Deliverance is not a movie
you find in the horror section of the video store. My
feeling though; if this isn’t a horror movie, what is.
My arguments would be these. First, the
violence, the degree of violence the characters must
experience. Two strangers suddenly appear into your life.
You can’t get them to listen to a word you say. They
pull out a shotgun, point it at your face and demand…now drop them
pants. They are not kidding. One of them rapes you up
the ass, then and there. As he finishes, the other starts to
tell a friend with you, you are going to blow me right now.
The second argument; In the 70’s, you saw
movies about Vietnam veterans, forced to deal with violence back
home. The sadly-forgotten Gordon’s War (Paul
Winfield), and Rolling Thunder (William Devane,
Tommy Lee Jones), then a few years later, the much more popular
First Blood (Stallone). These characters
can slip back into a soldier’s role easily; almost like putting on
an old sweatshirt. I can understand people grouping these movies
in the ‘action’ category.
Ed, Deliverance’s main character is
not a guy like that. If he was in the military
(even peacetime) the movie never mentions it. Violence is
thoroughly unfamiliar to him; watch his scared face time and
again. Yet in the space of several hours he realizes he
needs to kill someone, or he and his friends will never see home.
This is horror for sure.
Lewis, a good friend of Ed, is different, an adventurous
man who loves the wilds, the risks you take in the wilderness.
He has tried to bring that out in Ed. Lewis is angry
and sad about government plans to dam the largest river in
Georgia. Where there was wilderness for thousands of years, there
will be a “dead lake” in a few months. He convinces Ed and
two other friends to take a canoe trip; to experience this river
before it is gone.
The irony is this; they want to grip hold of
the present before the future grabs it away. But the reality
they find is actually a remote past: the worst of the Middle Ages,
where everyone carried weapons and precious little law enforcement
existed. Or maybe the prehistoric age pictured in the
prologue of 2001. Or the chimpanzee societies you
watch in documentaries, where tribes go out raiding, find monkeys
for food and literally tear their arms and legs off.
Ed–perceptive enough to sense they have entered
another world
In just a few hours, four suburban people realize
they have entered another reality. And the door back to
suburbia, to civilization, has been slammed shut behind them.
To open that door, they need to do some killing themselves.
Lewis told Ed and their friends Drew and Bobby
to expect a weekend trip; they will be back Sunday in time to
watch the football games. No problem there. But Ed has
seen enough, and heard enough from Lewis, about disrespecting the
mountain people they will run into. That can get you hurt.
Watch his face when Lewis offers a man forty dollars to
drive their cars, and the man says he’ll do it for sixty.
“Sixty, my ass,” Lewis says casually.
Ed’s eyes go wide.“Lewis, don’t play games
with these people.”
This same man is okay with compromising at
fifty dollars. But you see enough of these isolated people
so you understand; walk softly. At least two
children who appear to be results of inbreeding; cousins marrying
cousins already married to cousins. Noone else around to marry
Local people–not shy about telling Lewis he is a fool
The first day and night, almost the way Lewis
promised they would be. Mild rapids, excitement enough—good
times for everyone. Comfortable camping—Ed and Bobby drink,
Drew plays guitar; he loves to play. Lewis stays in the
moment; getting a sense of this wilderness doomed to extinction.
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Ed wakes early next morning. Dressed
only in sweats, he takes his bow and arrow and wanders away.
What is he looking for? Ed is no kid anymore, but he
is young in experience—he is searching for who he is, what he is.
Not far away, a young deer stands. Ed places an arrow
in the bow and pulls the string back. You can see he has had
plenty of experience shooting at targets. He knows how to
prepare himself for a shot and he has the physical strength to
pull the string and hold it still. But fear overcomes him.
He is barely able to shoot and when he does at last, the
arrow never even comes close.
Is he disgusted with the idea of killing an
animal…or afraid of how he will feel? Maybe the age of the
buck strikes something in Ed; no doubt it is a young animal, with
small, velvety antlers. And Ed has a young son at home.
So much in the wilderness he is ambivalent
about. Being with Lewis is always an
adventure, yet Ed wonders how adventurous he really is.
When Lewis bargains with the tough-looking mountain
guy about driving the cars, Ed’s comment: let’s play golf instead.
An uneventful start to the day. The day
before, Ed paddled with Drew. Today he is with Bobby.
They wind up ahead of Lewis and Drew, and stop on the bank
for a short rest.
Standing on the shore, they can see two men
walking fairly close. The strangers don’t appear with a
shock like Freddy Krueger or Norman Bates’ mother; they simply
walk up slowly.
Yet you are about to witness one of the
all-time brutal scenes in American—or World, movie history.
Truly men without positive emotions. People who make
you question your feelings about capital punishment. They
tie Ed to a tree, pull out his knife and test it by cutting his
chest. A small man does most of the talking. Ed tries
to reason with him, appease him with talk about money. The
answer is short and direct: “We want your money, we’ll
take your money.” He tells Bobby to drop his pants.
.
Not people anyone can reason with
Bobby, whose business is sales, desperately
searches for a way to reach them. He is realizing fast… you
can’t. The only question is how much humiliation they want
before raping him.
The small man finishes with Bobby. The
other man stares at Ed, makes a comment about his mouth, and
starts to unzip his pants. First he tells Ed to drop to his
knees and pray, “and you better pray good.”
He starts to pass the small man his shotgun.
Suddenly, an arrow tears through the small man’s chest.
It passes all the way through him, extending about equally
out of his front and back. Lewis’ arrow. The other
stranger runs for his life into the woods. The small man
stands paralyzed, dying.
Drew is dead set on taking the body back with
them, and giving the whole story to the sheriff tomorrow.
Lewis points out that any jury judging them will be local
people—all or most, related to the man he killed. His idea–
bury the man here, and the lake will take care of the rest.
“That’s about as buried as you can get.”
Lewis respects Drew’s attitude, though, and
agrees to go by a majority decision—everyone gets a vote.
First Bobby, then Ed, vote with Lewis. They bury the
man in the wet riverbank soil, then run back to their canoes.
They paddle mindlessly—everything feels wrong
now. Drew never even puts on his life jacket. You
may hear (probably only if you pay attention), a deep,
soft thud sound, just before they reach the rapids. Seconds
later, Drew slumps straight forward. No one has time to
react—the rapids sweep them up, then down hard. They fall
out of both canoes—one canoe is snapped in half completely, front
from back.
The river has changed, no more wooded banks;
rocky cliffs now. The three men are lucky to pull themselves
onto rock. Lewis’ leg is broken badly—a bone sticks out of a
hole in his clothing. He tells Ed and Bobby, Drew was
shot. The river noise is intense. They can’t
see Drew, even hear him. Seconds later, Drew’s battered
guitar floats by, then…nothing.
Right off, you see a different look on Ed’s
face. “He killed Drew. He has to kill us.”
“Now you’re gonna have to play the game,” Lewis
answers.
“We sure as Hell know where he’s gonna
be…right up there,” Ed points to the top of the cliff. In
that moment, he has realized what he needs to do.
Once darkness falls, Ed’s struggle begins; he
needs to climb the face of the cliff alone, carrying the bow and
arrow and some rope .A dangerous, exhausting ordeal.
Endless chances to rest but endless moments he can give it
up to his exhaustion. At one point, he takes his wallet from
his pocket. He needs to see the photo of his wife and son to
find the strength to go on. Then the wallet falls from his
tired hand. He wonders if he will have anything left if he
ever reaches the top.
What will come next is terrifying—facing the
beast inside you.
We all have gotten ourselves a good look at
the beast already. In 1972, the homosexual side of the rape
scenes was devastating. All I can compare it to before, was
Dov’s (Sal Mineo) short description of concentration camp
experiences, before he joins the Irgun terrorists, in
Exodus. And you don’t see any flashbacks.
Here, you sit through the whole thing.
Christopher Dickey, the 19-year old son of the screenwriter
and novelist James Dickey, worked on the movie crew, doing
whatever was needed. One job was going over this scene to
help the technical people—who would be standing where, how far
they would move… etc. None of the actors were there yet, but
he still found it terrifying. He also mentioned the
lighthearted, good-natured atmosphere early in the shooting.
But once they shot this scene, things were never the same.
Times were different.In 1972, the idea of
being turned into a homosexual (as irrational as that might sound
now) was a devastating one.You have probably heard stories about
boxers trying to psyche each other out before a fight: one says to
the other, “I’m gonna make you my wife.”
Now I think, most men have a clearer
understanding of women, straight sex and gay sex, than in 1972.
The sheer brutality is what devastates you now,
like the scene in Cape Fear where Max Cady
literally bites a chunk out of Lori’s face.
Or even Tom’s (Nick Nolte) horrifying
childhood memory in The Prince of Tides where
three escaped convicts broke into his house and raped him, his
mother and his sister. The words of one convict say it all,
better than any of us could. “Fresh meat.”
That’s all Tom’s family was, and all that the
four suburban men would ever be. I don’t want to spend much
time on the argument: was the rape about sex, or was it about
domination. To use another over-worked word, I think it was
about dehumanization, something that cuts right across
heterosexual/gay/bisexual lines.
Look at the average straight porno site, the
descriptions of the women: fat slut, MILF, whore. A
disconnect between your sexual attraction and any signs of
compassion. People may say, these sites are for guys
dissatisfied with their wives; these women are fantasies.
Maybe, but what about those feelings for women you see only
in photographs?
It was rarer to see characters like the two
mountain men in 1972. You might say they are beyond feeling,
yet they definitely enjoy the humiliation that goes along with the
violence. And though you never find out for sure, they
probably have homes and families to go back to.
Yet you say to yourself—Ed is making the right
decision, the only decision. During the video
extras James Dickey says, this is one of the themes I wanted to
look at. Any of these guys might have done what Ed
has to do. It just happens to fall on him this time.
Deliverance was a big
box-office hit. It was one of those movies that come out at
the right time to reflect a lot of fears people had. For
example, Lewis talks about the wilderness disappearing as
developers grab it, build over it.
“They paved Paradise/put up a parking lot.”
Most college kids knew the line, knew the song, related to
the message. People were beginning to realize that the
1950’s concept of “progress” might not only be hollow, but
destructive.
Another important change: migration of baby
boomers to the promised land—back to the country. Big-city
conditions were reaching an all-time low; many people felt it was
too late to repair the damage. And many baby-boomers had no
use for suburbia, the “little boxes on the hillside/ little boxes
made of ticky-tacky.”
In the country, they saw possibilities of
clean air and water, cheap land for sale, safe schools for their
children, and opportunity to be their own boss. They
imagined the people would be the opposite of the jaded, uncaring
folks around them. The ones who routinely walked by someone
passed out on the sidewalk and didn’t know the name of the people
next door.
But who were their new neighbors, really?
Maybe they didn’t fit that polite, welcoming, tolerant
stereotype. People started admitting to themselves they
might not know what they were getting themselves into.
Deliverance tapped into that fear–running
into country people with rigid ideas about outsiders—you were
guilty till proven innocent.
And maybe you’d never get the chance to prove
your innocence.Those two men from the woods were our ultimate
nightmare—nothing you said made a difference.
Travel agents got questions they had seldom heard before.
Foreign-born executives, engineers, scientists, whose first
American jobs had been in Northern cities. Now their
companies were asking them to relocate to the South. A
common question: how many hours will it take me from New York to
Memphis if we drive straight through? These people had seen
Deliverance or heard about it, and imagined
people like the nameless mountain men behind every tree in the
South.
Small towns outside the South could
be dangerous too. Thomas Tryon’s novel
Harvest Home was made into a TV-movie.
Another “small town hiding a deadly secret.” At least
in the big city, you knew how to get a cop when you needed one.
That was probably the bottom line. What
are you, alone, going to do when no cop is coming? Ed, Lewis
and Bobby all bring terrible secrets back with them. Secrets
they can never forget. All of us hope we won’t have
to carry around secrets like that. One of Deliverance’s many
themes: forget about “you hope.” It’s strictly a
matter of chance; you’d best be ready when the shit comes down.