#Dueling Banjo Pigs

[pigs-in-art]

Banjo Pig by John Martz Via Flickr: My contribution to Dueling Banjo Pigs.

[annoyingthemesong]

 SUBLIME CINEMA #533 - DELIVERANCE

This movie was semi hated when it came out - people didn’t really understand what it was about, abhorred the shocking violence and backwoods stereotyping, and thought it a reductive critique of man vs nature. I think the movie is way more basic. It’s as dark as Herzog’s descents into the abyss, where nature stands for, and provides nothing. There are no lessons to be learned - men always fail. 

[keiththesurvivor]

[lonelinessfollowsme]

I didn't know that there was a soundtrack. And it's on vinyl!

[nickchivewright]

Deliverance (1972) ☆☆☆☆

Ned Director: John Boorman

Writer: James Dickey 

The film opens to the wide, expansive, mountainous regions of the Southern States of USA. We are tracking the cars of four friends who have banded together for one final canoe trip through a soon-to-be-gone region of the state. This region – including the river, a town, numerous houses and, outwardly, even its backwards inhabitants – will be flooded by an enormous artificial lake used to generate power for the local city. So the tone is set for Deliverance, a film which is principally about the inadequacies and ignorances of civilised, 20th century men in the wilderness; the mistakes they make, and their scrabbling to atone for these mistakes, often without any luck.

Ed, Lewis, Bobby and Drew arrive at the start of the river with both nervous fascination and patronising contempt for their surroundings, depending on the group member. They think they are alone, but they need volunteers to drive their cars back to the nearest town where the river ends. It turns out they are not alone. A selection of undesirables seep out of the surrounding forestry, and the few dilapidated houses, with disquieting stealth in order to meet the group. They are “mountain people”: filthy, inbred, and with all the physical and mental afflictions we might expect from inbreeding – and all carrying their own looks of contempt for these intruders.

Appearances can be deceiving, though, and through an impromptu ‘battle’, we quickly realise that the locals aren’t to be underestimated. Drew (Ronny Cox), the moral, sensitive heart of our group, is casually plucking at his guitar after the group has arrived at the river. He notices that a small boy, physically lame with an unnerving stare, is copying every note he plays. They begin to duel. (In fact, they play “Duelling Banjos”. A famous song before, the music has become inextricable with Deliverance now.) While Drew plays contentedly, smiling and looking in awe at the boy’s ability, the boy takes a more combative posture. At one point Drew gets lost in the song, and the boy thrashes his ukulele, without faltering, to finish the song and the duel. Ever the gentleman in defeat, Drew holds out a hand, only to be rejected by the boy. It wasn’t a game for him, it was a message.  

The men begin their voyage downstream in two canoes. All the canoeing and stunts in this film were done by the cast themselves. This gives the audience a palpable sense of threat, because 3 of the characters – and, indeed, all of the actors – do not seem qualified to be in the rapids. It also means that there’s no need for any dubious editing: figures can move from the background to the foreground of the shot, over very real and very violent swirls of the rapids, and we can see that, yes, these figures in the canoes are indeed the lead actors of the film! This would never happen on film sets today but it makes a marked difference as a viewer. Similarly, Ed (Jon Voigt) really climbed a mountain face for one scene, and again, I cringed at this unmistakably real threat.

This realism also intensifies the now notorious rape scene. Squirm-inducing in 2020, it is hard to imagine how audiences reacted to this singular type of humiliation towards a white, male businessman in 1972. Halfway through the second day, Ed and Bobby (Ned Beatty) pull up their canoe to the river’s shore; the other boys are upstream somewhere. There is no music. The soundtrack is the familiar sound of insects and birds, unchanged since the first time the canoes went into water 50 minutes ago (film minutes). It is a serene sound of nature. Nature will continue to be the soundtrack over the next 8 minutes, as we watch two mountain men confront Ed and Bobby at gun point, forcing Bobby to strip naked. Bobby is then chased, exhausted, toyed with, ridden, forced to “squeal like a pig�� and then, finally, raped. To have prepared the audience for this horror with a brooding soundtrack, starting from when they left their canoes, would’ve been obvious and less effective. By guiding the audience with a soundtrack, we remove one of the crucial reasons why the terrifying things that happen to us are so terrifying: there is no warning. Almost invariably, horror arrives in our lives unannounced, from medical diagnoses to rape. With everything else kept constant in the film to this point, such as the setting, pacing and soundtrack, we ask ourselves, how is this happening to them? Is this really about to happen? And our questions recede as the horror unfolds in front of us.

Shorty after, just before Ed is about to at the hand’s of these unsavoury mountain folk, Lewis (Burt Reynolds, of course) shoots the perpetrator through the heart with a bow and arrow, with the other mountain man narrowly escaping. Two questions then arise, one obvious and the other not so obvious: the obvious question is, in a region where everyone knows everyone, how long will it take before the mountain man brings his friends? The other is more subtle and might have been omitted in a lesser version of Deliverance, but is picked up here: what do they do with the body? While the other men seem to have made an implicit agreement amongst themselves already, only Drew remembers that a legal system and society exist outside of this sordid place, a fact so quickly forgotten by the others, to deal with these problems. Drew’s view is not shared by the others; and after a quick vote, it is decided that the dead man is to be buried and forgotten about – and nothing more is to be said on the matter.

As the men make their way back into the river and approach a new set of rapids, Drew, who’s been in a trance since the burial, willingly slumps into the water to his death. The whole affair is too irreconcilably wretched for him. His conscience has overwhelmed him. The men in the other canoe offer the opinion that he was likely shot by the other mountain man. Ed knows better, but in a curious case of self-denial, he begins to agree with them, and even looks for this phantom bullet wound when he finds the body later. It’s as if Ed doesn’t want to believe that their actions are so morally heinous to warrant such martyrdom. After all, as a moral person himself, where would that leave Ed?

The remaining men’s voyage down the river becomes more arduous and more dangerous. There is another death and there are more lies to go with it. They finally arrive in the local town, thoroughly defeated, but not without provoking the suspicion of the local police force. Their story is a little too fanciful to be believed. But they’re in luck, because the town is getting ready for its great burial, and it seems that the town’s imminent death is suppressing the Sergeant’s scepticism on Ed, Bobby and Lewis. At one point, the Sergeant concedes to Ed, “I don’t think you boys should come back. Just let this town die in peace”. In other words, you – and city boys like you – have done your damage to this town, just let the funeral commence; let the slate be wiped clean.

This sentiment of wilful ignorance is reiterated in perhaps the most touching moment in the film. Ed walks into the dining room of the place where he and bobby are rehabilitating. It is dusk, and Bobby is sitting round with several other people, laughing, eating and enjoying himself. It is a picture of warm, Southern hospitality. When Ed sits down, he is quiet and restrained. He says he’s hungry and politely accepts his meal, but within a few moments he has broken down into tears. Whether it’s the picture of Bobby so civilised and unscathed after the horror of the last two days, the hospitality of the locals, or an overwhelming sense of moral responsibility, we don’t know. And the locals – and Bobby – don’t want to know. For no sooner has Ed started crying than he has stopped crying. Let’s move on. The cornbread is delicious. Don’t concern yourself with mistakes, Ed, because they can just as easily be buried – or flooded.

28th May 2020

[dweemeister]

Deliverance (1972)

Different genres of film appeal or repulse people to differing degrees. I can stomach an average musical, but I find that I have little patience with an average modern-day action film. The reasons for that are numerous, to be described in another review. John Boorman’s Deliverance is an action-survival film that might seem out of place today – there are long stretches without dialogue or violence and it dares to examine its protagonists’ mindsets as they become victims of violence. Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by James Dickey, Deliverance is a solid entry into the action-adventure tradition. A harrowing film even after the violence has passed, it is nevertheless hampered by its controversial rape scene and reductive depiction of those in the Appalachian American South.

Ed Gentry (Jon Voight), Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds), Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty in his film debut), and Drew Ballinger (Ronny Cox in his film debut) are four Atlanta businessman looking forward to a weekend canoeing down the Cahulawassee River (this river is fictional) before the river valley is flooded by a dam. In the opening minutes, Drew – a guitar player – spots an implicitly inbred boy (Billy Redden) at a gas station. The two share a duet of “Dueling Banjos”, in the film’s most famous scene.The men soon travel downriver, hoping to take in nature’s beauty and to escape from life’s responsibilities. Their desires, however, are shattered when Bobby and Ed are confronted by two men of the mountain (Bill McKinney and Herbert “Cowboy” Coward). For no understandable reason, Bobby – at gunpoint – is forced to strip his clothes. Ed is sexually assaulted as Bobby looks on. One of the rapists is killed by Lewis, unnoticed by the assailants, and the survivor runs deeper into the forest. The men resolve to head to their downriver destination, Aintry, as soon as possible.

The film’s infamous rape scene does not explicitly show the worst moments, but what is heard is horrifying enough. The cameras show Ned Beatty’s face, distraught and dirt-filled, for far too long. Burt Reynolds himself noticed the camera operators squirming away while director John Boorman continued. Disgusted, Reynolds stood in front of the cameras, asked Boorman why he let the scene run that long, and Boorman responded: “I wanted to take it as far as I could with the audience, and I figured you’d run in when it got too far.” The final cut of Deliverance lingers over the rape; for the audience’s sake, an implied or suggested assault would have been preferable and still respected Dickey’s adapted screenplay of his own novel. Boorman’s lack of restraint – even though some modern directors have even less restraint when presented with such a scenario – damages the film.

Since its release, Deliverance has helped solidify stereotypes about those who live in the American South and how Southern masculinity – bathed in humanity’s and nature’s violence – manifests itself. There is banter aplenty among the protagonists about their physical prowess; the weapons used in this film are phallic suggestions. Much of the pre-release promotion of Deliverance focused on Reynolds’ physicality and how Boorman’s direction pushed his four lead actors through physical pain and natural peril. The four leads, whose characters are from Atlanta, are distinguished from the mountainous locals they encounter at the gas station, during their trip, and in Aintry. Ed, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew represent a suburbanizing, “new” South – a departure from the increasingly urbanized and less white urban South.

In Deliverance, the suburban “new” South meets the Appalachian “old” South. The latter, accustomed to the wilderness surrounding it and wary of the former’s intrusions, is shown as humble and skeptical in Deliverance’s opening minutes to assertive and suspicious by the end of the film’s first act. Boorman depicts the Appalachian Southerners as backwards, their technology and understanding of the outside world decades removed from the present. Their paranoia, Boorman (a Brit who, in post-release interviews, showed little understanding of the poor white Southerners he encountered while making the film) will show, and aggressive territorial behavior can also be argued as self-defense. As Lewis explains to his friends about why they are going on this canoeing trip:

There ain’t gonna be no more river… You just push a little more power into Atlanta, a little more air conditioners [sic] for your smug little suburb, and you know what’s gonna happen? We’re gonna rape this whole goddamned landscape.

The rural Southerners in Deliverance can be interpreted as reacting against industrialized modernity and a white middle class, in defense of an individualistic naturalism that those in cities and suburbs cannot fathom. Their way of life, threatened by the damming project, is endangered – and most likely without their permission. Violence, when law enforcement is sparse, is an acceptable recourse to these people as is sexual assault, Boorman notes. And given how Boorman portrays the poor white men – snaggle-toothed, bone-thin, and underdressed – he is uninterested in providing any depth to these characters. Deliverance sides with the four middle-class whites, never affording the lower-class white characters anything more than their violent “nature.” These stereotypes that Boorman perpetuates are fixtures in how America media views lower-class white Southerners or, in common parlance, “poor white trash.” Look at the lengthy connections page on the films’ IMDb entry; notice how many films and television shows have featured footage or references to Deliverance without context. Numerous mentions and variations of the notorious “squeal like a pig” line appear when one character is threatening another with violence; a child with a banjo or a reference to “Dueling Banjos” brings up character’s fears or perhaps discussion of inbreeding and territorial violence.

Unfortunately, Boorman and Dickey’s approach to how the antagonists are portrayed works just as they want it to. The images that Boorman, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (1971’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and editor Tom Preistley (1965’s Repulsion, 1984’s 1984) summon play into a fear of the “other” – placing the antagonist above the protagonist during a frame, keeping the antagonists faceless by positioning them into the background, and wary glances from the four businessman towards the riverbanks as if looking for hidden threats. Not knowing what to expect from this film, I – in my first viewing – found myself unconsciously retreating to damning assumptions even in the opening moments as the Atlantan friends drive up to the gas station (nothing sinister happens at the gas station). My preconceptions have been shaped by various media, assisted (and not started) by Deliverance. In its bourgeoisie discomfort towards underclass whites, Deliverance has helped continue its dreadful ideas about “white trash” – treating them as an existential threat to urban-suburban prosperity and order. This anxiety, an offshoot of the Southern Gothic literary tradition, persists. This reality is, as the locals of Rabun County, Georgia (where this film was shot and where many of the film’s extras resided) will tell you, unfair.

Where Deliverance succeeds is in its psychological treatment of violence. The final twenty minutes of the film – where the men must contend with the police investigation and the personal, extralegal consequences of their actions – would be ignored by many other filmmakers. Beyond the physical acting required for the canoeing scenes and combat against their assailants, this is where the actors shine. Jon Voight is the standout in the closing act, even if Burt Reynolds somehow retains his charm in an otherwise grave moment. The actors convey their characters’ swirls of emotions oftentimes without saying a word in an excellent ensemble performance.

The canoeing scenes in Deliverance were shot on the Chattooga River, which divides northeastern Georgia from northwestern South Carolina. The series of rapids that the production shot on contain some of the most dangerous waters for canoers, kayakers, and rafters in the United States. Such is the Chattooga’s reputation that the likes of Marlon Brando and Henry Fonda backed out of roles when they learned about its rapids. A famous stunt of Burt Reynolds volunteering to send himself over a ninety-foot waterfall in a canoe was inspired by the fact that Reynolds believed that using a dummy was unconvincing. Reynolds break his coccyx on the way down. After returning from the hospital, Reynolds asked Boorman about how the new footage appeared. Boorman’s response: “Like a dummy going a waterfall.”

Whether or not one has seen Deliverance, this is undoubtedly an influential American film – especially how it portrays its Southern characters, the violence they sustain against each other, and the environment surrounding them. A technically effective movie, the stereotypes within have proven resilient before and long after its initial release. It is the film’s undoing and, because of how dominant these views are, its ballast.

My rating: 7.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

[darlingemmet]

Charles squeals like a pig when he's being raped

*Dueling Banjos*

[rotcivnasrab]

Where the idea 💡 of Dueling Banjo’s 🪕 originated.

Squeal like a pig 🐽

Rotcivnasrab

Boy with a cello⁣ Hungary, 1931⁣ Photo: Eva Besnyö⁣ ⁣

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Deliverance (Boorman, 1972)

Hearing for years about the “Squeal like a pig!” bit and the “Dueling Banjos”, I was expecting John Boorman’s Deliverance to be a slightly more realistic Hills Have Eyes, city slickers facing off against murderous backwards backwoods dwellers. The movie does have some of that element (the “Squeal like a pig” scene is still quite disturbing), but the overall effect is quieter and more ponderous. It’s an examination of masculinity under pressure, presenting us with four very different men, ranging from the burly outdoorsman Burt Reynolds to guitar-playing sensitive guy Ronny Cox (who would be insufferable if Cox weren’t such a good actor and “Dueling Banjos” weren’t such a lovely piece of music). The adversity of the wilderness and an encounter with violent, rapacious rednecks brings out the true nature in these men, with the most average of them, an unfortunately mustachioed Jon Voight, showing the greatest survival instinct and capacity for violence. Boorman uses artful wide shots to heighten the tension, emphasizing the insignificance of man against nature and providing an unsettlingly picturesque counterpoint to the intensity of the proceedings. His camera is in awe of the environment, and the unconvincing day-for-night effects during a climb up a cliffside might be distracting if it weren’t clear that it really was Voight doing the climbing.

8.5/10

[nicksthoughtsonthings]

Deliverance (1972) ☆☆☆☆

Director: John Boorman

Writer: James Dickey

Deliverance opens to the wide, expansive, mountain regions of the Southern States of USA. We are tracking the cars of four friends who have banded together for one final canoe trip through a soon-to-be-gone region of the state. This region – including the river, a town, numerous houses and, outwardly, even its backwards inhabitants – will be flooded by an enormous artificial lake used to generate power for the local city. So the tone is set for Deliverance, a film which is principally about the inadequacies and ignorances of civilised, 20th century men in the wilderness; the mistakes they make, and their scrabbling to atone for these mistakes, often without any luck.

Ed, Lewis, Bobby and Drew arrive at the start of the river with both nervous fascination and patronising contempt for their surroundings, depending on the group member. They think they are alone, but they need volunteers to drive their cars back to the nearest town where the river ends. It turns out they are not alone. A selection of undesirables seep out of the surrounding forestry, and the few dilapidated houses, with disquieting stealth in order to meet the group. They are “mountain people”: filthy, inbred, and with all the physical and mental afflictions we might expect from inbreeding – and all carrying their own looks of contempt for these intruders.

Appearances can be deceiving, though, and through an impromptu ‘battle’, we quickly realise that the locals aren’t to be underestimated. Drew (Ronny Cox), the moral, sensitive heart of our group, is casually plucking at his guitar after the group has arrived at the river. He notices that a small boy, physically lame with an unnerving stare, is copying every note he plays. They begin to duel. (In fact, they play “Duelling Banjos”. A famous song before, the music has become inextricable with Deliverance now.) While Drew plays contentedly, smiling and looking in awe at the boy’s ability, the boy takes a more combative posture. At one point Drew gets lost in the song, and the boy thrashes his ukulele, without faltering, to finish the song and the duel. Ever the gentleman in defeat, Drew holds out a hand, only to be rejected by the boy. It wasn’t a game for him, it was a message.  

The men begin their voyage downstream in two canoes. All the canoeing and stunts in this film were done by the cast themselves. This gives the audience a palpable sense of threat, because 3 of the characters – and, indeed, all of the actors – do not seem qualified to be in the rapids. It also means that there’s no need for any dubious editing: figures can move from the background to the foreground of the shot, over very real and very violent swirls of the rapids, and we can see that, yes, these figures in the canoes are indeed the lead actors of the film! This would never happen on film sets today but it makes a marked difference as a viewer. Similarly, Ed (Jon Voigt) really climbed a mountain face for one scene, and again, I cringed at this unmistakably real threat.

This realism also intensifies what is now the film’s most notorious scene. Squirm-inducing in 2020, it is hard to imagine how audiences reacted to this singular type of humiliation towards a white, male businessman in 1972. Halfway through the second day, Ed and Bobby (Ned Beatty) pull up their canoe to the river’s shore; the other boys are upstream somewhere. There is no music. The soundtrack is the familiar sound of insects and birds, unchanged since the first time the canoes went into water 50 minutes ago (film minutes). It is a serene sound of nature. Nature will continue to be the soundtrack over the next 8 minutes, as we watch two mountain men confront Ed and Bobby at gun point, forcing Bobby to strip naked. Bobby is then chased, exhausted, toyed with, ridden, forced to “squeal like a pig” and then, finally, raped. To have prepared the audience for this horror with a brooding soundtrack, starting from when they left their canoes, would’ve been obvious and less effective. By guiding the audience with a soundtrack, we remove one of the crucial reasons why the terrifying things that happen to us are so terrifying: there is no warning. Almost invariably, horror arrives in our lives unannounced, from medical diagnoses to rape. With everything else kept constant in the film to this point, such as the setting, pacing and soundtrack, we ask ourselves, how is this happening to Bobby? Is this really about to happen? And our questions recede as the horror unfolds in front of us.

Shorty after, just before Ed is about to suffer his turn at the hand’s of these unsavoury mountain folk, Lewis (Burt Reynolds, of course) shoots the perpetrator through the heart with a bow and arrow, with the other mountain man narrowly escaping. Two questions then arise, one obvious and the other not so obvious: the obvious question is, in a region where everyone knows everyone, how long will it take before the mountain man brings his friends? The other is more subtle and might have been omitted in a lesser version of Deliverance, but is picked up here: what do they do with the body? While the other men seem to have made an implicit agreement amongst themselves already, only Drew remembers that a legal system and society exists outside of this sordid place, a fact so quickly forgotten by the others, to deal with these problems. Drew’s view is not shared by the others; and after a quick vote, it is decided that the dead man is to be buried and forgotten about – and nothing more is to be said on the matter.

As the men make their way back into the river and approach a new set of rapids, Drew, who’s been in a trance since the burial, willingly slumps into the water to his death. The whole affair is too irreconcilably wretched for him. His conscience has overwhelmed him. The men in the other canoe offer the opinion that he was likely shot by the other mountain man. Ed knows better, but in a curious case of self-denial, he begins to agree with them, and even looks for this phantom bullet wound when he finds Drew’s body later. It’s as if Ed doesn’t want to believe that their actions are so morally heinous to warrant such martyrdom. After all, as a moral person himself, where would that leave Ed?

The remaining men’s voyage down the river becomes more arduous and more dangerous. There is another death and there are more lies to go with it. They finally arrive in the local town, thoroughly defeated, but not without provoking the suspicion of the local police force. Their half-baked story is a little too fanciful to be believed. But they’re in luck, because the town is getting ready for its great watery burial, and it seems that the town’s imminent death is suppressing the Sergeant’s scepticism on Ed, Bobby and Lewis. At one point, the Sergeant concedes to Ed, “I don’t think you boys should come back. Just let this town die in peace”. In other words, you – and city boys like you – have done your damage to this town, just let the funeral commence; let the slate be wiped clean.

This sentiment of wilful ignorance is reiterated in perhaps the most touching moment in the film. Ed walks into the dining room of the place where he and Bobby are rehabilitating. It is dusk, and Bobby is sitting round with several other people, laughing, eating and enjoying himself. It is a picture of warm, Southern hospitality. When Ed sits down, he is quiet and restrained. He says he’s hungry and politely accepts his meal; but within a few moments he has broken down into tears. Whether it’s the picture of Bobby so civilised and unscathed after the horror of the last two days, the hospitality of the locals, or an overwhelming sense of moral responsibility, we don’t know. And the locals – and Bobby – don’t want to know. For no sooner has Ed started crying than he has stopped crying. Let’s move on. The cornbread is delicious. Don’t concern yourself with your crimes and mistakes, Ed, because they can just as easily be buried – or flooded.

28th May, 2020

[pigs-in-art]

Dueling Banjo Pig by Vandão

[rotcivnasrab]

Who effed me more?

Dorothy for using K-Y warning jelly personal lubricant to oil my squeaky parts

or that man behind the curtain...when he got a wiff of the K-Y Jelly...let’s just say I walked like I rode a horse in the Boston Marathon...slowly...then when he said “squeal like a pig 🐷...with “Dueling Banjo’s”🪕 was playing over the loud speaker...that was the last straw...

rotcivnasrab

Got a Heart? ❤️ my butt!

Tin Woodman by Yan Blanco

[keiththesurvivor]

Deliverance (1972)

[hitman72-world]

Hayseed Dixie ‎– A Hot Piece Of Grass Tracklist Black Dog War Pigs Holiday Ace Of Spades Whole Lotta Love Whole Lotta Rosie Runnin' With The Devil Blind Beggar Breakdown Kirby Hill Mountain Man Marijuana Corn Liquor Moonshiner's Daughter Dueling Banjos

[arrrggghhhink]

This image was inspired by a blog by two of my favorite online illustrators, Guy Francis and Stacy Curtis. Their blog is called: Dueling Banjo Pigs: Www.banjopigs.blogspot.com #arrrggghhhink #Arrrggghhh #banjo #pig #🐖 #duelingbanjos #hog #characterdesign #humor #whimsical #music #banjos #piglet #pigs https://www.instagram.com/p/BtnB9pIHIpv/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=kcqekeo7piwo

[rotcivnasrab]

Can’t say I feel it...’cept on the bottom of my moccasins.. Dang it!... I think I might have stepped in it! It smells like...

SKUNK POOP 💩to me...

Suppose even Skunk 💩...May be better... compared to playing Dueling Banjo with BIG BOOGER in a...5 X 8 Prison Cell!

sing like a pig 🐷

✔️