For some people John Boorman’s Deliverance is a heart-warming tale of rural life filled with learning and laughs and folk music (not to be mixed up with John Boorman’s Deliveroo, which may have been sent to your house by mistake).
Well, those people, the ones who enjoy the gentle pastoral atmosphere of Deliverance and possibly the folksy charm of The Hills Have Eyes, have just been commissioned by Netflix to make Snowflake Mountain, a programme in which two guffawing backwoodsmen play outdoorsy japes on young “snowflakes”.
It is, of course, for their own good. Netflix is a branch of the social services now, and some worried parents in the United States and the UK have dispatched their feckless heirs off to them for improvement.
These caregivers are at their wits’ end with these youths, who strut around in sunglasses and fur coats, twerking for no reason, giving the finger to the camera and saying things like, “I don’t take shit from anyone. I’m a bitch,” and, “The king that I am stands alone and [you] are an army full of losers.” Much like I said during my recent Irish Times performance review.
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These youths are allegedly of the “snowflake generation”, and they are to be deposited on Snowflake Mountain, from whence they no doubt came. Look at them with their avocados and their twerking! They don’t know they’re born! In our day we didn’t have “smartphones” or “Instagram”, we only had affordable homes and pensionable jobs for life. How dare they stand there reminding us of society’s fading optimism and decline!
And so the programme starts with these 10 young people being left at the side of a mountain track with nothing but their stupid clothes and a camera crew who once dreamed of making art films but now sleep without dreams in a terrible blackness. We have all fantasised about leaving the young people up in the mountains, but when someone unaffiliated with Netflix takes his terrible nephews on a drive and leaves them in the wilderness he’s considered to be a “bad guy” and only fit for babysitting “in emergencies”.
At this point the youngsters all think they’re going to a luxury resort, for they are under 30 and don’t yet realise that nothing good ever happens when you’re abandoned on a track in the mountains. Then our survivalist hicks emerge. Their names are Joel and Matt, and they tell the snowflakes that they’re actually going to be living like common ducks out in the wild.
They both refer to the young people as “the snowflakes”, which I really enjoy. They order the snowflakes to hoof it through the wilderness to the camp where they will be staying. “Are you kidding me?” says a snowflake named Randy. “I hate walking. I try to avoid it at all costs. I don’t know if I’ve walked up a hill before.”
“Walking to camp—it wasn’t meant to be a challenge, in my head,” says Joel, a little taken aback.
So then Joel and Matt blow up all of the snowflakes’ suitcases with explosives, just like our primitive ancestors used to do with explosives they whittled from fruit, probably. One snowflake can’t handle it any more, and Joel and Matt walk her to the edge of the encampment, where she’s presumably left to die.
The first tasks are set. One group of snowflakes has to retrieve some food that’s in a bag on a tree. Another group of snowflakes has to retrieve some food that’s in a box on a raft. I believe this is called “hunting”, and I don’t know what the fuss is about. It looks easy!
Devon, one of the snowflakes in the lake with the raft, decides not to help and just frolics in the water like a happy seal. Meanwhile, Solomon, one of the snowflakes retrieving food from a tree, demonstrates the wisdom of his namesake by suggesting they keep the nicer tree food and not tell their campmates. He even rubs his hands together in an evil fashion when telling the camera about his forever-to-be-secret larceny.
Of course, Joel and Matt watch all this through the high-tech surveillance technology they have secreted around the forest and probably wove out of hemp.
Then they tell the snowflakes that there’s a $50,000 prize for one winner at the end of the show. Now the snowflakes are listening. Fifty thousand dollars? Why, that’s just slightly more than the median wage in the US, and, as you know, hope is dead! But there’s a catch! Each time a snowflake quits, $5,000 is taken from the prize pot. The snowflakes side-eye each other with suspicion, for this is now looking like that famous quiz show Late Capitalism: Let us Share the Dregs.
At the start of the next episode Joel and Matt tell the remaining snowflakes that they’re going to have to work harder.
“Fuck that,” says one snowflake.
“I’m scared,” says another.
“Why, though?” says a third.
It’s very like a departmental meeting in The Irish Times, to be honest. Their alienated labour thus conscripted, Joel and Matt dispatch half the team to chop a tree and dispatch the other half to skin a headless deer that one snowflake immediately christens Bambi. Throughout the episode there are learnings. Randy has an epiphany while tree-chopping sulkily. “So you don’t want to do the hard work, but you want the reward?” says Joel to Randy.
“Bingo!” says Randy, glad that Joel finally understands his position.
Solomon, the food thief, also evolves. While his hands are inside a deer carcass he realises for the first time that “ribs” the food is the same thing “ribs” the bones. “Ribs are actual ribs,” he says in awe, his mind blown.
He is a changed man. Seeing that Devon, a vegan, is upset by the deer slaughter, he tries to cheer her up by giving her some of the food he stole. But Devon tells everyone about the theft, for there is no honour among snowflakes. Justice is served. The food-thief snowflakes are sent to bury poo from the collective toilet as a punishment.
But it’s not a punishment for all of them! A snowflake named Sunny loves it. He is inspired to poo in the hole himself, and it apparently changes his life. “Twelve hours ago I was thinking of leaving,” says Sunny. “I’ve just shit in a hole. I’m never going back to who I was. I’m different.” (For more details, read his self-help book, Achieve Life Success by Pooing in a Hole, by Sunny Snowflake.)
At the end of the second episode Joel and Matt declare the snowflakes Deandra and Solomon to be the absolute worst and tell them they must sleep alone in makeshift shelters. And so night falls on Snowflake Mountain. Goodnight, Deandra. Goodnight, Solomon. Goodnight, Randy. Goodnight, poo hole. Goodnight, backwoodsmen. Goodnight, Bambi. Goodnight, Bambi’s delicious ribs. To snowflakes everywhere, goodnight!
