The Deer Hunter

Father, it has been six months since my last public post and I am in a different dimension. I have tried to Post but everything I write is incredibly bad. This doesn't stop me from saying that other people's writing is bad, which is an unfortunate residual side effect of having read the kind of anarchist literature that reinforced my philosophy that the critic's skillset is completely separate from the writer's at the exact peak of my angry era. I still think this is true, but I don't need to use it as an excuse to project my creative insecurities. It's all my fault. Will I ever grow up?

I watched The Deer Hunter last night, because of all the war epic classics I researched the stars looked the hottest. Christopher Walken and Robert DeNiro in 1978 should be in every movie. I enjoyed it and had several long discussions about thematic motifs and historical accuracy and whether it's pro-war, blah blah blah, you can read about that if you care about Vietnam War films. The most interesting lore I uncovered was that Christopher Walken was Natalie Wood's lover at the time of her death (is it possible I really never knew this, or did I forget? he was ON the boat!), and that Meryl Streep was at the time in love with John Cazale (Fredo Corleone in the Godfather movies) who had terminal cancer at the time of filming and died shortly after. I cried reading a moving recounting of their final months living together before his death, which made me feel awful after mercilessly making fun of his strange appearance and manner the entire movie. I should really work on this judgmental tendency. John Cazale seems like a much richer and more mystical person that I could hope to be and now I think I'm in love with him too. This happens to me a lot.

All you need to know is that there's a repeated trope of the characters playing Russian roulette -- first as Viet Cong captives and then as Christopher Walken's character's war PTSD trauma cope. He stays in Saigon to be some kind of Chinese businessman slave who becomes a heroin addict and a roulette player, like a dogfighter but for shooting yourself in the head, and we're supposed to believe that he survives this every night for years until Robert DeNiro's character finds out and comes to retrieve him. This depiction of the role of Russian roulette in Vietnam caused some controversy after the release of the Deer Hunter, since Russian roulette as torture was never attributed to the Viet Cong nor to anyone else. And also some teenagers shot themselves in the head because they thought it was cool.

I remembered that I knew Russian roulette was sort of a made-up game. There's no historical record of it having been played in real life before its fictional introduction in a Russian short story about cossacks during the Napoleonic Wars. I thought I remembered reading about a game of Russian roulette in Tolstoy -- maybe Pierre or Nikolai in War and Peace -- but I couldn't find it and chalked it up to misremembering a duel or a standoff or something. But it seems it wasn't Russian and has only been played in real life after its conception in the literary realm.

I have a few questions about Russian roulette. I don't know a lot about guns but can't you die or cause injury from shooting a blank? And Wikipedia says there's only a 66% probability of firing the round after five shots. Can someone who took actual math and not a statistics course where I mostly thought about poker explain that to me?

I found an excellent blog post from 2012 discussing the cultural ubiquity of Russian roulette in the US as being a direct result of the Deer Hunter. Since I was jazzed as hell about all of this I decided to email the person who wrote this blog post, only to discover the author was a professor in the film department of the college where I had just applied to work. Can someone who isn't constantly lost in the constellation of made-up symbolism in my head explain that to me?

While we're on synchronicity and film, they've sung "I love you baby" by Frankie Valli in the last three pieces of media I've watched. Does that mean anything? My friend said "I love you baby" is the cultural predecessor of "Sweet Caroline" and I said while that's true, and I don't like either of them, "I love you baby" is tolerable while "Sweet Caroline" is unbearable. This is a little bit of a lie, because I have an inexplicable patriotism deep within me that makes me cry when I hear Sweet Caroline sung at a baseball game.

I'm not sure anymore why I like war epics. My first theory is that my favorite type of story (or maybe, the kind I think is of the highest quality) is the kind that seems like it could not have been any other way. The characters and the scene are set in the first act and instead of an 'expansion' on that, the rest of the story is the natural and logical resulting events. I don't mind when stories are predictable, or if someone else spoils it for me before I read or watch it myself. The ability to intuit what will likely occur in a story based on its premise seems more of a triumph of the stability and reality of the initial explication than its failure. Life is like this. Being psychic is less a mythical power than the ability to see reality clearly. What will likely happen is often what happens, because it is most likely. All the information you will ever need is in the present. Something along those lines.

War epics are often like this because they are so much about male moral character and destiny which in film is a distillation of human behavior. In the Deer Hunter, you ought to know from the first scene that DeNiro's character will be the hero who saves the other two and returns from the war. It's all there in his action and his philosophy. The rest of the movie is these facts playing out through time in the materiality of events. This only works in a well-written movie, of course.

My second theory about why I like war epics is that the greatest joy in my life is the sense that I've imagined the way a experiencing a historical event might feel. I try to imagine the way a person might have felt in a situation, with all the sensory texture and specificity of the present moment, with the context and atmosphere of their place and time. Sometimes I can only grasp it for a second and then it goes away. Well-done period pieces, leaving aside strictly factual accuracy and focusing on sensory detail, allow me to be in that state for prolonged moments.

Even more than striving to feel the way someone else may have felt at some other time, I try to feel events in my own life in this time the vivid way imagining historical events makes me feel. That is, I try to imagine how it might hypothetically feel to be me in my own time, because I have the feeling that I'm not really getting it. I'm too immersed and submerged here and now. The historical events of my lifetime are like blank faces, a piece of news that while horrific and momentous makes so much sense in a sea of the same news day after day that it has no potency and I simply can't feel it. I try to think of this time as a 'historical' time period and feel the weight and the uniqueness and the movement, but it just feels like my life. It feels like being in my room looking at Twitter and then closing it and watching a movie.