And...
Writing About Film
Aiming too High, Shooting too Soon
The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978)
Paper for Vietnam and the Cinema class, 1988
Centering around two themes, The Deer Hunter focuses on both director Michael Cimino’s vision of the American ethnic working-class, and his vision of the Vietnam War. In many ways, this is too large a load for one film to bear (even one three hours long!) and explains The Deer Hunter’s descent into gratuitousness, racism, and a reliance on high mythic symbolism. Nonetheless, The Deer Hunter is a powerful and seductive piece of filmmaking. Not only is the film sensitively and powerfully acted, but its script, pacing, cinematography, and direction all work to its benefit. Because The Deer Hunter is so effective and because it was made at a time when very few films of its ilk were in circulation (other than Apocalypse Now, and 1978’s Coming Home, there were no other American films with which it could then be compared), Cimino’s film creates a powerful impression of the recently-completed war and its people, one which is harmful and misleading. For this reason, it is most imperative to examine the film, to burrow underneath its surface and explore its fundamental message.
The Deer Hunter could have been a fine, if subjective and male-centered, portrait of an ethnic Pennsylvania steel-town community, but by integrating the Vietnam War directly into its narrative, it strays into racism and historical revisionism. For whatever reason, Cimino chooses to center the movie around the Russian roulette episode in the North Vietnamese tiger cages. Because of this and other devices, the film attempts to shift the war’s moral blame away from the United States and to the Vietnamese. It becomes easier to do this by slandering the Vietnamese and their culture, many of the harmful aspects of which were exploited by the Chinese, the French, and the Americans in the first place. To whit, Vietnam becomes a horror house, full of slanty-eyed (or French) devils who talk gibberish and force victimized Americans to shoot themselves. This is what the film says causes Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and its related sicknesses, not the reality of war: the chaos, the firefights, or the breakdown of command.
At its crux, The Deer Hunter remains a film not about Vietnam as much as a portrait of a certain socio-economic ethnic group in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The fact that the narrative’s events seem to occur within a warped time stream is assuredly significant: by collapsing the highly volatile events of the late 60s and early 70s, The Deer Hunter creates its own reality, one which explains the characters’ actions. Whether some of the residents of Clairton, Pennsylvania, went to Vietnam or not is almost irrelevant: the war in Vietnam was an integral part of American reality and it stamped the period. By simply stating that Michael, Steven, and Nicky went to Vietnam, the film could have remained blameless: their further actions would still have made sense. Showing Michael returning home unhurt, Stevie in a wheelchair, and Nicky AWOL in Saigon could have sufficed; there really is no need to invent and depict situations which explain their later, extreme individual reactions. As history shows, there were plenty of veterans who returned from Vietnam with PTSD and/or crippling physical and mental injuries who were never captured (or even necessarily wounded), and who were certainly never forced to engage in Russian roulette at bayonet-point. Nicky could have simply — and much more realistically — been in Saigon shooting heroin, not the side of his head. This option would still have allowed Michael to return to Vietnam to retrieve Nicky, although it must be admitted that a drug overdose would have been no way near as horrible a death as the chosen alternative. But this is precisely where the film falters — it is so desperate for critical attention (or acceptance?) that it warps history and abuses the Vietnamese to further its poignancy. Cimino’s decision to go this route seems distinctly American, both aesthetically and politically: a European filmmaker probably would not feel so compelled to add glamor and horror to a movie that he or she would compromise the work’s historical accuracy — the director would give his or her audience enough credit to fathom the message without the addition of gratuitous suspense and gore.
Despite these obvious faults, The Deer Hunter still speaks quite strongly about the working-class’s failure to communicate, and its inability to break down emotional barriers through the constructive use of language. Because the film’s characters cannot talk to one another, they collapse and fall apart. It must be remembered that the film’s depiction of events in Vietnam, apocryphal or not, only make up about half of its 183 minutes. The rest of the action takes place in Clairton or the fictionalized Pennsylvania mountains, and much of the story has nothing whatsoever to do with Vietnam.
The Deer Hunter’s racism is another factor that any analysis should not omit. Every Vietnamese character in the film is either evil and corrupt, or terrified and helpless (though most usually the former). Witness the film’s first look at the Vietnamese, which is at the culmination of a village firefight. The lone remaining NVA soldier finishes up by needlessly and horribly killing his own people — who, of course, are all women and children. The next sequence emphasizes the soldier’s evil, as he brutally guns down a surviving mother and child (a mythic incarnation of passivity and vulnerability), and is fortunately torched by Michael before he can do more harm. (Would cannibalism or rape of the dead be beyond this film’s scope? Doubtful.) It should not be overlooked that Michael succeeds in stopping the NVA soldier only after the man has killed the helpless pair, emphasizing the message that all Vietnamese — “good” or “bad” — are beyond redemption. This point is furthered by the prison-camp episode, in which the only survivors are our heroes, the three white men. Later, in Saigon, we see that all of Vietnam is hell, the South included, and that the lead devil isn’t even Vietnamese, but French, assisted by a group of Chinese lieutenants. This completes the film’s argument: not only are the Vietnamese truly yellow devils, but they are too uncivilized and corrupt to work their mischief independently, and for this, need superior outside help. The fact that the vast majority of the actors who played the Vietnamese are actually Japanese or Thai raises further questions (Cimino’s refusal to hire Vietnamese? Vietnamese actors’ refusal to work on such a film?), but its underlying statement is a traditionally racist one: who can tell them apart?
The Deer Hunter probably had its intentions in the right place. As a product of a certain period in American history, it may have been vital for Americans to begin dealing with the war any way they knew how. If this meant, however, shifting the blame for the war’s many tragedies away from the American government, to the point of ending the film with the singing of “God Bless America,” then that may have been the only way to get the script approved and produced. But if that was indeed the only way, one’s tendency is to wish that the film industry had waited. Instead, under the aegis of the patriotism and high self-esteem that characterizes our current Reagan/Bush era, audiences could have been spared such virulent examples of historical revisionism and racism.*
*Addressing the problems of contemporary Vietnam films will have to wait
for further opportunity.