We're All Sally Hardesty Now

Marilyn Burns character in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Sally Hardesty, is one of the earliest iterations of a character model which would later come to be identified as The Final Girl by Carol Clover in her seminal work Men, Women and Chainsaws. The term would come to ubiquity later due to how well Clover's definition encapsulated the character model. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre could probably have been called Sally's Really Terrible, Terrifying, Disturbing Day, but it probably wouldn't have been as good for ticket sales. 

For those who might be unfamiliar, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is concerned with five young people in their early twenties. They take a road trip to investigate whether or not the grave of the grandfather of the brother and sister in the group may have been disturbed, after reports of grave robbery and desecration are taking place in the area near the cemetery. The protagonists stop at the abandoned home previously owned by Sally's grandfather, after a macabre run in with one of the creepiest hitch hikers in cinema history as they were passing an also abandoned slaughterhouse. Things go badly for them after they hear a generator and go seeking to buy some gasoline from whoever it belongs to. They'd earlier found the closest gas station to be out of gas (a thing not uncommon in the 1970s), and made the acquaintance of the proprietor who tried to warn them off heading to this abandoned house.  

There are numerous differences between Chain Saw and other horror films of its era, and non-genre films which make it something truly unusual. The odd combination of realism given it by the 16mm film stock. Daniel Pearl's considered, artistically inventive cinematography. Robert A. Burns set design. The central performances by Marilyn Burns, Edwin Neil as The Hitchhiker, Jim Siedow as The Old Man, Paul Partain as Franklin. The music by Wayne Bell and Tobe Hooper. Along with what is possibly among the darkest senses of humor in cinema history. My introduction to TCM was first through articles in horror magazines often referring to it as one of the great American horror films, and the regularity with which it was presented as an example of the kind of ultra-violent, creatively bankrupt film destroying America (especially the youth) during the moral panic of the eighties and early nineties that was tied to the Satanic Panic and also lead to Congressional hearings about the music industry. 

TCM is not a particularly graphic film though. The majority of the violence is implied or happens off screen. It succeeds in creating one of the most enveloping atmospheres of surreal madness and terror in the history of American cinema. This is the source of the film's reputation for being extremely violent. It's disturbing on a psychological and emotional level, to a degree that it requires rewatching it to pay attention to the amount of violence in the film to understand this. Memory fills in what we didn't see as a way to try to help explain why it's so disturbing. The violence in the film is implied, far more than it's graphically depicted. Conceptually though, the film is upsetting and disturbing to begin with. The degree to which it is able to create a marriage of realism and nightmare without tipping its hand to where the boundaries between the two are make it singular. 

On a personal level, it's not the scenes which suggest the most graphic violence which are the most disturbing. They were never the scenes which made the most significant impact and stuck with me. The dining room scene, after Sally has been captured, has always been the scene with the most power over me. 

We come to the dining room scene, after Sally has been chased by the now iconic Leatherface. In her attempt to escape him, she's run through his house, found what looks to be two corpses in an upstairs room, dressed and sitting in chairs, very much in the vein of Mrs. Bates in Psycho (both films draw from the Ed Gein's crimes). She jumps out the second story window, runs to the gas station where she and her friends had been earlier. She's knocked unconscious by The Old Man inside, tied up and returned to the house she just ran away from. 

As an audience, we've already seen Leatherface kill her friends. We know this is a house of horrors beyond what Sally has seen as she's run to its second floor and ended up jumping out the window. We seen that as she's being brought back into the house, The Hitchhiker is also a resident of this house. What we've seen of Leatherface through the course of the film suggests he is intellectually disabled, and possibly mute. We've seen he's wearing what looks like a mask made of human flesh, and in this scene we'll see a second mask in heavy makeup and a newly adorned wig, as if he's trying to take on a motherly or grandmotherly role. When they initially return to the house, The Old Man beats Leatherface with a broomstick as he makes some strange squealing noises, a punishment for having sawed through the front door in his pursuit of Sally. The Hitchhiker is sent to get Grandpa. It turns out Grandpa was one of the figures upstairs, and he's not dead, but he looks to be as close to it as one can get without visiting the great hereafter. 

When Grandpa is retrieved, The Hitchhiker sits him up in front of Sally, cuts her finger, sticks it in Grandpa's mouth as he suckles it, mimicking the movements of an infant sucking a bottle. In sheer terror, Sally passes out.  

Sally awakens, tied to a chair at one end of the table, and looks around to discover the other four at the other end of the table. The chair has human arms. A good deal of the decoration around the room is various animal skulls, bones and human skeletons, strung about. The set design doesn't recall anything like the gothic atmosphere the description suggests. This is filth and decay, degradation. The dining room could once have been something you'd see in thousands of colonial homes, now it's the stuff beyond what even most of our nightmares might conjure. Sally's discovery of her predicament causes a perfectly rational reaction, a continuous terrified screaming. At which point the hitchhiker begins mocking her, Leatherface leans in, as if curious. The Old Man alternates between laughing and looking concerned. Grandpa just sits at the other end of the table, ancient and barely alive. They begin regaling Sally with the tales of Grandpa's days at the slaughterhouse as "the greatest killer who ever was," interspersed with The Hitchhiker and The Old Man bickering about their roles in the family. Finally, they decide they're going to give Grandpa a shot at "taking care" of Sally. As Leatherface attempts to lend what assistance he can, a large steel mallet is put into Grandpa's hand. The Hitchhiker holds Sally down, her head over a bucket. In the midst of this clearly insane process, and not just because they're trying to kill Sally, but also because of how completely inept and incapable of interfacing with the reality that Grandpa is far beyond swinging anymore hammers, Sally ends up being able to escape The Hitchhikers grasp and again, jump out a window. 

It was this scene which thoroughly got under my skin in a way which lasted for days after my first viewing, and when I recall that initial reaction, I can still feel it viscerally. It wasn't the violence, but the pretext for the violence. It was the conversations about the slaughterhouse, the laughter, the joy they found in her terror. It was the realization that there was a reason and logic at work, but I could in no way make out even the outlines of its intersections. It was not within my grasp, but it was there. There is, of course, some degree of the discomfort which comes from how much of this is shot from Sally's point of view, along with very tight close ups of Sally terrified face and eyes. 

There were things about it which were recognizable though. It somehow had something to do with lineage, family, pride in one's labor, and ultimately survival. It wasn't just some monster with an animalistic will. It wasn't a demon, whose entire reason for existence is to destroy human beings. It wasn't some ghostly presence of another kind, bent on revenge. It wasn't even a serial killer, driven by some set of twisted, horrifying compulsions measure by psychology and categorized. They weren't Bond villains or comic book villains, driven to try to dominate the world or do some horrible thing to make themselves obscenely, vulgarly rich. It was the degree to which it was recognizable, but still completely unfathomable which was one of the most horror inducing aspects. There were ideas I understood. I don't think you can grow up in the United States and not have these concepts foisted on you to some degree. How they were hung together was something completely beyond my capability to understand, at the time. Carrying on in the family tradition, roles in a family unit, pride in one's labor and competing to survive are very much a part of the American tradition. 

It was also the laughter and the mocking. I could recognize it. It was something which could be found on any playground, and not just involving bullies. It could be found on every basketball court, baseball field etc. It was in every locker room I'd ever been in. The glee expressed in someone else's fear, pain and humiliation. I recognized it from the ideas often expressed by adults in my life, as well as on television and in print about the people in the world who were deemed undeserving in one way or another, when the undeserving experienced misfortune of some kind. I recognized the power dynamics at work in the family unit as similar to those I'd seen in families I knew. 

It unnerved me on a level few films ever have. It wasn't the variety of scary which was going to have me searching the house in the middle of the night, attempting to find the source of phantom sounds, like so many ghost stories. It was something much more profound. It may have been the first time I encountered characters for whom I could see some sense of motivation, recognize certain aspects of myself and the world I knew, as far as I'd been taught at the time, but was still completely unable to understand why they were doing something so terrible and so heinous. Pascual Laugier's Martyrs may have been as unnerving a film when I saw it many years later, but it was much more due to the motivations of the antagonists being clear, in addition to the degree they rang true. This was the creation of the unknown out of the very well known and relatable. 

Later, I'd pick up the subtext more clearly, and in reading, I'd encounter numerous different perspectives on the film and what it might be trying to say. At this point, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is to me, a film which obliterates any separation between what we would usually categorize as arthouse and grindhouse or exploitation, and the degree to which it's become a part of the the lexicon has also obliterated the line between cult and mainstream. 

This scene in the dining room has always been one I have a deep well of respect for. Any narrative art which can provoke so strong and profound a reaction has achieved some level of artistic merit, whether the reaction is one we might like or not. Lately, I've been thinking about the scene again, but in different terms. 

The discomfort and terror I've experienced (and I think many of us have experienced) in looking at what is happening in the U.S. has some correlation to this dining room scene. Sally is held hostage by a group of people whose belief in a personalized mythology dictates their survival is predicated on consuming her and her friends. The only concern the antagonists have about their actions is the possibility of being found out. It's treated as if they consider this the natural course of an intrusion into their "way of life." There's never a concern for anything else. Morality? Alternatives? These are never consideration, just this already established set of beliefs. The Old Man at one point bemoans that he's "never been much for killin'", and he's obviously rapidly vacillating between amusement and consternation, but that he might attempt to stop this is never a consideration. This is how it's supposed to be, as far as The Old Man and The Hitchhiker are concerned, and Leatherface it's obvious there can be no expectation of Leatherface to do anything but take direction from them. The connection between this scene and the current political and cultural climate in the U.S. shouldn't be very hard to see. The last several years have felt much like the country is essentially being held hostage by an ideological minority, who are dedicated less to an ideology than they are a mythology. The belief in this mythology demands they consume the rest of society, along with making it not only unnecessary, but contrary to the belief in the mythology to consider alternatives, especially those which ask uncomfortable moral questions. It's a belief system more akin to religiosity than to political ideology, but because it's a mythology and not a religion, it's capable of crossing religious boundaries, in the same ways it's capable of crossing political boundaries. Even separating the secular and religious, the mythology is still the uniting factor.

The effects of the Vietnam War on film, as an art and industry, as well as on the audience in the 1970s is widely recognized in the world of "serious" film commentary and academia. Maybe no genre was more changed than horror. All of this is interesting to consider in the context of understanding the estimates are roughly 60,000 Americans killed in the Vietnam War. The COVID 19 pandemic has now killed more than ten times that number. The reactions of this minority to the attempts of a more rational response to COVID 19, which would have prevented a majority of these deaths, is just one example fitting the pattern resulting from their dedication to their mythology. If we start counting the dead this mythology has produced as history has accumulated... well, we don't count those numbers because they're unthinkable. The most significant difference between Sally's reaction, coming out of unconsciousness to realize her predicament, and the situation the rest of society finds itself in as we're being held hostage by a minority whose belief in a mythology has wracked up the death toll, is Sally has the good sense to scream and be completely, utterly terrified. We're still attempting to reason our way through, to convince, as if this mythology has enough of a tangible connection to reason, and isn't primarily predicated on faith. Faith dictates belief beyond reason. It isn't faith if it responds to reason. 

At the final conclusion of TCM, following some more grisly goings on, including The Hitchhiker being hit by a semi as he pursues her, Sally has jumped into the back of a pick up truck, and is being driven away from Leatherface. He stands in the road, whirling his chainsaw around, in something like a dance. Part of this dance conveys a sense of defeat or consternation. Sally has escaped. It also conveys a territorial attitude. The intruder into their territory has escaped without paying the price. Sally, is crouched in the back of the pick up truck, an utterly unhinged laughter erupting from her. The look on her face is one of what can only be described as insane combination of glee and horror. Sally has escaped. She has survived. She has beaten them. This being said, Sally is also very clearly at or beyond the limits of her sanity. It's hard to see her, crouched in the back of the truck, peals of unhinged laughter ripping out of her, and believe Sally is ever going to okay. We know now, people who survive violent trauma can be okay, after no small amount of effort. We also know they're never going to back to being who they were before. One of the fundamental aspects of dealing with trauma like this is, is the grief related to the person whose been lost. It's coming to accept there is a difference between the person you have to be in order to have some semblance of peace and well being, and the person you can see yourself having become, had this experience not interrupted the process of your growth or evolution.  

As much as I often think about the dining room scene, I've started thinking about this as well. When there's a significant trauma in someone's life, there really isn't any going back to "before." We often delineate our lives into the before and the after, for a reason. We use the phrase "post 9/11" for a reason. Anyone who lived through 9/11  understands this. There are the times before. Then there are the times after. In the weeks and months after 9/11, there was also a rush to "get back to normal," as if it were possible to "go back." We have the experience and the evidence to demonstrate what happens when we attempt to "go back" without taking into account the societal trauma we've collectively experienced. No small part of the existence of this minority who hold the rest of us hostage and attempt to consume us, essentially our Old Man, Hitchhiker and Leatherface is due to the degree to which we didn't attempt to contend with the the collective trauma of 9/11. The result was the manipulation of that trauma and acting out on it in incredibly destructive ways, which have just compounded into many of the problems we have now.  We know the consequences of attempting to "go back" without also being very much aware of what we're becoming and what we're creating in our attempt to do this impossible thing we call "going back to normal." Just under 3,000 people died on 9/11. It may have been somewhat different in the degree of shock which came from losing them all in one day, and from watching it on live television, but we've lost over 600,000 people in just over eighteen months. We've been dealing with this loss, as well as the trauma of isolation. Now, we're adding to it by creating an environment where there is essentially no good answer. We have the Delta variant which in some regions is outstripping the previous COVID virus in its death toll, as we have an organized opposition to taking any rational steps to prevent further death, in part because of this minority who are very literally dead set on their mythology being the only acceptable perspective, and in part because we are again attempting to rush "to get back to normal." 

So many of us have become Sally, laughing at the horror and absurdity of it all to preserve our sanity. We greet or survive each day with a combination of gratitude, glee and horror. We greet news stories and viral videos with with the same reaction. For Sally, she's at least escaped the perpetrators of this nightmare. For us, there is no escape. There is only the waiting game to find out what fresh new act of sadism is going to be unveiled as the days unfurl.