Editing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (section)

===Contemporary American life===
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|quote = Hooper's apocalyptic landscape is&nbsp;... a desert wasteland of dissolution where once vibrant myth is desiccated. The ideas and iconography of [[James Fenimore Cooper|Cooper]], [[Bret Harte]] and [[Francis Parkman]] are now transmogrified into yards of dying cattle, abandoned gasoline stations, defiled graveyards, crumbling mansions, and a ramshackle farmhouse of psychotic killers. ''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'' [is]&nbsp;... recognizable as a statement about the dead end of American experience.
|source = — Christopher Sharrett<ref>[[#Sharrett04|Sharrett 2004, p. 318]]</ref>
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Critic Christopher Sharrett argues that since [[Alfred Hitchcock]]'s ''[[Psycho (1960 film)|Psycho]]'' (1960) and ''[[The Birds (film)|The Birds]]'' (1963), the American horror film has been defined by the questions it poses "about the fundamental validity of the American civilizing process",<ref>[[#Sharrett04|Sharrett 2004, pp. 300–1]]</ref> concerns amplified during the 1970s by the "delegitimation of authority in the wake of Vietnam and [[Watergate scandal|Watergate]]".<ref>[[#Sharrett04|Sharrett 2004, p. 300]]</ref> "If ''Psycho'' began an exploration of a new sense of absurdity in contemporary life, of the collapse of causality and the diseased underbelly of American Gothic", he writes, ''The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'' "carries this exploration to a logical conclusion, addressing many of the issues of Hitchcock's film while refusing comforting closure".<ref>[[#Sharrett04|Sharrett 2004, pp. 301–2]]</ref>

Robin Wood characterizes Leatherface and his family as victims of industrial capitalism, their jobs as slaughterhouse workers having been rendered obsolete by technological advances.<ref>[[#Sharrett04|Sharrett 2004, p. 308]]</ref> He states that the picture "brings to focus a spirit of negativity&nbsp;... that seems to lie not far below the surface of the modern collective consciousness".<ref>{{cite book|last=Gelder|first=Ken|title=The Horror Reader|year=2000|page=291|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-0-415-21355-4}}</ref> Naomi Merritt explores the film's representation of "cannibalistic capitalism" in relation to [[Georges Bataille]]'s theory of taboo and transgression.<ref>[[#Merritt10|Merritt 2010, p. 1]]</ref> She elaborates on Wood's analysis, stating that the Sawyer family's values "reflect, or correspond to, established and interdependent American institutions&nbsp;... but their embodiment of these social units is perverted and transgressive."<ref>[[#Merritt10|Merritt 2010, p. 6]]</ref>

In [[Kim Newman]]'s view, Hooper's presentation of the Sawyer family during the dinner scene parodies a typical American sitcom family: the gas station owner is the bread-winning father figure; the killer Leatherface is depicted as a bourgeois housewife; the hitchhiker acts as the rebellious teenager.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Str-Th/The-Texas-Chainsaw-Massacre.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080705152942/http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Str-Th/The-Texas-Chainsaw-Massacre.html |archive-date=July 5, 2008|title=The Texas Chainsaw Massacre|last=Newman|first=Kim|author-link=Kim Newman|publisher=Film Reference|access-date=November 15, 2009}}</ref> Isabel Cristina Pinedo, author of ''Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing'', states, "The horror genre must keep terror and comedy in tension if it is to successfully tread the thin line that separates it from terrorism and parody&nbsp;... this delicate balance is struck in ''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'' in which the decaying corpse of Grandpa not only incorporates horrific and humorous effects, but actually uses one to exacerbate the other."<ref>{{cite book|last=Pinedo|first=Isabel Cristina|title=Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing|publisher=SUNY Press|year=1997|page=48|isbn=978-0-7914-3441-3}}</ref>