Jigsaw and the Lightning Bolt:
How John Kramer used the Strategy of the Lightning Bolt for Habit Change
In this current day and age, every horror fan knows John Kramer aka Jigsaw from the Saw franchise. I’ve written about my feelings on Saw as a franchise previously. Check those out:
However, what I want to talk about right now is the strategy of habit change John chiefly employs in his victims to get them to ‘set their life right’ and ‘appreciate their lives’. That strategy is the Lightning Bolt.
For those of you who don’t know what the strategy of the Lightning Bolt is, I got it from Gretchen Rubin in her book, “Better than Before“. It is the idea that a single incident or piece of information can cause you to drastically change your life. In Gretchen’s case, it was the revelations brought to her by reading a single book which caused her to completely change her diet and never look back. In my own case, a single relationship falling through changed my life and caused me to move toward minimalism. You can read about that here:
In the case of the Saw movies, John Kramer repeatedly uses the strategy of the Lightning Bolt to change those around him for the better, or at least in his mind. Take the case of Amanda Young, who he touted to his wife as his proof the system worked in SAW VI. Amanda Young starts out in the Saw franchise as a junkie and in the original SAW she is the one who wears the iconic reverse bear trap which could be considered the symbol of the franchise. She is offered, like all of John’s victims, a simple choice: Prove you love your life or die. In her case, she wears the trap on her head and has to get the key hidden in what she believes is a dead man’s stomach to save herself. Turns out the dead man isn’t dead, and that makes the choice all the more gruesome because she has to kill to prove she loves her life. The choice of how far will you go to insure your own survival.
However, after the affair, she becomes John’s accomplice and helps him to trap and change others. In that sense, she shows the strategy works. John can change people for the better by putting them in situations in which they must choose. By making the choice so dire, he forces the person’s hand.
Yet, does the strategy really work when the change is so forced? One of the things about habits is that they have an insidious way of getting back into play. The brain, once it forms a pathway, never truly forgets it. It stops using it and the pathway atrophies, but is never truly gone.
Later in the series, during her time as his accomplice, Amanda goes on a tirade saying “People don’t change”. She is on a bit of a tear and then she shoots an important figure as if to make her point. She hasn’t changed for the better or otherwise.
So did the strategy work or didn’t it? Could it be that the strategy did work in Amanda’s case, but she was forced into a situation where she couldn’t show it? Again, the word ‘force’ comes up. It is later revealed, another accomplice pressed Amanda into shooting the doctor by threatening to reveal to John how she was involved with the death of his unborn son. Amanda, who in my mind had come to love John, couldn’t bear the idea of him finding out and thus went through with shooting the doctor. Amanda is subsequently shot by the doctor’s husband who comes in to find the doctor, supposedly dead.
In fact, looking at John himself, he has a lightning bolt moment when he doesn’t die in his self-induced car crash. He has cancer. He knows he’s going to die. Yet when he doesn’t die in the car crash, he realizes how much he appreciates his life and wants to show others, in his own twisted way, how to appreciate theirs.
From a less directly connected to John standpoint, there is the support group of survivors which appears in Saw VII. They, the survivors, appear to thank Jigsaw for the changes they’ve made in their lives. It’s almost scary how they all seem to be practically praising a serial kidnapper who pushed them into life or death situations. Except for the voice of dissent who has lost an arm and makes it very clear she has NOT changed for the better and is, in fact, quite bitter.
All this taken together, what do we take away from this? The strategy of the Lightning Bolt does work; however, there are caveats. It would appear one, you have to want to change. That seems to go without saying. In every book on habit formation I have ever read, the catalyst can come along and change may still not happen if you’re not willing. Two, you have to maintain the change. Habits are excellent at making things easy, sometimes too easy. Sliding backward is extremely easy to do since the brain never truly forgets.