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April 29, 2007
I came, I ‘Saw III,’ I conquered
The screening of slasher movies on college campuses in the US is becoming the norm, writes Joe Queenan
PEOPLE who graduated from college some time ago may fondly recall long winter nights when they lined up at the student union for screenings of The Seventh Seal,” “The 400 Blows” or “Citizen Kane.” Those days are long gone, as archaic as recorder societies.
To be sure, some colleges continue to screen classic art-house motion pictures, particularly for students studying film. But most student unions now function purely as a marketing appendage of the film industry, gleefully screening recent hits like “Happy Feet” and “The Departed” along with hot-off-the-presses offal like “The Holiday” and “The Black Dahlia” and whatever forlorn Samuel L. Jackson project happens to be floating around.
A surprising number of campuses are also showing bloodcurdling slasher films like the “Saw” movies. “Saw” I, II and III are a purposefully stomach-turning series in which an ill-tempered, cancer-plagued vigilante subjects victims to unspeakable tortures, most of which involve severing parts of their bodies. In his defence, the killer does this because his victims are self-indulgent whiners, not because he is mean.
In olden days — say, from the morning the Sorbonne was founded until the night MTV made its debut — the traditional purpose of the university was to provide some sort of sanctuary from the world of Mammon. The idea was to erect an island of intellectual freedom where young people could probe and question and develop their own ideas before reality closed in and everybody went to work for a private equity firm. Part of this nurturing process was to expose young people to great books, great music and great films.
This was not to denigrate mainstream pop culture; saucy comedies about grown men cavorting in diapers have always had an important role to play in our society, and always will. Still, there did once reign a belief that because generic Hollywood fare was widely available elsewhere in a way that films by Eric Rohmer were not, it might be nice to apprise students of the world of cinema beyond Jack Black and Adam Sandler.
Today, this attitude seems pitifully old-school. Campus organisations now have a Darwinian, give-the-people-what-they-want attitude. Consider one of the fixtures of college life, the university-maintained cable channel that pipes movies right into the privacy of a student’s dormitory room.
At the University of Connecticut, for example, students and professors can access a college-sponsored website and suggest films they would like to see on the Residential Life Movie Channel. After making the rounds of student union screening rooms in January, “Saw III” began popping up on channels like UConn’s.
Since “Saw III” contains graphic scenes in which naked or near-naked women are tortured to death, fussbudgets might pose the age-old in loco parentis question: Who’s monitoring these programmes to make sure my daughter doesn’t wander into somebody’s dorm room and see a bunch of naked women being defiled? Forget about Take Back the Night rallies. How about Take Back the Res Life Movie Channel?
Obviously, my squeamishness is hopelessly out of step with the times. Last fall, Daniel J. Heffner, who produced the “Saw” movies, gave a talk at his alma mater, Ithaca College. A standing-room-only crowd of 225 students turned up. This prompted the dean’s office at the school of communications to offer a three-day, one-credit course this semester in which Mr Heffner taught 60 students about the responsibilities, roles and challenges of being a producer, showing all three “Saw” movies on class time.
Did anyone challenge the appropriateness of offering a for-credit course on slasher movies?
The 30-something April Korpi, assistant to the dean, concedes that the “Saw” films were “not aimed at my demographic group.”
“I think the audience is definitely younger,” she says. “A lot of students loved it.” The class included 23 women.
Clearly, this is a generational issue, a situation where students could easily accuse mature audiences of cavalierly judging a book by its cover. For instance, the villain in the films — who insists he is not a murderer but a facilitator of attitude adjustment — choreographs his atrocities to convince his victims to stop being so darn blase. He meets with only mixed success, however; most people, after being pressured into sawing off an appendage, are in a pretty sour mood and rarely take these pranks in the spirit in which they were intended.
From the point of view of the film buff, there are two ways of looking at these motion pictures. Hidebound traditionalists (including my children, 20 and 23, who think the “Saw” movies are slime) might view them as fictionalized snuff films. But “Saw” fans might see them through the prism of genre, insisting they be accepted on their own terms as the classic horror films of a new generation, the 21st-century equivalent of “Psycho.” Bear in mind, the “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies — somewhat less visually repellent than the “Saw” series — were once dismissed as gory slasher films but are today accepted as classics of the horror idiom. And not just by lonely men who spend a lot of time alone in dark rooms staring at photographs of Jamie Lee Curtis. Following this logic, the “Saw” movies, reviled by fussy purists, may one day be viewed with awe and affection for the deep, though cleverly camouflaged, moral current running through them.
Before a “Saw” double feature on UConn’s Res Life Channel, one fan explained it: “It reminds me of ‘Se7en,’ ” the 1995 film in which perpetrators of the seven deadly sins are quite appropriately punished for their misdeeds, with the notable exception of Gwyneth Paltrow, who is decapitated purely to provoke Brad Pitt’s character.
“It might be a religious message at its core,” she said.
The student, who considers herself “fairly religious,” believes that being able to see movies like “Saw” helps her sort out what she thinks. “The more freedom you have, the more able you are to decipher your own values,” she said. “If I look away, I’m depriving myself of what a creative mind can come up with.”
To which another student added: “It really made me think. A movie like this can really make you appreciate life.”
Gosh. That sounds exactly like “The Seventh Seal.” —Dawn/The New York Times
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