I remember when the film came out; it was 1972 and friends who saw it were shocked. The film's subject matter and imagery breached taste levels with a level of graphic realism not yet seen in popular culture. An expanding media reality expertly created vacuums of expectation and filled them with ever more shock content which became an ongoing spectacle and staple.
I did not see Deliverance. My life then was about Baby World and the intimate delight of little feet and first words, and I wanted little else but an occasional Hawai'ian vacation.
So, now, tough and clear, I read. From its first sentence, Deliverance is a fine work of compelling descriptive and narrative power. The would-be adventurers survey the map of the wild river they intend to canoe, and it snaps and tenses until they subdue it by staking it with their beer steins. Was ever there a clearer warning of the debacle to come?
Their macho-survivalist leader, Lewis (Lewis & Clark?)persuades them to make the trip because the river basin will soon be forever hidden by a new dam. He does nothing to prepare as a true woodsman would, and I marvel that his charisma is so persuasive.
Ed Gentry is a civilized middle-class family man, Lewis' thoughtful and admiring buddy. He knows himself and his limits and accepts his artistic and marital dimensions. At one point when his wife asks him if she's done something wrong, he tells her no, but "...it partly was, just as it's any woman's fault who represents normalcy".
Gentry has constrained his sexual rapacity by transforming it into the energy of an observer and voyeur; this strategy permits his fidelity. But his inside isn't tender, it's raw and ruthless, and Gentry will soon need this power to survive.
He should know better than to make the trip but he goes along because Lewis models macho, allowing him a tourist version of an explorer/pioneer past. And the fantasy of recovering his manhood, lost to the tool world: office, city, sports, and monogamy.
I've seldom read nature writing that conveys its power with more clarity and precision than Dickey's. As Gentry is connected to the life of the river, with its "packed greenness", I am too, as memories of singular rafting and canoe trips are summoned for me.
A description of Gentry climbing out of the canyon to save his friends is breathtakingly cinematic. His ascent of the cliff is so intense he describes it as "fucking" the cliff.
They "get away with it"; but they will pay. Dickey's view is a dark one. The seekers' encounter with primal forces does nothing to deliver them from a terrible trial.
There is a certain solemnity in viewing a lake created by a dam upriver. The vast surface of the water presses upon the land it took, doing what led water will do. It covers and hides, smothers past and possibility. It has the beauty and poignancy of a veterans' cemetery, this river grave.
What would the valley beneath hold this present day, if not water? What denizens of the air living on valley updrafts escaped drowning? What shelter did the creatures of the craggy rocks and grassy alluves find?
Are the beneficiaries of this watery largesse deserving? Is that a question one can ever answer?
The blue volume above, the blue volume below, halves of this lost space; the shape of plaint to sere and inattentive souls.
Ed Gentry and his wife, years later, sit evenings on their porch overlooking another dammed lake. The lost river remains in his soul, he says. But he seems to have no scars, his countenance as calm as the ersatz lake he watches over.
"The world is easily lost", says Gentry. He is, after all, a modern man, a private ambiguous hero whose distance from his deed has deepened as the years have passed. The dam has made a funeral for his acts, but the lake testifies mutely to his soul every day.
No comments:
Post a Comment