The Deer Hunter
Before Director Michael Cimino's 1978 film The Deer Hunter, the only cinematic treatment of the Vietnam War most Americans had seen was John Wayne's The Green Berets a decade earlier. By 1978, however, American audiences were finally ready to deal with the war on-screen. The Deer Hunter was popular with audiences and critics alike, nominated for nine Academy Awards and winning five, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor (Christopher Walken). The Deer Hunter broke the ground in the cinematic treatment of Vietnam, opening the door for films like Apocalypse Now a year later, Platoon (1986), and Full Metal Jacket (1987). All of these "Vietnam" films shared the same shattering emotional impact on audiences, but none was as moving as The Deer Hunter.
The Deer Hunter deals not only with Vietnam, but also foregrounds the contrast between the soldier's comparatively gentle life at home with the brutal trauma of war. The film opens in the Clairton, Pennsylvania steel mill where Michael (Robert DeNiro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steve (John Savage) are working their last shift before shipping out to Vietnam. The quotidian details of their working-class lives revolve around work, hunting, drinking, and playing pool. But Steve, like so many soldiers before him, is getting married before he leaves for the war. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond beautifully photographs the Russian Orthodox wedding ceremony, but portents of the war intrude upon the revelry. A Green Beret mysteriously appears at the wedding like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, foreshadowing the death and destruction that await in Vietnam.The brutal rituals of war replace the rituals back in Pennsylvania; however, Cimino and co-writer Deric Washburn use Russian roulette in a North Vietnamese prison camp as their metaphor for combat. The Russian roulette game is an ironic, terrifying counterpoint to the trios hunting and pool playing stateside, and the prison camp scenes are a chilling condensation of the Vietnam war itself—bamboo, rain, and death. The end of the film leaves us with three characters that represent the spectrum of the Vietnam veterans' experience. Nick
dies, Steve returns home in a wheelchair, and Michael returns emotionally crippled.
A scene from The Deer Hunter featuring (from left) John Cazale, Chuck Aspegren, Christopher Walken, Robert De Niro, and John Savage.Besides the emotional impact of the story and the photography, the film benefits from its excellent ensemble cast. In addition to Oscar winner Christopher Walken, Oscar nominee Robert DeNiro (Best Actor), and John Savage, the film stars Meryl Streep (nominee for Best Supporting Actress), George Dzundza, and John Cazale in his last film (Cazale died of cancer right after filming was completed). Stanley Myers' powerful, melancholy musical score, mostly consisting of a solitary, plaintive guitar, adds to the film's heartbreaking effect.
The Deer Hunter, according to literary critic Leslie Fiedler, is "the reenactment of a fable, a legend as old as America itself: a post-Vietnam version of the myth classically formulated in James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer and Last of the Mohicans." The myth that is played out in The Deer Hunter is an ancient one: The transition from innocence to experience. War films, according to author John Newsinger, "are tales of masculinity. They are stories of boys becoming men, of comradeship and loyalty, of bravery and endurance, of pain and suffering, and the horror and the excitement of battle. Violence—the ability both to inflict it and to take it—is portrayed as an essential part of what being a man involves." No film before The Deer Hunter and few since have so brutally captures war as an initiation rite.
Further Reading:
Dittmar, Linda, and Gene Michaud, editors. From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film. New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Eberwein, Robert T. "Ceremonies of Survival: The Structure of The Deer Hunter." The Journal of Popular Film and Television. Vol. 7, 1979, 352-64.
Fiedler, Leslie. "Mythicizing the Unspeakable." Journal of American Folklore. Vol. 103, 1990, 390-99.
Hellman, John. American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York, Columbia University Press, 1986.
Newsinger, John. "'Do You Walk the Walk?': Aspects of Masculinity in Some Vietnam War Films." You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men. Ed. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thurmim. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1993.
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