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"Deliverance" and Iraq
Nov. 1st, 2007 12:29 pmFrom Newsweek, Oct 29 2007
By Christopher Dickey
You probably know as much as you want to know about the most infamous scene in the 1972 movie "Deliverance," that homosexual rape by the riverside in the backwoods of Georgia - "Squeal, piggy!" It has been a source of hetero horror and sophomoric jokes ever since it hit the screen 35 years ago. Warner Bros. has just released a deluxe anniversary DVD of "Deliverance" in HD, or Blu-ray if you please, so the film's likely to have something of a revival in America's living rooms. Woe to any parents who fail to take the R rating seriously: That one nightmare sequence is so graphic, so carnal, so violent and humiliating that you cannot help but cringe, or laugh. (A lot of people laugh, nervously.) And you just cannot forget it.
Since my late father, James Dickey, wrote the novel "Deliverance" and the screenplay, I like to think there's more to the story than the shock of that single scene, and indeed there is--in particular the movie's relevance for the post-9/11 world. The plot of "Deliverance" is simple enough. Four suburbanites from Atlanta go canoeing in the mountains. ("This is the weekend they didn't play golf," read the publicity campaign.) Then they find that the wild river and the people around it are much more dangerous than they'd bargained for. One of the men is raped, one is killed, and the others learn to kill. The instigator of the expedition is Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds in the movie), and while he talks about getting back to nature and testing himself against the wild, he's really more of a country-club Friedrich Nietzsche: a would-be "ubermensch" or "superman" riffing on the 19th-century German philosopher's conceits, constantly training his body and mind to excel, reinventing himself to lead. His destiny--to survive against all odds--will be a triumph of his will. Or so he thinks.
In the end, though, it is not the "ubermensch who offers deliverance from the nasty, brutish horrors of the river. It is the ordinary man, Ed Gentry (Jon Voight), who transcends himself to survive. He is not inspired by a vision of the future, he does not aspire to be tested by man and nature. He's motivated by fear, pure and simple. In the early parts of the story, Ed thinks Lewis is a little nuts, but he's fascinated by the idea that Lewis might be right about-something, he's not sure what. Obsessions like those of Medlock can create their own charisma, inspiring fear while pretending to resist it. The other businessmen from Atlanta, the soft-spoken Drew (Ronny Cox) and porcine Bobby (Ned Beatty), think Lewis is a lot nuts. In fact, they think he's dangerous. And they're right. Me, I think Lewis is Vice President Dick Cheney's closet fantasy of himself, and as such, a sort of model for the Bush administration as a whole. And Ed, he's about the rest of us, just scared and trying to get by. And the river? That's the war in Iraq.
"What the hell you want to go f--ing around with that river for?" one of the locals ask Lewis early in the movie.
"Because it's there," says Lewis.
"It's there all right. You get in and you can't get out, you gonna wish it wasn't."
One of the most disconcerting aspects of the war the United States is fighting now is that it started because Iraq was there: it appeared to be a made-to-order target for an easy invasion that would have great symbolic (indeed, philosophic) significance for the thinkers around Bush. After 9/11, the capture of the terrorists who plotted the attack and the destruction of the Taliban government in Afghanistan that gave them shelter just hadn't seemed a weighty enough challenge for these would-be supermen. "There's a feeling we've got to do something that counts," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a confidant of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, told Newsweek in November 2001. "And bombing caves is not something that counts."
Now look at our man Lewis in "Deliverance." He's a rich boy from Atlanta whose main income is from inherited real estate. But he loves to flirt with extinction. "To come near death, then survive--that's something special," Lewis tells Ed as they're driving up into the mountains. "I believe in survival, all kinds. Every time I come up here I believe in it more."
Normally, government is supposed to put a brake on cynical, self-serving calculation, especially at times of great danger and confusion. Nobody knows that better than professional soldiers, who are trained to understand the laws of society and of war. But the core coterie of ideologues in the Bush administration, who were never before more than weekend warriors, if that, pushed for the invasion of Iraq at all costs, and as an end to almost all constraints.
You remember the scene in "Deliverance" where Lewis has shot one of the mountain men in the back with a broadhead arrow and he's convincing he other three that they should hide the body. The decent family man Drew says no, they have to tell the police what they've done. After all, the law is the law.
"The law?" Lewis half laughs. "The law? What law. Where's the law, Drew?" Then Lewis goes on. "You believe in democracy don't you? Well then, we'll take a vote." The terrfied companions opt to hide the evidence.
Yeah, you believe in democracy, don't you?
By Christopher Dickey
You probably know as much as you want to know about the most infamous scene in the 1972 movie "Deliverance," that homosexual rape by the riverside in the backwoods of Georgia - "Squeal, piggy!" It has been a source of hetero horror and sophomoric jokes ever since it hit the screen 35 years ago. Warner Bros. has just released a deluxe anniversary DVD of "Deliverance" in HD, or Blu-ray if you please, so the film's likely to have something of a revival in America's living rooms. Woe to any parents who fail to take the R rating seriously: That one nightmare sequence is so graphic, so carnal, so violent and humiliating that you cannot help but cringe, or laugh. (A lot of people laugh, nervously.) And you just cannot forget it.
Since my late father, James Dickey, wrote the novel "Deliverance" and the screenplay, I like to think there's more to the story than the shock of that single scene, and indeed there is--in particular the movie's relevance for the post-9/11 world. The plot of "Deliverance" is simple enough. Four suburbanites from Atlanta go canoeing in the mountains. ("This is the weekend they didn't play golf," read the publicity campaign.) Then they find that the wild river and the people around it are much more dangerous than they'd bargained for. One of the men is raped, one is killed, and the others learn to kill. The instigator of the expedition is Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds in the movie), and while he talks about getting back to nature and testing himself against the wild, he's really more of a country-club Friedrich Nietzsche: a would-be "ubermensch" or "superman" riffing on the 19th-century German philosopher's conceits, constantly training his body and mind to excel, reinventing himself to lead. His destiny--to survive against all odds--will be a triumph of his will. Or so he thinks.
In the end, though, it is not the "ubermensch who offers deliverance from the nasty, brutish horrors of the river. It is the ordinary man, Ed Gentry (Jon Voight), who transcends himself to survive. He is not inspired by a vision of the future, he does not aspire to be tested by man and nature. He's motivated by fear, pure and simple. In the early parts of the story, Ed thinks Lewis is a little nuts, but he's fascinated by the idea that Lewis might be right about-something, he's not sure what. Obsessions like those of Medlock can create their own charisma, inspiring fear while pretending to resist it. The other businessmen from Atlanta, the soft-spoken Drew (Ronny Cox) and porcine Bobby (Ned Beatty), think Lewis is a lot nuts. In fact, they think he's dangerous. And they're right. Me, I think Lewis is Vice President Dick Cheney's closet fantasy of himself, and as such, a sort of model for the Bush administration as a whole. And Ed, he's about the rest of us, just scared and trying to get by. And the river? That's the war in Iraq.
"What the hell you want to go f--ing around with that river for?" one of the locals ask Lewis early in the movie.
"Because it's there," says Lewis.
"It's there all right. You get in and you can't get out, you gonna wish it wasn't."
One of the most disconcerting aspects of the war the United States is fighting now is that it started because Iraq was there: it appeared to be a made-to-order target for an easy invasion that would have great symbolic (indeed, philosophic) significance for the thinkers around Bush. After 9/11, the capture of the terrorists who plotted the attack and the destruction of the Taliban government in Afghanistan that gave them shelter just hadn't seemed a weighty enough challenge for these would-be supermen. "There's a feeling we've got to do something that counts," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a confidant of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, told Newsweek in November 2001. "And bombing caves is not something that counts."
Now look at our man Lewis in "Deliverance." He's a rich boy from Atlanta whose main income is from inherited real estate. But he loves to flirt with extinction. "To come near death, then survive--that's something special," Lewis tells Ed as they're driving up into the mountains. "I believe in survival, all kinds. Every time I come up here I believe in it more."
Normally, government is supposed to put a brake on cynical, self-serving calculation, especially at times of great danger and confusion. Nobody knows that better than professional soldiers, who are trained to understand the laws of society and of war. But the core coterie of ideologues in the Bush administration, who were never before more than weekend warriors, if that, pushed for the invasion of Iraq at all costs, and as an end to almost all constraints.
You remember the scene in "Deliverance" where Lewis has shot one of the mountain men in the back with a broadhead arrow and he's convincing he other three that they should hide the body. The decent family man Drew says no, they have to tell the police what they've done. After all, the law is the law.
"The law?" Lewis half laughs. "The law? What law. Where's the law, Drew?" Then Lewis goes on. "You believe in democracy don't you? Well then, we'll take a vote." The terrfied companions opt to hide the evidence.
Yeah, you believe in democracy, don't you?
