The world has been Surrealist for a hundred years, though the adjective that people turn to in trying to describe their ever more pervasive feeling of shocked disbelief in the face of history and its discontents is ‘surreal’. André Breton hated most of the things that anyone outside his movement did with its terminology, and spent much of his time booting followers and collaborators out in order to be able to disdain them too. He also loathed any suggestion that Surrealism was just one more artistic movement thrown up by the innovators and shakers of modern culture.
Breton’s aesthetic breakthrough had come when he and Philippe Soupault embarked in 1919 on the automatic writing collaboration The Magnetic Fields, in which ‘grocery stores beautiful as our random successes compete with each other from floor to floor in the labyrinth’, in Charlotte Mandell’s sumptuous and nifty translation. An extreme faith in three associated forces drove that project and flew back out of its pages to carry Surrealism on through its subsequent decades: dreaming, chance and the image.
The most powerful of the three by far was the image. Breton wanted his ideas to change history, but what they did most profusely was provide a stunningly adaptable template for reabsorbing the experimental gains of the years of Cubism, abstraction and collage into a revived and revised commitment to figurative images. Modern artists were once again allowed to be illustrational, so long as they illustrated the right sorts of oblique or deviant things. Salvador Dalí became the great Surrealist emblem around the middle of the century because he understood how to flaunt the twirling and merciless instinct for sheer pizzazz hiding amid the movement’s doctrines of subversion.
Yet there is no greater or more richly clamorous account than Breton’s of the euphoric hopes and desperate needs that modern history invests in images. All the combinations of brilliance and hokum that paraded out of his ideas attest to their vibrancy, their stubborn lividness; no one was more disappointed than he at the movement’s lavish failings.
Tobe Hooper’s movie The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – released fifty years ago, halfway between the Surrealist Manifesto and now – is fundamentally a story about images. An opening montage seems designed not so much to split the difference between stills photography and cinema as to crush it. Pitch darkness is broken by series of flashbulb bursts and brightly lit close-ups of decaying body parts, before the sun rises over a grisly tableau perched on a graveyard monument. The cannibal family who wreak the film’s havoc have a thing for making images and effigies of death, and the story starts with these lurching attempts to picture their misdeeds.
The film’s horror lies in what it is prepared to do to five young people in order to fill images with vigour and charge, to return power to a depleted image world. Unlike plenty of horror films, it neither dislikes nor idealises its characters as it carts them off to destruction. Rather, it seems to regret what happens to them with impressive sincerity, though this only raises the question – with baffling, deadpan poignancy – of why the horror genre exists at all.
The final instruction in Breton’s essay ‘Leave Everything’ is to take to the highways, and the warning that stalks through Hooper’s film about the possible consequences does not mean it was not the right advice. Bursts of radio news provide much of the film’s addled soundscape for its first half or so, as the five young people drive in their van to the desecrated graveyard. The grandfather of two of the group is buried there, but it remains unclear whether they’ve come out of family piety or the desire for a ‘fun trip’.
The day is hot and the film is sweaty, the camera filling with a bleached wooziness as it seeks out harsh solids and broken objects: crumbling walls, a cranky vending machine, bones. From the graveyard the group drive on in search of the grandfather’s house. They pick up and then eject a scrawny hitchhiker with a penchant for photography and knives – their first encounter with a member of the cannibal family who live next door to the dilapidated ancestral house. Homes and neighbours in this world are shattering things.
Hooper’s film is structured like a bleak chute, and simplicity is part of its horror. One by one the characters are picked off, as they are drawn in search of fuel or one another to explore the neighbouring property. A tracking shot follows the story’s second victim as she drifts towards the house with an inevitability that is hard to tell from aimlessness. The oil crisis of the 1970s is part of the news backdrop to the action, but the film is also a revisionist western: its tough visual rampancy shows the influence of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. The carnage wrought by the cannibal family has one origin in the slaughterhouse work they are ancestrally devoted to, its concealed violence the culmination of the herding and ranching that other films treat more piously. Leatherface is the only name the film gives to its iconic character, a lumbering incarnation of doom who doesn’t know what to do with this stream of young people turning up at his door except to turn them into meat. Maybe they were meat all along.
Bodies are seen as and turned into fragments. One chase sequence is a riff on the Surrealist and Romantic obsession with forests at night. Laughter is pressed so close to horror that they invade each other. The film shows what happens to images when an adventure like Surrealism no longer seems possible, or cogent.
Not that the Surrealists themselves weren’t troubled, or even convulsed, by such thoughts, as the movement sought to grasp the rise of fascism in the 1930s, or to disentangle its own destructive urges from those of its enemies. After the Nazis had been defeated and America had unloosed atomic weapons, Alberto Giacometti moved away from his doctrinally Surrealist early sculptures towards a renewal of human figuration in which desiccation and restoration coexist, while Jackson Pollock invented a new labyrinthine lyricism that turned the Surrealist imagery of his earlier style into fuel for a tattered but accelerated bodily and psychic freedom.
In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, however, a limit case approaches for the faith that convulsion brings metamorphosis and culture can renew itself by hating itself. Do we still want to be convulsed if it means only death and entropy? Might our enemies not be as delighted as astonished by our embrace of derangement?
The film’s most surprising passage may come about halfway through, when we start to realise just how bleak this chute is. The power of pop and pulp depictions of evil generally lies in the extreme of either knowingness or ignorance that the bearer of violence incarnates: the personification of evil is either an omniscient mastermind (as in Star Wars) or an automaton devoted to destruction (as in Jaws). Leatherface wields his violence with a purity that seems purely reactive, maybe addictive, even devotional, were it not for this brief passage of bewilderment around the film’s midpoint. He has been despatching these intruders one by one, but something about what is happening troubles him; he does not know why these people are turning up at his house and offering themselves. So he sits down amid the sprawl of murderous implements and images of disaster, and thinks about what is going on, his large face twitching ponderously beneath the sallow mask.
The great performance of the film comes from Marilyn Burns in the role of Sally, the final victim, who is captured and incorporated into the family’s grisly dinner ritual but gets away in the end. Burns has to avoid giving her character any great weight or interest, because the film cannot become a study of the people that these things are happening to, and because it cannot break with the codes of pulp storytelling that allow it its explosive freedom of manoeuvre. Yet Sally’s survival has to matter a lot, and to result from reserves of fortitude and resourcefulness that can’t seem heroic. She is an incarnation of sheer victimhood who also outruns the category and empties it out.
Hooper’s images in the dinner scene have a monumental, giddy ferocity, as the cannibals’ homespun cult of skeletal artefacts and slaughterhouse techniques tangles with their tetchy family dynamics, but the key to the scene – and maybe to the whole film – is the juddering and flaring focus on Sally’s eyes. As Leatherface shuffles around, and the images fuse extremes of dream and reality just as Surrealism intended, Sally’s gaze flickers and strains and darts in search of options or explanations or respite. The film wants our eyes to be as open as hers are. But this has become a lot to ask.
One of the questions for the Surrealists was whether they meant to overthrow reality or to increase it. Perhaps what Surrealism wanted all along was to suggest an art of survival, vigilance, rampant responsibility. Sally at last jumps through a window to escape. Her ordeal has been nightlong, and the dawn’s early light tears into the action as she heads back to the highway. Bloodsoaked and screaming, she becomes a ghastly hitchhiker herself, tumbling into the back of a pick-up truck just in time, and Leatherface is left in a state of marauding solitude, his chain saw flailing in the florid air. History has left us with nowhere to go except further into reality.
