They came forward, moving in a kind of half circle as though they were stepping around something. The shorter one was older, with big white eyes and a half-white stubble that grew in whorls on his cheeks. His face seemed to spin in many directions. He had on overalls, and his stomach looked like it was falling through them. The other was lean and tall, and peered as though out of a cave or some dim simple place far back in his yellow-tinged eyeballs. When he moved his jaws the lower bone came up too far for him to have teeth.[6]
The one that initiates the sodomic act is also identified as having a "sick-looking face"[7] or simply "whorl-faced"[8], which together with the country drawl makes for overly reprehensible yokelness. But passages later Gentry, the would-be rape victim, exhausted after his erotic cliff union and animalistically prepared for killing hunt, muses seconds before arrowing Stovall to death: "There was something relaxed and enjoying in his body position, something primally graceful; I had never seen a more beautiful or convincing element of a design"[9]. Strangely enough, the passivity and wailing of the raped Bobby during the assault is more reprehensible to the narrator than the physical appearance and inhumanness of malefactors, which is ostensibly shown when the former's manhood and his place in the group is invalidated in the following terms: "he felt tainted to me"[10]. Scened later, Gentry exhibits an apathetic acceptance of the ruthlessness of natural order and a kind of bizarre amity with Stovall:
I felt, in the moonlight, our minds fuse. It was not that I felt myself turning evil, but that an enormous physical indifference, as vast as the whole abyss of light at my feet, came to me . . . [i]f Lewis had not shot his companion, he and I would have made a kind of love, painful and terrifying to me, in some dreadful way pleasurable to him, but we would have been together in the flesh, there on the floor of the woods . . .[11]
It appears that Dickey was also the foreshadower of almost every backwoods slasher scene in which strayed young city-dweller(s) first irresolutely encroach upon the territory of the enemy. In the following passage, the four townees enter The Griner Brothers' Garage, seeking supplies and help in the downriver trip:
It was dark and iron-smelling, hot with the closed-in heat that brings the sweat out as though it had been waiting all over your body for the right signal. Anvils stood around or lay on their sides, and chains hung down, covered with coarse, deep grease. The air was full of hooks; there were sharp points everywhere - tools and nails and ripped-open rusty tin cans. Batteries stood on benches and on the floor, luminous and green, and through everything, out of the high roof, mostly, came this clanging hammering, meant to deafen and even blind. It was odd to be there, not yet seen, paining with the metal harshness in the half-dark.[12]
I guess what gives Deliverance its terrifying resonance on the level of subconscious urges is the minimal stylistic gradation of sexual horror, and its placement in a certain ideologically contorted territorial universe (the US South) where some forms of behavior might not be baffling or detestable for the persons involved. The behavior of the narrator seems to prove this porno semi-dystopic adaptive attitude. While the events unfolding are traumatic from the perspective of the habitual normalcy of social rules, some sort of tantalizing mysticism of encountered perversion is also involved. The factor that makes every pornography work for anybody is a (hidden) fetish. That the men-raping Benson has a wife adds an aspect of realism to a story that might be otherwise considered purely an exercise in pornographic evil sublime. That's what good pornographers try to achieve: to make the characters and their actions believable despite the setting and generic formulaicism. Relevantly, Samuel R. Delany aims at precisely such skewed realism when it comes to most of his protagonists;when Kidd discovers that the twenty-seven-year-old hunk Tak is sexually involved with a 15-year-old black boy, this is how he reacts: "[s]uch distortion tells me nothing of him, and is only terrifying because so much is unknown of myself"[13]. And much of the sexual iceberg seems to remain hidden considering Tak's bragging confession that he's "gone to levels of perversion" one might have hard time imagining[14], even in such a liberatory space as Bellona.
Nicely executed stroytelling, altogether.
[1] Deliverance p.227
[2] Farmer's Daughters (1976)is, IMO, the unavoidable classic of the genre with its half-retarded boychild, inbred sex coercion at gun-point, the motif of convicts trespassing on a family farm, the atmosphere of bizarro rustic pornotopia and sexploitation.
[3] D. p.40
[4] D. p.22
[5] D. p.151
[6] D. p.95
[7] D. p.95
[8] D. p.100
[9] D. p.161
[10] D. p.111
[11] D. p.154
[12] D. p.57
[13] Dhalgren p.423
[14] Dhalgren p.413
