Health Policy in Saw VI & Sharia Law

Concept testing global models for a more humane death panel.

You can tell a lot about someone’s politics from their favorite film in the Saw franchise.

For a series that found its start in the violence-glorifying post-9/11 milieu alongside torture tales from 24 to Hostel, the Saw series has sustained itself long enough to see itself shapeshift politically. Spiral: From the Book of Saw was a post-2020 resistance-inflected critique of police power, and other installments take on the legal system (Saw III), medical scams (Saw X) and predatory mortgage lending (Saw VI). And then there’s the feel-good Saw V, which is a sort of allegory promoting teamwork and collaboration -- almost sickeningly sweet for a series that is normally just, well, sickening.

The scattershot worldview of Saw universe is a major critique of the series¹, and it is indeed very disorienting. But it also allows the films to serve as a kind of social barometer measuring shifts in attitudes about political violence over the two decades it spans. Specifically, you can plot how the sto…