Review of Sadgati (1981) by Gordon T — 21 Apr 2010

Now; I know "Nobody reads 'long reviews'" especially "'crazy-Gordon's' long reviews" but for the Somebodies who do read "long reviews," Present my review for DELIVERANCE through this excerpt.

(my "prattling-on" about movies and stuff on this site has intersected the lives of some THIRTY-NINE THOUSAND PEOPLE WORLD-WIDE, so if I totally suck, why do people keep clicking on my profile?).

So, I will continue prattling-on and rambling-on and yaking about movies for some time because out of 39,000 visits, some ONE has got to be interested in something I have to share.

EXCERPT FROM DELIVERANCE by JAMES DICKEY: (poor Bobby . . . if anyone should ever read this, do you guys find Bobby's rape funny or sad--one audience I saw Deliverance with thought Babby's rape was hilarious--tell you the truth, I find it traumatizing . . . really "messed-up"; its like, the rest of Deliverance turns into a blur and I fixate on the stuff that goes-on in the text below (Deliverance is a traumatizing movie and fascinating "POETICALLY-WRITTEN novel:".

Two men stepped out of the woods, one of them trailing a shotgun by the barrel.

Bobby had no notion they were there until he looked at me. Then he turned his heads until he could see over his shoulder and got up, brushing at himself.

"How goes it?" He said.

One of them, the taller one narrowed in the eyes and face. They came forward, moving in a kind of half circle as though they were stepping around something. The shorter one was older, with big white eyes and half-white stubble that grew in whorls on his cheeks. His face seemed to spin in many directions. He had on overalls, and his stomach looked like it was falling through them. The other was lean and tall, and peered as though out of a cave or some dim simpler place far back in his yellow tinged eyeballs. When he moved his jaws the lower bone came up too far for him to have teeth . . .

They came on and were ridiculously close for some reason tried not to give ground; some principle may have been involved.

The older one, looming and spinning his sick-looking face in front of me, said, "what the hail you think you're doin'?".

Been going since yesterday.".

I hoped that the fact that we were at least talking to each other would do some good of some kind.

He looked at the tall man; either something or nothing was passing between them. I could not feel Bobby anywhere near, and the other canoe was not in sight. I shrank to my own true size, a physical movement known only to me, and with the strain my solar plexus failed. I said, "We started from Oree yesterday afternoon, and I hope we can get to Aintry sometime late today or early tomorrow.".

"AINtry?".

Bobby said, and I could have killed him, "Sure. This river just runs one way, cap'n. Haven't you heard?".

"You ain't never going to get down to Aintry," he said, without emphasis on any word.

"Why not?" I asked, scared but also curious; in a strange way it was interesting to cause him to explain.

"Because this river don't go to Aintry," her said. "You done taken a wrong turn somewhere. This-here river don't go nowhere near Aintry.".

"Where does it go?".

"It goes . . .it goes . . .".

"It goes to Circle Gap," the other man said, missing his teeth and not caring. "'Bout fifty miles.".

"Boy," said the whorl-faced man, "you don't know Where you are.".

"Well," I said, "we're going where the river's going. We'll come out somewhere, I recon.".

The other man moved closer to Bobby.

. . .

I looked at the river, but we were a little back from the bank, and I couldn't see the other canoe. . .

I shook my head in a complete void.

With the greatest effort in the world, I came back into the man's face and tried to cope with it. He had noticed something about the way I had looked at the river.

He asked me.

I swallowed and thought, with possibilities shooting through each other. If I said yes, and they meant trouble, we would bring Lewis and Drew into it with no defenses. Or it might mean that we would be left alone, four being too many to handle.

"No, "I said, and took a couple of steps inland to draw them away from the river.

The lean man reached over and touched Bobby's arm, feeling it with strange delicacy. Bobby jerked back, and when he did the gun barrel came up, almost casually but decisively.

"We'd better get on with it," I said. "We got a long ways to go." I took part of a step toward the canoe.

"You ain't goin' nowhere," the man in front of me said, and leveled the shotgun straight into my chest. My heart quailed away from the blast tamped into both barrels, and I wondered what he barrel openings would look like at the exact instant they went off: if fire would come out of them, or if it would just be a gray blur or if they would change at all between the time you lived and died, blown in half. He took s turn around his hand with the string he used for a trigger.

"You come on back here lest you want your guts all over these-here woods.".

I half-raised my hands like a character in a movie. Bobby looked at me, but I was helpless, my bladder quavering. I stepped forward into the woods through some big bushes that I saw but didn't feel.

The voice of one of them said, "Back up to that saplin'".

I picked out a tree. "This one?" I said.

There was no answer. I backed up to the tree I had selected. The lean man came up to me and took off my web belt with the knife and rope on it. Moving his hands very quickly he unfastened the rope, let the belt out and put it around me and the tree so tight I could hardly breathe, with the buckle on the other side of the tree. He came back holding the knife. It occurred to me that they must have done this before; it was not a technique they would just have thought of for the occasion.

. . . .

The lean man put the point of the knife under my chin and lifted it. "You ever had your balls cut off, you fuckin' ape?".

"Not lately, "I said, clinging to the city. "What good would they do you?".

He put the flat of the knife against my chest and scraped it across. He held it up, covered with black hair and a little blood. "It's sharp, "he said. "Could be sharper, but its sharp.".

The blood was running down from under my jaw where the point had been. I had never felt such brutality and carelessness of touch, or such disregard for another person's body. It was not the steel or the edge of the steel that was frightening; the man's fingernail, used in any gesture of this would have been just as brutal; the knife only magnified his unconcern. I shook my head again, trying to get my breath in a gray void full of leaves. I looked straight up into the branches of the sapling I was tied to. And then down into the clearing at Bobby.

He was watching me with his mouth open as I gasped for enough breath to live from from second to second. There was nothing he could do, but as he looked at the blood on my chest and under my throat, I could see that his position terrified him more than mine did; the fact that he was not tied mattered in some way.

They both went toward Bobby, the lean man with the gun this time. The white-bearded one took him by the shoulders and turned him around toward downstream.

"Now let's you just drop them pants," he said.

Bobby lowered his hands hesitantly. "Drop . . . ?" he began.

My rectum and intestines contracted. Lord God.

The toothless man put the barrels of the shotgun under Bobby's right ear and shoved a little. "Just take 'em right on off," he said.

"I mean, what's this all . . . " Bobby started again weakly.

"Don't say nothing," the older man said. "Just do it.".

The man with the gun gave Bobby's head a vicious shove, so quick that I thought the gun had gone off. Bobby unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his pants. He took them off, looking around ridiculously for a place to put them.

"Them panties too," the man with the belly said.

Bobby took off his shorts like a boy undressing for the first time in a gym, and stood there plump and pink, his hairless thighs shaking, his legs close together.

"See that log? Walk over yonder.".

Wincing from the feet, Bobby went slowly over to a big fallen tree and stood near it with his head bowed.

"Now get down crost it.".

The tall man followed Bobby's head down with the gun as Bobby knelt over the log.

"Pull your shirt-tail up, fat ass.".

Bobby reached back with one hand and pulled his shirt up to his lower back. I could not imagine what he was thinking.

"I said up," the tall man said. He took the shotgun and shoved the back of the shirt up to Bobby's neck, scraping a long red mark along his spine.

The white-bearded man was suddenly also naked up to the waist. There was no need to justify or rationalize anything; they were going to do what they wanted to do. I struggled for life in the air, and Bobby's body was still and pink in an obscene posture that no one could help. The tall man restored the gun to Bobby's head, and the other one knelt behind him.

A scream hit me, and I would have thought it was mine except for the lack of breath. It was the sound of pain and outrage, and it was followed by one of simple and wordless pain. Again it came out of him, higher and more carrying. . . . .

The white-haired man worked steadily on Bobby, every now and then getting a better grip on the ground with his knees. At last he raised his face as though to howl with all his strength into the leaves and the sky, and quivered silently while the man with the gun looked-on with an odd mixture of approval and sympathy. The whorl-faced man drew back, drew out.

The standing man backed up a step; and took the gun from behind Bobby's ear. Bobby let go of the log and fell to his side, both arms over his face.

We all sighed. I could get better breath, but only a little. . . .

I had watched everything that had happen to Bobby, had heard him scream and squall, and wanted to reassure him that we could set all that aside; that it would be forgotten as soon as we left the woods, or as soon as we got back in the canoes. But there was no way to say this, or to ask him how his lower intestine felt or whether he thought he was bleeding internally. Any examination of him would be unthinkably ridiculous and humiliating.

There was no question of that though; he was furiously closed off from all of us. He stood up and backed away, still naked from the middle down, his sexual organs wasted with pain. I picked up his pants and shorts and handed them to him, and he reached for them in wonderment. He took out a handkerchief and went behind some bushes.

----\yak yak yak yak yak yak yak . . . (I'm going on about Civilized Man versus Bestial Man and stuff) . . . yak yak yak yak.

(you know how reviewers get: yak yak yak yak yak about so much psycho-analytic stuff and stuff.).

Dude, Deliverance is straight-up a messed-up movie about grown men coming of age in the woods.