Price to see Saw I: $6.75 at the Regal Cinemas. Price to see Saw II: $1.00 at a bootlegged screening. Price to see Saw IV: $3.75 at the Brassfield Cinemas. Lesson learned from seeing the film series: PRICELESS.
To watch the movies I actually had to pay, everything else, I just SAW. Let me state, as a point of reference, that I am a total Saw fanatic. While walking into each of the four film screenings, I expected to see something terribly horrifying, yet so mysterious that you can barely afford to blink. Never, throughout my entire obsession with these films did I think that I would walk into a theater living and walk out truly realizing that I must choose to live. Living after all is a choice, and if you don’t choose life, than you’ve chosen death.
T. Shavonne Fordham is a junior Journalism and Mass Communication major. She can be reach at [email protected]
It’s funny because something always drew me towards Jigsaw. Not in a crazy, “I want to be a killer” way, but in a way that is reflective of the soft spot in my heart for tragic heroes.
Starting with my love and understanding of Brutus, from Julius Caesar, I have often found myself identifying with those great characters in the arts that are categorized as the antagonist, simply because they have a tragic flaw.
Choices, don’t we all make them daily? Like many people in the world, Jigsaw just could not bear to see people live in a way that degrades the beauty of life and the gift of living. While I wouldn’t go so far as deciding who deserves to live, because I have some problems of my own, I can understand what was, perhaps, going through Jigsaws mind.
I look around and see people drinking which kills the liver, smoking which kills the lungs, being sexually promiscuous which kills the spirit, and these are only some of the hundreds of things people do, to die, daily. Jigsaw, also known as John Kramer, simply wanted to remind people to, “Cherish your life,” and he decided that if they were not going to do that, then they did not deserve to live. That was his tragic flaw, deciding that he was worthy of judging peoples lives, but as a hero he simply wanted people to live.
As a God loving Christian I can understand that notion. Now, don’t for one second think that I am saying that Jigsaw’s motives were God based, that is nowhere insinuated throughout the films.
However, doesn’t God give us that very choice, to live or die? Doesn’t God allow us to “kill” ourselves, or choose the tools to live? It is not by God, rather by ourselves that we are given to death. In the same way, Jigsaw allows individuals to see what they have done wrong, make a choice to turn from those wrong doings, or choose to die sinking in them.
Furthermore, God gave his very life so that we may live. Jigsaw, in Saw III, died surrendering his self to someone else’s pursuit of life. Jigsaw is simply a man. No matter where his heart was, we see him for the madness he perpetuated, but perhaps there was a mission in the madness.
Perhaps we should all choose life, because it is after all dwelling within us daily. Maybe the victims in the Saw series were not victims at all. They were people and like many of us they were choosing, daily, to die. Jigsaw did not kill them; he simply moved the process of them killing themselves along. We should be thankful that our maker doesn’t choose to do the same.
No one said that living would be easy, but the gift of life, dangles from a simple choice. So, what will your fate be? Live or die, make your choice.
T. Shavonne Fordham is a junior Journalism and Mass Communication major. She can be reach at [email protected]
- T. Shavone Fordham