DEER HUNTER, THE 85
an instrument of torture on American POWs. At Oscar night (9 April 1979) 13
members of Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW) staged a leafleting protest
against the film outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. In a press
interview, VVAW member Randy Rowland said, “Having John Wayne give the Best
Picture Award to The Deer Hunter was just too much. I’m convinced that John
Wayne knew the film would win, because it carries on the John Wayne tradition.
It’s The Green Berets of the 1970s. It puts the shoe on the wrong foot, turning the
Viet nam ese into the aggressors and war criminals. It’s a racist view and lays the
basis for future wars. At the end of the film, when the survivors sing ‘God Bless
Amer i ca,’ I was shaking with rage” (Hartl, p. 69). Further aggravating matters,
Cimino lied about his military ser vice while promoting the film, falsely claiming
he had been a Green Beret medic in Vietnam at the time of the Tet Offensive in
1968: a claim debunked in the April 1979 issue of Harper’s magazine by Tom Buck-
ley, a former Vietnam correspondent for The New York Times. Lost in all the outrage
over the film’s reckless deployment of the Rus sian roulette meta phor, however,
was the recognition that The Deer Hunter does make a valid point; that the war
wreaked havoc on the white working class that supplied the bulk of American
troops in Vietnam, an insight proffered some years later by USC En glish professor
Rick Berg: “What we see [in the film’s culminating “God Bless Amer i ca” scene] is
a community shattered by Vietnam, trying to express a deeply rooted national-
ism, with all its ironies and contradictions. These people, then, are not merely the
inheritors of simple freedoms, but the constructors of a history that has both
made and unmade them. Like the Viet nam ese, they are the ignorant and innocent
victims of a war being waged against exploited peoples by exploited people” (Berg,
1986, p. 120).
Reel History Versus Real History
As a cinematic repre sen ta tion of ethnic working- class life in Amer i ca, c.1967–1975,
The Deer Hunter has considerable merit. As a Vietnam War movie, it is a pure fiction
that perpetrates gross historical inaccuracies. Though the North Viet nam ese treated
American POWs brutally, there is not a single documented instance of either the
Viet Cong or NVA forcing American POWs to play Rus sian roulette for their captors’
amusement. Likewise, there is no evidence that Rus sian roulette gambling dens
existed in Saigon during the Vietnam War—or have ever existed anywhere, for
that matter. The film’s timeline is also deeply suspect. Nick starts playing Rus sian
roulette on a regular basis no later than 1968, yet he is still alive when Michael
tries to rescue him in April 1975: a miraculous feat of survival on Nick’s part that
beggars logic. Fi nally, the movie’s exclusive focus on white working- class soldiers,
although perfectly valid, pres ents a skewed ethnographic depiction of the Ameri-
can experience in Vietnam. Despite being barely vis i ble in the film, 12.6 percent
of the soldiers in Vietnam were African American. Overrepresented in combat sit-
uations, African Americans accounted for 15.1 percent of the war’s American
casualties while comprising only 11 percent of the population: a historical real ity
that cannot be extrapolated from The Deer Hunter.