A Cinema of Confrontation

A CINEMA OF CONFRONTATION: USING A MATERIAL-SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO BETTER ACCOUNT FOR THE HISTORY AND THEORIZATION OF 1970S INDEPENDENT AMERICAN HORROR _______________________________________ A Thesis presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts _____________________________________________________ by COURT MONTGOMERY Dr. Nancy West, Thesis Supervisor DECEMBER 2015 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled A CINEMA OF CONFRONTATION: USING A MATERIAL-SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO BETTER ACCOUNT FOR THE HISTORY AND THEORIZATION OF 1970S INDEPENDENT AMERICAN HORROR presented by Court Montgomery, a candidate for the degree of master of English, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. _________________________________ Professor Nancy West _________________________________ Professor Joanna Hearne _________________________________ Professor Roger F. Cook ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my committee chair, Dr. Nancy West, for her endless enthusiasm, continued encouragement, and excellent feedback throughout the drafting process and beyond. The final version of this thesis and my defense of it were made possible by Dr. West’s critique. I would like to thank my committee members, Dr. Joanna Hearne and Dr. Roger F. Cook, for their insights and thought-provoking questions and comments during my thesis defense. That experience renewed my appreciation for the ongoing conversations between scholars and how such conversations can lead to novel insights and new directions in research. In addition, I would like to thank Victoria Thorp, the Graduate Studies Secretary for the Department of English, for her invaluable assistance with navigating the administrative process of my thesis writing and defense, as well as Dr. Matthew Gordon, my mentor, for his continuous advice and support. I would also like to thank Dr. William Kerwin, Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of English, for aiding me in returning to finish my degree, and Dr. David Read, Chair of the Department of English, for approving the department’s financial assistance when I needed it most. Finally, I would like to thank everyone who had patience with me and offered me encouragement. I truly appreciate it. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ii List of Figures iv I. Introduction 1 II. Literature Review 5 III. Method 16 Close Readings IV. Night of the Living Dead 24 V. Last House on the Left 61 VI. Texas Chain Saw Massacre 93 VII. Conclusion 132 Works Cited 135 Endnotes 146 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Traditional one-way encoding/decoding of meaning vs. revised model 4 Figure 2: Traditional and revised historical and theoretical accounts of horror 12 Figure 3: Marketing gimmicks for Night of the Living Dead 30 Figure 4: Racial anxieties promote In the Heat of the Night and Night of the Living Dead 30 Figure 5: The title sequence from Night of the Living Dead 33 Figure 6: Introducing Ben in Night of the Living Dead 35 Figure 7: Symbolic Space in Night of the Living Dead 40 Figure 8: “The Last Supper” sequence in Night of the Living Dead 47 Figure 9: The Influence of EC Comics on Night of the Living Dead 49 Figure 10: Evoking and Inverting the Saturn myth in Night of the Living Dead 52 Figure 11: Reissue poster for Night of the Living Dead 53 Figure 12: Ben’s Confrontation with the Posse in Night of the Living Dead 55 Figure 13: Ben’s Death in Night of the Living Dead 57 Figure 14: Final sequence in Night of the Living Dead 59 Figure 15: Film poster for Last House on the Left 66 Figure 16: Front page of the Milwaukee Sentinel, October 27, 1972 66 Figure 17: Kent State—Girl Screaming over Dead Body 66 Figure 18: Terror of War 68 Figure 19: Juxtaposition within the frame in Last House on the Left 69 Figure 20: Two covers of Time Magazine tell a story 73 Figure 21: The Stillos butcher Phyllis in Last House on the Left 81 Figure 22: Krug’s rape of Mari and its aftermath in Last House on the Left 84 Figure 23: The Stillos follow Mari to the lake in Last House on the Left 86 Figure 24: Evocations of Vietnam in the execution of Mari in Last House on the Left 87 Figure 25: Parallels between Hamlet’s Ophelia and Mari in Last House on the Left 88 Figure 26: The closing credits sequence and music in Last House on the Left 92 Figure 27: Film poster for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 100 Figure 28: Opening sequence in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 103 Figure 29: Grotesque sculpture in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 105 Figure 30: Title sequence and the “terrible place” in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 107 v Figure 31: Evocations of Vietnam in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 111 Figure 32: “Dead art” in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 115 Figure 33: Sympathizing with the Monstrous in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 117 Figure 34: The “Nightmare” sequence in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 120-127 Figure 35: Evoking the “Mad Tea Party” in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 128 Figure 36: “Murdering time” in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 128 Figure 37: The final images of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 130 1 I. Introduction In The Films in My Life, François Truffaut describes how “cinematic success” is often not the result of the best efforts of the director as auteur (“good brain work,” as Truffaut describes it), but rather “a harmony of existing elements in ourselves that we may not have even been conscious of: a fortunate fusion of subject and our deeper feelings, an accidental coincidence of our own preoccupations at a certain moment of life and the public’s” (15). This fragile, temporary confluence of elements—the director, the film itself, and its audience—is joined, Truffaut points out, by others (“Many things”): critical reception as well as “advertising, the general atmosphere, competition, timing” (ibid). “When a film achieves a certain amount of success,” Truffaut continues, “it becomes a sociological event” (ibid). Truffaut’s words have stayed with me for some time; they suggest an approach to cinema studies that I am interested in pursuing, an approach that perhaps can address certain problems that I believe have occasionally pervaded film theory and histories of cinema. For example, regarding the lingering effects of psychoanalytic theory that dominated cinema studies in the 1970s and 1980s, Stephen Prince laments a general lack of social grounding: “In the attempt to grasp the social psychoanalytically,” he observes, “the social has been lost” (120). How might we go about regaining the social? One relatively recent intervention in sociological theory has involved the introduction of material-semiotic methods such as actor-network theory. As sociologist John Law explains, a material-semiotic approach “describes the enactment of materially and discursively heterogeneous relations that produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors” (2). Actors in this sense include not just human beings, but also objects, machines, and physical spaces (materials), as well as abstract concepts, theories, and ideas (semiotics); material-semiotic methods involve describing (social) networks that arise—that are assembled and continuously reassembled—out of the relations between such actors. In considering the assemblage of elements that Truffaut points to and his description of that assemblage as “sociological,” it occurs to me that a material-semiotic method could be a productive alternative approach for cinema studies. Material-semiotics are perhaps even especially relevant with regards to film. A central criticism of material-semiotic approaches is that they involve assigning “agency” (not intentionality) to non-human actors (materials and ideas) in a given network, but with regards to cinema studies, something very much 2 like agency for materials and ideas is often already assumed. Consider, for example, how Susan Hayward begins her definition of apparatus in Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts: …the apparatus or technology has an ideological effect upon the spectator. In the simplest instance the cinematic apparatus purports to set before the eye and ear realistic images and sounds. However, the technology disguises how that reality is put together frame by frame. It also provides the illusion of perspectival space. (15, emphases mine). We often speak similarly of the camera “loving” an actor and the relative “power” of high angle shots; these examples speak to what “agency” means in material semiotics. Such an approach seemingly could be used successfully to map out the relations between those “many things” Truffaut writes of in order to describe the cinema socially in a way that other methods often neglect. Such an approach could include those other methods, in fact, assembling and borrowing concepts from diverse theoretical approaches. The objective of my research is to formulate a material-semiotic approach that can be used to trace associations between films and to describe the confluence of elements that lead to their cinematic success. To demonstrate this approach, I will examine three horror films that have in recent years received a significant amount of critical attention: George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Horror has long been an established genre, one that has proven dependably lucrative for studios, but these three films were independent productions made with miniscule budgets, largely inexperienced directors, casts, and crews, and without the promotion of the studio system. There was little chance for them to do well at all, yet all three were wildly successful. In fact, all three almost immediately garnered large cult followings, as their received messages about the real-life horrors of the age spoke directly to audiences.

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