All the young men in The Deer Hunter hunt deer. But the deer hunter referred to in the film’s title is the character of Michael. For Michael, deer hunting is a near-religious experience. The scenes in which he pursues his swift-footed prey are accompanied by sacred-sounding music, and the beliefs he possesses about the activity are tantamount to the tenets of a personal faith. Michael reminds his best friend Nick about his hunting philosophy: “You have to think about one shot. One shot is what it’s all about. The deer has to be taken with one shot.” For Michael, killing a living creature with a single shot is humane and evinces a reverence for the glorious nature that he enters into while on the hunt. Yet despite its title, The Deer Hunter isn’t just about deer hunting, of course. It’s also about people-hunting. Michael’s one-shot conviction carries over into the sick, twisted games of Russian roulette the American and South Vietnamese POWs are forced to play by their captors. One bullet is loaded into the revolver’s chamber, and the unlucky prisoners die of single gunshot wounds to their heads. Several other critics have noted how this “game” is used by the film to emphasize the unpredictability and senselessness of war. One’s nationality, ethnicity, social status, etc. don’t matter. The bullet kills whom it kills.

But the Russian roulette motif doesn’t end when Michael returns home from Vietnam—as seen when he attempts to teach his sniveling, irresponsible friend Stan a lesson with the little pistol Stan always waves around. Michael’s pulling the gun’s trigger after pointing it at Stan’s head (as well as his own) recreates the imagery of a hunter and his hunted, as well as the film’s insistence that life and death are matters of chance. Furthermore, the fact that Michael cannot separate himself from the horror and fascination of Russian roulette gives clear indications of how his experiences in the war have damaged him.

Michael on the hunt.

Nick too cannot escape the deadly game. Given the opportunity to return home because of the wounds he has sustained, Nick is instead persuaded by a French opportunist to remain in Vietnam and participate in Russian roulette games for money. Always the gambler, Nick’s introduction to the seedy Vietnamese underworld “gaming group” comes when he (as Michael does with Stan) shoots an empty chamber at the head of one of the players before doing the same to himself. Like Michael, Nick cannot separate himself from his previous experiences as a soldier and POW.

Ironically, Michael’s “psychological healing” occurs while he is again hunting a massive buck in the mountains. When he finally has the majestic creature in his sights, he fires one shot high above the deer’s head (opposed to the one shot he fires to kill a buck earlier in the film). The buck stares at Michael, and Michael asks it (and himself), “Okay?” The moment is a turning point for Michael, who has struggled to fit back in to his previous life and relate to his friends who did not go to war. It seems at this point in the film that Michael makes a choice to continue to live his life—in essence, he denies chance any power over his future, rejecting a “Russian roulette” philosophy of existence. Rather, he himself decides to move on in his relationship with Linda, and he himself determines to go back to Vietnam to save Nick from whatever is preventing his return.

In the film’s climatic scene (spoiler alert!) in which Michael attempts to persuade a drugged-out, barely coherent Nick to return home with him, Michael makes another choice of his own when he challenges Nick to a game of Russian roulette in an attempt to make Nick remember their shared past. The only thing that registers in Nick’s mind as the two trade the loaded revolver back and forth is Michael’s hunting mantra: one shot. Heartbreakingly, Nick repeats “one shot” before shooting himself in the head and dying—recognizing his former life, but denying the possibility of returning to it. In the end, then, Nick also makes his own choice—the choice to let chance determine his fate.

Nick’s final choice.

For Me Then…

The critical moment comes when Nick is in the army hospital in Vietnam and attempts to call home to speak to his girlfriend Linda. He waits for his turn at the phone; carefully spells out the name of his hometown; and then even after all his deliberateness, he tells the operator to “never mind.” It’s Nick’s decision to end the call, but just moments earlier he was unable to answer a doctor’s basic questions about his family. Although his body has mended, there is clearly something wrong with Nick’s mind, something that leads him to live a life of terrifying chance. The Russian roulette games he participates in trap him once more in his previous captivity experience. It is as if Nick cannot process what he has gone through, and each time he points a gun at his head and pulls the trigger is an attempt to come to grips with the trauma that has stolen precious years and unrecoverable security from him.

With this focus on the horrendous effects of war on its participants, it is quite shocking and unnerving when the film ends with Michael, Linda, and Nick’s other surviving friends singing “God Bless America” and toasting Nick’s memory as if he had been killed in battle. Personally, I didn’t see the singing as sarcastic, anti-American propaganda, bashing the Vietnam War and those who participated in it. However, the song is haunting and really ironic because both the war and the end of Nick’s life (which he loses on the same day that Saigon falls to the communists) seem meaningless and unnecessary. Of course the war killed Nick even though he was a “civilian” at the time that he shot himself. The Nick who lived in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the film would never have done such a thing to himself. And certainly none of the other characters escape the war’s devastation either. In that sense, the Vietnam War perhaps is the hunter and that entire generation the hunted.