The two films I most feared seeing in class were Last House On the Left and especially The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I’m (slightly) ashamed to admit that I liked Last House quite a bit and now love TCM. I'm relieved that I’ve finally seen it—so it no longer marinates in my imagination-- and I have wanted to chain-see it ever since!
SALLY THROUGH THE (LOOKING) GLASS
Sally Hardesty, more than earns the cinematic title of "last girl" in Tobe Hooper's first chainsaw film by out-screaming and out-running a nightmare named Leatherface, and his cannibal family.
Their chase scene occupies the last 3rd of the film and is bracketed by 2 dramatic jumps where Sally crashes through the plate glass panes of closed windows. First she jumps from the attic of the slaughterhouse family’s home, which, with bizarre, and circular dream logic, drops her even more deeply into the looking-glass inverted household where Sally will endure a “grisly parody of the Mad Tea Party” (The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Christopher Sharrett, p.258). The dinner party is excruciating so she crashes through the window once more where she escapes-- picked up, appropriately, by a passing pickup truck.
Into the rabbit hole...
As her boyfriend and other companions are being butchered, Sally and her whining, wheelchair-bound brother, Franklin share a quiet scene. Sally admits to feeling tired—she doesn’t say of Franklin directly but her prior interactions with her brother on the trip, especially when she leaves him alone downstairs at their grandparents house, suggests that she is burdened by his dependence. The film moves into the nightfall of it’s last third, the scenes demarked by rack-focused, circular images of the moon, headlights, and distance houselights. You feel for both of the siblings. As it darkens, they get worried and like children yell from the edge of a circle of light into the darkness encroaching on the scene for: "JER-RY, JER-RY"! Hooper and DP Daniel Pearl are inventive; producing beautiful images in the dark using logical but evocative sources to light the scenes and action. They stand near the car with headlights on (yet they don’t have the keys?!) and they fight over the flashlight. Of course this same flashlight illuminates the stalking Leatherface just horribly enough when he falls upon Franklin with his chainsaw as Sally struggles to push her brother's wheelchair through the brambles. Franklin’s dependence and fear of being left alone in the prior scene is affecting—he can’t help himself. If Franklin, with his attraction to knives, to gore and to death, had not left town or if he hadn't had Sally for a sister, perhaps he would have grown up into a Leatherface (and would kill the whole family if freed from his chair.)
There was something bracing and comic that comes from the chasing, the screaming and the chain-sawing of the movie reminiscent of Keystone cops and other slapstick. It is nightmarish but unlike in dreams, Sally is able to run (a lot!) rather than experiencing heaviness or paralysis.
Burdened with a heavy chainsaw spouting a diaphanous trail of smoke, LF pursues Sally stodgily but doggedly in a roundelay of choreographed movement racing through the reeds and branches of the path between the 2 houses. It’s beautiful, fairy-tale and dream imagery. Sally runs into perspective where the scale is really odd and Leatherface appears even larger in the foreground. She seems to disappear through a small hole in the branches as if jumping into the rabbit hole. The scenes are lit solely by head-,moon-, flash- and other fairy lights.
In TCM’s spaces there seems to be no outside world. While not entirely anarchistic (there seems to be some methods to the madness) there is no intrusion nor invocation of the Law (except once when Sally fruitlessly tries to threaten, plead and finally makes a sexual appeal for which she is comically mocked). The slaughterhouse family appears to be the only residents of the place and they do their own thing--killing everyone who comes through the area and stops by the screen door, Welcome!! (Hitchhiker sometimes sneaks out of their environment to make those graveyard cadaver sculptures.)
See Sally run! Run Sally, Run!
Towards the end of the film Sally is fighting for her life—she’s surviving wildly, instinctually and desperately, throwing herself though the windows which like the screen door that each victim approaches, acts as layers between narrative, real, and dream spaces. Each time Sally busts through a window she lands in another space. They are the same spaces we’ve seen previously but as in a dream—they are familiar but appear and/or feel changed.
So, when the characters attempt to pursue Sally beyond the narrative space of the crazy house into the outside world, they are foiled. In her second leap she crosses the space between night and daylight, inside and outside. There is suddenly the imposition of the outside world with the driver and truck. Hitchhiker gets run down by the vehicle and when the driver sees Leatherface coming and he doesn’t ask any questions he just runs too!
In this disordered world when Sally goes through the glass the second time she is really running out of the tale—as in a lucid dream. Sally escapes from the movie in the pickup truck as Leatherface, free (?) on the border of the outside world (is there a world outside for Leatherface?), in his Fred Astaire shirt and tie and with his curly hair wig, dances around with his chainsaw. Leatherface dances because he can’t follow Sally any further just as (curly-haired) Franklin, trapped in his wheelchair, couldn’t follow her into their childhood home. I found Sally’s triumphant escape combined with Leatherface’s dance wonderful and invigorating, a fairy tale ending.
Or maybe, it’s really a sort of musical…
The End?
While I appreciate the reading of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a metaphor for apocalypse (and there are so many apocalyptic strains—especially the sinister and violent radio reports that run throughout) the film doesn’t strike me as soley dark and hopeless.
The lesson of the film, for me, is this:
If you see someone running after you with a chainsaw, run and run and run until you get away. Persevere and hopefully, you’ll survive!
