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Don’t you understand what I’m saying?.They’re gonna stop the river up. They’re gonna flood a whole valley, Bobby, that’s why… Just about the last wild, untamed, unpolluted, un-fucked up river in the South. Lewis, the boorish type, describes the necessity of their river trip because “they’re building a dam across the Cahulawassee River. Lewis can sense this affection and so those two men frequently pair off together, the admired and the admirer as Lewis either tests Ed’s resolve or shows him his superior nature by racing through the woods, leaving the other car behind, and Ed holding onto his seat with a scared look on his face. Drew and Bobby’s existences are plainer and Lewis’ appears more primal and manly. He’s attracted to Lewis’ bravado because he wished he had it himself. Whereas Drew doesn’t appear to be enamored with Lewis or engaging in any pissing matches, Jon Voight’s Ed is somewhere in between Drew and Lewis. Drew’s declarations don’t come with gruff language and ultimatums like Lewis’, despite his intelligence grounding the entire group. Ronny Cox is Drew, someone of refined talents in books and musical instruments, and is described to be “about the best damn person” you’d ever meet. No one seems to respect him but they like having him around to feel superior to and to feel adulated by. Ned Beatty is the waggish fellow who doesn’t flex an attunement to back-to-the-earth survival.
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Burt Reynolds is the alpha male who is constantly shown in a state of trying to prove himself, even though all the other men in the group have already conceded to his machismo superiority from his leather vest to his fast off-road driving, and his back-to-the-earth passionate description of why they need to traverse this river before a dam gets built turning it into a staid, motionless lake-Reynolds’ Lewis is always attempting to show that he’s in charge. And the two scenes that Deliverance is most well known for play out entirely differently than you probably remember.īefore dissecting those two scenes, let’s discuss the four men who come from the city into Appalachia for a canoe trip. un-evolved rural men is also a gross oversimplification.ĭeliverance is about men who feel weak around other men, regardless of social or regional status, but it’s also about the freedom that men take for granted. Yes, there’s definitely strife between city folks and rural folks in Deliverance, but just like a purchase and then dismissal of Vance’s book because it doesn’t share a similar worldview is a kneejerk oversimplification, the view of Deliverance being modern city men vs. Vance’s bootstrap success book because his descriptions of impoverished learned helplessness sure seems to echo a governmental down-speak to the rural poor. Sure, in America, many who are grappling with the current state of the White House have turned the The Hillbilly Elegy into a bestseller through a desire to “get to know” the people in the states that bleed Republican red. And it demands a re-watch but not for the reasons you might think. And a redneck man’s desire to rape another man has been used in films as varied as Pulp Fiction and Dumb & Dumber after 1972, confederate flags and bad teeth all became easy story codes to imply danger to another man that a rape could be coming.ĭeliverance has now been in the world for 45 years. The banjo chords alone can be used as a you’re not welcome here sound from afar whenever a stranger enters the woods or played for laughs whenever a city slicker enters the rural south. That’s probably because its two most iconic moments, a banjo session at a truck stop and a man’s rape in the woods, have been co-opted for numerous hillbilly exploitation moments ever since many of us probably associated the roots of mainstream hillbilly parody coming from this film. Deliverance wouldn’t seem like a film that begs for a re-watch.