What The Deer Hunter Can Teach Us About Acceptance and Responsibility
**This article contains spoilers, graphic clips, and “offensive” language**
I recently watched Michael Cimino’s 1978 film, The Deer Hunter.
On the surface, it is a gut-wrenching story about three small-town Pennsylvania boys who get drafted to fight in Vietnam, turning their lives upside down. Below the surface, it is a story about heroically stepping into manhood.
The story follows the journey of Mike Vronsky, played by Robert De Niro. Act I begins in 1967 in Clairton, Pennsylvania, where we see that Mike lives an innocent and routine life as a steel worker who drinks with his friends and hunts deer for fun.
Setting the Stage
Mike is prepared. In an exchange during a deer hunting trip before they leave for Vietnam, Mike is asked by his friend, Stan, to use his extra boots. Stan forgot his boots, and he knows Mike has an extra pair. Mike refuses.
From this, we also see that Mike is reasonable. “This is this” and “no means no,” shows that he accepts reality for what it is. He knows that if you are not prepared, you won’t always be able to lean on your more prepared friend. Bring your own damn boots. The real world is tough. Boys may get away with being unprepared, but men cannot. Mike knows this and he accepts it.
In the end, Mike’s best friend, Nick (played by Christopher Walken), diffuses the situation and gives Mike’s boots to Stan.
What this tells us is that by virtue of being prepared, you are taking responsibility not only for yourself but for those around you who are unprepared. There will always be boys who lean on others, and there will always be men who lean on themselves. Choose which one you want to be. This is a noble responsibility which should be accepted and lived integrally, at the expense of friendship or “doing someone a favor.”
We see more of Mike’s responsibility in Act II.
Stepping Into the War
Going to war is a clear metaphor for moving away from home and entering the chaos of the real world. Try to imagine a place farther from the comfort of your own childhood.
As Act II begins, the three young men from Clairton quickly find themselves imprisoned by the Viet Cong. Their captors pit them against one another in games of Russian roulette in a horrifying scene (of questionable historical accuracy).
As they are sitting in the cage below the shack, they hear the clicks of the gun as the game goes on. They hear their captors laughing and placing bets as the whimpering prisoners are forced to take turns shooting themselves in the head until the gun actually fires. Each of them know they are next.
Mike’s friend from Clairton, Stevie, starts to lose control. He screams uncontrollably because he cannot accept the horrifying situation he is in. His inability to accept reality leaves him only with the ability to scream. This obviously doesn’t help the situation, though to be fair, what could he possibly do?
This is where we turn to Mike.
What do you do when catastrophe strikes? How do you react to an impossible situation? What actions do you take when you are trapped with no way out?
The Deer Hunter asks us to answer these questions ourselves by displaying an extreme case of an impossible situation. Hopefully you don’t have a gun to your head, but perhaps your heart was broken, you lost a loved one, or lost your job.
These moments, no matter how objectively extreme, beg answers to the same questions.
Have you ever been in a situation in which you were so trapped that it felt like the only thing you could do was scream? I have.
Did you let yourself lose control, unable to accept the reality of the situation? Or did you come to grips with situation and walk towards it consciously?
While Stevie is screaming, Mike is comforting him and telling him everything will be OK. Just like when Stan used his boots, Mike’s umbrella of responsibility is now doing what it can to protect his screaming friend.
Knowing that their time is approaching, Mike pulls his other friend, Nick, aside and develops a plan. He decides that their only option is to play with three bullets in the chamber instead of one. This significantly increases the chances that one of them will kill himself during the game. But if they make it far enough, three bullets would give Mike an opportunity to kill three of the guards while Nick can grab a gun from the fourth one and kill the rest.
This is an absurd plan. They are clearly outnumbered, and their chances succeeding are slim-to-none, assuming they can even convince their captors to load three bullets in the chamber, and assuming they can make it through the first round of the game.
But there is no other way. Mike has accepted reality. “This is this.” He does not scream, unable to comprehend the situation. He consciously understands where he is, and calculates the best plan he can think of. Then, despite dismal odds and guaranteed pain along the way, he commits to acting it out.
Luckily most situations you face in your life won’t require you to escape from captivity at gunpoint. But a truly responsible man faces every difficult situation with the same consciousness and ferocity that Mike does in this scene.
It is not enough to decide on the best plan of action. You must act it out, which is where you will face the most adversity. During the scene, Nick starts to back off from the plan. “No more,” he says, sounding defeated and empty. He is letting himself submit to his fear and lie down in the face of death rather than moving into it courageously.
Mike’s umbrella of responsibility steps up again to remind Nick to stand up and do the impossible thing. He does, because he knows it is right and Mike has helped him see this.
So, what does a man do in the face of adversity?
Mike shows us that our answer to this question is just as important whether we are packing boots for a deer hunting trip or staring down the barrel of a gun. We must never lose our way of operating with responsibility, through all of the good, bad, easy, and hard times.
A man accepts what is, calculates the best possible course of action available to him, and acts it out consciously and forthrightly.
This is how you must handle your problems if you plan to consciously step into adulthood as a responsible man. Life consists of unavoidable pain and suffering.
To pretend that your suffering does not exist is to be a boy. To expect someone else to carry you out of the suffering is to be a boy.
To accept suffering and move yourself through it courageously is to be a man.
On the left is Mike, a man who has accepted death and taken responsibility for himself. On the right is Stevie, a boy who has not accepted his reality and thus can only scream and whimper in the face of death. Their facial expressions tell you everything you need to know.
One shot.
This is Mike’s philosophy when it comes to deer hunting. Early in the movie, he tells his best friend, Nick, that he must kill a deer with one shot. “Two shots is pussy,” he says.
This philosophy signifies his single-minded approach to decision-making. There is no second-guessing and there is no half-assing. When he decides to do something, he does it all the way, as we see in his escape from the Viet Cong in Act II and on their Deer hunting trip before they leave for war.
When Mike makes it home from the war, he goes on another Deer hunting trip. While he’s tracking a deer, he shoots and misses the deer, letting it get away. This symbolizes that he has lost his way. He has gone back on his “one shot” philosophy, and he has gone back on the responsibility to which he once committed himself.
Where did he go wrong? Let’s rewind.
At the beginning of the story, on a drunken night before they leave for war, Mike promises Nick that he will not leave him in Vietnam.
In Act III, after being discharged, Mike sees Nick in Saigon during a chance encounter before they are sent home. Nick leaves in a car before he notices that Mike has seen him from a distance. Mike knows that Nick is alive, and he knows that he has promised he wouldn’t go home without him.
Mike ends up going home without finding his friend and bringing him home.
Mike broke his promise. It does not matter that Nick should have been responsible for bringing himself home, because being a man means your umbrella of responsibility transcends yourself.
To accept responsibility for yourself means you accept responsibility itself. Committing yourself to responsibility means you must hold yourself responsible not only to yourself, but to the people you care about. This is why true responsibility is in short supply — it is not an easy undertaking.
Nick’s PTSD results in his death in Saigon without ever coming back home. Mike takes responsibility for his death because he broke his promise to him and because he let his best friend slip outside of his umbrella of responsibility, the very thing which has driven him to improve and not crumble through the worst possible situations.
Accepting responsibility means more than facing adversity courageously — it means upholding your promises, living honestly, and generally doing more than one person should be required to do.
This is not easy. The Deer Hunter shows us the tragic heroic task that is accepting reality and taking responsibility.
