Deliverance (1972)

Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)

It's probably a mixture of spite and irreverence that persuaded me to spend a little less than two hours of this year's Valentine's Day to watch John Boorman's Deliverance, an unsympathetic account of four suburbanites tragic canoing trip in hillbilly country. It's the proper film to suck any notion of what Valentines invokes --- the proper panacea for those feeling antagonistically unromantic while the rest of the world is sizzling with love.

The four men arrive in a make-shift gas station and while waiting for their station wagons to refill with fuel, Drew (Ronny Cox) starts playing his guitar, attracting a deformed youngster to challenge his strumming with his very own banjo renditions. It's an arresting scene; both absurd and lovely --- a defining image of an uncomfortable marriage between the city slickers and the country bumpkins (the 'Dueling Banjoes' song naturally urged the natives to break into a dancing fit, as the tourists get amused out of the weirdness of it all). The scene, and the succeeding sequences of peaceful canoing are illusionary portrayals of an uneasy calm before the traumatic turn-around: two horny mountain men successfully sodomize insurance salesman Bobby (Ned Beatty) and attempt to similarly encroach on the masculinity of Ed (Jon Voight) before being foiled by the group's bow and arrow-wielding alpha-male Lewis (Burt Reynolds).

Deliverance is a film that is totally devoid of any depiction of romantic love. In fact, love isn't merely absent but the exact opposite of it pervades the air. Deliverance's central imagery concerns the act of rape; not only in its more obvious (when one of the mountainmen asks Bobby to squeal like a pig, while raping him) but also in its symbolic form. It's interesting how it's not only the city folks that were invaded, but also the serenity of a river and its denizens. From the start, an unamicable relationship between the Atlanta-based group and the backwoods is felt. Lewis lording it over as the leader of the pack; the rest of the gang try to regain or push forward their machismo. It is when an act of violation of that struggle for natural dominance occurs (the rape scene and the river's angry act of revenge with the terrible rapids that kills one of them) that the cycle of violence surfaces. Nature gets back at the agents of human expansion and shows them who's boss.

Rape is the most incongruent of acts --- it uses a method reserved for love-making but is fuelled by the basest of human emotions (hate, lust, vengeance, selfishness). The four urbanites' weekend in the river can be perceived as a rape in itself; an unwelcome entrance, and their respective reactions from the excitement of being victorious in conquering the initial rapids of the river, orgasmic in the sense that they achieve the goal of rape, which is dominating over the victim. It is also interesting that the method of the hunt is through a bow and arrow --- the image of an arrow piercing a mountain man, an appropriate vengeful response to the similarly graphic invasion that was done to them.

Even the reactions by the urbanites to the depraved act is comparable to those victimized by rape, a mixture of the need for retribution and a total whitewash of the act. The convenience of the river being drowned by the construction of a dam almost settles the score, forever burying the remnants of the hellish weekend. Yet the psychological effects persist; the knowledge, the guilt, the shock remain indelible portions of their lives (as shown by the concluding dream image of a corpse hand surfacing out of the lake). It seems that the struggle for dominance between urban development and the depicted backward country life and nature should end with the cycle by that final act of invasion (and rape) of flooding the entire river, yet it doesn't.

I thought Deliverance is probably one of the most truthful, painful and scathing cinematic depictions of rape, within a setting void of any tired notions of classical romanticism. Both its symbolic and its more visceral portrayal of the act are appropriated with real destructive repercussions against masculine dignity and that fairy tale-notion of urban dominance.

*****
This post is my contribution to 100 films: The Lovesick Blog-A-Thon.

In My Country (2004)

In My Country (John Boorman, 2004)

When Nelson Mandela took over South Africa's presidency and effectively dissolved apartheid in the nation, he solved the problem of justice for many of the nation's victims of the ruling Afrikaners' atrocities through the traditional means of African justice. As opposed to the Western view of treating injustice with retribution and punishment, Mandela instituted a series of hearings where victim and victimizer face each other and tell each other (in the presence of the public) what, where, why, and how these atrocities happened. The system might seem ridiculous at first glance, but it is actually quite effective and very humane. The victim releases his nurtured wrath and repressed anger through his words, and the perpetrator is released from the burdens of his past sins. Of course, the system is not without its flaws as it is a venue for real criminal elements to get away without an ounce of punishment, but it is justified by the endgoal that is sought to be achieved: a balance between the two races brought apart by decades of apartheid.

John Boorman's In My Country is a story of an erstwhile romance between Anna Malan (Juliet Binoche), an Afrikaner woman, and Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson), an African-American. The two are journalists who are tasked to cover the reconciliation hearings held in different parts of South Africa. In the midst of much disagreements over skin color, the value of the non-traditional (at least to the American journalist) justice system, and the racial history of the nation, the two are swept in a romance that made an impact in their respective lives and viewpoints on life. The film was released in Britain with the title "The Country of My Skull," a much more poetic title that somehow hints of the anthropological roots of all humanity, black or white, which is Africa.

Langston arrives in South Africa to interview the biggest perpetrator of the apartheid atrocities, De Jager (Brendan Gleeson). Langston's interviews with De Jager is interspersed between the many romantic interludes, and the several reconciliation hearings. At first, it's an ominous encounter. De Jager's mansion is adorned with heads of animals and surrounded with bodyguards carrying high powered ammunition, and naturally, Langston cowers in the huge figure cast upon by De Jager. As the interview goes on, and Langston's character grows, the fear and the shadow cast upon Langston grows thinner. In the end, the power struggle almost diminishes with Langston (Jackson is a much taller man than Gleeson) towering over De Jager who seems to give up in quiet finality and resolution.

It's a much flawed film. Yet despite the flaws, there's so much to adore. Boorman utilizes actual details of the several hearings conducted. Most of the stories recounted during the film's many hearing scenes actually happened. Within the context of such hearings, the two journalists are brought together in seamless grace. Much has been commented about the impropriety of the romance in the backdrop of the many atrocities being recounted. But again, the value of these hearings are not to shock or to shame, but to reveal and in the end, establish a perpetual connection between the victims and the perpetrators. In a way, Anna and Langston being brought together romantically through a medium of reconciliation is poetic in its own right.

The two, besides reporting objective truths on pain and suffering, have grown to understand the value of the reconciliation hearings, that apartheid isn't merely contained in racial roots, but in varying opinions, or the lack of such, or in differing philosophies, again brought out, not by one's skin color, but by how he or she is brought up. Langston, despite his African-American roots, is the stranger in the land who learns from the white woman the value, or perhaps, the real lack of value, in one man's skin color, and learns to love (Boorman uses romantic love of course, it is practically film's most potent method of depicting love) without looking at one's color.