Rose, James. the Texas Chain Saw Massacre
2014; Volume: 25; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoRose, James. Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Leighton Buzzard, UK: Auteur Publishing, 2013.108 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-906733-64-3. $15.00. Marriott, James. Descent. Leighton Buzzard, UK: Auteur Publishing, 2013. 120 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-906733-71-1. $15.00. Genre fans and scholars have lately been blessed with an abundance of book series detailing the production, reception, and meaning of various films. Examples include the more-canonical works examined in the BFI Film Classics line published by Palgrave Macmillan and the cult-focused Cultographies books produced by Wallflower Publishing. Now England-based Auteur Publishing has thrown its hat into the ring with its Devil's Advocates series, specifically devoted to horror cinema. These books, like the BFI and Cultographies books before them, are short texts focused on handling a specific film in depth, targeted at both a fannish and a scholarly readership. Two books in the Advocates line, Texas Chain Saw Massacre by James Rose and Descent by James Marriott, illustrate many of the merits and deficiencies of this trend. Texas Chain Saw Massacre sets itself the task of reexamining a much-theorized work, Tobe Hooper's 1974 film. It does so through a seven chapter structure. Rose begins with a brief discussion of Hooper's personal history and the production context of the film, which does an adequate job of corralling the various myths and legends that surround the film and its notoriously odd director; he then moves, in the second chapter, to the film's difficulties in obtaining release certification in England. While the latter subject is clearly relevant in the country of publication, and is fascinating to anyone with an interest in the Video Nasty era of UK censorship, it is ten pages of a very short book devoted to a niche and nationalistic subject, and feels somewhat out of place in a work of this kind; at the same time, the chapter's brief length (ten pages to cover a very involved subject) requires the text simply to state the facts without providing much in the way of insight. Still, anyone with an interest in horror censorship is well-advised to mine the book for usable information. book's next three chapters, Bad Omens, The Chamei House, and The Family, form the greater part of Rose's argument. They consist of a progressive, scene-by-scene analysis of the film, with each chapter linking a segment of the film with one or more element (s) of contemporary film and cultural theory. Mostly, though, Rose makes use of psychoanalytic theory to the near-exclusion of other perspectives, with the partial exception of the first chapter. This is, in itself, a problem for the book, as psychoanalytic readings of slasher films are far from uncommon. Bad Omens, as mentioned, strays the farthest from psychoanalysis proper, instead employing an easy (and largely unsupported) critique of the class structures inherit to postindustrial decay present in the opening of the film. Rose also touches on the film's use of astrology through the character of Pam, as well as the first images of the desecrated graves, to introduce the theme of a return to the primal. chapter's close reading is obvious and poorly-sourced, though not entirely without merit, as the groundwork Rose lays here is better used elsewhere in the book. Next comes The Charnel House, dealing with the initial forays of the film's teenage protagonists into the house containing the cannibal family. psychoanalysis here examines the Gothic by way of David Punter and Glennis Byron, turning away from Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992). This move, while differentiating this book from others in the field, also creates a notable absence in Rose's text; it is fair to say that the book is haunted by the specter of Carol Clover's analysis of the same material. Although Rose's framing of the tropes of the Gothic as an alternate means of understanding place in Massacre is intriguing, space limitations make his theory somewhat underdeveloped. …
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