The Deer Hunter

Man's most primal reaction to majesty is mastery. The awe inspired in us by the graceful gallop of the mighty deer can only be conquered and controlled with the deer itself; the terrifying panoramic world of thought and feeling from which we feel ourselves so distant is too tremendous to become part of us, nor we part of it, and therefore the moment that opens it up to us, the beauty that briefly bridges the gap, must be clasped to our chests and destroyed. The killing of the deer is the denial of something better than this, to cast one's eyes away from the wide world and fix them sadly on the damp little square of it in front of our feet.

Deer-hunting, like the Russian Roulette the POWs in Vietnam are forced to play, is a game. But it, too, like Russian Roulette, was once played by men with survival the stakes, and the deaths of the deer were the lives of the men who killed them. Before the war, Michael is as dead as the deer he hauls home on the bonnet of his car; by its end, he is as alive and wracked and thrashing as the wounded comrade he carries through jungles to dump on the front end of a dusty jeep.

When Stan is watching a stranger grope his girlfriend on the reception dancefloor, there can scarcely be a red-blooded male in the audience who is not secretly thinking what he supposes Stan is thinking, which is why it is all the more brutal and shocking when he stalks across, splits the dance up, and punches her instead. But there is no redemption for the deer hunter in the knowledge that he, at least, sees beauty before he closes his eyes against it, and that his brutality is not impotently directed against himself. For the deer hunter, unlike Stan, must go home every day to his musty trailer with the tyres on the roof, the stuffed head on the wall with the milky, lifeless eyes, the fiancée of his best friend, and the drive to fight what is most beautiful in others with what is ugliest in ourselves.

Thomas Clark