When taken as a whole, it’s apparent that Hooper was just as politically minded in the creation of this film as he was with the first, his sights set firmly on the targets of America’s continued degradation across a decade of harsh social and political unrest and the various cultural elements playing into that dynamic at large. Residual Vietnam tensions, Reagan-era capitalism, American traditionalism – all of these served as agents of entropy to the extent that even the apparatuses intended to combat them were transformed into twisted facsimiles of themselves.
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Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 has been a consistent source of fascination to me, both as a horror fan and as a general lover of American genre cinema curiosities. On its initial release, reception was mostly mixed – audiences and critics alike didn’t know what to make of the film’s wild swing into splatter satire, more in the vein of Evil Dead 2 than the overwhelming rage and freneticism of the original. In recent years, reappraisals have led to a wider appreciation of its horror-comedy riffing on the themes of the first film, blowing them up into garish caricature with the added bonuses of practical effects legend Tom Savini and Hooper at one of his many creative peaks. And while I’m always happy to see a cult favorite of mine get proper recognition in the public consciousness, I’ve been frustrated at the continual insistence that its strengths lie exclusively on its gorgeous, gory surface. Readings of its predecessor often center on the political environment of its release, which is entirely fair – 1974 was a hell of a time to release an aggressively anti-American picture, amidst the roiling turmoil of Watergate and the military’s retreat from Vietnam. But I’d argue that this film was a similarly righteous roar of fury at the continued rot of the American soul throughout the 1980s, spurred on enthusiastically by Reagan-era capitalism and the lingering specters of the previous decade. Given free rein to craft whatever sequel he saw fit, Hooper took a gamble on reapplying his old frustrations to a new era, shaping his cast of new and returning characters into signifiers for the various forces that were eroding the moral fabric of the country at large. I’d say his risk paid off and then some, having successfully crafted one of the most unhinged and entertaining cultural critiques of the decade.
Looking at the wild and varied cast of oddballs on display, it’s only right to start things off with the show-stopping villains of the picture: the Sawyer family. Drayton Sawyer, played by the original film’s Jim Siedow, is the family’s requisite moneygrabber, standing in as a totem for capitalist greed with his focus centered purely on the need to make money and his trials as a “small businessman.” He whines and yells about the financial stresses his family causes while regularly indulging in the most obvious excesses, wearing fancy suits and using an expensive car phone to call up the boys when he’s low on meat or has a job that needs doing. When he’s confronted at the end of the film by Lefty, one of the film’s protagonists, his first instinct is to peg the guy as a potential competitor and attempt a bribe – it doesn’t even occur to him that Lefty would be opposed to the whole “using people as food and furniture” deal he’s surrounded by. To a Reagan-era capitalist, the human cost of living the good life was a necessary banality; standing in a cathedral of their misdeeds was simply being in a big room.
His introductory scene serves as a playful bit of commentary as well, seeing him take home a comically oversized trophy as the long-standing champion of a local chili cook-off. The glee he feels is palpable as he admits that the competitive edge of his family’s recipe comes down to having an “eye for meat,” smiling wide as he surveys the crowd rabidly chowing down on the obviously once-human dish. A judge even mentions Drayton being the town’s favorite caterer as she pulls out a human tooth from a bite of chili, her eyes widening in terror just as he steps in with a quick excuse to calm her down: “One of them white peppercorns.” The American populace had embraced a dog-eat-dog philosophy during the Reagan years, and Hooper cynically suggests that, in a way, they’d developed quite a taste for it. For a man whose family specializes in sawing innocent people down, turning it into a business is the next obvious step to making it rich when folks are clamoring for what the Sawyers can provide.
After Drayton comes the film’s newest addition to the Sawyer clan: the cartoonishly grotesque Vietnam vet Chop Top, brought to life with a rabid energy by the always eccentric Bill Moseley. In his first on-screen appearance, he’s dressed in a Sonny Bono wig and hippie garb, fingers held up in a sarcastic peace sign as he giggles menacingly and uses a wire hanger to scratch at the exposed metal plate in his noggin. Hooper lights him in a mixture of sickly pinks and green, his gangrenous presence seemingly infecting the space around him while the danger he presents becomes more apparent. Even his dialogue reads like a cruel joke at times, full of intentional malapropisms and missed social cues as he takes obvious glee in seeing people squirm under his gaze. The rest of the family gets a kick out of what they do, certainly, but none of them seem to have quite as much fun as Chop Top when the blood gets flowing and meat needs carving.
In the film’s vernacular, he represents the country’s attitude in the ’80s toward the veterans of Vietnam and their discomfort toward them, made manifest in the form of a cannibal with a plate in his cranium. Those who returned from that conflict weren’t met with the hero treatment previous generations had received when coming home; they were treated as pariahs – living, breathing avatars of the horrors performed overseas in the name of American hegemony. Chop Top taps into that cultural discomfort and reappropriates it as a weapon, exploiting his status as an outsider to maximize the harm he can inflict on the world around him. He regularly mentions his experiences in the war, even going so far as to suggest with his hyena-like laugh that the Sawyers change their incredible lair in the third act into “Nam Land.” The idea of a Vietnam theme park sounds like madness, but to the folks who’d fought for their homes and found themselves totally ostracized on their return, the consumerist hellscape of the 1980s provided fertile grounds for turning their violent trauma into new modes of entertainment.
The oldest members of the family, Grandma and Grandpa, play comparatively smaller roles in the plot of the film but retain thematic importance in the portrait Hooper attempts to paint of the American ’80s. Neither speaks – I can’t even say for sure if Grandma is alive – but both serve as textual symbols for how the country had deified its violent history and refused to let it die, instead going so far as to keep it alive via an “all liquid diet” of blood for Grandpa and enshrining it atop a fake mountain they call Chainsaw Heaven for Grandma. The traditions and appetites they’ve passed on to the rest of the Sawyers have shaped their entire lives and existences, molded them into the rotten, awful people that continue to terrorize Texas. By the time the credits roll, Grandma and Grandpa are firmly dead, but the impact of their legacies remains in the terrors they helped to perpetuate via the actions of their family. History can be buried, sure, but it can never be truly erased once it has inspired others to follow in its footsteps.
Last but not least, the most storied and complex member of the Sawyer clan: Leatherface. At once both the franchise’s icon and thematic lynchpin, he returns in this sequel as a representative of the unfettered American id, ever-hungry for opportunities to channel his pent-up anger via his bloodied blade. His introduction in the first kill scene sets the tone of his presence in the film’s commentary at large, his chainsaw-wielding form wearing the corpse of the first film’s hitch-hiker cannibal (named “Nubbins” here in passing) as a phantasmagoric facade in army fatigues as he murders a couple of irritating yuppies running rampant on the Texas highways. One of the victims pulls out a gun and shoots at the ghoul’s head, revealing instead Leatherface’s furious visage beneath as he proceeds with viciously satiating his chainsaw’s appetites. Symbolically, Leatherface’s use of his deceased family member represents America’s repurposing of the casualties of Vietnam from tragedies to excuses for further imperial action, supposedly in the name of spreading American influence. Reagan himself had openly decried the public and political opposition toward further overseas intervention – at the time known as “Vietnam Syndrome” – for restricting his ability to continue expanding American influence, arguing it would be a “dishonor” to those who had died for it. After the US government attempted to dissuade the general antimony with a failed invasion of Grenada in 1983, Hooper simply had to sit back with a pen while the news played and write what was on the screen.
Being a walking id comes with other complications, though, as shown in the unique relationship between Leatherface and the film’s protagonist, Stretch. In the film’s most infamous scene, Leatherface manages to corner Stretch on a tub of ice and proceeds to thrust his weapon suggestively into the freeze, the chainsaw spraying white flakes into the air and pumping between her legs as she screams for him to stop. He very disturbingly adopts his iconic tool as a makeshift phallus, dragging the teeth along Stretch’s inner thigh as she tells him he’s “so good” in the hopes of defusing his psychosexual desire for bloodshed. When he finally reaches a point of climax, he roars in fury and destroys the entire space they occupy, his sexual impotence transformed into senseless brutality once again. Unpacking this scene has always been, as Leatherface actor Bill Johnson noted, “delicate,” but it seems Hooper is suggesting in this moment that the American id, typically fettered by murderous action, also seeks a kind of sexual domination of its victims through those same modes of destructive expression. Stretch’s attempts to appeal to those base urges reads as a rumination on the fearful acceptance Americans had adopted in the face of the increasingly hostile climate that the government had cultivated for the disenfranchised and victimized. Playing prey can be a successful tactic when the predator seeks only to control by fear, and this scene manages to capture that dynamic in a frighteningly unsettling way.
The film’s protagonists similarly serve their own purposes in the thematic canvas Hooper paints of the already-rotten decade. Stretch, played with real charisma and gusto by Caroline Williams, is a confident, ambitious radio DJ who finds herself pulled into the world of the Sawyers after inadvertently recording one of their killings on her radio show, innocent until she’s exposed to the sound of the saw. After learning that the film’s other protagonist, Lefty, is on the hunt for the family, she offers her help under the auspices of justice for the victims and an end to the bloodshed consuming the area. But in private, she admits that her motivations are more selfish, holding dreams of doing something more meaningful with her journalistic career and seeing this as the break she’s been looking for. It’s not necessarily that she’s ill-intentioned, but rather that her individualistic drive for success leads to exploiting the very spectacle she opposed to further her own self-interests. American journalism in the ’70s and ’80s was at a similar point of moral hypocrisy, fearmongering widespread crime and violence under the guise of good faith to generate viewership and maintain a foothold in the increasingly hostile capitalist climate. In the name of preserving itself as a bastion for championing an end to hatred and hostility, the media had inadvertently allowed itself to become another arm of the greater American apparatus that was continuing to erode the country’s soul. Similarly, as Stretch’s exposure to the Sawyers grows, so too does her capacity to operate in their world and speak its language. By the time the film wraps, not only has she adopted a chainsaw of her own to defend herself from Chop Top, but she even goes so far as to recreate Leatherface’s chainsaw dance from the original film. Where his swings felt like a roar of frustration and rage, hers feel almost celebratory, as though she’s acknowledged that the only way to survive is to play like her oppressors and accept her own role in the violent dynamic she’s fallen into.
Lefty, played by screen legend Dennis Hopper, also experiences his own fall to corruption, although the particulars of his descent lead to a different conclusion. As a Texas police lieutenant, he represents the general law and order of the land, looking to put an end to the Sawyers and their endless spree for the sake of public good. But much like Stretch, he has his own selfish goals in mind; he’s uncle to the first film’s Sally and Franklin and eager to bring a particularly Texan brand of justice down on those who hurt his family. When Stretch comes to him with her evidence of the Sawyers, he urges her to play the recording on the radio for widespread exposure of the cannibals, promising to protect her afterward if they come around knocking. That promise proves false, though, as he admits later that his primary goal was to use Stretch as bait to pull the Sawyers out of hiding. Thematically, this lines up with how the “law of the land” (i.e., government agencies, the police) often manipulated the news media’s fearmongering to build a spectacle of tragedy and bloodshed and build a perception of disorder to excuse their own ruthless behaviors and attitudes. Over-policing and police brutality were regular issues in the 1980s, and both were spurred on continually by the news media’s willingness to overemphasize violence-related stories to incentivize viewership. In Hooper’s eyes, this relationship is symbiotic – both entities may have been convinced of the earnestness of their causes, but their inability to recognize the selfish motives coloring their actions only led to a perpetuation of the problems they wished to solve.
And while Stretch ultimately wields the chainsaw as a method of self-defense, Lefty’s adoption of the Sawyers’ methods is far more thorough. It’s clear from his first appearance that Lefty is already well along the path of transformation – his fellow police officers think he’s a conspiracy-obsessed crackpot, the local news feels similarly to the point of open mockery, and even Stretch finds herself thrown off by the obvious toll his pursuit has taken on him. At one point, he enters a shop comically filled with chainsaws and finds himself in awe of the tools and their destructive power. When he takes one out for a test on a log outside the store, he doesn’t even try to use it properly, instead swinging it wildly like a weapon as sawdust clouds the screen and the film’s piercing soundtrack punctuates his imbalance. By the time he finally meets the Sawyers, Lefty has made the full descent, both literally and figuratively. After all his talk of retribution and justice, he’s prepared to meet them on their level, saw for saw. Symbolically, his fall reads as a reflection on how many of the apparatuses of justice in America found themselves hypocritically calling for an end to the vicious crimes they were also callously recreating, generating their own problems and excuses to justify further extremified action.
When taken as a whole, it’s apparent that Hooper was just as politically minded in the creation of this film as he was with the first, his sights set firmly on the targets of America’s continued degradation across a decade of harsh social and political unrest and the various cultural elements playing into that dynamic at large. Residual Vietnam tensions, Reagan-era capitalism, American traditionalism – all of these served as agents of entropy to the extent that even the apparatuses intended to combat them were transformed into twisted facsimiles of themselves. The country had effectively created an ouroboros of corruptive violence and destruction for itself, habituating a struggle where the only winner is the one left standing with a chainsaw by the end. Hooper was always a filmmaker interested in imbuing his work with thematic richness and textures while crafting entertaining pieces of schlocky genre thrills, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is no exception. It’s a confident and sharp piece of satire that disguises itself as some fun splatter horror, and time has only proven its cynical prescience correct as the country continues down its brutalistic path of violent, capitalistic hegemony.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
