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Male egos can be delicate things. The traditional ideas of masculinity that are woven into us from before our first unsteady steps have created steely-seeming figures masking their uncertainties, their fragility. I would hope that we are moving past the deep association of wilderness-based activities with masculinity, but the wild spaces have traditionally been seen as staging grounds for performances of this male bravado; places where people go to find their limits, to prove themselves, to conquer and resolve something.
Deliverance (1972) is a classic of the men-trying-to-be-manly-in-the-wild genre. Watching it now, it feels like a strangely melancholic film. The four main characters have left the suburbs to head out to the deep wild to canoe a river that is about to be dammed, ‘just about the last wild, un-tamed, un-polluted, un-fucked up river in the South’. It is a beautiful stretch of densely wooded banks and water that is at turns languid or studded with rapids, churning-white. All of it will soon be submerged, drowned for hydro-power and pleasure boating. It is a ghost landscape, wilderness on the way out.
The group are led by Burt Reynolds’ character Lewis, accompanied by a disarmingly young Jon Voight. Burt is a whole hunk of man in this, spending most of the film in some kind of half-zipped up, sleeveless wetsuit top looking thing; all chest hair and taut, tanned arms. He is an Action Man model, driving his car unnecessarily fast down deep-ridged woodland roads, living his life on the edge, baby, and filled with words of wisdom about the wild – lines like there’s ‘something in the woods and the water we have lost in the city’. He is there to re-discover what they have lost, the pampered descendants of the American frontiersmen trying again to define themselves in opposition to the wilderness around them.
Backcountry (2014) is a more modern re-formulation of these same ingredients. Loosely based on a real incident in Ontario, it follows a couple on their hike through the Canadian woodland as they become lost and end up deep in a bear’s territory. The main man, Alex, is a real piece of work. It is testimony to Jeff Roop’s performance just how insufferable he is. The desperation to prove your self-sufficiency of Deliverance here becomes a more generally anti-modern attitude as he scorns his partner for being on her phone and brags about his ability to start a fire with no matches. He approaches the hike with a supreme confidence, mocking her for bringing bear spray and a flare, so confident in his own navigational abilities that he turns down a free map. He is the kind of guy who would have absolutely loved to be Burt Reynolds in Deliverance. Alex is trying to craft an image of himself as master of nature, anti-modern man of the wild places, but there is such a falseness to his bravado, a mis-placed arrogance at the heart of it all.
The men of these films venture out to the wild with their expensive camping gear, hungry to taste a less-civilised life, but seem dramatically unprepared for what happens once your control of the situation slips away. The wild drags at them, pulling them apart piece by piece. They arrive with their sturdy masculine confidence but this crumples, collapses once it is outside of the society it was constructed in. Deliverance decays into trauma. Men dig graves in the woods with their bare hands, scrambling like dogs in the dirt. Reynolds ends up whimpering, crying with a broken leg, river-soaked and prone in the bottom of a canoe. Voight breaks down over his food, his sleep haunted by nightmares of hands emerging from beneath the water. They set off into the wilderness to test their limits and emerge from it traumatised, fractured, carrying their scars with them.
This transition from the powerful to powerless is at its most visceral in Backcountry. He is broken twice. First, emotionally, as they emerge from the tree cover, out onto a rocky outcrop just to see mile after mile of unbroken woodland stretching out in front of them. He has got them lost, hopelessly lost, with no map, no phone, no idea where they are. All his condescending Bear Grylls shtick crumbles on contact with this reality as she lays into him, calling him ‘such a fucking loser’. As a white Canadian man he has lived his life with about as much social capital as it is possible to be born into; the absolute apex of a racist, patriarchal, anthropocentric world, but here in the wilderness he is reduced to a white sack of panic with a knackered foot.
His irritation with phones and ability to start a fire without matches mean absolutely nothing to the black bear that is stalking them. They used a real animal for the scenes, no animatronics here, and it is genuinely intense; a night-black bulk of fur and claw. There is a raw violence to it that you just cannot stand up to. It’s worth noting the good use that the film makes out of the tent as a cinematic space at this point, with the heavy sound effect of the bear’s breath outside. The structure becomes a tiny, fragile island of synthetic control here in the deepwood and is similar to the eighteen minute single-take tent shot at the end of Willow Creek, both of them accented by the Blair Witch.
It is difficult to overstate the damage the bear does to Alex’s body. The attack is built around shakey camera footage and heavy sound editing, the audio itself seeming to slip in and out of shock. The entire front of his body is a torn up ruin of red meat and bone. Ribs have been ripped open. There is blood everywhere, pouring out of him, all over the bear’s mouth. It is an intensity of trauma that is unique to film; a visual, audial, mobile assault. It is part of why this transition from the powerful to the powerless works so well here, the viscerality of actually seeing swaggering city boys reduced to physically broken, fractured bodies.
There is an uncomfortable satisfaction in seeing him get torn apart, and this seems to be endorsed by the film. Adam MacDonald, the writer and director, switched around the genders of the survivors of the real attack the film was inspired by – in Ontario it was the man who made it out – while also exaggerating Alex’s irritating, frail bravado. Instead, the film becomes a story of his partner Jenn’s endurance, her level-headed wariness of and respect for a landscape that does not revolve around her, that she cannot just command as she likes. Like Deliverance, it seems a deliberate message of the false strength of traditional masculinity. They all go to the wild to prove themselves, to live out their hunter-gatherer self-sufficiency fantasy, and instead have their deficiencies and entitlement carved into them.
Obviously, these are created, archetypal figures, but the cultural arrogance they are drawn from is very real. The lines flow easily from this attitude of the wild as a plaything and male-proving ground to a disregard for its long-term welfare. Deliverance is quite explicitly environmentally focused, its undulating story of masculinity set firmly in a background of a loss of wilderness, of natural decline. We live in a global system that is ran by a male-dominated, capital-driven elite, wherein the wilderness is all resource-site and soon-to-be-conquered frontier. Of course, things are not as simple as men equal bad, but the same society that has constructed these traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity is the one that is ruining the planet. Climate breakdown is a gendered issue, a problem so huge every other societal problem seems woven into it. To truly work towards remedying it involves looking at how our deep seated societal attitudes have created the environmental situation we now find ourselves in, to trace the scars and legacies of everything from racism through to economic inequality and gender roles. The empathy and self-sacrifice that are required to effect actual change are hardly features associated with traditional masculinity. Now is not the time to go and conquer anything, to prove yourself in opposition to the wild.