DELIVERANCE
(1972; d. John Boorman, w. James Dickey)

Title from Lord’s Prayer city-boy Bobby recites before being raped by “mountin’” man, action to follow God’s (non-)response: 2 unpunished murders + 1 successful cover-up of accidental death on brutal rapids, nature neutral territory removed from Law + Lord.

Bobby (insurance salesman [à la preacher] in world w/o assurances) + friends Ed, Drew + Lewis (all 4, respectively: corpulent Body, reflective Mind, gentle Soul + unity of 3, survivors to lose Drew on trip) take memorial excursion thru backwoods down Cahulawasee River (along evolutionary regression, à la primitive Lewis’s protest against advancing civilization) before area flooded (nature – both environment + earthy human – buried under social repressions) to build hydroelectric dam (harnessing power to feed civ: maturational drama of men/adolescents reining own instincts) for sprawling suburbs; only musician Drew, blown away by mute “Duellin’ Banjoes” country kid on elevated porch (city-boy humbled to silent, inscrutable nature), dsn’t make it (irony that arrogant + indifferent ones do natural selection), kid later spotted on bridge (credited, in fact, as “Boy on Bridge” rather’n for greater jammin’ role: necessary transition from earthy youth [played by dir’s son Charley, later gone native in JB’s similarly themed Emerald Forest]), again elevated: paradox of danger of putting self beneath nature which finally proves indifferent to man, Drew naïveté (+ morality) lost on journey thru life.

Arrange for cars to be driven to destination (2nd title interpretation: dependent on less-hostile locals to deliver vehicles that’ll deliver them out, Lewis better at negotiating w/ median [Griner Brother who, like him later, “fucks up” when hammer blow misses] than w/ nature itself), civilization at other end of journey suggesting trip also thru birth canal (3rd “deliverance”) for arrogant (Lewis), fat (complacent: Bobby), unproven (Ed, who flinches at killing), or innocent (Drew, river/film machine set up to eliminate him); message also that river/life will cripple you if you challenge it (Lew, who breaks + risks losing leg), rape you if you offend it (B, whose sodomizing is payback for ridiculing local who suggestively pumps his gas), traumatize you if you are unprepared (Ed, who falls asleep at critical moment), kill you if you hold to abstractions like reason + morality (D, who possibly commits sideways rather than cover up homicide, justifiable or not) – or, conversely, if you don’t (rapists) – or sustain you if you harmonize w/ it (locals).

Mountain men reenact city dwellers’ “rape” of earth (as Lewis maintains is happening in opening voiceover), escape of one after Lew’s arrow kills other temporary avoidance of accountability not to last forever, as when corpse’s resolutely unburied arm (as Ed’s own unquiet/unsteady drawing-arm when aiming bow at deer: man’s violent nature won’t stay repressed) returns to disturb Ed’s sleep in end (protracted descending action emphasizing inevitability of repercussions); trapped later after violent rapids (emotional upheaval repressed by all but Drew) under surviving mountaineer’s vigilance, Ed climbs crag (mind’s dream-elevation [seeming impossibility of feat] while body + ego incapacitated below, long wordlessness paradoxical descent into pre-lingual primitivism) to face down nemesis (shadow side which nearly raped him) + falls asleep at summit.

Awakes (?) as target appears from behind head (as in back of mind) + takes him out, uncertainty as to positive i.d. à la similarly innocent deer (killing him dream-rectification of earlier inadequacy); using corpse as anchor, rappels down cliff (dead material providing means of descent into psyche; also, murder weighing down soul + providing similar, moral descent) until rope breaks + both plummet (asleep) into river (deepest unconscious + primitive commonality, as in sim Psycho III + Leatherface climaxes), where reunited w/ body-ego Lewis (latter having passed “bad night”).

Finally make destination (rusted cars civilization, Ed’s embrace of own vehicle advance in same), where 1st met by different boy (½way btwn stubbleheaded Bridge Boy + Ed’s own bowl-haired son: near-return to innocence following macho ordeal), later taxi around uprooted church (à la lost soul Drew, whole town being moved as in ’99 In Dreams) temporarily circumventing accountability; wily Sheriff (poet/novelist/scrw Dickey, closest thing to God in story) on to them but can’t prove anything (what passes for forgiveness in letting them wriggle free [+ author’s determination to not pass judgment], “don’t come back” ejection from cruel Eden), imminent covering of evidence in flood both biblical judgment + not-quite washing away of sins (final meaning of title, delivering men from own evil).

Back home, Ed wakes from unquiet conscience à la Viet vets’ post-traumatic syndrome (already obvious allegory made even more so by ’81 Southern Comfort remake) to wife’s unconvincing “It’s all right,” raising question postulated by post-Drew Bobby as to whether nightmare will ever end.

In film taking place almost entirely in outdoors + where actors apparently do much of own stuntwork, Dickey’s often aphoristic dialogue sounds stagey + un-natural, tho his performance is least actorly of the main characters’.