In 1978, when I first went to the cinema to watch The Deer Hunter, I expected to see a film about the Vietnam War. What I didn’t expect was a reflection on friendship—pure, unfiltered, and painfully human.
For me, the war serves as no more than a backdrop to the drama that plays out over the movie’s three hour, three minute run time. The real story lies in the emotional terrain between a group of Pennsylvania steelworkers bound by loyalty, shaped by hard graft, and quietly broken by experience … and that which they cannot express.
The character of Michael, played by Robert De Niro, becomes the heart of this experience—not because he has courage, not because he is a natural-born leader, but because he loves. Not romantically, but plainly, directly. Without fuss.
THERE’S A SCENE early in the film that lingered in my mind long after the final credits rolled, a scene in which the friends gather in a streetside bar on the scuzzy side of town following a successful hunt in the mountains. Three of them, Michael, Steven and Nick, have been drafted and are about to go to Vietnam. It is also the eve of Steven’s marriage.
While they swig bottled beer and play pool, the Frankie Valli song ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ belts out of the juke box, prompting them to join in. There’s nothing dramatic about the scene—no foreshadowing, no heavy symbolism. Just a group of young men singing together, unconstrained, caught in a moment of innocence before everything changes.
‘I love you, baby, and if it’s quite alright
I need you, baby, to warm the lonely night
I love you, baby, trust in me when I say
Oh, pretty baby, don’t bring me down, I pray
Oh, pretty baby, now that I found you, stay
And let me love you, baby, let me love you.’
It’s raw, honest, and heartbreakingly simple. And it is that authenticity that makes it so powerful.
Yet it was another, later scene that moved me most. Following a gruelling tour of duty in Vietnam, Michael returns to his hometown on leave. His friends have planned a welcome-home party – a gesture of love, of normalcy. And yet Michael can’t face it.
He withdraws to his motel room. There he sits with his head in his hands, his pain palpable and visceral, while Stanley Myers’ haunting theme, ‘Cavatina,’ plays in the background.
In a profoundly emotional scene without words, we see Michael’s heart-breaking hesitancy. This isn’t about avoiding friendship—it’s the silent grief of knowing he cannot go back to being the person he was.
‘Being ‘strong’ means not being able to tell everyone that he actually feels broken – and being surrounded by a bunch of people who don’t quite know what to say to him would be a miserable experience.’
Eric Harris – ‘Bobby’s World’
For me, that moment distills the essence of trauma, guilt, and love more profoundly than anything I’ve seen in any other movie.
AND THERE’S THE unforgettable motif that laces the entire film together: the ‘one shot’ philosophy. ‘This is this,’ Michael says in the mountains, referring to the hunter’s code—one bullet, one kill. This mantra becomes a grim echo in the movie’s final act, in a game of Russian Roulette that claims the life of Michael’s best friend.
What begins as a principle of precision and humanity in hunting – ‘one shot‘ – mutates into a fatal gamble with chaos. The line between control and madness blurs.
AND YET, for all its darkness, The Deer Hunter is not a hopeless film. It’s a love story of a different kind—a story of men who don’t say much, but would do anything for each other. The kind of friendship that exists not in grand gestures, but in simply showing up, in being true, and in knowing.
It is that which stays with me. Not the war. Not the politics. But the unspoken, unwavering love between friends—here made more poignant by the fact that it is so rarely openly expressed, and yet it is as solid and unyielding as a Pennsylvania mountain.
RAVEN MOON 