By Dr. Harriet Stilley, University of Oxford
For Aaron
In the opening scene of Tobe Hooper’s slasher classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, henceforth TCM), a group of young friends drive past the old Texan slaughterhouse where protagonists Franklin and Sally Hardesty’s “grandpa used to sell his cattle.” Looking out the window and across a mass of unwitting livestock, the plump and porcine Franklin describes in horrifying detail the way the animals would “start squealing and freaking out” as they “bashed ’em in the head with a big sledgehammer two or three times. And then sometimes it wouldn’t kill ’em.” Before Franklin can finish recounting the various methods used to “skin” the animals “before they were even dead,” his sister Sally covers her eyes in disgust and retorts, “Franklin, stop! I like meat, please change the subject!”
Sally’s attempt to render invisible the torturous mechanisms by which edible meat appears on our plates is notably predicated upon a familiar chain of dissociations that refuse to acknowledge the moral and ecological horrors of industrial food processing. Her emphasis on the disjunction of thought and speech, of the unspeakable proximity between the processes of flesh procurement and food consumption, moreover, speaks to the ways in which the film succeeds to blur the boundaries of acceptability, question ‘natural’ hierarchies, and – through the notorious Leatherface family’s gourmet cannibalism – constantly confront the economies and ecologies of modern meat production. TCM temporarily transforms the normative, traditional, and comfortable cultural assumptions that serve to define and mark the indivisible, oppositional limit between the human species and the animals outside of it into a more fluid and corporeal critique of the typologies of violence that underlie Western consumption practices.
A seminal cult classic comparable to the likes of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), TCM ranks amongst the most influential American horror films of the twentieth century, and is perhaps the most famous slasher film in popular culture worldwide. Set in 1970s rural Texas, TCM tells the “mad and macabre” story of Sally, Franklin, Jerry, Kirk and Pam, five friends whose road trip is cut short by the monstrous appetites of the cannibalistic Sawyer cadre in an anthropological slippage that raises important ethical issues, particularly around the exploitative nature of carnivorous capitalism. The film became most famed for its totemic character Leatherface, whose blood-soaked butcher’s apron, phallic chainsaw, and ‘killing mask’ made from raw human hide not only changed the face of horror (doubtlessly providing the influence for such later masked antagonists as Jason Vorhees and Mike Myers) but reshaped the way American cinema in the postwar era conceptualised the relationship between ordinary everyday themes and the terrifying emotional excesses of the Gothic. Since his initial appearance in 1974, Hooper’s chainsaw-wielding serial killer has been the psychotic and/or psychological subject of multiple reincarnations, including four sequels, one prequel, two remakes, several comics books, and a chorus of popular cultural analyses. In every iteration, however, the malevolent mystery of Leatherface’s character has remained tacitly linked with larger ecocritical concerns, specifically relating to animal welfare. In light of growing contemporary ecological awareness, it is, therefore, especially timely that we appreciate the extent to which alternative animal and environmental ethics play an integral part in the culminative horror of TCM and the audience’s reckoning with a fearful feeling of dissociation from the known and ‘proper.’
An evocative narrative of industrial food processing clearly runs throughout TCM, relentlessly throwing us, along with its cast of characters, into a chaotic, cannibalistic realm deprived of both the socio-practical structures and cultural meaning constructs that define the human body as outside of the political economy of meat. Where the everyday capitalist systems of consumption and the liberal ideologies that support it tend to alienate humans from the material circumstances of animal slaughter, TCM is replete with scenes of bloody meat hooks, stained butcher’s tools, and overflowing ice-chests, purposefully placing the human body at the physical and conceptual centre of a cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption that connects the merciless way in which human beings are butchered in the film to the continuous, high-number killing of animals in capitalist slaughterhouses. The gruesomely iconic image of Pam’s exsanguinated body – left to hang helplessly on a metal meat hook as Leatherface butchers her boyfriend Kirk’s body into pieces – is a striking example of this transgression, whereby the human body is taken from its normal state to what Lorna Piatti-Farnell calls a “hyper and horrific state,” to that of “simply being meat” (149). The dehumanising reduction of Pam and Kirk’s bodies here to flesh – and, in turn, to food – echoes the conceptualisation of animals as “absent referents” in that the killing of humans in this example is highly “organised and rationalised,” just as it would be in a slaughterhouse, where matters of optimised utilisation become the “most important value to be pursued” (Piatti-Farnell 147).
Indeed, within three minutes of arriving at the Sawyer’s house of horrors, both Kirk and Pam have been stunned, bled, and dressed in a process efficiency that harrowingly ironizes the violent reality of inefficiency and incivility underpinning oxymoronic Western notions of ‘civilised slaughter.’ The family cook’s demand to kill Sally quickly and without unnecessary torture further parodies this desiring-machine of civilisation, which, in a concerted fashion, tenders the promise of a perfect ideal of quick, clean, unseen and unheard animal butchery – because he “just can’t take no pleasure in killing” – when in actuality it takes eight long, messy, and ultimately unsuccessful blows to the head before Sally is able to break free and escape as the film’s sole survivor. The totalizing nature of this horrifying scene, in which the Sawyer cannibal clan sit around the dinner table in a perverse homage to the revered family meal, is, in point of fact, key to the film’s polemic critique. The cinematic spectacle of Leatherface in his formal dinner wear, combined with the film’s sound editors’ incorporation of hysterical pig squeals into Sally’s “bitch-hog” screams, induces strong viewer feelings of disgust that significantly reveals an anxious insecurity about the hybrid intermingling of seeming incompatibilities. This emphasis on pigs is certainly propitious in light of Peter Stallybrass and Allon’s White’s engaging Bakhtinian cultural history of the pig, according to which the pig is a “deeply ambivalent and ambiguous creature” that “diffuses and confuses” social boundaries and categorisations (47). The careful alignment of Sally with pigs serves, then, to trouble the qualitative distinction between human and animal, between the “forms of life which [betoken] civility” and the “confusingly debased” (Stallybrass and White 47), finally forcing the audience to confront that which we habitually repress; namely, “the way our meat is processed, the similarly between slaughterhouse practices and human butchery,” and, as Carter Soles contends, “the horrifying possibility that we may be literally eating our own” (241).
Despite its ostensible abject abnormality, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre therefore becomes a horror film about the savagery of everyday practices, which reveals the contradictions inherent in our relationship with the natural conditions that form the basis for our existence; that is, the fallacies of contemporary liberalism and neoliberal frameworks, the viciousness of factory farming, and, more immediately, the complexities of learning to take responsibility for the moral and ecological costs of eating meat. As Hooper himself noted, TCM is a film about the chain of life and killing sentient beings, and much of the consuming horror and violence of the film is certainly borne out of our own largely subconscious assumptions and cultural attitudes toward the rest of the natural world. But something is changing nonetheless, and in light of the 400,000 people that partook in Veganuary 2020, it seems that this “grizzly work of art” remains a raw and telling symbol of cultural, if not moral revolution.
Works Cited
Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film. New York: Springer. 2017.
Soles, Carter. “Sympathy for the Devil: The Cannibalistic Hillbilly in 1970s Rural Slasher Films,” in Ecocinema Theory and Practice. Ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt. New York: Routledge. 2013.
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. California: University of California Press. 1986.
Biography
Dr Harriet Stilley is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute. She was awarded her PhD in 2017 from the University of Edinburgh, where she has also worked as a teacher of English and American literature. Harriet’s main areas of teaching and research expertise lie in modern and contemporary American fiction, genre theory, critical race theory, and masculinity studies. Her work has featured in a variety of journals, including the Cormac McCarthy Journal, the Journal of American Studies, the European Journal of American Studies, and the Horror Studies Journal. Her first monograph, From the Delivered to the Dispatched: Masculinity in Modern American Fiction, 1969-1977, was published by Routledge in late 2018. Harriet is currently working on her second monograph, titled Contesting Gender and Genre: Masculinity in Contemporary Asian American Crime Fiction, 1990-2020.
Email: harrietstilley@btinternet.com
Twitter: @DrHStilley
Webpage: https://www.routledge.com/authors/i18319-harriet-stilley