The Deer Hunter

A devastating masterpiece of Americana. One that leaves you forever changed. I think I'll need a few days and probably a few rewatches to properly understand and then articulate what this movie has made me feel, but I'll try to at least express the thoughts that are fresh after my first watch. What does it mean to go to war? More fundamentally, what does it mean to destroy? What price do we, as individuals, and then, as a society, pay for causing destruction? I feel as if I have come closer than ever to these questions. Thankfully, we are at a stage in Western society where most of us will never have to actually face the horrors of war and our explorations of the topic remain purely academic. Yet for most of the 20th century, young men (sometimes children) were thrown head-first into the maelstrom of warfare and returned forever changed. What is the net result of war? For the Vietnam War, this was the key question at the heart of counterculture. And the answer being that we are all losers at the end of a war. But I feel Deer Hunter is more concerned with another question. A much more fundamental one: if we solely destroy, without an obvious constructive output, what do we gain? I believe this is posed by the first sequence which features a large imposing factory made of rusty metal with tall chimneys spitting out black smoke and, on the inside, seemingly uncontrollable flames crackling and jumping and burning everything in their path. Whatever is happening inside those flames is clearly destructive; something is being burnt up forever, there is no going back from that level of destruction. Yet, the final output of this factory is constructive (barring climate arguments). In fact, it is constructive in quite an obvious way; it is a steel mill! Producing the steel we use to build our cities! And I imagine there is probably an anti-capitalist/imperialist argument someone somewhere has made linked to this, but my focus is on how this destruction differs to the one that we see in the war. The destruction we see, specifically from Steve, Michael and Nick's eyes, is destruction for destruction's sake; for the enjoyment of the viet-cong, for the enjoyment of westerners and south viets, for revenge, for escape. This is a war that is taking everyone and everything down a dark path to hell. And the destruction we wage, whether it's against us, by us, or around us, affects us deeply. No matter how much you run, how much you drink, you cannot escape the level of death you saw, nor the level of death you caused. You can only try to add the opposite to the world. You can be constructive. You can refuse to shoot a deer in front of you. You can save your friend from melting in a mental institution away from his family. You can love a woman who has lost hope. You can save your best friend from himself.