Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Deliverance
1972 · John Boorman · Deliverance on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how gray and cool the Appalachian green looks. (light)
Vilmos Zsigmond pre-exposed the negative to light before shooting, a technique he had just worked out on McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The lush summer forest comes back muted, cold and slightly wrong.
Payoff: The landscape never once looks like somewhere you would want to be. That is a lab process, not a mood.
Notice that the river only runs one direction. (setting)
Once the canoes are in the water there is no going back upstream. Cliffs have to be climbed, rapids cannot be reversed, and the terrain keeps deciding what the men are allowed to do next.
Payoff: The geography removes choices one at a time. Everything after the put-in happens on a slope that tips one way. In the reading: line of slope / entropy. The reading calls this a line of slope: an irreversible downward gradient where each stage costs something and nothing is recoverable.
Listen for how little music there is. (sound)
There is no orchestral score. What you get is water, wind, breath, the scrape of a hull and gunfire. The only music is played on screen, when a guitar and a banjo chase each other for ninety seconds.
Payoff: Nothing tells you how to feel. Tension has to come out of physical action and the noise the world is making.
Watch what the boy does when a hand is offered. (performance)
The duet ends in delight on both sides. Then Drew puts out his hand and Billy Redden's boy turns his face away from it. The exchange that felt like contact closes with a refusal.
Payoff: The film shows you the gap between these two worlds narrowing and then shutting, in one gesture, before anything has gone wrong.
Count how long it takes before they see another person. (staging)
Boorman opens on four recognizable suburban types with weekend gear and opinions, then walks them steadily out of reach of anybody who could help. Lewis sermonizes about self-reliance while the safety net disappears.
Payoff: The trip is staged as a descent out of one world and into another. The pretense goes as the distance grows. In the reading: derived milieu. The reading calls Atlanta and the gear a derived milieu: the ordinary social surface that the river is about to peel off them.
Once you have seen it
Watch the two mountain men and how little they explain. (performance)
Bill McKinney and Herbert Coward play them without motive, backstory or any of the softening a film usually supplies. The line McKinney delivers exposes the whole relation in one posture.
Payoff: They arrive as appetite rather than as people with plans, which is why the film never turns them into cartoons. In the reading: originary world. The reading calls them the originary world walking upright: the savage substrate the picnic had been sitting on all along.
Count the cuts that tell you where the canoes are. (cutting)
Tom Priestley has to build every piece of geography without a score to orient you. He balances long contemplative stretches of travel against sudden bursts of violence and earned an Oscar nomination for it.
Payoff: Your sense of danger on the water is manufactured entirely by shot order and duration.
Watch how plainly the worst scenes are staged. (staging)
Boorman refuses stylistic distance. No slow motion, no cutaways, no music to cushion it. The assault and the killing are presented at ordinary distance and ordinary speed.
Payoff: You are put in the same moral confusion as the men, with nothing in the technique telling you how to hold it.
Watch the last shot of the lake. (structure)
The men come home with a buried secret and a story they agreed on. There is no triumph, no confession, no release. The film closes on Ed waking from a dream of a hand rising out of the water.
Payoff: What they did comes back up. The refusal to settle anything is what separates this from an adventure picture.
Carry this in: Watch the river. It only runs one way, and everything the men decide has to be decided going downstream.