[Pride 2021] “How Much Do You Value Your Life?”: Torture Porn & Overcoming Suicidal Ideation

[Trigger Warning/Content Warning: Frank discussions of suicidal ideation and thoughts]

My parents went to bed at about ten; I killed time for another hour, until I was certain I was the only one still awake. I took the stairs carefully, and made sure to wear socks so my feet wouldn’t glue to the kitchen tiles and make that dissonant kissing sound. Lit only by the pygmy lamp over the stovetop, its eggshell glow bouncing off the aqua-blue walls with a sickly pallor, my hands would fumble their way across the island until finding that old friend, the plastic block, a half-dozen chef’s knives sheathed within. I’d select a new one each night, not out of any logistical practice, but because I couldn’t stand the thought of the blades being as lonely as I was.

I’d retreat to my room, the TV still casting an animated shadow over my bed, and I would begin my night’s work, the same work every night. I couldn’t will myself to sleep, so I would watch TV. I would twirl and pluck at my hair, dropping tufts to the floor like flowers around a casket, a tic that morphed into a compulsive disorder known as trichotillomania. And I would hold the knife to my wrist, pleading for the courage to make one decisive slit.

In 2010, the indelible era of my coming of age, I determined two unshakeable truths, conclusions that would settle into my perception of self as if carved into my skin. I knew I was gay, and I knew I wanted to die. I was fifteen years old.

I lived in Davie, a comfortable pocket of south Florida, though not a particularly enlivening or progressive one. A forty-five-minute drive to Miami may as well have been another planet, and anyway, I was keener on the indoors than the beaches, and keener on the edgelord ethos of Internet forums than the freewheeling utopia promised by exploration of the city. I wish there had been some delicious brush with queerness to unlock the epiphany of my own sexual orientation, but in truth, it was a small and solitary discovery. I had a crush on a boy in my phys-ed class, and like every writer, I tried massaging my churning mind in a screed of a Word document. I arrived at the earth-shaking conclusion after about two thousand words in plain, ten-point Calibri: Maybe you’re gay? I closed the file without saving and shut my laptop, as if that would undo the idea. But such a revelation is a bit like a lacerated throat: once it’s open, it can’t really be resealed.

I didn’t have a ‘problem’ with Gay People, and my parents never suggested that Gay People were intrinsically evil. Brokeback Mountain wasn’t banned in my house, it just wasn’t my family’s cup of campfire stew. I didn’t know any gay ‘elders,’ save the drama teacher who showed me Moonstruck for the first time (which, I know now, is mentorship of an oblique sort.) My opinions on queerness were more akin to bland disdain, an unspoken understanding that Gay People were lesser-than. What I’d been taught of Gay People by my environment, intentionally or otherwise, was that they were frivolous, slothful, and ultimately disposable.

I wanted to be excellent, and serious, and indispensable. But my grades were flagging, my discipline was heretofore nonexistent, my mood on any given day was tempestuous and disorderly, and my only discernible talent was sneaking slipcases into my room, my parents none the wiser. I lacked the worldly connections to take real advantage of my stealth, to slip more illicit secrets and substances, and so I settled for depraved media, horror of the most indulgent and repulsive strains.

A refresher: in 2010, paranormal activities excited the zeitgeist, while the fading scares of gruesome ‘torture porn’ were drifting down the tributary of entertainment: from multiplexes, to used DVD bins and, finally, to late-night basic-cable, where they arrived to me.

The premier titles of this trend were, of course, the Saw films; there was something admirable about their directness. The serial killer John Kramer (Jigsaw if you’re nasty) spends ninety minutes abducting assorted lowlifes and staging, for lack of a better word, an intervention. Said seedy individuals do not “value their lives,” he growls over a grainy tape recording, and their only means of redemption is a visceral come-to-Jesus by way of an absurdly sophisticated (and admittedly creative) DIY torture device. There’s a detective story interspersed throughout, in the same way a copy of Hustler is interspersed with articles.

It does not surprise me that the Saw franchise resonated on a level both conscious and subconscious. I’d been engorging on horror movies from the day my mom told me I wasn’t allowed to watch Jaws. (Discipline? Nonexistent!) Like any passion-cum-addiction, I’d built up a tolerance for austere frights. I needed harder stuff, and by the second Saw, would-be survivors were already scalping their own heads with Bowie knives. They scratched my media itch with a rusty razor.

The majority of Jigsaw’s targets are garden-variety scumbags, people who don’t value life insofar as they take advantage of other living beings. But it’s clear that the temptation to die, to extricate oneself from the physical and psychological rigor of a trial of the flesh, was always a consideration for series creators Leigh Whannell and James Wan.

In the original draft of the Saw screenplay, the first tape we hear, dedicated to Whannell’s grungy slacker Adam, observes, “So many days you have wanted to die – today your aim is to live.” In Saw III, we learn that John Kramer’s erratic assistant Amanda still suffers self-harming tendencies despite her master’s rehabilitation, cutting her thigh to cope with her grief.

For all of Kramer’s gravelly posturing about retribution, Adam and Amanda are targets of a different agenda, one less concerned with justice than with simple appreciation. When Amanda defeats her brutal bear trap test, Jigsaw’s puppet persona Billy wheels into the room, opining: “Most people are so ungrateful to be alive. But not you. Not anymore.”

This emphasis on gratitude strikes me as a relic of the mid-aughts, a time before it was inappropriate to call it ‘committing’ suicide. Even a franchise which reveled in bloodshed, making crimson snow angels in untold layers of human viscera, still abided by the Bush-era value judgment that those who wish to die are selfish or weak. It’s a thematic trademark the series is allowed to return to time and again, and it remains uninterrogated because audiences of the time misunderstood, or weren’t interested in understanding, the ensnared depressives.

As he’s questioned by detectives in Saw II, John Kramer insists, “I’ve never murdered anyone in my life. The decisions are up to them.” Jigsaw isn’t a serial killer, he swears, no more than a drug dealer is a serial killer, or a high school bully. He enables miserable people on a downward spiral, providing both the means and the motivation to finish the proverbial job their destructive behaviors have already suggested. If they want to earn their reprieve, they must miraculously find gratitude, somehow reversing years of hopelessness and injurious practices free of professional help. To say nothing of the whole gouging-your-own-eye-out-with-a-scalpel-in-under-a-minute business.

From outside of the whirlpool of an unkind, even violent self-image, it must seem so easy. If I didn’t want to die, I would simply fight for my life. If they didn’t want to die, maybe they shouldn’t have acted in a way to attract Jigsaw’s attention. Them’s the breaks! It sounds like another refrain I used to hear: Have they ever tried not being gay?

The Saw films ask their audience to side with John Kramer; why else would they devote so much time to the education of his disciples Amanda and, later, Detective Hoffman? The only explanation for the end of the series’ dominance can be that the stories we tell about ourselves has shifted.

If horror fans once consumed from a place of draconian superiority, they have since migrated to a land of unprejudiced empathy, not viewing the horror from above so much as placing themselves inside of it. The twin films of Ari Aster, Hereditary and Midsommar, have given culture writers dozens, nay, hundreds of pieces about the complicated empowerment of damaged women. Likewise, viral tweets about suicidal ideation cross my feed every week, often penned by users younger than me, often darkly humorous. It’s apparent that an impulse toward hopelessness or even suicide is more universally understood now as something which defies easy treatment or, in my case, something beyond predictable teenage melodrama.

Though I never engaged in any Saw-adjacent hypotheticals, I must have appeared like a prime candidate for one of his traps: a mercurial suburban dilettante whose self-loathing was entirely unearned. I grew up in a house with two floors and two refrigerators; my parents both worked as accountants, and their dry professional pragmatism extended to my upbringing. I had been blessed with unbelievable good fortune, yet I had failed to show exceptional aptitude (or interest) in any one subject or activity. I was a bratty little twerp with a bad attitude and even worse acne. And, I’d recently discovered, I was a deviant queer to boot. What use did the world have for me?

Reflecting on my two-year nadir, when the knife work was a private nightly commitment in my mind’s planner, I wonder why I settled on my particular method of absolution. There were plenty of over-the-counter bottles around the house I could have gulped in full before being lulled into eternal sleep. There was a perfectly good car in the driveway, and a perfectly good canal just down the street, deep enough for a midnight plunge. That, I think, would have been too bombastic; I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone with my fatuous undoing. And anyway, I didn’t think I was owed such an easy death, the shame of my queerness made manifest.

For as much of a stink as Jigsaw makes about his subjects being “grateful” for their lives, gratitude wasn’t at all a factor in my ideation. I was plenty grateful for the roof over my head, and the TV that accompanied my sleepless nights, and the family who didn’t strike me when I displayed a modest (fine, major) passion for pop music and red-carpet fashion.

I wanted to die because I didn’t deserve it, all of it, and if no one else would punish me, I had to punish myself. Had Jigsaw ever captured me, what a relief it would have been! I would have sat patiently on the dirt-soaked floor, arms folded, and waited for his timer to detonate, thereby proving my unworthiness and releasing me from a lifetime of wasteful guilt. Slitting my wrists might have offered a way out, but perhaps I didn’t deserve that, either. These are the places to which my mind traveled, in lieu of confronting the notion of presenting daily as an incompetent gay boy at a high school in Davie, Florida.

I applied myself to the torturous test every night, and while by Jigsaw’s metrics I had succeeded, my humiliation only multiplied. It was shameful for me to be alive, a sexual anomaly without the talent to forgive my perverse fantasies; it was shameful for me to die by my own hand. Most shameful of all, I couldn’t even conjure the grit to make an attempt, a shallow slice to at least proffer a receipt for my intentions. If I was trapped in something like a Jigsaw test, it was as if the nefarious mastermind had never activated the chamber.

I would learn that the test wasn’t my nightly communion with the kitchen knives. My trial transpired in the daytime, when I would crawl from my bedroom, dazed and without affect, and return the knife to its block undetected before dutifully joining my sister on the way to school. I weathered years of teachers chiding me for falling asleep in class; of feeling inadequate seated next to students with Ivy League aspirations; of insisting I wasn’t gay when I very well knew I was because faking it was the only way I could conceive of survival in such a redneck sphere of the world. And then, it occurred to me, survival had become the new objective, rather than purposeful, ecstatic annihilation.

Ultimately, it was my trichotillomania, that compulsive hair-pulling habit, which startled my parents into sending me to therapy. I didn’t take it seriously, offering insincere agreement and reticence, but the sessions worked in spite of my petulance. I fought the urge to pluck and twirl, and the lessons I discerned from that battle transferred imperceptibly to my ideation. At first it was merely performance, but I found a way to act like I’d earned the life I’d been given, like John Kramer would have wanted, until the acting congealed into authentic experience. Then I started actually kissing boys, and that really gave me something to live for.

Last Halloween, I returned to the Saw movies, their immutable qualities of exposure therapy triggering memories of my insomniac nights of imagined flagellation. Am I supposed to resent these films, for the vicious thoughts to which they played party? I don’t, and I never will. I count them among the pantheon of seminal genre works that ensnared my psyche before I could articulate my fascination with the macabre.

I’m not suggesting that the Saws, of all things, are seminal to the medium of film, merely seminal to my education within it. Upon revisitation, they’re quite silly: sophomoric depictions of heinous grotesquery in service of a time-sensitive mandate, a need to escalate the intricacy of the torture devices with each sequel, rubber-stamped to increasingly sadistic crowds on an annual basis for the better part of a decade. In a recent thread that made the rounds across Film Twitter, some users accused the Saws of being prime examples of “truly evil” movies.

I find this reading rudimentary, and delivered in bad faith, but I understand the logic: present a succession of candidates given the opportunity to earn their living, only to fail nine times out of ten, and an audience at risk of suicidal ideation might intuit a wrongheaded lesson. When a Jigsaw copycat enters the fold in Saw III, creating tests which literally cannot be beat, the implication seems to be that no matter how strenuously one champions their own survival, some forces are too powerful to overcome.

In Saw: The Final Chapter (to be followed by two sequels and counting), Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington plays the leader of a despicable gang of skinheads whose especially revolting vehicular executions elicit little sympathy. In press interviews, Bennington spoke at length about advocating for a role in the film, despite his limited acting credentials. Something about these glorified grindhouse flicks connected with him, converted him to a self-proclaimed Saw devotee. Bennington died by suicide in July 2017.

I don’t believe the Saw franchise encouraged my suicidal ideation, nor do I believe years spent devouring movies like Hostel, Turistas, and Martyrs was indicative of my latent unwell. Rather, I believe that people who will to imagine their own deaths are endeared to the more abstract idea of imagination at large. Whatever could be said about my inability to self-harm, at least I was the one to design my hypothetical demise.

Their predilection for morality is what separated the Saws from their slasher brethren. There was always more on the minds of Whannell and Wan than the colorful slaying of nubile teens; hell, I maintain that Saw VI is a better indictment of the insurance industry than anything else modern cinema has been able to offer.

But such an emphasis on thoughtfulness in execution is a double-edged sword (strangely, not a weapon Jigsaw ever employed.) If a horror film is going to contend with philosophical quandaries of human worth, it is inevitably tied to the values of the era in which it was created, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more callous period in modern American history than the years following the September 11th attacks. The Saw movies were ubiquitous in their time; there is no other time in which the Saws could have been ubiquitous.

I don’t cast aspersions. I, too, am a product of this time, as merciless to myself then as any horror audience to the victims onscreen. I was the audience for these films, the white male teen to whom Hollywood caters exclusively nowadays. The studio heads presumed I was watching for the gleeful carnage, and I suppose, in a sense, I was. I projected my inner hatred onto fictive figures, and though queerness never really enters the narrative equation, it was always at the fore of my mind, and it couldn’t help but mingle with my ingesting of torture porn. Addiction, abuse, suicide, homosexuality… a sin is a sin, so said the dogma, and there must come atonement.

Ten years removed, I’m very much grateful for my life, and I’m getting better at not chastising myself for it. A new chapter in the Saw series has emerged, one I can watch on a theater screen, rather than a twenty-four-inch TV. As a writer, I can still feel the tendrils of my adolescent influences and experiences snaking their way across my stories, for better or worse. My characters, while often loudly, ebulliently gay, are by no means infallible. As a result of their misdeeds, I don’t tend to write easy journeys for them. Indeed, I tend to punish them.

This probably makes me a poor poster boy for ‘representation.’ But then, horror has never been a space for moral purity. I can’t help that I’m attracted to transgressive material, among other things to which I can’t help my attraction.

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