The villain protagonist John (archetypal everyman European name, John Q. Public, like fellow bald reactionary European moralist "John Doe" from Se7en) Kramer/Jigsaw: a charismatic cult leader, highly intelligent (formerly a middle-class civil engineer), bitterly resentful, morally self-righteous, reactionary, control freak, skinhead (in Saw 1), social Darwinist/eugenicist and hypocritical sadistic psychopath of German ethnic origin.
The villain protagonist in the second half of the Saw series (2007-2010) is detective turned sociopathic Jigsaw apprentice Mark Hoffman, another ethnic German.
The ageing Kramer is diagnosed with the Walter White/Walt Kowalski special: terminal cancer (a metaphor for "inevitable racial decline and death") and proceeds to lash out by going on a pronged killing spree (commit genocide), with a bathroom (traditionally a place of cleansing, "shower" parallels, but also a place of filth and waste removal) being the series' central location (incidentally, the central location of Saw 2 is the "nerve gas house" and one of its traps is an oven, with the house containing a hidden basement door to the bathroom).
The five most prominent ethnic European characters in Saw 1 are supposed archetypes of "white America's" moral degeneracy (“we arrested a dentist last week who liked to play with kids a bit too much. He lived two blocks from here. The sewer lines run under this neighbourhood too, doctor.” - Tapp to pre-trap Jigsaw suspect Gordon). They are morally compromised at best, evil at worst and evil more often than not:
Kramer (the Jigsaw killer)
Dr. Gordon (arrogant, largely absent and emotionally unavailable as a husband and father, correspondingly fails to protect his family from Jigsaw/Zep, meets an East Asian student doctor in a hotel room for an affair, future Jigsaw apprentice with shades of Dr. Mengele)
Adam (vulgar dirtbag freelance photographer, "voyeur", dies in the bathroom)
Amanda (heroin addict, cutter, explicit Stockholm syndrome, future Jigsaw apprentice and surrogate daughter)
Zep (subservient and downtrodden hospital orderly, incel-coded, deranged psychopath, dies in the bathroom)
Jigsaw and his apprentices intimidate their victims with a grotesque white doll and dress up in (decidedly non-kosher) pig costumes when kidnapping them; a nod to their shared colour, animalistic brutality and moral corruption. Notably, Kramer never recruits a non-European apprentice and we are nine Saw films in at this point, with it being a very racially diverse franchise.
By radical contrast, the multiracial and sex egalitarian police are framed as America's heroes in opposition to patriarchal ethnic European moral degeneracy and evil; the three most prominent in Saw 1 being detective Tapp (African, meticulous, obsessively devoted to bringing Jigsaw down, self-sacrificial, saves Dr. Gordon’s all-American family from Zep, played by Danny Glover of Lethal Weapon and Predator 2 hero cop fame), detective Sing (Chinese) and detective Kerry (tough, no-nonsense, "the voice of reason", played by a Jewish woman).
More policemen are added in the 2nd film to replace Jigsaw victims Tapp and Sing: officer Rigg (African, idealistic hero cop, name almost identical to Danny Glover’s heroic buddy cop partner in Lethal Weapon) and detective Matthews (European, adulterer, bad father, divorced, pig cop, the first unambiguously European-American cop and the first seriously corrupt cop, his rage and lack of composure enable Jigsaw to escape). The second major European male cop we're introduced to is the aforementioned detective Hoffman in Saw 3.
In this regard and others, Saw is similar to "Nazi exploitation films" like Eli Roth's Hostel and The Human Centipede.
Saw also shares strong thematic parallels with Breaking Bad, a subtle example of this being that Art Blank and Declan (minor characters and business partners of Jigsaw and Heisenberg respectively) are played by the same actor. The casting process in these productions is meticulous: did they HAVE to cast Louis Ferreira in that seemingly insignificant but very specific and identical role? It's there to make the connection subconsciously: Jigsaw and Heisenberg represent the same archetypes ("the regular white man", "the evil white man", "Hitler", "Satan"), as do Jigsaw and fellow European intellectual social Darwinist psychopath Hannibal Lecter (which the final scene in Saw 1 makes clear, evoking a parallel with Hannibal's false-face removal in The Silence of the Lambs). Jigsaw is part of a vast post-war genealogy of authoritarian European villains.
Let's say John Kramer had instead been named John Finkelstein or John Goldberg. Would that fact have been seen as unremarkable by Western critics? Would the film have ever been distributed by a "big six" Hollywood studio? If it had been made it would have been labelled "anti-Jewish hate propaganda", with significant career and social repercussions for those involved in its production. By contrast, Hollywood is more than happy to give the green light to the production and distribution of ethnocidal anti-European hate propaganda.
Saw is fundamentally a loose roman à clef of WW2 with Jigsaw as Hitler, his Mansonian cult as the Nazi party and his campaign of torture-murder as the holocaust.
The villain protagonist in the second half of the Saw series (2007-2010) is detective turned sociopathic Jigsaw apprentice Mark Hoffman, another ethnic German.
The ageing Kramer is diagnosed with the Walter White/Walt Kowalski special: terminal cancer (a metaphor for "inevitable racial decline and death") and proceeds to lash out by going on a pronged killing spree (commit genocide), with a bathroom (traditionally a place of cleansing, "shower" parallels, but also a place of filth and waste removal) being the series' central location (incidentally, the central location of Saw 2 is the "nerve gas house" and one of its traps is an oven, with the house containing a hidden basement door to the bathroom).
The five most prominent ethnic European characters in Saw 1 are supposed archetypes of "white America's" moral degeneracy (“we arrested a dentist last week who liked to play with kids a bit too much. He lived two blocks from here. The sewer lines run under this neighbourhood too, doctor.” - Tapp to pre-trap Jigsaw suspect Gordon). They are morally compromised at best, evil at worst and evil more often than not:
Kramer (the Jigsaw killer)
Dr. Gordon (arrogant, largely absent and emotionally unavailable as a husband and father, correspondingly fails to protect his family from Jigsaw/Zep, meets an East Asian student doctor in a hotel room for an affair, future Jigsaw apprentice with shades of Dr. Mengele)
Adam (vulgar dirtbag freelance photographer, "voyeur", dies in the bathroom)
Amanda (heroin addict, cutter, explicit Stockholm syndrome, future Jigsaw apprentice and surrogate daughter)
Zep (subservient and downtrodden hospital orderly, incel-coded, deranged psychopath, dies in the bathroom)
Jigsaw and his apprentices intimidate their victims with a grotesque white doll and dress up in (decidedly non-kosher) pig costumes when kidnapping them; a nod to their shared colour, animalistic brutality and moral corruption. Notably, Kramer never recruits a non-European apprentice and we are nine Saw films in at this point, with it being a very racially diverse franchise.
By radical contrast, the multiracial and sex egalitarian police are framed as America's heroes in opposition to patriarchal ethnic European moral degeneracy and evil; the three most prominent in Saw 1 being detective Tapp (African, meticulous, obsessively devoted to bringing Jigsaw down, self-sacrificial, saves Dr. Gordon’s all-American family from Zep, played by Danny Glover of Lethal Weapon and Predator 2 hero cop fame), detective Sing (Chinese) and detective Kerry (tough, no-nonsense, "the voice of reason", played by a Jewish woman).
More policemen are added in the 2nd film to replace Jigsaw victims Tapp and Sing: officer Rigg (African, idealistic hero cop, name almost identical to Danny Glover’s heroic buddy cop partner in Lethal Weapon) and detective Matthews (European, adulterer, bad father, divorced, pig cop, the first unambiguously European-American cop and the first seriously corrupt cop, his rage and lack of composure enable Jigsaw to escape). The second major European male cop we're introduced to is the aforementioned detective Hoffman in Saw 3.
In this regard and others, Saw is similar to "Nazi exploitation films" like Eli Roth's Hostel and The Human Centipede.
Saw also shares strong thematic parallels with Breaking Bad, a subtle example of this being that Art Blank and Declan (minor characters and business partners of Jigsaw and Heisenberg respectively) are played by the same actor. The casting process in these productions is meticulous: did they HAVE to cast Louis Ferreira in that seemingly insignificant but very specific and identical role? It's there to make the connection subconsciously: Jigsaw and Heisenberg represent the same archetypes ("the regular white man", "the evil white man", "Hitler", "Satan"), as do Jigsaw and fellow European intellectual social Darwinist psychopath Hannibal Lecter (which the final scene in Saw 1 makes clear, evoking a parallel with Hannibal's false-face removal in The Silence of the Lambs). Jigsaw is part of a vast post-war genealogy of authoritarian European villains.
Let's say John Kramer had instead been named John Finkelstein or John Goldberg. Would that fact have been seen as unremarkable by Western critics? Would the film have ever been distributed by a "big six" Hollywood studio? If it had been made it would have been labelled "anti-Jewish hate propaganda", with significant career and social repercussions for those involved in its production. By contrast, Hollywood is more than happy to give the green light to the production and distribution of ethnocidal anti-European hate propaganda.
Saw is fundamentally a loose roman à clef of WW2 with Jigsaw as Hitler, his Mansonian cult as the Nazi party and his campaign of torture-murder as the holocaust.
