Analysis of the Reverse Bear Trap

The Game: Reverse Bear Trap

The Players: Amanda, a heroin addict; an unknown man.

The Trap: Amanda is loosely bound to a chair, with limited range of movement. A metal device is attached to her head and over her jaw. A timer on the back of the device is rigged to start counting down as soon as Amanda leaves the chair. When the timer reaches zero the device will snap open, ripping Amanda’s head in half.

The Message: Shortly after waking, Amanda recieves a videotaped message from Billy.

“Hello Amanda. You don’t know me, but I know you. I want to play a game. Here’s what happens if you lose. The device you’re wearing is hooked into your upper and lower jaws. When the timer at the back goes off your mouth will be permanently ripped open. Think of it like a reverse bear trap. Here, I’ll show you. [Here there is footage of the device going off while attached to a mannequin head; it completely shatters.] There is only one key to open the device. It’s in the stomach of your dead cellmate. Look around, Amanda. Know that I’m not lying. You better hurry up. Live or die. Make your choice.”

The Object: Amanda must unlock the device and remove it before time runs out. The key is inside her cellmate’s stomach; she must carve it out of him with a small knife. Despite what Billy said the man is NOT dead, merely under the influence of powerful opiates (Tapp reflects later that the man couldn’t move or feel anything).

The Time Limit: Time begins as soon as Amanda stands up, a pin having been pulled from the device with a loud metallic scrape followed by the ticking of a stopwatch. The stopwatch seems to have sixty seconds on it, but this can’t be accurate. The trap scene is actually a flashback; Amanda is explaining to the police how she escaped the trap in the present, and the two scenes are interspersed. The stretch of time where the trap is live is shown to us as four short scenes, broken up by cuts to Amanda in the police station:

1) Amanda triggers the trap and realizes time has started, then frantically tries to remove the device by hand. This is not done in real time, but rather a sped-up sequence full of stylish jump cuts. (14 seconds.)

2) Amanda slowly approaches the unknown man, lifts up his shirt, and begins to sob. This happens in real time. (22 seconds.)

3) Amanda picks up the knife. A shot of the stopwatch shows the second hand sweeping from about 20 to 30 seconds. The unknown man’s eyes flutter open. Amanda stabs him repeatedly. This also happens in real time.(30 seconds.)

4) Amanda finds the key in the unknown man’s intestines, reaches back, unlocks the device and removes it, flinging it to the floor where it triggers almost immediately. This also happens in real time. (18 seconds.)

So the device was live for at least 70 seconds, plus however much time elapsed during the frantic first sequence, giving Amanda a minimum of 84 seconds. The third scene shows the stopwatch between 20 and 30 seconds, but we know at least 40 seconds have passed by this point, so the watch has to have made at least one complete sweep. It’s likely the timer was set to a number of minutes, rather than just one.

The interesting thing about this game is: how much time Amanda has is completely irrelevant. Billy doesn’t tell her how long she has, and the stopwatch is situated in a place where she cannot see it. Amanda doesn’t know when the trap is going to go off and kill her; from her point of view, literally every second she is wearing the device may be her last.

Plausibility

Construction: If the device does, in fact, work like a reverse bear trap, then building one should be perfectly doable: just design it so the spring mechanism is holding the device closed instead of open, and attach the trigger to a timer rather than a pressure plate.

Escape: This seems pretty ironclad. If the device was constructed as described and could be made to fit snugly enough inside the mouth the wound it inflicts would almost surely be mortal, especially if medical attention is not forthcoming. Given the resources Amanda had at hand, the key seemed like her only way out. Even if she knew how the device worked she would not have been able to tamper with it.

Fairness: Amanda is one of the few people who wins the game. It’s clear she was given more than enough time to locate the key and escape, and was actually given a wide margin in the beginning before her timer even started. Most victims don’t have that luxury. Amanda squanders some of her time coming to grips with what she has to do, but gets the device off in the nick of time. Whatever damage was done to her by the metal hooks in her mouth was minor. From Amanda’s point of view the game was perfectly fair.

However, we don’t know who the man on the floor was, with the key in his stomach. From this man’s point of view it wasn’t even a game. He had no tape, no means of defending himself, and Amanda may not even have known he was alive. (Later, in the police station, she refers to him as “the body”.) The only way this man lives is if Amanda runs the timer down before killing him. If the man was a player in this game the odds were very clearly stacked against him.

Jigsaw does, however, sometimes use failed players as pawns in other games, from which they have no escape. Perhaps this man had already failed a previous test, or perhaps the test was altered without Jigsaw’s knowledge by Hoffman.

Aftermath

Billy rides into the room on a tricycle to give Amanda a contratulagory message:

“Congratulations. You are still alive. Most people are so ungrateful to be alive. But not you. Not anymore.”