“Can’t we just comfort each other?... Did you ever think life would turn out like
this?” Linda, the girl-next-door, to the
elusive war veteran Michael, in “The Deer Hunter”
Two epic films about America, made in the 1970s, end with
the singing of a song.
“Nashville” (1975), a comic panorama of character and music,
concludes with a crowd of concertgoers singing the upbeat, ironic “It Don’t
Worry Me” after a sudden tragedy. Three
years later, “The Deer Hunter”, a searing portrait of an American community and
its rituals, ends as a close-knit blue-collar group sings “God Bless America”, turning
it into a requiem for a friend devastated by Vietnam.
The two films, while very different in content, style and
tone, reflect the country in a time of uncertainty, a nation on the verge of a
Bicentennial, a people divided between embracing their resilience and questioning
their values.
Both films stirred hours of controversy and debate. “The Deer Hunter”, especially, given the
harrowing three hours leading up to its perplexing conclusion, left audiences sad
and reflective, if not totally drained.
Modern audiences, pummeled by the double whammy of a
devastating virus and an antagonistic political season, can readily identify
with these emotions.
Like “Nashville”, “The Deer Hunter” is once more relevant to
our moment, posing many questions and stirring us in deep, indefinable ways.
Covid-19, from its ominous origins early in 2020, to its resurgence
during a contentious change in leadership, has made us feel insecure and
fearful, and has required unprecedented sacrifice. It is as close as this generation has ever come
to wartime. And this pandemic-war
doesn’t seem to be over yet.
Although “The Deer Hunter” is set during the specific era of
the Vietnam war, it is more symbolic than literal, so it allows us to
project onto it whatever we to bring to it. The film’s almost mythic imagery works on us
unconsciously, like a Rorschach test. Part
of the film’s power lies in the inability of the characters to adequately
express their feelings; their inarticulate grasping results in our being
emotionally devastated on their behalf.
Director Michael Cimino and his gifted cast (Robert DeNiro,
John Savage, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep, John Cazale, and scores of
authentic extras), working from an epic, slightly unfocused script, has crafted
a metaphor for the horrific effects of the Vietnam war on a Russian-American steel-mill community, and by extension, for our
horrific twin crises of pandemic and politics.
The protagonists, Michael, Nick, and Steven, are on their
way to Vietnam. On the eve of their
departure, Steven marries his pregnant girlfriend, Angela, but secretly confesses
that the baby is not his. Michael
(DeNiro), a quiet, stoic man’s-man, is an expert hunter. He observes a strict code of masculine
conduct, and believes in killing a deer with one shot. He is silently devoted to his best friend
Nick (Walken), who quietly adores Michael, but is too sensitive to share Michael’s
masculine coda.
Both men are attracted to Linda (Streep). She loves both men, chastely; Nick suddenly
proposes to her before he departs. Linda,
who is beautiful, loving and almost wordless, is like a conduit for Michael and
Nick to have their own, non-threatening homoerotic relationship.
Their three friends, Stanley, Axel, and John, are
good-hearted and dumb to varying degrees. John, who owns the bar, sings in the
church choir. Axel is a bear whose vocabulary consists mostly of the f-word. Diminutive
Stan is a hotheaded lady’s man, a misogynist, and a braggart.
The movie is divided roughly into three sections.
The sweeping first hour immerses us inside of Clairton, Pennsylvania, a prototypical blue-collar town. Elaborate set-pieces introduce us to the characters, and
how they live: the hellish flames of a fiery steel mill; a deer-hunting expedition
in the mountains; an elaborate Russian-Orthodox wedding and the raucous
reception that follows; and a quiet moment of drunken camaraderie. Many average viewers have complained that this
section goes on too long, and doesn’t significantly develop the plot.
To me, this brilliant first section is actually the most
important in the film. It is here that
we are totally engulfed in American images and iconography. It sets off associations and levels of
meaning that haunt us as the film goes on.
There are American flags, war veterans in their VFW hats, red-white-and
blue bunting, and a grocery store called Eagle.
Old women carry a towering wedding cake past young, naïve girls who frolic
in their dresses and new hairdos. There is the steel mill and the cathedral. A beat-up
classic American car drag-races with a semi-truck. There is the corner bar
playing popular American hits on the jukebox. There’s the majesty of the
mountains. Guns are a given, even for small kids. Beer is everywhere. In all, we are surrounded by a typical, masculine American
culture that is taken for granted.
The whole film seems to move along vertical lines, the camera slowly moving upward or downward, to suggest
height and strength.
In an ironic twist, the music in this first section
blares with Russian folk-songs and hymns, while the three buddies, who are
gung-ho to fight the communist threat in Vietnam, seem to deny their Russian origins. (Later, when asked if his last name,
Chavatorevich, is Russian, Nick denies this more directly by answering, “No…American”.)
In the manner of a legend, there is grim foreshadowing: a
drop of wine spilled on a wedding dress; a Green Beret soldier who wanders into
the bar at the wedding, almost catatonic with disillusionment; and the look of surprise
and resignation in the eye of a dying buck who has just been shot. Deer heads
adorn the walls, composed in shots with characters who are vulnerable, or have
been or will be hurt.
The second hour of the film is a symbolic depiction of
hell. The movie jumps from a quiet piano
interlude in a bar to the fields of Vietnam in the midst of battle. The film’s cutting from the bar to the war
sequence, with no buildup or preparation, ranks with some of cinema’s greatest
cuts (the blown-out match in “Lawrence of Arabia”, the weapon hurled into the
sky in “2001”.)
This section is utterly frightening in its fast-paced,
intense imagery and chaotic sound. Suddenly we
are devoid of anything suggesting the American culture we have relaxed into for
the previous hour. The sudden feeling of
alienation amid the scenes of carnage is incredibly potent, and there
is no turning back. The next time we see an
American flag, it is flying over coffins that are being loaded for transport. The
sudden appearance of the song “Midnight Train to Georgia”, heard in a sleazy
Saigon strip club, has never sounded so sad.
Michael, Nick and Steven are reunited, captured, and
imprisoned under a remote, waterlogged hut and forced to play Russian Roulette
with other prisoners, and then each other. This sequence was notorious for its
gore, and stirred controversy for its racist depiction of the Vietnamese. But this sequence is meant as a metaphor, a
concentrated image of the random death and suffering of war, told from the
point of view of Americans who have been trained to hate the enemy. It is not meant as a literal depiction of
Vietnam. Additionally, especially for
audiences in 1979, it recalls the infamous image of a Vietnamese man being
executed by a gunshot to the head. The sequence forcefully makes its point, and
is unforgettable.
They escape. Steven
drops to a river during an airlift, and his body is permanently broken. Michael tries to save him, and gets him to a
hospital. Nick is left behind, later wanders AWOL through the underbelly of
Saigon. An unscrupulous French businessman
lures Nick into an underground game of Russian Roulette, where he wins a lot of
money, becomes a mindless drug addict, and loses himself for good. (The Frenchman is a vague reference to
France’s involvement in the war before America’s.)
In the final, third hour, Michael returns home after a year or so, a
decorated Green Beret who has survived being wounded. He is impatient with John, Axel and Stanley, his friends who stayed
behind, because they have not changed. He finds their bumbling behavior trivial after
what he went through. He finds Angela, who
cannot speak due to grief, and learns that Steven is in a VA hospital. Michael tries hunting again, and corners a
beautiful buck, but purposely misses him.
When he shouts “Okay” to the deer, and then to the heavens, it is as
though he is sending Nick a message that he no longer believes in "one shot"; Michael
even tosses Stanley’s little pistol away.
Michael and Linda try to talk to each other, but he cannot express his
love for her, feeling that it would betray Nick, who is still missing.
This final hour has a feeling of desperation, of life never
again returning to normal. And then, there’s a clue of Nick’s whereabouts, and
Michael returns to Saigon to try to save him.
The three sections of “The Deer Hunter” aptly represent the three
phases of our national tragedy with the pandemic.
First, there is America, its people and culture, a feeling of
freedom and individualism, a resistance to rules and restrictions, a culture of
rituals and national symbols, all which are taken for granted. A deadly pandemic never entered the
consciousness, with no way to prepare for what we would lose because of it..
Second, there is the sudden contagion, without warning,
taking people quickly and at random. While
not bloody and violent as the war itself, it is nonetheless increasingly fatal.
The anxiety, the restrictions, the curfews, the curbs on personal freedom, even
the resistance to those restrictions, are what getting through a war must feel like, but exacerbated
by incompetent leaders and their mindless acolytes.
Third, there is an attempt to recover, even though it isn’t
over. In the film, watching Nick play
Russian Roulette for money somehow strongly represents the current, defiant,
almost perverse wish to return to a pre-pandemic normal, to revive the economy
in spite of unknown danger, to make money even if there might be a random bullet
waiting in the chamber.
Meryl Streep, playing Linda, conveys so much with so little dialogue. So it is interesting that Linda, of all the characters, utters the two simple
lines of dialog that explode with meaning when applied to our situation. In a time when we are reminded constantly to
stay away from each other, her question to Michael, “Can’t we just comfort each
other”, elicits a response that is sad and regretful.
And to her question, “Did you ever think life would turn out
like this”, a response is neither necessary, nor
possible.
