“Overall the movie is about the Jenny character,” Henkel said. “It’s her story. It’s about her transformation, her refusal to shut up, to be silenced, to be victimized. And by extension her refusal to be oppressed. Even by culture.”
“Within the Chainsaw family’s world certain cultural norms abide that most outside the family culture would deem bizarre, taboo, criminal,” he continued. “I wanted to suggest something about the way culture informs, and misinforms, an individual’s worldview. And something about its power to overwhelm reason.”
“Bringing Jenny into a world in which the culture was grotesquely exaggerated was a way of bringing her to see her own world more clearly – that is to say, my intent was to present a nightmarish version of Jenny’s world in the form of the Chainsaw family in order to enlarge her view of her own world. She came from a dysfunctional family. The Chainsaw family is spectacularly dysfunctional – a nightmarish blowup of Jenny’s own dysfunctional family.”
“Everybody tells Jenny to shut up. After she rejects her stepfathers’ advances, he threatens her with the consequences of speaking out. And again when she calls Barry on his bullshit in the car, he tells her to shut up. Then the Chainsaw family, not only do they want her to shut up, but they want her to buy into their world, to accept their bizarre cultural norms, silly mythologies, and preposterous apocryphal tales. But in the end Jenny tells them, in essence, that they’re full of shit, and she’s walking. Of course, it doesn’t work out all that happily, at least not in the short term. But she does stand up to them, and it’s the beginning of her salvation.”
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