Deer Hunter: "Success" in Casino
Michael Cimino’s 1978 film "Deer Hunter" is astoundingly informative. On the surface, it is an apocalypse of the Vietnam War. In fact, it is a dream of the Russian-American Nankei. It not only covers war, Thinking of politics, class and ideology is more the director's reflection on the success and failure of life, life and death, dream and awakening.
In hunting culture, deer symbolizes honor and also reflects the heart of hunters. Either restless or calm, deer hunters, as the name suggests, are people who look for "hearts." Sharpshooter Michael is a suitable deer hunter, he is not only a calm bystander, but also a kind and righteous person. At the pre-war wedding, he leaned against the corner, drinking, observers and friends. Everyone was drunk and I was alone. In the prisoner of war camp, he faced the muzzle of the Viet Cong and rescued himself calmly. friend. He is the kind of person who can control fate and see through illusions in movies. But it was such a sober person who was completely lost when he returned to his hometown after the war. Michael collapsed when faced with the stag, who no longer escaped and faced death calmly. At that moment, he no longer knew whether the deer was his prey, or he was the phantom of the deer.
This film has an ingenious Mobius ring structure, just like Azarello’s graphic novel The Joker. Until the end of the story, Batman is like an angry Jehovah who descends on Gotham and ridicules himself as a cowardly clown. At that moment, Batman, the city guardian, had the same dark heart as the criminal clown. "Deer Hunter" uses two Russian roulette gambling games to shape the two protagonists, Michael and Nick, to show its structure and express its thought content. The two gambling games constitute the director's thinking on the homogeneity of war and ideology; the transposition of the two protagonists from the dreamer to the bystander reveals the success or failure of life and death in life, and the reflection on the awakening of the dream.
The two gambling games were held in the Viet Cong Prisoner of War camp and Saigon, the seat of the South Vietnamese government. They symbolized the Soviet-American ideological struggle behind the Vietnam War, and also symbolized the seemingly different but in fact the same philosophy of survival in the two worlds. Life is like a big dream, and it is also a Russian roulette game. One bullet and one shot reflect only the cruelty of life-just like capitalism's temptation to laugh at the poor and not laugh at the prostitution-if it is not successful, if there is no money, What's the point of you being alive? The Viet Cong gambling game is nothing more than an unentertaining expression of this contest of survival or destruction.
As a dark line of narrative, Nick is an important part of the structure of the film’s Mobius ring. When the Russian-American youth of this steel mill hoped that his hunting skills could achieve the American dream on the battlefield in Vietnam, he suddenly discovered that there was something on the battlefield. A paradise of aircraft cannons and napalm bombs, the muzzle has been aimed at the forehead, and the marksmanship is useless. When he took his life back, but was questioned by the officer about his Russian surname, Nick's dream was awakened, and the battlefield had neither glory nor fame for the people at the bottom. Therefore, when the agent of the Saigon Casino hinted that his bottom people could only change their fate by wearing a red cloth and going to the gaming table, he understood that Vietnam is only a casino controlled by the two super players, the United States and the Soviet Union, and what the whole world is like. Not playing the same gambling game. This is exactly the same as their other friend, Stephen, playing bingo every day in a veterans nursing home after returning home.
At the end of the film, Michael finds Nick wearing a red cloth in a Vietnamese casino. At this time, Nick is shaped like a wood, his heart is like ashes, and he looks like a walking dead. The pistol has changed hands several times. No matter how Michael persuades, Nick finally still He waited for the long-awaited bullet that smashed the dream. Michael held the bloody Nick and wept bitterly, as if Nick was the stag who neither escaped nor frightened under his gun. There was a lot of noise in the casino, and the punters secretly thought that he was the one sober. People, don’t know that Nick has entered the Bucks’ dream with that bullet.
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