One Shot
Shawn Morgan

Crack. The hammer falls, colliding with primer, igniting powder, and firing a lead bullet. So goes the lone shot from the rifle of a hunter perched by a mountainside waterfall, so simple, so clean. It is from this simplicity that men are torn, and placed into the fires of war. History repeatedly shows how war changes men, some for the better, while others, and perhaps most, for the worse. Michael Cimino’s motion picture, The Deer Hunter, tells how three such men, Michael, Steven, and Nick, go from the simple Middle-American life they know so well to the tormented post-Vietnam existence through which they all struggle to survive.
Though not all would call Michael the hero of the work, it is obvious that he is the one to which all of his friends look for direction. Cimino uses this to develop Mike’s character as the group heads out on their last big deer hunt before shipping out for Vietnam. In fact, Cimino spends much of the movie developing each of his characters before they even get to war in order to show that war itself is only a way of testing those characters and eventually changing them.

“The war is really incidental to the development of the characters and their story,” says Cimino. “It’s part of their lives and just that, nothing more. So the war is simply a means of testing their courage and willpower (Production Notes)”.

So as the hunt moves on, Michael sums up his philosophy on hunting and on life with his motto, “One shot.” This seriousness with which he takes hunting bleeds through into how he handles war as well. The action of the movie picks up in Vietnam with Michael, who is now a battle-hardened soldier. When faced with adversity, he rises to the challenge, and his courage and will to survive both prove worthy. It is evident, however, that war has had its effect. As a fire burns off the impurities of a metal, so does the war shape Mike into a more pure and solid character. Cimino finally displays this change in the last hunting scene. Here, Michael finally relinquishes his “One shot” philosophy and lets the deer live, admitting to the sky, “Okay.” Only then, when his character has come full-circle, from a green, mid-American mill worker to a seasoned veteran of war, does Michael succeed in his post-war struggle and go back to Vietnam to reclaim his lost friend Nick.
If Michael is the image of a character made pure, reconciled to his country once more, then Steven is the antithesis of this. Once a good-ole-boy from the Midwest, newly married and with everything to live for, Steven finds himself caught up in the fires of war, green from inexperience much like a fresh-cut piece of wood, soft yet slow to burn. The trauma incurred in a mind-breaking game of Russian roulette alongside a Vietnamese river all but destroys what is left of Steven’s resolve and courage. “I just want to go home,” he says to Mike, as the two of them float down the river. Just as Cimino said, war has tested a man’s courage and willpower to the extreme. Ironically enough, however, back home is where Steven becomes reluctant to go once he arrives as an amputee in the VA hospital. Utterly broken and ashamed, Steven can no longer bring himself to confront the reality of life back at the small little town from which he came. He has been changed by his experiences in war to the point that he is too rattled even to confront the wife he left behind. Longing just to be left alone, left in the VA hospital, left to die and to leave an existence void of any more meaning or sustenance, Steven now realizes that he too has been changed by war, a war that he and his friends were once so eager to join, “Put us where the fighting’s worst”, yet now a war that has become the greatest burden in his life.

Obviously a burden of this size is going to change a person. However, the most drastic change of character in The Deer Hunter happens to Nick. At the beginning of the film Nick, much like Michael, is a serious hunter and takes that seriousness with him into other parts of his life, but he balances this seriousness with his love for life in the Midwest: “The whole thing, it’s right here. I love this place…the way the trees are.” This is how Cimino creates such a drastic change in Nick’s character. The test that Cimino speaks about inevitably comes to Nick as well, and how his courage and his willpower measure up determines how severely his character changes. The fires of war burn up and destroy all of his love for life, all of his love for home and for the trees. He is a broken man, wandering the streets of Saigon, searching for something that he knows he will never find. When Michael finally comes to bring him home, Nick is changed so much that he doesn’t even recognize his best friend. All that matters to him is the release he finds from the burden of war in a game of Russian roulette. Forced to play with him in this deadly game, Michael realizes that the Nick he knows is gone, and that he must now watch his best friend die. Though he never dies on the field of battle or in some military hospital, Nick becomes a casualty of war because the change through which he goes tragically ends his life. This is perhaps the most potent example in all of Cimino’s work of how war changes a man. It puts strain on a man’s character, on his will to live, so much that even the strongest passion for life is subject to destruction.
“Fuck it.” These are the words of a veteran, a Green Beret, a man who experienced the burden war placed on his character. Though Michael, Steven and Nick fail to realize why this soldier is telling them this before they ship out for their tour in Vietnam, they all undoubtedly come to the same conclusion once they face the same burdens and see their own courage and willpower held up to test against the flames of war. War changes a man. Michael Cimino understood this. He set up three very similar characters, to show three different results of what war can do to a man. In doing so, he created one of the most profound portrayals of the effects of the Vietnam War that has ever been made.

Works Cited

Production Notes, Bonus Features, The Deer Hunter DVD, produced by Universal Pictures and EMI Films, 1978.

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