Blood for Oil: Crude Metonymies and Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Author: Jackson, Chuck

Source: Gothic Studies, Volume 10, Number 1, May 2008 , pp. 48-60(13)

Publisher: Manchester University Press

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Abstract:

My analysis of Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre centralizes the film's political setting: an early 1970s Texas gas station that has no fuel and that offers only death to those who assume petroleum's easy purchase. Such a move shifts critical attention from the film's monstrous bodies to its Gothic economy and the dead ends of corporate US oil culture. In Chain Saw, metonymies of blood and oil signify not only the material history of Texas oil and the seemingly unstoppable machinery of capitalism, but also the tremendous gap - or 'gulf' - between human and nonhuman persons.

Keywords: TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE; EARLY 1970S; GULF OIL; MACHINERY OF CAPITALISM; HUMAN AND NONHUMAN PERSONS

Document Type: Research article

Publication date: 2008-05-01

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This new international journal considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day. The aim of Gothic Studies is not merely to open a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, but to provide a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in almost all academic establishments.

Gothic Studies invites contributions from scholars working within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially welcome, as are readings in the media and beyond the written word.
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