The Deer Hunter

[Jan Klimkowski]

Peter, Jan, et al,

I can't resist chiming in on this wonderfully illuminating and challenging thread.

Charles - I've always shared your view that DPF should be a place where art and politics can be discussed and argued over.

Welcome to this thread. I was hoping you'd show up. :bandit:

If we reject the either/or, this/that approach to arts criticism, I believe we arrive at the realization that The Deer Hunter is indeed, as Jan notes, ambiguous in its messages. And ambiguity often reflects the artist's own multiplicities of viewpoints and values.

I read Cimino's ending as a terribly depressing testament to the power of tribalism. What did any of the characters -- with the exception of Nick and in particular Michael and Steve -- learn from the horrors they experienced? That in the end, country endures?

Yup.

I've watched The Deer Hunter many many times.

I've watched it intently, allowing myself to be sucked into its world, maybe three times. Once, I had a very similar reaction to yours above.

Depressingly, for these characters, Country endures.

The other two times, I had a different reaction.

One time, the characters seemed to have an unconscious realization that country, flag, honour, as they had always defined it, was empty, meaningless.

John, the bar owner, asks: "How does everybody want their eggs?"

The Meryl Streep character, who loves both Nick and Mike, tersley responds: "How about just scrambled, John?"

A moment of silent reflection is broken by Angela, Steven's pharmaceutically zombified wife, saying: "It's been such a gray day."

The banality is absolute.

To fill the silence, John, who never left immigrant steel town, starts singing "God Bless America". And the others pick it up. Still desperate to belong. Even though what they thought they belonged is dirty, contaminated, broken.

The third time I was sucked into The Deer Hunter completely and absolutely, after watching the ending, I just sat on the floor for hours afterwards, thinking what the fuck is this film about????

Charles - I am in total agreement about the perhaps necessary and inevitable ambiguity of art.

Only Nick recognized what he saw when the curtain briefly parted. One of the most telling scenes in this regard takes place when Nick, in a Saigon hospital, is asked by an attending physician who his reading his chart, "Is that a Russian name?"

Nick laughs and cries at the grossest stupidity -- at the same stupidity evinced by the Johnny Mann singers at film's end.

Another great and ambiguous scene is when the mysterious American (as opposed to Russian American) Green Beret arrives at the bar near the climax of the wedding.

It's a Green Beret !
- [ Steven ] Hey ! Whoo ! - [ Mike ] No kidding.
Jerry ! Jerry, give the man a drink.
- Hey ! - Give him a drink !
- Sir ! Sir ! - Sir !
Na zdorovije.
- Na zdorovije. - Na zdorovije.
Don't cause any kind of problem, huh ?
Nah, I wanna talk to the man. I wanna talk to the man. We're goin' over there.
Sir, Mike Vronsky.
- Nick. This is the groom, Steve. - I'm the best man.
We're goin' airborne, sir. What's it like ?
- I hope they send us where the bullets are flyin'. - That's right.
- Fighting's the worst, huh ? - [ Both ] That's right.
Fuck it.
- Fuck it ? What did he say ? - Fuck it.
Fuck it. That's what I thought.
W-- Well, what's it like over there ?
[ Mike ] Can you tell us anything ?
Fuck it.
[ Mike ] Okay, fuck it.
Fuck him.
Fuck it. Hey !
[ Steven ] Michael, hey.
- Hey. - Fuck who ?
Fuck who ?
- [ Axel ] Who the hell is he ? - [ Mike ] Who the fuck knows ?
[ Axel ] He looks like a fuckin' hillbilly.
[ Mike ] Give him another drink, Jerry. Just the same.
- Hey ! Fuck it ! - [ Laughing ]
- [ Laughter Continues ] - [ Steven ] Fuck you.

The Green Beret knows the truth about Vietnam. His only words are the existential "Fuck it".

They are not the words these young men, desperate to belong, to prove that they are worthy of belonging to their immigrant town's myth of America, want to hear.

I wonder what Mike or Nick would say to the Green Beret after they have encountered the reality of American War?

As for my interpretation of Cimino at film's end: The director very well might scoff at an appreciation that so broadly misses his intentions. I would respond by noting that often times artists are the last to realize what they really mean.

Yes.

A profound truth.