#53 ‘The Deer Hunter’
Brotherhood, Trauma, and the Great American Gaslight
The Deer Hunter (1978) wants to be a war epic. A meditation on friendship. A searing portrait of PTSD. What it actually is, though, is three hours of slow, masculine unraveling framed by a wedding, a war crime, and a lot of deer getting blamed for things they didn’t do. It’s a film that looks you dead in the eye and says: “War is hell. But you know what’s worse? Men crying in bars.”
Michael Cimino directs with the kind of reverence typically reserved for monuments and funerals. The first hour is a never-ending Russian Orthodox wedding sequence that could double as a hostage situation. We’re introduced to our central trio: Mike (Robert De Niro, brooding with patriotic pain), Nick (Christopher Walken, gentle and doomed), and Steven (John Savage, mostly there to suffer). They’re steelworkers, drinkers, and rugged archetypes of blue-collar America—salt-of-the-earth types whose emotional vocabulary doesn’t extend beyond shotguns and deer antlers.
The wedding drags on forever because Cimino wants you to feel the Americana. The flannel. The beer. The myth of noble masculinity before it’s ripped apart by Vietnam. But here’s the thing: these men were already broken. The war just gives them permission to stop pretending.
And when we do get to Vietnam? It’s chaos. Violence. Screaming. And the infamous Russian roulette scene, which became the film’s calling card—and its most morally incoherent flourish. There is zero historical evidence of Viet Cong forcing POWs to play Russian roulette. But Cimino stages it like a ritual, turning it into a metaphor for trauma, chance, and male martyrdom. It's powerful. It’s unforgettable. It’s also exploitative as hell.
Vietnamese characters? Barely people. Mostly shouting, sneering caricatures wielding guns and cigarettes. Women? Decoration or devastation. Back home, Meryl Streep plays the sole female character with a name and lines, and even she exists only to absorb the psychic fallout of the men’s pain. She whispers. She weeps. She waits. It's not a role—it's a shrine to patience.
Nick never returns, Mike comes back hollowed out, Steven loses his legs. And yet, the film closes not on revolution, not on justice, but on “God Bless America”, sung through tears and post-traumatic inertia. A moment meant to feel solemn. What it is is deranged. A jingoistic lullaby over the corpses of broken men, performed by a community still pretending it understands what any of it meant.
Yes, the performances are incredible. Walken in particular looks like he’s dying from the inside out. Yes, Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography is bleakly gorgeous. But The Deer Hunter is less a critique of war than a melodrama of male suffering, sanctified by violence and wrapped in a flag. It doesn’t ask why America destroys its men. It just wants you to cry about it, and maybe buy a commemorative rifle on the way out.
3.5 out of 5 bullets in the chamber
(One for Walken. One for De Niro’s tortured stillness. One for the cinematography. Half a star for the audacity to end with a hymn instead of an answer. The missing stars? Blown away with nuance, accountability, and the possibility that women might be more than witnesses to masculine collapse.)
