During the late 1970s, a slue of critical films on the Vietnam War were produced, including Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, The Boys in Company C, Go Tell The Spartans, and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978). Though it received nine Academy Award nominations, The Deer Hunter manifested enormous political and emotional controversy with its depiction of Vietnamese as despicable, sadistic racists and murderers. In his book Inventing Vietnam; editor Michael Anderegg (1991) presents a number of essays that depict two polar views of the Vietnam War. As Anderegg (1991) writes, “The earliest film responses to America’s involvement in Vietnam employ myth and metaphor and are at times unable to escape glamorized Hollywood. Later films strive to portray a more realistic Vietnam experience, often creating images that are an attempt to memorialize or to manufacture different kinds of myths,” (3). Though The Deer Hunter overlaps these categories, it is mostly a member of the latter group.
In The Deer Hunter, the metaphor of deer hunting is used to show both the perspective of the hunter and the hunted. It is also a buddy film but extensively uses the deer hunting metaphor even to demonstrate the close-knit relations of combat soldiers. As Michael, played by Robert DeNiro, explains to his buddy Nick, “I’ll tell you Nick, you’re the only guy I go hunting withy, you know. I like a guy with quick moves and speed. I ain’t gonna hunt with no assholes,” (Cimino 1978). Michael’s character is one of the most common of characters in the Vietnam genre of films, a man whose commitment and love for his family is severely tested by his experiences as a Vietnam combat soldier.
The Deer Hunter is structured in three sections to underscore its main theme, the impact of combat on the hunter and the hunted and on the individual and his family members and friends. In the first section we are provided with the typical life experien...