On the Road Again: Rehearsing the Death Drive in Modern Realist Horror Cinema‪.‬

Perhaps the most terrifying experience in watching examples of modern realist horror cinema can be summed up in one word: Leatherface. I am thinking of his propensity, implacably repeated throughout The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), suddenly to burst into our field of vision and, waving his saw or carrying it before him as if it were an extension of his body, to pursue single-mindedly one or other of the film's characters.' There is something childlike about Leatherface in his determined--and overdetermined--refusal to recognize the slightest constraint, in his overcoming of all obstacles as if they were not there. He seeks the quickest possible satisfaction of his needs by the shortest possible route, cutting his way through undergrowth and, if necessary, bodies, to reach his goal. I see in Leatherface the manifestation of infantile, pre-Qedipal drives in their purest form: the death drive itself. For him, no such thing as desire, a submission to the "No!" of the father and to the Symbolic Order, no intent ion of putting off satisfaction until later, still less of renouncing it in favor of a less narcissistic acceptance of a bare minimum of social restraint, of a recognition of the right to existence of others and hence of their subjectivity. This determination on Leatherface's part is, as I have said, overdetermined: by society's own ideology of drives and the meaning of their accomplishment. Firstly, let me remind readers of the explicit socio-economic context into which this extraordinary movie is inscribed: capitalist exploitation, unemployment, family values. Just as Leatherface and his family were deprived of their livelihood by mechanization in the name of "progress" (= what is necessary for capitalism to survive), so Leatherface has interiorized this ideology and projects it onto any and every person he comes across. They become so many obstacles to his obtaining satisfaction and must be eliminated. No plea for restraint is possible in the case of Leatherface, any more than rational, adult argument will stop a young child's cry "I want it now" or appeals to altruism and the environment the capitalist drive to speculate and maximalize profits. My argument here is based on the conviction that no discussion of the death drive is going to get very far down the theoretical, let alone political, road without some attempt to historicize the concept.