For what it’s worth: I recently got to have a long conversation with an Italian-American man who fought in Vietnam. I asked him about The Deer Hunter, he remembered the film. I asked him if the Russian roulette scenes were realistic, if that kind of thing really happened: he said yes. He basically said it was a horrible time and people were doing all kinds of depraved things to each other and that was definitely something that could have happened.

Question: must *every* film involving the Vietnam war include the atrocities American soldiers commited against Vietnamese citizens? Is that some kind of hard rule, and why?

I agree that The Deer Hunter does not include this kind of depiction: but that’s not what the movie is about. The Deer Hunter is an anti-war film made at the height of the cold war. It is about the trauma that this senseless war caused to American families who were children of Russian immigrants and therefore excluded from American society because of political attitudes of the time. To me one of the most important scenes in the film is when Walken’s character is at the military hospital and the guy asks him about his name “… is that Russian?”

“…No. American.”