Response

The Journal of Popular and American Culture

There are a plethora of messages in higher education intimating the importance of diversity in higher education. Yet, engaging with diversity needs to be more than just identity politics and whose group is more oppressed. The imperatives of general liberal education require students to participate in educational activities that will deepen their understanding of personal, professional, and social responsibility to self and others, and for students to be able to apply the principles of social justice and multicultural competence to their chosen academic track and vocational goals. The insistence within higher education to teach diversity content in general education courses as well as in disciplinary studies requires faculty to prepare new strategies that will increase student interest in and understanding of difficult material. Faculty have, for far too long, insisted on showing films as a sole means of diversity education without teaching them the visual media literacy skills required to enhance their learning.¹ This essay demonstrates how one film provides a case study designed to locate social justice in the dark.

I have been teaching, studying, and writing about film for over a decade. As a diversity educator, I have found that movies regularly portray the darkness of the manifestations of racism and other oppression, but rarely ever depict what viewers (students) can do to change the way society operates. When they leave the classroom or theater, viewers may feel powerless to enact any real change, and may perhaps not even feel compelled to. Imagine my surprise when I witnessed a horror-thriller like Saw IV offering a primer towards developing the empathy skills that are a necessary component of an action orientation towards social justice.

This essay will examine the manner in which feature films have become a popular classroom teaching tool in general, but also the ways in which movies have become useful for classroom discussions or lessons about diversity, power, and inequities, as well as the development of other student competencies. This section will explore the role of film in educational settings both as an instructional visual aid and as a method of influencing attitude and belief change.

For the Uninitiated

For the uninitiated, this movie series follows the exploits of what many had called a serial killer, John Kramer, nicknamed “Jigsaw” (played by Tobin Bell), as he sets up intricate puzzles that his targets must figure out or face certain death. To be sure, Jigsaw never actually kills anyone himself, but instead tests the victims’ endurance and willingness to put themselves through often excruciating pain in order to keep living.

Certainly, a running goal of the original film and its sequels has been to catch Jigsaw. With each grisly death, the detectives wonder why Jigsaw goes through such lavish extents to teach his lessons. They seek to understand his motivations—to figure him out. From the original film through its subsequent sequels (7 at the time of writing), the films ask viewers to consider, through Jigsaw’s tests, what is your life worth, what is your value to the world? Saw IV is necessary viewing, for it is here where we finally get a sense of the method to John’s madness, as Jigsaw’s games are designed to assist the detectives in better understanding his intentions.

Empathy as a Social Justice Construct

In her classic literary work, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch states, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”² One of the most difficult challenges teachers have when wanting to engage students in diversity education is getting them to learn to be aware of their own and others’ perspectives and worldviews. Many students do not possess the deeper abilities to critically evaluate the perspectives of others—especially students from privileged, predominant identities. Pratto and Stewart question how dominant groups seem to be unaware of their own place of privilege in contrast to those in subordinate groups. They acknowledge that minorities have more awareness of social status as members of an affinity group, while those in dominant positions are able to recognize subordinate group status (and associated stereotypes) but identify that status simply as normal. They also often express concern with the cultural norms that direct attention away from dominant group status and privilege, a sort of bait and switch that normalizes and hides the hierarchies related to race, gender, and sexual orientation. This blindness inhibits dominants from seeing their superiority as privilege and makes dominant group status less salient.³

Students need to develop “social empathy … the ability to more deeply understand people by perceiving or experiencing their life situations and as a result gain insight into structural inequalities and disparities.”⁴ In Saw IV, Jigsaw seems to invite the detectives to better understand his motives, ostensibly to “see what I see,” and “feel what I feel,” in order to “save as I save.” What he suggests is developing an empathy for how he views life and what comprises his worldview. This is the stuff of social justice advocacy. Gerdes, Segal, Jackson, and Mullins suggest empathy is “extremely useful, if not essential” to social change and an action orientation.⁵ Empathy is an attribute and disposition where one attempts to understand the feelings and perspectives of others.

There is a significant likelihood that 100% of the readers of this feature would agree that they were raised with the value that “all people are created equally” and we are supposed to treat “everyone the same.” For centuries, the Declaration of Independence has guaranteed “the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to all its citizenry. We forget that at the time of it’s writing, a number of human beings could not claim its benefits. Couple the principles of equality with the socialization of treating others fairly and the question must be asked: “How did we get here?” If we are honest, as we enter the third decade of the 2000s, freedom and equality are not enjoyed by all, and we need to continually reinforce the need for social justice education amidst the clarion call for diversity and inclusion in American higher education.

Social justice, by definition, is “a combination of laws, behaviors, and attitudes promoting equal rights and fair treatment of all members of society.”⁶ This is more than an aspirational statement; it’s also a call to action. It’s about moving from a belief to a social action—from head to heart. Social justice requires collective action and movement.

In most of the installments of the Saw franchise, Jigsaw’s victims must act alone, but the theme towards considering others continues into the fifth installment. In Saw V, Jigsaw begins his game through a speech likely fitting for those from privileged identities. Jigsaw states, “From birth, you’ve all been given the advantages of few others. Yet through poor moral decisions, you’ve used these advantages to selfishly further only yourselves at the expense of others. Well, today this singular way of thinking will be put to the test. Today, five will become one, with a common goal of survival. You are all connected.”

Thus begins the set up at the beginning of the film for the death trap. These veritable strangers awake to find themselves bound with cables around their necks. In order to escape, the group needs to work as a team to ensure that no one will be killed or harmed. They are instructed by the Jigsaw doll, “In choosing how to react to this situation, your lifelong instincts will tell you to do one thing, but I implore you to do the opposite.”

As stated previously, “Jigsaw killer” is a misnomer, of sorts, since Jigsaw does not really kill his victims. He merely places them in untenable positions where they will test their metal and willingness to struggle for life or face certain death. He leaves the “choice” up to them. One of the unnamed “teammates” in Saw V warns, “We’re all here for a reason. Okay, and we’re all connected, as the message said.” The team then begins to explore their similarities in hopes of saving their lives. If ever there were a more important social justice tenet, this movie premise sets it up well. As the hostages struggle through multiple challenges, a person dies at each obstacle. When the final two get to the last challenge, they realize that if they had followed the instructions on the tape to ignore their instincts, that all of them could have made it to the end. EMPATHY.

Brief Literature Review on Using Film in the Classroom

Since the 1930s, film has been used for educational purposes; “educational” films primarily consisted of documentaries and dramatized reconstructions.⁷ In the 1970s, there was a shift to include mainstream Hollywood feature films to complement classroom instruction. Since then, movies have been useful in a variety of ways: as case study; for experiential education; to teach symbolism and satire; and to teach students to make inferences, interpretations, and in meaning-making.⁸ More recently, pursuant to academic pressures to increase teaching about issues of diversity, university faculty have turned to mainstream movies to provide fodder for classroom discussions on these issues.

To make up for the deficit in preparedness to teach diversity concepts, some faculty members have turned to using feature films to bridge the gaps.⁹ According to Ross, Kumagai, Joiner, and Lypson, films use the power of narrative to “enhance perspective-taking and empathy, and help learners—including faculty—to critically assess their own assumptions and biases in their ‘encounters with otherness.’”¹⁰ Teaching diversity concepts through film, then, affords educators with both a medium and an instructional strategy for engaging student learning about diversity issues, including race and ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and language, socioeconomic status, and ability, as well as the intersections and complexities among them.¹¹

Movies can provide visual examples of the multiple manifestations of the historical and current forms and mechanisms of oppression and discrimination, including racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, stereotyping, prejudice, and inequality.¹² Films are able to present subject material in a way that may be difficult in a traditional lecture format.¹³ The content of these films tend to fall within the drama genre. The diversity film canon includes such films as Crash (2004) (interrelated vignettes of individual dealing with discrimination and racism), Do the Right Thing (1989) (ethnocentrism and stereotyping in an urban setting), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) (rape and criminal justice), and A Time to Kill (1996) (child rape, race, and criminal justice). By nature of their subject matter, these films are “serious presentations or stories with settings or life situations that portray realistic characters in conflict with either themselves, others, or forces of nature.”¹⁴

The primary objective of this section is to examine the literature on the usefulness of using the medium of mainstream Hollywood film as a part of instructional pedagogy, particularly applying the literature to the domains of Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy of student learning. Film has been found effective in both the cognitive and affective domains. As a popular mass medium, film has the potential to have both entertainment and educational value; according to recent research, both are necessary and beneficial in the classroom.

For decades, classroom instruction has employed a traditional lecture format, where the teacher imparts information, and students become passive receptacles. In recent years, that traditionalism has been challenged, as educational research has stressed the need for students to be more involved in the creation of knowledge and to be recognized for already having ways of knowing that are important to the course content. Film pedagogy has been advanced as a promising method of facilitating classroom communication by offering instructors a more interactive, student-centered classroom experience. Movies are already a popular medium, and their pervasiveness has the potential to create a classroom consensus that is important for deeper and sustained dialogue. Film offers benefits for all learning domains: cognitive, affective, and behavioral; as students grow in their knowledge, motivation, and skills, the potential for enhancing group communication in classrooms grows exponentially.

Conclusion

There is an advantage to meeting students where they are. Students find movies vastly entertaining. Diversity learning—not so much. If students can receive the message of the importance of empathy and perspective-taking from a mainstream popular film, there is little to no disadvantage. Sure, the Saw series is grim and macabre, but students need to understand the immediacy of a call to action—it’s pervasive. Let’s help them find friends and potential allies “in the dark.”

Jigsaw pointing towards empathy leads students towards a goal of diversity education (opportunities to critically examine the tensions of diversity engagement—educational, sociopolitical, historical—apparent in American society). In a strange and macabre fashion, perhaps Saw IV leaves room for faculty to choose an alternative to the classic diversity canon to focus on these goals as outcomes: teamwork, equality, and fairness.

Bibliography

Champoux, J. E. “Film as a teaching resource.” Journal of management inquiry 8, no. 2 (1999): 206-217.

Dale, Edgar. Audiovisual Methods in Teaching (Third Edition). New York: Dryden Press, 1969.

Dowd, J. J. “Reading 3.1: Understanding social Mobility Through the Movies” in Cinematic Sociology: Social Life in Film, eds. Jean-Anne Sutherland and Kathryn Felty, 60-69. London: Sage Publications, 2012.

Fehim Kennedy, N., Şenses, N., and Ayan, P. “Grasping the social through movies.” Teaching in Higher Education 16, no. 1(January 2011): 1-14.

Forlin, C. and Chambers, D. “Teacher preparation for inclusive education: Increasing knowledge but raising concerns.” Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education 39, no. 1 (2011): 17-32.

Gerdes, K. E., Segal, E. A., Jackson, K. F., and Mullins, J. L. “Teaching empathy: A framework rooted in social cognitive neuroscience and social justice.” Journal of Social Work Education 47, no. 1 (2011): 109-131.

Johnson, B. C. We’ve Scene it All Before: Using Film Clips in Diversity Awareness Training. Leiden: Brill Sense, 2009.

–. Reel Diversity: A Teacher’s Sourcebook (revised edition). Bern: Peter Lang, 2015.

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co., 1960.

Pratto, F., and Stewart, A. L. “Group dominance and the half-blindness of privilege.” Journal of Social Issues 68, no. 1 (2012): 28–45. (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560....)

Ross, P. T., Kumagai, A. K., Joiner, T. A., and Lypson, M. L. “Using film in multicultural and social justice faculty development: Scenes from Crash.” Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions 31, no. 3 (2011):188-195.

Segal, E. A. “Social empathy: A model built on empathy, contextual understanding, and social responsibility that promotes social justice.” Journal of Social Service Research 37, no. 3 (2011): 266-277.

Tisdell, E. J. “Critical media literacy and transformative learning: Drawing on pop culture and entertainment media in teaching for diversity in adult higher education.” Journal of transformative education 6, no. 1 (2008): 48-67.

Notes