The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

<The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not a great movie, and yet I feel an ineluctable complusion to write about it simply because it is such a compelling compendium of sheer oddity. Take, for example, the scene in which the rustling of one of the female campers in the ostensibly abandoned living-room attracts the attention of Leatherface. The screen door to the workshop bangs suddenly open, revealing Leatherface in his shirt-sleeves and work-apron, the girl screams and turns to flee, the much larger and quicker man catches her immediately and stalks off into his workshop with the girl squealing and struggling underneath his arm, and the door is slammed behind them. This ought to be frightening, and it is, but it is frightening in a strange way, in the way that other kids' fathers (and sometimes our own) were frightening when they appeared from nowhere with a bone-jarring crash and a look of angry, disturbed concentration on their faces. That Leatherface should appear first to us as a father is odd; but still odder is when he is later the snivelling son, berated by his own father, and eventually the mother and matriarch of this family of cannibals, wearing make-up at the dinner-table and serving his own, home-cooked meals. Strange the grotesque aping of family ritual, strange the father's rant about "self-respect" and respect for one's home on finding the over-exuberant Leatherface's chainsaw damage to the shack's front door... It is all most peculiar.

One of the first things the campers see on approaching the cannibals' shack is a collection of shiny automoblies. Given that the family are murderers, and the father of the family runs the nearby gas station, it is pretty obvious that the cars formerly belonged to the cannibals' victims; but what is most noticable about them is that they are arrayed exactly as if they were in a parking lot, awaiting and inviting inspection and purchase. Strange. And then the father's proud, weary speech about how tired he is of killing people, how long he's been doing it for, and his father before him, too, but still, we all have to do things we don't really care about doing, right? Yes, yes we do, and we call them "jobs"; unless we're really good at them, in which case they might be called "careers", or unless we rise to the very top of our profession, in which case we might call them "the family business". The monstrous joke of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not that this collection of mindless, bloodthirsty freaks seems to try and act like a family, but that they are a perfect nuclear family; self-sufficient, self-sustaining, and performing a definite social function which makes them an inalienable part of the organic whole, unlike the aimless wanderers they pick off like parasites. To paraphrase Chaplin; to kill one man is murder, but to kill many men is simply business.

Thomas Clark