Vietnam and the Hollywood Genre Film: Inversions of American Mythology in the Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now

Abstract

SINCE THEIR RESPECTIVE RELEASES IN 1978 AND 1979, MICHAEL CIMINO'S Deer Hunter and Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now have enjoyed remarkable popular and critical success. But their wide recognition as contemporary cinematic masterpieces has been accompanied by corresponding controversy regarding their thematic significance and coherence. In addition, none of the commentaries on either of these two epic-scale films about the Vietnam War has searched for possible connections between them. My first purpose in this essay is to show that each film draws its design from popular American narrative formula, with the separate formulas providing the basis for the differences between The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now as interpretations of the Vietnam War. I further wish to demonstrate that link between those formulas establishes an underlying relation between the two films, embodying their essential aesthetic strategy. The allusion of The Deer Hunter to The Deerslayer signals the presentation of the Vietnam War through the popular genre for which Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales are the prototype: the western. Similarly, the opening scenes of Apocalypse Now establish the presentation of the symbolic journey of Heart of Darkness, itself an adventure/mystery tale, through the specific conventions of the hard-boiled detective formula. This use of popular genres that are related as central American myths of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries connects the two films. A popular genre, as Stanley Solomon succinctly defines it, is a certain mythic structure, formed on core of narrative meaning found in those works that are readily discernible as related and belonging to group. 1 As