The Day Of Spilled Brains

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is more than just the title of a movie. It is, depending upon your perspective, either a threat or, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, a promise. From the moment you decide to watch the movie till the moment, fairly deep in, when the titular atrocity begins, you know you’re living on borrowed time. You have decided to watch a movie in which you know, for a fact, includes a chain saw massacre. One of the smartest things I ever read in film school was that half the work of Tobe Hooper’s grisly, greasy torture-porn masterpiece was done by the title alone.

This episode of Chief of War is titled “The Day of Spilled Brains.”

Now, I had the wrong idea about this one. I thought that was the promise kind of title, not the threat kind of title. I figured we’d finally get an opening battle between the forces of Kamehameha and Ka’iana on one side, and King Kahekili and King Keōua on the other. Shark-toothed clubs vs. the red-mouthed weapon, that sort of thing.

Horrifically, “The Day of Spilled Brains” turns out to have been a threat. Named by Taula, the blind seer and prophetess who feels the terrible event coming, the day marks the slaughter of nearly an entire village of unsuspecting people by Captain Simon Metcalfe (Jason Hood). With his offer of trade kindly but firmly rejected by Chief Kamehameha, then his men threatened in the night by Ka’iana before Kamehameha calls him off, Metcalfe is out for pointless, senseless revenge. He simply selects the nearest bay, fills his cannons with nails, and opens fire.

The resulting shrapnel tears holes in an entire community. This includes Waine’e, the Hawai’ian woman whose long journey from her native land to the outside world and back again now ends in death at the hands of a white man, right there in her home.

There will be a reckoning for this, of that you can be sure. When Metcalfe and his man Marley, the dirtbag who tried to sell Ka’iana’s friend Tony into slavery, show up on Hawai’i, Kamehameha gets an earful about their cruelty and perfidy from Ka’iana, with Tony to back him up. But since Kamehameha can’t really understand the kind of savagery Ka’iana encountered in the Paleskins’ world, and since these guys have given no indication they’re hostile, he doesn’t see things the war chief’s way. He listens to Ka’iana and Tony enough to tell the men to leave, but not enough to follow Ka’iana’s wishes and kill them where they stand — the better to send a message to the waves of white men who will be sure to follow.

Kamehameha’s reasoning for sparing the men seems sound. Wouldn’t it be better for their reputation to be one of hospitality and kindness, but fierceness when crossed? No, Ka’iana says. None of that will matter. The time to take action is now.

Even in his own family, Ka’iana’s advice is divisive. His big-maned brother Nāhi is all in on giving these bastards the Captain Cook treatment, and of course Tony knows better than anyone the kind of people they are and the threat they present. They’re the men who sneak aboard Metcalfe’s ship to try to take matters into their own hands.

But they’re ratted out. Not by Namake, the brother who became emotionally involved with Ka’iana’s wife Kupuohi during his exile and has been distant since his return. By Kupuohi herself. 

Why would Ka’iana’s own wife risk jamming him up like that? In part it’s because she, like Namake, believes in Kamehameha’s conciliatory ways. But it’s also that she feels her husband has left her with no other choice. Once upon a time he would have listened to her counsel and acted accordingly. But that’s no longer true, and it’s not just because his time in the Land of Men Who Wear Pants has changed him right down to his choice of below-the-waist coverage. 

No, it’s because he seems more willing to listen to Kamehameha’s wife, Ka’ahumanu, than to his own. Though she is constrained by her subservient position, Ka’ahumanu is one of the war hawks in the chief’s counsel, eager to prepare for battle against the enemies all around them, from Hawai’i to Maui and O’ahu to the Paleskins’ world. As such she’s more sympathetic to Ka’ian’s “the best defense is a good offense” approach than Kupuohi is.

But she’s sympathetic to Ka’iana specifically, because there’s chemistry there. In a rapturously romantic, even erotic scene, Ka’ahumanu explains to Ka’iana how white people greet their queens, as she learned from their castaway John Young. Women curtsey, which she demonstrates to their mutual amusement. Men, though, get on their knees, take the Queen’s hand in their own, and kiss it. Ka’ahumanu is insistent on the kneeling. Ka’iana, who kneels for no one, seems happier than we’ve ever seen him to oblige. To watch a man that powerful voluntarily submit to a woman simply because she told him to? Hot stuff.

If only Kamehameha were so pliable. Try as they might, no one can get him to see that the threat presented by the Paleskins is worse, far worse, than he could ever imagine. His philosophy are noble. But what good are norms against people who’ve no intention of adhering to them? What good are laws against men who feel the law does not apply to them? How do you get anyone to listen to you about the enemy when the enemy is so bad that to describe them plainly and accurately is to sound insane?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.