'Deliverance': When film presages reality
by Leigh Pomeroy
I am currently teaching a film class to 200 (mostly) eager students at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
I am a profit center for the university. I work at adjunct wages — somewhere between one-quarter and one-sixth of what regular professors get, including benefits — and teach a class roughly eight times the average size.
But don't feel sorry for me. I enjoy the class, as do most of the students, since primarily what we do is watch movies — and there aren't any papers for them to write or for me to grade. (Have you ever tried grading papers for a class of 200? Forget it!)
Actually, one of the most difficult challenges in teaching the the class is choosing which films to view. There are so many good fones that have been made worldwide since the beginning of the technology, and only 15 weeks in the semester to cover them — an impossible task!
Often, I don't choose which film I show until sometimes the day of the class, depending upon what's happening in the news and what feedback students are giving me. Last night, for instance, I was meeting with a group of students of Somali, Vietnamese and American Black background (MSU Mankato is predominantly Midwest-bred, all-American white), and they wanted to see a Bollywood film. Well, okay!
One film I've never shown, and in fact I've never thought of showing until now, is Deliverance, which is mostly known for its ahead-of-its-time scene of homosexual rape. (It was made just after the hectic '60s, 35 years ago.)
But Deliverance is also a film about survivalism, which is relevant today. And as Christopher Dickey, the son of the film's screenwriter, argues in the October 19 issue of Newsweek, it is presciently pertinent to the Iraq war.
No, Dickey doesn't go as far as to draw a parallel between Deliverance's rape scene and what the Bush administration has done to America's psyche, but he does say this about the larger-than-life protagonist, Lewis Medlock (played by Burt Reynolds), and his mild-mannered companion, Ed Gentry (Jon Voight) — both of whom, incidentally, were friends of the victim, not the rapist:
Read the Christopher Dickey article on Deliverance here. In fact, read the entire October 29 issue of Newsweek. You won't regret it.
I am currently teaching a film class to 200 (mostly) eager students at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
I am a profit center for the university. I work at adjunct wages — somewhere between one-quarter and one-sixth of what regular professors get, including benefits — and teach a class roughly eight times the average size.
But don't feel sorry for me. I enjoy the class, as do most of the students, since primarily what we do is watch movies — and there aren't any papers for them to write or for me to grade. (Have you ever tried grading papers for a class of 200? Forget it!)
Actually, one of the most difficult challenges in teaching the the class is choosing which films to view. There are so many good fones that have been made worldwide since the beginning of the technology, and only 15 weeks in the semester to cover them — an impossible task!
Often, I don't choose which film I show until sometimes the day of the class, depending upon what's happening in the news and what feedback students are giving me. Last night, for instance, I was meeting with a group of students of Somali, Vietnamese and American Black background (MSU Mankato is predominantly Midwest-bred, all-American white), and they wanted to see a Bollywood film. Well, okay!
One film I've never shown, and in fact I've never thought of showing until now, is Deliverance, which is mostly known for its ahead-of-its-time scene of homosexual rape. (It was made just after the hectic '60s, 35 years ago.)
But Deliverance is also a film about survivalism, which is relevant today. And as Christopher Dickey, the son of the film's screenwriter, argues in the October 19 issue of Newsweek, it is presciently pertinent to the Iraq war.
No, Dickey doesn't go as far as to draw a parallel between Deliverance's rape scene and what the Bush administration has done to America's psyche, but he does say this about the larger-than-life protagonist, Lewis Medlock (played by Burt Reynolds), and his mild-mannered companion, Ed Gentry (Jon Voight) — both of whom, incidentally, were friends of the victim, not the rapist:
Me, I think Lewis is Vice President Dick Cheney's closet fantasy of himself, and as such, a sort of model for the Bush administration as a whole. And Ed, he's about the rest of us, just scared and trying to get by. And the river? That's the war in Iraq.It's a terrific article, not to be missed in a weekly journal that more and more is refusing to pull punches when most mainstream journalism has been far too polite in accepting the standard PR spiel of a government and political system gone bonkers. (Read Fareed Zakaria.)
Read the Christopher Dickey article on Deliverance here. In fact, read the entire October 29 issue of Newsweek. You won't regret it.
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