Meat, Murder and Ethics: Motel Hell
“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
- George Orwell, Shooting An Elephant
The older I get, the more I realize how much there is to learn about individualist American success and collective American failure from the Sanders story.
In the final years of his life, Colonel Harland Sanders, despite becoming a millionaire who could have retired more than a little comfortably, chose to drive all over the country visiting his Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises for a little hands-on quality control. He spoke often and in no uncertain terms of being consistently disappointed, if not appalled at the poor workmanship and cut corners that were besmirching his reputation and disrespecting a beloved product he spent the latter half of his life perfecting. The corporate bigwigs who owned his company and likeness were too interested in opening new restaurants and maximizing their profits to listen to the complaints of an old man making a fussbudget over their business plan.
The Colonel was a true entrepreneur in the most American sense - a rugged individualist with a good product and a clever strategy. He backed his process with a set of deeply held personal and professional ethics about how to conduct a successful business without compromise. The gradual subversion of his product and his name is another familiar American story - the degradation and debasement of a promising business and its products at the hands of corporate greed, with no regard whatsoever for its roots.
Like the Colonel, Farmer Vincent in Motel Hell makes and sells his foodstuffs with great pride in his products and a set of ethics. What makes Motel Hell (1980) less of a horror movie and instead a very, very smart satire of American values, are the cheerfully absurd and deeply American hypocrisies excused or ignored by those ethics. It’s as if they were something independent of his practice of murdering nearby motorists and guests of his Motel Hello, hanging their butchered flesh in a smokehouse and selling them as jerky and sausage. He’s perfectly played by tall, blue-eyed, All-American leading man, Rory Calhoun, who I venture is 100% in on the joke. With his toothy, ear-to-ear grin and sunny cornpone demeanor, his disposition as a murderous psychopath and cannibal is diametrically opposed to his folksy, downhome charm.
A square leading man from a duller generation, Rory Calhoun’s brilliant performance would indicate he’s as hip to the proceedings as Adam West on Family Guy
As movie murderers, he and his sister, Ida, have the most bizarre killing method I’ve ever seen. They bury their victims up to their necks in a garden like bulbs. The subjects look to have had their vocal cords severed so they can’t scream - a process we’re not shown, which speaks to my point that gory horror is not what’s on this movie’s mind. Disoriented and terrified, the human seeds are lined up with burlap bags placed on their heads, presumably to make them docile. When the bags come off, powerful psychedelic lighting is employed to lull the protruding heads into a state of euphoric numbness.
What’s more, Vincent introduces the Pink Floyd light show to the victims, squirming in their dirt holes as they moan and gurgle like zombies. The way he describes it, it’s as if he were Timothy Leary leading them all on an LSD trip. He’s dictating the light show like a hippy shaman, distracting them from the nooses being placed around their necks, which are tied to a tractor that backs up and kills everyone in one quick shot.
Farmer Vincent’s bizarre psychedelic culling method for his potted zombie meat farm.
We’re given a smirking satire here on the meat industry and American attitudes towards food production in general. There’s a great deal of fuss Vincent goes through to make his murder a graceful and short process for the victims. He wants as little stress for his livestock as possible, presumably under the impression that if they were able to scream and fidget, it would make the meat taste tougher and less flavorful. They even appear to be fed through tubes to prep their alimentary canals (It’s not uncommon: top-tier fisheries will stop feeding to their fish for three days prior to killing so that they discharge all the waste in their bodies). It’s an elaborate means of disguising the reality of murder and torture inherant in the job of processing meat. It looks ridiculous, like a cruel joke, but perhaps, so is factory farming. Vegetarians and vegans should especially get a kick out of this material.
Vincent (and by extension, the screenwriting team) likely read the highly influential and much lauded study by Mary Temple Grandin that was published in 1980, the same year Motel Hell was made. Temple Grandin did groundbreaking psychological studies into the unique ways people with autism (like herself) process their environments in sensory terms. She applied some of these principles to her observations of the handling of livestock. In the first of her published findings, Observations of Cattle Behavior Applied to the Design of Cattle Handling Facilities, which would be expanded for her book, Animals Make Us Human, she reported that animals are sensitive to visual distractions in handling facilities, “such as shadows, dangling chains, and other environmental details most people do not notice.” She designed new equipment for livestock handling - like the double-railed center track conveyor restrainer system - for making the experience of stunning and handling cattle as humane as possible.
Mary Temple Grandin
Farmer Vincent and Ida’s human culling method seems like a Temple Grandin production. Vincent sees himself as doing the important work, considering, “the way the world is today.” He thinks he’s helping out: “There’s too many people. Not enough food. I’m solving both problems.” In Motel Hell, we get a situation substitution worthy for an animal rights organization to facilitate a discussion: This is more or less what we do to animals. How do you like it when it happens to you? All that calming and anesthetizing just to maim and kill something. The appearance of sound ethical and moral practice as a cover up for what is basically an orderly form of industrialized brutality.
And Vincent prides himself on not using artificial preservatives or hormones in his products. That way he can preserve his veneer of personal integrity. As long as he muses about the “karmic repercussions” of what he’s doing, those pesky ideological reservations about murder will never eat away at him, so to speak. A serene monster, he sees himself as deeply connected to the land and to nature. He’s very likely another ex-hippie deadhead who suffered blows to his fragile utopian idealism as he got older, and whose peaceable ethos would mutate into a kind of motivated derangement taken to its absolute delusional extreme, like Charles Manson. Or Steve Bannon.
Whatever kind of monster Vincent is, he’s a truly American one, enacting a grim hypocrisy with a mask of moral and ethical clarity blanketing it (the charlatan televangelist he and Ida are always watching on TV seems to highlight this point). Your Salt of the Earth, all-American, God-fearing, friendly neighborhood cannibals, who charm us into accepting their butchery as a sacred charge. Vincent: “Somebody’s gotta take responsibility for the planet!”
Motel Hell uses a premise a tad similar to Psycho for its own specific take on what’s really going on in America. Hospitality-minded Mom-and-Pop small business owners who are all smiles and sunshine are never as placid as they seem. Here, the way the siblings go about murder speaks volumes about how they (and all conservative ex-hippies) regard humanity, their setup a similar but somewhat larger manifestation of the characters misanthropy than the pneumatic captive bolt pistol wielded by Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men.
Vincent truly believes that Terry, the young woman who survived a car accident he set up as a trap (ironically using wooden cutouts of cows), can be conditioned to his way of life with enough time. She stays at the Motel Hello - the business of which is never really explored by the filmmakers - and Vincent falls in love with her and seduces her, to Ida’s jealousy. Ida’s protective feelings for her brother have an incestous overtone (also very rural America) and unlike him, she has no delusions about what they’re doing in the slaughterhouse.
The way she jumps out to scare and tussle their town Sheriff younger brother Bruce - who doesn’t know Vincent’s encased meats aren’t 100% pork - suggests a psychologically messy upbringing that failed to produce mature adults. Bruce may not be a murderer, but his sleazy treatment of Terry makes it hard to root for him. Vincent, the psychopath wearing the hollowed out pig’s head as a mask, is otherwise a perfect gentleman, and Calhoun never plays down to the material.
Don’t stop the presses: Smalltown U.S.A. hides gruesome, dangerous practices. But this iteration, with what it implies about how we regard and prepare the food we eat, implicates the general public on a larger scale
In fact, none of the characters are tempered to elicit our sympathies. The parade of Farmer Vincent’s victims include the shyster TV Preacher (Wolfman Jack, for some reason), a Russian punk rock band, followed by a degenerate couple taken to whipping and humiliating each other in their room to a Franz Liszt composition. They’re all so obnoxious, we suspect no one will miss them. We’re to bid good riddance when scum like these are brought to slaughter.
It’s not that Vincent and Ida are animal rights activists (their human products appear to be blended with hogs). They just don’t see humans as superior to cattle, chickens and pigs. Meat is meat and every head is worthy to them. The movie makes its case. Humans are after all, easily the meanest species on Earth, and maybe, unlike humans, the fact that all other species don’t actively participate and cooperate in their own undoing makes our own exemption from the food chain seem more bizarre in the abstract.
Having worked as a butcher myself for several years, I know the immense amount of messy and sometimes unpleasant work involved in preparing dead animals for feeding people. It was just a job, but I learned that what we eat and how it’s raised and processed says a lot about us. And in America, the land of agricultural mega-corporations, what it’s saying about us is not to our credit. Worthless herds of cattle and sheep are raised by ranchers every year. These are animals who cannot live off the land without human supervision. Meanwhile, those same ranchers hunt and kill magnificent, individualistic animals like wolves, creatures totally capable of caring for themselves without assistance. It’s the theatre of our own tendency towards conformity, with individualism giving way to sheep behavior. Sound familiar?
It’s a hack tactic to get the audience cheering the dastardly acts of killers by making the case for the worthiness of the targets, but in a movie that's more or less about professional ethics, it’s not out of place.
We must drastically reduce the amount of meat we consume because the process is a major contributor to environmental ruin. Ceasing to eat it all together - for the sake of the strain on the animal kingdom - would probably be even better. The factory work of preparing this food is also a litany of human rights abuses, because companies that do these things to animals are likely to regard people the same way. Plant-based substitutes are a step in the right direction, but we as a species have to step up this game immediately. That process that should probably start in this country, with its decadent and wasteful carnival sideshow attitudes towards food.
This may be why we’re not so quick to judge the Farmer and his sister.
Horrorwise, 1980 was a transformative year. Some horror directors hit major artistic strides. On the other hand, cottage industies dedicated to lowbrow gore and exploitation (typically of sexually active women) would find their audiences. It was a year with the The Shining perched on the top drawer, and the ketchup-smeared murders of Friday The 13th on the bottom. But in this context, it’s hard to place Motel Hell. It’s not very scary. There’s some gore but it’s not lingered over. Much of the real gore is left off screen or played for laughs (like the chainsaw fight). For its sharp satire, it would be in better company with the top comedies that year - The Blues Brothers, Airplane! and Caddyshack (wow).
But the tongue-in-cheek Motel Hell is smarter than those films, not to mention stranger and more interesting. In a way, it’s about a man’s stubborn commitment to his ethics. It was directed by British filmmaker Kevin Connor and perhaps only an outsider could have realized this demented look at the insanity of Americana entering the age of Ronald Reagan. As Farmer Vincent meets his fate following a protracted duel in the meat locker, the movie kids itself one last time: “I’m the biggest hypocrite of them all!......I used......preservatives!”
Then a hard cut to the credits over which plays a song beginning with the line: “You’re eatin’ out my heart and soul, babe!”
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