Re: this, and lots of other people who think they're clever.
Just stop it already with the "Dueling Banjos" shit. It's deadly unfunny and absolutely ancient - the "I Drink Your Milkshake" joke of 1972. And you don't even realize how hateful you're being when you use it.
Deliverance is, among other things, a movie about how middle and upper class urban folks need to be terrified of the white rural poor, who engage in all manner of perverse sadism when left to their own devices. That it's an expertly crafted thriller is pretty inarguable, but it's also a primary document of the hateful middle class backlash in the 1970s against Johnson's War on Poverty. It takes as premise that Appalachians are cretinous, villainous subhumans and goes from there to argue that we should avoid rural America and its people at all costs.
The one thing that the movie gets right in its distorted-funhouse-mirror portrait of southern Appalachia is the region's beautiful musical tradition, as evinced in the well-known 'dueling banjos' scene - in which Ronny Cox's character engages in an awesomely complex impromptu jam session with a young boy implied to be autistic or in some other way 'different.' It kills me that this scene, the one moment in the film where you get a sense that there's a rich cultural life in Appalachia that two centuries of prejudice and continued economic hardship have obscured, has become shorthand for 'dangerous/stupid hicks/white trash/hillbillies here.'
And in this case it obscures the truth about Sarah Palin: Palin is not dangerous because she's from a rural area, or because she hunts, or because she 'talks funny.' She's dangerous because her ideas about governance and the role of the government in people's lives and on the international stage are very, very wrong, and those ideas aren't endemic to rural America. Lampooning Sarah Palin as a 'dumb hick' is a grotesque of political engagement, and the makers of the above parody are just being lazy.
Comedy Moratorium Declared
Re: this, and lots of other people who think they're clever.
Just stop it already with the "Dueling Banjos" shit. It's deadly unfunny and absolutely ancient - the "I Drink Your Milkshake" joke of 1972. And you don't even realize how hateful you're being when you use it.
Deliverance is, among other things, a movie about how middle and upper class urban folks need to be terrified of the white rural poor, who engage in all manner of perverse sadism when left to their own devices. That it's an expertly crafted thriller is pretty inarguable, but it's also a primary document of the hateful middle class backlash in the 1970s against Johnson's War on Poverty. It takes as premise that Appalachians are cretinous, villainous subhumans and goes from there to argue that we should avoid rural America and its people at all costs.
The one thing that the movie gets right in its distorted-funhouse-mirror portrait of southern Appalachia is the region's beautiful musical tradition, as evinced in the well-known 'dueling banjos' scene - in which Ronny Cox's character engages in an awesomely complex impromptu jam session with a young boy implied to be autistic or in some other way 'different.' It kills me that this scene, the one moment in the film where you get a sense that there's a rich cultural life in Appalachia that two centuries of prejudice and continued economic hardship have obscured, has become shorthand for 'dangerous/stupid hicks/white trash/hillbillies here.'
And in this case it obscures the truth about Sarah Palin: Palin is not dangerous because she's from a rural area, or because she hunts, or because she 'talks funny.' She's dangerous because her ideas about governance and the role of the government in people's lives and on the international stage are very, very wrong, and those ideas aren't endemic to rural America. Lampooning Sarah Palin as a 'dumb hick' is a grotesque of political engagement, and the makers of the above parody are just being lazy.