Sheriff Arpaio’s War on Drugs and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Or: The Early 2000s Yearning to BE Eric Balfour

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is widely regarded to be an anti-capitalist narrative. Made on a shoestring budget, Hooper’s film examines a dynastic slaughterhouse family after the industry moved beyond them. The old way was better, the new way put people out of jobs and forced them into cannibalism. Marcus Nispel’s 2003 remake retains traces of the original’s anti-capitalist streak, although most of the anti-capitalist beats of Scott Kosar’s script were left out in revisions. Originally, Kosar delved more deeply into the inner workings of the cannibalistic community.  They’re but remnants in the film now, unanswered questions and details better left to the imagination. Instead, the remake plays like a more familiar slasher flick. No longer are the group of innocent teens naively investigating potential vandalism of a loved one’s grave; now they’re low-level drug traffickers, open to subsequent punishment under horror genre rules - and the whims of noted conservative megaproducer Michael Bay. 

After smuggling two pounds of marijuana over the Mexican border, Erin (Jessica Biel), her boyfriend Kemper (Eric Balfour), stoner Morgan (Jonathan Tucker) and drifter Pepper (Erica Leershen) come across a distraught woman in the road. They pick her up, but she panics and tells them they’re going the wrong way before pulling a gun from her underwear and blowing her brains out. The town she’d left, we’ll learn, once oversaw a prosperous meat-packing plant that’s since fallen on hard times, forcing townspeople to sustain themselves, literally, on unsuspecting travellers. 

The Bayification of horror films in the early aughts must be addressed, as Massacre’s climax features Jessica Biel running in a white tank top while fire sprinklers go off. Though there’s less of the stereotypical Bayhem than one might expect. He’s a producer here, and the kills - while gorier than its notoriously tame source material - are more stylized than gruesome. Nispel and Bay streamline some of Hooper’s shaggier energy into something more akin to a Friday the 13th sequel, and the characters are merely ham-fisted 70s icons – hippies discussing cosmic luck and synchronicity. 

But Massacre’s biggest departure arrives with Leatherface. Hooper’s chainsaw-wielding monster is gender fluid, forced into the matriarchal role when no one else would fill it. In the Bay-produced remake, he couldn’t be more of a dude, played by bodybuilder Andrew Bryniarski (who actively campaigned for the role). Thomas Brown Hewitt - unnamed in the original - was born with a rare form of ichthyosis that ate away most of his nose. Subjected to intense ridicule throughout childhood, his motive seems to be envy. While his family strips the cars, clothes and people travelling the backroads of Texas for parts, Leatherface only aspires to be a chad. He only takes male faces, and has no use for Harry Knowles’ head (the unsightly founder of Aintitcoolnews is just rotting in a bin on the table, too malformed to be of any use). Lucky for him, a 2003 Eric Balfour is the first unfortunate soul to walk into his lair in search of help after the distraught woman’s suicide. He kills him with a hammer and immediately sets about taking his pretty face.

Resultingly, Massacre accidentally reinforces actress Jessica Biel’s statement that she was too pretty to find work in Hollywood, as Leatherface seems to really have it in for her.

Make no mistake, I love the 2003 remake. I love how Daniel Pearl’s cinematography drastically contrasts his work on the original film, no longer sun-washed and homemade but processed into grim high contrast after decades of working in the music video industry for the likes of Prince, The Police and Michael Jackson. The spectral, otherworldly light that dances off the Hewitt family home feels as much of a recontextualization of the Lovecraftian elements always dancing around the frames of Hooper’s work as the dolly-out tracking shot through the hole in the suicidal drifter’s head. And I love the film’s new threat: a sadistic, anti-drug lawman in the form of Sheriff Hoyt, played by the legendary R. Lee Ermey. 

The patriarch of the Hewitt residence, Hoyt took his alias from the sheriff he murdered when he assumed his position and is deadset on vengeance against the cityfolk that left his family behind – particularly when he finds marijuana in the hippie’s van. Ermey plays it with the same angry ferocity he had in the Kubrick film from which he built his reputation, quiet intensity bursting into full-throated hostility with burning eyes. Ermey’s a Vietnam vet, and Massacre has him do the most badass thing a Vietnam vet could conjure: he forces a kid to play ersatz Russian Roulette.

While Tobe Hooper’s film stared into the rotting entrails of the American capitalist system after the Vietnam War, Bay’s production sharpens its blades on the Silent Majority and its ultimate representative strongman, Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio wasn’t a household name yet, but he had been branding himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff” since 1993.  If Arpaio ever had a cinematic avatar, it’s Sheriff Winston Hoyt. 

“I want them to know that it is so bad in my jail they won’t want to commit crimes here,” Sheriff Arpaio said of his outdoor, Arizona tent city prison, where he concentrated over 500,000 inmates. The prisoners were forced to wear pink jumpsuits and given two meatless-meals a day, while labouring under the sweltering Phoenix sun. The prison opened in 2003 and was slowly phased out over the course of 2017. That same year President Donald Trump pardoned Arpaio for criminal contempt of court, a conviction he’d received for refusing to cease racially profiling citizens. 

A Korean War vet who never saw a day of combat, Arpaio started as a beat cop in Clark County, Nevada, which gave him the bragging rights of citing Elvis Presley for a traffic violation. True or not, it was the first building block in Arpaio’s mythmaking: a Bufford Pusser-esque lawman whose punishment would always fit –or preferably exceed– the crime. By 1994, he was elected Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona and quickly mobilized vigilante squads to patrol the streets for solicitation and petty larceny; he banned movies and coffee in prison and erected the first tent cities for inmates. By the next year, he’d brought chain gangs back. His terror campaign saw 157 deaths across Maricopa prisons. While none were officially attributed to the blazing 140 degree heat, it clearly didn’t help. 

The actor playing the screen version of Arpaio famously never spoke about his experiences in Vietnam. Ronald Lee Ermey enlisted in the Marines in 1961. Eleven years later, he retired medically. Outside of his now-legendary turn as a drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket (and The Frighteners) as well as a litany of other roles, he worked in aviation support with Marine Wing Support Group 17 and was present for the Tet Offensive.

Joe Arpaio and R. Lee Ermey didn’t have much overlap in life, except that both occasionally worked with Steven Seagal, both had close associations with the NRA and both wholeheartedly endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Around the same time the teens of Massacre were being slaughtered by a forgotten, rotting dynasty, Arpaio’s services were in high demand. With President Richard Nixon, Arpaio devised and organized Operation Intercept. This anti-drug measure would shut down the US-Mexico border for an entire month.

Massacre’s repugnant prequel, The Beginning, is painful to watch. It’s a grueling, sadistic, torture-porn-friendly addition to the franchise that, like much from the era, only serves up grimy, enhanced-interrogation viscera. Though it does offer further insight into Sheriff Hoyt. Like Arpaio, Hoyt went to Korea, only he wound up as a POW (detailed in a standalone comic). The torture comes in when his new batch of victims are revealed to be draft dodgers, something Hoyt, Ermey and Arpaio just won’t tolerate.

“I don’t have any respect at all for the scum-bags who went to Canada to avoid doing their fair share,” reads the quote right on Ermey’s IMDB page.

Two years before The Beginning, Sheriff Arpaio ordered that all undocumented immigrants between 18-25 be forced to register for selective service.

“Ain’t nothing I hate worse than a draft-dodging, hippie protester!” Hoyt, with unfettered access to slackers, works out his grudges more directly, torturing and serving up all four protagonists.

Count boomer bloodthirst as another quality Ermey and Arpaio shared. If The Beginning is worth any attention, it’s as a gritty, unpleasant, only slightly hyperbolic portrayal of whatever the fuck happened in Arpaio’s custody (there’s also a very mild callback to Friday the 13th part 3D, so take what you can).

And therein lies the central problem with Bay’s remake; glorious, scary and nerve-wracking though it may be, America never stopped yearning for a Sheriff Hoyt. The services his kind provides are never replaced by industrialization or humane slaughter practice. Cruelty is intrinsic to the system. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and its prequel are, ostensibly, set in the 70s, but only the absence of cell phones is noticeable. The decade in which they’re set becomes merely an aesthetic, as history repeats itself and the same arguments rage. While the first was in theatres shortly after the US invasion of Iraq, Senator Chuck Rangel introduced a bill to reinstate the military draft.

Ermey is the best part of both films, arriving on the scene of the crime with a dense metatext that reflects and rejects Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Alas, whatever hideous, internal motivations drive Arpaio, his brand of justice will never outlast its usefulness in America; never relegated to the outskirts. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre runs him down in the road, reverses to finish the job, and then drives over his corpse one last time for good measure. If only we were so lucky. This prick precursor to ICE is still alive.