Brutalny kontakt cielesny z dzikością Appalachów

The article invokes a resurgent interest in John Boorman’s 1972 Hollywood classic Deliverance, spurred by the fiftieth anniversary of its release. The author considers the film’s reversal of the rhetoric of rape and sexual violence committed on nature by the extraction industry in Appalachia. Deliverance on the one hand reinforces, and on the other hand modifies region’s ill repute by dramatizing a clash between the grotesque model of local “uncouth” masculinity with the privileged masculinity of young, metropolitan professionals seeking to experience an encounter with the wilderness; a masculinity shaped in the context of the rapacious development of technology and industry in the USA at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. The article analyzes the growing enmity between the “interlopers” and the local “hillbillies” that leads to sexual violence and a rape committed by the latter group on one of the tourists. The conclusion of the article points to the fact that the narrative of Deliverance makes use of a rhetorical inversion by employing the figure of chiasmus that evokes the process of contamination. Owing to this strategy, the fi lm offers viewers a glimpse of the ambivalence and equivocality of Appalachia, a region that has been assigned the role of abject in American culture

Ambivalence · Hollywood · Masculinity · Narrative · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Appalachian Studies and Mathematics · Cinema and Media Studies · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis