Texas Chainsaw and Pink Flamingos

¶ … Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Pink Flamingos belong to utterly different genres, they share in common aesthetic sensibilities that celebrate the macabre, fetish, and even the grotesque. As such, both films encapsulate the punk aesthetic and its complete disregard for, and subversion of, the manufactured "beauty" packaged by the dominant culture. Both these films were released in the early years of the 1970s, Pink Flamingos in 1972 and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974. In many ways, both films capture the disillusionment with popular culture and with establishment norms and values. The early years of the 1970s arrived at the tail end of the counterculture movement of the late 1960s, during which sexual norms and gender norms, as well as norms related to race and class were being systematically challenged. As the Vietnam War wound to a bitter end, many Americans confronted deep and even existential questions about their own society and especially its cultural myths. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Pink Flamingos challenge prevailing myths about American culture and American beauty.

Tobe Hooper's 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre fails to conform to mainstream aesthetics, and directly subverts those aesthetic judgments. Its monster, Leatherface, is everything a handsome man or woman is not, underscored by both his appearance and his actions. Viewers appreciate The Texas Chainsaw Massacre not to root for Leatherface, but to experience the same type of twisted pleasure that Marquis de Sade touches upon in his work. The film titillates, but not by being a "slasher" film that shows a lot of blood and gore, but by revealing the universal darkness in the human soul. That darkness is not personified necessarily, as the monster Leatherface is portrayed as being more than human. Leatherface is the epitome of human depravity. The audience is not privy to Leatherface's motives, adding an additional element of shock to the film. Part of what makes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as intense as it is from an audience perspective is the sound editing. The incessant buzz of the chainsaw, coupled with the screams of the victims, offer an overlay that more than makes up for Leatherface's own lack of words. Evil and darkness are palpable, irrational, and inevitable.

John Waters presents an entirely different vision of reality in Pink Flamingos, but ironically, the aesthetic of his film is not too far removed from that of Texas. In Pink Flamingos, gender bending assumes the role of shock value. Leatherface does dress as a woman in one scene of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, though, revealing the close subconscious connection between gender deviance and violence. Waters also juxtaposes deviant gender roles and deviant sexualities with motifs related to violence, power, and coercion as with the forcible impregnations and surrogate motherhood. In Pink Flamingos, gender deviance is celebrated but also scorned by the dominant culture. The film's protagonist, Divine, is shunned as the "filthiest person alive," which makes the audience root for her. On the contrary, Leatherface is a genuinely filthy creature and the audience has no desire to root for him. The audience does desire, on a deep and dark level, to know exactly what he will do next, who he may harm and how. The celebration of the macabre is something both films share in common, as they challenge viewers to consider the nature of beauty and what makes a work of art important or valid.

Kant's view of aesthetics stresses impact over beauty, psychological or intellectual transformation over preconceived or static norms of beauty. Films that challenge viewers to question beauty norms therefore draw upon the Kantian critique of aesthetic judgment, and moral judgment as well. A horror aesthetic such as the one in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, subverts mainstream beauty norms and so too does a "camp" aesthetic like that of Pink Flamingos. The final scene of Pink Flamingos depicts Divine deliberately eating dog poop in front of the camera, breaking the fourth wall as she does so. Waters wants his viewers to know he is watching them, creating a voyeuristic feedback loop. The audience has a sick fascination with the world of Divine and her warped sense of self and her twisted sense of art, just as the audience has the same sick fascination with the world of Leatherface and his inexplicable desire to maim and murder with a chainsaw. The audience is the voyeur, but Waters has the last laugh by watching the watcher.

Both films also depict worlds in which ordinary middle and working class values compete to find validity in a society that is polarized along class lines. The context of both movies is among the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. The films transcend the divide between fine art and pop art, because neither of them fits into either category. As macabre works of art, these two films edge closer to the category of fine art. Numerous works of art demonstrate the macabre through imagery of death, rape, and other dark elements of human life. Pop art is comparatively superficial.