Monster Mishmash: Iconicity and Intertextuality in Tobe Hooper's the Texas Chain Saw Massacre
2008; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoLet me live, please. Punish me, torture me, but let me live. I can't die with all those lives on my conscience, all that blood on my hands. --Renfield, Dracula (1931) I just can't take no pleasure in killing. There's just some things you gotta do. Don't mean you have to like it. --The Old Man, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) Introduction Along with Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962) and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) represents of the watersheds--or rather, bloodsheds--of filmmaking: The most enduring flick of the era was made by twenty-eight-year-old Tobe Hooper, perhaps the most underappreciated horror director in who used $60,000 raised by an Austin politician to create a film that is still shown in almost every country in the world, and whose innovations have continued to influence the horror genre for the last thirty years. (Briggs 188) This film, shown at the Cannes and London Film Festivals (Gelder 273), and bought by the Museum on Modern Art (Clover 22), chronicles in near-cinema verite fashion (Briggs 190) the deaths of five men and women who, driving through the Texas countryside, encounter a family of murderers with, the film implies, cannibalistic taste. The film takes its inspiration from the true story of Ed Gein, (1) whose depravities, reclusiveness, and cannibalism also inform Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Jeff Gillen's Deranged (1974), and Jonathon Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Moreover, the villains in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre contextually resonate with Manson family overtones, another source of the film's narrative that frustrates its designation as independent Usually, though, this designation identifies films made outside the conventions, artistic limitations, or commercial interests of Hollywood cinema. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, even though it takes its subject matter, as its establishing voiceover claims, from one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, thus (un)-safely falls under this designation. However, we cannot assume The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's independence as a filmic, artistic, or sociocultural statement, since we then free it from the reach of mainstream cinema, or rather its hegemonic subsuming of the artistic and cultural forces that films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre react to and comment on. The appellation independent cinema categorically removes from these films a certain voice and salience, freeing critics to dismiss or marginalize them, which with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre seems the case, since it claims as many detractors as admirers (Clover 22). With its reinvention of the Gein and Manson murders, that made sense to 1970s audiences coming to terms with the macabre undercurrents of hippie counterculture, we cannot see the film as strictly independent, since it stems from its genre as much as from its milieu. If filmmaking seems a troublesome term, then, we must look more closely at films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that delineate the influence of the mainstream within their own imagistic and diegetic contents-- the conventions that make these films acceptable, intelligible, and meaningful to their audiences. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, for example, takes its villains from Universal's monster series, specifically from Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy, reconceptualizing these icons while also codifying some of the sociocultural disturbances since the 1960s affecting America's collective sense of identity, stability, and ethicality. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre smoothes over these disturbances through a tacit connection to 1930s mainstream cinema, a time of similar turbulence for Americans and a frame of reference that allows an audience, sitting in a theatre for over sixty minutes, to reassure themselves the whole time about watching Hooper's monsters torture other men and women, ever-conscious of their fictiveness, even though these audiences may not exactly overcome certain creeping suspicions about their own monstrousness in thrilling over the violence on the screen. …
Referência(s)