MOVIE MEMOIRS
Sali Hughes on the films that shaped her life #15 THE FILM YOU CAN’T LEAVE ALONE — THE DEER HUNTER
HAVE YOU EVER had a friend whom you love, think charming, incomparably wise, intelligent, insightful or interesting, but can only face seeing once a year, maybe even less? It’s not that you’d want to imagine the world without them in it, but seeing them can wring dry your emotional core for several weeks? Well, this is essentially how I feel about The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino’s 1978 epic about a group of friends from a close-knit community of Russianamericans in a Pennsylvania steelworks town, who leave their families to fight in Vietnam. Over three-plus-change harrowing hours, Cimino, through his extraordinarily talented cast including Christopher Walken, Robert De Niro, John Cazale (already suffering from terminal cancer during filming) and his fiancée, theatreactor Meryl Streep in her first substantial film role, delivers one gut-punch after another. From the terrifying swamp scene in which the friends are held captive in a rat-infested bamboo cage to await their execution, to the horrific and iconic denouement (SPOILER), where Mike (De Niro), finger on trigger, face in abject despair, confronts his dead-eyed, Ptsd-suffering soulmate, Nick (Walken), in a game of Russian Roulette. One viewing of The
Deer Hunter is enough to scar the soul so why, I wonder, have I willingly reopened the wound even once, never mind every couple of years?
The same question can be asked of my repeated viewings of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s
Nest, Nil By Mouth and Dumbo (yeah, you read that right. I make no apology). These are the films guaranteed to break me and yet no sooner have I put myself back together, I’m halting the channel hop and deciding once more won’t hurt. I’ll sit through each like someone sloshing greedily through a vineyard in the belief that a hangover will never come. But it always does. As the titles roll, I despair at the injustice, political neglect, disempowerment of ordinary people, at human beings’ seemingly endless capacity to hurt one another (and baby circus elephants), and wonder why I can’t just get my thrills from the American Pie franchise or one of the many variations on
Dude, Where’s My Car?. Am I just a glutton for punishment, or, in making me feel terrible, is The
Deer Hunter serving an important purpose? The truth is that in forcing my anguish, outrage and heartbreak, Cimino’s masterpiece makes me feel alive. I’m hardly one for spiritual awakenings, but Nicky’s numb, exploited, shell-shocked indifference to his impending death makes me confront how much I still care about mine. My capacity for anger over the wasted lives of the Vietnam war reinvigorates my rage at modern US policy, and reminds me that nothing is hopeless, everything will ultimately change. But I’d be lying if I claimed the appeal of films that make me feel terrible is entirely noble. Sometimes, I feel suitably miserable that I want to wallow in the power of it all, to have the wind knocked out of my sails, to cry with impunity and the separation afforded by an LCD screen. I want to pour petrol on my hopelessness, through the artfully controlled use of fictionalised images and stories, whose visceral effects I know will nonetheless be temporary. I choose to be floored by my own feelings, then left to reflect and rebuild, my perspective re-calibrated for another couple of years. Film can do that like nothing else. That’s why we keep on pulling the trigger.