Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [70]
Hansen knocked the actor over his head with a mallet so hard that he broke blood vessels in his eyes. He fell to the ground, shaking epileptically. Hansen did not drag him away so much as flip him up like a pancake and catapult him to the next room. He slammed the door and in no time was gone. This is the hunt. It took very little time, and the scene was made even quicker by jump cuts, and while the theatrical door slam may have been unnecessary considering the remote house, it announced that a Grand Guignol monster had entered this ordinary Texas landscape. The next kill was even more flamboyant. Despite its reputation for grim fly-on-the-wall realism—stoked by its announcement at the start of the movie that it was an account of “one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history”—Chain Saw was not shot in the verité style of Last House. The camera glided and the story was often told through editing of shots. For instance, audiences regularly remember the second kill when Leatherface mounts a victim on a meat hook as bluntly graphic, but it actually never shows any flesh being abused or even a drop of blood. You see a close-up of the hook, then Leatherface, but when he mounts her on it, there’s a cut to a close-up of her agape mouth croaking in pain.
The real revulsion is what follows. Hooper shoots the victim’s face and chest on the hook and then pans down to a bucket, allowing the audience’s imagination to connect that the purpose of the bucket is to collect blood, that it will drop, even though it does not. It’s a credit to the direction that fans think they see more than they do.
The next time Leatherface appears he is in cooking mode, wearing an apron and a dress. In his final appearance at the dinner table, he is wearing his finest drag outfit, clown makeup, and wig. The meal is served. In the original production notes, Hooper said that he wanted to make a film “about meat,” and the structure of the scare scenes is a profile of our food industry, with people cast as the animals. As played by the bearish Hansen, Leatherface doesn’t communicate in words, just grunts and growls. Inarticulate, masked, brutal, it’s understandable that most critics and audiences saw nothing more than a killing machine. But Leatherface is not that simple. He is as much victim as monster. There is something in his eyes that brings us to his side: fear. Leatherface is bullied by his brother to get dinner and tries to appeal to his father. Like Norman Bates, he struggles with his identity and plays dress-up.
The movie doesn’t merely take the side of the young kids. The usual interchangeable teenagers are pointedly annoying. As the kid in the wheelchair, the actor Paul Partain whines gratingly. And while the script asks you to sympathize a little bit with Leatherface, it doesn’t exactly make you see the world through his eyes. At least, not in the way that Hitchcock did with Norman. Most of the time Hooper’s point of view remains neutral. Before heading into the house for the first kill by Leatherface, the roaming camera sets up behind a blond girl on a swing. As she stands up and walks toward the house, it stays at a distance, showing us neither her perspective nor that of the killer inside the house. The insect-eye shot emphasizes the scale of the rickety two-floor