So I decided to watch two horror classics, Saw and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. I watched Saw last night.
As I process it, several plot elements come to mind. First the emotionlessness, the passionlessness of the doctor. Even as time is ticking, he is acting as if he has all the time in the world. 6 o’clock comes around, and he is surprised by it. ONLY when he can no longer act, does the full weight of urgency strike him.
For his part, the kid is hasty. The movie is bookended by the key he lost in his haste to get the recorder. Interestingly, had the doctor been on his side, his plodding approach might have won him the key. But of course the murderer knew that.
It occurs to me that all the characters in the movie have classic hamartias, and that Horror in some cases might be viewed as a species of tragedy, complete with catharsis.
In Movie Yoga, he makes the case that life is characterized by constant death and rebirth cycles, which have four main components: complacency/safety; being forced from safety, but unable to move, being trapped; energetic motion away from the forces oppressing you, running from them, fighting them, and eventually moving towards something; and finally freedom, a completion of the journey. There are of course numerous examples of this in the Lord of the Rings. One he doesn’t mention is the womb-like pseudo-safety of Helm’s Deep, and the final need to press out, to forego defensive barriers, in order to win the day, which of course happens at dawn.
This series of steps echoes the physical birth process, which Stan Grof argues is a very important element in everyone’s psychosocial development. Parts of ourselves can be stuck at each stage, with following life consequences. The goal, of course, is to facilitate movement, with the idea being that sufficient movement will erode barriers preventing us from consistently being able to travel through to freedom and stay there.
But back to Saw. I was watching myself, and when the movie started, I was acutely feeling their confusion, panic, anger at confinement, and an overall sense of anxiety. I found myself standing while watching it. What was going to happen? And I identified with the doctor’s final panic attack, when he realized how his passionlessness has put his wife and daughter in grave danger.
And in the end, of course, he failed. There was nothing he could do when he finally chose to do something. But we the viewers did not fail. We can learn from his lesson. We can learn to value life more, and to live with more passion, more connection, more vitality.
In some respects Jigsaw acts as a deity in the Greek sense. He even wears a pig’s head, and dresses as a priest. He acts as a daemonic spirit, where daemon can mean god, demon, fortune or fate.
He is evil, of course, but the point of the movie is to interact creatively with it. What do the events on the screen teach US, the viewers?
It is worth noting that Greek tragedy is quite violent. Cannibalizing children, incest, rape, and of course murder feature prominently, particularly, I read, in tales concerning the House of Areus.
I have work to do, but will likely post something on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre after I view it.