Given our appetite for fictional obscenity, one might be rather surprised at the resistance among Americans to the idea of torture carried out by the government. I think it's a good thing which is testament to our maturity as a society. It is in fact this maturity and robustness that is the only thing that allows me to say that porno is good, but pornography is bad. Most of our entertainment rated 'R' or 'M' is porno. Every once in a while, such mainstream products lurch over into pornography.
One of those products which occupies that line is the series of grotesques known as the Saw series of horror flicks. This weekend, Saw III killed at the box office, drawing something like 34 million blood-soaked dollars. Having seen the original first installment, I cannot bring myself to bear another. Like the Nick Berg video, it's one of those things that reasonable people ought to avoid watching in order to save their souls. Unless one is of strong intellect and quite capable of compartmentalizing, it's really not a good idea to ingest such stuff.
I was reminded of this matter in watching some older films this weekend. In fact, I'm also compiling a list of my favorite spy, con-game and twisty mystery films. But the one that most caught my attention in regard to the protection of the soul was 'The Conversation' starring Gene Hackman. Hackman shows up in a number of my all-time favorite films including 'Heist', 'Enemy of the State' and 'Unforgiven'. It is however in 'The Conversation' that he is most soulful.
As Harry Caul, Hackman portrays a man who is unafraid of death but scared to death of murder. A sometimey devout Catholic, Caul is on the technical side of the spy business and designs recording equipment for sometimes murky clients. It is revealed that he delivered the some evidence against a corrupt union official that resulted in the murder of that official and his family. Caul's technical brilliance was such that nobody believed the official could have been bugged, and so the conclusion was that he ratted and so met his doom. Caul lives in the shadow of that and takes responsibility for it. As he completes a new near-impossible assignment, he realizes that the stakes are life and death once again, and he tries as best he can to forestall the inevitable. His life now hangs in the balance. He is the messenger, and the only way he can protect his own life is to stay mum, a witness to murder.
This is a dilemma shared by the best journalists, and likely the best of all of us. It is inevitable that we, in our professionalism encounter corruption, but only a few of us see the extent to which such corruptions of humanity lead to matters of life and death. And yet this is the very bread and butter of our more sordid entertainment. We go straight for that jugular in watching horror films, and in that regard Saw is rather unique, although extreme. For the premise of Saw is that most of us take our lives for granted and would not dare do anything extreme in order to preserve it. And so the radical antagonist, Jigsaw, kidnaps individuals and forces them to do just that, some horrid act of self-preservation. In the first episode, two men are shackled by the leg to pipes in an abandoned building and given hacksaws. These saws are incapable of cutting through the chains - Jigsaw expects them to cut off their feet in order to save their own lives. Grand guignol to be sure. It gives the Saw series a moral appeal through all its grisly gore.
Were we a bit more attuned to more upstanding moral entertainments, such points could be made without gallons of bloody verisimilitude. Hard to know, however if our principled thinking would make the connection. You see we are faced with precisely the same dilemma geopolitically. I wonder if the weekend movie audience, those who made this Halloween thriller number one in the country, are aware of the parallels. For there is certainly a group of thinkers out there who see the fate of our nation and indeed Western civilization as hanging in the same bloody balance. What indeed are we willing to do for our own survival which we so blithely take for granted?
In the first episode of Saw, a doctor who has taken liberties with his marriage is blackmailed. He doesn't appreciate what he has and thinks he can get away with his indiscretion, but Jigsaw has him tailed and photographed. Jigsaw also gets someone to tie the doctor's family up and threaten his wife and daughter at gunpoint - the doctor hears all this via cell phone as he remains shackled and realizes that his family is worth so much more than the dalliance that got him into Jigsaw's dastardly, yet radically moral plot.
We were aghast at the comments of Pat Robertson and others as they suggested that America brought the wrath of Al Qaeda upon itself. In the same twisted way as the Jigsaw killer of Saw, their moral logic is consistent. But whether or not we are forced to cut off our own feet to survive, there are very difficult choices we must face. Better to think about them now than later.
Is torture or the use of weapons of mass destruction the foot we must cut off to escape the shackles our liberties have ironically put on us? Should we resent the grisly lesson that Jihadists are trying to teach us or learn from it? Do we deserve the horror brought upon us, or is this just part of the price we pay for being strong in the first place? Are we being held hostage my our unwillingness to stay paranoid at all times?
Even though I cannot bear to watch another greay-gut episode of the Saw series, its themes resonate is a peculiarly uncanny way.
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