Da 5 Bloods: Where narratives intersect

Spike Lee makes movies with his fingers on the pulse of America.

More than any other filmmakers of this era, Lee understands what it feels like to be American. Mind you, he understands what it feels like, not what it means.

Lee was once asked what he thinks is the solution to the problems he addressed in his film. This question was asked after the release of his masterpiece Do the Right Thing (1989), a film which received some controversial responses. Lee or any artist in general should not be asked to produce a solution to the societal problems they alluded to in their works. We don’t ask Bong Joon Ho to solve class division, nor do we ask Raphael Bob-waksberg to solve depression or substance abuse. Lee's intention here is just to show what America was or is feeling. The best thing about his films is that, unlike Crash (2004) and to a certain extent Bright (2017), they don’t pretend to know more than a limited viewpoint nor do they engage in the kind of reductionism that plagues modern conversations about race.

On the 25th of May 2020, an African-American man named George Floyd was arrested after using a fake $20 bill at a grocery store. Derek Chauvin, one of the police officers, knelt on Floyd’s neck for up to 8 minutes. Floyd’s death sparked a wave of protests across the United States. This was not the first time America has seen this kind of protest. Watch a 2015 video on police brutality and institutional racism in the US and one might mistake it for a video on George Floyd.

So, what exactly is repeated here? The brutality? The racism? The reductionism in all discourse involved?

Talking about race is difficult. There is no absolute answer to anything. There have been numerous clumsy attempts to tackle this issue through film. The aforementioned 2004 Oscar-winning film, Crash, comes to mind. As recently as 2019, another Oscar winning film about race, The Green Book, also came under criticism for talking about race wrong. One person displeased about that film was Lee himself whose Blackkklansman had, in the same year, been snubbed at the Oscar.

Spike Lee, director of Da 5 Bloods

(Image credits: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP/Shutterstock)

Lee has always been a vocal filmmaker. Soon after Floyd’s death, Lee appeared in interviews talking about the issue. On 12th June 2020, his latest film, Da 5 Bloods, was released on Netflix. All this context is kind of important for us to understand Da 5 Bloods. The film is great in itself, but you can’t really watch the film in isolation from the events that had taken place. As shown above, while Lee’s films tend to make little truth claims in themselves, he is vocal about the issues he addresses. There are elements to this movie that make it a product trapped in the time it was released and other elements that make it ultimately a universal message.

The movie follows four African American Vietnam war veterans as they go back to the country they once fought to retrieve the body of a late friend, and some literally buried gold. But what is it really about?

(Image credit: Looper)

Between Blackkklansman (2018) and this year’s Da 5 Bloods, Lee’s most recent films express his disillusionment towards America and what it represents. Both films conjure up deep scars in the history of the United States: White Supremacy and the Vietnam War. Lee explores these histories in relation to the African American community.

In both films, Lee always illustrates the complexity of the issue. Blackkklansman shows the main character wrestling with the dilemma of becoming part of a rigged system that discriminates against his people. Da 5 Bloods shows the role African Americans play in one of the ugliest chapters in American history. It is oddly visceral to watch the often self-contained narrative of African Americans merge with the story of the Vietnamese, another victim of the US. Here, Lee also tackles an aspect of the infamous war often neglected in filmography: postwar Vietnam.

If the war represented Americans fighting for what they believe in, exploring the aftermath would mean conjuring up images of disillusionment. Take Paul, one of the soldiers suffering from PTSD. Take the daughter of Otis and Tien. These are those whose lives have been touched and damaged by the war. In one ironic sequence, our main characters are dancing as they walk across a Vietnamese bar. Music is blaring. The poster behind reads Apocalypse Now. Even in Vietnam, memories of the war can still be seen through the eyes of the US media. Later on, we would discover that the cognitive dissonance experienced by the Vietnamese who now accepted the Americans as tourists. In one scene, the tour guide compares Ho Chi Minh to George Washington. We expect the veterans to accuse Ho of being the villain to Washington’s hero. Instead, one veteran pointed out that Washington owned slaves, implying that Ho represented something different. The tour guide implied that Ho was not so different. No leading nationalist was ever just an “Uncle Sam”. No nation was born innocent. We’ll get back to this point.

The film presents the Vietnam War as an intersection between two narratives: the African American and the Vietnamese narrative. Again, in the past, we don’t really ever see either narrative spill out of its own confinement. So, let’s first break down how each narrative is explored in this film.

I. The African American narrative

The key theme here is that the African American people had fought for a country that never accepted them. This was exemplified in the opening sequences of the film which included various footages of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali discussing the war. Malcolm X talked about how the war was not theirs to fight. Muhammad Ali added by expressing a sense of solidarity with the people of Vietnam. Those people never discriminated against his people, nor made his people slaves. Why would he go and fight a war against them? In the middle of the film we saw how the five soldiers reacted to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. At this point in the film, the soldiers' disillusionment has reached its peak. These guys fought for America. But America killed their leader.

Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

(Image credit: Black History)

The central character here is Norman, portrayed throughout the film as a spiritual figure. He is mythical, almost flawless. He acts as the conscience to our main characters, guiding them to the right direction. He taught them about their history as African Americans and also kept them from staging a mutiny. Is it a coincidence that this character is colloquially referred to as Norm?

Stormin Norman (played by Chadwick Boseman)

It is also interesting that in their return to Vietnam, the veterans are looking for two things: 1. Norman’s remains and 2. the gold that they buried years ago. This could be interpreted as their search for their lost spirit, symbolised in Norman’s remains, and material riches, exemplified by the gold bars.

Halfway through the film, the gold wreaked havoc, killing countless people. This alludes to how greed often wins in the end. The African American story can be seen through this lens. Lee is showing here that the struggle of America is always governed by the spirit and material gains. The struggle between these two poles rages on. As African Americans gain a greater place in the American economy, are they free from the racism that had bound them for so long?

These are hard questions to ask in 2020.

But there is another narrative here. And this is where Da 5 Bloods becomes a brilliant story- a double narrative.

This gold that they are looking for, who does it really belong to? Did Norm want to reclaim this gold as some sort of reparation? The meaning of this can be disputed.

When a group of Vietnamese gunmen showed up, claiming that the gold belonged to the Vietnamese, we have to admit that they do have a point. However, this point is almost instantly undercut by the reveal that they were working for a French banker by the name of Deroche. Everything have become a convoluted mess.

However, we might have missed something here. If we pay closer attention, in the beginning, before Norm and his bloods intervened, this money was going to an entirely different group: the Lahu people.

II. The Vietnamese narrative

Vietnam is a very young nation, born out of years of civil wars and bloodshed. Ho Chi Minh, the nationalist who created this S-shaped nation, fought so the Sino Viet people would become the dominant ethnic group in Vietnam, despite originally coming from the north. For hundreds of years, they slowly pushed various hill tribe groups into the forest. The Lahu is one of these groups. They and many other ethnic groups were subjected to years of struggle, land collectivisation and alienation from what was their state. The conflict was so severe that many of these groups willingly supported the Americans in a war against the people of their nation-state. The reason why they did this is very simple: to them, their nation wasn’t at all theirs.

Vietnamese gunmen in Da 5 Bloods

(Image credit: World of Reel)

If this story rings a bell, it’s not surprising.

The story of the Lahus is not far from the story of African Americans. Norm and his bloods were stealing from yet another group of minorities who might’ve needed that gold to survive... a group of people who, in their struggle, was trying to forge an identity against a nation that ultimately did not accept them.

To this day, Cham, Khmer Krom, Rede, Jarai and various other groups of ethnic minorities in Vietnam continue to face pressures to assimilate with the larger ethnic group. They have to struggle to maintain their identity through little acts of defiance, such as maintaining one’s language and culture. Some went so far as to compete in arms struggle. The more radical of the Khmer Krom attempted this.

Hanoi Hannah (played by Ngo Thanh Van)

When Hanoi Hannah spoke to “Black GI” on behalf of North Vietnam, she was calling for them to fight for their self-determination. Yet, the country she represented took away the rights of those who were here long before her and Uncle Ho ever got there.

This issue cannot be reduced. No one in the Vietnam War was ever righteous. Not even Norm, whose attempt to find justice for his own, stole from other people.

We see flashes of the My Lai Massacre that helps to justify the words of the Vietnamese gunmen only to find that they were paid by the French colonialists who were here long before the Vietnam war ever happened. What Lee accomplished here is not a neat narrative but a story of intersection between different struggles. The mixture is a beautiful mess.

One thing the film definitely accomplished is to remind us that everything is part of something. Histories and narratives will always intersect. They can never be self-contained. In a time where the discourse surrounding George Floyd's death grew increasingly divisive, it is refreshing to see a story so unashamedly universal. It does not seek to fit into any narrative. It does not confine itself to the struggles of a group. It does not portray anyone as pure or good. It shows voices and stories from different angles, intersecting in a chapter of the world history that is crucial and unforgettable.