Duelling banjos and retarded rednecks

Simon-JarrettSimon Jarrett discusses a disturbing 1970s film classic which peddles some very old ‘retardation’ myths.

Film Deliverance (1972) Director: John Boorman

The film Deliverance, by the English director John Boorman, and starring amongst others Burt Reynolds and John Voigt, is a 1970s Hollywood classic. It tells the disturbing story of four Atlanta businessmen who decide to make an adventurous and perilous canoeing trip down a river in the remote Georgia countryside of America’s Deep South. Soon they realise the river is not the only danger they have to face. They are chillingly pursued and attacked by white ‘rednecks’, the pejoratively named insular and inbred rural inhabitants of the area.

Disturbing

When the film ends only three of the men remain alive. Their experience has been so horrifyingly disturbing they vow to keep it a secret for the rest of their lives. The suspicious sheriff whom they meet at the end of their journey has no evidence of how their companion died, so eventually he simply tells them to leave the area for ever. This, they willingly do.

The scene contains two scenes which have become iconic in film history. The first is a horrifying male rape scene perpetrated against one of the men by two rednecks. The second is known as ‘Duelling Banjos’.

The four men encounter a strange family of rednecks. One of them, noting that a young boy has a banjo, tries to engage with him by bringing out his own banjo and starting to play. The boy responds, playing to an incredibly high level of skill. For many minutes, they duel, each outdoing the other with their playing, until the boy finally triumphs. It is a mesmerising scene.

The next day they encounter the boy again and he is hailed and invited to play the banjo once more. He gazes back at them, expressionless and motionless, showing no recollection of meeting the visitors at all.

Retarded territory

The implication is clear. The boy is, in the American usage, retarded. Many other hints of retardation appear. In the background of one scene, another child lolls helplessly, strapped in a makeshift wheelchair, itself strapped to a rickety pick-up truck.

Isolation

Redneck territory is retarded territory, caused by generations of in-breeding and isolation from the rest of the world. They are contrasted with the smart, middle-class interlopers from the urban sophistication of Atlanta, whose entry into the bizarre world of the redneck brings only humiliation and horror.

The belief that the poor white inhabitants of the Deep South are retarded runs deep in the American psyche. To this day ‘poor white trash’ is the label attached to them, from all sectors of United States society. It has its origins in the eugenic scares of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Academic social scientists carried out lengthy surveys of particular Deep South families, producing graph- and chart-laden studies which ‘proved’ that  criminality, retardation, chronic disease, alcoholism and mental illness were all caused by their feckless in-breeding. The families produced ever-growing armies of useless humans.

Discredited

These ostensibly scientific studies (since widely discredited) began with The Juke Family in 1877, which was then followed by The Hill Folk, The Nam Family and, most notoriously, The Kallikak Family in 1912.

Several years later, the mass call-up of World War 1 was used to carry out the world’s first mass IQ testing programme. It came to the alarming conclusion that 37 per cent of white Americans and 89 per cent of black Americans were feebleminded morons.

All of this was nonsense of course, with distortion of evidence to prove the researchers’ theories, and IQ tests designed simply to prove the pre-existing assumptions of the testers. But it was dangerous nonsense, and it lives on.

Deliverance proved that, even in the heart of liberal Hollywood, demeaning racialised theories about intelligence always bubble below the surface.