The Saw is Family

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986, directed by Tobe Hooper) was always likely to be a fiasco over and above the inevitable comparisons to the unrepeatable original film. It was a troubled, unstable production, one whose budget ebbed and flowed depending on the box office of whatever films the feckless Cannon Films had in theaters at the time. Tobe Hooper was a reluctant director who originally intended only to produce the film before landing in the director's chair when no suitable director could be found for the money producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were willing to pay. Golan and Globus wanted a very different film from what Hooper wanted to make, too, and were horrified when he delivered not the intense bloodbath they expected, but rather a pitch black comedy. Even so, Hooper leaned into the original film's unearned reputation for extreme violence, resulting in a film that had to either accept an X-rating from the MPAA or go out unrated. Cutting the film wasn't even in the discussion. The film's problems with censors were a worldwide mountain to climb. Cannon was stuck with marketing a film it did not like or understand, but even so the teaser trailer was killer ("After ten years of silence, the buzz is back!") and the one-sheet was hilarious. Critics, like the producers, expected something else and excoriated the film for it.

And yet...somehow, the film managed to make a profit in its original theatrical run and slowly developed a cult following on home video. Rob Zombie has been trying to reverse engineer the film for years with indifferent results. For myself? The first time I saw it I knew it had more on its mind than its sick jokes and elaborate gore gags--though the sick jokes and elaborate gore gags were occasionally inspired. To quote another cult film from the 80s: it had a philosophy

The story kicks off on the weekend of the Red River Rivalary, the annual football tilt between the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma. Two of the yahoos in town for the game are out driving around and raising hell, shooting mailboxes from their convertible and terrorizing other motorists. Part of the game is monopolizing the request line of radio station K-OKLA, much to the annoyance of Stretch, the DJ. When they try to run the wrong truck off the road, Stretch has them on the line and records them being murdered by a lunatic with a chain saw. The scene of the crime brings the attention of Lefty, too. Lefty is an ex-Texas Ranger who has been hunting a band of killers for a decade, ever since the death of his nephew, Franklin, and Franklin's friends. He recognizes the hallmarks. He puts out a call for evidence, which Stretch answers. She agrees to play the tape of the murder on the air in an attempt to flush the killers. Much to her sorrow, it succeeds. A threatening figure in a bad wig shows up at the station claiming to be a fan. He wants to hear Lefty's special request. His brother, Leatherface, shows up too, knocking them both over revealing a metal plate in her visitor's head under the wig. She's too terrified to notice. She holes up in a closet with a metal door that's proof against Leatherface's chainsaw. Stretch is able to master her fear and convince Leatherface that she likes his power and his skill with the saw, which confuses him. He leaves her alive when he and Chop Top, his brother, leave. Unfortunately, they take Stretch's engineer with them. She pursues, cursing Lefty for being late. But Lefty wasn't late. He was using her for bait. Their pursuit leads them to an abandoned amusement park, where the Sawyer family make their base, and find an underground abattoir beyond their imagining. Lefty wades in chainsaws a blazing--hell bent on taking them on with their own weapons. Stretch, on the other hand, is left with only her wits to help her survive...

While The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is a very different movie than its predecessor, it preserves the essential nature of the Sawyer clan. They are economic monsters. In the first film, they were displaced slaughterhouse workers carrying on with their trade after their jobs vanished. In the sequel, they're clinging to the ruins of capitalism while trying to make a go of freelancing. Drayton Sawyer, the cook from the original film, is a small business man, traveling Texas with his secret recipe for award-winning chili (it's the meat). His sons are the suppliers. Drayton interprets everything through an economic lens. When he catches Stretch, his first impulse is that she has to pay for the damage that Lefty is doing to their lair. When the end comes for him, with a chainsaw to the backdoor, he wails that "It's ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS the small businessman who gets it in the ass!" This is a potent subtext for the Reagan years, even more so than it was in 1974. The world has deteriorated in the years between, and the Sawyers have gotten more and more desperate. The wreckage of the 1960s living in the 1980s is represented by Chop Top, a Vietnam veteran with a plate in his head and a list of complaints about the VA. He's been abandoned, too, and 'Nam still lives in his head. He wants to turn their lair into "'Nam Land," as if the United States wasn't already 'Nam Land from the mid-sixties onward. This is a film that's aware of its zeitgeist and creates a sick joke out of it. The film's vision of late capitalism is a dilapidated amusement park under which lurks a reeking charnel house. For all that, the Sawyers remain inscrutable even though this film makes more of an effort to understand them than the previous film. This is especially true in the re-staging of the family dinner from the first film, with Leatherface transformed into an awkward suitor who is completely embarrassed by his family when he introduces Stretch to them. She's the closest thing to a girlfriend he's ever had, and he doesn't want to treat her the way his family would prefer.

The depiction of Leatherface as a lovelorn misfit is conflicted, though. The scenes between him and Stretch have overtly Freudian symbolism, with the chainsaw representing his cock. Seriously, I don't even need to argue this. It's so obvious from the way he presses the tip of the dormant chainsaw to Stretch's crotch that this is the filmmakers' intent. It's also equally obvious that Leatherface is an ur-incel, given that when presented with a woman who might actually dig him--however fraudulent--he can't get the chainsaw to start. I can't say this film has the wrong idea about the character type. He wants to make her over into his idea of what's attractive by draping the face of her friend over hers to her complete horror. This could have veered into an uncomfortable misogyny in the hands of less capable filmmakers, but the intent is clear enough here. Indeed, none of the film's victims are women, which is so unusual in 80s horror movies that it immediately marks the film as an outlier.

The heroes of the piece are more distinctive in this film than in the first, too. Lefty is a memorable grotesque, although Dennis Hopper's performance is not as good as it might be. Hopper himself once said that this was the worst film he'd ever made, but he said that about other films in his portfolio, too, so who knows, right? There's a certain amount of embarrassment in his face when he throws aside an armbone after failing to save Stretch with it. Beyond that, Hooper has encouraged Hopper to go way over the top into camp, though I might argue that he's less out there in this film than he is in the other film he made in 1986. The two performances are similar. Hooper is definitely exploiting Hopper's reputation as a madman in this film. Caroline Williams has the more difficult role as Stretch, who has the burden of being a screaming mess while trying to think herself out of her situation. The film saves its best scene for her.

The film is so confrontational with its intent to assault your sensibilities and standards of good taste that its most subtle coup de grace slides right below immediate perception. At the end of the film, Hooper crystallizes his theme--until that point generally drawn in broad cartoon strokes through Hopper's character--by switching the agency of that theme to Stretch. The final shot of the film is a rhyme of the final shot of the original, but here' it's positively Nietzschean. We must become monsters to fight monsters, the philosopher said. The abyss gazes also into you. In this film's world, though, we must become monsters just to survive. It's a profoundly unsettling thought.

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