SOURCE: "Vietnam and the Hollywood Genre Film: Inversions of American Mythology in The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now," in American Quarterly, Vo. 34, No. 4, Fall, 1982, pp. 418-39.

In the following essay, Hellmann traces how Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter and Coppola's Apocalypse Now use different American genres—the western and the hardboiled detective, respectively—to portray two different interpretations of the Vietnam War.

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 a 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 a popular American...