THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE
(1974; dir. Tobe Hooper, w. Kim Henkel)

Sun + moon recurring motifs (answer to 2001’s optimistic cosmology), w/ Saturn in retrograde: consciousness/(credits-sequence solar flares: Old-Testament punishing) God + unconscious/Satan, neither exerting overt influence while Saturn (pagan deity, who killed his children [Vietnam-era US government]) only explicit force in film signaling Age of Aquarius officially over for film’s 5 vanwarmin’ post-hippies.

Opening snapshots (à la Bonnie + Clyde; other debts also to Straw Dogs + Deliverance) of grave-robbed body parts dreaming mind unearthing telegraphic fragments from unconscious in order to construct similar work of "art"; later Hitchhiker revealed as sculptor (dream-consciousness, hitching mental ride + creating pastiches from day-life offal [buried/repressed information: "they used everything"]), snapping wheelchaired (twice a passenger: captive ego w/ diminished agency in sleep à la similarly incapacitated prophesying drunk in "wheel-chair" tire at beginning) Franklin’s picture equating him w/ corpse (last-to-die Self [whose fall down hill the mind asleep] + complex both – all other riders combined into one corpulent frame, as when all become similarly immobilized on running out of gas [as has entire generation, per JOURNAL OF POPULAR FILM 5:2], burning photo predicting similar end to old self).

Traveling TX to Frank + sister Sally Hardesty’s ancestral home (dream-journey twd archetypes), where grandfather owned slaughterhouse (America’s violent birth + history) whose advancing technology (finding new ways to kill irony of progress + immortality of lower impulses) put Hitcher’s family out of work (disowned material thriving in unconscious/underworld); on ejection from van (pacifist youth – Pam’s objection to killing animals for food – denying violent nature) for cutting F (repressions damaging Self) after doing same to own hand (blood wedding: disparate two are same), Hitcher hex-marks fender à la own birthmarked face (head/mind [of also-behind-camera dir] where film takes place).

At gasless gas station (whole world run dry, real Energy Shortage few short yrs away)/barbecue (hell, where "sinners" similarly simmer), get directions to house from owner (aka Satan, later yclept "the Cook"), whose halfwit attendant (gazing at sun à la 2001’s primal Moonwatcher) keeps cleaning windshield but never hex; at Hardestys’, Kirk + Pam look for swimming hole (dried-up Styx), lured then to killer’s house by sound of generator (imagination + unconscious, similarly powered by independent source), where they discover impounded cars (civilization’s graveyard) + K (sledgehammered) + P (meathook) meet death at hands of masked + corpulent (annihilating not-the-Self to similarly machine-attached + ridiculed Franklin) Leatherface: in capitalist society, humans meat, too.

At dusk, Sally’s beau Jerry goes in search (following Franklin’s directions [à la Cook], as did Kirk + Pam: Self eliminating peripherals to boil down to core issue) + disappears; after dark, S + F leave van (departing body/civilization) for woods, where F gored (Self/civilization [wheelchair last – self-propelled – vehicle]/body transcended so anima [sister of Self/soul] can descend into primal mystery) + S escapes to + from house (Grandma + Grandpa upstairs in petrified Psycho-parody of family life "highest" ideal of conventional America, he/they Minotaur at culmination of labyrinth) pursued by faceless man w/ saw (essence of drama man/civ’s eternal malefic pursuit of nature [braless Sally]/woman), back to gas station where Cook (Sally’s adding-up gazing into smokehouse as into meat-is-murder hell + burning heart/unconscious of man) brains her + bags her (fall into deepest unconsc).

Awakes (into most irrational core of complex) to insanely in-fighting brothers (self-hatred at heart of men’s violence, absence of mediating parents btwn both hippie + backwoods families as of consciousness btwn Self + archetypes in dream) who decide Grandpa shd do honors of killing her (valorization of ancient + atrophied "Best Killer" allegiance to long-passed ideal [film’s secret optimism]), affording her escape when he fails; Leatherface stopped by Black Maria trucker (at opposite end of Night o/t Living Dead’s similar truck-driving African-American hero, he spirit-guide out of house [at dawn] where siege conversely inside) w/ tool to head (literally throwing wrench into works) after mowing down Hitcher (civilization’s coup de grâce to self-proclaimed Old Way) + disappearing on arrival of pickup-hauling 2nd deus ex machina (progress scaled to personal proportion), Sally in back demented + bloody (cf end of ’71 Tombs o/t Blind Dead + Hitchcock’s The Birds) + LF doing mad ballet in empty road (poles apart from dawn-beginning – again à la 2001 – w/ hippies on rd), confrontation w/ regressive masculinity – in both senses of term (as both bkwd-propelled men + Freudian intuition of masculine agency in wmn's mythic past) – for once not positive, nothing good coming of foray into Jungle, à la Vietnam.

Scrw Henkel’s marvelous, hard-to-find Last Night at the Alamo mines similar women putting up w/ stupid, violent men ore.