Happy West Virginia Day, everyone! To celebrate the rich heritage we all have as native Appalachians and not coastal elite Californians, we’ll be diving into two classics—Deliverance and Wrong Turn.
I haven’t seen either of these movies, but I certainly get the gist from Jeff’s excellent review. They’re movies built on Appalachian racism (the kind against people of the region, not the kind perpetrated by them). Stereotypes concerning Appalachia, as Jeff points out, are often contradictory. Savage and violent people are also supposed to exhibit classy Southern hospitality. The paradoxical nature of these seemingly opposing states of being is a classic example of what Orwell would have called “double think”. It’s a staple of fascist movements that you’d think Jeff would be familiar with by now, based on all the neo-Nazi ska bands he’s been in and also the news.
Incest, which I surmise to be the main theme of Deliverance, is stereotypically considered to be an Appalachian pastime. In reality, only two states have legalized recreational cousin stuff. In Rhode Island and New Jersey, you can have a baby with your sister, and since the overturn of Roe v Wade, may even be obligated to under penalty of law. Not only is incest illegal in West Virginia, it’s not even particularly common. The state with the highest rate of incest is Florida, most of which can be attributed to the sitting President.
In the episode, Jeff seems to be critical of Deliverance’s place in the Library of Congress. I’d recommend keeping in mind that the Library of Congress loves archiving racist movies, so Appalachian racism is not unique in this regard. The Library of Congress also contains Gone With the Wind, a film which could be described as 3 hours and 58 minutes of a sepia-tinted N-word. In 1992, they added The Birth of a Nation, a movie so racist it rebooted the Klan, not unlike DC’s efforts to reboot their cinematic universe with the upcoming Superman movie. The Library of Congress also includes what 9 out of 10 dentists consider to be the most racist movie ever made—Spy Kids. When it comes to offensive movies in the Library of Congress, Deliverance is far from the top. It is, however the most prominent anti-Appalachian movie in the archive, at least until Vance inevitably gets his shitty Netflix movie added.
We run into a different sort of problem with Wrong Turn. Honestly, I sympathize with Jeff—I also can never tell if someone is a medical student. Where our opinions differ is in seeing how a medical background allows one to better understand roadkill. I’ve been a medical laboratory scientist my whole life the last 4 years, and I can vouch for medical students knowing roadkill. After all, I can smell a skunk’s UTI from 100 paces. Jeff also highlights the director’s inspiration from Alien. While he may see this as a very different movie, I can definitely see the parallels. Alien is a movie about a company willing to sacrifice its workers to have a chance of securing information about a new species which could be monetized and innovated upon. West Virginia is a state that has been exploited and sacrificed upon the altar of capitalism, despite not being a virgin and actually fucking quite hard. They’re both stories about the horrors of our economic system, but the difference is that Wrong Turn demonizes West Virginians, whereas Alien fetishizes Xenomorphs.
The conclusion I’ve drawn from this week’s podcast is that we need better representation of the Appalachian spirit. Appalachia is not a lawless, incestuous cesspit of uneducated beasts—you’re thinking of the Trump administration. Stop giving us savage redneck incest monsters—give us Blair Mountain. The story of the Battle of Blair Mountain would be an infinitely better movie than either of these motion pic-turds and convey the positive aspects of the Appalachian culture. Show us defiance and determination in the face of overwhelming exploitation, as well as the undeniable beauty of shooting cops in the face. That is the story we need. It’s just like Jeffrey said—there are people in the woods who will shoot you. And I think that’s pretty neat.
Hard Flickit 