[In the following essay, Suarez juxtaposes Dickey's novel with the film version of Deliverance.]

James Dickey and director John Boorman battled over the making of Deliverance to the point that Dickey was asked to leave the set. To Dickey's chagrin, Boorman cut the original screenplay's first twenty-five pages, altered scenes and changed the film's ending in order to create a more commercially palatable product. After the film was finished, Boorman felt that he had influenced Dickey's product to the extent that he claimed co-authorship, which would have entitled Boorman to approximately ＄250,000. Though the Screen Writers' Guild eventually adjudicated in Dickey's favor, and though the film received much critical acclaim and generated Dickey a huge amount of publicity, Dickey has continued to express dissatisfaction with the movie. Dickey's primary objection resides in Boorman's handling of characterization, as the director's emphasis on creating a taut, thrilling adventure film left little room for what Dickey calls “the psychological orientation—the being of the characters, their interrelations, their talk with each other, the true dramatic progression … it is not the film as I would have it … though something which resembles the original story remains, the texture, the field of nuance, the details, characterizations, dramatic buildup and resolution as originally conceived are lost; nothing but the bones are left” (Screenplay 156-57).

Dickey's remarks are not surprising because of his longtime preoccupation with the psychological dimensions of primitivism, a phenomenon he has explored in To the White Sea, his screenplay of Call of the Wild, “Reincarnation II,” “Approaching Prayer,” “The Fiend” and many other poems. In Deliverance, Dickey creates four differing characters, all suburbanites, and plunges them into a situation in which they must battle nature (including primitive man) for survival. By emphasizing how each character behaves, Dickey demonstrates how returning to a primal condition can be simultaneously horrifying and enlivening. Unlike Boorman, who wanted to get the canoers on the water as quickly as possible in order to quicken the film's pace, Dickey desired to use the opening scenes to create a complex relationship between the characters and, particularly, within Ed.

Unlike the movie, which begins with shots of the flooded river and the dam's construction, highlighting the vanishing wilderness, the screenplay echoes the novel's opening scene, with the four main characters drinking beer in a tavern while looking over a topographical map. Dickey uses this scene, as well as others that Boorman cut, as a lens through which to interpret the wilderness episodes, especially those involving Ed's reversion to a feral state, a transformation which the film ignores. Whereas in the film the characters first appear fully outfitted, in the mountains and driving towards the river, the screenplay uses the tavern scene to distinguish between them, first through close-ups of Lewis's muscular hand pointing to coordinates on a map, followed by an emphasis on how his attire—“an expensive sport shirt”—differs from the others' business suits. Dickey also suggests that “one of the three men—anyone but LEWIS—occasionally glances at the behind of one of the waitresses in sheernet tights” (2). However, when “the waitresses pass the table, he (LEWIS) is the one they look at” (3). Lewis is clearly the center of attention, as well as in control:

ED:
I'll go along. For some reason I always do. But what are we proving, Lewis?
LEWIS:
Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Now tell me the truth, buddy. You ever regret going with me?
ED:
(hesitating just a little, but not much): No, but sometimes I've had the shit scared out of me. Like when it was your idea to put our lights out in that cave “to hear the very sound of the earth,” as you said, and then couldn't get them back on.
LEWIS:
But we got them back on, didn't we?
ED:
Finally, but my God. … I'll take the river.
DREW:
Well, by damn, let's do take it! I need to get out some. I'm getting too soft. I can't even climb the steps to my office without worrying about a heart attack. I just stand at the top panting.
BOBBY:
They tell me that this is the kind of thing that gets hold of suburban dwellers once in a while. But most of them just lie down till the feeling passes.
LEWIS:
And when most of them lie down they're at Woodlawn before they think about getting up.
BOBBY:
I mean, the whole thing does seem kind of crazy.
LEWIS:
(looking down): All right. Let me demonstrate. What are you going to be doing this afternoon?
BOBBY:
Oh … most likely I'll see a couple of new people about mutual funds. I have to draw up some papers and get them notarized.
LEWIS:
How about you, Drew?
DREW:
Hire some more route salesmen. Our newest carbonated miracle is not selling like we want it to. The whole soft-drink market is in a slump now, especially our share of it. Somebody's got to find out why.
LEWIS:
Ed?
ED:
Take some photographs for Kitts Textile Mills. Kitt'n Britches. Cute girl in our britches stroking her pussy. A real cat, you understand.
LEWIS:
(with a tolerant grin as he leans back): Too bad. But have I made my point?

(3-4)

This exchange situates Ed between Lewis and the other two characters. Unlike Lewis, Ed and the others are “average” Americans, but Ed's relationship to Lewis implies that Ed possesses the desire to move beyond his current circumstance. However, for Ed the escapades with Lewis represent a diversion from daily monotony; for Lewis they also serve as preparations for a future in which “the machines are going to fail, the political systems are going to fail, and a few good men are going to take to the hills and start over” (19). Though Lewis is the scene's focal point, Dickey specifies that viewers should “see this scene as though … sitting in the position occupied by Ed” because he wants the audience to share Ed's fascination with—and difference from—Lewis (2). In this manner, Lewis functions to provide insight into Ed's psyche, setting the contours of the transformation Ed undergoes when he becomes both predator and prey.

The screenplay's next scenes continue to emphasize Ed's psychological state, as the description of Ed sauntering back to his advertising agency indicates:

A full, middle-distance shot now as ED begins to walk, and we see him, occasionally pulling at the stickiness of his jacket, walk along in an unorganized but plentiful procession of secretaries of all ages, most of them with exaggerated hairdos and tasteless summer clothing. If desired, the camera can pick out some of these faces in close-ups, showing a gum-chewing young one, a middle-aged one with a toothpick in her mouth, and various other unimaginative, commonplace, hopeless everyday female human beings going back towards doing what they have to do.

ED moves along in this procession, uncomfortable but resigned to it; but, though he goes along quietly, it should be obvious that, though he can stand it, he dislikes it.

A closer shot as a large leaf comes down. He stops for a moment and looks up, and as another leaf falls, he catches it in his hand.

Close-up on leaf, which is beginning to turn with autumn. ED's hand travels briefly around the edge of the leaf. He discards it and walks on.

Long shot of ED in procession of women, which, it is now obvious, is heading for a big, modern office building. At the fountain in front of the building where one of the women tosses in a coin, the procession divides, and in this division there is something both comical and ceremonial. ED goes around the fountain in his part of the line and enters the building.

(6-7)

Dickey accents Ed's relationship to the civilized, a circumstance that threatens Ed's masculinity. The women, costumed in “exaggerated hairdos and tasteless summer clothing,” are used to represent society's artificiality. The series of adjectives—“unimaginative, commonplace, hopeless everyday”—employed to describe them provides a sharp contrast to the realm of masculine adventure that Lewis inhabits. Details ranging from the “stickiness” of Ed's jacket to the meditative moment of grasping the leaf, as well as his place in the “procession,” suggest Ed's anxiety that he is wasting his life by becoming an automaton groveling for coins. When he enters the “antiseptic” building, he is told that “nothing interesting” has happened, and, glancing at advertising layouts, he experiences sensations of “disgust, boredom, fed-upness” and “simple ennui” that convey “futility, well-financed boredom, uselessness, unorganized tedium” (7-8).

However, in the midst of this suburban sterility Dickey interjects a moment used in later scenes to suggest Ed's desire for something beyond his present circumstance, as well as to indicate the illusory dimensions of his desires. When Ed enters the studio where the Kitt'n Britches advertisement is being shot, the young model

manages to convey, through the way in which she gets up, that she is doing it for ED, and for no one else in the whole world. There should be no professionalism in this, no standard glamour, but just a simple and private act of giving.

In close, very close on the girl's face, and then right into her right eye, where there is a curious-looking but unforgettable fleck of gold.

(9)

Unlike the scene where he is walking to the office, here Ed is not just another body in a procession but the focus of someone's attention. In contrast to the secretarial horde, the model is pictured as genuine, with “no professionalism,” “no artificiality.” The “unforgettable fleck” in the woman's eye also establishes the moment's uniqueness for Ed, who responds to the robed woman's sexuality.

After several shots highlighting the model's eroticism and Ed's fascination with her, the script fades to a scene of “practical sexuality,” Ed's and his wife's bedroom on the morning of the canoe trip. Dickey employs Martha's appearance and sex to further define Ed's emotional condition. In contrast to the model, “Martha moves towards” Ed in “a movement we can see is entirely habitual” and she “is definitely not glamorous,” “her head wrapped in a towel” (10). As Martha reaches for a jar of vaseline, Ed grumbles.

ED:
Do you always have to be so surgical about it? (But he likes this about her, and she knows it.)
MARTHA:
(knowing this is something that she can do): What do you expect from an exsurgical nurse? Any nurse can tell you that sex is not romance. It's practice. Whatever helps, helps.
ED:
Ok. Ok. Do your thing.
MARTHA:
(after a short silence): Which way do you want it honey?
ED:
Why don't you turn over this time.
MARTHA:
Will do.
What follows now I will leave to the discretion and ingenuity of the director and the cameraman. There should be a confused but quite definite suggestion of sexual intercourse, not ecstatic but rhythmical and orderly. There might be a cut or two of MARTHA's bare back heaving and the sound of her muffled sexual voice coming from the pillow.
Out of this should come, as though called forth, an ectoplasmic image of the girl in the studio, and then a close-up of her face and then her eye, as she appears in Ed's mind. Through and beneath this might also still be suggested the heaving of Martha's back, as she dutifully labors.

(12)

Similar to the way that Dickey locates Ed between the adventurous Lewis and the more commonplace Bobby and Drew, he places Martha between the model and the secretarial mass. She is not “artificial,” but neither is she exotic, a distinction stressed by her attitude towards sex and the description of the sex as “not ecstatic but rhythmical and orderly.” But, like Dickey's use of Lewis, Bobby and Drew, the distinctions between the female characters are less revealing about them than about Ed. Ed's choice of having Martha “turn over” so that he cannot see her face during intercourse and his fantasy about the model as Martha “dutifully labors” reinforce how he feels about his own existence—he wants change—and foreshadow his eventual realization of Martha's value.

Having established Ed's psychological state, the scenes following the bedroom episode begin to illuminate the reversion motif. The characters (Ed and Lewis in one car with Drew and Bobby following in another) drive through suburbia, onto two-lane rural highways, and into the mountains, a sequence which Dickey uses to indicate “that they are moving towards more primitive people, wilder scenes” (18). As the cars climb up the narrow mountain roads, Ed, who has been “alternately sleeping, dozing, and waking,” becomes increasingly aware of danger, a process described as “sinister but exciting,” making Ed “wake up fully.” When Lewis begins to espouse his survivalist philosophy, Ed “wakes up even more fully,” indicating that, despite his cynicism, dormant aspects of his nature are beginning to stir:

ED:
Oh, I don't care anything about all that, Lewis. You ought to know that by now. I'm a get-through-the-day man. I'm not a great art director. I'm not a great archer. I like the way I live well enough.
LEWIS (confidently):
We'll see. (he pats the dashboard as though it represented all manmade things) You've had all that office furniture in front of you, all these years: desks and bookcases, and filing cabinets and the rest. You've been sitting in a chair that won't move. But when that river is under you, all that is going to change. There's nothing you do as vice-presidenct of Emerson-Gentry that's going to make any difference at all, when the water starts to foam up. Then, it's not going to be what your title says you do, but what you end up doing. You know, doing. (19)

.....

ED:
Oh, I don't know. If you wanted to, Lewis, you could go up in the hills and live right now. You could have all those same conditions. You could hunt. You could farm. You could suffer just as much as if they dropped the H-bomb. You could even start a colony.
LEWIS:
It's not the same. Don't you see? It would just be eccentric. Survival depends—well, it depends on having to survive. The kind of life I'm talking about depends on its being the last chance. The very last of all.

(21-22)

Lewis's claims intrigue and unsettle Ed, who goes on to question Lewis about life in the mountains. After their conversation Ed “shrugs, tries to relax again and doesn't succeed” because, in an indefinite manner, the survivalist scenarios that Lewis has posited, like his encounter with the model, speak to a fundamental part of his being. And, indeed, Lewis's observation that “when the river is under you, all that is going to change” is confirmed by an exhilarating first day of whitewater canoeing, as well as by the horrifying experiences of the second and third days in the wilderness.

Boorman's elimination of the screenplay's early scenes caused the suburbanites' encounters with the mountain people to lose subtlety and psychological impact. Though the screenplay and the movie employ the same basic cast of mountain characters, the film highlights these characters' grotesquery, whereas the screenplay uses their grotesquery to develop the reversion motif. As a result, in the film the implications for Ed's sense of himself and of his civilized existence are severely diminished. For instance, Dickey uses Ed's conversation with Lewis during the drive to suggest the nature of Ed's transformation in the rape scene, which Dickey asserts should “be filmed from” Ed's “point of view, with the camera reeling and tracking unexpectedly and violently” (63-64). After Lewis shoots the hillbilly with an arrow, Dickey calls for:

Close-up of Ed as he rises, transfigured by terror and by the turn events have taken. He is beastlike with the power of having the gun. He wraps the string the gun uses for a trigger around his hand and swings the barrel to cover the woods and everything in it: to be able to blast whatever will come.

Now we go back to a full shot of the man (the hillbilly that Lewis shot) as he falls to his knees and then to his side, rolling back and forth, spitting and gritting his teeth. Then he gets, with awful comic seriousness, back onto his feet again, this time with his lips red with blood and drooling saliva and blood. He turns towards the woods and takes a couple of halting steps toward them, and then seems to change his mind and turns back to ED, holding out one hand like an Old Testament prophet about to divulge a secret to one of the chosen.

(66-67)

Lewis's claim that “survival … depends on having to survive” (22) resonates throughout the scene: the trip changes from a journey that enables Ed to fantasize about shedding suburban angst to a situation that genuinely awakens dormant energies, but at a substantial cost. The shock of Bobby's rape and of his own near-rape by truly primitive people “transfigures” Ed, making him “beastlike” by releasing his aggressive urges. Indeed, Dickey's description of the dying man moving towards Ed “like an Old Testament prophet” stresses that the suburbanite has been initiated into a new condition, for he has attained an awareness which will later enable him to kill.

The screenplay's early episodes also inform Dickey's treatment of the main characters after the canoers decide to conceal the hillbilly's body. Bobby and Drew, the two most contentedly civilized characters, are completely ineffectual in the wilderness, where civilized mores do not apply; Drew, who wants to call in the police and rely on the system, is murdered and Bobby is paralyzed by fear. By foregrounding Ed's initial differences from Bobby and Drew, as well as the changes in Ed that have taken place during the journey, the connection between Ed as a fantasizing, discontented city man and as a creature who is both predator and prey becomes apparent, a point suggested by Dickey's use of the model during the cliff climbing scene:

ED:
(mumbling profoundly): What a view. What a view.
He lies watching, and we watch with him. Nothing happens for a while. Then we might have a very brief, nearly subliminal image of the girl model in the studio: just her face, superimposed on the river. From the little we are able to tell, she is looking inviting and enigmatic, as mysterious as the river and the wilderness itself. Then she is gone, and we are not sure we have seen her at all.

(97)

Dickey associates Ed's feeling towards the model with the river and the wilderness, implying that the same energy that caused Ed's discontent with social conformity feeds his instinctual urges. In the movie, Ed appears to be gambling out of desperation and succeeding through willpower and luck; there is no sense that his essential nature has changed. But in the screenplay, like the novel, Ed's experiences take on a mystical quality, a near-religious dimension, which is reflected by Dickey's instructions that Ed should appear “absolutely crucified on this cliff,” and that when Ed reaches the top he seems “not completely mortal or even human” but “more Godlike, or demonic.” The climb makes him “infinitely more sensitive to the feel of things than he's been before,” resulting in “a profound sense of exaltation” (98).

Dickey's description of Ed as “Godlike, or demonic,” and the terror and “exaltation” he senses, also reveal the paradoxical qualities of Ed's transformation. When Ed's mind merges (“I'm going to do just exactly what I would do if I was him.”) with the hillbilly's, it becomes clear that he has shucked civilization's artificiality, but, again, with results that he never supposed. After Ed shoots the hillbilly through the throat with an arrow, the screenplay, unlike the movie, describes Ed hunting him down, following the “blood spoor like a dog would” (104). When he finds the body, he is “fascinated,” as he takes his knife and issues a “low growl,” indicating that he is on a predatory level. As he hovers over the dead man, “the audience cannot possibly know what Ed is going to do … he could do anything,” but “shaken by his own incipient violence,” a Beatles song and an advertising jingle pop into his mind, signaling the beginning of his return to a civilized condition (106).

The concluding scenes that Boorman excised return to the suburbs, starting with Ed's drive back from the mountains, a sequence that shows him moving “gradually back into his own territory, his own life.” This continues until he pulls “into his own driveway,” where he gets out of the car, “takes his knife and belt … slings them deep into the suburban woods behind the house, and takes Martha in his arms,” indicating his awareness of his previous life's value (146). Dickey reinforces this through Martha's rebandaging of Ed's wounds:

ED:
Is this what you call romance?
MARTHA:
No. I never called it romance. I call it love, actually. It includes enemas and cleaning up after a man's vomit. (pointing to ED's side) Us wives and nurses know it includes this.
ED:
What about wine and roses?
MARTHA:
(smiling a tough, practical, loving smile): We get those, too.
ED:
Yes. That's the real thing I guess. All of it. (pause) Look, let me go see Drew's wife. Then I'm coming back to sleep for a week. Right with you. Right with you.

(149)

Ed's visit to Drew's wife underlines the tremendous cost of the knowledge Ed attains, but in contrast to Ed's fantasy about the model while he had sex with Martha, he now affirms her reality and importance. She is not a fantasy, but a “tough, practical, loving” part of his life, a realization brought about, at least subconsciously, by the rape, when he and Bobby were the victims of others' desires for sexual adventure. Indeed, the screenplay's closing scene, which shows Ed and Lewis shooting arrows at targets while Ed's son skis on the lake created by flooding the river, echoes Ed's assertion in the novel that the “river underlies, in one way or another, everything I do,” a point the screenplay suggests by interjecting “an ear-splitting scream, a scream exactly like Bobby's in the forest when he was raped” into the work's closing moments (274-75, 151). The scream comes from Ed's son (though this is not immediately apparent), and “could be a terrible human cry of pain,” but as the closing shot pulls away it becomes evident that the boy's cries are of “exultation,” capturing the paradoxical nature of Ed's wilderness experience (151).

Dickey's screenplay, like his fiction and much of his poetry, reflects his tendency to explore situations that may positively enhance an individual's capacity for experience and/or lead to devastating consequences. Unlike Boorman's film, which concludes with Ed having a haunting nightmare, Dickey's concluding scenes focus on the ways that the weekend journey have altered Ed's relationship to himself and his surroundings. At the office Ed's creative energies are reignited, for he now works “busily … seems vigorous and very much in place,” but he must live with the thought that Drew—“the best of us … the only decent one”—lies under the lake on which Ed's son skis (150).

Whether Dickey's version of the film would have been as successful as Boorman's depends on one's valuative criteria. Dickey's Deliverance would be much longer, not only because of the additions to the work's start and conclusion, but because scenes, such as Ed hunting the hillbilly, would be more detailed and complex. In an age of shortened attention spans, such demands would likely diminish the film's commercial appeal, as Boorman was no doubt aware. However, the original screenplay does more accurately reflect the Dickey ouevre, particularly its preoccupation with an individual's relationship to nature, humanity's potential for violence, and the connection between the instinctual and the imaginative, concerns that have made Dickey one of America's most compelling writers for four decades.

Works Cited

Dickey, James. Deliverance. Boston: Houghton, 1970.

———. Deliverance (Screenplay) with “Afterword.” Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982.