(1972)

Starring Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty; dir: John Boorman

Deliverance casts a long shadow. Even people who’ve never seen the film have an awareness of it. It’s become part of the firmament, a cultural touchstone. Why has it cornered its own piece of turf and endured for so long, seemingly unchallenged?

In part it’s a mixture of timelessness and contemporaneity. Its characters’ journeys, to varying degrees thinly disguised searches for frontiers that are more internal than external, now seem universal, but at the time struck several topical chords. Novelist James Dickey’s ecological concerns are one, even if today (nature as the fallback position "because the machines are going to fail") they sound more survivalist, Unabomber-like.

Vietnam offered a handy metaphor, Deliverance warning its U.S. suburbanite audience against blundering into alien landscapes. And alternatively, its back-to-nature impulse was perfect for the rising tide of hippie ideology.

Deliverance is a cautionary tale. Venture where you ain’t meant to go and you’ll get burned, baby. Or worse. Lewis (the Burt Reynolds character) in particular is seeking, in untamed nature, a validating reflection of his own animus which he feels suburbia’s air-conditioned nightmare is trying to tame. The expedition only becomes a reluctant Heart of Darkness when they get far more than they bargained for. Seeking deliverance, they find a nightmare beyond their imagining.

Perhaps Deliverance’s resonance today is for a world where grotesqueries are increasingly commonplace and served up daily as media morsels. Don’t go there. Stick to the well-trodden pathways and forget any illusions about your inner reality. Yet it’s a far less conservative film than the expansive Easy Rider that was soon to inspire an entire generation (and forever forge Steppenwolf on the soundtrack as a cinematic cliché).

It’s the pessimistic message of Deliverance that has endured, without it ever being transformed into quaint ‘cultural artifact’ nostalgia. With its haunting imagery and spooking associations, Deliverance is one of those films that isn’t going to go away.