Something to Hide: The Ethics of Spectatorship in Saw

Abstract

In her infl uential analysis of the slasher horror fi lm, Carol Clover also suggests alternatives to models of spectatorship developed in psychoanalytic and apparatus theory that describe a position of distanced mastery over the image. The slasher is a sub-genre of fi lm that would, on the surface, seem to exemplify the qualities of voyeuristic and sadistic male gazing identifi ed by these theories. Clover argues, however, that the slasher fi lm promotes an unconventional male-to-female form of cross-gender identifi cation and a masochistic, “reactive” gaze that ultimately undermines and takes priorityover the sadistic-both for the characters in the fi lm and for the spectator. 2 However, Clover still situates these transgressions of conventional viewing positions in a psychoanalytic framework, arguing that they remain responses to fantasies of castration. The spectator is engaged by a sadomasochistic fantasy that ultimately resolves castration anxiety by eliminating the early female victims and then reconstituting the “Final Girl” (locus of viewer identifi cation) as masculine. 3In Williams’s and Clover’s analyses, spectators’ affective and bodily responses implicate them at deeper psychological levels; body genres, like slasher horror fi lms, tap into structures of fantasy rooted in the formation of the subject in the bourgeois family. These fi lms produce their ideological effects (in slasher horror, a moderate transgression of conventional gender roles, which are then recuperated by the resolution of castration anxiety) by tethering bodily response to modes of identifi cation with characters. I have argued elsewhere that the most notable fi lms of the “torture porn” cycle other than the Saw series-Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Hostel II (2007)— derive certain of their themes and conventions from earlier slashers. Like the infl uential slasher The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), they must be interpreted as allegories of broader sociopolitical anxieties — as forms of cultural problem solving. 4 While, in Williams’s analysis, the body genres also represent modes of cultural problem solving, she frames these questions in broad terms that encompass the individual psychological along with the social: the problem of sex itself, the problem of violence related to sexual difference, and the problem of the pathos of loss. 5In my argument, Hostel follows iconic horror fi lms like Texas Chainsaw in depicting the horrifi c return of the repressed in social terms, rather than simply as a matter of individual psychology. Where Texas Chainsaw thematizes the horrifi c unrepression of a mode of commodity production that middle-class society would prefer to keep out of sight and mind, Hostel adapts this structure of reversal for the context of the “war on terror” and the positions of torturer and tortured. In Texas Chainsaw, the working-class labor of meat production represents the repressed; the analogous object in the thematics of Hostel is the United States’ “renditions” program and other dirty business in the “war on terror.” 6 The fi lms, in certain respects, present a critical perspective on US political and cultural imperialism. Both Hostel fi lms follow the slashers in performing their cultural problem solving via modes of viewer identifi cation with characters; indeed, both rework conventions of the “Final Girl” in differing ways. In Hostel, the spectacle of young, middle-class white American males subjected to abduction and torture in foreign nations dramatizes the exceptionalism accorded to the “ordinary American” in the discursive regimes of the “war on terror,” and identifi cation with these characters constructed for the fi lm’s ideal (young male) spectator provokes critical refl ection on this exceptionalism. Ultimately, however, identifi cation with the protagonist Paxton’s acts of brutal vengeance in the fi lm’s closing sequence helps to contain this criticism andreaffi rm a “(neo)conservative view of the necessity for American aggression in what is represented as a corrupt and dangerous world.” 7However, unlike the Hostel fi lms, the Saw fi lms’ visual and narrative strategies work to severely attenuate the prospects for viewer identifi cation with any of their multiple characters-killer and accomplices, cops, and various victims. The fi lms invite viewer involvement in suspenseful narratives premised upon concealment, misdirection, and the gradual revelation of story information, and provoke moments of intense affective and bodily viewer response to the often brutal and gruesome trials of the bodies onscreen. Nevertheless, these forms of bodily and affective intimacy are mediated by the fi lms’ distancing strategies: Specifi cally, the fi lms displace conventional devices fostering viewer identifi cation with characters, and privilege dramatic spectacles of bodily suffering, narrative puzzles, and refl exive gestures. The resulting form of what I term “intimate distance” for the spectator suggests a way of understanding the fi lms’ political resonances and ethical implications.