Comment

Feb 17, 2020MichelleinBallard rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
This film is largely a narratively disjointed mess. And with all due respect to Mike Lofgren*, his claim that "The movie is suffused with the notion of the wounded innocence of a valorized white working class fighting in a righteous (but otherwise undefined) cause" could hardly be more mistaken. "The Deer Hunter" clearly shows a DE-VALORIZED white working class chewed up and spit out by the commercial-industrial machine and fodder for the war machine. It presents us with a lost segment of humanity sedating themselves with alcohol and largely unmoored from any meaningful life in the community, church, or family. Moreover, nothing in the film suggests the war in Vietnam is "a righteous cause". The one barely hopeful moment in the film is the singing of "God Bless America". Surely, the characters and America of *The Deer Hunter* are sorely in need of God's blessing to extricate its people from an evil war and an evil economic system that turns people into dehumanized cogs in what Ken Kesey, in his excellent novel *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest*, called "the Combine". Unfortunately, it's not clear that the characters in *The Deer Hunter* will actually seek out and follow the "light from above". * Lofgren's review is quoted in an earlier comment by The_Most_Casual_Observer and see <https://seattle.bibliocommons.com/list/share/75111489_michelleinballard/959513987_the_deep_state>