An Apology for Smali Town Usa

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Film review by David Whitfield Take a hero-make him a young man, a steel-worker in the closely-bonded community of a small industrial town in Pennsylvania.

Provide him with two companions, from the same background, and subject them to a terrible ordeal-the experience of war in Vietnam, where one companion is crippled, and the other breaks apart psychologically and dies in horrific circumstances.

Structure the events of the narrative so as to present the moral progress of the hero.

At one level, that is the essence of 'The Deer Hunter'. Produced with an extensive budget and impressive resources, the film has attracted huge audiences, and rave reviews.

But this praise has been exaggerated out of all proportion to the conscious or unconscious political preconceptions of the reviewers.

'The Deer Hunter' is a thoroughly. reactionary work, though not because of its treatment of the war in The scenes in Vietnam express the reactionary positions which lie far deeper than any apology. for US foreign policy, or even for the inter. national role of imperialism.

Steel mills

The opening scenes give a long and loving portrayal of Clairtown, with its tight community of Russian descent.

The town's economic life is based on the steel industry, and Cimino actually takes the camera inside the mills.

But the film stops short at reproducing the violence of the noise, fire and moving weights.

No attempt is made to show anything of the social relations which dominate this process of producton-the men are not seen as living here, but as passing numbed through the whole experience.

At the changing lockers they begin to revive, and once ouside the gates they. emerge as individual humans. Michael, the hero (played by Robert de Niro)

spends his leisure time getting pissed up with his buddies, and going off into the mountains to hunt deer.

The climax of this section is the wedding feast, where the forces of religion and the family integrate all the classes of the community into one united whole which can contain every kind of potential conflict and yet survive as a source of strength to its members.

After this celebration of faith, the film cuts to Vietnam-.

and to war. In a sense, the two are not related.

Not political 'The Deer Hunter' is not a 'political' film. On the surface, it has no direct concern with the Vietnam war, and certainly no. concern at all with its political reality.

The film's concern is with U.S. society, and a community within that society which is presented as completely self-contained, totally unaware of any outside developments and absolutely lacking in k any political consciousness at all.

From this perspective, the Vietnam war has no historyit is simply a grotesque irrational experience which cuts across 'normal' every-day life and has no connection with it.

But it is an experience which has to be seen through to the bitter end.

The war scenes are certainly presented with immense power. The horror of war, and the terrible pity of war are conveyed relentlessly to devastating effect.

But just as the steelworkers were shown as having no conscious or social life within the mills, so the three Americans from Clairtown do not appear as soldiers in an army.

Individuals

They are simply individuals caught up in a war that is not of their making, subjected to attacks and so forced to fight back in self defence.

Faced with these incomprehensible obstacles, they must either respond i with dumb heroism, or go under-only American 'grit' or 'guts' can see them through.

Michael-a solid, unexceptional guy in Clairtown-passes the test with flying colours (and a row of medals for gallantry). In the crucial scene, all three are imprisoned by the NLF in a water-cage. Above, their captors gamble by forcing The Americans to play Russian roulette.

It is Michael who urges on his fellow prisoners to dety the terror of the situation, and then gives them their due praise: "You've done it, you've shown them. It's a cliche from any one of the thousands of films celebrating machismo.

But in The Deer Hunter' the cliche draws its force from the way 'they' are presented. Throughout, the Vietnamese are protrayed as 'aliens' with barbaric practices-in fact, scarcely human in the terms of the screen Clairtown.

Atrocities

The NLF commit endless and wanton atrocities, while the Americans act decently and from the necessity of self-preservation. But the anti-communist element in this ridiculous perversion of history is entirely subordinate to the dominant racism.

In Saigon, different Vietnamese are shown busily exploiting the Americans through gambling, prostitution, drugs and the black market.

And of course exploitation is form of relationship completely foreign to the friendly cooperation of Clairtown.

It is to this city of corruption that Michael returns, after his term of duty has been completed, to rescue his great buddy, Nick.

Steve has already received the appropriate deserts for a failure of courage-he is now a wheelchair cripple, legs and an arm amputated.

Mindless wreck

Nick had become a mindless wreck, repeatedly playing Russian roulette in gambling dens. When Michael finally tracks him down, the predictable happens and Nick at last fires a loaded chamber.

In one of the three major scenes which 'form the conclusion of th film, Michael breaks down, shaking the body and sobbing, "Nickie, Nickie, 1 love you". With this unconvincing line, the film sums up their relationship in totally confusing terms.

Mike and Nick form another link in that apparently endless succession of devoted male buddies (but never lovers) which have infested American cinema ('Casablanca' , 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' etc.). solidarity in superiority to the They embody masculine demands represented by women, and security from the burden of domestic life (the province of women).

What Michael has apparently achieved from his experience is US airmen the ability to articulate the value of their relationship to him. It is, really, just as weil Nick is dead at this point- it is difficult to see how the film could have coped with their future relationship if he had survived beyond Michael's moment of self-knowledge.

The film ends with the funeral party of friends after Nick's body has been flown back to Clairtown. Helpless, unablé to absorb the experiençe which has thrown their lives into catastrophe, they resolve their confusion by joining together to sing 'God Bless America'.

As a conclusion, this totally unprepared and a disastrous artistic failure. But Cimino is not just throwing caution to the winds and staking everything on a desperate last fling of blatant jingoism. The message is far more subtle, and none the less reactionary for thatine 'American nation has had to undergo the terrible experience of war in Vietnam.

But this has not all been disruption and loss-it has also been a process of education, of learning the importance of the values which sustain American society.

Perhaps the purging of war was even necessary for this purification to take place.

America needs God's blessing, because it's been through a bad time, but now it's humble, trying to learn from past mistakes.

The crude political conclusion which flows from this is that US foreign policy should return to the days of 'splended isolation'-with the small proviso that it may be necessary to break this rule from time to time in order to keep the world a place where men a free to make their peace with Nature, free to take wives, and where buddies can go on meeting just as good friends.

Forlorn

Ten years from now, The Deer Hunter' will seem laughable, a forlorn attempt to breathe new life into the commonplace pieties of American liberal humanism.

The film is not an apology for the role of US imperialism in Vietnam, but a hymn in praise of the traditional values of American society with all its bourgeois forms and the massive apparatus of bourgeois ideology.

In the USA of The Deer Hunter', all are united in one nation, where (white) immigrants of any nationality are accepted as equal citizens, where class is an irrelevancy and the class struggle non-existent.

It is a reactionary fantasy projected with considerable force, in its way., a heroic effort.

But the artistic weakness of The Deer Hunter' is not accidental or avoidable. It is a direct product of the inability of bourgeois ideology-however liberal or well meaning-to present an image of US imperialism that fully corresponds with its reality and can explain the crimes it has committed, not only against the Vietnamese and other peoples, but against the working class within its own frontiers.

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SOCIALIST PRESS. nairesa::: M PIgE Y "In his summing up one of the reasons he gave for granting the injunction was that the picket was acting against union instruction"

In other words the union