Note: this review contains spoilers!
They say that the Vietnam War was the first "televised war". For the first time ever, the violence and chaos that war brought had suddenly disquieted the sanctity of American homes, and with the counter culture movement in full swing - of which Vietnam had a huge part in - American culture was thrown off of its usual sense of balance. Vietnam came at and influenced a time when America was going through one of its most rapid and full-bodied changes in culture. Suddenly, even though we were going through the peace and love movements of the late 60s (and the fallout of the early 70s), America was consuming more violence than ever.
It is hard to watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre without this gnawing at the back of your mind. The rural family that terrorizes the teenage hippies are literally eating the people they kill, consuming their own violence. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows a group of teens-or-twenty-somethings (who can ever tell?) traveling across the country, specifically in Texas to look for two of the group, Sally and her paraplegic brother Frank's grandfather's grave. Things quickly turn sour when they pick up a hitchhiker from outside the local slaughterhouse, who promptly freaks everyone out. They kick him out of the van, carry on until they run out of gas and decide to spend the night in the dilapidated house Sally and Frank's grandfather used to live in. Things get rather by-the-numbers, plot-wise, as each of the kids (save for Sally) are slaughtered at the hands of mentally challenged butcher Leatherface. It is worth noting that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the first slasher flicks ever made. Black Christmas and Psycho were both around either before or at the same time as this film, but the genre was still finding its legs. A lot of what would later do so well in films like Halloween are done here: faceless, tall monstrosity hunts sexually promiscuous teenagers. And much like Halloween, there is more than meets the eye here.
Leatherface is a part of a rural family that spend their time digging up graves, making odd furniture out of skeletons, and butchering and eating people. The patriarch of the family, simply credited as "Old Man", runs a gas station not far from the family home (which is also situated next door to the house the teens decide to spend the night in). "I don't take pleasure in killing", he says. "But sometimes you gotta do things that you don't like!" So, instead of killing himself, he gets his two sons to do it for him. Leatherface kills, butchers, and cooks the people, and "hitchhiker", the unnamed brother of Leatherface, tortures and digs up graves. The final member of the family is the grandfather, who "was the best there ever was" at butchering people, as told to us by the hitchhiker. Both Leatherface and the hitchhiker both show evidence of mental deficiency, something exploited by the Old Man to abuse and shame them. It is an absurdity that the Old Man would think that cannibalism would be something you had to do. There is a certain quality to it, much like the rural stagnation that would prefer to withstand suffering in favor of nothing ever changing. Violence to these people is the new standard, and just something we should accept. Sally screams at him "You can tell him to stop!" to which the hitchhiker mocks back "No he can't!" before cackling madly. This is just The Way Things Are.
The teens, by contrast, seem to be aware of the violence but oblivious as to its proximity to them. They read horoscopes in the van which all tell of trying times ahead, horrors just around the bend but not here yet. Their every action tells us that they don't actually believe these predictions. They pick up a hitchhiker and withstand a lot of discomfort before finally kicking him out, they separate and invade someone's house looking for gas, and they seem unphased by the help of the gas attendant who warns them of the danger they face (ironic, as he is the Old Man of the family, but his unheeded warnings are valid all the same). They're just looking for some fun, unaware of the horror happening and developing around them.
It is no surprise that Leatherface wears a mask made of human faces. As the iconic monster from the film, his stitched together visage is wearing the true horror the film wants to get at: humanity themselves. Sally is the only one to survive the film, and she doesn't do it by any kind of wit or strength, but rather by sheer luck, wriggling free of the bickering brothers and blocking an incoming truck on the highway, quickly jumping into the bed. She laughs madly as the car speeds away, looking back at Leatherface as he angrily swipes his chainsaw around in the middle of the road, looking almost like a grotesque ballet dancer. It is a cacophony of art, horror, and absurdity, all things key aspects of what many people would say makes humans human. The film isn't a commentary on the violence obsessed post-60s America, so much as it is an absurd, horrific, gaped jaw at what we have become.
10
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