Kevin Greutert's No Sympathy For The Devil

It is popularly said that movies reflect life. Directors and writers of movie production usually aim to send some form of message to their audience that may be adhere to the political, social, economic, or moral aspects of modern life. Some of these movies directly refer to modern events and entangle them into the plot of the movie. This event or policy usually directly affects the main character. This is reflected in the movie Saw VI, directed by Kevin Greutert in 2009. Saw VI reflects a real world concern of corrupt insurance companies that use the clients’ money for profit through making obscure criteria to avoid providing coverage in place of trying to help and cover their patients through their illness. The film reflects the severe aftermath of a patient who is refused help by their own insurance company who ends up becoming known as “the Jigsaw Killer”(Saw VI). Saw VI is about a serial killer known as the Jigsaw killer. The killer himself, however, stands by the theory that he has never actually killed anyone himself. He believes they chose their own fate. He gives all of his victims a chance to survive because he wants all of his victims to find an appreciation for their own lives through what the Jigsaw killer phrases it as “a game”(Kramer, Saw VI). He only places people into his traps if he believes they do not appreciate their lives. An example of someone who does not appreciate their lives, from his perspective, could be a drug addict or someone who is suicidal. He has put people like this in his “games” before. In every movie he asks the victim, “Do you wanna play a game?” before explaining what they must do to survive (Kramer, Saw VI). In his “games”, he sets a trap, most commonly constrained by time, and the victim has to play the game by his rules in order to survive. If the “player”, or victim, does not play by the rules, does not do it on time, or does not win the game, the victim dies. Sometimes he puts multiple victims together who have to work together in order to survive. Some victims will kill other victims so that they can survive. In this particular movie, he makes an insurance executive fight for his life because the executive sentences others to die by rejecting them for health insurance coverage. This insurance executive ends up dying because whether he died or lived was dependent upon a family who recently lost their father to an illness because the same executive rejected their father for coverage. This is the Jigsaw killer’s way of providing justice or righting the world’s wrongs. The main character’s name is Jigsaw, the Jigsaw Killer or John Kramer as he is known to those outside of his game. Although most people see Kramer as a classic villain, he …show more content…
She is a former victim, or survivor as she likes to say, of Jigsaw. She went into his “game” as a drug addict and came out drug-free. However, she is not a hero in this movie, maybe even far from it. She starts out as an outlaw hero that murders in order to survive. Then she transforms into a villain when she becomes Jigsaw’s assistant and does not abide by the rules of his game by not giving the victims the chance to live. She is this type of villain because she doesn’t have a backstory that makes her sympathetic to the audience. In “No Sympathy for the Devil”, the author argues that in Dexter, the television show, he became sympathetic when the audience saw his backstory (Havrilesky 466). Amanda does not have a compelling backstory and simply wants to torture people. When Kramer gives her the freedom to be in charge of one of his “games” she makes it so no one can survive it. What motivates her to participate in the “games” is to please Kramer, she sincerely believes that Kramer healed her, “It works. It's real. He helped me” (Amanda, Saw VI). However, she also does it to satisfy her own sick desire to torture people the way she was tortured. A struggle within herself is to try to please Kramer while also trying to fulfill her own desires to hurt people while trying not to get caught by the police or having Kramer disapprove of her