What You Missed If You Didn’t See the Late Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate”

The announcement of filmmaker Michael Cimino’s death on July 2, 2016 was usually accompanied by warnings about the dangers of hubris and egotism that bankrupted a studio and destroyed a promising film career. Cimino was the toast of the 1979 Academy Award ceremonies; earning Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture for his Vietnam War picture The Deer Hunter. The commercial and critical success garnered by The Deer Hunter convinced United Artists to bankroll Cimino’s next project Heaven’s Gate (1980); a Western epic based upon the Johnson Country Wars of the early 1890s in Wyoming. However, budgetary overruns on the film, as chronicled by film executive Steven Bach in the best-selling Final Cut (1985), almost bankrupted United Artists, and the epic length, bad publicity, and negative reviews led to a financial disaster at the box office. Cimino was never able to resurrect a promising career. The story of Heaven’s Gate and Cimino’s filmmaking, nevertheless, is more complicated than this conventional moralizing suggests. The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate were ambitious projects not only in their budgets, but in the filmmaker’s efforts to introduce more European concepts of Marxist class conflict into mainstream American cinema. Although Cimino was a third-generation Italian-American from a relatively affluent New York City family, his two major films focus upon Eastern European immigrants and their families who are the victims of capitalism and find the American dream elusive.

The Deer Hunter concentrates upon the lives of three young steelworkers from the Eastern European working-class community of Clinton in western Pennsylvania. Following a long wedding scene which introduces viewers to a working-class way of life that seems under siege, Michael Vronsky (Robert De Niro), Nick Chebotarevich (Christopher Walken), and Steven Pushkov (John Savage) are sent to Vietnam. While engaged in combat the three buddies are captured by the North Vietnamese, and the captives are forced to participate in a game of Russian roulette. Michael, as the strongest of the three, orchestrates an escape, but Steven is wounded and loses his legs, while Nick is psychologically damaged and deserts to become a Russian roulette player in the underworld of Saigon. Michael, who begins an affair with Nick’s girlfriend Linda (Meryl Streep), nevertheless, seeks to fulfil a promise and returns to Vietnam in order to bring Nick back to his Pennsylvania community. Michael, however, is unsuccessful as Nick shoots himself. The film ends following Nick’s funeral when his friends gather in John Welsh’s (George Dzundza) bar where they sing “God Bless America.”

Adulation for the film, however, proved short lived as many critics began to challenge the film’s interpretation of the war in Southeast Asia. The backlash to The Deer Hunter focused upon the motif of Russian roulette, depictions of the Vietnamese people and culture as violent and barbaric, and presenting the Vietnam War as a noble cause. There was simply no evidence of Russian roulette played with American prisoners of war or that this macabre dance with death was part of Saigon’s underground culture. The game was more of an artistic device for Cimino who did not perceive his film bound by the restraints of history—as would also be evident with Heaven’s Gate. The film was also denounced for defaming Vietnamese culture as blood thirsty and savage—similar to an older Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans.

Defenders of Cimino’s film, such as the cinema scholar Robin Wood, insisted that critics were missing the class analysis of The Deer Hunter. According to Wood, the long opening segment of The Deer Hunter introduces the idea that the community of steelworkers and their way of life is under siege by international capitalism even before the devastation wrought by the Vietnam War. Thus, the singing of “God Bless America” at the film’s conclusion is not simply ironic but a lament to a lost way of life destroyed by modernism, capitalism and globalization. As a hunter, Michael attempts to cling to the mirage of control with his refrain that a deer must be felled with one shot, but the Russian roulette motif introduces the concept of chance and chaos over which Michael is unable to exercise control and save Nick’s life. Drawing upon the visual images that parallel the steel mills and Vietnam, Wood argues that “the America of heavy industry, monopoly capitalism, and consumerism is felt from the onset as a threat to the integrity of the organic ethnic community—a threat which is then projected on to the canvas of Vietnam.”

Similar elements were evident in Heaven’s Gate as Cimino’s film embraced a Marxist perspective that the frontier experience was based upon the exploitation of the poor and immigrants; questioning the mythology of the American dream and Benjamin Franklin’s faith in the self-made man. The screenplay written by Cimino was loosely based upon the 1893 Johnson County War in Wyoming and concentrates upon how the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (WSGA) conspired to murder immigrant farmers who were considered a threat to the free grazing land enjoyed by the ranchers. The flawed hero of the film is liberal reformer Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson); a Harvard-educated aristocrat who as a federal marshal in Wyoming tries to protect the immigrant homesteaders from the WSGA. The film suggests, with apologies to Frederick Jackson Turner, that the frontier was hardly a safety valve for the poor and European immigrants, while the American West reflected the class conflict that characterized such labor unrest as the Pullman and Homestead Strikes in the urban East during the 1890s.

The Johnson County War is usually read as a conflict between organized monopoly capitalists who are out to destroy, with the assistance of the state, small capitalist entrepreneurs and independent producers. Instead of this Jeffersonian rendering of events in Wyoming, Cimino empathizes with the Eastern European communities of the urban East who are being victimized by industrial monopoly capitalism and renders them into agrarian Socialists crushed by monopoly capital and the state. The history of the 1890s offered important instances of class conflict between American capitalists and an Eastern European proletariat reacting to horrible working conditions and the devastating Panic of 1893; culminating in the Pullman and Homestead strikes. What Cimino does is transfer this class warfare from the urban East to the most American of environs—the Trans-Mississippi West following the Civil War and Reconstruction. In this altering of historical context, Cimino employs the most American of all film genres—the Western—to suggest that Marxist class conflict was as American as apple pie.

Thus, it is difficult to analyze Heaven’s Gate without returning to the Vietnam War and Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. In both films, the focus is upon immigrants from Eastern Europe whose visions of the American dream were destroyed by the decline of the steel mills, the carnage of Vietnam, and the violence initiated by the WSGA supported by the government of the United States. The films, however, ignore themes of discrimination toward Native Americans, Hispanics, blacks, and Asians—and in the case of The Deer Hunter, Cimino is accused of racism in his depiction of the Vietnamese people. But essentially these are topics for other filmmakers as Cimino has chosen to concentrate upon the Eastern European experience in America. In Cimino’s cinema, the working-class dreams of these ethnics are crushed in the jungles of Vietnam, the plains of Wyoming, and in the deterioration of the American industrial heartland.

The growing economic inequality in America dating back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when Heaven’s Gate was produced and released makes the class themes of Cimino’s epic more relevant than ever. Heaven’s Gate challenged the traditional Hollywood Western genre by emphasizing the more Marxist and European theme of class conflict over the American championing of the individual, and Cimino’s death should encourage the re-evaluation of Heaven’s Gate already well underway by film critics and audiences.