Lovecraft (cosmic pessimism’s great, hopelessly paranoid godfather). This imagistic design gestures to the terrifying concerns with physics and universal disorder found within the fiction and philosophy of H.
This visual upending of scale works to diminish the human characters as puppets within an indifferent universe, subservient to a star’s subsistence. The underlying thread of cosmic pessimism is further visualized by the film’s powerful use of rack focus, which repeatedly sees human characters pictorially dissolve into the sun, the moon and, on one occasion, a swarm of insects. This devolution serves the film’s overarching thesis of cosmic pessimism: despite its implicitly vegan and animal abolitionist politics, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ultimately finds a void in its search for morality and reason. Dialogue and reason disintegrate in the film’s final act, which is scored prominently by screams, cackles and the ceaseless buzz of Leatherface’s chainsaw. Within this space, the protagonists quickly devolve into engines of survival instinct. Rather than offering narrative exposition to detail this clan’s practices, Hooper allows their environment and actions to convey the necessary information. Hooper deftly applies visual language to convey the Sawyers’ cannibalistic practices and indifference to humanist ideals art director Robert Burns brilliantly designs the family’s house with grotesque detail, turning it into a madhouse of grisly signifiers. The film is unforgiving in its deployment of images to illustrate this point: taxidermy hybrids of human and nonhuman animals, piles of bones from indeterminate origins, methods of slaughter normally reserved for enslaved cattle now inflicted on the hapless protagonists. This bleak philosophy emphasizes the absurd cruelty in privileging human wellbeing over the rights of nonhuman animals. Unthinkable things happen to us without reason or consequence, our capitalist social structures cultivate our resentments toward one another and we inhabit a society designed to swallow us whole. It fixes an unblinking stare on the violence that humans inflict on both human and nonhuman animals, reminding us of our fallibility and inconsequentiality. By orienting its characters within an indifferent world governed by contingency and disorder, the film highlights its deeply anti-anthropocentric ideas - most notably and most bluntly, that we are not special - and these ideas are further exemplified by its graphic, disturbing allusions to the atrocities of the meat industry.
Indeed, this film, which at its basest level portrays two very different groups of people brutally colliding over the course of one very bad night, functions as an expression of cosmic pessimism. Within its tight, historically-specific construction, which is visceral and close-up in terms of narrative, aesthetics and sensibility, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre gestures to ideas that transcend sociopolitical specifics.
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