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Deer Hunter Out of Focus“The Deer Hunter” is a vile, snobbish, vicious film, all the more evil because it is a brilliant technical exercise in cinema making (though like all self-indulgent important” films, it is narcissistically long)“The Deer Hunter.” directed by Michael Cimino, is less about the Vietnam War than it is about “America,” maintaining cautious neutrality about the war itself and even being so bold and innovative as to present the Viet Cong as something less than living saints It is not so much the war that is portrayed as evil as the American nation and culture, subtly but brilliantlyportrayed as being irredeemably bad. In Cimino's vision, the war and alt its mindless horrors are in fact the result of the “machismo” of America, particularly of American men. So well done is the film that you walk out of the theater persuaded that we are a “macho” culture and that the same urge which turns many of us into tavern heroes and hunters of dumb animals led us to the disaster at Vietnam.It is only afterwards that the thoughtful person begins to wonderFather jAndrew j v L j Greeley jhow “macho” American society actually is. Are American men more likely to be the victims of machismo than, let us say, Spanish or Italian or German or Russian men** How many Americans actually are hunters? Is there really a link between the pseudo-self-reliance and toughness, the John Wayne heroism of The Deer Hunter” and Vietnam?One does not, of course, test art is tic symbols against social science data, but one can legitimately ask whether the symbol perverts rather than clarifies the reality I submit that the symbolism of The Deer Hunter” is a perversion It was not frontiersman machismo that got us into Vietnam. It was moral self-righteousness, the conviction instilled in the American people — not by the ethnic, working-class hunters, but by their intellectual andcultural elites — that we were morally responsible to fight tyranny everywhere in the world — a conviction preached in 1917, in 1940 and in1950, to justify two world wars and Korea. Americans accepted this moral obligation their “betters ’ instilled in them and fought in four foreign wars during this century, not because our self-interest was at stake, but because we were morally obliged to fight in such wars. Thisnotion of the moral mission of Amer ica is a major cultural flaw - and one which ought to be ruthlessly exposed by works of art. but such a flaw in the national character has nothing to do with ethnic working men who hang out at bars and go deer-hunting on weekendsOn the contrary, if the American character flaw which caused the Vietnam involvement is to be castigated, it is the journalists, the editorial writers the college pro lessors, the Harvard graduates, the graduate-school trained govern ment bureaucrats about whom the movies ought to be made
Newspaper Details
Colorado Springs Gazette
Colorado Springs, Colorado, US
Fri, Apr 27, 1979
Page 15
Full Page
Clipped by
Jon C.
NJ, USA 13 Jan 2020
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