2017 ends and we say goodbye to Tobe Hooper, one of the most gifted but under-recognized directors of the 20th century. I'm a huge fan of the man and professed for years there are deep levels to his work that were overlooked as kooky paranoid drugginess until our current political hellstorm. Now that he's dead it seems the world is waking up and cinema is catching up to his vision.
The clearest example of this is Get Out, the critic's and audience's favorite this year. The American horror fandom's white male minority were quick to label it "liberal propaganda" and "too funny to be horror". Little do this backwards simpletons understand Get Out is a postmodern remake of their holy Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Because so many still don't realize TCM is a fierce, focused satire on rightwing politics in America.
While Get Out is a game-changing liberal-friendly attack on neoliberalism, TCM was the original. Hooper and screenwriter Kim Henkel were two jaded Texas radicals feeling the effects of the collective bad LSD trip that killed Flower Power and gave power to corrupt capitalist authoritarians. Henkel's script is a harsh Marxist criticism of hippies and their blissful ignorance and cooperation with conservatism, but Hooper directs it with a game self-deprecating empathy with these goofy hippie victims and a kind of morbid sympathy for the backwoods cannibal hillbillies who are tools of the bourgeoisie. This collaboration birthed the first Libertarian horror film; "Easy Rider" meets "Psycho".
I would say Hooper is the Leftist Libertarian, as his sequel TCM2 is a trashing of yuppies and warning of neoliberalism and Reagan republicans. Henkel is the more Right Libertarian, not trusting the CIA at all and casting a young libertarian Matthew McConaughey in his TCM4. Both films are radical politically, just as feminist as the first Massacre but really work best in tandem aesthetically.
Where Henkel is ultraviolent, nihilistic, political, symbolic, mystical, minimalist, primal, politically incorrect, transgressive, Jungian and naturalistic, Hooper counters with a style that is "staged", ironic, operatic, stoned, satirical, logical, optmistic, technical, cartooned, perverse, expressionist, Freudian and romantic. Seperate one from the other and you get their respective sequels.
But where do they agree? The negative direction of our country. They each shift the blame more on the other but find both at fault. Hooper finds the rednecks the more absurd & dangerous threat and I suspect Henkel finds them a byproduct of the hippies' isolating classism. The film is a comedy that laughs at both sides of this family rivalry and illustrates a reflection and relation between Sally and Leatherface. They live right next door, both lose a brother (Vietnam reference) and are both getting screwed by "The Man". Its the pointlessness of their violence and separation that is tragic. What probably hatched as a white male's dark fantasy of torturing his little sister on-screen developed into a transcendent confession of an impossible union between Beauty and Beast. The story expresses the personal pain of these two scruffy Texan boys never being able to bring the rich blond girl home to "meet the family". Leatherface and The Hitchhiker are the yin and yang of the creators, the Id and SuperEgo. The Old Man is a crazed, shame-filled mixture of both, the Ego.
This confused moral grayness creates the transgressive use of black & white throughout the film. The "White House" turns out to be a slaughterhouse of teenage hippies. The white damsel is saved by a chubby black protector (as Get Out would play off of). Repeatedly, there is great horror shown in daylight The Sun is shown as an evil force.
And there is more meaning to the production design. Sally comes to the White House later for sanctuary only to find it full of dead bodies in the attic - a rejection of The Church. Immediately after, she tries The Gas Station that has no gas left. This could be a reference to concentration camps or the Middle East.
So much of the Normal gets subverted: family dinner, the kitchen, patriarchy, white men, meat-eating, capitalism, the South, victimhood, the very idea of hippies as useful, the binary. This is hardcore cynical Marxist stuff. The writers are out for blood and pissed off at everyone. This informs the now famous formula of Scare-Laugh-Scare-Laugh that this film popularized. It can't be overstated how archetypal this script has become. Every year it looks more and more tame because fan works like Get Out & True Detective spread its influence. But its most famous for spawning the basic slasher formula. Isn't Halloween just an unofficial sequel where Leatherface breaks out into suburbia? (the unintentional effect the TCM had on mainstream audiences that made it a frightening hit with teens) No one would argue that its not a horror film, but its creators maintain TCM was a dark satire first.
Here we are going into 2018. Tobe Hooper has passed on, the Leatherface franchise seems massacred after the latest installment and the most popular film of the year is a postmodernist retelling of this film. Is the TCM now a classic film and its more of a history lesson than a relevant commentary? No way. Get Out's evil family make sexual objects out of black people for business. Very topical. But TCM's evil family make food out of the poor and less fortunate for business. That message is more encompassing and even more pressing as its no longer the stupid hippies we must fear in political power but the evil cannibal white trash themselves. This explains the popularity of Leatherface during the George W Bush era and I hope TCM becomes a beacon for resistance to fascist tyranny again. With each film, Leatherface's world opens up more, exposing his insulated world of lawless slavery, inbred mania and capitalist brutality to new generations. The story has never been completed and its culmination might bring needed positive closure to the real world. Its become an American film institution, more than a franchise, with power to attack the highest criminals in our society.
I hear the film rights are back on the market. Maybe now we have artists worthy enough of doing Mr. Hooper & Mr. Henkel proud.
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