We discuss Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", then look at Hooper's earlier films, "The Heister", "Down Friday Street", and "Eggshells", and examine again "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in light of them. There are some caveats in this episode concerning my hazarding an interpretation of "Eggshells", which I did in the moment in respect of obvious conflict concerning the 1960s counter-culture giving into what might be considered middle class values. Though the movie does comment on such, it is not cut and dry, and complexity is layered with fractured, incomplete truths. I may take a couple of weeks more to think about how "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" works in relation to "Eggshells" and write something up on it, and I don't know if it will be the view I expressed in the episode.

A thing we explore in these episodes is how time, place, and personal history color the experience of a film. Personal history has meant that there have indeed been films I've been unable to watch or have put off watching for a number of years. In this episode I relate how Martin, my husband, had a work place accident, within our first year of marriage, which made it impossible for me to watch certain films for a while. He was working at a greenhouse and one of the large glass plates fell out of the roof, split as it hit his neck, and went both under and over his jugular vein so that the jugular was fully exposed but uncut while the rest of his neck had been sliced open. He had the trauma of his experience, but so did I and this meant that certain films that reminded me of the incident were left or avoided until I could tolerate them.

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Five tales of Ben Hur! Exploring the Cinema as Spectacle

Talk Cinephilia to MeBy Juli KearnsApr 23, 2020