Deliverance

Saw Deliverance, the man-rape survival film. The actual story is about four men who decide to ride a canoe down a river before it's flooded due to a hydro-electric dam that's being built downstream. For the first half, it's just a camping story, with the guys hanging out and drinking, telling jokes while one of them, their ringleader and most nature-man-minded, waxes philosophical about how modern civilization has cynically sold all of this wild beauty to make a few bucks. Yes, he says, in his gore-tex vest, holding his fiberglass recurve bow, we must return to nature.

There is the famous rape scene, parodied hundreds of times because it is rather shocking and because basically people can't believe men are capable of being penetrated, but the film is mostly about harrowing survival when everything goes wrong. They do difficult things and live through traumatic events, but the difficulty of living with what they've done is dwelt on far more than what they actually do. There's a recurrent image of the hand of a dead man, its relaxed fingers seeming to point accusingly at the viewer. This is a fresh and interesting angle. Usually in horror movies, the bad guy is killed and then that's it. We maybe see some cops and the surviving protagonists draped in blankets, but we don't deal with the PTSD. In this one, we do. Good.

Anyway, the film is shot in a messy, loose 70s sort of way, with a focus on naturalism. The use of deformity and physical ugliness to symbolize back-woods evil is kind of lazy and distasteful. Also, as a confirmed urbaite, I didn't really dig that one character's praise of nature, although I think the entire rest of the film is supposed to serve as counterpoint to this, revealing his idolization of the wilds to be a luxury of the affluent city-dweller. It's an interesting film, not nearly as horrifying as I'd been lead to believe, focusing less on survival than on having survived.