(2) In Chain Saws Gothic, the reserve of hoarded money referred to by Marx gets displaced by both commodity and human forms, thus effectively critiquing what Marx describes as the bourgeois thirst for and dream of money as 'the only wealth'. And while Marx's theory of capitalist hoarding directs our attention to the hoarder's 'work, thrift, and greed', it also remains focused on the value transformations of commodity, coin, and money, explaining how the hoard proves how money 'is the universal representative of material wealth because it is directly convertible into any other commodity'. Such a transformation highlights the pointlessness of cash money in a panic-inspired, hoarding economy in which the use-value of bodies and fuel increases while the market-value of the dollar bottoms out. The flow of capital stagnates and, in the film's Gothic schema, its value gets transferred to other kinds of fluid forms: blood, urine, tears, automotive traffic, news media, and, in one two-shot sequence, fuel. The film smartly tracks a concatenation of geopolitical events that emerged during the early 1970s, including the drying up of Texas oil fields the strengthening of a corporate-controlled, transnational oil economy oil wars in the global South and the creation of a more urgent demand for the oil-based products in first-world countries like the United States.Īgainst this backdrop, Chain Saw tells the story of a total disaster. (1) In other words, Hooper's horror text makes visible how local bodies, economies, and terrors participate in and, indeed, are made possible by global capital's early 1970s political economy, an economy which has been pushed into the twenty-first century and further globalized so that present-day viewers of Chain Saw have the opportunity to look beyond its shocking spectacle of human slaughter. can be made to express and to designate the absent, unrepresentable totality'. The film functions as a 'prophetic accident' in which its director foresees a Gothic future controlled by an oil-hoarding patriarchy while simultaneously participating in what Frederic Jameson also calls the 'world system's cognitive mapping', or 'how the local items of the present. Suddenly the film's reticent and stuttering hitchhiker looks upsettingly familiar. Perhaps the most surprising thing to say about Tobe Hooper's film Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is that it is a predictive analysis of the present political moment: a spiraling narrative of fear in which two inarticulate and goony sons take directions from a sadistic father who demands that they hoard gasoline and sell bodies so that the family can maintain the illusion of power and safety inside their home in rural Texas.
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