The Deer Hunter is a film that shows the lives of people from a small town who go to the Vietnam war. The first hour of the movie, one of the friends is getting married. Except for preparing for the wedding, he and his friends are also preparing themselves to go to Vietnam. In the first part of the movie, the Vietnam war is really viewed as a very negative destructive factor. All of the men and women are proud that the men are going to serve their country. One of the men who cannot go to the war because of he is disabled even feels bad and tells his friends that he would have gone with them if he was not handicapped.
The next part of the movie, shows us the destruction of war. Unlike the other movies we have seen, it solely shows the 'cruelty' of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. The movie shows the VC or North Vietnamese shooting a wounded mother carrying her baby, a VC or North Vietnamese soldier throwing a grenade into a tomb where people including children were hiding. The movie also shows the cruelty of the Viet Cong/North Vietnamse Army in their betting game where they bet whether the Americans will crack under the pressure and shoot themselves.
When coming home, the film shows how the people back home haven't changed and are just as 'human' and caring as they were before. However, the veterens cannot be that way because of all they have seen and done.
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The first part of the Deer Hunter depicts the people in a small town in Pennsylvania. Two people are getting married and the whole town is very excited and happy. The film depicts the people as typical small town people who are busy in their everyday lives and are not really aware or concerned about what is going on outside of their town. The group of friends in this town is drafted to go to the Vietnam War and is proud to serve their country initially. These men look forward to go to Vietnam and expect to have great heroic experiences over there. One day before going to the war they bump into a Vietnam veteran in his military jacket at the bar. The men ask the veteran about the war and he replies “fuck it”. This is a foreshadowing of what the men’s lives will become like after they have experienced fighting in the war. They become indifferent and depressed.
ReplyDeleteThe film further depicts the destruction and hatred in war. When Michael and Nick are captured, they are forced to play Russian roulette, a horrifying game where your life depends solely on luck. Nick later becomes obsessed with this game because just as Mark Levy said the men who go to war have a need for a rush, they cannot stand their regular boring lives otherwise. This game symbolizes the Vietnam war where you only survived by luck. Another issue this movie symbolized was the shooting of the innocent deer as a symbol of shooting innocent Vietnamese villagers. The men from Pennsylvania used to go deer hunting for recreation and the deer that had done nothing wrong would get shot. Similarly, in the Vietnam war like other wars, oftentimes innocent people in villages would be destroyed just because the soldiers ‘felt like’ bombing or destroying that village on a certain day.
When coming home, the film shows how the people back home haven't changed and are just as caring as they were before. However, the veterans cannot be that way because of all they have seen and done in the war. However, one of the veterans’ wives, Angela, goes mute because of all she has seen in her husband since he came back from the war. This is to show that her husband is suffering terribly and there is nothing she can say or do to change this.
Overall, this film is an anti-war film because it shows us what the war does to people. The three friends who went to war were rather happy people leading normal lives but after going to war they had such a negative outlook and their lives were destroyed. The men went into the war supporting it and proud to fight for their own country but in the end at Nick’s funeral it becomes clear through their tone while singing God Bless America that they are questioning the war and whether it was necessary for their friend to die because of that war.