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As I write this series, I keep thinking of this play I saw, an avant
garde,
actors talking to the audience, break-the-fourth-wall kind of thing called
Windmilled. Actress/writer/director/main character Sharon Greene
used the
frame of the literary classic Don Quixote to explore (rather
abstractly) her own
personal experiences.
In it, she speaks about traveling with a theater
troupe that presented sex education in the form of artistic performances. She says that
most of this involved getting heckled and sexually harassed by eighth graders, and, with
rare exception, she didn't see many positive results from what she was doing. In
reflection, she concluded, it seems that educational theater didn’t produce much good—for
the kids or for art.
Overall, throughout the play, it’s underscored that
when you set out to be
social or political rather than allowing the themes to grow
organically from
the art, the result is going to be contrived.
In the
early seventies, it wasn’t surprising to find a film catching the wave of feminism,
flipping prevailing notions of nuclear family order and smashing
patriarchal values
in the most perverted of perverse ways. This same film,
however, would ironically
launch a genre known for moralizing and condemned for misogyny. The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre (1974) took America by storm, reveled in taboo, clashed with the MPAA, and
was subsequently banned. It emerged with sadistic disillusionment regarding the Vietnam
War, stripped American myth from reality like flesh from the bone, and went on to create
legendary figures both on film and behind the camera.
Tobe Hooper took a
true-crime incident and combined it with a rather
frustrating holiday trip to the
hardware store (where he entertained for a
moment the idea of literally cutting in
line with the help of a chainsaw) to
produce a genuinely horrifying experience. The
result was a dark, terrifying
social commentary—a controversially influential film
reflecting the national
psyche in the post-Vietnam era loss of innocence. In his
words, though, “I
think we shoot a lot of stuff and then 20 years later, we find out
what it
meant.”
Hooper discusses TCM in the documentary
American Nightmare, explaining that much of his inspiration came from his own fear
of family gatherings. While he doesn’t say whether his extended relatives sent him
glove-and-scarf gift sets made of flesh for the holidays, regularly abused power tools,
or occasionally ate their guests, he does talk about how his family subjected him to
particularly grim fairytales. Among them, his Wisconsin relatives rehashed stories of
their serial-killing neighbor Ed Gein—a real life grave digging, flesh wearing, mommy
obsessed, Psycho inspiring maniac.
It isn’t a leap in logic to see
how these images made their way into his
masterpiece, but what’s significant is that
the nightmares transposed on script and screen were intimately personal, not
intentionally political. It’s even less
of a leap to see how this film was
blacklisted from public release. It was a
catalyst for reforming the MPAA rating
codes and is still a favorite reference
in the battle cry for censorship. Barred from
theaters at the time, TCM created a black market demand that became one of the
major sources of illicit revenue for the Mafia during the seventies, raking in profits
while the cast and crew barely saw a dime.
The film itself was ragtag
gritty, shot with twelve-to sixteen-hour days spanning a seven-day week while
temperatures spiked to 115 in mid-August Texas heat. Slaughterhouse realism was created
of rotting animal carcasses, which had an equally realistic stench so hideous that some
of the cast had to throw up between takes. Actors suffered for art, being physically
battered, beaten, and bruised while trying to make the action sequences look real.
Overall, the result was powerfully authentic—which is the cause for emotionally dramatic
outcry,
both in opposition and frighteningly fanatic devotion.
Even
decades later, the film still resonates with a raw, unsettling effectiveness. In fact,
an ex-girlfriend once got so upset that she hung up on me because she couldn’t stand the
sounds of my roommates watching it in the next room. It’s not surprising, then, that it
would inspire rip-off copycats, genuine homage, disappointing sequels, and a re-make—as
well as launch an entire sub-genre of
slasher films.
By transmitting
real personal fears on celluloid, TCM still reflects much larger scale fears; the
film taps so deep into the unconscious that it becomes a kind of cinematic Rorschach
test. It can be political because it accesses the
depths of social fear through a
lens of the personal. In a sense, Hooper’s
private fears came to illustrate a public
nightmare for the seventies, but
today its re-make is its exact apolitical
antithesis.
So what went wrong?
Be sure to check out
Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5
of “Politics
as Horror, Horror as Art.”
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