Landscapes of the Mind

I think this is getting closer to what the film is all about, and certainly why it works as well as it does. The audience is gripped and held there, by the human and psychological drama. I wan to make a link here that might be a little hard to take, but I think I can support it. Maybe it's because I just recently saw a (dismally amateurish) production of Shakespeare at the Opera House, but The Deer Hunter puts me in mind of Macbeth. Part of that play involves the three witches 'drawing out' from Macbeth some of his least admirable inner desires and qualities. The stage becomes (insome interpretations of the play at least) in a way located in the mind of the hero, and expresses his mental state. A similar kind of process goes on in Cimino's film. The traumatic experience of combat in Vietnam, which is presented as a kind of inferno — a totally alien, hostile, and sometimes almost surreal environment (a subjective viewpoint that rams us firmly into the protagonists' perspective, and is a valid explanation for the way the Vietnamese are depicted), changes the character of each of the three men. Nick (Walken) is consumed by it, Stephen (John Savage) both physically and mentally crippled, and Michael (Robert De Niro) is, possibly, strengthened.

The plot focuses on Michael, and it is interesting that in his important deer-hunting episodes (beautifully photographed - Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is superb throughout) the landscape once more moves towards surrealism. Constantly, Cimino's camera picks out incongruous or unexplained details (scattered pills at the hospital, the way De Niro grips a handful of knives and forks in the last scene) that give the film a.......... resonance? texture? The editing too, the order in which scenes are arranged (and the film's natural division into five parts, with a discernible if not always definable movement between them), creates more than just a feeling of depth and meaning, but a genuine significance of events and ideas related to one another.