Yes, you read the title right. I just finished watching the sixtha nd the final Saw movie. Now, some people mocked it by claiming it's torture porn. I assume that with this the aim is to propose that the sole purpose of Saw movies is to offer people an opportunity to watch others suffer, seriously suffer, both physically and psychologically (and morally in traps involving more than one person), not so much to offer an actual plausible story in which torture is just a way of carrying out the motivations of the characters.
I suppose it all boils down to one question: which came first, the storyline or the traps? I've watched all the extras the DVDs have to offer and it seems it's a bit of a borderline case. I mean, it similar to the cases (in film, music, art etc.) which are provocative and, in fact, require thinking. The first one to come to mind is the art exhibition by some Finnish female artist who criticised child porn through photographs of minors. Another example would be the movie "An American Crime", which has been accused of sensetionalising the events that actually took place, and being blurring about whether the movie is a drama that has violence or violence with celluloid drama. I think the Finnish phrase "mässäillä väkivallalla/seksillä" is quite sufficient.
So basically: is the controversal thing there for its own sake or does it serve a "higher", more abstract purpose? If you look at Saw movies separately, I suppose one could interpret them as torture porn. However, this in turn boils down to another question: the question whether a viewer perceives Jigsaw's logic of the person's crime matching the game they are chained into, so to speak. If the viewer disagrees, and thus is in need of an even higher purpose, they are more likely to view it as torture porn. But if the viewer does agree, they may be more likely to consider the given purpose sufficient and/or is willing to wait and see what the rest of the movie has to explain on the matter (as there always is a plot twist) or perhaps to the rest of the series (Saw VI did wrap up many loose ends). Of course this division isn't infallible as all Saw movies have several traps and thus propose numerous situation, each in which the viewer must take a stand to agree or disagree with Jigsaw's logic of punishment.
The whole concept of porn (torture or regular) is also slightly problematic as there are also different views on that. Is porn for porn's sake okay? I'm sure there are plenty of people more than willing to disagree but I think it is okay. There's an interesting to this attitude within the adult film community, too: (1) Do the writers/directors take porn for porn's sake without making a plot around it to make it perhaps more believable or to point out clearer that the film is indeed fiction? (2) Do the writers/directors make up a sloppy, superficial, a-few-cliché-lines dialogue as if to.. yeah, what? Does someone need that kind of dialogue and unbelievable plot? (3) Or, do the makers, regardless of the genre and therefore, by definition, having sex in it, make a nice and believable background story and characters for the actors (I'd like to refer all lesbian porn fans to Girlfriends Films but I'm pretty sure you're aware of the production already)? Personally, I'm in favour of numbers 1 and 3. Perhaps this is why I don't get passionate over the possibility of Saws as torture porn as they make the storyline plausible enough to fall to the third category.
Apparently there's no clean-cut answer for this question (and my essay writing has clearly left my brain on the academic writing mode...). Below is a link to a YouTuber called Nykytyne2 from whom I got the term torture porn.
