If you’re a leftist and a fan of no-holds-barred gory horror flicks, there is one movie that you should watch every Halloween: “Saw VI,” one of the best satires of the American healthcare system ever released by a major Hollywood studio in a tentpole franchise. I am convinced it has been overlooked by critics solely because of its supposed status as “torture porn.”
I despise the term “torture porn.” It is used to contemptuously dismiss horror films which focus on the visceral terror that comes from the ways our bodies can be abused to create extreme physical agonies. The derisive label “torture porn” implies that the violence, gore, mutilation and sadism are somehow perverse.
This is an absurd accusation, and throughout history similar smears have been used against many horror gems that few would declare immoral today. Never use it unless you want to belong in the same company that is mocked for having once been outraged by classics like “The Exorcist,” “The Driller Killer,” “Friday the 13th: Part IV — The Final Chapter” and “Silent Night, Deadly Night.”
History tends to be unkind to the prudish and easily offended.
Anyway, to my reasons for loving “Saw VI,” a movie in which health insurance executives are tortured. Given that in the real world health insurance companies cause far more evil than any popular horror franchise villain, the victims’ fates are morally fitting, at least within the ethical context of exploitation films.
I’ll start by deconstructing my favorite scene from the movie.
William Easton (Peter Outerbridge), the head of an insurance firm, stumbles into a room where six of his top associates are tied to each other on a carousel. After the obligatory expressions of confusion and horror are expressed by all, Jigsaw (or to be more specific, Jigsaw’s voice as presented by Billy, the series’ iconic animatronic evil clown doll) appears on a videotape. He then proceeds to deliver a monologue that should be iconic, but isn’t because America is a country that ignores satirical masterpieces like “Saw VI” since we give them dumb labels like “torture porn.”
“Before you are six of your most valuable associates. The ones who find errors in policies. Their findings result in over two-thirds of all applications denied or prematurely terminated. Now you must apply your analysis to them. And will you be able to find their errors? Six ride the carousel, but only two can get off. The decision of which two survive falls upon you. But remember, the mounted gun will continue to fire until all six rounds are spent. And if no decision is made on your part, all six will perish. To offer the two reprieves, you must press both buttons at once in the box before you. However, in doing so, you will give a sacrifice of your own. Two can live, four will die. Your decisions symbolized by the blood on your hands.”
While the “horror protagonist forced to choose who shall live and who shall die” conundrum is hardly original, what makes it particularly ingenuous here is the appropriateness of its symbolism. On a superficial level, there is a Shakespearean gruesomeness: Like Lady Macbeth, Easton will have blood on his hands — in his sense, literally so — due to the “sacrifice” the trap demands of him.
Yet this scene, and others like it in “Saw VI,” also asks deeper social and economic questions: Are health insurance companies not always making cold, depraved choices about who lives and who dies? What else can we honestly call the termination of benefits to those who become sick, to say nothing of the fact that for millions of people quality insurance is outright unaffordable?
This isn’t just the insurance companies choosing profits over human lives; it is society expressing implicit agreement with the rationalizations they use to justify the “formulas” that allow them to commit their acts of murder.
In that sense we are all serial killers, no better than Jigsaw… and less honest, in fact, about admitting what we really are.
Sure, the murders committed by health insurance executives are carried out indirectly, and of course, the insurance companies themselves are usually not motivated by sadism. The people who support them don’t think of themselves as murderers, but merely as followers of the “correct” economic dogma. But does any of this change the undeniable fact that millions suffer bodily and psychological torture, and even death, as a direct result of the insurance company choices condoned by our society?
The only significant difference between Easton’s situation and the real-life actions of insurance companies and their supporters is that, in Easton’s case, the Jigsaw killer forces him to see the faces and hear the voices of his victims as he is killing them. He is directly accountable, both during the carousel trap and on other occasions set up by the evil mastermind. Blood is literally on his hands.
That’s what makes “Saw VI” (directed by Kevin Greutert in 2009) so unique. The first five movies were about slasher villains, the Jigsaw Killer and his proteges, but in this one the real villains come straight from our actual lives – health insurance executives.
To be clear, Saw VI is not perfect. If you haven’t seen the previous five films, the secondary storyline — one mostly unrelated to the health insurance subplot — will be difficult to follow. It has great moments of tension, as the superb Costas Mandylor plays an aspiring Jigsaw heir desperately trying to avoid being caught by the police. He is particularly exceptional in a standout scene in which a recording of what the other characters believe were a different Jigsaw Killer’s own words is replayed over and over by police investigators, with the same phrase gradually taking on a different meaning as it is repeated.
Yet the carousel scene is the highlight of the movie, and by quite a bit. The movie has other merits, of course. Several of the traps are also effective as allegories on the evils of private health care, as well as by being viscerally horrifying (people who fear asphyxiation will squirm at two of them). The original Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell) has a few nice moments of dialogue with Easton in which he lays out an oddly compelling Darwinian argument for socialized medicine. There is an especially nice touch in which Jigsaw finishes his scathing analysis of American health insurance companies by comparing Easton to a piranha.
But the movie’s core message comes when, after Easton has just selected the last person on the carousel to live – and, by default, condemned the remaining live person on the torture trap to die – he averts his eyes as the impending victim is about to be executed. The victim, however, doesn’t simply curse and whimper, as have most of the other soon-to-be corpses in this series. Livid and heartbroken at the betrayal, he stares up at his former boss and makes a last demand that cuts to the heart of this film’s moral message:
“Look at me! When you’re killing me you look at me!”
The genius of Saw VI’s central conceit is that, in its cruel and brutally poetic way, it gives an insurance company’s corporate mercenary no other choice but to do precisely that.
Saw VI was politically prescient for its time and is even more so today. It was released in 2009, during the height of the debate about President Barack Obama’s proposed health care reform legislation (which ultimately passed and cemented his legacy as one of America’s great modern presidents).
Yet the Affordable Care Act did not solve all of America’s health insurance industry problems. As I write this in 2020, America is in the midst of a global pandemic, millions remain uninsured or inadequately insured and insurance companies are still making evil choices for profit like they did at the time of this film’s release. Even worse, the Supreme Court is considering overturning Obama’s health care reforms, throwing millions more off their insurance at the worst possible time so that greedy companies will be able to make even more money at the expense of the innocent.
Even though Obama once defended the motives of insurance executives by saying that they “don’t do this because they are bad people, they do it because it’s profitable,” Saw VI has a rebuttal that is impossible to refute: Health insurance companies take human life for profit. That makes them bad people. They are the real serial killers of our time. Jigsaw and his proteges at least have the excuse of being fictional.
Update: After reading this review, director Kevin Greutert was kind enough to reach out to me on Twitter. First he wrote this:
“We could use more critics like you, Matthew! When we made it we didn’t know health care would become such a giant issue, but it was by the time we released the film. While some were turned off by contemporary politics in a horror movie, I’m glad it worked out the way it did.”
Flattery will get you everywhere with me, so we began to talk and I learned some interesting backstory about the movie. Apparently the fact that “Saw VI” was timed at the peak of the Obamacare controversy was purely coincidental.
“We really weren’t trying to be political, it was just fun to dish on insurance salesmen!” Greutert explained. It just so happened that the movie came out at the same time that Obama was in the thick of his very public fight to pass health care reform, an effort that had been underway since he had taken office earlier in 2009 and would bear fruit five months after “Saw VI” hit theaters.
Yet I don’t think the story of “Saw VI” being a great left-wing horror satire, on par with “They Live” or the original “Dawn of the Dead,” ends with the coincidental timing of its release. Even though Greutert may not have anticipated that an epic battle over health care reform would occur when “Saw VI” came out, people have long been upset with how health insurance companies use impersonal formulas to decide who lives and dies in order to maximize their profits. In the process, they ignore each unique individual’s will to live… a point Jigsaw does not hesitate to mention. Indeed, out of the eight “Saw” films, Jigsaw is never more incisive in his thinking then when he tells Easton, “Did you know that in the Far East, people pay their doctors when they’re healthy? When they’re sick, they don’t have to pay them. So basically, they end up paying for what they want, not what they don’t want.”
He concludes that “we got it all ass-backwards here” because, instead of letting well-intentioned doctors make decisions with their patients regardless of economic considerations, “they’re not made by doctors and their patients or by the government. They’re made by the fucking insurance companies.”
Despite all of this, however, Greutert told me that he was nervous about Obama kicking off his presidency with a health care reform push.
“I’m a huge Obama fan,” Greutert explained. “But I was nervous when he, like Clinton, made public health care his first big move in office. It cost Clinton a lot politically, as it did Obama, but at least [Obama] got it passed.“
Eleven years later and Greutert thinks it will be “a disaster” if the Supreme Court overturns Obamacare. “I would be fully on board with the Democrats (assuming they control the presidency and Congress) getting rid of the filibuster and re-passing a better version of [the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare],” Greutert explained. That said, he expressed cautious hope that more moderate Supreme Court judges like Chief Justice John Roberts would realize that “there will be a shitstorm if their first move after the election is to kill health care for 20+ million Americans in the middle of a pandemic.“
He concluded, “It’s a lot more popular now than it was when Obama first got it passed.“
Yes it is… and that’s all the more reason “Saw VI” deserves credit. Any Hollywood blockbuster can take a political position when the studio is comfortable an overwhelming majority is on its side. It takes real guts to send a political message on an issue where millions upon millions disagree with you.
Regardless of the coincidental scheduling of its release, “Saw VI” was ahead of its time and on the right side of history in 2009… and, in the very near future, may be even more relevant than it was more than a decade ago.