"Wanting people to listen, you can't just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you'll notice you've got their strict attention."
--John Doe, Se7en
"Yes, I'm sick, officer. Sick from the disease eating away at me inside. Sick of those who don't appreciate their blessings. Sick of those who scoff at the suffering of others. I'm sick of it all!"
--Jigsaw, Saw
I love movies, and I love philosophy, so I decided to combine these interests and analyze the ethical beliefs and philosophical motivations of my two favorite cinema serial killers: John Doe from Se7en, and John Kramer, otherwise known as Jigsaw from the Saw movies. Both of these serial killers clearly share some characteristics beyond their first names. Both are highly intelligent, willing to be apprehended by authorities if it furthers their goals, deeply committed to their system of values, and believers that they are serving society through their work. Both allow their lives to end in order to teach someone else a moral lesson. The killings of both hold symbolic significance: Doe kills his victims or arranges for them to die in ways that reflect whichever of the seven deadly sins is most prominent in their life, and Kramer puts his victims in traps that similarly have some special meaning pertaining to the individual(s) in each trap. Where the two differ is in their philosophical foundations for their values, the intended outcome of the methods used, and their attitudes towards their murders.
Although John Doe deviates from Biblical morality in so many enormous ways--he murders (Exodus 21:12-14), kidnaps (Exodus 21:16), commits acts of vigilantism (Deuteronomy 25:1), stretches out the torture of the sloth victim for around a year (Deuteronomy 25:3), involves rape in one of the killings (Deuteronomy 22:25-27), and implicitly makes adulterous advances to Mill's wife (Deuteronomy 22:22)--at the very least, despite his deviance from his seeming quasi-Christian morality, he has a philosophical basis for his work that is at least partially correct. The exact moral nature of the deity he believes he serves is grossly different from that of the actual Yahweh in reality, but Doe does at least have a metaphysical basis for his moral beliefs. He is not simply saying that his values are a matter of preference. He believes that they are objectively binding. Still, despite the Christian undertones and overtones in his moral beliefs, he seems to derive the specific moral obligations of his system not from divine revelation in Scripture but from some claimed special relationship with God, which is an entirely fallacious foundation for moral knowledge. Intuition, conscience, preferences, social popularity, nature, and estimated outcome can never tell someone if an act is right or wrong, and while Doe avoids the fallacies for some of these other ethical systems he still succumbs to deep errors.
John Kramer, contrary to this, and despite all of his moralistic passion, never appeals to anything more than his own subjective pangs of conscience. For instance, in Saw V, when arguing with his future apprentice Hoffman over Hoffman's vigilante murder of a man in a Jigsaw trap imitation that did not allow the victim even an opportunity to escape, he yells out that "Killing is distasteful . . . to me." Hoffman violated one of his most prioritized moral principles--that no one should be directly killed, only tested in a scenario where he or she can escape and be inwardly transformed. Kramer has no deficit of commitment to his work, yet he never actually explains why his values system is true and how he knows it is. Why is gratitude morally good? Why is intentionally killing someone universally wrong (by Kramer's standard, not by Yahweh's)? Jigsaw gives no answers and never even brings up the questions. He is still a moral realist and certainly not a moral nihilist. He just has no rational basis for his moral claims. Yes, Doe's moral epistemology is wildly fallacious at best, but he at least has a metaphysical anchor for his values.
Kramer, on one hand, aims to rehabilitate people through their tests, which will kill them if they fail. He laments the travesty of people wasting their lives by not experiencing gratitude for their existences. "Those who do not appreciate life do not deserve life," he claims. He concludes that "Most people are so ungrateful to be alive" and that the solution is to place people in situations that force them to decide if they appreciate life enough to exert the effort necessary to escape their traps. Ultimately, Kramer thinks that he is not even a murderer because he has never directly killed someone, as he lets them make their choices in the traps; he even says that he despises people who murder. Of course, this does nothing to negate the fact that he is still directly responsible (along with his apprentices in some cases) for abducting them and putting them in the situations that often kill them. He is still a murderer, albeit in a somewhat more untraditional way.
Doe, on the other hand, seeks to expose the commonality and disgustingness of the seven deadly sins and their manifestations in the modern world. "We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it's common, it's trivial," he tells a detective, upon voluntarily surrendering himself to the police. He sees a world that overlooks the smaller examples of sin that contribute to an environment where the larger examples of it can happen with less of an outcry. Doe admits to enjoying his work, while Kramer objects when his own apprentices display sadistic attitudes (Hoffman in a Saw VI flashback). At the very least Kramer wants his victims to survive and learn from their experiences, having little to none of the overt malice that Doe revels in. Doe is far more morally apathetic towards the results of his actions than Kramer.
Both Doe and Kramer, though, share some common moral ground with actual Christian ethics (I say "actual" because what is often represented as "Christian morality" in many areas like criminal justice and sexuality is deeply contrary to what the Bible actually teaches). Each still operates in total violation of parts of Christian morality; each serial killer simply believes things that are indeed distinctively Christian ideas. John Doe and John Kramer are not entirely wrong in their conclusions, just entirely wrong in the actions they engage in as a response to their observations.
Se7en and the Saw films are not movies that will be enjoyed by everyone as films that entertain or as conductors of philosophical concepts. But for those who do view them, the movies can bring attention to issues about justice, moral metaphysics, moral epistemology, human nature, and redemption (though this is found more in the Saw series). Christians can find some very intriguing claims made by the serial killers John Doe and John Kramer, having to do with issues that all Christians must be equipped to address.
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