The Deer Hunter

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

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ived by his one shot nearly religious philosophy of deer hunting. As he says, "A deer has to be taken with one shot. I try to tell people that but they don't listen," (Cimino 1978). He has lived by this code of honor and ritual all of his life. In one exchange with Nick, he explains that anything less is unmanly: Michael: I'll tell ya one thing, if I find out my life had to end up being in the mountains, it'd be alright, but it has to be in your mind. Nick: What? One shot? Michael: Two is pussy. (Cimino 1978) However, in the final deer hunting sequence, we see that the Vietnam combat experiences the men have endured has altered even Michael. No longer can he abide by his previous, pre-war definitions of manhood and courage. He has seen all of those lofty concepts like honor and manhood don't add up to a hill of beans in the brutal reality that is combat. Hunting with John, Axel and Stan in the final deer hunting episode, Michael hunts by himself in the snow covered mountains. The others shoot at their prey but miss it with a spray of scattered bullets. Michael, in contrast, stalks a beautiful buck and has the animal locked helplessly into his gun sight. He aims at the animal and surveys the scene for a moment. He

Category: Film - T