ABSTRACT
The Saw series (James Wan, 2004; various directors, 2005–2010) has proved the most durable and popular of the films that emerged during the “torture porn” cycle of the mid-2000s. With a focus on the first Saw, but with reference to subsequent installments in the franchise, this essay argues that the films construct a form of spectatorship I characterize as “intimate distance.” Spectators of Saw are linked to the experiences of characters at a visceral, affective level: Scenes in the films are staged to make viewers cringe or recoil in horror at spectacles of bodily suffering and abjection. At the same time, the films attenuate the possibilities for viewer identification with characters and ethical reflection upon the films’ spectacles, instead distancing and insulating the spectator from these forms of involvement and implication. Surveillance functions as both narrative device and as a trope linking the films’ model of spectatorship to dominant ideologies of the post-9/11 United States, in which citizens are compelled to relinquish privacy and civil liberties because “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”
