By the time you finish reading this paragraph, somewhere in America, someone — a long-haul trucker cruising a lonely highway in Iowa, a soccer dad piloting his Subaru through the Virginia suburbs, a lawyer commuting to her office in Atlanta or Bismarck or Madison — will have hit a white-tailed deer. Since the mid-20th century, a period of exponential growth for both Odocoileus virginianus and Homo automobilis, the Deer-Vehicle Collision has been a staple of modernity. Drivers hit more than a million white-tails every year, accidents that cost the public billions in hospital bills and vehicle repairs. In the wolfless East, cars are practically the only predators deer have.
No wonder, then, that the deerkill has become an enduring pop-cultural trope, as ubiquitous onscreen as in real life. Ryan Reynolds kills a white-tail in gratuitous fashion in The Voices; Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain do the deed in A Most Violent Year. Deer crashes have been played for horror, as in The Ring 2, and for comedy, as on The Simpsons. Some representations defy the laws of physics; some are pointlessly cruel; some feature Tom Green. Nearly all involve the weaponization of a buck’s antlers, even though hunting pressure tends to skew sex ratios toward does. Cars and animals fly into the air as easily as kite surfers.
Despite the many duds, the annals of entertainment history contain the occasional roadkill masterpiece. In recognition of these gems, I’ve developed a precise, novel, and extremely science-based cinematic DVC ranking system. After some intensive YouTube perusal, I scored DVC scenes from film and television in four categories, each of which was worth ten points, for a total of forty possible points. Why forty? Why not?
The categories are as follows:
- Verisimilitude: Is your scene a plausible collision, or did some prop lackey blatantly stick a bad taxidermy job in the road?
- Road ecology insight: Deer-vehicle Collisions aren’t random — they’re the predictable product of road type, topography, ecology, temporality, and so forth. Two-lane highways are more susceptible than eight-laners; dusk is riskier than high noon. The best roadkill cinema instructs as well as engages.
- Plot relevance: If your movie is going to brutally end the life of an elegant sylvan creature, it better do so for a damn good reason.
- Compassion: Let’s not forget that every deer-related crash involves two parties, and that the armorless ungulate almost invariably fares worse than the primate encased in the two-ton steel wrecking ball. Is your movie treating its non-human characters with the respect they deserve?
Without further ado, the five best DVCs ever put to film (it’s a low bar):
5. Gilmore Girls
Synopsis: Rory is sitting at a stop sign when a deer bumps the side of her Jeep.
Verisimilitude: The notion of a deer plowing into a vehicle in broad daylight seems implausible, to say the least. Maybe this buck had been chowing down on fermented apples, a la the drunken moose of Sweden, or maybe he had Chronic Wasting Disease. That must be it. 2/10
Road ecology insight: Don’t park in a migration corridor. 1/10
Plot relevance: This is the only snippet of Gilmore Girls I’ve ever watched (I admit to being charmed by the banter), so I’m cribbing from fan pages here, but apparently Rory was on her way to take a big Shakespeare test in a high school English class when the deer struck her, causing her to miss the exam and get sent to the headmaster’s office. Drama! 5/10
Compassion: Rory seems genuinely concerned for the deer’s well-being, despite the fact that, again, her car was not moving at all, and the deer appears totally fine. Good for you, Rory, whoever you are. 8/10
Total: 16/40
4. The Long Kiss Goodnight
Synopsis: Geena Davis hits a deer, sustains a concussion, and, because brain damage is known to improve long-term memory, suddenly recalls her past as an ex-CIA assassin.
Verisimilitude: After crashing through the windshield, the hokey animatronic deer slashes insanely at Geena and her companion with his hooves for what feels like five minutes. No thanks. 3/10
Road ecology insight: This DVC occurs at night, on a low-volume two-lane road in a densely wooded rural area. What’s more, the driver is being actively distracted by her boorish male passenger at the moment of the incident. Many authentic risk factors at play. 8/10
Plot relevance: The fact that a deer collision is the catalyst for Geena recollecting her past is a bit random — like, she could’ve just skidded on black ice or been t-boned by a drunk driver to achieve the same effect — but I guess it sets the entirety of this ludicrous movie in motion. 4/10
Compassion: This poor deer gets put through the wringer, but Geena — aka Samantha Caine, aka Charlene Elizabeth “Charly” Baltimore — does use her CIA skills to grab the buck by the rack and put him out of his misery by snapping his neck. Dock another point for realism, add one for semi-humane euthanasia. 6/10
Total: 21/40
3. Tommy Boy
Synopsis: David Spade and Chris Farley hit a buck, stash him in their backseat, and then watch in horror when the deer revives and trashes their controvertible.
Verisimilitude: This is less preposterous than you might imagine. In 2016, a Wisconsin driver stuck a seemingly dead deer in his trunk for later eating. Reported the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “(T)he man gingerly opened his trunk. The deer moved and the motorist pulled it out of the trunk. A few seconds later the deer bounded into the woods on shaky legs… Adams County Sheriff’s Department posted the incident the next morning on its Facebook page with a photo of actors Chris Farley and David Spade.” 5/10
Road ecology insight: LOL. 1/10
Plot relevance: The car’s deterioration throughout the movie is a pretty good running joke, so props to the deer for kicking that off. 6/10
Compassion: It’s satisfying to watch a deer-vehicle incident in which the car is totaled and the wildlife bounds away unharmed. The glorious climactic shot (see the top of this post), in which the 10-point buck stands victorious athwart his vanquished gasoline-powered tormentor, took a month to nail, and belongs in a museum. 11/10
Total: 23/40
2. Get Out
Synopsis: Allison Williams and Daniel Kaluuya hit a deer on their way to Williams’s parents’ house, where Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener plan to enslave Kaluuya, steal his brain, and transplant it into a rich old white guy. Yikes.
Verisimilitude: Easily the most realistic DVC in cinematic history: It’s abrupt, jarring, and occurs (rightly) with the deer moving at a perpendicular angle to the vehicle, rather than standing stock-still in the middle of the road. (Alas, no complete version of this scene seems to exist on YouTube.) 10/10
Road ecology insight: Another rural, lightly trafficked two-lane highway. Deduct a point for taking place in broad daylight, a much less common collision time than the crepuscular “deer o’clock.” 7/10
Plot relevance: Jordan Peele’s intellectual creativity cannot be fathomed by us mere mortals, but I think the deer is a horrifyingly apt metaphor for the way these wealthy white suburbanites simultaneously revile and commodify the Other. Although Whitford’s character rants about how deer have overrun the neighborhood — “one down, a few hundred thousand to go” — he also has a buck mounted on the wall of his den. Like the black men that Whitford and Keener kidnap, deer are simultaneously perceived as undesirable community members and coveted trophies. Jordan, if you’re reading this, debunk me in the comments. 9/10
Compassion: Kaluuya eventually impales Whitford with the antlers of the aforementioned mount, so Peele does let an ungulate play a role in the protagonist’s righteous triumph. If you’re complaining that this is a spoiler, I counter that you should have seen this movie twice in theaters. 7/10
Total: 33/40
1. The Straight Story
Synopsis: Our down-on-his-luck hero Alvin Straight is driving across the Midwest on his John Deere (heh) when he encounters the Deer Lady, a distraught woman who’s just hit her thirteenth white-tail in the past seven weeks.
Verisimilitude: Although the crash itself isn’t depicted — Straight arrives in its immediate aftermath — the ambient circumstances are certainly conducive to roadkill. First, the collision occurs in Iowa, the state with the country’s fifth-highest DVC rate (West Virginia holds the dubious crown). Second, judging from the senescent state of the background vegetation, the movie appears to take place in fall, when deer enter the rut, or breeding season. Addled by the pursuit of mates, deer in fall seem to cross roads more frequently and, perhaps, less cautiously. 8/10
Road ecology insight: Credit to the Deer Lady, the only driver on this list who actually takes steps to prevent collisions. “I’ve tried driving with my lights on, I’ve tried sounding my horn, I scream out the window, I roll the window down and bang on the door and play Public Enemy real loud!” she wails. The fact that none of these countermeasures work is also, in its way, insightful: Research suggests that interventions aimed at modifying driver behavior, such as speed limit reductions, don’t actually affect collision rates. Better to put our faith in infrastructural solutions like wildlife crossings and fencing. (Granted, scientists have never rigorously tested the efficacy of blasting Public Enemy.) 10/10
Plot relevance: Alvin, who’s begun to run out of food, eats the venison, which sustains him on his journey. Don’t waste good meat! 8/10
Compassion: This is what makes this brief scene so wonderful. For the first minute of the Deer Lady’s rant, the viewer assumes she’s dismayed by the damage to her car. At around the 1:15 mark, though, she crouches over the buck and briefly lays her palms on his neck and flank, a gesture of heartbreaking tenderness. “He’s dead,” she cries. “And I love deer!” Her grief isn’t for her damaged car, but for the stricken animal. (Note that she refers to the buck as the personal he rather than the dehumanizing it.) She knows who the real victim is. 10/10
Total: 36/40
What a year for David Lynch — first that Oscar, and now this extraordinary honor!
Did I miss an important DVC? Let me know in the comments. And thanks very much to everyone who commented on this Twitter thread. You sure know your deer.