Russian roulette is a game where a player spins a cylinder with six rounds of ammunition, each round containing five bullets. If the player guess the number of bullets in a round correctly, they can then pick up the cylinder, replace the round they guessed with another one, and spin the cylinder again.
If they guess the number of bullets in a round incorrectly, they take a random bullet from the cylinder and suffer the consequences.
In Deer Hunter, Robert De Niro plays Russian roulette with his friend Chris Penn. In one scene, De Niro pulls out a revolver and places it to his head. He pulls the trigger, but doesn’t pull the trigger again. Penn tells him to put the gun down, but De Niro refuses.
He tells Penn that he’s going to play Russian roulette until he dies. Penn tries to reason with him, but De Niro doesn’t listen. Eventually, Penn caves and takes away the revolver. .
In this scene, De Niro is playing Russian roulette as a way of dealing with his fear of death. He’s trying to find an outlet for his fear so that he can eventually come to terms with it.
By playing Russian roulette, he’s putting himself in a situation where he knows that he could potentially die at any moment. This forces him to confront his fears head-on and eventually conquer them.
While De Niro does eventually put down the revolver, this doesn’t mean that his fear of death has been completely eliminated. The scene still leaves us with an uneasy feeling because we don’t know what could have happened if Penn hadn’t intervened when he did.
This is why it’s so important for films like Deer Hunter to explore issues like suicide and suicide prevention in such detail – so that audiences can understand and contextualize these scenes in a way that makes sense for them.
