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At the beginning of the 1960s, American culture was defined by a hope for a ‘Great Society’, as promised by Lyndon B. Johnson, who was building on what John F Kennedy had started working towards before his untimely death. This involved not just living well, but increased equality and peace in the USA and its operations elsewhere and this ideology was defined by the peaceful demonstrations made by the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights movement and the counterculture movement. These groups did not believe in violence and rallied for an America that was equal and prosperous for everyone, epitomized by the counterculture movement’s vision of anti-violence and optimism for the future as ‘hippies’ constantly protested for peace and love. The longhaired, psychedelic fashion and the demand for peace became synonymous for the era and people believed the government would listen to them.

 In the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper’s groundbreaking and horrifying debut, we see this ideology and the movement that represented it in the main characters who are dressed and look like the people who’d been seen protesting against the Vietnam War or stargazing at Woodstock. Ryan Hollinger said in his article on the film that these characters ‘simply reflect free spirited, expressive attitudes indicative of 60s/70s rebel teens’ and the film demonstrates this when they decide to pick up a hitchhiker almost without hesitation, it’s a normal thing to do and they trust no harm will come of it. Not only this, but he graphic nature of the hitchhiker’s descriptions of the slaughter house that disgust everyone apart from Franklin, the most conservatively dressed of the group and a clear outsider, who seems to find some pleasure in what he’s hearing. However, they represented something that would not live on in American society, ‘a soon to be undermined mindset’, as Joe Gamp puts it. This is emphasised by the symbolism of a group of young teenagers on a road that doesn’t lead anywhere with no gas, unsure of where they’re heading- similarly a future without inequality and violence looked increasing out of reach towards the end of the sixties and the start of the seventies.

As the new decade drew closer, social change didn’t look to be progressing and hateful assassinations began to remove key figures (Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy) from the fight against violence and inequality leading to the peaceful movements that had been so influential in the 1960s becoming violent. Simultaneously, Richard Nixon was introduced to government after a split in the Democratic Party. ‘By the end of the decade, community and consensus lay in tatters’ (history.com). This only continued in the 1970s as Nixon ‘abolished as many parts of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty as he could, and he made a show of his resistance to mandatory school desegregation plans’ (History.com), making the vision that had seemed so attainable at the start of the decade seem more and more out of reach.

The optimism for a ‘great society’ in the 1960s began to wither under conservative government policies that only hindered social progress and the fight for equality. Much as Leatherface is an ‘unstoppable, advantaged force’ (Joe Gamp) of violence and horror in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so, it seemed, was the government and the conservative backlash against the idyllic politics of the sixties. The death of (nearly all) the teenagers in the film therefore ‘signified the end of the innocent, utopian ideal’ (Joe Gamp).  In this context the film becomes deeply political, showing a rage at how regressive America had become. The cannibal family arguably represents the uneducated and backward south, unable to move forward from a past that they were happy with, but a modern society wasn’t able to entertain. This is shown by their anger at losing jobs and their inability to adapt in a way that’s productive, instead applying the same skills they used to previously slaughter animals to harvest people.

The two parties in the film- the teens and the cannibals, epitomised by Leatherface- and what they appear to represent is also highlighted by the color schemes in the film. The Texas sun and blue skies that are emphasized by shooting from low angles quite often in the first half of the film reflect the attitudes of optimism in the teens, whereas the dreary house interior covered in bones, body parts and decaying wood shows a much bleaker outlook, one of brutality and cruelty. Alternatively, these contrasting palettes can be seen as a more direct critique of American politics, displaying instead ‘the America people were being “sold” and the America that really existed’, as Michael Ewins points out.

The family of cannibals can also serve as a commentary on the notion of family. The fact that the house that, on the outside, looks like a stereotypical, American home (although perhaps a bit worn down) hides such dark and horrific activities works as a commentary on family life as a whole in America and elsewhere. Something that is so integral to American life can be hollow and rotten, Peter Bradshaw says that the idea of ‘the “family”, so readily evoked as the benchmark of American normality, can be anything but’. Hooper exaggerates a dysfunctional family to highlight the reality of many households.

This dysfunction can become normality in rural areas, where neighbors being ‘30 minutes’ drive away, and the uniformed forces of law and order further still’ can open up endless possibilities within the walls of the family home. The suggestion Peter Bradshaw makes is that, while the dream of American family may not be true anywhere, the vastness of the southern states means family life can be heavily indoctrinating and disturbing when compared to the ideal. This reflects a fear of ‘the south’ and the lower classes, for the very reasons shown in the film i.e. the seclusion and mystery behind many families who rarely contact the outside world. We see this in the film firstly in how unusual the people in the graveyard are at the start of the film, one old man proclaiming ‘things happen here about, they don’t tell about. I see things.’ From the start of the film we get a sense that people of this place are not those that the characters are used to. Hooper also shows the seclusion of the south and its effects in the fact that, after the first ten minutes or so, the only people we see outside the teens is the family of cannibals.

This criticism of the family also came at a time at which conservative backlash was trying it’s best to preserve traditional gender roles and family values, demonstrated by the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in 1972 that said equal rights could not be denied on account of sex. This resistance to the bill arose from a fear ‘that it would undermine traditional gender roles’ (history.com). It’s therefore notable that there are no female figures in the deranged family that appears in the film, suggesting that it is the men in society that construct the family ideal and the idea of gender roles, with the woman as simply something that needs to fit into this ideal. This is emphasized by the fact that the only woman we see to be part of this ‘nuclear family’ is forced there against her will- suggesting that the traditional family ideals limit women to and even entrap them within the household.

The cannibalistic family also serves as a commentary on class, as huge amounts of unskilled and uneducated workers were made unemployed in the 70s, a big reason for this being advances in technology- as the hitchhiker in the film describes when talking about how he was replaced as the killer of the cattle in the slaughterhouse. Unable to provide for themselves in an orthodox way in a harsh, fast evolving economic climate and exacerbated by the lack of opportunity in rural Texas, the family turns to extreme ways of surviving. The state of the house they are living in and their dirty appearances are clear results of their dire economic situation that was forced on them by conditions outside of their control. Eric McClanahan says that ‘their piece of the American dream was taken away when their jobs at the slaughterhouse were rendered obsolete’ adding to my previous point by suggesting how hard it is to achieve the ‘American dream’ when in the lower classes, criticizing social mobility in the USA. This reframes the family not just as a commentary on a struggling working class, but a criticism on capitalism. Joe Gamp builds on this describing them as ‘victims of U.S capitalist society’.

The event that defined U.S politics between the 60s and 70s was the Vietnam War and this is consistently referenced, serving as a backdrop to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The film appears to deal with the issue of the Vietnam War, which was still not resolved when it was released, in a way that’s very anecdotal. A group of young American’s travel to an unknown place where a masked killer kills them. In this way, Leatherface becomes an interesting metaphor for the Vietcong, as none of the teenagers die have any idea of what is about to happen, there are no previous clues of the threat that the house poses until they enter it, much how it was so hard for American soldiers in the Vietnam war to spot their enemy before they were ambushed. Not only this, but the mask of Leatherface seems significant in this context as we can only assume it is made from the remains of previous victims, a horrifying reminder to those who had encountered him previously. Joe Gamp says that ‘Leatherface's mask signified the end of the dream, the dead face of innocence, the remnants of the youthful optimism ruined by war’.

The film also references the experience of those who didn’t go to fight during the war, but stayed in America, demonstrating how this far-reaching conflict affected the lives of all Americans. In his article about the film, D.J Devereux encourages readers to see the teens as more than some kids looking for an inheritance, suggesting instead that they were facing conscription and going to the country to escape, he says, ‘This was the time of the Vietnam draft. Two of the males could have easily been drafted and think about it, they are running.’ The Texas Chainsaw Massacre appears, then, to be a Vietnam film, but framed in a way different to other films dealing with the same issue. Another scene is highly suggestive of the experience people in America had during the war- when Leatherface hooks one of the teens to a meat hook and forces her to watch the dismantling of her boyfriend’s body. This scene emulates, in an exaggerated manner, the way in which television stations and other forms of entertainment broadcasted the horrors of war to American homes. A result of this was that many young viewers saw the state of the situation that their peers where being subjected to and that they themselves could soon be experiencing as a result of conscription laws. Through this scene, we get a glimpse of the dread that many young people faced when hearing and seeing the effects of the war, knowing full well that it could people who they knew and where close to that were experiencing it, or even themselves.

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