A Consideration of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre--Page 2
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The opening, pre-credit sequence is an overture. It introduces the style, themes, and even, as the viewer discovers later, one of the characters. First there is the scrolling text and voice over, which warns us that what we are about to see is a true story--loosely based on overheard rumors is closer to the truth. (Is this a horror film or documentary?) After that there is darkness. We hear furtive scratching, shoveling, wood being pried apart. Then a photographer's flash bulb ignites the scene. There is a brief, almost subliminal, glimpse of something red and rotten. Darkness returns. The flashes continue, becoming more frequent. We get closer to the objects being shot--a yellow, hooked fingernail; a grinning rictus; a hollow eye socket, flooded with shadows. This sequence, like the movie that follows, has a documentary feel, the dirty intimacy of a snuff film. It's like we're photographing evidence at a crime scene.
Suddenly there is a close-up of a decaying human head in glaring sunlight. The skull beneath seems to be laughing. The camera pulls back to reveal a twisted corpse bound to a funeral monument. The setting is sunbaked, dusty, hellish--Texan. This is all a comment on the movie to follow: It will be a well-executed piece of work, unpleasant to look at, but strangely compelling because of its craftsmanship. On the soundtrack there are droning gongs and a radio news report. A blasé reporter's voice reads headlines concerning grave robbing in Texas. He refers to the "grisly work of art" we are looking at. Suddenly the credits hit us. Sun flares burst in garish slow motion blacks and reds. The announcer's voice continues, listing other horrors in the day’s news: an oil refinery fire in Louisiana, an infectious disease outbreak in Atlanta, a collapsed building, and an unidentified body in Gary, Indiana. The monotone reading contributes to the documentary feel of the film and the sense of reality, but it also gives the horror a mundane feel. Grave-robbing, disease, building collapses-- they’re all part of the daily web of tragedy. As we stare at the gruesome totem and listen to the calm catalog of horrors on the radio, we are oddly detached and numb. There is so much horror and violence in the world, and it is all tallied and reported in clinical detail each and every day. We are desensitized. Evil becomes commonplace. However, the backdrop of solar flares and cosmic fires also elevates this idea of evil. It says that evil--be it murder, disease, or destruction--is a natural force. As you watch the horror that is about to unfold, don't look for the hows and whys. Just gaze upon it and realize that there is an uncontrollable, angry chaos in the world. Again and again, the camera focuses on the sun, zooms into its angry eye. As Pam reminds the others: Saturn is in retrograde and bad things are in store no matter what. The events that follow confirm this, and the final shot seals the argument: Leatherface spinning and dancing with his growling saw in the bloody dawn light--the churning, cosmic forces at the beginning of the movie are still revving.
The documentary aspect is echoed again when the kids pick up the hitchhiker. He shows them his photographs of hung and dressed cattle from the slaughterhouse. The kids review them with guarded disgust. If only they knew about the other pictures he is carrying, they could really be disgusted. Franklin becomes a touchstone for the viewer. Just as the viewers are trapped in their theater seats and must watch events beyond their control, Franklin is trapped and forced to witness unpleasantries: the hitchhiker slicing himself and then Franklin; he is left alone in the old house as the others run ahead; and of course he has no hope of escape when Leatherface emerges. From his first appearance when he is rolled out of the van to piss into a can by the side of a road and roaring semi sends him careening down a hill--talk about taboo busting!--until his brutal mutilation, the viewer can only watch. Franklin's chair- bound helplessness is echoed by Sally's fate at the dinner table.
If the opening sequences are the overture, then the family dinner sequence is certainly the crescendo. Here the editing becomes frenzied, the close-ups are very close, and the soundtrack is at its most disturbed. At this point, it's hard to believe that Maryilyn Burns, the actress who plays Sally, is only acting. (The grueling marathon shooting schedule and unbearable heat certainly encouraged her performance.) This scene really has the feel of a documentary on how to torture someone. And the most disturbing image in this cavalcade of disturbing images is the extreme close-up of Sally's twitching eye as she takes in the horror and madness. The movie, which has been so removed and observant, suddenly becomes subjective with a vengeance. The viewer is trapped with Sally. We are quite literally in her eyes. When she passes out the screen goes black and when she awakes we see what she is forced to see. All of this watching, culminates in the penultimate shot of Sally in the back of the truck: Her eyes are wide and round with shock; the blood outlines and defines them, giving her a skull-like visage reminiscent of corpse-totem that opened the movie; and like that death's head, Sally is laughing with madness. The old man in the graveyard has been proven right: There are some things so horrible that all you can do is laugh and laugh and laugh.
There is another form of claustrophobia felt throughout this movie: familial claustrophobia. As in Psycho, we see characters both good and evil trapped by their family situations. The reason that Sally, her brother, and their friends get involved in this nightmare to begin with is that they are going to the cemetery to see if any of the Hardesty family plots were disturbed by the recent grave robings. After that they travel to visit the old family house, which is long deserted and has fallen on hard times. The walls are rotten, the rooms have been torn up, the old swimming hole has long gone dry. Each step into the family history brings them closer to the death. And, of course, there is a more immediate form of family burden: Franklin. Though Sally isn’t openly hostile towards her invalid brother, the responsibility obviously weighs on her. The strain shows most when all of the friends have vanished and Sally and Franklin are left alone at the van. It is a tense scene, and Sally can barely stand her whining brother. After that, when night falls, she quite literally pushes him in his wheelchair through the tangled, clawing underbrush. Family ties have brought her right into the reach of madness, death, and another family. This feeling that family equals death is a very young attitude, especially for youth of the early seventies; but there is another feeling from that time period that adds to the film’s stifling sense of family decay.
The atmosphere of Viet Nam was mentioned earlier, and has often been noted by critics for influencing the gritty look of gore and violence; but a very seventies sense of recession and economic strife informs TCM. The news report during the credits puts the movie in a very real and current period. It is a lack of fuel that strands the kids and their van in that desolate area. This would be a very real concern--even a fear--during a time of oil embargoes and gas station lines in...Texas. Beyond this we find a land of struggling roadside stores, abandoned houses, and advancing industry that needs fewer and fewer trained workers. For such a fantastic and nightmarish horror film, these a very mundane yet frightening settings. Likewise, if you remove the gruesome decor and the human shanks in the kitchen, you find a somewhat normal family down the road, too: they live in a nice white house; the father comes home from work; the brothers fight; they sit down to dinner together; they respect their elders. It cannot be denied that they are a recognizable family unit--very twisted and even darkly comic, but a family nonetheless. Ads for the sequel informed us that “the saw is family.” (The structure, the fact that it is all male and that the grandmother is a rotting corpse in the attic, is very interesting, too; but it is a topic for a different essay.) This clan probably was very much like the Hardestys at one time--why even that nice, clean family once worked at the slaughter back when it was a hands-on business. And perhaps that is the most terrifying and most American of the fears that course through this film--the only real difference between the good family and the cannibal one is money. In Psycho the interstate was moved and Bates Motel slid into ruin. In TCM the only real business we see in that desolate stretch of Texas in the slaughterhouse, and when it “went mechanical” the prosperity dried up like the swimming hole. The Hardestys had the good sense to get out, but the other clan collapsed in on itself and became a family of the Mason variety--and they kept on doing what they had been trained to do, the only thing they knew: carve meat.
In closing, a note should be made about the music. Many horror movies have haunting or thrilling soundtracks, but TCM has an electronic collection of sounds that truly is the music of decay, madness, and violence. When I see footage of Dahmer or Gacey I believe that the soundtrack to TCM played continually in their heads. Creaks, groaning, gonging, and scratches--this collage can’t really be described properly on paper; it must be heard. So if you haven’t had the “pleasure,” then you should rent The Texas Chainsaw Massacre tonight. If you’ve already seen the film, don’t be afraid to revisit it--it hasn’t lost its edge.