Overated Films?

[Statto]

of course he didn't fuck her
ya big perv

:P

he did.

she wanted him to fuck her, sure, but they didn't!

droid - i don't have access to that article, damn...

Sorry about that. Heres an excerpt:

Restaging the War:
The Deer Hunter and the Primal Scene of Violence

Abstract
The Deer Hunter's controversial representation of the Vietnam War reveals how violence figures an imaginary relationship between the American subject and its Oriental other. This article examines the film's reception and relationship to media images of the war, particularly Eddie Adams's photograph Saigon Execution.

No one will go out of the house to see the Vietnam war on a movie screen. The American people don't want to confront the war yet. Every one of these movies will die.

—Anonymous American movie executive, November 1977

Michael Cimino's 1978 film, The Deer Hunter, came rather late in the string of Vietnam movies released that year—Coming Home (Hal Ashby), The Boys in Company C (Sidney J. Furie), Good Guys Wear Black (Ted Post), and Go Tell the Spartans (Ted Post). None of these earlier films did much at the box office, although critics wrote favorable reviews of Coming Home and Go Tell the Spartans. When Universal Pictures decided to show The Deer Hunter at special screenings in November and December 1978, there was healthy skepticism about how the film would be received. In addition to its Vietnam theme, which was still considered a liability, the film had a running time of 183 minutes—a challenge to both filmgoers' attention spans and theater owners' schedules. Even with Robert DeNiro prominently featured in the ads, would filmgoers turn out to see a three-hour Vietnam saga directed by an unknown and featuring an otherwise obscure cast?2

The answer turned out to be an emphatic yes. The initial run, designed to qualify The Deer Hunter for the Academy Awards in April, showed to standing-room-only audiences in both Los Angeles and New York City. Even with theater owners complaining about its length, the film grossed nearly $55,000 during its one-week run.3 By previewing the movie in New York as well as Hollywood, Universal was able to exploit positive reviews in the national media in its advertising. The Deer Hunter eventually won five Oscars—for picture, director, sound, supporting actor (Christopher Walken), and editing (Peter Zinner)—and eventually earned more than $49 million on a budget of $15 million.4 Roughly two-thirds of [End Page 89] The Deer Hunter takes place in the United States rather than in Vietnam. Still, many commentators focused their discussions on the war itself rather than on the film, further blurring the line between representation and reality.5 Though the war was over, material traces remained in the present, most notably in the presence in U.S. towns and cities of Vietnamese immigrants and Vietnam War veterans. Just as reviewers debated the meaning of The Deer Hunter's infamous Russian roulette scenes, which restaged the "Saigon execution" during the Tet Offensive, the U.S. government was attempting to deport Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the South Vietnamese general who executed a Vietnamese communist spy on camera ten years earlier.6 The Deer Hunter did not simply represent a historical past—it was animating a war that had never really ended for America.

In reanimating the war, The Deer Hunter displaced the Vietnamese depicted in Eddie Adams's famous photograph, Saigon Execution, and recentered the narrative on Americans as victims. While retaining the style and structure of violence as shown in Adams's and other media images, The Deer Hunter inserted Americans into that structure, resulting in a reracialization of both form and content.

If Vietnam was such a disturbing site of Orientalized violence in the American imagination, how did Americans end up at the center of that violence? The answer lies in the imagined relationship between U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers that breaks through the dichotomy of victim/aggressor implied in the film's narrative. By explicitly restaging the Saigon Execution in a visual style that I term the "oriental obscene," The Deer Hunter creates an intimate relationship between the American and the Vietnamese soldiers that might not be supposed from a narratological or political viewpoint.

The Asian body became visible to the American body politic during the Vietnam War era largely through the trope of violence. The oriental obscene thus describes a phenomenon of mimetic contagion in which violence circulates from Asian to non-Asian bodies in American popular culture. This article concentrates on the interplay between the photograph Saigon Execution and the film The Deer Hunter as an example of this circulation. I thereby draw new lines of relations between differently racialized subjects in American culture. I propose that the politics of identification in The Deer Hunter lie not in its verisimilitude and historical accuracy but in its stylization of violence. Thus, The Deer Hunter implies an identification between American soldiers and their VC counterparts that is disavowed on the level of the American body politic, as exemplified in the Nguyen deportation case.


Between Art and Politics: Loving and Hating The Deer Hunter .

If the contemporary reviews of The Deer Hunter were any indication, it was impossible to come away from the film with a neutral opinion. As Robin Wood states, "The Deer Hunter raises fundamental questions about the relationship between politics and aesthetics."7 Opinions fell precisely along this fault line, with those who admired the film emphasizing its artistic value and those who disliked it focusing on its politics. A collection of critical opinion printed in Film Quarterly claimed the film [End Page 90] was "xenophobi[c]" (Michael Dempsey), "fatally oversimplified" (David Axeen), and "herald[ed] a new wave of reactionary jingoism" (Marsha Kinder).8

In many ways, the divide over The Deer Hunter mirrored that between supporters and opponents of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Defenders of The Deer Hunter were more likely to link its critique of violence to war in general, thus foreclosing discussion of the war in Vietnam more specifically. As an editorial in the Christian Century remarked, "If The Deer Hunter is seen as a work of cinematic art projecting Cimino's vision, then it becomes clear that the question of war's morality is not at issue. The debate that tore this nation apart . . . is not the subject of this film."9 What, then, is its subject? Love between men, the nobility of the American working class, survival of the fittest in the inferno of combat? Is it in essence a narcissistic reflection of America and American masculinity through the mirror of Vietnam?

The film's narrative structure departs from the mold of other Vietnam War movies such as The Boys in Company C and Go Tell the Spartans in that much of The Deer Hunter is set in the United States. Of the film's three acts, the first and third take place in Clairton, Pennsylvania, a small town filled with Russian immigrants and centered economically around a steel mill where the three main characters—Michael (Robert DeNiro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steven (John Savage)—work. Even the second act, which takes place in Vietnam, does not depict combat per se but focuses on the characters' experiences in a VC prisoner-of-war camp, where they are forced to play Russian roulette with one another. After they escape from the camp, they go to Saigon, where they spend time in military hospitals, brothels, and a unique gambling hall whose main attraction is again Russian roulette, this time played for profit. No references are made in the first or third act to the war supposedly dividing the nation or to the characters' impending military service. "The war is really incidental to the development of the characters and their story," claimed Cimino. "It's part of their lives and just that, nothing more."10

As Cimino's comment suggests, the Vietnam War forms more of a backdrop for than the focus of the human drama that unfolds around Michael, Nick, and Steven. For example, in the elaborate Russian Orthodox wedding that takes up almost thirty minutes of screen time at the beginning of the film, the only hint that the country is at war is the presence of a Green Beret veteran in the bar next to the reception room. "What's it like over there?" Michael asks eagerly. "Fuck it," the veteran replies, foreshadowing the horrors awaiting the men.

Later in the film, when Michael goes back to Vietnam to rescue Nick from the gambling halls, news footage of the chaotic evacuation of Saigon, showing South Vietnamese desperately clinging to helicopters and scaling embassy walls, is interspersed with Michael's arrival. Yet the major news event takes a back seat to Michael's quest to find Nick. The only Vietnamese portrayed at length are either VC, ruthlessly vicious in their treatment of American and South Vietnamese soldiers, or upper-middle-class civilians in Saigon, equally vicious in their disregard for life while gambling on human lives. [End Page 91]

The Deer Hunter's treatment of the Vietnamese disturbed some critics, many of whom had opposed the war. As Wood pointed out, "The rejection of the film on political grounds is in fact closely involved with the issue of realism and the confusions that almost invariably attend the use of that term."11 Critics of the film focused almost exclusively on realism as historical veracity. In light of the disproportionate amount of violence Americans inflicted on Vietnamese during the war, Cimino's focus on Vietnamese violence against American soldiers seemed perversely counterfactual. Even when U.S. news coverage reported on American casualties, the visual representations almost exclusively portrayed the casualties among the Vietnamese.12

Historian Bruce Cumings referred to the Vietnam scenes in The Deer Hunter as revisionist "print negatives" that inverted the power relations of the war: "It was the Vietcong terrorists who burned villages," rather than the U.S. marines.13 Pauline Kael remarked: "The impression a viewer gets is that if we did some bad things over there we did them ruthlessly but impersonally; the Vietcong were cruel and sadistic. The film seems to be saying that the Americans had no choice, but the V.C. enjoyed it."14 According to these interpretations, Cimino not only distorted the historical record of American atrocities but also justified U.S. acts of violence committed on screen by deferring to the ethics of warfare.

Cimino maintained that The Deer Hunter ought to be taken as "surrealistic" rather than realistic: "I used events from '68 (My Lai) and '75 (the fall of Saigon) as reference points rather than as fact. But if you attack the film on its facts, then you're fighting a phantom, because literal accuracy was never intended." Yet the biographical details Cimino disseminated constructed an aura of authenticity based on his personal "experiences." "For me, it's a very personal film," Cimino explained. "I was attached to a Green Beret medical unit. My characters are portraits of people whom I knew."15 Among those who accepted Cimino's defense was David Denby, who deflected criticism from The Deer Hunter. "Putting the 'correct' attitudes into a movie isn't so hard, especially now; what really counts is authenticity of experience, which this movie has by the ton." Cimino's life story, however, was later debunked by Tom Buckley in Harper's.16

Ironically, critics used the same aura of authenticity that Cimino abused to defend their versions of historical truth. Gloria Emerson, who called The Deer Hunter "the most racist film I have ever seen," stated that "the most brilliant dissections of The Deer Hunter have come not from professional critics but from men who reported the war in Vietnam." Other critics of the film also prefaced their remarks by stating their personal qualifications. John Pilger, who renamed the film "The Gook-Hunter," began his editorial: "I have spent much of my adult life in Vietnam and the United States as a journalist and documentary-film maker. I have been with American soldiers when they were killed or maimed."17

The Deer Hunter was held up to veridical criteria as well as to ideological and aesthetic scrutiny. It was compared not only with other fictional films about the Vietnam War but also with prior news coverage of the war. Accordingly, the ultimate arbiters of the "truth" were the journalists covering the war. [End Page 92]

This equation of news coverage with the "real" is particularly problematic. A fictional film is accountable to a different set of aesthetic and formal standards than television news coverage. With the exception of the event captured in Saigon Execution, violence was rarely caught "live." The act of violence was usually temporally displaced by a past-tense narration by a foreign correspondent or by showing only photographs of forensic evidence.18 In contrast, post-1968, American film directors such as Sam Peckinpah employed a form of hyperrealism in order to stylize violence and make its effects on the human body extremely, even obscenely, visible.19 These techniques, involving closely framed squib work and quickly edited montage sequences, highlight the body's loss of control over its contents and its movements. On the one hand, such exaggerations seem contrived when compared with documentary-style television news coverage. On the other hand, they pack tremendous psychological force within the context of a film narrative. "How is this film a distortion of history," one filmgoer asked critics of The Deer Hunter, "if it evokes, better than any other, feelings comparable to those of the total chaos and mind-breaking destruction that occurred in Southeast Asia?"20

The hyperrealism used in the scenes of violence in The Deer Hunter conflicts with the film's fantastic historicism with regard to the war and calls into question the moral authority associated with the "truth-telling" of visual realism. In an essay on the film, Peter Lehman pointed out that "the critics who were deeply offended by Cimino's 'unrealistic' portrayal of Vietnam were seemingly quite satisfied with the 'realistic' portrayal of the Pennsylvania steel town."21 Whereas the social realist style of the Clairton sequences rely on a thickness of naturalistic detail, the Vietnam scenes draw on the thickness of corporeal experience and perception—specifically blood.

Defending the artistic brilliance of The Deer Hunter as a whole, Vincent Canby nonetheless admitted that

the film repeatedly exploits violence through images so graphic they establish new boundaries for the cinema of simulated blood-and-guts, at the same time making one wonder whether this kind of graphic detail isn't a kind of theatrical blackmail. Showing us precisely how a man looks at the instant his brains are being blown out by a bullet is, indeed, a spectacle to elicit strong emotional responses.

Canby described the scenes of violence in The Deer Hunter as an act of violence on its audience: the film wields its violence like a threat to prevent viewers from turning away from the screen. Summarizing the attacks on the film following the Academy Awards, Aljean Harmetz pointed out the contradiction between the hyperrealism of some of the details and the counterhistorical claims of the narrative itself: "The rising backlash against the movie may come partly from the increasing knowledge that the seemingly realistic sequences of violence are not based on any reality."23 The graphic effects of violence, plus the camera's relentless slow-motion stare, seem to equate visibility with truth. Yet their application to such clearly counterfactual material leads to the sense of being cheated to which Harmetz and Canby refer. [End Page 93]

The opposition between an artistic and a political approach to The Deer Hunter breaks down when we consider how Cimino's aesthetic choices—in particular, his deployment of multiple film realisms—give the film its "political" meaning. The bulk of The Deer Hunter's aesthetic energy is devoted to representing violence. The graphic violence was very important in the marketing of the film, such that Universal Pictures erroneously used language reflective of an X rating in its first ads for the movie.24

Given that Cimino used such different visual styles for the sequences of the men playing Russian roulette and in the sequences in Clairton, what is the meaning conveyed by this visual style? An analysis of these formal choices can explain how and why The Deer Hunter became linked with Adams's infamous photo, which, unlike news clips of the evacuation of Saigon, never appeared in the film...

Theres a school of thought which says that all films about war are pornography. I don't 100% agree with that, but its a fairly compelling argument. I think films that alternately romanticise war, demonise the enemy and treat the agressors as (sometimes flawed) heroes or victims - stuff like 'Green Beret' or 'Blackhawk Down' serve a very important propagandistic purpose - reinforcing the mainstream political narrative. In the case of Vietnam that narrative is clear. Vietnam was a 'mistake'. The Vietnamese were brutal and vicious, and the Americans were flawed but idealistic, overreaching itself for a good cause - thus the US was a victim of Vietnamese agression, not the other way round... parallels with current events is obvious.

This is a sickening revision of a war which utterly devastated a country, destabilised the region and killed up to 5 million Vietnamese. Deformed babies are still being born in Vietnam today because of chemical weapon use, people still die from mines... - and this is over 30 years later! Vietnam ranks amongst the great war crimes of the 20th century - certrainly on a level with Japan's invasion of China, and in some respects rivalling Turkey's genocide of the Armenians.

Thats not to say you cant enjoy the film on a dramatic or emotional level - like you can appreciate the power of 'triumph of the will' whilst simultaneously understanding the political purposes behind the film.

@ Ashes - 'Raping and murdering at night'? Thats a new one for me. Do you have a source?

No-ones denying that the Vietnamese (North and South) committed atrocities, but they were nothing at all like the scale of US crimes. 50,000 people tortured and killed in 'Operation Phoenix' alone, hundreds of thousands of civilians relocated to 'Strategic Hamlets'. I could go on for hours.

@ Erbanta - Glad I could entertain you! :P

@ Ashes - 'Raping and murdering at night'? Thats a new one for me. Do you have a source?

No-ones denying that the Vietnamese (North and South) committed atrocities, but they were nothing at all like the scale of US crimes. 50,000 people tortured and killed in 'Operation Phoenix' alone, hundreds of thousands of civilians relocated to 'Strategic Hamlets'. I could go on for hours.

Word Droid! I'm glad theres others up here who have the same passion for this flawed "conflict"

A great book to read from the North Vietnemese civilian side is here

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heaven-Earth-Cha...246&sr=8-1

also the book about kim Phuc - The girl in the photograph

hope you read these.

ok,just to get it back on track

A.I. by steven spielberg- CRAP!!!!!!!!

ok,just to get it back on track

A.I. by steven spielberg- CRAP!!!!!!!!

i liked it, better than yo robot

@ ashes - 'raping and murdering at night'? thats a new one for me. do you have a source?

no-ones denying that the vietnamese (north and south) committed atrocities, but they were nothing at all like the scale of us crimes. 50,000 people tortured and killed in 'operation phoenix' alone, hundreds of thousands of civilians relocated to 'strategic hamlets'. i could go on for hours.

word droid! i'm glad theres others up here who have the same passion for this flawed "conflict"

a great book to read from the north vietnemese civilian side is here

http://www.amazon.co.uk/heaven-earth-cha...246&sr=8-1

also the book about kim phuc - the girl in the photograph

hope you read these.

not sure if 'passion' is the right word, more like captivating revulsion. it was chomsky's 'at war with asia' that radicalised me back in my schooldays, as it flew in the face of everything i thought i knew about vietnam, the us, and the world.

since then ive had a morbid fascination with that war - and particularly how it is portrayed in western and us culture and media.

thanks for the links. i will seek them out! always looking for more info. theres an excellent biography of ho-chi min which covers the war with the french, the paris treaties and elections in the 50s - but i cant remember the name of it.

meant to put this link into the last post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vevj_48ygtg

politically speaking, the deer hunter is just a (slightly) more sophisticated version of this...

NO NO NO!!!!

I Robot was far better than A.I.!!!

NO NO NO!!!!

I Robot was far better than A.I.!!!

They were both shit!

An I dont think theyre really 'overrated' either....

Beaches

"Wind beneath my wings" - never likes that song!!

i thought the departed was really good. nicholson is such a cnut.

casino is a great movie as is pulp fiction, they arent overrated

i thought the departed was really good. nicholson is such a cnut.

we're all dying.....


thats the line of the film

not sure if 'passion' is the right word, more like captivating revulsion. it was chomsky's 'at war with asia' that radicalised me back in my schooldays, as it flew in the face of everything i thought i knew about vietnam, the us, and the world.

since then ive had a morbid fascination with that war - and particularly how it is portrayed in western and us culture and media.

thanks for the links. i will seek them out! always looking for more info. theres an excellent biography of ho-chi min which covers the war with the french, the paris treaties and elections in the 50s - but i cant remember the name of it.

meant to put this link into the last post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vevj_48ygtg

politically speaking, the deer hunter is just a (slightly) more sophisticated version of this...

thanks for the link. i also have the same morbid fascination with war and its impact, in particular for me the indo-china wars and then on cambodia.

i have lots of amazing literature on the khmer situation if you interested.

oh and those fast and furious movies are the worst ever. How they got to make 3(i think) is beyond me

robin hood price of thieves.

hate hate hate hate!

peace

dark water
the grudge
the grudge 2
the US remakes of course,all shite!!!!!

also battle royale 2 was a complete let down,what a pile of pap!

saws

lethal weapon....all of em.

crap!!!!!

Jesus, most of my favourite movies have been named here!

Perhaps I am just a whore for the mainstream!

Haven't seen The Departed yet but I have heard only good things about it.... until now....

Casino is excellent as is The Deer Hunter.

Just please don't anyone consider posting Apocalypse Now or Deliverance.

I've got the feeling '300' is massively overrated. Haven't seen it yet tho.

Borat- very very over-rated!

dark water
the grudge
the grudge 2
the US remakes of course,all shite!!!!!

also battle royale 2 was a complete let down,what a pile of pap!

Dark Water HAS to be the most terrifying movie i EVER saw at the cinema..... i was cacking myself.....

Grudge is quite creepy too......not really scary though.....

Did you really think battle royal 2 was THAT bad..... i didnt think so....what were you expecting?

Why do the US even bother remaking amazing japanese films (very badly, and with proper shite actors) for people who can't be arsed reading subtitles on the originals anyway......(?)

The afore mentioned people should fuck off and die!

Originals or STFU!

:rant over:



BTW, Van Helsing IS the worst film EVER.....

Dark Water HAS to be the most terrifying movie i EVER saw at the cinema..... i was cacking myself.....

really? i thought it was pretty tame. i even went to the cinema on my own and at a time when i knew it'd be mostly empty to try and scare myself

i think La Haine is ridiculously overrated. it's good, but people who think it's one of the best films ever really need to watch more movies imo. it's one of those films that it's cool to say is one of the best ever made. it's decent, and no more

......then again, i only go to the cinema like 8 times a year or something like that......

and, i'm not really into horrors etc