French teacher shows sixth-graders Saw, beginning their education in the existential cruelties of life

By Sean O'Neal | June 11, 2013 | 9:45pm

Aux Features Film

Knowing that all young people must be inoculated against incurable ennui, a sixth-grade teacher in France apparently sought to educate his charges in the empty cruelties of life with a screening of Saw, the film that reimagines Jean Paul-Sartre’s No Exit with more mutilation. “This will be your first horror film," Jean-Baptiste Clément reportedly said to his students, presumably meaning that it would also be their first introduction to the horrors of existence—an unfathomable situation in which “free will” is merely the ability to decide how and when you will die, and where the tortures inflicted upon them spring from a self-imposed morality, or occasionally from springs with big spikes on them.

Unfortunately, some of the children were not yet ready to sever ties with life’s cheerful illusions as readily as Cary Elwes severs his foot: Some parents complained to the school, such as the father who said his son came home that day “visibly in some discomfort,” likely only growing more melancholy after his second glass of wine. (“I would like to play a game… Ah, and what is life but a game we must all play, one without rules or potential for victory?” his son probably slurred despondently through merlot-stained teeth.) In response, the school gave Clément a one-day suspension while it conducted an inquiry into its possible legal recourses, leaving Clément to wait in limbo while some outside forces determined his fate. “Oui… Exactement,” Clement said, we hope. [via Gawker]