Deep into the Winter Woods

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And for anyone who's seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as I now have, I want to be clear: my subject line is accurate. I don't mean her character, Sally Hardesty, though she was indeed a proto-Final Girl. I mean the actress herself, Marilyn Burns.

In my recent post, I detailed three particularly nasty examples of her mistreatment while making the film, but these were far from the only ones. Among other things she was semi-accidentally hit on the head with a sledgehammer whose steel shaft hadn't been made safe, was hurt doing a six/seven-foot jump involving sugar glass that had hardened in the humid conditions (her limp near the end is genuine), smashed up both knees to be bleeding pretty badly after 17 takes of the gas station sequence (Tobe Hooper: "It was terrible, but it played very well"), was chased through dark woods with a live chainsaw (chain off, but rubber belt on), and – for just a second – was in a room with a Gunnar Hansen who literally wanted to kill her because the set conditions had driven him deluded and for that moment he thought he was Leatherface.

So, Final Girl? Let's have a look at the scorecard:

1) Moral superiority. Her safety was treated as rather a low priority by Tobe Hooper and his obsession with bloody "raw authenticity", leading to injury after injury. She was upset by neither him nor anyone else on set praising her performances. Yet in later years, while she was honest about what she'd faced, she never sounded vindictive or twisted, and she was willing to remain on good terms with Hooper, Hansen (except for a while after his knife deception was revealed) and the others. She didn't treat anyone else the way Hooper treated her. Box ticked.

2) Resourcefulness. Despite not being an experienced actress, she was able to produce a performance that is still talked about while frequently acting under extreme duress – exhaustion and overheating at best, active abuse and assault at worst. She did most of her own stunts, some of which were significantly more dangerous than those of many other actresses of the era and genre – sometimes even more reminiscent of the silent era. Box ticked.

3) Resilience. Are you kidding me? Let me remind you that she somehow made it through a shoot where, in the space of five weeks, she had been beaten to the point of unconsciousness, dripped with her own blood, assaulted with a knife, run from working chainsaws and done about 900 takes of every angle regardless of fatigue because of Tobe sodding Hooper's cavalier attitude to her safety and obsessive artistic perfectionism. Box ticked.

4) Survival. On this set, that didn't just mean getting through a tedious, tiring shoot. It literally meant what it says: survival. She could have died in several ways out there: if Hansen's delusion had lasted a little longer, if the steel-cored "broom" had caught her an unlucky blow on the temple, if the sledgehammer had been wielded a bit too hard, if she'd succumbed to the extreme heat of the dinner scene, if a chainsaw accident in the dark had severed an artery... Box ticked.

5) Overcoming her monster. The "monster" here is probably a combination of things. Tobe Hooper (yes, again), the generally appallingly unsafe set, and the brutal Texas heat. In post-production, Hooper deliberately drove her to emotional collapse for the eye close-up scene, despite being under nothing like the pressure he had been on set. The set involved genius stunts like one actor putting gunpowder on his hand and lighting a match. All this should have broken her. It didn't. Box ticked.

6) Bearing witness. Burns didn't retreat into a quiet life once TCM had finished filming. She chose to lean into her experience and engage with fans and journalists, guest at conventions, do Q&A sessions and interviews, and more besides. She was straightforward about how hard her experience had been, but she almost never crossed into bitterness or anger. Once she knew the truth about Hansen's lie, she was able to talk about it fully. Box ticked.

So there we are. A perfect full house. The whole point of the Final Girl is that she's supposed to be fictional, something impossible to recreate in real life. Yet Burns did it – and she did it without the predestined protection of the script that her fictional counterparts have. She faced moments when it was genuinely uncertain whether she would leave that movie set alive. Her treatment was unconscionable, and she should never have had to earn this title. But since she did:

Marilyn Burns. The real Final Girl.
 

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265/365: Fifteenth century houses, Bewdley
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Not a lot for me to say tonight; I think the most interesting thing I did was to buy a small box of Ritz crackers... and then to eat the lot. Ahem. The weather wasn't exactly brilliant, but it's late October and the clocks go back this weekend, so I can't really be surprised that it's getting to be damp and chilly more now. Here's a not very interesting photo of some houses in High Street, Bewdley. These houses look like they're Georgian creations, but in fact only the frontages are. The one with the blue plaque in the centre of the picture has actually been there for about 600 years. The date on the plaque is 1419, but I don't think the exact year is known for sure, so "early fifteenth century" will do!

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264/365: Civil War mural, Worcester
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I had to be in Worcester today for boring reasons, but I did at least have a little time to myself to go for a walk, so I wandered up past Fort Royal Park (site of part of the Battle of Worcester in 1651) and went as far as the Mount Pleasant pub, since it has this rather nice mural on the back that I don't think has been there all that long. My photo isn't that great, but getting an angle without parked cars in the way was tricky! The text "It is for aught I know a crowning mercy" was written by Oliver Cromwell to William Lenthall (Speaker of the Commons) after his victory in the battle. Worcester was a Royalist city, so it's not often you see Cromwellian wording around here! Still, I seriously doubt the landlord sees this as anything other than a nice bit of historical artwork. :)