See, Seeing, Seen, Saw: A Phenomenology of Ultra-Violent Cinema

Vivian Sobchack claims in Carnal Thoughts that human bodies are continually remade by the “technologies of photography, cinema, and the electronic media” (2004, 135). One such sphere of contemporary media that continuously redefines the notion of the human body is horror cinema. The recent advent of so-called ‘gorenography,’ spearheaded by James Wan and Leigh Whannel’s Saw (2004), issues conceptual and philosophical challenges to the presentation and conceptualization of the phenomenal body. Following in the scope of frameworks advanced by both Sobchack and Jennifer Barker this paper aims to explore how the body of the Saw series is constructed and how it emulates both the conceptualized bodies of its viewers and the state of modern information flow in a technological age. It will be argued that the Saw series not only recognises viewers’ enjoyment of its genre conventions but also acknowledges and manipulates their engagement with the film as a phenomenological object through which a sense of re-embodiment can be enacted