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I spent my childhood visiting doctors with my mom. We couldn’t afford it; my dad had recently been hospitalized after a car crash for a strange episode of delusions that the doctors couldn’t figure out, and after hours coloring in a Batman coloring book while my mom whispered to my dad, handcuffed to the hospital bed, I couldn’t figure out why we were wasting even more money we didn’t have so a doctor could examine my genitals. There was nothing wrong with them. They didn’t hurt. I didn’t have a rash. And Mom wouldn’t tell me why we were there.

In the mornings, my parents got me up at 3 a.m., one hour before their shifts at the factory started. They would get me dressed and stick me in the back of Dad’s $25 Cadillac (a salvage gift from a mechanic uncle who fixed up junkers at his trailer), with a quilt and a pack of Hot Hands to brace me against the Ohio winter. The Cadillac had no AC. I’d either sleep in the factory parking lot until one of them could take a break to drive me to school, or they’d drop me at a classmate’s house and let their parents ferry me there. The school I attended was fiercely Lutheran, stocked by German immigrants, with services in German every Sunday and choir practice in the mother tongue. My classmates there sensed that something was wrong with me; they started calling me ‘tranny’ as early as second grade, and ‘faggot’ by third. Tranny came first.

At age eleven, my dad swallowed his meds (sertraline at the time, and every time he asked me to get the bottle for him, I’d yell “Sir Traline!” in a Monty Python voice and I’d gallop to the kitchen cabinet like a knight on a horse) and drove me to Salvation Army. I came away with a college textbook on psychology for twenty-five cents. That was where I read about the John/Joan case, identical twin boys – one raised as a girl after a botched circumcision burned his penis away. The boy’s parents hid the truth from him, but inside he always knew he was a boy. I fantasized that something like this had happened to me, but I didn’t believe it.

In middle school, my classmates knew me as a boy. In eighth grade, I won a writing prize that entitled me to $100 of free books from the tiny bookstore in town. I picked out an anatomy textbook and, like any fourteen-year-old would do, flipped right to the reproductive organs. The charts there didn’t match what was between my legs. “Maybe I’m reading it wrong,” I thought. That year, my mom took me to an endocrinologist (I’d long stopped wondering why we wasted money on these mystery appointments) who cheerfully told me that my estrogen levels were extremely high.

So I grew my hair out and spent high school as a girl.

At sixteen, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. That same year, my dad’s medication stopped working. In a sleepover – we were hosting – I tiptoed out of my makeshift bed and left my friends in the living room, while I coaxed the gun out of my dad’s hand in the kitchen and urged him to pet our dog instead until he calmed down. I knew my options then were to either go to work at the same factory as my parents or join the military. But I had to get out. I dreamed about combat: not about killing people, but about being killed, and about the shapeless anonymity of a military uniform and a buzzcut.

There was only one real hurdle to my enlistment: my birth certificate. My recruiter examined it, a wrinkle appearing between his eyebrows. I sat nervously picking scratchy pieces of fiberglass from my clothes while I waited for his reaction. He was a good ol’ country farmboy, a jocular young man who delighted in driving me home from training so he could see the green cornfields and Amish buggies on the way to my house. He couldn’t wait to get out of the military, he said, and buy a farm somewhere. Out here, where it was quiet. “He’s crazy,” I thought. Nobody out here actually made a living farming. Everyone had a second job: trucking, working on cars, sweating at the factory. I liked his optimism. But for the first time his jocularity disappeared, and he studied my birth certificate for longer than he should have.

“This doesn’t have a gender on it,” he said.

“They didn’t put genders on birth certificates back then,” I said, repeating my mother’s lie.

Six days later I went to the hospital. I had dug up my brother’s birth certificate, and then my grandpa’s for good measure. Now I knew that birth certificates were supposed to be stamped Male or Female in the 90s, and in the 20s, too. At the secretary’s desk, I haltingly explained the error on my birth certificate and requested that she fix it so I could join up. Smiling, she studied the slip of paper and without missing a beat, unfazed, she asked,

“So what gender do you want me to put down?”

Couldn’t she tell I was a girl? Wasn’t it in my file? Wasn’t I doing it right? Long hair. High voice. I’d even been voted prom queen earlier this month, though I’d been waiting for a bucket of pig’s blood to fall on me the entire time. But the secretary stared at me, smiling sweetly, waiting for me to decide. She couldn’t tell by looking? My head swam. By now I understood through context clues that when my classmates called me a tranny, it meant something bad; I had vague ideas of men wearing dresses and girls dressing as boys, mostly gleaned from the Family Guy parody of Boys Don’t Cry, which I watched obsessively on DVD. I didn’t know about transgender people, but I knew you couldn’t just walk in off the street and request any gender you wanted on your birth certificate. Sweat prickled at my scalp. Something was wrong here. I couldn’t decide what it was.

I got a new birth certificate. I joined up.

At age 23, a Navy psychologist told me with the same casual air that she thought I had PTSD, but since PTSD would qualify me for disability, she had to put BPD in my file. She explained that benefits were really very small and hard to get, and if with a PTSD diagnosis, I’d be stuck in military processing for months, maybe even past my detachment date, subjected to humiliating tests and interviews to prove I really had it. With a BPD diagnosis, I could detach immediately, and wasn’t that really what I wanted? My command had institutionalized me for wearing the wrong underwear, something they only discovered when I lay stripped of my uniform and close to dying in a hospital bed, E-9s and O-2s surrounding my bed, no Batman coloring book in sight. Trump had just banned trans people from serving.

At age 29, I watched The Deer Hunter.

*******

The plot of The Deer Hunter is simple. Released four years after the Vietnam War, it follows three friends from a steel-mining, Russian Orthodox small town in Pennsylvania, just one state away from the German-speaking Lutheran church I spent my childhood in. Robert De Niro plays Michael Vronsky, a steelworker who lives in a double-wide trailer with his best friend Nick (Christopher Walken). His youngest coworker, the angelic-looking Stevie (John Savage), is getting married this weekend. The plan is for everyone to go on one last deer hunt after the wedding, before Michael, Stevie, and Nick ship off to Vietnam.

They weren’t drafted. They enlisted. There is no anti-war sentiment in their small town. Their community sends them off at the wedding reception, where the hall is draped in American flags and massive portraits of the enlistees hang from the walls. The only person who seems to oppose the enlistment is Stevie’s mother, who laments in a mix of Russian and English – not that her boy will soon be fighting overseas, but that he will leave a pregnant wife behind in the mother’s spare room.

During the fifty-minute wedding scene, Nick (best man) and his girlfriend Linda (maid of honor) wrap their hands in Kleenex and hold identical, ornate crowns over the heads of the groom and bride. I’m not familiar with Russian Orthodox ceremonies, but I’m interested in the unisex appeal of the crowns. Both Stevie and Angela are kings. At the reception, hosted by the local VFW, Nick throws himself into the dancing and Stevie is bolstered up on the shoulders of his fellow party guests, but Mike keeps to the sidelines. He skulks in the background, avoiding the eyes of an interested woman and burying himself in alcohol at the bar. His attention is drawn, time and again, to Nick’s slender form as he twirls Linda around, his ruffled shirt soaked with sweat to reveal a narrow waist and protruding ribs. While the sad, lonely woman tries to catch Mike’s eye, he gazes up instead at Nick’s bigger-than-life portrait on the wall.

Mike does dance, eventually. His friend Stan (John Cazale, emaciated in his last film role before succumbing to cancer) bodily lifts him and forces him onto the dance floor. He poses reluctantly for a group photo. Linda (Meryl Streep) asks her boyfriend Nick to dance with her afterward, but Nick ignores her, his eyes chasing Mike. After an intimate hug where Mike’s hand lingers on Nick’s waist, preventing him from pulling away, Nick abruptly separates himself from the group and pushes Linda to Mike, insisting they dance together instead. The dance is brief and deliberately clumsy. Mike forgoes choreography and opts instead to lift Linda in a masculine bear hug, swinging her around in circles until she collapses, giggling. When Mike does dance – really dance – it’s with his coworker Stan, their tuxedoed bodies close together, coming apart only to affect a twirl.

For the rest of the night, Mike pursues Linda, offering her the same drink he shares with his buddies at the bar – Rolling Rock. A confused Linda accepts, but her face is pinched. Meryl’s face is soft but thin, her strange bone structure mirroring Christopher Walken’s so closely they could be twins. They have the same long nose, the same bright eyes and fluffy blonde hair. The only difference between their bodies is their height – and that Meryl’s narrow frame is cinched into a pink bridesmaid dress while Chris is tucked into a tailored tuxedo, the ruffled shirt skin-tight.

When the bride throws her bouquet, it’s Linda who catches it. She gasps in delight. At her side, unseen, Nick pumps his fist, but his face is strangely blank. Under the chatter of the crowd, he asks Linda to marry him, and she says yes. She studies him; he avoids her eyes. He amends his statement without looking at her: After the war, of course. If he gets back. When he gets back.

The reception ends. A drunken Mike shows his first signs of real instability. He leaps over the wedding car and strips off his jacket, unbuttoning for the first time when all his coworkers have been stripped down to their shirtsleeves for the last hour. As he races down the streets of Clairton, Pennsylvania, he’s chased by John, Stan, and Axel (who falls down and growls “Fuck it,”), by Angela and Stevie in their borrowed wedding car (Mike swerves down an alley and the newlyweds drive past, no longer bothered) and by Nick. Mike removes every last piece of his tuxedo, but by the time he’s in his briefs, only Nick is still chasing. Down a dark alleyway, Mike emerges naked, sprinting to the basketball court, and only Nick is still there. For the first time in fifty minutes, Nick is wearing his jacket again, but he quickly removes it to drape it over Mike’s exposed lap. They sit together on the pavement, in the dark, each of them leaning against the pole of a basketball hoop. Nick doesn’t ask what’s the matter or why Mike stripped. Even chasing Mike, the only thing he yelled was, “I gotta talk to you.”

Breathless, they broach the topic of Vietnam. Nick begs a naked Mike not to leave him. “If anything happens over there … you gotta promise me.”

Mike promises. The tension breaks. They dissolve into laughter.

****

The actual deer-hunting in The Deer Hunter only takes about five minutes. In their double-wide trailer, Mike chides Nick about not treating his hunting gear earlier. They bicker gently, like a married couple, but as Mike roams restlessly through the kitchen, it’s clear that something is bothering him. Old KFC boxes are stacked on the top of the refrigerator and hunting trophies clutter the already-claustrophobic kitchen walls. Finally, Mike confesses that he doesn’t want to go hunting with all these people. He only likes hunting with Nick.

“I tell you Nick, you’re the only guy I go hunting with. I like a guy with quick moves and speed. I don’t hunt with assholes.”

“Who’s an asshole?” Nick asks, and Mike glances out the window as their friends Axel and John load beer into his car – the wedding car, still decorated with pink tulle.

“Without you, I hunt alone,” Mike says.

In the woods, Stan, John, and Axel disappear. They were there in the wedding car during the long drive up to the mountain, but here, in the mist, it’s just Mike and Nick. Choral music swells in the air as they stalk over a steep ridge, Mike’s eyes sharp, Nick’s head down to watch the forest floor. The viewer might be forgiven for thinking the choral music sounds familiar; they might misidentify it as the eerie hymn sung during Stevie’s wedding. It is hauntingly similar to Memory Eternal, the Russian Orthodox dirge sung at a funeral much later on.

Mike keeps his gun at the ready; Nick wears his over his shoulder on a sling. When they find a deer, Mike kills it with one shot, waiting until just the right moment to take the buck down. “Two [shots] is pussy,” he told Nick the previous day. Back home again, the boys pile into a bar while John plays the piano, a Chopin nocturne that kills their laughter and turns all of them from rowdy rough-housing boys, soaked in beer, into contemplative men.

The noise of a chopper intrudes. The scene fades out to Vietnam.

***

To give you a brief summary of the rest of the film:

Mike, Nick, and Steven are captured by the Viet Cong. They are forced to play a game of Russian roulette, sometimes facing each other instead of the anonymous soldiers trapped inside the pit with them. Stevie crumbles; he spends his Vietnam scenes hyperventilating and dissociating, and when he holds the gun up to his head, he pulls his punch. The gunshot barely clips his head, and he’s thrown into a cage underwater, trapped and bleeding, surrounded by dead bodies and rats.

When Mike and Nick face off, they share a plan – Mike’s plan, which Nick reluctantly goes along with. They pretend to hate each other, to want each other dead. Mostly it’s Mike affecting this plan. At his request, the VC soldier fills the gun with three bullets, and three empty chambers. They trade the gun back and forth, tempting fate more and more each time, until finally Mike turns the half-loaded gun on his captors and attacks. Together, he and Nick and Stevie escape, floating down the river on the trunk of a fallen tree. Only Mike escapes from their captors uninjured. When an American helicopter bears down on them, it rescues only Nick; Mike and Stevie fall thirty feet into the water below, where Stevie hits the rocks and loses all feeling in his legs.

Time passes quickly in war. We see Stevie laid out on the hood of an ally car, driven through a procession of fleeing citizens – presumably toward a clinic – while Mike wanders alone into the crowd. We see Nick at a hospital, unable to remember his parents’ names (with ease) or their birthdays (at all). In the streets of Saigon, Nick explores brothels and dark alleys and finds his way into a game of Russian roulette, where Mike is sitting in the audience. Nick interrupts the game, grabs the gun, holds it to his own head, and fires. The hammer clicks.

Back home, Michael tries to adjust to civilian life. He avoids his own welcome-back party. He sleeps with Linda. He tracks down Stevie, a double amputee with only one working arm, living in a VA hospital and refusing to come home to his wife and child. Stevie has been receiving money and gifts from an unknown sender in Saigon. Nick is AWOL. Nobody knows where he is; he never came back home.

Toward the end of the movie, Mike once again abandons Clairton, this time not to enlist but to find Nick. As Saigon falls, Mike scours the clubs and brothels and eventually makes his way to a discreet club where Nick is “the famous American,” the winner of every Russian roulette game for the last several years. He’s gaunt (Walken ate only rice and bananas for a month leading up to this scene). His arms are streaked with dark veins. He doesn’t recognize his oldest friend, but he sends all his winnings home to Stevie. He walks inexorably to the table where a gun is waiting for him, and when Mike insists on playing against him, Nick doesn’t flinch. They trade the gun back and forth, the same way they did when they were captives, but this time it’s Nick who appears to be in control. He breaks only when Mike reminds him of their deer-hunting trips, the trees that Nick loved, the solitude and companionship of the mountain, just the two of them. Nick’s mouth works; he tries to speak. He remembers Mike’s rule for hunting deer: “One shot.”

****

The film is bookended by two important rituals: the first, the ritual of a Russian Orthodox wedding, long and cheerful and filled with song. The last, the ritual of an after-funeral breakfast. Here there is no element of Russian culture. The cast is stripped down from a sea of Russian extras to our main cast, all saddled with American names. They sing together – “God Bless America” – before they toast Nicky, and there the movie ends.

Ritual is important to The Deer Hunter. There is the ritual of communal singing, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” at the bar and during the wedding, “Katyusha” at the reception, and after the hunt, Bobby Bare’s “Dropkick Me Jesus.” They sing only the chorus, omitting the lyrics, “Make me, oh, make me, Lord, more than I am / Make me a piece in Your master game plan / Free from the earthly tempestion below / I’ve got the will, Lord, if You got the toe.” There are also the rituals of military life, the uniforms and salutes, the strict adherence to rank; the masculine ritual of deer-hunting in the woods with your best friends; and the ritual of gambling, sometimes with cards but mostly with a gun to your head.

Ritual appealed to me a lot as a kid. I loved the elaborate robes our pastors wore in church on Sunday, and the colorful chausibles draped over their shoulders. Being an altar boy was my favorite; I took pride in remembering all the steps to the dance, the slow rhythm of bowing at the altar in perfect synchronization and lighting the ten candles mounted on the wall first, the two candlesticks wavering on the altar next. I thought about being a priest when I grew up: Catholic, not Lutheran, because Lutherans were allowed to marry. Something about abstinence appealed to me. I knew it was important that your partner had the right genitals; I couldn’t figure out whose genitals, exactly, would match up with mine. Better to leave the whole question behind and serve God instead. Or join the military – die on a battlefield – and never have to face the problem to begin with.

When Nick says to Mike, “I love this town,” I understood him. I loved the ritual of communal singing, and I loved the community that comes built-in with an immigrant church in a small factory town; I also loved the factory town, the surnames that were unpronounceable to outsiders, the small grocer where my dad picked up his third job in 2007 selling expired cereal and moldy cheese, the decaying buildings by the railroad tracks, the broken windows in my bedroom taped up with plastic sheets, but still letting snow in during the winter. I loved getting my first hunting rifle at age three and learning how to shoot in my backyard. I loved going out to bars with my grandpa as a kid, signing the books, secluding myself by the pinball machine while he took a strange girl upstairs. But when Nick stays in Vietnam, refusing to come home, even killing himself to stay away, I understood that too.

****

The Deer Hunter is most commonly analyzed as a film about war trauma – its effects on the individual as well as the community – and the weaponization of patriotism and a love of home, of family, to drive young men into war. These elements are certainly there, but what’s often missed is that The Deer Hunter is also a film about being queer: specifically about being queer in a small, religious, steelworking town.

Stevie – delicate, small, blond – is marrying Angela. Her pregnant belly is visible during the “Troika” sequence when Steve’s friends lift her over their heads. He confesses to Nick that he’s not the father. He’s never even slept with Angela. Yet he marries her anyway, with a strangely suicidal air, downing beer after beer until Stan gently tells him to stop.

Mike – rugged, masculine, Robert fucking De Niro – is the loner. He refuses to dance at the wedding. He’s the only one in his friend group who isn’t already attached: Stan flits around any hot babe who will give him attention; Axel chases a screaming blonde who beats him with an umbrella in the coat room; Stevie has Angela; Nicky has Linda. Mike is alone. We see him interacting mostly with men, spanking a naked coworker in the shower, stripping nude in the street so Nicky will comfort him. On the long drive up to the mountains for their deer hunt, annoyed that it’s not just him and Nicky, Mike refuses to let Stan borrow his spare boots. He’s surly in this scene, visibly irritated by the intruders who are ruining his ritual with Nick. When he refuses the boots once again, an angry Stan accuses Mike of being a faggot.

“I fixed you up a million times,” Stan says. “I don’t know how many times I must have fixed him up with girls. And nothing ever happened. Zero. Hey, you know your trouble, Mike? Nobody ever knows what the fuck you’re talking about. This is this. What the hell is that supposed to mean? I mean is that some faggot-sounding bullshit or is that some faggot-sounding bullshit? … There’s times I swear I think you’re a fucking faggot.”

Throughout this whole scene, Nick has remained silent and blank-faced. He stands between Stan and Mike, changing from his tuxedo into his hunting gear. He neither laughs at the fighters’ barbs nor joins in their jeering, as Axel and John do. But at the word ‘faggot,’ Nick breaks his silence. He calmly tells Stan to shut up and holds his ground: “You’re out of line.” But if Mike thinks he’s got an unquestionable ally here, he’s not quite right. When Stan throws the spare boots at Mike, Nicky slowly walks over, picks them up, and asks Mike, “What’s the matter with you?”, his voice soft and his eyes piercing. He gives the boots back to Stan, and he keeps looking at Mike, unwavering, his face unreadable. In frustration, Mike points his gun out at the open sky and fires off a shot.

Nick – of the three friends, Nick seems the most comfortable in their small town. He flirts easily and sincerely with Linda. He’s the center of every dance and every song. Yet he seems unmoored from the community in a subtle way that mirrors Mike. Nick has no family. He lives with Mike; his parents do not attend his funeral. In a deleted scene, Nick reveals they’ve been dead for twenty years. In the early scenes, Nick is the only man to wear a ruffled shirt at Angela’s wedding, and he struts through the waltzes and folk dances with precision and grace from Walken’s training in dance. His thick blond hair and pin-thin form bring to mind David Bowie in his Thin White Duke era, ongoing at the time this movie was filmed. Despite his intimacy with Linda, Nicky is always watching Mike, and Mike is always glancing back just a second later, too slow to catch Nick’s gaze.

The war isn’t a war. The war is self-destruction. It’s self-discovery. It’s an escape from a small, religious-minded town. It’s a place where boys are turned into men. It’s a place where the bonds between two men, holding each other in a water-filled prison pit or in the aftermath of a suicidal game, is more real and more intimate than the picture of Linda that both Mike and Nick keep in their wallets. War is the hell of admitting that you’re queer; the aftermath is how you face up to it.

***

So how do they face up to it?

Stevie, the pretty young man who confessed to never sleeping with his bride, breaks. He is the most visibly destroyed by what he encounters inside himself in Vietnam. In the prison pit, he sobs and panics, clinging to the bamboo bars while Mike nuzzles against his neck to soothe him. Nicky watches from the shadows, an inscrutable peeping Tom, interrupting to call Mike’s name, but never forcing himself to physically join them. What he wanted Mike for, we never find out; the strange tension between the three of them, the push-and-pull of Mike’s old friendship with Nicky vs. Stevie’s need to be comforted by someone more experienced – all of that is broken when the VC hauls Stevie up and forces himself to point a gun to his own head, to admit who he really is.

Back home, Stevie is permanently marked by this experience. Anyone on the street can see what he’s been through; he can never go back into the closet. He secludes himself from Angela and his unnamed baby. He hides in a hospital, pressing pause on the revelations that have been forced upon him and the reaction he will face when he comes back home. In the hospital, when I had been caught wearing the wrong underwear, I did this, too. I played dumb when the nurses asked about my gender identity and laughed it off when they apologized to me about a fellow patient who went on an unprompted transphobic rant. I avoided the disciplinary charges and interrogations I would be faced with when the hospital let me out. When my three days of involuntary hospitalization ended, I asked to stay there for another two weeks.

Nick never comes home from Vietnam. In the hospital, he forgets his parents’ names. He approaches a phone and asks to call Linda, then ends the call before the operator patches him through. Convinced that Stevie and Mike are dead, he eventually forgets them, too. For Nick, who fit in so well back home, going back is now impossible. He has faced up to the gun and survived it, but where is there to go from here? It’s the late 60s, early 70s. The only thing Nick can do is stay here, facing the gun again and again.

For Mike, it’s different. Mike, the loner, never fit into Clairton, Pennsylvania to begin with. He is the one accused of being a faggot before he ever faces the gun at all. His masculinity, his ruggedness, his skill at hunting – all of that means nothing. His friends see through him; they wonder why he doesn’t date. Perhaps they wonder, too, why it is that when he does go for a girl, it’s for the girl that Nicky likes, the girl who looks just like his best friend. For Mike, Vietnam is a breeze. He is capable; in control; in charge. He is the one who makes the plans, who forces his friends to face the gun and coaxes them through their fear. Vietnam comes as no shock to Mike; he’s known who he is for years. He’s understood what kind of life faces him in Clairton and made some kind of peace with it, a bargain with himself that he can do it as long as he has to. He’s able to go back home.

You can stay where you are, marry a nice girl, have kids and work at the same factory your parents work in. You can enlist and come back different, harder, quieter, and do what you’re supposed to without complaint. You can enlist and come back different, marked, with your scars exposed, and everyone you used to call your family will whisper about you and stare at your wounds in the street. Or you can not come back at all.

****

In the hospital, Nick sits alone staring at corpses being put into metal coffins. He was the only one of his friends to entertain the thought that he might die in ‘Nam, and now, as far as he knows, he’s the only one who lives. It’s an intolerable thought. He leaves the hospital and walks the streets, searching through seas of soldiers and inside brothels, seeing Mike in every brown-haired soldier he meets. A prostitute approaches him at the bar. She persuades a reluctant, disoriented Nicky to go upstairs with her. She asks what he wants to call her.

Uncertainly, Nick says, “Linda.” But when the prostitute repeats the name, he pushes her away. He tries to get away from her, stares out the window, and the prostitute pins him to the window in a scene that is at once familiar and strange. We are used to men pinning women to the wall for sex. We’re not used to seeing it happen to a man. Dissociated, Nick stares down into the street where a vendor is selling wooden elephants, the same souvenir he will send to Stevie in the hospital over and over again throughout the years. His expressions among women are distant, disinterested, distracted. But when he hears a gunshot in the alleyway, Nick changes. His eyes become sharp. There’s a haunted longing to his features. He’s drawn to it.

There is a distinct coding in The Deer Hunter that ties Russian roulette to gay sex, and particularly to prostitution. When Nick wanders down that dark alleyway, paralleling the alley where he chased after a naked Mike, he finds a distinguished Frenchman sitting in a white car. The Frenchman sips champagne and offers Nick a glass. When Nick says no, the Frenchman tuts. “Don’t say no.”

The club inside is bustling. Nick doesn’t want to go, but when the Frenchman takes his arm, Nick allows him to lead. Just like with the prostitute a scene earlier, Nick reluctantly lets himself be dragged to a destination: once a brothel, now a roulette room. Just like with the prostitute, when Nick sees what’s required of him, he flees. But there are a few key differences here: 1) Nick doesn’t fuck the prostitute, but he does take the gun, hold it against his head, and pull the trigger to hear the hammer click. 2) Mike isn’t in the brothel. He is in the roulette room, amazed to see Nick, desperately trying to catch his eye. And 3) Nick doesn’t stay in Saigon’s red light district for the girls. He stays for the cold press of a gun barrel against his head.

*****

“Can’t we just comfort each other?” Linda asks Mike.

They’re in the double-wide trailer Mike used to share with Nick. Mike wears his uniform, his medals pinned to his chest. “No, I can’t,” he says. “Not here.”

*****

In the hospital, Mike tells Stevie of his latest hunting trip. Nick wasn’t there, of course. It was Mike and Stan, John and Axel, beer and nervous laughter. “I was tracking a beautiful buck,” Mike says, “and I let it slip away.”

*****

Mike and Nick are alone on the mountaintop. They walk together, Mike leading the way in hunter orange. Over the scene, a Russian folk song plays. It tells the story of a robber about to be hanged. Asked to name his co-conspirators, the robber lists four comrades: the dark night, a damask knife, a good horse, a tight bow for hunting. Behind Mike, Nick picks his way carefully over the ground, wearing a coat the muted brown color of a deer.

*****

In his hotel room, Mike crouches down and sits against the wall. He buries his head in his hands. The theme song, “Cavatina,” plays – a beautiful guitar piece composed by Stanley Myers and performed by John Williams. “Cavatina” has an alternate title. “He Was Beautiful.”

*****

At the end of the film, Mike makes his way back to Vietnam just in time for the fall of Saigon. He tracks Nick to the red light district where he last saw him. Drawn to the brothel, as if he can sense that Nick has been there before, Mike enters, sees a prostitute waiting for him, and turns away. He passes the old man selling wooden elephants in the street. He finds the roulette club abandoned and the same distinguished Frenchman sitting in his white car.

The Frenchman knows where Nick is at. He guides Mike there for a fee. They take a gondola through a river, passing under a bridge, just as Mike once held onto Nick and Stevie as they sailed beneath a broken rope bridge on their fallen tree. In the next roulette club, Mike pays over a thousand dollars to enter, then bribes his way into the game to play an emaciated Nick. Track marks eat their way up Nick’s arms. In a hallway lined with metal box fans, Mike grabs Nick’s face, clasps it in both hands, and tells him he loves him. He calls Nicky by his nickname; he calls him Nick; he calls him Nicolas. He asks Nick to call him by his name, too.

The gun is loaded. “Don’t do it,” Mike urges, but Nick raises the gun to his head anyway. He is the male prostitute performing for their pleasure. The hammer clicks.

“Is this what you want?” Mike asks. He holds the gun to his head. “I love you, Nick.” The hammer clicks.

The crowd cheers. When they go quiet, Nick stares at Mikey as if seeing him for the first time. His mouth opens and closes. You can hear his tongue clicking in his mouth, but he doesn’t speak.

“Come on, Nicky, come home,” Mike says, and Nick’s eyes shunt away. His face works, but when the gun is placed in his hand, he’s calm again. Mike grabs his hand. He places it against the table. “You remember the trees?” he asks. “The mountains? You remember all that?”

“One shot,” says Nicky with a smile.

Mike laughs in relief.

****

Minutes before Nicky’s death, Mike calls him Nicolas.

In the hospital, a doctor searches through crowded rooms full of patients, looking for Nikanor Chevotarevich. Nick’s closest friend doesn’t know the name he was given at birth; Nick himself barely seems to recognize it. In another scene, the deer hunters pause their long drive up the mountain to rest and eat. Axel watches Nick sitting on the hood of the car, napping and drinking beer, and asks, “How come I never see you eat?” Nick responds, “I like to starve myself. Keeps the fear up.”

“It ain’t natural,” Axel says.

In 1979, when The Deer Hunter was released, director Michael Cimino was a burly, masculine guy who looked like a Midwestern mechanic. In Cimino’s memoirs, he writes about playing around with anorexia, self-medicating, drinking himself into oblivion. “I think I am dead and somebody has taken my place,” he writes. “I don’t recognize this person.”

By the early 2000s, Michael Cimino had changed. Some alleged plastic surgery. Cimino denied it. He was thin now – thin and androgynous, his face smooth, his hair long and his body swathed in stylish women’s clothing. He applied for a name change with the director’s union. When he came to visit his close friend Valerie Driscoll, the director Michael Cimino introduced herself as Nikki.