The Fourth Wall
Jeremy Naugle
td
Director
James Wan
and
Screenwriter
psychopath nicknamed
“Jigsaw” has chained his latest
victims to pipes in opposite
corners of a dirty bathroom with
a man shot in the head lying
between them, neither victim
recalls how they got there. Much
of the story is told from the
utility room with flashbacks
from Dr. Lawrence Gordon
(Cary Elwes). Dr. Gordon is
supposed to kill the other man
Adam (Leigh Whannell) within
eight hours or Dr. Gordon's wife
Alison (Monica Potter) and his
daughter will be killed. Both men
work together in an attempt to
free themselves from “Jigsaw’s”
newest life-or-death “game.”
Veteran actor Danny Glover
(“Lethal Weapon”) plays a
career-damaging role as
Detective David Tapp, who,
after being injured on the job,
becomes obsessed with finding
“Jigsaw.”
The killer targets individuals
who, in one way or another, take
advantage of life. In one of many
flashbacks, we learn of a victim
who recently made a suicide
attempt. “Jigsaw” forces this
man to choose between death by
starvation or he can try to save
himself by making his way
through a series of razor wires,
but then risks bleeding to death.
The killer wanted to know how
much blood would he shed to
live.
This movie has an excellent
story line, but those looking for
the gruesome scenes you might
conjure up from the title and the
DVD case will be
disappointed. You do see
some guts, just not what you
might expect from the horror
genre. Whatever is lacking
Bowling Center
during the film, including
the end. The many twists will
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keep you wondering who the
this movie, try putting the
pieces together to determine the
true killer. Look for SAW?2 in
theaters Fall 2005.
American Fiction
Chuck Palahniuk arrived on
the literary scene as the author
of the captivating and difficult to
classify novel Fight Club, a romp
into the imaginary world of
underground boxing and social
rebellion. Ironically, it wasn’t
the book that focused attention
on Palahniuk’s writing, but film
director David Fincher’s riveting
adaptation of the novel that
generated interest in the writer.
Fight Club recounts the
interaction between two men:
the unnamed
narrator,
milquetoast product]
of America
consumerism and
politically correct
gender sensitivit
and Tyler Durden,
the embodiment of
the masculine ideal, a
violence in his quest]
to regain an identi
free from the suffocating banality
of Ikea catalogues and designer
crockery. The novel is gutsy and
brave. It is the only novel in the
past ten years that openly
confronts the frustration many
men feel toward a shifting
cultural landscape which
demands of men restraint and
Fight Club launched
Palahniuk’s career as a writer,
but it does not define his literary
limits. His other works are
equally engaging, and, although
they do not all deal with men,
Monsters chronicles the life of a
supermodel who is disfigured in
an automobile accident and who
travels the country with Brandy
Alexander, a transsexual who
twists conventional notions of
gender.
Survivor skewers religion.
The story is told by Tender
Branson, the last
surviving member of a
suicide cult. The novel
opens with Branson
fsitting alone in a
‘commercial airliner.
he plane is on
utopilot. While
ranson, who is not a
ilot, waits for the plane
to run out of fuel and fall
rashing to Earth, he
records his life story
into the plane’s black box.
Palahniuk says of the novel,
“Books are never about what
you think they are about.
Survivor is really about our
education system because I feel,
more often than not, kids are sort
of taught or trained to be the best
possible cogs in some big
corporate machine. They're
not really taught in an
empowered way that they can
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start their own company so that
they can create and run their own
lives. They are sort of aught to
be just good employees, to just
fitin.”
Both Survivor
and Invisible
Monsters were §
pre-Fight Club |
Ww. 0 'r kis
Palahniuk
followed Fight |
Club s success
with Choke,
about a med- |
school dropout
and sex-addict
who makes a
living by
pretending to choke in
restaurants and then milking his
saviors for money. Then Lullaby,
a fable about a nursery rhyme
that kills, which, according to
Palahniuk, “makes Fight Club
look like Little Women.”
His most recent novel is
Diary, which was released last
year. Diary is Palahniuk’s
most cohesive work.
The book is the diary of artist
Misty Wilmot written while her
husband lies in a coma.
again after a long sabbatical.
Diary is eerie and subtle and
seduces readers into the
nightmarish practices of the
© citizens of
Waytansea. It is
Rosemary s Baby for
the postmodern set
and Palahniuk’s best
read to date.
Despite the
intelligence and
inventiveness of his
work, Palahniuk
represents, for some,
a difficult read. He
pulls no punches and
sometimes leads to rather
visceral passages. But what most
disturbs some readers most is his
willingness to eschew
convention and confront modern
culture with its own alarming
reality. While many fiction
writers are content to keep their
readers in the waiting room,
Palahniuk insists on walking
them into the morgue during the
autopsy. He forces readers to face
what they already suspect is true,
but are afraid to admit, and in a
time when many people are
trying to put rose-colored glasses
on everyone, it’s not a bad idea
to have someone who is trying
to pin back our eyelids and force
us to look at the culture we are
manufacturing.