Deliverance
Our film this week is Deliverance, made in 1972 and one of the great Hollywood movies of the period. When it was first released it hit audiences with the impact of a body-blow, and, unlike quite a few 25-year-old movies, it’s hardly dated at all—or at least it remains as effective now as ever.
The story is very simple. Four Atlanta businessmen take a canoeing trip down a river running through backwoods Appalachia, and have a very different experience from the one they anticipate. The river and all the surrounding countryside are scheduled to be buried under a massive lake being formed in the creation of a new power station. The leader and organizer of the trip—the character played by Burt Reynolds—wants to experience this almost virgin wilderness before it disappears. In fact he has a whole natural and social philosophy which he tries to persuade his companions of. He rejects the complacent middle-class materialism of his friends and of mainstream America, and talks about what vital things are missing from that kind of life. Nature is missing, the awesome encounter between mankind and sublime, powerful nature—a closeness to the earth and to natural processes, a sense of exhilaration at running rapids, hunting and fishing, surviving with only minimal tools in the midst of an undomesticated and in a sense pre-historical environment. Of course these are primitive masculine values of meeting and mastering the natural world—and it’s an unspoken part of Reynolds’s project that the journey will allow some kind of a reclaiming of this primitive masculinity which is lost in the surroundings of a modern American city.
The other men—played by Jon Voigt, Ned Beatty and Bobby Cox—are less committed to these ideas and even somewhat reluctant, but go along partly out of curiosity and partly because of the force and enthusiasm of Reynolds’s opinions. And in fact Reynolds has an almost charismatic appeal to them simply because he has a philosophy, while they are making their conventional ways through life without much thought of any kind. Because Reynolds’s passionate views are really existential views—they address issues about the basic meaning and quality of life which a modern materialist society completely ignores. The other three men, like most men in this society, are vaguely aware that there’s something missing from their lives, and feel vaguely troubled about their loss of that primitive masculinity. You could almost say that Deliverance starts out like a kind of Men’s Movement field trip whose purpose is to restore “natural” meaning to the characters’ lives—though of course in 1972 nobody had heard of the Men’s Movement.
What follows, though, could hardly be further from anything envisaged by the Men’s Movement. The natural wilderness, and even more tellingly the backwoods inhabitants of that wilderness, provide an experience that educates the men all right, but the lessons they learn are dramatically different from the ones in the blueprint. And the film’s philosophy turns out to be very different from Reynolds’s.
Deliverance was directed by an Englishman, John Boorman. Boorman is still active as a filmmaker today, and his career has been a real roller-coaster of ups and downs. His first film Point Blank, from 1969, and then Deliverance, are extremely successful in maintaining a vivid and anti-conventional sensibility right in the Hollywood mainstream—and some of his later projects have flashes of brilliance as well. But Boorman’s counter-cultural and sometimes even mystical attitudes have sometimes seemed as if they needed the discipline of Hollywood story-forms. Films like the Exorcist sequel The Heretic, Boorman’s version of the Arthurian legends Excalibur, and the eco-melodrama The Emerald Forest are alternately splendid and just silly. And although Deliverance resembles Boorman’s typical critique of the arrogance of modern rationalist civilization, the film also brings a kind of horror of nature which must derive from James Dickey’s original novel. Dickey, incidentally, wrote the very fine screenplay for the movie as well.
[screen movie]
Deliverance is a harrowing movie in almost every way. Not only do the men have to face the implacable violence of the rapids and the rocks—they might have anticipated that, even though their first experience of the river is so exhilarating. But they must also survive something far more disturbing—the primeval malice of the mountain men. Where do these evil creatures come from, and what do they mean? Because of course you can’t simply take the movie as a literal anthropological description of the people of the region, a kind of anti-tourist brochure whose message is DON’T VISIT APPALACHIA. Certainly they conform to a stereotype of subhuman, demented hillbillies who inhabit the hinterlands beyond civilization. In this stereotype, inbreeding has produced a snaggle-toothed, mongoloidal race who know nothing about the outside world, but know everything about the dark, primitive nature they inhabit. They are a race of Others, beings who are frighteningly separate in their ignorance of us—and worse, their contempt and hatred for us—and also frightening in the power ascribed to them to move easily and “naturally” through an environment which seems so strange and hostile to us.
But this stereotype says practically nothing about the social group it pretends to describe, and everything about the sensibility which has invented the stereotype, namely our sensibility. Because these creatures are nothing but projections of our fear of nature, and fear also of human irrationality. Lewis’s project to bring overcivilized men closer to their instincts succeeds much too well. What Ed and Bobby and Drew are brought up against is not just a brute nature hostile to man, but, much worse, the kind of human nature which belongs to this brute nature. It’s exactly that human nature the men discover during their trip—that nature and not the idealized version of that nature as some proud, noble savage conquering the natural environment with purity and wholeness.
The horrific pair of mountain men who humiliate and rape Bobby and are on the point of doing something similar to Ed are not only the embodiment of the wilderness whose destructiveness Lewis has terribly underestimated, they’re also the embodiment of those human impulses that have been suppressed and erased in civilization but which are still resurrectable in the environment of untamed nature. Repressed, civilized men can’t dabble with unrepressed, uncivilized nature, because messing with this nature will cause also the return of everything that’s been repressed to make the civil world. That at least is what the movie says. Sadism, bestiality, sodomistic humiliation, twisted and decayed teeth, deformed faces—all these are not the characteristics of people as we know them. They’re the characteristics of monsters, the monstrous ravening animals which will emerge from human nature itself if it’s allowed to enter the heart of darkness. The heart of darkness, of course, is that nature which lies beyond and behind the everyday psyche that’s been conquered by repression and morality—a dark, evil human nature which is the inner equivalent of the dark untamed nature the men set out to explore. So the movie is really the reverse of what it seems on the surface. Deliverance is desperately afraid of what ugliness lies inside; and that fear is projected outwards into a fear of the unknown natural world, and the unknown monsters which might inhabit it.
Dealing with this horrible, repressed inner ugliness is not so easy. In fact the movie’s principal terrors include not just the spectacle of this monstrous ugliness, but the extra and equal ugliness which is necessary to re-repress it. The whole problem of what the Law will think of them, how the Law might misinterpret their acts, is an expression of this. The hysterical scene of the debate on this topic with the grotesque, nightmarish corpse posed in their midst, and the equally hysterical and nightmarish scene of its burial are the best examples. But the killing of the second hillbilly and the awful scenes with Ed struggling to manage that corpse—which even tries to embrace him when they both plunge into the water—is another vivid instance. And so is the more sombre scene of sinking Drew’s corpse tied up with a stone—Drew the one amongst them who wanted to resist as much as possible this complicity with the repressed world of violence and horror. Looked at coldly, it’s kind of odd that the group should move from anxiety about the monstrous backwoodsmen to anxiety about what they had done to the backwoodsmen. But in the film’s psychological allegory it makes perfect sense. The crimes of the backwoodsmen have somehow become their crimes, and the repression of both sets of crimes becomes the same thing.
Moving the allegory onto a yet larger plain—the plain of American history—would present equally interesting prospects, but we don’t have the time. In a nutshell, though, you could say that the movie’s resurrection of a kind of gothic horror of the uncivilized backwoods reveals a kind of bad conscience about what the true basis of the traditional American experience has been, and about how much the modern America of technology and suburbia is just a kind of forgetting of that. You could remember too that 1972 was a time of defeat in Vietnam, assassinations and riots at home, and generally a period of crisis for American ideology—and that the kind of pessimism about both nature and culture, and about history too, that Deliverance shows was entirely characteristic of the period. And of course the men’s experience in the backwoods is like America’s experience in Vietnam, with the hillbillies playing the part of the Vietcong. All of these connections contributed to the shock of the film on its first release. As I said before, though, I don’t think its message has dated much.