Horror and Philosophy
Hegel and the "Texas Chainsaw"
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Family Values:
Hegel and the "Texas Chainsaw" Hewitts:
Man and Woman in Marcus Nispels The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The premise of director Marcus Nispels remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) is simple; five kids are going to a concert, and they pick up an obviously distraught female hitchhiker (Lauren German) along the way. Not 10 minutes into the movie, the hitchhiker pulls a gun out from under her dress and shoots herself in the mouth. They try to report the incident, but in the process, unwittingly uncover a gruesome backwoods family (the Hewitt clan) who eventually kill all but one of them.
The movie is structured such that the protagonists display a conventional schism between the family and the state (with man and woman each corresponding to the roles dictated by Hegel in his discussion of ethical life).
The antagonists display a convoluted relationship between family and state duties. 
Sheriff Hoyt (R. Lee Ermey) is the epitome of human law (he is supposed to serve and protect the needs and interests of the general populace), and only after our initial encounter with him do we learn that he is actually acting in the interests and needs of his own twisted family.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a fetid commentary on the condition of family values, or as Hegel puts it, divine law, across the generational divide.
As Nispels film, and writer Scott Kosars reworking of Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkels original script suggests, antiquated family values take on the utmost importance no matter what the cost, and even bring these nether world values to the level of the externally enforced human law.
However, in the end, the film does not even progress past this initial schism between the family and the state; where Hegel moves on to the eventual disintegration of a set of values based on gender roles, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre only reinforces them.
The happy state suggested by Greek Ethical Order is almost exactly analogous to what we take to be our recent history; it is a delusion that has manifested itself in American culture and society. Where else could a joke such as Why did the woman cross the road? What is she doing out of the kitchen? emerge but in the annals of modern Western thought? The family unit is fundamental to our way of life, in that most individuals come out of such a unit, and in most cases go on to form their own family unit. When we couple this with the traditional American conception that the husband should be the bread winner and the wife should take care of the home, it becomes strikingly similar to what Hegel describes as Greek society.
These two universal beings of the ethical world [man and woman] have, therefore, their specific individuality in naturally distinct self consciousnesses, because the ethical Spirit is the immediate unity of the substance with the self consciousness-an immediacy which appears, therefore, both from the side of reality and of difference, as the existence of a natural difference. (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 276)
The idea behind this is that the ethical order distinguishes the separate spheres of existence naturally; that is, individual beings who feel at home in the world feel this way because the Spirit that has pervaded their culture, or what ties them all together and why they are happy in the first place, stems naturally from the inherent difference in the universal form of being human.
This then leads to the belief that while men should be concerned with human law, due to the fact that they constitute the public sphere, women should be concerned with the divine law (positive ethical action towards the individual, Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 271), due to the fact that they cultivate the ethical life in children, that is made either intrinsic in the daughter or extrinsic in the brother. Ideally, acts ethically in this society, but it is supposedly up to the men to uphold the ethical laws of the nation and women are solely relegated to this inert cultivation of goodness in society. This is exactly why these separate spheres of existence cannot thrive apart from one another; that is, they must interact in order for the whole of society to appear as a happy ethical state.
Just as the Familypossesses in the community its substance and enduring being, so, conversely, the community possesses in the Family the formal element of its actual existence, and in the divine law its power and authentication. Neither of the two is by itself absolutely valid; human law proceeds in its living process from the divine, the law valid on earth from that of the nether world, the conscious from the unconscious, mediation from immediacy-and equally returns whence it came. (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 276)
Hence, American culture before the social activism of the 1960s bears a sinister resemblance to the picture that Hegel paints as Greek Ethical Life. Furthermore, while the movement to officially abolish this kind of subjective treatment of men and women made progress throughout the 20th Century, some still firmly believe in this biologically divided sense of responsibilities.
Perhaps one of the most relevant factors of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to this dynamic is that it takes place in 1973, right on the heels of this activism; that is, the young protagonists could be part of a culture rejects these ideals of women being strictly assigned to household responsibilities. 
Almost immediately we are confronted with a scene where the hysterical hitchhiker commits suicide, which suggests a trajectory for the movie; as the disturbed woman shoots herself in the mouth, we are given a view that tracks out the bullet hole in her head, through the hole in the back windshield and then outside of progressively further away from the van. We learn later on that the suicide victim was forced to bear a child and then give it up to the demented family. This suggests that the shock and gore contained in this film will draw us out of our comfort zone, and then make us reevaluate our perspective before viewing the film.
In another instance, Morgan (Jonathan Tucker) finds a picture of the suicide victim, and then a picture of a happy family in the trunk of a car. The family in the picture can be none other than the family that terrorizes our heroes, which suggests that in some way they are limiting themselves with their narrow set of beliefs. In this case, our traditional beliefs are represented as being enclosed in some sort of restricted space, and then they are drawn out so the audience can reflect on them.
It is clear that all the violence in this movie occurs because of the conflation of human and divine law. Since the antagonists live in such an isolated area, both geographically and in terms of population (the Hewitt family is the only one that occupies that particular town), there is no question that the beliefs they hold have not progressed in any way.
The problem remains that our protagonists have confused the Sheriff for a real representative of human law; they thought that he was performing his job when he took the suicide victim off of their hands, when in fact he was t covering tracks.
In fact, if we go to the beginning of our heroes interactions with the Hewitt family, we see that the grandmother (Marietta Marich as Luda May) consciously manipulated them into thinking that the Sheriff could help them. Perhaps more importantly, we later learn that the grandmother is at the root of the terror in the first place; she completely justifies and motivates her entire familys behavior based on the fact that society was not accepting of Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) when he was a child (he has a skin disease which he hides with real skin masks). In effect, she enforces her divine law through aggressors (the Sheriff and Leatherface) who appear to have the authority of human law. Even when the faade of human law falls away, they still have enough power to enforce any kind of law that they desire. Simply put, if a specific divine law is given the significance of a universal human law (as it is when the Hewitt family deceives our heroes), and it is enforced as such, the results cannot be anything but disastrous. It remains that the female figure is still confined to motivating the public figures to act; it does not matter that she is motivating them towards unethical action because she has both the power of divine law and the authority of human law to back up their way of life.
The fusion of divine and human law indicates the disorder that results from their collective force. Since the power of both are combined in this case, we see that the consequences of this are made manifest through the actions of Leatherface as well as the Sheriff; the result is death and violence. However, we must keep in mind that the attitude of universalizing a certain set of beliefs is supposed to be aligned with an antiquated way of life. That is, this interaction of human and divine law is supposedly nullified by the fact that Erin (Jessica Biel) eventually gets the best of the Hewitt family. She triumphantly seizes the baby of the suicide victim and rides to safety in a stolen cop car. In the sense that a female figure obtains victory over a restrictive ethical order, we supposedly have moved past this stage in our society. It is exactly in the sense that this film displays the fact that the American culture of family/gender role-assignation, perhaps in 1973, perhaps in 2003, has not really made any progress. In grabbing the baby, Erin only reinforces the ethical order; she can be construed as acting out of her ethical instincts (or as appealing to divine law), even though we would not question the ethical correctness of saving a baby from a horrible fate. If this was a truly Hegelian film, a male character would have been the one to survive and save the baby. This would definitely transcend the boundaries laid out in the Greek Ethical Order.
However, since the filmmakers present the female acting on this kind of interest, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre perpetuates an infatuation with the very ethical order to which it might otherwise have seemed opposed.
In the end, the film does not live up to a goal of prompting a reexamination of Western beliefs and practices. Instead, it simply reinforces stereotypes that have been ingrained in Western culture for years.
Graham Davidson
Cinescare Correspondent
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2003
Perhaps one of the most relevant factors of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to this dynamic is that it takes place in 1973, right on the heels of this activism; that is, the young protagonists could be part of a culture rejects these ideals of women being strictly assigned to household responsibilities.
