Meat of the Matter: Dissecting The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Cultural Economics
Normalizing the abnormal is perfectly normal. It’s the economy, stupid.
On March 23, 2020, not long into America’s internal political struggles with COVID 19, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick of Texas suggested, in a display of pure, unadulterated sociopathy, that Old People Should Volunteer to Die to Save the Economy.
Texas. A land of interesting characters. And such provocative notions about the free market!
Sadly, Patrick is not alone in this perverse pseudo-patriotic fervor for citizen culling. This notion is a little hypocritical (remember death panels?) and a lot medieval considering the numerous alternate approaches available. Such as this. Or this. Or this.
Thinning the herd as a pretense for sound economics is like throwing innocents into volcanos. It’s straight-up wickedness seeking rationale.
Where do ideas this ugly come from?
They erupt in an illusioned society. When the promise of a better tomorrow meets the actualization of worsening circumstance, then questions arise about the very utility of sanity in a society gone insane.
If you wanted to know whether anyone’s ever made a film about such a thing, about the madness that bubbles up through the divergence between America’s myth narrative and the perverse normality of actual reality, then you’re in luck.
His name is Tobe Hooper.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, despite the implications of its name, isn’t just some easily dismissed, batshit-crazy indy chiller. On a deeper level, it’s a subversive chronicle of the empathy void, the place where American-style capitalism reaches its harshest apogee, and the propaganda that gets us there.
There’s more to TCM than meats, er, meets the eye.
Horror Archetypes and The Family Unit
The plot is simple. Prompted by a rash of cemetery desecrations, Sally Hardesty and her paraplegic brother Franklin journey to their grandfather’s gravesite to ensure it hasn’t been vandalized. Along with their three friends, the five decide to take a side trip (big mistake) and visit the siblings’ old family farm, now in decrepit disuse. Bad stuff happens.
That bad stuff comes courtesy of the notorious cannibal clan at the pan-fried heart of the film. The family is a villain homage, the legacy of classic horror movie monsters housed in familial cultural containers. Each member is a reference point: Vampires (The Hitchhiker), Frankenstein’s Monster (Leatherface), Ghouls (The Cook), and Zombies (Grandpa).
Zombies, you may not know, were first rendered in economic terms as unceasing slave labor serving Bela Lugosi’s Sugar Cane magnate in White Zombie. Similarly, TCM’s living dead patriarch is revered by his progeny as a legendary worker:
“They still talk about Grandpa down at the slaughterhouse. Nobody ever bested him.”
His kin clings so deeply to this value narrative that despite him being — essentially — a corpse, they can’t distinguish the memory of what he was, or may have been, from what he is. The measure of a man’s worth determined by what he earns, owns, kills.
The stay-at-home matriarch, Leatherface — named for the various stitched-together human skin masks that hide his face (one which features long black hair, rouge, and lipstick) — utilizes various purpose faces for preparing, serving, and partaking in the family meal. So uncomfortable in his own skin, Leatherface is using someone else’s; the film’s Frankenstein’s Monster, he’s a destructive man-child with a pieced-together identity playing dress-up, an overgrown mama’s boy being mama.
His brother, The Hitchhiker, is the rebellious punk son. A self-mutilating Dracula, he pranks polite society with graveyard sculptures constructed from human remains. Like Leatherface, The Hitchhiker’s face is marked unpleasantly, a massive purple birthmark covering half his mug.
Last, but not least, is the entrepreneurial head-of-the-household, The Cook. A ghoul with an ever-altering face that flips between weary working-class countenance and amped-up sadistic glee, he’s the most recognizably human of the bunch, if barely. Just like you, his life is shaped by income and expenses. Mid-kidnapping, he stops the proceedings momentarily in order to shut off his shop lights:
“Cost of electricity’s enough to put a man out of business!”
Unlike you, however, he anguishes over these utility costs while beating a woman into submission and placing her as commerce into his meat wagon. He’s literally bringing home the bacon.
Man’s gotta make a living.
The Death of Livelihoods
Like Psycho and Silence of The Lambs, TCM is inspired by the lurid true tale of murderer-cannibal, graverobber, and demented seamstress Ed Gein. Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel cleverly reconstituted Gein’s disturbing antics, his post-mother madness, into the four personas mentioned above, a cross-generational unit comprised of killers proficient in the trade of butchering bovine. Their livelihood has been eliminated by the cattle gun, the old story of technology’s impact on those who can’t adapt.
“The old way, with the sledge, is better. A lot of people don’t have work now with the new way.”
As if a proof-of-concept confirmation of this “old way,” the film’s first victim is struck upon the head in accordance with the antiquated skillset. Progress means increased profit, in this case through the mass elimination of the powerless (slaughtered cattle/downsized workers). The beneficiary is Ownership.
Lesson learned. Later scenes will clarify that these maniacs are actually former slaughterhouse workers now proprietors applying their skills to the running of a roadside barbecue. Anyone outside the tribe is fair game, and one look around their grisly house adorned with actual armchairs proves they use every part of the animal. This is their post-industrial normality.
What was, what is, what’s supposed to be
The underlying tension of society is the place where expectation, monstrousness, and suppressed conscience collide.
The world may be a house of horrors, but many of us live in the saferoom, protected from its direct reach. Most choose not to dwell on such things, like the war-for-oil petrol pumped into our cars or the neighbors denied care by insurance companies or the last moments of the animal on our plate.
Hooper took this disconnect — between the history of the real and the really awful — baked it into a movie meat pie, and served it to audiences seeking ninety minutes of simple thrill-seeking diversion. And he did it once more, not even a decade later, with the PG rated Poltergeist (the rating that alluded him with TCM), in which a spiffy housing development is built on an Indian burial ground.
The point is made. Genocide, slavery, endless war — so much dollar-driven evil built this place. And while most empires may follow a similarly blood-strewn trajectory, how do we in the US reckon with our history?
As if in a dream.
At the core of every dream, we often find an inescapable truth. We can almost taste it even if we refuse to admit it.
For something to live, something must die —that’s the cruel calculus of TCM and the world that influenced it. Whether misery is delivered via natural selection or corporate malfeasance (from war profiteering to opioids), creation comes with killing. Make no mistake, someone’s getting paid.
Fictionalized representations (like TCM) are born out of dehumanization’s debt to the flow of capital. At its crudest, most localized level, this might be represented like TCM’s backwood boys, a deranged version of the nuclear family shadowing society’s norms and — from our modern perspective — a murderers row of toxic masculinity. However you slice it, they make a life out of the only method they know — bringing death to living things.
They’re not the only ones.
The Economy of War and Media
During the Vietnam War era, the time in which TCM was made, the American dream was becoming a nightmare. For many, expectations of opportunity earned within a moral system (an idea cultivated through education and corporate media) were napalmed.
These clashing concerns fester in TCM, placing the film in relation to its time and infusing it with the truth. Not real, real-adjacent. Cinematographer Daniel Pearl’s artful yet documentary-like feel captures the confronting, visceral rawness of the period’s war footage, the key to the film’s unsettling effect. It’s in this light that the film’s opening narration should be understood.
The “true story” proclamation is a nod to The Media’s “if it bleeds it leads” business model. The model thrives, even more so now than it did then, through avaricious repackaging of Suffering-As-Story. From newscasts fetishizing crime and war to reality television’s petty narcissism to the Tweet Hatescape of our current moment, we are not a people made of flesh and blood, but characters and avatars to entertain and distract. Some of us survive and some are us deboned by bloodthirsty trolls. Some of us are trolls. ALL of us are grist for the mill, grub for the grinder.
TCM makes the drama explicit. We feed on ourselves.
Humans as ground beef is a sickening concept to be sure, but did you know U.S. General Westmoreland’s Vietnam attrition strategy was named “Operation Meatgrinder?” I have a feeling Tobe Hooper did because the idea of extracting wealth through systemic violence is not unlike how a vegetarian filmmaker might view a meatpacking plant’s murderous efficiency.
That permanent economy of death is not unlike a permanent war economy where soldiers and civilians are meat for the warmonger machine, the ingredients feeding a selectively destructive economic engine. Many are physically and/or mentally disassembled; many who are fortunate enough to escape the thresher first-hand pay for it in other ways.
President Eisenhower (who knew something about winning wars) warned us 50+ years ago of going down this bad road. Instead, we went on an extended death drive.
Road to Ruin
America may not be unique in the horrors of its history or its denial, but understanding that history and how it shaped the present can make films like TCM truly resonate with relevance, breathing new life into the seemingly anachronistic.
In the United States, freedom and capitalism are interchangeable terms, psychologically conjoined. This economic model (even if the model is a but a beard hiding its true cronyism face) can be read as an assault on the very definition of what it means to be American. “Love it or Leave it” deflections of honest criticism prevents course correction, leaving treason, racism, war criminality to linger in lieu of a definitive, killing blow. When the awful isn’t met with consequences commensurate with that awfulness, then the collective moral compass is broken. Sociopathy becomes systemic, our country a husk of the ideal we imagined it to be.
TCM is a pit stop on this road to Hell, a 1970's splatterpunk microcosm of sociopathy that hits close to home because that’s ultimately what it’s about: Home. From Leatherface peering fretfully out the window of his violated asylum to The Hardesty’s visiting the old homestead to Sally’s dinner with the family, there’s a sense of home as a symbol of safety and security left shattered. We’re all vulnerable, even the monsters are driven by fears.
Which raises the question of who and/or what created the monsters.
TCM shows us the economics of factory farming conscienceless creatures. A graphic endpoint of zero-sum road-kill culture, of deprivation and depravity, where the sole need is the need to feed.
“A whole family of Draculas!”
When your society’s functionally insane
Tobe Hooper’s film version of a family gone cuckoo-for-coco-puffs produced one of cinema’s most iconic and enduring homicidal nutballs. But, while the Chainsaw-wielding Leatherface gets the slew of TCM’s cinematic glory, The Cook may be the film’s most terrifying character.
In relative comparison with his family, The Cook is the single observably human of the bunch, the personification of Hooper’s contention that Hell is hiding in humans, revealed situationally.
“You don’t wanna go fooling around other folk’s property. Some folks don’t like it. They don’t mind showing you.”
Earlier in the film, The Hitchhiker smears blood across the travelers’ van, marking them for death. So when The Cook attempts to dissuade the group from continuing their nostalgia tour, he does so in order that they steer clear of his murder house. “Steer” as in drive away, far away, or else be treated like steers in a slaughter pen. His effort fails; later he takes that ride with her — transporting Sally to the ranch, during which he alternately tries to calm her and beat her with a broom.
“You got nothing to worry about. Just take it easy. ”
When he arrives home, he’s met by a front door left shredded by chainsaw bedlam. “Look what your brother did to the door,” he yells at The Hitchiker as if Junior dragged dog dirt through the living room. Despite the utterly warped context, this moment representing a child’s costly irresponsibility is oddly relatable. It’s but an appetizer to the main course, the dinner sequence, the most pronounced exploration of morbidly humorous family dynamics shaped by pocketbook issues.
The dinner scene symbolizes the society that eats its own.
We find Sally (as guest and main course) exhausted and overloaded by sustained trauma, mercifully passed out. Then — still at the mercy of madmen — she comes to, only to leave the peace of dreams into a waking nightmare. Hysterical, Sally begins to scream without pause.
The family responds by shrieking back at her mockingly.
There’s no containing the disdain they have for Sally’s carrying on; for them, her antics are overly melodramatic. For us, the viewer, the aggressive facetiousness is a shock of black comedy, both unsettling and weirdly amusing.
Hooper masterfully uses humor as horror’s handmaid, helping the mind process the horrific seen here in this demented family’s disassociation. They are so desensitized to the plight of someone so othered, that whether cow or cowboy makes no difference. Those outside the family are Meat and Money. Pure commodity.
“Please! You can make them stop!”
Of the four, however, The Cook is unusual in that he appears to have a semblance of humanity. Sally pleads with him repeatedly to reign in his crazed children because she identifies The Cook as being unique among the group in possessing anything resembling sympathy.
While Sally endures prolonged anguish at the hands of Leatherface and The Hitchhiker, The Cook keeps a distance; he’s like a man watching a train crash, a crash he couldn’t resist causing. He knows the pleasure he derives from this situation is wrong — his twisting facial expressions illustrate as much.
He grimly justifies that killing Sally “can’t be helped” (Governor Patrick anyone?) and chides the others that “you don’t need to torture the girl.”
In this latter comment, a recognition of the humane, The Cook is differentiated from his overtly antisocial brood. He’s the cut-throat, bottom-line businessman, the family’s General tasked with making grown-up decisions that contrast sharply with the indulgences of children. Unlike these children, who lack even a whiff of conscience, he rationalizes the irrational.
“I just can’t take no pleasure in killing. It’s just something we gotta do. It don’t mean you have to like it.”
His guilt mitigation, an approximation of decency, is short-lived.
Soon Sally’s panic-stricken pleas fill the family with fever-pitch anticipation. The Cook, alone, struggles awkwardly to maintain a respectful composure during what he acknowledges is the solemn occasion of lamb to slaughter. But like the shared repressed laughter of school chums egging each other on behind the teacher’s back, the giggles win out as awkward facial tics transform The Cook’s token attempts at fatalistic stoicism into uncontainable merriment. He jumps about gleefully at her torment, plainly intoxicated by the mayhem.
The Cook is the embodiment of a schizophrenic world where the sane struggle to maintain their grip on a world rife with madness; incredulous at the horror committed by their fellow humans some of citizens ultimately give up on sanity altogether.
In a crazy-making culture, Sally, in her inability to psychologically break free despite her physical escape, is who many of us will become.
Under-appreciated and over-delivering, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a real stitch of stealth cultural commentary in an entertaining-as-Hell grindhouse wrapper. A transgressive classic of psychological terror, TCM puts us in the midst of a practically gore-free yet sick suggestive spectacle (yes, Hooper really wanted that PG) and asks us to try and deny the evil that’s all too possible even when it’s suddenly upon us, when it is us. This makes the film a singularly crafty and evergreen piece of hyper-reality, a real work of Art In Excess deservedly preserved in MOMA’s permanent collection.
Well done, Mr. Hooper. Or should I say Medium Rare?
