The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)”
Text By: Basil Swartzfager
Original Publication Date: October 28th, 2014
One of the main criticisms I’ve heard leveled at this film is its portrayal of people in the rural South. Like Deliverance, this film preys on urban/suburban fears of the rural unknown, of a monstrous “hillbilly” people lacking any sense of reason or compassion. I am going to posit a fully different interpretation of these characters. I am unfamiliar with Tobe Hooper’s oeuvre, and I haven’t read any critical writing on this film, so I have no idea whether this has been floated before*, but here goes.
Within the United States culture of capital, occupation becomes a strong identity. When someone asks, “What do you do?” the answer is framed as an extension of your personhood. “I’m a doctor” or “I’m a barista” rather than “I practice medicine” or “I serve coffee.” In some ways this linguistic distinction no doubt arose from convenience -- it’s easier to say the former than the latter. But in a nation that once valued the idea of citizens who got a job in a factory, worked there for forty years, and were proud to do it, the idea of identifying oneself closely with the job you do every day becomes ingrained in social fabric. Regardless of the truth, this is the story that’s passed down. So, in 1974, with the United States facing a growing disenchantment with these ideals (perhaps never more deified than in the post-war economic boom of the 1950s), Tobe Hooper asks the question, “What if your job is to be a murderer?” And then, “What happens when you take that murderer’s job away?”
It can’t be accidental that many of the opening minutes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are dedicated to the local slaughterhouse. Hooper gives us shot after shot of imprisoned bovine, fascinated by the existence of this modernist warehouse of murder. Franklin, one of the film’s two main characters, exhibits a similar enthrallment with the assembly line mechanization of death. He gives a long speech to his friends detailing the more efficient air-powered bolt gun that has replaced the old method of a man hitting the cows in the head with a hammer. At first the point of this speech seems to be another way for Hooper to hint at horror without quite getting there yet. The cows could be seen that way too, as grim portents for the fate of the characters, oblivious to their entrapment and inevitable doom. But then this motif resurfaces when the protagonists pick up Edwin Neal’s “Hitchhiker” character. In the course of conversation Frankling asks about the new cow-killing machines. Hitchhiker replies that the new machines are no good, that they cost a lot of people their jobs.
Within the first fifteen minutes Hooper begins to solidify the difference between the characters traveling through town and the people who will eventually murder all but one of them. Can you imagine what working in a slaughterhouse every day for years would do to you? To be part of a giant industrial mechanism, and to be the part that spends 8+ hours a day killing? Now the endless search for wider profit margins has replaced you, and sent you out into a world asking you to stop doing the thing that has defined you. I think to position the film alongside Deliverance is a mistake. That is a film (based on my memory) that sees rural Southerners with the same colonialist combination of fear, fascination, and condescension that it once did the people of Africa. There is no outer thread of culpability that indicts an entire system for their behavior. They are the frightening unknown. Hooper’s argument is not nearly so one-sided. Instead it asks what possesses a culture to ask a man to murder all day, and then acts surprised when it arbitrarily tells him to stop and he doesn’t? This idea comes to its darkest (and, weirdly, funniest) head when Leatherface and family capture Sally and try to help their grandfather relive his glory days, handing him a sledgehammer to hit her on the head with. They didn’t grow up choosing to be murderers. They were born into the weird American world that decided, for the good of its national industry, they needed people to commit murder for hours a day every day. And then they expected this wouldn’t surprise people. That they would somehow put down the tool that gave their life meaning, that, as they say, “put food on the table” and move on to something else as soon as they became replaceable. According to Hooper the human psyche doesn’t work that way.
*Note: After writing this essay I did some minimal research and found that Eric Henderson’s fantastic 5-star review at Slant Magazine broaches a similar theory.
-Basil Swartzfager, 2014
