09-11-2012, 12:03 AM
My psyche insisted on dragging this thread back from the depths of DPF.
Why?
There are current threads on DPF about the programming and conditioning of the human mind for malign purposes, and about vulnerable children who were prey to powerful paedophiles, and who cried out for help and were abandoned.
How does the psyche deal with devastating violence and trauma? With overwhelming violence and trauma that is sanctioned, that is Power Incarnate?
Does the climax of The Deer Hunter occur with the banality of the bar owner who didn't make it to Vietnam saying "How does everybody want their eggs?" before the descent into the safety of an American mythology?
Or does the climax take place at the wedding party just before Steve and Nick and Michael go to Vietnam, when the Green Beret walks into the bar and, when asked about his experiences, says "Fuck It!"?
At the end of Full Metal Jacket, does "Joker" rebel, preserving his humanity, or join the Killing Club?
More than a decade ago, along with an academic researcher of integrity, I listened to the stories of a man who had been a victim of America's human radiation experiments in the immediate post WW2 period. Some of his chldren were stillborn. He blamed it on the radiation he'd been subjected to.
He was from an immigrant community. He wanted to belong to America. He claimed later to have been recruited as a Mechanic (in the Evica-Drago Mechanic - Facilitator - Sponsor model) in MK-ULTRA offshoot experiments.
More than a decade ago, he told me things about the death of Frank Olson that we now know to be true.
He wept as he told of procuring children - street children, orphans - in Brazil and taking them to a compound deep in the Amazon jungle for covert experimentation.
At the time, he thought he belonged.
These powerful people trust me with important work.
I belong to secret America, therefore I am.
As an ageing man, he realised he hated what he belonged to. What he had done in order to belong.
In the end, he refused to participate in a documentary or go on the record in writing. In fact, his testimony now exists as a signed oral history, lodged in a small American university archive, which cannot be published until 30 years after his death.
Anyway, this man was a victim of devastating abuse, and then he joined the system and became an abuser.
He was never able to articulate quite what he wanted. Why he was talking. He didn't see any solution to his lot, any possibility of redemption for what he had done.
He was a religious man. I suspect he thought he wanted his soul back.
I looked through his tears, into his eyes.
I don't know what I saw.
Why?
Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Peter - good points.
They make me realize that I view The Deer Hunter primarily as a film about American identity, rather than a Vietnam film.
For me, Apocalypse Now is a Vietnam movie: Conrad's Heart of Darkness meets the Phoenix Program.
Platoon is a Vietnam movie: complete with an ending which is Oliver Stone at his very worst.
I interpret Full Metal Jacket as part of Kubrick's lifelong exploration of Power, Control and the human Psyche. If A Clockwork Orange is about Their attempts to control and channel violence, Full Metal Jacket is about how They create Killers. And what causes Manufactured Killers to break with the conditioning and, potentially, rebel (or not): through Suicide at the end of Part One; and Horror at the end of Part Two.
Joker "mercy" kills the Vietnamese woman. Has he joined the Club? Or rebelled?
The credits roll as Marines exchange their tribal war songs for Disney: Who's the leader of the Club that's made for you and me? M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-E!
The scenes set in the Russian American steel community at the heart of The Deer Hunter resonate very strongly with me. I view the movie as the story of a small, insular, community with a strong code of loyalty: the need to belong of outsiders. Suddenly that fundamental, unthinking, automatic, world view is tested by extreme events. The young men sign up to fight for "their country", to prove their loyalty, and end up playing Russian roulette in a rat-infested hellhole. Vietnam only really exists in the Russian roulette pits of the river and Saigon. For me, Vietnam represents a psychological trauma in the journey of these young Russian Americans discovering what is important and what isn't.
And perhaps this is why the one-dimensional portrayal of the Russian roulette game organizers doesn't really bother me. I don't see them as representing the Vietcong. I see them as extreme manifestations of the human condition, which Nicky (Walken) and Mike (DeNiro) are drawn to and repelled by, in their own different ways.
So, I read the end scenes of The Deer Hunter, Nicky's funeral, and the breakfast wake, as being the culmination of this journey into the psyche of these young people and their discovery of deeper meanings of identity, loyalty, love, hate.
Michael has finally brought Nick "home", to the American immigrant steel town in which he was born and raised.
They sit round the kitchen table, struggling to make sense of what they've been through.
"How does everybody want their eggs?"
"God bless America. Land that I love."
A great and ambiguous ending.
There are current threads on DPF about the programming and conditioning of the human mind for malign purposes, and about vulnerable children who were prey to powerful paedophiles, and who cried out for help and were abandoned.
How does the psyche deal with devastating violence and trauma? With overwhelming violence and trauma that is sanctioned, that is Power Incarnate?
Does the climax of The Deer Hunter occur with the banality of the bar owner who didn't make it to Vietnam saying "How does everybody want their eggs?" before the descent into the safety of an American mythology?
Or does the climax take place at the wedding party just before Steve and Nick and Michael go to Vietnam, when the Green Beret walks into the bar and, when asked about his experiences, says "Fuck It!"?
At the end of Full Metal Jacket, does "Joker" rebel, preserving his humanity, or join the Killing Club?
More than a decade ago, along with an academic researcher of integrity, I listened to the stories of a man who had been a victim of America's human radiation experiments in the immediate post WW2 period. Some of his chldren were stillborn. He blamed it on the radiation he'd been subjected to.
He was from an immigrant community. He wanted to belong to America. He claimed later to have been recruited as a Mechanic (in the Evica-Drago Mechanic - Facilitator - Sponsor model) in MK-ULTRA offshoot experiments.
More than a decade ago, he told me things about the death of Frank Olson that we now know to be true.
He wept as he told of procuring children - street children, orphans - in Brazil and taking them to a compound deep in the Amazon jungle for covert experimentation.
At the time, he thought he belonged.
These powerful people trust me with important work.
I belong to secret America, therefore I am.
As an ageing man, he realised he hated what he belonged to. What he had done in order to belong.
In the end, he refused to participate in a documentary or go on the record in writing. In fact, his testimony now exists as a signed oral history, lodged in a small American university archive, which cannot be published until 30 years after his death.
Anyway, this man was a victim of devastating abuse, and then he joined the system and became an abuser.
He was never able to articulate quite what he wanted. Why he was talking. He didn't see any solution to his lot, any possibility of redemption for what he had done.
He was a religious man. I suspect he thought he wanted his soul back.
I looked through his tears, into his eyes.
I don't know what I saw.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war