In Deliverance (1972), an asshole with a leather vest takes a guy who doesn’t know himself, a coward, and a good man on a bad canoe trip. The good man dies, the coward is raped, the guy who doesn’t know himself commits murder and is haunted for the rest of his life. The asshole breaks his leg.

This movie is famous for a beautiful scene where the good man and a local teen experience mutual recognition through music. When their song ends, their meeting does too, as the social dynamics of their respective groups rush back in. The teen is played by Billy Redden, whose short wiki page I’m gonna quote twice: 1. “Because Redden could not play a banjo, he wore a special shirt which allowed a real banjo player to hide behind him for the scene, which was shot with carefully chosen camera angles that would conceal the player, whose arms were slipped around Redden’s waist to play the tune.” 2. “In a 2012 documentary about Deliverance, Redden says, ‘I’d like to have all the money I thought I’d make from this movie. I wouldn’t be working at Walmart right now. And I’m struggling really hard to make ends meet.’” Redden saw five hundred bucks for his part. Burt Reynolds, who plays the asshole, died with a net worth of $5 million. All of this is one description of the movie for sure.

The other famous scene depicts a rape, but it’s harder to read. It’s clear that the hunters seek to humiliate the coward and the other guy, who exacerbate the situation, but it’s not clear what the hunters’ intentions are at the outset, or if the situation could have gone some other way. This inscrutability houses the movie’s core pessimism: it’s not a question of whether this bad vacation could have been improved by the friend group upping the decency levels. Violent social ordering between men is just something that exists, and as it plays out, it escalates, and when control is lost, intentions stop mattering. Deliverance is “about” this evil magnetism that’s allowed to drive certain masculine power dynamics, not “about” depraved hillbillies or whatever. If anything, the asshole is the clearest villain here, and of course he experiences the fewest consequences.

The friend group’s camping convos are oriented around a fake-deep proto-“men’s rights” argument, about how “society” functions to curb this inherent and constant impulse to violence, providing safety and material comfort at the cost of denying men the pleasure of “playing the game” of unfettered leather vest masculinity. I found this a little distracting since it’s extremely not how I perceive society’s functions, or how I experience leather vests.

One nice thing is that you can feel the movie’s loving eye for the river, played mainly in endless lush shots of the group paddling thru rapids and getting all wet. There’s a scene where the coward points out a snake swimming along, and plenty of shots of the woods, or of rocks. Everything else aside here, it’s a nice occasion to think abt how much I’d love to go camping with my friends.

Deliverance belongs to a subset of films that work with a concept I’ll refer to as “Dude Law.” A Dude Law movie is one where a fella or group of fellas are put into a situation where they decide societal rules have been put on hold, so now they have to get creative. A cluster of important Dude Law films were released around Deliverance (Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs; all 1971) and it continued for a while with movies generally having a more and more positive view of Dude Law, culminating in Die Hard(1988), possibly the most pro-Dude Law movie ever made. These films are generally made by men about men, and Deliverance is no exception – a pretty pure take on what goes on when you let guys be guys. (There are exceptions from this era, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!(1965) being a shining example.)

Deliverance comes down hard on the “Dude Law is bad” side of the fence. The plot in a nutshell is a group of friends go on a boat ride down the river, get attacked, are egged on by a member of their party to declare Dude Law, enter it, commit unnecessary violence, survive, then realize they’ll forever be marked by what they did. And it’s an unusually nuanced interrogation of this concept. It’s also beautifully shot, has great stunts (accomplished by not getting the film insured, then having the actors do the stunts themselves) and has some pretty good performances.

But the film also goes way out of its way to depict everyone who lives around the river (“outside of society”) as insane, rude, terrifying backwoods mutants. The movie lightly makes the point later that the two attackers were isolated bad actors, but it still heavily lumps all the folks around the river together visually and thematically throughout. This is the movie’s central contradiction: the main characters on the boat are punished for not viewing a group of people as human, but the movie doesn’t treat them as human itself. It creates something of a feedback loop for the audience, where the narrative presents a high-minded argument on humanity, but the images aggressively depict the locals as uncomplicatedly different monsters. Those images are much stronger than the movie’s themes of men negotiating their place in civilization, and in the end that’s what Deliverance leaves you with.

So does Deliverance deserve its place in the Dude Law pantheon? I don’t know. It’s a well-crafted but fundamentally dishonest film. And there are better movies made about a group of guys going down the river in a boat – Aguirre: The Wrath of God was made the same year. What it is though is an extremely pure example of a movie having an argument with itself and then losing. For that, I think it’s worth watching.