Dickey's Deliverance - The Macho Movie to End All Macho Movies

James Dickey was one of the most celebrated poets during his lifetime. Chronologically, he belongs to my parents' generation. Born in 1923, Dickey served as a fighter pilot in the Army Air Corps in WWII (and later again in Korea), then attended Vanderbilt, and embarked on a teaching career, interrupted for a time while he worked in advertising (Coca-Cola and Lays Potato Chips), before taking up writing and teaching full time in the 1960's. His first three books published by Wesleyan--Drowning With Others [1962], Helmets [1964] and Buckdancer's Choice [1965] which Dickey eventually named collectively "the early motion"--were widely admired. During the Sixties, he published dozens of poems in major periodicals, principally The New Yorker. Also during the Sixties, he became associated with hawkish positions on the war in Vietnam, opposing the liberal phalanxes (represented by, for instance, Robert Bly, Denise Levertov and Galway Kinnell), and was routinely vilified in the press for his reactionary, chauvinistic and jingoistic attitudes. His verse, which addressed many of these issues directly, was frequently condemned along political, as opposed to aesthetic, lines or criteria. As Dickey's career progressed, his successes as a fiction writer tended to overshadow his efforts in verse, and by the late 1970's, when Deliverance [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970] was published, and then made [1972] into a successful movie, he was thought of mostly as a literary has-been, who had descended into pop culture status. He would go on to write more novels (Alnilam and To the White Sea), but his best days clearly lay behind him.

Seen within the context of Dickey's political biases and tendencies, coming out of the 1960's, Deliverance is like a kind of manifesto of his vision of life, and the manly culture he advocated. It presents as clear a picture as we may yet have, of a belief in a primitivistic reliance and a culture of dominant male ritual. Dickey was a sportsman, and had been an athlete in school. He was a child of the South, and he subscribed to many of the familiar attitudes peculiar to rural Southern whites. But Dickey's was an intelligent and inquiring mind. He took nothing for granted, and his work is as much as anything an exploration and a pondering of traditional issues: Death, the dream-life, wildness, our primitive nature(s), courage, conflict, violence. Like Hemingway, he believed in testing his principles under fire, and Deliverance is (rather in the way of Death In the Afternoon) if nothing else, certainly a ritualistic testing adventure, a fictionalized drama of men against men, men against nature, and men pitted against, or expressed through, their own natures.

Lewis, a devoted backwoodsman whose hobby is hunting with a bow and arrow, convinces his buddies Ed, Bobby and Drew to accompany him on a canoe trip down the imaginary Cahulawassee River in the Georgia outback, before it's inundated by a new dam. This rough, unspoiled back country is peopled by rough, mangy, predatory hillbillies, who would (it turns out) as soon rape and shoot you as not. Dickey wrote the screenplay for the movie, and also plays the part of the local sheriff, in a memorable cameo.

The testing part of the narrative at one level places these citified slickers against the challenges of running down an untamed river, where there are no easy portages, and no first aid stations. It's a wilderness that belongs to those who are familiar with its dangers, or those who can master its raw power. The trip will obviously be, at the least, a kind of gauntlet, to be survived as much as enjoyed. Nature is beautiful--seductive--but uncaring, even hostile. A man can discover parts of himself which civilization has domesticated out of him, and once he begins to sense and cultivate these, he may discover a new power, but also an evil or grimly aggressive side of his nature. Confronting other men--uncivilized men who do not follow society's soft compacts and mutually assured comforts and securities--in a natural setting, where the rules don't apply--may awaken qualities and strengths (or weaknesses) which we would perhaps rather not know about ourselves. These are the basic conflicts which face the men as they set out on their vacation canoe trip.

As quiet, courteous, contemporary American suburbanites, the men are hesitant to abandon their duties and obligations, and they'd prefer to think of their adventure as clean fun, instead of as the jeopardy they fear it may entail. As the movie begins, the men arrive at an encampment of old buildings and abandoned auto hulks in a forest setting, where they've hired some locals to drive their cars down river where they will end up. An aura of malice and mystery pervades the place. You can feel the trappings of civilization loosen as the wilderness closes in around them.

As the canoes slide into the water, there's a sense of immersion in the unknown, an irrevocable baptismal submission has begun. The scenery is gorgeous, but all-encompassing. As the men begin to absorb the sounds and smells and motions of the country, they feel both delight and foreboding. Lewis, the leader, brimming with confidence and risk, urges them onward.

Ed is also a veteran of several trips but lacks Lewis' machismo. Bobby and Drew are novices.
The locals are crude and unimpressed with the presence of outsiders, and the film implies that some of them are inbred. Drew briefly connects with a local weird banjo-playing boy by joining him in an impromptu dueling bluegrass duet. The boy's playing is so miraculous that it seems magical. The City Boys are suspicious of these locals. They'd best be left alone.

The men spend the day canoeing down the river in pairs before camping by the riverside at night. Shortly before they retire for bed, Lewis tells the others to be quiet and disappears into the dark woods to investigate a sound he heard. He returns shortly after and says that he didn't find anything. When asked whether he heard "something or someone," he tells them he doesn't know.

The next morning, Ed wakes first, and heads into the woods with his bow and arrow. He sees a deer, but cannot keep his aim straight. He fires and misses. This first confrontation in the woods creates a spooky sense of mystery. He returns as the others are finishing breakfast and loading the canoes. Bobby and Ed get away first, and Lewis says that he and Drew will catch up.

After a while, they pull off to the side to wait. They notice a pair of unkempt hillbillies (Bill McKinney and Herbert Cowboy Coward) emerging from the woods, one carrying a shotgun. Bobby speculates that the two locals have a moonshine still hidden in the woods and amicably offers to buy some, but the hillbillies are not moved. Bobby is forced at gunpoint to strip naked. McKinney's character chases after and physically harasses Bobby as he tries to escape. Bobby's ear is twisted to bring him to his hands and knees, and he is then ordered to "squeal like a pig" as McKinney's character rapes him, holding him by his nostrils. Ed is bound to a tree with his own belt while this is taking place, helpless as Bobby is violently sodomized.

As the two hillbillies set their sights on Ed's "pretty mouth", Ed notices Lewis sneaking up with an arrow drawn. Lewis shoots and kills the rapist as the dimwit escapes into the woods. Lewis and Drew argue about whether to inform the authorities. Lewis argues that they would not receive a fair trial, as he claims that the entire local population are related to one another, and the jury would be comprised of the dead man's friends and relatives. Likewise, Bobby does not want the incident of his sodomy to become public. Lewis tells them that since the entire area would be flooded by a lake soon, the body would never be found and the escaped hillbilly could not inform the authorities since he had participated in the incident. The men vote to side with Lewis' recommendation to bury the dead hillbilly's body and continue as though nothing had happened. During the digging, Drew, the most lyrical and "soft" of the group, is obviously agitated with guilt and remorse, and blurts reservations during the dig.

The four make a run for it downriver, cutting their trip short, but soon disaster strikes as the canoes reach a dangerous stretch of rapids. In the lead canoe, Ed repeatedly asks Drew to don his life jacket, but an unnerved Drew ignores him without a word of explanation. As Drew and Ed reach the rapids, Drew's head appears to shake inexplicably, perhaps from being shot, and he falls forward into the river; the roar of the river is so loud in the rocky confines of the canyon they're passing through that a gunshot would not be heard above it.

After Drew disappears into the river, Ed loses control of his canoe and both canoes collide on the rocks, spilling Lewis, Bobby, and Ed into the river. Lewis breaks his femur and the others manage to swim ashore ashore alongside him, pinned under the overhanging cliff where the shooter may be above. The badly-injured Lewis believes the toothless hillbilly shot Drew and is now stalking them. Ed, in an almost superhuman demonstration of skill, climbs a nearby rock face in order to dispatch the suspected shooter using his bow, while Bobby stays behind to look after Lewis. Ed reaches the top and hides out until the next morning, when he sees the man he was looking for standing on the cliff holding a rifle, looking down into the gorge where Lewis and Bobby are hiding. The moment has an eerie quality, as if seen in a dream. Ed abhors violence, and killing, but he knows he's in a state of absolute natural selection. If he weakens, the half-wit hillbilly will surely despatch him.

Ed, a champion archer who nevertheless earlier lost his nerve while aiming at a deer, now freezes in spite of his clear shot--either out of extreme fear, or preternatural reluctance, we can't be sure. The man notices Ed and fires as Ed clumsily releases his arrow. In the movie version, the botched release of the arrow is made to seem as if the arrow has back-fired somehow and not been released, but instead stabs Ed. The man reaches Ed and is about to shoot him when he collapses, revealing an arrow sticking through him. This whole episode seems like a fantasy; did Ed really shoot him with the arrow, or what? The incident feels a little like the passage in The Shining when the metal door to the freezer compartment opens by itself to enable the Jack Nicholson character to escape. Ed lowers the body down the cliff with a rope and climbs down after it. His rope breaks and he falls in the river, not far from Bobby and Lewis.

Ed and Bobby weigh the dead hillbilly down with stones and drop him into the river. Later, they come upon Drew's grotesquely-contorted corpse and, after being unable to find any definite gunshot wound, they also weigh it down and sink it in the river to ensure that it will never be found. This business of drowning the dead bodies in the river has symbolic significance. The river valley itself will be inundated soon enough, concealing all its history and secrets of human presence. Near the end of the movie, grave-diggers are seen unearthing coffins from a cemetery, in order that they may be moved to new ground--it's an unsettling scene. The religious overtones are clear: Sinful acts can't be completely submerged or hidden. The guilt and consequences of evil or violence may float up to the surface, against our best efforts to keep them pushed down.

When the three survivors finally reach their destination, the town of Aintry (which will soon be submerged by the dammed river and is being evacuated), they take the injured Lewis to the hospital while the Sheriff comes to investigate the incident. One of the deputies has a missing brother-in-law, who may have been the man that Ed killed, and is highly suspicious. The three hastily concoct a cover story for the authorities about Drew's death and disappearance being an accident, lying about their ordeal to Sheriff Bullard (played by author James Dickey). The sheriff clearly doesn't believe them, but having no evidence and clearly sensing the truth of what happened, simply tells Ed: "Don't ever do nothin' like this again...Don't come back up here... I'd kinda like to see this town die peaceful," to which Ed readily agrees. The men vow to keep their story a secret for the rest of their lives, which proves to be psychologically burdensome for Ed; lying in bed with his wife, he awakes screaming from a nightmare in which Drew's hand is seen rising from the lake surface.

The men have suffered through an ordeal which they share, but the secret they've agreed to keep binds them together in ways they want to escape from. They've had a glimpse--in a very Conradian sense--of human vulnerability and culpability, and want no more to do with it. They'd prefer their tame games of golf, and gratefully embrace the familiar trappings of the secure, easy life they know. But there is a lingering sensation of enrichment as well. An experience as profound--and potentially life-changing--as this, wields an improbable power over these men's memories and characters. They appreciate civilization in a way they hadn't before, but they also perceive its fragility with an awful new objectivity. Men may dam nature up, contain it, bury it, conceal his own depredations of it, but nature won't be bottled up and tamed. It's inside of us, a part of our natures, and demands to be recognized. Our genetic inheritance isn't something we can manage as if it were a problem in corporate governance. We're capable of violence, and revenge, and ruthless acts of self-preservation. Under the grace and beauty and efficiency of selection and technological solutions, lies a stranger, intractable force.

This recognition would be familiar to readers of Dickey's poetry, where ritual killing and death and violence are regular subjects. It was part of what made his poetry powerful, if a bit brutish and relentless. Dickey was considered a bit reckless as a poet, but his daemon demanded nothing less. This proclivity for seeing life in terms of its most sharp challenges--in a competition with nature, or with other men (as in war)--undoubtedly was crucial in shaping Dickey's conservative attitudes towards American foreign policy during the post-war period. As a veteran of two wars, it would be unusual if he hadn't turned politically the way he did. As a generational split, it's completely appropriate and predictable. Men dressed in fatigues, hiking around the Appalachian hill country, carrying automatic weapons, isn't very far removed from soldiers patrolling the jungles of South Vietnam. The rehearsal of ritual manhood common to the country this fictional story describes, holds the same imaginative attraction we experience when thinking about any virtual battleground.

But Dickey loved wilderness. The wilderness in himself. The wilderness around us. The wilderness of our dreams and plans and the commitments we make. They are gestural and histrionic, but also fated and joined. Deliverance is a masterpiece of movie-making. It reminds me of another testing film, The Edge [1997], which starred Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. Both are films that ask fundamental questions in the context of a state of nature.