Particularly with Bridges' encounter with the nude housewife and his conversation with Red about it afterwards, the movie seemed to be flipping conventional expectations of masculinity / heterosexuality on its head. There are other borderline moments that toy with mainstream masculinity, but that sequence of the film always stood out to me.

I remember seeing the film years back, hopping over to imdb, and mostly agreeing with this post : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072288/board/nest/31834225 . . . I don't think the whole film is as heavily coded as people in that thread tend to believe, but it feels more right than wrong to me.

Couple all that with Cimino's own ambiguous sexuality and "gay" subtext in The Deer Hunter*, and I think you've got something.




*It's been a decade since I've last seen The Deer Hunter, so I'm mostly trusting what I've read about the film in the years since. Yeah . . .