Leatherface (Cara de Cuero): The monster that a family raised

Of all the villains in this archive, Leatherface is the one who most resembles a pure monster: gigantic, deformed, without language, hidden behind a mask sewn from human faces, wielding a chainsaw on a lost farm in Texas. He is, at first sight, the exact image of the degenerate criminal that old criminology believed it could point to with a finger — the primitive, bestial being, «bad blood» made flesh—. But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre keeps, beneath the horror, a detail that changes everything: Leatherface is not alone. He lives with a family — some brothers, former slaughterhouse workers ruined by mechanization— who dominate him, humiliate him and use him as their weapon. The monster who seems born of a defect turns out, looked at closely, to be something far more uncomfortable: a broken man raised to kill.

// The theoryThe monster with «bad blood»

We already traveled with Edward Hyde and the Penguin through the theory of the born criminal: Lombroso's idea (1876) that the offender is an atavism, an evolutionarily backward and degenerate being who gives himself away in his body. Leatherface seems its perfect illustration — deformed, primitive, with the mind of a child and a monstrous strength—. But that theory had a particularly venomous branch that Leatherface embodies even better: that of the «degenerate families». In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, studies such as Dugdale's The Jukes (1877) or Goddard's The Kallikaks (1912) claimed to prove that criminality, «feeble-mindedness» and vice were inherited across entire clans — that there were families of «bad blood» who produced generation after generation of degenerate criminals—. That pseudoscience fed the eugenics movement and its horrors (forced sterilizations included). Leatherface's cannibal family is that fantasy turned into film: the degenerate clan from which only the monster can come.

Except that the film, looked at closely, dismantles the fantasy it appears to confirm — just as Hyde and the Penguin did—. Leatherface is not a monster sprung from a biological defect: he is a man with an intellectual disability, dominated by his brothers, who give him orders, beat him and have trained him to kill the way one teaches the family trade. He is not the brain of the operation —he barely understands what he does—, but its instrument. His violence does not spring from «bad blood» he carries inside: he learned it, through beatings, from the family that raised him. And that family is not a genetic accident, but a social product: slaughtermen who lost their work and their place when the slaughterhouse was mechanized, and who transferred onto people the only skill they had left — to butcher flesh—. The «born» monster turns out, once again, to be a bred monster — by a family, and by a world that ruined it—.

// The subjectThe weapon, not the hand

What makes Leatherface such a revealing case —and not a simple boogeyman— is that he is, at once, executioner and victim. He commits atrocious, real and unforgivable violence; but he is also a dominated being, with a disability, terrified of his own brothers, who kills partly out of fear of them and partly because it is the only thing he was taught. In one of the most disturbing scenes, after an attack, he is seen nervous, agitated, looking out the window like a child who fears he has done something wrong — not the calm of a predator, but the anguish of the dominated—. That ambiguity is exactly what the theory of the born criminal erases: by presenting the monster as an autonomous defect, it makes invisible the chain that produced him — the family that trained him, the abuse he suffered, the poverty that surrounded him—. Leatherface is not the source of the horror on that farm; he is its most visible tool. The hand that wields the chainsaw is his; but who put the chainsaw in that hand, and why, is a story that the myth of the «born monster» does not want to tell.

// The crackFrom eugenics to today's determinism

The theory of the born criminal, as we saw, was refuted: Charles Goring (1913) demonstrated statistically that no anatomical «criminal type» exists, and Stephen Jay Gould exposed the racism and bad science of the whole tradition. The studies of degenerate families turned out to be even worse science — biased, manipulated (the famous retouched photos of the Kallikaks), unable to separate heredity from environment—. But their error did not die: it mutated. The temptation to believe that crime «runs in the family», that there are lineages or groups of «bad blood», reappears every time there is talk of crime genes without due caution, or when whole communities are stigmatized as inherently criminal. Leatherface warns against that slope: where the myth sees a family condemned by its blood, one must learn to see a family condemned by its history — the misery, the abuse, the neglect that are passed down and that can be broken—.

And there is a social reading that the film, a child of the seventies, stresses forcefully and that the myth of the born monster hides: the family of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a product of deindustrialization. They are skilled slaughtermen left without trade or future by the mechanization of the slaughterhouse, cast into rural misery, who reconverted their only skill —killing animals— into a horror. The monster did not come out of nowhere nor out of a defect: it came out of a world that discarded an entire family and left it to rot in a corner. It is the same uncomfortable truth that runs through this archive from Shelby to Fagin: behind so many monsters there is an abandonment, and blaming their «blood» is the most comfortable way of not looking at the world that produced them.

That is why Leatherface, behind his chainsaw and his mask of skin, is more sad than terrifying when looked at closely: he is not pure evil born of a defect, but a vulnerable being whom a broken family and a cruel world turned into a weapon. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre seems to confirm the oldest fantasy of the born criminal —the degenerate monster recognizable at a glance— and in reality it refutes it completely: the monster was raised by a family, and the family was raised by abandonment. The lesson is the same one science has been repeating for a century against Lombroso and his heirs: there are no condemned lineages nor bad blood. There are environments that manufacture monsters — and the possibility, if we dare to look at them instead of blaming the blood, of dismantling them before they put the chainsaw in the next vulnerable hand—.