America Returns from War

When we talk about the "nightmare of war" we must recognize the imagination that accounts for the range or dimensions of that experience.

The Deer Hunter (1978) is often cited as a racist work of narrative film based in part on the Russian roulette scene, which, as critics point out, was not part of any U.S. POW's Vietnam War experience. But America is a racist country; therefore, it is not surprising that U.S. POWs traumatized by their wartime experiences could have dreamt themselves playing Russian roulette against each other under threat of death by their Vietnamese captors.

Less is made of another torture scene in another American film set during the Korean War, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), where a group of brainwashed U.S. POWs are led to believe they are waiting out the weather at a New Jersey ladies auxiliary meeting, when in fact they are being presented to a meeting of Chinese and Russian communists.

U.S. soldiers kill themselves in The Deer Hunter, while in The Manchurian Candidate they simply kill each other.