The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Its Meaning and Aim
(in unwitting collaboration with E. Griffith-Jones)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has stirred the panic and the pens of cultural commentators across eras. Critic Matt Risnes has characterized the film as “the cinematic incarnation of the most primal fear mankind experiences, that of being captured and eaten by an animal more vicious than ourselves.” Horror writer John Adam Gosham has called The Texas Chain Saw Massacre “a perfect celluloid distillation of America.” For independent film maven Joseph Lanza, “the film and the circumstances leading up to its public presentation serve as a metaphor for the early ’70s mayhem.” All told, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a timeless, geysering font of inspiration and insight.
We may say with confidence that lurking among the greatest of human filmic achievements is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And so, in virtue of its recurrent relevance and perpetual pre-eminence, we should come to think of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as The Film, much as the Bible is thought of as “The Book.” The Film was made decades ago by men belonging to a sprawling, backwards state, many of them theretofore toiling in obscurity, and none of them established filmmakers in the fullest and most professional sense of the term. Yet The Film’s message is still vital, its images still brimming with brutality and nastiness. Though The Film is a motley assemblage of homicidal set-pieces, there is a unity of purpose running through its contents that no reverent viewer fails to grasp. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a compendium of insight, obscure in origin, limited in outlook and devoid of morals, but nonetheless charged with a harsh and veracious message for humanity, the impact of which has deepened with the lapse of decades. That message is, of course, utter hopelessness. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the vade mecum for any pilgrim cinephile making his or her journey from grindhouse to grindhouse en route to a finishing vision of sheer nihilism. Therefore, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a movie to be viewed, learned, absorbed, and inwardly digested by all who desire to live a fully disillusioned life, and who look askance at the entire human species.
What is the source of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s influence? Implicitly or explicitly, The Film always and everywhere deals with the inherent horror of America. It registers on one side the New Age progressive graspings of the urban liberal in the various futile stages of a search for meaning; on the other, it unfolds the inescapable descent into rabidity experienced by every single rural old-timer. If any person desires to know his or her own heart in all its possibilities of savagery and abomination, if he or she desires to know humanity at its barbaric core, let him or her learn by rote this movie.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s gallery of American portraits comprises seeker and nihilist, educated and moronic, moneyed and poor, consumer and producer, civilized and feral, and, ultimately, city dweller and redneck, each revealing (sometimes in simple image) their distinctive qualities, and unfolding their destiny without accordance to kind — that is, that all shall wind up consumed. The astrologer is here, wrestling with the dark problems of retrograde, sometimes lost in perplexity, sometimes radiant with vision; the auteur is here, weaving into images of simple but matchless ghastliness the futile longings, discoveries, and aspirations of the deluded soul; the historian is here, unfolding the significance of current events, and pointing out the failures of both today and tomorrow; the prophet is here, gazing into the fast-passing glory of America, brooding in sorrow on the pathos of inevitable murder and mutilation. Most profoundly, we have pictures of American family life at its most undistorted — the feral familial tidings of the all-male clan of cannibals making repast on their city kin, who are nothing less than a species apart. We watch while, over the course of a tour from city to country, the American empire passes from serenity to atrocity, once rising into power, but now fading like the Texas sun into nothingness. There is no typical experience of terror that is not somewhere lensed on this living celluloid; virtue and vice are chronicled with a firm, disinterested touch, the former obliterated, the latter reveled in vis-à-vis the unutterable awfulness at the center of American life, sawed raggedly as it is between city and country.
Studying The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is thus the only way of understanding American life itself in all its futilities and brutalities. This dissolute congregation of figures, when their varied impressions are blended into one composite picture, reveal the human soul in its vulnerability and viciousness, its spinelessness and savagery, its depths of depravity, and its heights of empty idealism. He or she must be an insipid viewer who, having screened The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, fails to see him or herself somewhere in The Film as he or she truly is, and as he or she ought to be.
It is characteristic of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s director, writer, and cinematographer to use the dark background of human degeneracy to throw up the most disgusting picture of America into stark relief —that is, as a nation characterized not by a divine exceptionalism, but rather by an irrepressible nihilism over-geared even when compared to other supposedly more backwards parts of the world (e.g. Afghanistan). When we cross the threshold of the climax and dear Sally Hardesty’s escape to (relative) safety, we are in a transformed environment, but not a reassuring one. Rather, the same commanding conclusion is with us as it is with our sole survivor: the wild American psychopathic energies now radiate out to the city and to the wider world. Leatherface lives. He does not die and, though wounded, does not deplete. In fact, he dances on the road, galvanized by the rumble of his rusty saw-chain. In America, all roads lead to Leatherface.
