User:Paleface Jack/Themes and Analysis of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

The 1974 independent horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been subject to extensive analysis on its style, themes, and artistic merits. Vigorous discussions on a wide variety of cultural, social, and political themes identified by critics and commentators have persisted after its original release. The film's writers Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper have commented on the film's social and political subtext, as director Hooper acknowledged that the film was partially written in response to his growing mistrust in the political climate and the media's focus on violence.

Style

Visual aesthetic

Documentary style

Sun-baked color The visual style of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is

Use of violence

The film has been the subject of extensive critical debate in its depictions of violence; critics and scholars have interpreted it as a paradigmatic exploitation film in which female protagonists are subjected to brutal, sadistic violence. Stephen King describes the violence in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as "cataclysmic terror" in his 1983 treatise on the horror genre, Danse Macabre. He comments that the film artfully uses violence to push the boundaries of what is considered art and exploitation. The film historian Stephen Prince comments that the horror in the film is "born of the torment of the young woman subjected to imprisonment and abuse amid decaying arms ... and mobiles made of human bones and teeth."

Accusations of mysogeny

Critics argue that even in exploitation films in which the ratio of male and female deaths is roughly equal, the images that linger for the audience are the violence committed against its female characters. The sociologist Leo Bogart highlights specific points in the film in support of this: three men are killed quickly, but one woman is brutally slaughtered—hung on a meathook—and the surviving woman endures physical and mental torture. In her article Women and Violence in Film, academic scholar Mary Mackey wrote that the film "concerns itself with the varieties of violence men perpetrate against women". She argues that the women in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are depicted as weak and incapable of defending themselves, adhering in her estimation, to the typical male power fantasy. Sally's capture and torture by Leatherface and his family are symbolic of male domination, which Mackey claimed was one of the reasons for the film's popularity.

The Final girl

Main article: Sally Hardesty

Anticipating slasher film boom, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre incorporates the "final girl" trope—the heroine and inevitable lone survivor who manages to escape the horror that befalls the other characters: Sally Hardesty is considered one of the earliest examples of the final girl trope.

Comedy of terrors

Incorporation of humor Chain Saw is known for its elements of black comedy.

Social themes

Contemporary American life

Hooper's apocalyptic landscape is ... a desert wasteland of dissolution where once vibrant myth is desiccated. The ideas and iconography of Cooper, Bret Harte and Francis Parkman are now transmogrified into yards of dying cattle, abandoned gasoline stations, defiled graveyards, crumbling mansions, and a ramshackle farmhouse of psychotic killers. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [is] ... recognizable as a statement about the dead end of American experience.

— Christopher Sharrett

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, like several of Hooper's films, thematizes and parodies contemporary American life of the period. As journalists Louis Black and Ed Lowry write in their 1977 essay, the horrors in the film are anchored in our fears of human nature and American life, "Whereas most horror movies had traded on the ghosts of the dead or the supernatural transformation of the living. Chain Saw explores the almost unimaginable horror of those real events that appear in the headlines. When corpses rise from the grave in Chain Saw they are not resurrected by an otherworldly power, but dug up by real life ghouls."

Robin Wood characterized the antagonists as victims of industrial capitalism, their jobs as slaughterhouse workers having been rendered obsolete by technological advances. He states that the picture "brings to focus a spirit of negativity ... that seems to lie not far below the surface of the modern collective consciousness". Naomi Merritt explores the film's representation of "cannibalistic capitalism" concerning Georges Bataille's theory of taboo and transgression. She elaborates on Wood's analysis, stating that the family's values "reflect, or correspond to, established and interdependent American institutions ... but their embodiment of these social units is perverted and transgressive."

Thematic connections between the film and the exploration of family life in the works of Alfred Hitchcock were noted by the critic Christopher Sharrett. He argued that since Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963), the American horror film has been defined by the questions it poses "about the fundamental validity of the American civilizing process", concerns amplified during the 1970s by the "delegitimation of authority" in the aftermath of political scandal. Describing its themes as a continuation of Psycho's absurd and diseased underbelly of contemporary American life and American Gothic fiction, writing that Hooper brings these themes to their logical conclusion by "addressing many of the issues of Hitchcock's film while refusing comforting closure".

In Kim Newman's view, Hooper's presentation of the cannibal family during the dinner scene parodies a typical American sitcom family: the gas station owner is the bread-winning father figure; the killer Leatherface is depicted as a bourgeois housewife; the hitchhiker acts as the rebellious teenager. Newman

Cannibalism and vegitarianism

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been described as "the ultimate pro-vegetarian film" due to its animal rights themes. According to Hooper, "it's a film about meat", and even gave up meat while making the film, saying, "In a way I thought the heart of the film was about meat; it's about the chain of life and killing sentient beings."

Political themes

• https://euppublishing.com/doi/pdf/10.7227/GS.10.1.6

Mistrust of authority

Developed during the 1973–1975 recession and public mistrust of authority,

Anti-Industrialism

Some commentators have highlighted the film's exploration of the impact of industry advancement and its effect upon urban communities.

References

Works cited

Bibliography

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Web publications

• Black, Louis; Lowry, Ed (October 17, 2003). "Unrelentingly Hostile: Editor's Cut". The Austin Chronicle. Archived from the original on September 2, 2021. Retrieved July 29, 2024.
• "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at 50". Museum of Modern Art. Archived from the original on May 17, 2024. Retrieved July 16, 2024.
• Whittaker, Richard (October 3, 2014). "Cowboys vs. Hippies: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Subtext". Austin Chronicle. Archived from the original on October 4, 2014. Retrieved March 18, 2024.