"He Shur Duz Have a Pritty Mowth"

Deliverance, it seems, has indelibly embedded itself in popular consciousness, despite its being nearly as old as me. The banjo-totin' cretin with fingers of fury, Ned Beatty's harrowing porcine approximations, vengeful crackers stalking the woods above the river—these images, enhanced for home audiences by a first-rate digital transfer and crystal-clear audio remix, have aged well—much better, in fact, than Burt Reynolds, one of the film's actors, whom seeing sans hairpiece and porn mustache was uncanny—and have, I think, taken on an added relevance for these times of dire ecological prospects. The impending demise of the town of Aintry, Georgia and the river running through it at the hands of a hydroelectric utility is a harbinger our fate writ small.

Deliverance is also interesting for being one of a slew of '70s films whose subject matter is those marginal types stalking the hinterlands, and the various perversities around which their aggregate identities are organized. In addition to Deliverance, the ' 70s saw the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and, Friday the 13th. Admittedly, Deliverance distinguishes itself from this company in its thematic content, which aims for psychological and philosophical depth, as opposed to mere exploitation. The existential glosses of Deliverance are nothing short of masterful. The images of dying and death have an agonizing physicality to them, and the dead bodies themselves seem almost to make the screen sag under their insistent corporeality (The actors portraying the two key hicks deserved Oscars for their utterly convincing expirations). Such touches elevate Deliverance above the sensationalism it flirts with.

Intercalated with the theme of masculine self-actualization, are those of man's collisions with both nature and civilization, either having the power to undo an individual. For the hillbillies, Georgia's hill country is a mis-en-scène of very palpable degeneracy, while for the four vacationers, the city is the same. The gap-toothed menace of the lustful rustics finds its complement in Ned Beatty's flabby lubricity. The city takes what the country makes, and vice versa. This is most clearly seen in the neat narrative symmetry at work between Burt Reynolds and John Voigt's respective characters. Oppositions in this movie are never facile, though, and one is left with the sense that the Weltanschauung expressed in it is one eternal Manichean struggle; civilization consumes nature (the hydroelectric dam destroying the river), and is in turn consumed by nature (this is at work at many levels in the film, but the most striking image is the rising waters around Aintry). Viewing Deliverance again has led me to muse upon the historical and culture dimensions of the '70s, and what anxieties the film and those of its ilk capture.