The Deer Hunter

Annotation for KRRR! 2012 by Michal Böhm

The Deer Hunter (1977) – one of the most important films about the Vietnam War – can be divided into three parts of almost equal length. They cover the period from 1968, when personal participation in the war was still an expression of love for the American homeland, to the ignominious end of the war conflict in 1975. The entire first part of the film is spent observing one day in an American industrial town, where a stormy wedding party is taking place, during which the enlistment of three young men in Vietnam (one of whom is the groom) is also celebrated. The opening part of the film is thus dedicated to a miniature sketch of their character, as well as a realistic description of the environment from which they come. Director Michael Cimino only takes us to the center of the war with an unexpected sharp cut, which also begins the second part of the film, which presents a shocking antithesis to the story so far.

If we were to classify films in the war genre based on how much time the audience spends in a war zone, The Deer Hunter would be more of a psychological drama. After the first third, Cimino does throw the viewer into the midst of the turmoil of war, but only long enough to expose the heroes to a fundamental existential situation, and for the rest of the film, he could watch them cope with that experience. And although the director offers a critique of war as such, this is not a topic that would be of primary interest to him.

Cimino is primarily interested in the change that a person goes through after the war experience. And especially the experience of an American who has been through Vietnam. The idealistic expectations and subsequent disillusionment that the film characters experience in relation to Vietnam actually represent a synecdoche of the trauma that the entire America as a nation suffered after the fiasco in Vietnam.

The theme of Vietnam trauma is not very familiar to us and may evoke a certain contempt for American self-pity and wounded pride rather than compassion. The other most famous films about Vietnam - Lead Vest (1987) and Apocalypse (1979) - use the conflict primarily to make a general comment on the war, but they do not allow the viewer to identify with their characters as strongly as The Deer Hunter. In Coppola's psychedelic Apocalypse, the characters are more like satirical caricatures, while in Lead Vest, Kubrick denies the cadets their personal identity in order to comment on the way the army treats its soldiers. In Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), the viewer can identify with the character of a young rookie, but he is more of an observer than an acting protagonist.

On the other hand, with the main characters of The Deer Hunter, we get a taste of their real life before the war and experience the subsequent hell of war with them. We naturally understand their inability to integrate back into a society that seemed to understand none of it. And although as former members of the Soviet Eastern Bloc we don't share the trauma itself with Americans, we can share the feelings of those who experienced the Vietnam trauma in this exceptional film.