ABSTRACT
John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance is, inevitably, most often remembered for the humiliating scene of male rape at its center, with Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty) forced to “squeal like a pig” as he is sodomized by a hillbilly who embodies a middle-class nightmare vision of “white trash.” This scene alone would be enough to qualify Deliverance as a film about white, middle-class masculinity in crisis, but the larger crisis the film explores has little to do with the rape. Indeed, as Linda Ruth Williams (1994) points out, a “collective disavowal” rules both the film and its critical reception, as the rape must be buried along with the male bodies that keep piling up in its wake. 1 The imperative to disavow knowledge of the rape is emblematic of the film’s larger concern with the perils of emotional, sexual, and “natural” expression and its concern, as well, with the equally perilous repression of emotional, sexual, and “natural” impulses. The film, Williams speculates parenthetically, “could be seen almost as a treatise on the many forms of repression” (9), and, we might add, their inadequacy. Damned if they do, and damned if they don’t, 2 the men in Boorman’s film are caught between two competing, but oddly complementary, truths structuring masculinity and male experience: male power is secured by inexpressivity, even as inexpressivity damages the male psyche and the male body.
