The Vietnam Reader (36 page)

Now, twenty years later, it’s hard to understand how critics missed what Cimino is trying to say about the individual and community. The institutions he’s accused of celebrating are all exposed, at best, as precarious. Linda is beaten by her drunken father. The priest refuses to listen to Steven’s mother, and so the church sanctifies a marriage in which the bride is pregnant by another man. Stan punches his girlfriend at the wedding reception. Michael is forced to admit that his hunter’s philosophy of “one shot” (possibly a metaphor for American foreign policy) doesn’t work. Linda and Michael together are unfaithful to Nick. Michael’s big-finned Cadillac, a stand-in for American prestige, slowly rusts and falls apart. In brief exteriors, we’re shown lonely people drinking outside the church, shut-ins peering from their windows. Throughout the film, we’re given examples of characters separated from the community (including all three friends), their exile often self-imposed. With all the talk about “home,” almost no scenes actually take place in someone’s home. And the version of “God Bless America” the friends sing in the end is a dirge, with all of the characters painfully aware of the price they’ve paid.

As for being a prowar film, certainly the fate of the three friends refutes that. Like the frontier hero and the United States, Michael discovers that his power to beat the odds—his mastery—has limits. Michael wins every game he plays, including, tragically, his final round of Russian roulette with Nick. The charges of being anti-Vietnamese may stick; Cimino, like so many other American authors and directors, isn’t concerned with the Vietnamese, only the war’s effect on America. It could be said that, like Caputo in
A Rumor of War,
Cimino paints his three heroes as innocents who can’t bear the evil that Vietnam is. And yet, in his portrayal of Tu Do Street and the Wall Street-like pit of the Russian roulette arena (the men in Western
suits, boxes of Kimbies piled in the background), Cimino appears to accuse America of contaminating Vietnamese culture. As usual, the viewer is left to determine whether
The Deer Hunter
celebrates or tests our national myths.

In terms of types, Cimino gives us a few veterans we’ve seen before. Michael fits the professional soldier category early on, and the troubled loner vet later. Stevie is at first the reluctant soldier and later the disabled vet, and Nick, in the end, is a bona fide psychotic and drug addict. All are portrayed as victims of the war, an improvement from the crazed bikers of the early-seventies films. But despite the fine performances of DeNiro and Walken, they still seem rather two-dimensional, emblems rather than fully rounded characters.

The common storyline of the vet trying to return to society through the love of a woman is present in Linda and Michael, with the interesting variation that Linda is the instigator. This is neatly underlined by the mismatch of Angela and Stevie. Axel’s caveman routine and Stan’s ridiculous notions of masculinity fit well into an examination of what it means to be a man or a woman in this society.
The Deer Hunter
takes on a great deal beyond the obvious metaphor of the hunt. Other themes include the correlation of luck and gambling, nature versus technology, fire and water, music as a communal bond, religious ritual, and the various uses of alcohol. If Cimino sometimes strays too far from realism—say, in Michael’s descent into hell with the satanic Frenchman—his extended metaphors also dramatize many of the complexities of the war.

While some critics panned
The Deer Hunter
on political or aesthetic grounds, the movie did well at the box office and impressed most people as a serious (perhaps too serious) and thoughtful if muddled attempt to put the war into perspective. Reaction from veterans was mixed; some found the Vietnam sequences unconvincing, if not ridiculous. Yet one veteran, Jan Scruggs, found the movie so compelling that after seeing it he decided to build a monument to the men and women who served; only four years later, he presided over the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C.—what we now call the Wall. Even liberal Hollywood realized
The Deer Hunter’s
strengths. It won the Oscar for best picture,
Cimino won for best director, and Christopher Walken won for best supporting actor. It could have won more —DeNiro and Streep were both strong nominees—except that suddenly 1978 had become the year of the Vietnam movie; the best actor and actress awards were taken by Jon Voight and Jane Fonda, the stars of the unabashedly antiwar
Coming Home.

While
The Deer Hunter
focuses on small-town America and community using what could be misinterpreted as a realistic slice-of-life approach, Hal Ashby’s
Coming Home
looks at a typical Hollywood subject, the individual looking for a true self through loving another in a scenic, even fairy-tale locale.

Coming Home
starts with a roomful of disabled vets playing pool in a VA hospital. Many of the actors in the scene were in fact disabled vets—another attempt to establish authenticity. Their seemingly aimless conversation rolls around to the question “Would you go back?” They all agree that they wouldn’t, that there was no point—all but one man (a professional actor, notably), whose hesitant and half-formed explanations move no one. He’s easily refuted and ridiculed by the others.

Cut to Bob (Bruce Dern) jogging through an Army base to the Stones’ “Out of Time” (“You’re obsolete, my baby.”). We crosscut between the embittered, wise vets and Bob, finally ending up in the officers’ club, where Bob smarmily tells a friend who’s shipping out to Vietnam with him that his wife, Sally (Jane Fonda), “doesn’t understand it all.” Bob, an officer, sees the war as “an opportunity.” An acquaintance’s death is “an embarrassment,” presumably to the Army as a whole. The scene, juxtaposed with the disabled vets, indicts the Army in general and more specifically the career officer for being out of touch.

As Bob leaves for Vietnam, Sally gives him a ring, which he vows he’ll never take off. The buses pull out, and Sally is left behind with Vi (Penelope Milford), the girlfriend of Bob’s buddy. They have a drink, and we see how square Sally is compared to the unmarried, somewhat hip Vi. Vi’s only here because her brother Billy’s in the VA hospital; he went crazy in Vietnam.

Inspired by Vi, and with nothing else to do, Sally volunteers to work at the hospital. She meets Luke (Jon Voight), a paraplegic vet we’ve seen in the opening shot. He’s feisty and bitter, and, as fate would have it, he was the quarterback and big man on campus at Sally’s high school. He’s cool where Sally’s uptight. They quarrel over Luke’s attitude, but soon, because of how uncaring the VA hospital staff are, Sally becomes friends with him, and she begins to understand the plight of these men and how awful the war is. Meanwhile, she’s moved off the base to a beach house and bought a Porsche roadster; even her hair has become frizzy and more natural, no longer the coiffed bonnet of the Army wife. In short, she’s becoming hip, something we know will be a problem when square old Bob comes back.

Quickly, Sally and Luke fall in love. But Sally’s torn; she’s always been faithful. Bob writes and tells her and Vi to meet him and his buddy in Hong Kong for R&R, but Vi can’t leave her brother, so Sally goes alone. Bob’s buddy is furious. Much is made of the difference between being a girlfriend (free-willed) and a wife (seemingly a piece of property, under orders).

In a classic laying-out of the gap between vets and civilians, Bob goes on about how he’s tired of hearing “all this bullshit about Nam,” and dutiful Sally says, “I’d like to know what’s it’s like.” “TV shows what it’s like,” Bob mutters. “It sure as hell don’t show what it is.” Later, in the hotel room, Bob incredulously tells Sally how his men chopped off heads and stuck them on poles to scare the VC. Sally’s mute response as the Stones play “Sympathy for the Devil” seems to seal the gap.

Back in the United States, Luke is about to indulge his wounded manhood in a hooker when he gets a call from the hospital. Vi’s brother Billy, whom Luke befriended earlier (in an example of only fellow vets understanding what another vet has been through), is attempting to commit suicide by shooting air into his veins. Luke races over in his Mustang GT, but he’s too late. In protest, he chains himself and his wheelchair to the gate of the Marine depot.

Meanwhile, Vi has found out about Billy and—in her sorrow—heads off to a go-go club with Sally, where the two get picked up by two nerdy guys. Vi gets drunk and nearly does a striptease in the men’s
hotel room before breaking down weeping. In the lobby, they see Luke on the news. Sally is so moved that she spends the night with Luke. He’s nervous, she’s tender, and Sally has her first orgasm.

It’s love, and the two, sometimes with Vi in tow, frolic along the beach. Sally takes Luke into her beach house, and Luke lets Sally look at his slides of Vietnam. He shows her tunnels, a buddy who didn’t make it, a picture of some Vietnamese kids (“They’re a pretty people,” he says.) Suddenly, the sheltered Army wife is braless and drinking beer on the beach.

But the FBI has them under surveillance because of Luke’s protest, and Bob is coming back because he’s been shot in the leg. Luke warns Sally that “whatever he says it’s a hundred times worse than what he can tell you.”

The lovers part, and Bob returns, hobbling. “What the hell did you do to your hair?” he asks, though the Porsche impresses him. As in
The Deer Hunter,
a banner welcomes the hero home, but the party never starts. Vi wants Bob to tell the story of his leg wound, but Bob refuses. It’s boring, “just like this whole fucking war is boring.” He gets angry, claiming that he tripped and shot himself; “It was an accident!” he says, and we’re left to decide whether he actually did it to leave the war. He goes out to drink with some Army buddies, then brings them back hours later, smashed. They sit around the beach house making brutal jokes about women.

The FBI summons Bob and tells him about Sally and Luke. Enraged, he comes back to the beach house and fixes a bayonet in the garage before hunting down Sally. First Bob and Sally face off, Sally stalling with “I’ve been wanting to talk to you. You seem so far away from me since you’ve been back.” Bob counters with “How can they give you a medal for a war they don’t even want you to fight?” as well as “I don’t belong here,” and “Get back, slope cunt.”

Luke arrives to intervene. “I can understand,” he says, “because I’m a brother.” And later, “I’m not the enemy. Maybe the enemy is the fucking war.” And “You’ve got enough ghosts to carry around.”

“I’m fucked,” Bob says, then whines, “I just wanna be a hero, that’s all.” Later, Bob receives his apparently unearned Purple Heart. Meanwhile,
Luke’s TV appearance has made him a local celebrity, and a high school asks him to speak on the war. A spit-and-polish Marine precedes him, then Luke comes on and tells the kids how it really is.

Cut to Bob on the beach, wearing his dress uniform, staring blankly at the waves. Crosscut back to Luke. Bob starts to strip as Tim Buckley’s maudlin “Once I Was a Soldier” plays. Luke gets emotional, tells the kids, “I’m tellin’ ya it ain’t like in the movies,” and Bob takes off his ring and runs naked toward the waves. “There’s a lot of shit that I did over there that I find fucking hard to live with,” Luke says. “I don’t feel sorry for myself. All I’m saying is there’s a choice to be made here.” Bob swims away. The last shot is Sally and Vi going into a supermarket, a cigarette-ad sticker on the door ironically saying
Lucky OUT
.

Coming Home
was a massive success on all counts, reaping solid reviews, doing well at the box office, and garnering its stars the best actor and actress Oscars. While some critics took issue with its use of melodrama, few if any argued with its politics or its representation of the veteran.

The mode here is a strict—even dull—Hollywood realism. Present again are the themes of bitterness and alienation, the gap, the return to society through the love of a woman (and the enlightenment of a woman through the love of an antiwar veteran). At times the feminist message of the film overshadows its concerns about Vietnam. Sally’s character is the only one with choices, her self-realization the real arc of the narrative. Bruce Dern’s Bob is dim before the war and psychotic after. Luke is too typically the disabled protest vet, his situation copied, it seems, from Kovic’s
Born on the Fourth of July,
but with fulfilling sex and a pat validation of his antiwar philosophy. In a film that ends with a major character telling us there’s a choice to be made, the moral and political issues of the war are mostly ignored.

But perhaps most striking is the appearance of Jane Fonda in a fiction film about Vietnam. During the war she was a vocal opponent of U.S. policy—maybe
the
most visible celebrity protestor—even touring Hanoi. Her posing by North Vietnamese antiaircraft guns and her statements read over Radio Hanoi made her a widely reviled figure among veterans, many of whom still boycott her films and products
today, their cars sporting
I’M NOT FONDA JANE
bumper stickers. For some vets,
Coming Home
was the ultimate slap in the face, a polemic completely void of subtlety. More than a few recent critics have noted the irony inherent in Sally’s change from rigid Army wife to liberated, antiwar lover, saying it should be no surprise to the viewer that by the end of the movie she becomes, in essence, Jane Fonda.

The reaction to
Coming Home
is perhaps more indicative of the cultural climate of 1978 than the aesthetic quality of the film. The same ultimately cannot be said of 1979’s
Apocalypse Now
.

At Cannes, where
Apocalypse Now
premiered, Francis Ford Coppola uttered the same basic line every author who has taken on Vietnam at some time utters. “My film is not about Vietnam,” he said. “My film
is
Vietnam. It’s what it was really like.”

At the time, this claim wasn’t as unfortunate as it might sound now. Like the Americans in Vietnam, critics noted, Coppola and his crew had gone into the jungle unprepared and with muddled intentions, encountered unexpected and devastating setbacks, and returned years later, humbled and bankrupt. So at Cannes perhaps Coppola was projecting himself into the role of America, acknowledging how easy it is to fall victim to one’s obsessions.