My Life at the Movies 10.14.08:1978 - The Deerhunter

Posted by DC Perry on 10.14.2008

If anyone ever forces you to play Russian Roulette, make sure you trick them into filling the gun. It's the little life lessons that count.

1978. The world, if my childhood pictures are to be believed, was harvest gold and avocado green. The American economy was in a recession, the Dow Jones Industrial Average having lost nearly 3/4 of its value. Wait, what year was I talking about? If you had any money to see a movie, you had a few options. Superman would convince you a man could fly, but that seems like a dangerous idea to float during an economic recession. People were probably thinking about it anyway. Midnight Express taught us all about Turkish prisons and what boobs look like smashed against glass. But despite all that awesomeness, the best movie of the year was The Deer Hunter.



Let's recap the year, shall we?

1978 at a Glance

US President: Jimmy Carter
Median annual salary: $17,000
Gallon of gas: $.63
Dozen eggs: $.82
New house: $62,500
New car: $6,400
Movie ticket: $2.34
Boston Red Sox: Bucky Fucking Dent
Me: Walking, talking, eating, calling my sister a turkey, Sheffield, Massachusetts
Wife: Still undiscovered

This is the second De Niro movie I've done in the past three weeks. Anybody else notice that the older he gets, the more Milo Ventimiglia looks like a young Robert De Niro? It's kind of freaking me out.



Vietnam may have been a shitty war, but it gave us some brilliant movies (he said, tipping his hand for next week ever so slightly). Where are the masterpieces about the Iraq War? Actually, Grace is Gone is a pretty amazing piece of work. And The Deer Hunter came out five years after the Vietnam War ended, so we should be ready to wait a hundred and five more years (or maybe 10,005 years) for something of this quality, I guess.

Jean-Paul Sartre said "Hell is other people." The Deer Hunter says pretty much the same thing, except it takes three hours to do it and it's a little uncertain about that whole "other" thing. Michael (De Niro), Steve ( John Savage), and Nick (Christopher Walken) are factory workers in Clairton, a western Pennsylvania Russian immigrant town. Steve is about to get married to Angela ( Rutanya Alda), who's "not so thin," if you get our drift (if you don't, we'll drift it right in front of you – she's pregnant, and it ain't his), and all three of them are about to ship out for Vietnam. Before they go, though, they're going deer hunting. Michael and Nick are both looking forward to the trip, but for different reasons. Michael enjoys the hunt, the skill involved in taking the deer down in one shot ("Two is pussy."). Nick likes the trees, the mountains, the way things all look different; in short, everything his factory job isn't. After Steve's elaborate (and very patriotic) Orthodox wedding, where they meet a taciturn Green Beret who has only two words for Vietnam, and after their unsuccessful hunting trip, the men head back to the bar. John (George Dzundza) goes to the piano and plays what can only be described as requiem for their lives as they know it. Everyone sits quietly and listens.



Cut to Vietnam. Michael is a Green Beret, and he's torching and gunning down a North Vietnamese soldier who has just thrown a grenade into a group of civilians. Reinforcements drop in, including Nick and Steve, and the three reunite just before they're captured. Turns out "Didi Mau!" is Vietnamese for "Point these guns at your heads and pull the trigger before we throw you into underwater bamboo cages!" Who knew? Steve is clearly shell shocked. Michael can barely calm him down every time a gun clicks, whether it goes off or not. After Steve ends up in the bamboo cage, Michael convinces Nick to goad the guards into putting more and more bullets in their guns until they have enough to escape. Foolproof! Well, assuming they survive. They do, and there's a bloodbath. Michael is ready to ditch Steve, since he's dead weight, but Nick won't. They make their way downriver to a bridge where a helicopter spots them but can only get Nick aboard. Michael rescues Steve and leaves him with some South Vietnamese troops to have his broken leg tended to, then disappears.

Nick's pretty messed up in the head after all this. He assumes Michael and Steve sacrificed themselves for him, and he starts hanging out in a seedy part of Saigon at night. He meets a French man who runs a Russian Roulette ring (this is big business in Vietnam, apparently). Nick angrily grabs the gun from one of the players and points it at the man's, then his own, head in turn, then storms out.



Clairton plans a big homecoming for Michael, but he ditches it. Linda (Meryl Streep), Nick's girlfriend, has taken over the place Michael and Nick shared, and she tells Michael that Nick went AWOL. Michael later finds out from Angela that Steve's in a veteran's hospital, and he has no interest in leaving. He found a comfortable place for himself, and he just doesn't fit in outside. Linda wants a relationship with Michael, but he's too distant and too guilty over Nick's disappearance. He returns to Saigon and finds Nick playing Russian Roulette. Nick has no idea who Michael is. He's lost himself. Michael sits down across from him and plays, trying to jog his memory by risking his own life. He asks him if he remembers the trees back home. Nick remembers. "One shot?" Michael smiles. Yeah, one shot. Nick fires, and he's gone.



Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau would love this movie. These guys are poisoned by industrialization. They are not equipped for reality. Hunting trips help them escape the harsh conditions of their factory jobs, but they don't know how to take care of themselves when they go, forgetting basic items like boots and socks but remembering cold cuts and Twinkies. Michael is the only one who has any connection to nature – he knows Indian lore, and he cares about making humane kills when he hunts. He's the only one who doesn't pamper himself ("I like to starve myself. Keeps the fear up."), though he does see Rolling Rock as the best beer around, which shows he's unconsciously part of the pre-packaged, unreal society. As run down and destitute as life in Clairton, it's downright luxurious compared to Vietnam. He comes out slightly better than the other two, but not much. Michael doesn't gain much emotional scarring, but that's mostly because he had plenty before he left. He's more distant, cold, and disconnected, but he was already pushing himself to that before he left Clairton. When Stanley (John Cazale) wants to borrow boots and socks on their hunting trip, Michael shows him a single bullet (foreshadowing, folks!) and says, "Stanley, see this? This is this. This ain't something else. This is this. From now on, you're on your own." Being industrialized – being separate from nature, from their own humanity, rotted them from within before they ever got to Vietnam. The only one who didn't rot was so disconnected from his own society that he couldn't fit in there. After Nick's funeral, Angela points out that it's a gray day. In the shadow of the factory, every day is gray.

Was this the best movie of 1978, Axel?



Fuckin' A.