Saw’s Adam Faulkner-Stanheight and Queercoding
In today’s day and age, I believe any relatively media-literate person would be able to tell you what “queercoding” is in the lamest of terms.
It’s the flamboyant male sidekick in Disney movies who is comically gender non-conforming and is played for laughs. It’s the punky girl in sitcoms who seems to despise all men and is mean to everybody she encounters, while still having a heart of gold she extends to her female friends. That's, no offense to media critics who spent years unpacking the never-ending layers of undeniable queerness in these characters, baby’s first queercoding. For the context of this essay, let’s call this extremely obvious type of coding “cishet queercoding” - coding largely done by cishet people, easily recognizable by cishet people. What I want to unpack in this essay is “queer queercoding”. By my definition, “queer queercoding” isn’t necessarily LGBT characters by LGBT folks for LGBT folks, but rather coding a character as queer (accidentally or not) in such a way it’s painfully familiar for LGBT people but largely goes over the head of cishet folks. So where does Saw fit into all this?
Saw’s whole premise is a complicated, morally gray mix of one man both exacting revenge on people who wronged him and teaching them to appreciate the sanctity of life. While the main antagonist, Jigsaw, isn’t afraid of collateral damage, his main targets are people who somehow ruined his life and don’t appreciate their own. This is why Dr. Lawrence Gordon finds himself in the trap - for cheating on his wife and not fulfilling his duty as a compassionate doctor to Jigsaw, a terminal cancer patient. His companion in the trap though - a downtrodden twenty-something photographer Adam Faulkner-Stanheight - seems to only be there as an accessory to Gordon’s torture. He doesn’t have any immediate connection to Jigsaw and his only connection to Gordon is that he was hired to spy and photograph his activities. Gordon’s condition to escape the trap is that he must kill Adam. Adam doesn’t get a solution to escape.
Adam’s function in the film is seemingly to be an audience self-insert and then to suffer. The audience for gory, tacky horror flicks is obviously much closer to Adam’s character than to Gordon’s so while we can sympathize with the latter’s struggle, the former’s is much more visceral. It can also be argued that Adam is much more relatable because he was closer to the filmmakers’ heart - the film’s screenwriter, Leigh Whannell, portrays him in the film. Adam’s background was also largely left on the cutting room floor, hints as to what a person he was like outside of the trap left much more ambiguous than Lawrence Gordon’s life. Adam’s only crime seems to be taking a job to earn some money and not being satisfied with a life that’s frankly hard to be satisfied with (In his own words - “I remember going to sleep in my shithole apartment and then waking up in an actual shithole”1). And he dies in the end - abandoned, on the edge of escape, not knowing what he did to deserve this fate - while his fellow prisoner, as we later find out, becomes Jigsaw’s apprentice and goes on to torture other people. And we’re also left haunted, as I mentioned we were well-acquainted with Gordon’s wrongdoings, but we don’t know what Adam did to deserve a cold and lonely death. Is trying to make money to try to survive such a crime, on par with negligence and infidelity? Obviously, I’m weighing these actions on Jigsaw’s scales, no one should cut off their foot for cheating on their wife, but you can see there’s a very potent theme of class horror bubbling under the grindhouse surface of Saw, among other things.
Cool, so I’ve explained why Saw is scary beyond a guy cutting his foot off, why is Adam queer again? Well, besides his artistic career, general cynicism about life, comically crippling addiction to nicotine (queer existence and addiction to substances is a well-documented problem in real life, a coping method for living in an unaccepting society), and a cut dialogue line revealing he doesn’t speak to his parents2 (I don’t think I need to explain how many queer children were disowned by their caretakers), being put in a narrative only to suffer, die and be outlived by some cishet douchebag is possibly the oldest queer trope in cinema. His character plays nicely off Gordon, a well-groomed, seemingly well-adjusted middle-class man, who fell out of love with his wife but doesn’t seem to garner strong feelings for his mistress either. I wonder what the common denominator here is. Leaning into the symbolism even more, Adam was cunning and on guard the whole movie, obviously recognizing the only other person in the trap with him is just as likely to be a foe as an ally, but by the end, he put his life entirely in Gordon’s hands. He shot Adam to escape and Adam still helped him, believing he will return with help. To make it painfully obvious, Adam was punished for putting his trust in another man. Adam Faulkner-Stanheight, bleeding out from a bullet wound inflicted by someone he thought he could trust, still embraced him and begged him not to leave. Saw is scary because of the gore, its moral grayness, its themes of class struggle, sure, but it’s also scary because of its unexpectedly fresh look on the heteronormativity horror movies often espouse with their violence. Men in these movies, when they’re survivors, are lone survivors. They survive explicitly because of their supposedly masculine traits - cunningness, brute force, courage. Saw challenges that idea throughout its run-time, playing the game alone, trying to brute force it, acting stand-off-ish would never work in its premise. Saw asked its male main characters to put their trust in each other. But in the horror movie playbook, being vaguely queercoded was strike one against Adam and trusting another man entirely was strike two. The tragedy is that Saw is a surprisingly compassionate movie, it invests you in its main characters (y’know, the ones that don’t die in the scenes that last two minutes and yet garner the most buzz) and doesn’t even satisfy you with their gory deaths - Lawrence Gordon crawls off-screen (and isn’t even dead as I mentioned) and Adam just gets locked in the room he’s shackled in, darkness descends on him and credits roll.
I don’t think it was Leigh Whannell’s intention to make a veiled kill-your-gays metaphor. It would have been easy to make Adam less sympathetic, to make his death more exciting. On the contrary, I think that the ephemeral queerness of suffering elevated this movie far beyond its successors. It becomes a commentary not only on needless violence, the sanctity of life but on how queer people suffer both in media and in real life. Perhaps by not considering this perspective, Saw was able to look queer pain in the eye and not flinch.
saw-2004.pdf (scriptslug.com)
Ibid.