Deliverance

I recently watched Deliverance, James Dickey's masterful tale of four suburban guys off on a weekend adventure, canoeing down a wild river through deep Georgia woods. It was the first time I'd seen it in (whoa!) decades, and was so taken by how well it stood up and how provocative it was that I determined to blog about it this week.

Then I remembered that this weekend is our wedding anniversary. (D'oh!) I say to myself, "Deliverance? Wedding anniversary? What’s wrong with this picture?” Has there ever been a more macho man movie (where even the banjos are dueling)? Has there ever been a movie more contra the institution of marriage than Deliverance?

In the novel version, Ed, the narrator, attributes his need to get off into the woods with his friend Lewis to his wife as some vague feeling of discombobulation. The wife asks if it's her fault. Dickey writes:

"Lord, no," I said, but it partly was, just as it's any woman's fault who represents normalcy.

In the film version, Lewis is openly contemptuous of marriage, and when Ed calls him on it for making him feel bad about his, Lewis replies, "If you like it so much, why do you keep going on these trips with me?" The clear homoerotic subtext of the exchange in the film is conveyed through the direction and the actors--through Burt Reynolds's open, sleeveless leather jacket, allowing full exposure of his muscular arms and hairy chest and through Jon Voight's guileless eyes and pulpy lips.

When I describe it as homoerotic, I do not mean to suggest gayness as in our current cultural context. There’s nothing remotely Modern Familycuddly gay guy parenting about it, nor is there anything flaming gay pride parade about it either. This is the deeper, darker far more primal homoeroticism, as my sensei Norman O. Brown defines it in Love’s Body:

The brothers introject the parents in coitus, in a new coitus, a new covenant or coming together…the brothers perpetually re-enact in their mutual relations what Freud calls the primal scene; their wrestling is sexual as well as aggressive, in imitation of parental coitus.

Of course the homoerotic subtext explodes to the surface in the most famous scene in Deliverance--the anal rape of Lewis and Ed’s chubby traveling companion Bobby by two primitive mountain men. Homoerotic may seem an outrageous misnomer in this context. There is nothing erotic about the behavior of the mountain men, and the sheer brutishness of their actions is more akin to beastliness than manliness. And that similarity is sharpened to terrifying clarity when Bobby’s rapist makes him squeal like a pig, rubs his bare belly and compares him to a sow. As Ed--standing in for the audience, though tied to a tree--averts his eyes, the other mountain man watches his partner rape Bobby. The mountain men act without visible shame or inhibition, and we realize in watching that they’ve done this before. They’ve probably done it with pigs. And they’ve probably watched dad do it to mom, if not to little brother.
Lewis has truly led his friends to the forest primeval he promised them, where the killing is done—and then the crime that is essential to the male bonding Nobby describes in Love’s Body:

The foundation of the fraternity…is itself a crime, or rather the primal crime. The brothers club together in a criminal conspiracy: “society was now based on complicity in the common crime.” Freud says that the sense of guilt can be allayed only by the solidarity of the participants. Actually it is the common crime that creates the solidarity.

The film version is nearly as drenched in machismo as it is in the Cahulawassee River. During filming, writer Dickey got into a fistfight with director John Boorman. They say Dickey was drunk, but whether he was drunk on alcohol or testosterone remains unclear. The lone female in the film—Ed’s wife Martha—emerges out of the shadows in the closing minutes.
There is slightly more of a female presence in the novel, which I taught at the high school level for a number of years. The school was located in New Hampshire hunting country, where the first day of hunting season was annually an unscheduled, yet excusable, holiday expressly because it was a day for the boys to bond with their fathers. 
I have the fondest memories of teaching Deliverance there because of the way the book gripped the somewhat anti-book male segment of the student population. The boys’ surprising embrace of the book overwhelms my memory of the girls’ reception to it. I don’t know if Martha’s early disappearance left them without a character to identify with, or if they were able—perhaps subconsciously--to identify with the fourth member of Lewis’s warriors—Drew.
Drew is surely the agent of civilizing—dare I say, feminizing--values in Deliverance.  He is the musician—one part of the instrumental duel that comprises the film’s other classic scene. But more than that, he is the voice of conscience after the killing, who urges his companions to do the right thing and report it to the authorities.  It is when they vote Drew down that the others commit the crime of which Nobby writes—the cover-up.
Lewis’s argument for not trusting the law and the courts is a verbalization of the vigilantism that would permeate Hollywood in the early 70s through the Dirty Harryand Death Wish films and proceed to infect our society up to today’s Stand Your Ground laws and Minutemen border goons. “Politics made out of delinquency,” Nobby writes, “All brothers are brothers in crime: all equal as sinners.”
But Ed, who has gone down the river looking for his manhood is feminized in the instance of the guilt he feels for his crime.  At last, seemingly safe at home, he awakens in a cold sweat from a nightmare of the mountain man’s hand reaching out of the grave. But then, like an angel, Martha rises up from of her side of the bed to put an arm around him and comfort him and reinstate him with the normalcy he had longed to escape.
One night in the first year of our marriage we went knocking at the doors of perception, as many of our generation were inclined to do in those days.  They say I got some bad acid, but I’ve had enough experience with the workings of my own mind to know that it can sometimes be so susceptible to foreign stimulants that it could be a humble glass of Manischewitz that sends me tripping down to a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. So I can often be counted on to bring my own level of madness to the party without much help from bad chemists.
Whatever. It was--in the parlance of the day--a very bad trip. I couldn't believe that I was still there—I had literally lost myself. And in a desperate attempt to find myself, I started taking inventory of my body parts—squeezing my fingers—hard—and then telling myself that these were my fingers. And then my hands—these are my hands. My arms—these are my arms. And then I would ask, “Why are you doing this? You’re doing this because you’ve lost your mind.” And then it would be cue the colored spirals, the flashing lights, and Cream: “In a white room with black curtains near the station….” The utter senselessness of UnBeing would begin again. Then the body part inventory would begin again. Then into the twilight zone again. This went on all night long. At intervals, I would think that the only way to feel real again would be to jump off the roof of the building, and I wandered close enough to the large open window to do just that.
But I didn’t. I made it through the night...down the river and through the woods. I made it because Lorna was there to comfort me—to love normalcy back into me. She was my deliverance.
Happy 44th anniversary, Lorna Ruth…