What was largely unremarked upon, at least at the time, was the fact that, as a metaphor, the Russian roulette sequences were nothing short of stunning and entirely apt.
The last time I’d felt to wrung out by a film was Taxi Driver four years earlier, and it was itself a kind of thinly-disguised Vietnam metaphor about a unglued vet – De Niro’s Travis Bickle – who becomes something of a national hero for perpetrating a righteous bloodbath in the seedy hotel where Jodie Foster’s pubescent hooker turns tricks.Įvery bit as intense as Martin Scorsese’s movie, The Deer Hunter – also featuring de Niro as a repressed but explosive veteran – was nevertheless ripe for attack on the basis that it not only fabricated the very thing that made it such a powerful viewing experience, but that it ultimately justified what, certainly by 1979, was an utterly unjustifiable historical quagmire.
I remember travelling from Ottawa, where I was studying film, to Toronto to see the movie in first run, and I recall emerging almost physically shaking from the experience. Up to a point, the charge was baffling because what movie isn’t a metaphor of something or other, but on the other it was inevitable since the depiction of the game was not only central to The Deer Hunter’s plot, it was depicted in the movie with such excruciating suspense it likely generated flashbacks and nightmares all on its own. It had, so far as just about anyone who’d actually been there, never happened. As in, according to just about anyone who’d actually been there, the Russian roulette business was something of a crock. In the first instance, Cimino’s movie was tagged with racism, and in the second, it was attacked for playing loose with the historical record. The major issues driving this anger were these: the depiction of Vietnamese on both sides – North and South – as sadists and savages, and the game of Russian roulette forced on two of the movie’s principle characters, Christopher Walken’s Nick and Robert De Niro’s Michael. Of this quartet, only Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter managed to stir up the kind of controversy that saw the movie draw protests (among anti-Vietnam veterans, among others) in most major cities where it played. Suddenly, or so it seemed, Vietnam was everywhere: over the course of eighteen months four major Hollywood releases – Coming Home, Who’ll Stop the Rain, The Deer Hunter and, later in the year, Francis Coppola’s epic nightmare of a movie, Apocalypse Now – were released.
If Vietnam haunted America as a kind of open, unhealed wound, it asserted itself with chilling power in the form of something that would become something of a hallmark of the movies of the day: the Vietnam flashback.īut something had happened by the time John Wayne opened that envelope in April, 1979. It lurked behind the facade of genre like a ghost or a bad dream that couldn’t be shaken off. Which meant, at least on screen, the war was both ubiquitous and invisible at the same time.
Nothing had taken on the conflict directly, like The Green Berets and a largely unseen little movie called Go Tell the Spartans, but the indirect influence of the war could not be denied: metaphorically at least, it filtered on down through westerns, crime movies and even horror movies of the late sixties and first half of the seventies. In striking contrast to the two World Wars and even Korea, Vietnam had been something of a phantom event in the movies. In the ensuing decade, Vietnam, the most polarizing war in American history since the Civil War, was a conspicuous absence on the big screen. Ten years earlier, Wayne had become something of a national laughingstock – especially among liberals and those further left – for directing and starring in The Green Berets, an outrageously simplistic flag-waver set in the jungles of Vietnam. Not only because he was stricken with the cancer he would die from in a matter of months, but also because, as the presenter of the Best Picture Oscar of 1978, Wayne had to keep his red-meat conservatism to himself when he opened the envelope and it read “The Deer Hunter.”
The final public appearance of America’s top cowboy must have been something of an ordeal for John Wayne. How The Deer Hunter’s Oscar Win Ended Hollywood’s Unofficial Moratorium on the Vietnam War JBy