"It's a cursed life where even death has become a luxury."
- Prince Florizel (Robert Montgomery), Trouble for Two (1936)
ADDENDUM PREFACE (6/8):
I had been working on the below post for almost six months, until finally publishing it mainly because I had nothing else more 'relevant' to put out... then, the very next day, or the same day, these sad, twisted photos come out of our dear Lindsay. Of course, it's coincidence... or is it? Just look up into her false-colored eyes above; if anyone in the media would join a suicide club like in THE DEER HUNTER or TROUBLE FOR TWO, it's Lindsay.
Let me tell you, to be FORCED to stop drinking and doing drugs when you don't really want to, and to have your every vulnerable misstep chronicled by hyena pack press photographers, well, I can truly understand the pain in her eyes... and I've seen it before, in the pictures of Kurt Cobain, who would be my age were he alive today.
Just hang on, LL --keep your powder dry and your pecker hard... and the earth will turn.
(that's from PLATOON)
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Over the years I've seen Michael Cimino's tale of small PA town Russian Orthodox churchgoing / hard drinking steelworkers going to 'Nam, THE DEER HUNTER (1978), in a lot of different situations, but the weirdest was via Betamax in high school Social Science class, where it was supposed educate us on the Vietnam war (and allow the hung-over teacher--and some students--a nice nap in the dark). I can still remember the collective sigh of relief at the sight of some AV geek dragging in the big old TV stand, killing the lights and drawing the blinds against the 11 AM sunshine, knowing this meant there would be no test or class discussion, just VC goons and Pittsburgh drunks. Each class period was only 45 minutes, so we saw HUNTER in daily installments, rewinding and forwarding trying to find the right spot (since each class the teacher had was watching the same tape) until it stretched on for weeks. And two different teachers showed it in one year, in different classes at different times, until half my junior year of HS was spent watching Asians slap around Bobby De Niro and Chris Walken.
Not a lot of the film made sense, especially back then (1983), a land before internet. The film's central group of buddies for example never need to sleep. They work the late shift at a steel mill, clock out at dawn, drop by the local bar on their way home to breakfast, then get dolled up for a wedding reception that afternoon into the evening. They party all through the early morning hours then drive out to their cabin in the mountains to go deer hunting, drinking all the while. Until finally -- after being awake for 24 hours at least -- they're back in the bar, playing piano and standing around. BAM! Vietnam. Well, no wonder shit was so fucked up over there!
And so it came to pass that everyone in Bridgewater Raritan HS West thought Russian roulette was the cool game to play overseas. Russian roulette was simply what one does in war, the way bridge and shuffleboard are what one does on a cruise ship, or poker and blackjack in Vegas--to think it might be any different required raising your hand and asking the teacher if any of this actually happened or was common, and then he may have remembered he was supposed to give us a quiz last week, and you would have been in trouble with the class thugs, not to mention you hadn't studied. Hearing those squeaky TV stand wheels was like hearing the empty chamber click on that roulette pistol, knowing we were safe for one more day... tonight, god help us, we'd get it together and do the reading.
But of course we never did. "Click." Sometimes, Mike, when I dream, I'm back in class, still unprepared, hoping against hope those AV wheels are going to come squeaking down the hallway.
And of course we were too cool even after it was too late for the test to be administered to ask the teacher why Christopher Walken's character, Nick, becomes addicted to Russian roulette, why he plays it of his own free will, and how he possibly could survive longer than six games; the sheer absurdity of the idea that anyone could work an eight hour steel mill shift followed by 24+ hours of partying, or last more than a week on a suicide circuit, not to mention months, was accepted without comment. It must be because these guys are from Russian immigrant stock (the wedding is at a Russian Orthodox church), I figured. Russian are fearless and disturbed. Violence is in their blood like vodka; that's why it was called Russian roulette instead of, say, Polish roulette, or Central Jersey roulette. (Russians didn't invent it I later heard, it's based on a rumor of one angry moment in the life of one old Cossack general.)
Since those HS screenings I've seen the HUNTER dozens of times, each time thinking it's both better and worse than I remembered. The ambiguity of Walken's motivations on 'the RR circuit' has over the years forced a nation of film lovers to contemplate macho self-annihilation at its most terrifyingly nihilistic, for better or worse, without any rationale or explanation within the narrative. Here's what one helpul scholar notes of the film:
The roulette stands for the horror, the abjection, the reptition-compulsion, the split of subjectivity and the male body, the unwilling fratricide, the collapse of otherness and of the symbolic order. Negating the sexual gaze, the Russian roulette image transforms the Corpse into the subject of the history of defeat (Peter Lang, Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of War, p. 187)
But according to the actual vets and POWs, that whole RR aspect of the story was total bullshit: there never was no such suicide circuit, either in or out of POW camps. While seeing the film in the sacred situation of high school Social Science class may have planted seeds of sexual gaze negation and defeat in our eggshell minds, it did nothing to actually tell us anything about Vietnam, which negated why it was in Social Science class to begin with.
Here's what a Vietnam war correspondent says:
I am now discovering that increasing numbers of Americans believe that the last act of the war took place in a sinister back room somewhere in Saigon, where greedy Chinese gamblers were exhorting a glazed-eyed American GI to blow his head off. Had I as a working reporter missed such a vivid human-interest story on the last day of the war, I might have opted for a similar fate.
I have found that enthusiasts are genuinely hurt when I tell them that while Vietnam had all manners of violence, including self-immolating Buddhist monks, fire-bombings, rape, deception, and massacres like My Lai in its 20 years of war, there was not a single recorded case of Russian roulette, not in the voluminous files of the Associated Press anyway, or in my experience either. The central metaphor of the movie is simply a bloody lie....
But Cimino defends his creative rights. During the filming in Thailand, he told reporters: "War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades. It's a question of survival, friendship and courage, and what happens to these things in people under stress." But they didn't play Russian roulette in the Crusades either. (Peter Arnett - LA Times, via The Veteran)
Creative rights or no, it's hard to believe Nick has been playing the game nonstop through the time it takes Michael to come home from the war, hang around, move in on Nick's girl, visit folks, hunt deer, feel guilty, fly back and search for him while Saigon falls. The odds of surviving that long are probably the same as Nick winning the lottery three times in a row. Further going unmentioned for good reason is that after being released from the hospital in Saigon, Michael first spies Nick at an RR game which Michael himself is attending! Is the yen for competitive suicide so unshakable or is there just nothing else to do in Saigon? Have they tried heroin? It's soo much safer! Instead both Nick and Michael, independent of each other, find the same French promoter in a convertible parked behind the 'Mississippi' club, like he's just waiting for traumatized soldiers too zonked to care about booze, drugs and/or hookers to wander through the rear exit and get in the game, following the irregular sound of gunshots like zombies following the sound of human screams. That Frenchman must go through dozens of these shell-shocked soldiers a day, like Warren Oates with his cocks in Cockfighter.
The idea of competitive suicide is of course fascinating to the minions of places like Central Jersey, and though it wasn't 'real' in any way before The Deer Hunter, it sure is now.
TROUBLE FOR TWO (1936) features a kind of Russian roulette (It's based on Robert Louis Stevenson's story, "The Suicide Club"), wherein a group of people gather around a long table and the emcee deals cards instead of a gun. The one who draws the ace of spades kills the one who draws the jack of diamonds (not at the club, but later). Set in Victorian-era London, the club is more of a response to the stigma of suicide'as well as a condemnation of jaded thrill-seeking. Rich young scoundrels go because it's the only thing left that's new under the sun and they've already gambled up their inheritance and are left with nothing but shame -- a shame they've no wish to expound with suicide punishable by jail time, hanging or permanent blight on your family's honor. Old people with terminal illnesses are there too, at the table every night for the dealer to pass them a tasty card.
Robert Montgomery stars as a royal prince from the continent visiting London who stumbles on the club and goes just for thrills (as a baby he once played with a lit bomb tossed in his crib by an anarchist and has been unafraid of anything since). Rosalind Russell goes to the club also, because she's spying on him. Love ensues, but the next night she draws the ace of spades and he the jack of diamonds, so they better do some declaring fast.Of course there turns out to be reasons for all this suicide clubbing: it seems royal persons must prove their worthiness through regular bouts of courage. Luckily a gentlemen can always call on the aid of other gentlemen when it comes to scourging anarchists. And at any rate, duels, wars, anarchists and horse-related hunting accidents were common enough at the time that a young man of honor probably had a one bullet / six chambers chance of surviving into his thirties anyway. Chances for bravery came close to home, with gentlemanly pauses while the other guy picks up his dropped rapier, and a doctor standing by instead of a lot of chain-smoking VC slapping one around.
That's why the only reason the metaphor works and the only reason it doesn't kill the overall greatness of The Deer Hunter--it's not realistic but it fits the overall mode war and courage-proving in general, i.e. every time you climbed into your B-17 to bomb Berlin in 1943, or launched an attack or amphibious assault you probably had a Russian roulette trigger pull chance of surviving. But the thing is, most of thos guys didn't need to hang around the backs of German and Japanese saloons, huffing ack-ack or flame thrower exhaust from a hookah to feel alive. In this, Cimino perhaps makes the mistake of putting the masculine critique before the horse and sacrificing coherence for intensity, of trying to make it all super authentic and true by focusing on something that never actually happened.
There's nothing wrong with adding fantasy / fictional elements into war films, ala, say INGLORIOUS BASTERDS but we know from the beginning that BASTERDS isn't about war, but about war films. We presume from the beginning that THE DEER HUNTER is about war's victims, 'real people' from small American towns who play with fire and get burned, but it turns out it's not about them at all. It's about Cimino's desire to morph blue collar alcoholics into Slavic mountain gods who are then consumed and brought low by gibbering Asian devils and their own thousand yard staring contests. Suicide may be painless, but make a habit of it and you become a pain... in the ass... of valor.
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