On Cruelty and Violence in Film

I used to be a fan of the Saw film franchise. Up until the seventh film, I did my best to watch each film as soon as I could. But around when the seventh film was entering theaters, I had fallen off being a fan of the series. For years, I tried to figure out why that happened. Was it the ultraviolence? Was it the lack of Tobin Bell’s John Kramer as the primary villain? Or was there something else underpinning my feelings on the series?

The solution didn’t click into place until a few days ago, when a brief ad for The Meg 2: The Trench played before a Twitch stream. The ad focused near-entirely on people being eaten by the eponymous megalodon; it even painted one particular victim as damn near deserving of their gruesome fate. And as I saw that ad a few more times, the answer finally fell into place: The violence wasn’t the problem — it was the cruelty.

To be clear, I don’t have many issues with violence on film. I enjoy a good action flick as much as the next American; the John Wick series remains a personal benchmark for how to do proper-ass action scenes in live-action. Hell, I’ve watched plenty of horror films in the past that feature more violence than I’m comfortable with, but I still powered through them because I liked the story or the characters. (Hi there, recent Halloween trilogy! Your third film sucked!) But the violence of something like the original Halloween, which was arguably in service of a metaphor about how even small towns aren’t safe from such brutal acts, or the over-the-top Friday the 13th films (e.g., Jason X), don’t seem nearly as cruel as the violence of “torture porn” films like Saw.

Jason Voorhees is basically a force of nature. He doesn’t “choose” to kill in the sense that he intentionally tries to murder certain people for certain crimes. He kills as an instinct, whether it’s to avenge his own death, his mother’s death, or because that’s all he knows how to do any more. The various Jigsaw Killers, on the other hand, make conscious choices to kill others based on more understandable motives like revenge. (The recent trailer for Saw X proves as much.) Their murders are deliberate decisions made not on instinct or impulse; in choosing to torture people before their deaths, they’re enacting cruelty upon people who may or may not be deserving of legal punishment. To wit: Did the people in the Carousel Trap from Saw VI all deserve to die even if their actions were only morally reprehensible instead of wholly illegal?

Maybe the difference here is the level of, and portrayal of, violence. The violence of a film like Jason X is so over-the-top and ridiculous that my taking it seriously would be near-impossible. The violence of Jigsaw, on the other hand, is not nearly as ridiculous — and that, combined with the motives of the killers, makes the violence seem so much crueler and horrific. And yes, one could argue that “the cruelty is the point". But in going back to the Halloween example, the counterargument is simple: “What is the point of the cruelty?” What greater purpose does the violence and the cruelty serve to the story being told around it?

Therein lies my ultimate problem with the Saw franchise (past the first film): The cruelty isn’t really telling a story, or at least a story I want to hear. It’s not hard to sympathise with the John Kramer character as you learn his backstory. But knowing how he uses the tragedies visited upon his life to justify murder and torture kills much of that sympathy. At least with something like Jason X, the killer is so far beyond any kind of human motivation that sympathy becomes irrelevant.

My feelings about this kind of violence and cruelty in film are probably more complex than this surface-level dive. (After all, I can still watch the Saw sequels without too much issue.) But for now, this dive will be sufficient enough.