On Being Chainsaw'd
If the test of great art is not only in being able to challenge the imaginative and aesthetic limitations of its consumers but also to do so over the course of multiple generations, it’s pretty evident that Tobe Hooper’s breakthrough film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has passed both.
Since its conception and release nearly five decades ago, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has dominated over not only its succession of sequels, reboots, and sequels to those reboots, but its copious imitators, even its most credible challengers coming out of Australia. Not even Hooper’s subsequent films have ever matched its staying power and intensity.
This rare esteem is obvious to all who have seen even a little of it. Even, perhaps especially, by those who don’t like the film. It’s a film that commands disgust every bit as much as it commands awe; earning both consistently and in equal measure. From what sources does this power derive?
First from its strength as a sensory rather than a narrative film. It was less important to know why Hooper’s doomed characters were compelled to that part of Texas than to come away from the film with the nearest possible impression of being in that particular part of Texas at that particular time. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the most pungent of films, the most restrictive of a viewer’s comfort. Its projection on whatever screen has a way of getting not just in your face, but onto and under your skin. The oppressive heat and sun of rural Texas, the barren end-of-civilization landscape, the rot of old abattoirs, the musk of unhinged hitchhikers, and the scent of unusual meats of uncertain origin, all weigh heavily upon the viewer even from the comfort of their couch in the verdant suburbs. And this is all before anything actually happens. Before the chainsaws can rev, the stench and the heat, and other accentuated dreads, are the film’s greatest weapons.
It stinks, and yet at the same time it is beautiful. If The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does have a true peer, it is not found in Halloween or in Hostel or in Wolf Creek, but in Badlands, released a year before it. Both Hooper’s and Malick’s films are minimalistic and meditative at their core. They are fascinated by the overwhelming and uncompromising landscape of the American frontier. But where Badlands is epic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is claustrophobic. Its wide-open spaces give its characters everywhere to run but nowhere to hide.
Both films, moreover, seek to capture something of the American spirit, as all aspirant American masterpieces wish to do. I don’t actually know what Badlands has to say about the American spirit, as I’ve never finished it. What The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has to say of it is clear enough on first viewing, but helpfully clarified with the second, third, fourth, and eleventh viewing: that humans, and Americans specifically, have a disinclination for being chainsawed.
Now if I went only by simple intuition, this theme of the film would stand out a little bit beneath its other traits. But setting that aside and only considering raw experience, which lacks in anything related to chainsaws, the film’s persuasive power on that point is unmistakable and unavoidable. And the force of clarity on which this point hinges in the film is all the more admirable. It wastes no time in putting across how greatly having the chain-end of a chainsaw directed into your person goes against the general ideal. If you were not so assured on that point going into the film you are not likely to stay that way coming out of it.
In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the undesirability of being chainsawed is actually the crux of an entire worldview. One aversion is followed by a host of dependent aversions. Humans are not inclined to being hung upon hooks by the back or neck. They are not partial to being kept in freezers, even if their frames are compatible with its dimensions. They would prefer the contents of their gravesites, or the gravesites of their loved ones, to be kept below rather than above ground. The notion of their meat and ligaments being used for sustenance turns their stomach; as does the idea of their bones and skins being used as home décor, even if, in purely aesthetic terms, any seasoned interior designer would at least consider it in the abstract. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre entered the American collective consciousness with a particular message. What great fortune that it was receptive to that message.
All this, however, is to overlook another test of great art that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has so far not had to undergo.
Cultural moods are ever shifting, and never in any predictable pattern. Art is seldom truly timeless, and to aim for timelessness first is not an impulse I’d encourage. Those works are boring, without risk, and, ironically, forgotten. Works of art submit themselves wholly and unreservedly to the finicky, anxious temper of the public while only being able to say so much to it. A work of art that speaks from its circumstances and which also withstands a turn against them by subsequent consumers is worthy of endurance in the public imagination.
Though the ebb and flow of mass taste is unknown to us, we can’t take for granted that the views espoused in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will hold in perpetuity. It isn’t impossible that Americans may develop a more positive attitude toward being chainsawed and all the related experiences the film’s protagonists rejected but could not avoid. Such a shift is out of the hands of the film’s admirers and other people who generally agree with its message. And that it may fail this important test is no small source of anxiety. It is to imagine a wholly different film.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre draws much of its impact not from its violence but from the happenstance collision of opposed worlds. A world free of chainsaws stumbles into a world that is full of them. Neither were so aware of each other that enmity between them was granted. In fact, there may not have been any, just a reflexive attitude born out of specific conditions locked in place, as if stuck on a loop. But there was so little opportunity or ability for understanding that, tragically, no more pleasant outcome was workable. Under reversed moral precepts, the accidental collision becomes intentional. People come in from all directions to undergo the Leatherface experience. Countless young travelers leaping into his roaring blades.
The effect of that shift would have significant if presently intangible implications on the original vision of the film. We must be realistic, but not fatalistic. We must not drift from the spirit of horror which, despite some trends detouring to the contrary, is the most optimistic of the speculative genres. Through it, all of our most intense impulses our enabled, our darkest instincts are confirmed, secrets practically throw themselves at us for their revelation. Even meat has a purpose.