so to protect yourself and your neighbors you drop an anvil on its head wiley coyote style the law would say that your intention was to harm someone and therefore your anvil drop was immoral and more importantly to you a ruling of murder nature would look at your action and say that because its consequence was good i.e people not being robbed of their jewelry and electronics and pokemon cards then the action would be a moral one in other words nietzsche believed that the ends justify the means and that an action with positive consequences is moral regardless of its motivation or execution nietzsche is saying that the results are what really matter in determining the right thing to do someone who sees the same burglar and calls the police or warns the neighborhood might have a purer intention than the anvil dropper but those shouldn't be considered because their consequences are less effective the police might not arrive or they might let the burglar go and commit future burglaries warned neighbors might still get robbed but if you smush that burglar on the sidewalk like a pancake you can be sure that he's committed his last burglary and therefore nietzsche would consider it the most moral of the choices because its consequence no more burglaries was the most certain then he'd lean back in his chair and comb that epic 19th century mustache of his jigsaw presumably agrees given that he considers himself morally righteous in playing these games he figures that if some people can be saved or improved as a result of the torture then the torture was the right thing even more importantly nietzsche believed that progress was the result of suffering specifically he wrote this quote the discipline of suffering of great suffering don't you realize that up to this point it is only this suffering which has created every enhancement in man up to now that tension of a soul in misery which develops its strength has that not been given to it through suffering through the discipline of great suffering again to translate that from cranky german philosopher to english nietzsche was saying that all of mankind's progress is the result of suffering and therefore we should embrace it well if that ain't jigsaw to the letter i don't know what is if mankind's greatness is the result of suffering jigsaw figures he can just add more suffering into the mix and create better people as a result okay so jigsaw studied some philosophy to impress people in college we've all been there or at least i've been there because i studied kantian philosophy in college to impress my now wife stephanie which worked i guess i don't know it was the only class that i ever skipped it was senior year and just a bonus class that i was taking to fill out my schedule also in my defense still got an a anyway just because some of jigsaw's principles are rooted in the thoughts of great philosophers doesn't necessarily mean he's right do his games actually change the survivors for the better surprisingly yes it was the best thing that ever happened to me he was abusive but it wasn't until that moment that it really did something well to be fair most of the players wind up dead a shocking number of survivors wind up with a new outlook on life it's something that the series deals pretty heavily with in saw 3d during a group therapy session for survivors of jigsaw's games we hear that many have found themselves a new outlook on life i am simply here to illustrate the fact that a traumatic experience can have a positive outcome but if you look around at all of these people taking their lives for granted eventually they all found something positive from their experience heck both amanda and dr gordon from the first saw movie not only survive but also end up adopting jigsaw's philosophy helping him set up his games with new participants in future films so some philosophers agree with jigsaw many of the surviving victims of the movies agree with jigsaw but does the science agree with jigsaw i suppose to convince you you need some real world evidence that the kind of trauma jigsaw subjects his victims to actually has benefits well let me introduce you to richard tadeshi and lawrence calhoun psychologists and creators of the post-traumatic growth index in studies conducted in the 1990s tadeshi and calhoun set out to see if they could measure the positive impact of disasters in people's lives whether that was being diagnosed with a terminal illness being a victim of violence or surviving a natural disaster and the results for the survivors of these traumatic events were positive survivors self-reported positive change in the direction of their lives overwhelmingly 80 said that they had established a new path for their lives and 76 reported that they were able to do better things with their lives a separate study compared survivors of trauma to those who had experienced no major trauma the results found that the survivors outscored the control group in terms of their ability to relate to others personal strength and most importantly for jigsaw their appreciation of life all in all 60 of participants expressed that there was a positive effect on themselves after the trauma so that kind of means jigsaw is right doesn't it trauma's messy to be sure but science shows that overwhelmingly it leads to improvements in people's perceptions of themselves and their lives the victims in the movie agree ye oldie philosophers agree and science agrees that's it theory over slapping on a thumbnail we're done with another halloween season upload except for one thing john kramer didn't read himself the fine print this is why i always gotta read past the headlines people because while yes sixty percent of participants expressed a positive effect after the trauma a whopping 94 said that they experienced either some or extreme negative consequences as a result of the trauma estimates vary but experts believe that people who experience some acute form of physical trauma have between a 20 and 50 chance of developing acute stress disorder and or post-traumatic stress disorder both of which often manifest in nightmares flashbacks increased likelihood of self-harm sure if you survive a plane crash you might appreciate your life a bit more and not get bothered by little things as much decide to take that improv class that you always wanted to but you're also much likelier to suffer panic attacks and have your daily routine more interrupted so it's pretty short-sighted to say that introducing trauma into people's lives will only help them and you know what jigsaw of all people should understand that because most of his trauma was damaging to him rather than helpful after he lost his unborn son his response was grief and depression not wow my life is suddenly better when he was diagnosed with cancer more grief and depression not sunshine and rainbows it took him a third trauma the near-death experience of ending his own life for him to have his quote-unquote epiphany but the whole situation should have told him that the typical result of a traumatic event is not some positive life-affirming change it is insecurity it is depression it is grief it is post-traumatic stress turns out that maybe we shouldn't be looking to a serial murderer for philosophical and psychological guidance who knew in the words of one of his former survivors you want to know the best thing that happened to me after having to cut off my own arm his handicap parking at the damn mall everyone's a critic i guess but hey that's just a theory a film theory and game over you

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 2,437,120

Rating: 4.9403782 out of 5

Keywords: saw, saw trailer, saw 2020, new saw movie 2020, new saw, saw traps, saw movies, saw full movie, saw ii, saw 2, saw III, saw 3, saw 4, saw trap, saw tests, jigsaw, jigsaw movie, scary, scary movies, horror, horror movies, how to beat, saw franchise, kill count, saw kill count, film theorists, film theory, matpat, john kramer

Id: bgm1B5cLLl8

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020

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