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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
This paper hermeneutically examines the relationship between technology, masculinity, and modernity in John Boorman's film Deliverance (1972). It finds that the suburbanites who are victimized in Appalachia do not regress to a primal, premodern state but rely on their modern values to justify killing their assailants. The men's violence allegorizes the institutionalized violence of the power company that is damming the Cahulawassee River to power their suburban technological comforts. Hermeneutic analysis and critical theories of technology are combined to examine how each man reassesses his life, as one of modernity's beneficiaries, after encountering the displaced mountain people – modernity's others.
1 Linda Ruth Williams reminds us at the outset of her well-known essay on Deliverance entitled “Blood Brothers” that the Oxford English Dictionary offers a second definition of deliverance as the “action of giving up; surrender.” Sight & Sound, 9 (1994), 17–20, 17.
2 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, first published 1922).
3 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
4 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
5 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).
6 John Boorman (dir.) Deliverance (motion picture) (Burbank: Warner Bros., 1972).
7 James Dickey, Deliverance (novel) (New York: Dell, 1970).
8 Pamela E. Barnett, Dangerous Desire: Sexual Freedom and Sexual Violence since the Sixties (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 45.
9 Bauman, 12; emphasis in original.
10 James Dickey and John Boorman, Deliverance: From the Novel by James Dickey, 2nd draft (Hollywood: Script City, 1971). Like most screenplays, this co-authored version of the script contains scenes that were never filmed, including some that take place on the streets of Atlanta, which Dickey felt were crucial, and dialogue that varies somewhat from the shooting script.
11 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1955), 17.
12 Kellner, Douglas, “Poltergeist: Suburban Ideology,” Jump Cut, 28 (April 1983), 5–6, 5.Google Scholar
13 See Nystrom, Derek, “Hard Hats and Movie Brats: Auteurism and the Class Politics of the New Hollywood,” Cinema Journal, 43, 3 (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a detailed discussion of New Hollywood production practices and directorial autonomy that shaped such films as Avildsen's Joe and Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces.
14 Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 131.
15 Davis W. Houck and C. J. S. Picart, “Opening the Text: Reading Gender, Christianity, and American Intervention in Deliverance,” in David Blakesley, ed., The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003).
16 Williams, “Blood Brothers,” 17–20.
17 Hartigan, John, “Reading Trash: Deliverance and the Poetics of White Trash,” Visual Anthropology Review, 6, 2 (1992), 8–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 161 footnote 15, quoted in Feenberg, Andrew, “From Critical Theory of Technology to Rational Critique of Rationality,” Social Epistemology, 22, 1 (2008), 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 7.
20 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 15.
21 Ibid., 15.
22 Ibid., 15.
23 Armour, Robert, “Deliverance: Four Variations of the American Adam,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 1, 3 (1973), 280–85.Google Scholar
24 Aigner, Hal, “Deliverance,” Film Quarterly, 26, 2 (Winter 1972–73), 40–42, 40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 Ibid., 40.
26 Ibid., 40.
27 Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 134.
28 Feenberg, Questioning Technology, xi.
29 Feenberg, “From Critical Theory of Technology,” 20.
30 Ibid., 19.
31 Indeed, the film's anal fixation is firmly established by the rape scene, by the repeated references to “shit” that populate the screenplay, and by the depiction of phallic arrows piercing the bodies of three different men throughout the narrative. After Bobby is sodomized, Lewis shoots the first mountain man from behind and the camera lingers on the arrow that has penetrated his body, which bends lifelessly over a branch, an echo of Bobby's body which had been bent forcefully over a log during the rape. In the novel, Ed's “intestines contract” as he watches Bobby's assault, and the men then dig the grave for the mountain man with an old latrine shovel. The novel offers this depiction of a wasted landscape: “The ground came up easily, or what was on the ground. There was no earth; it was all leaves and rotten stuff. It had the smell of generations of mold. They might as well let the water in on it, I thought; this stuff is no good to anybody.” See Dickey, Deliverance (novel), 114–17. The mountain men inhabit a world of “no earth” and “no good” in the novel, a Godless abyss modelled after Dante's Inferno. See Peggy Goodman Endel's reading of “the anality of evil” in “Dickey, Dante, and the Demonic: Reassessing Deliverance,” American Literature, 60, 4 (1988), 611–24.
32 Hartigan, “Reading Trash,” 10.
33 Feenberg, Questioning Technology, xiii.
34 For an analysis of “economic guilt” in horror films with rural American settings see Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
35 Lowenstein, 131.
36 Interestingly, despite acquiring a shotgun, a weapon technologically superior to their bow and arrow, the men decide to bury the gun in the shallow grave with the first mountain man. Later in the action, they sink the second mountain man's shotgun. They choose to relinquish these weapons because the guns represent evidence of their crimes, a choice which I am reading as rational and calculating. However, the choice to defend themselves solely with the bow and arrow has multiple implications in a narrative that explores themes of innocence and regression. For an alternative reading of the choice see Armour, “Deliverance: Four Variations,” 280–85.
37 Hartigan, 11.
38 Ibid., 11.
39 Williams, “Blood Brothers,” 17; emphasis original.
40 Dickey, Deliverance (novel), 117.
41 Houck and Picart, “Opening the Text,” 175.
42 For examples of some reservations expressed by critics see S. Farber, “Deliverance, How it Delivers,” New York Times, 20 Aug. 1972, and Samuels, C. S., “How Not to Film a Novel,” American Scholar, 42, 1 (1972), 148–54Google Scholar.
43 Williams, 17.
44 Houck and Picart, 178.
45 Glenday, Michael, “Deliverance and the Aesthetics of Survival,” American Literature, 56, 2 (1984), 149–61, 151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
46 Ibid., 158.
47 Bauman, Wasted Lives, 23; emphasis in original.
48 Dickey and Boorman, Deliverance: From the Novel by James Dickey, 5.
49 Dickey, Deliverance (novel), 11.
50 Ibid., 11; italics mine.
51 Bauman, 23.
52 Williams, 18.
53 Christopher Dickey, for instance, compared his father's story to the current crisis of masculinity represented by the US-led invasion of Iraq, a country he suggests is akin to the river in Deliverance. See “War and Deliverance,” Newsweek, 17 Oct. 2007, n.p.
54 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin, 2000; first published 1899), 20.
