‘Da 5 Bloods’ and the war that never ended
By Jacob Skubish
If a movie released in the past five years makes any attempt to comment on American society, you can be certain it will be labeled as saying something about the “Trump Era.” This characterization is plainly true, to a certain extent: all art is shaped by the time and place in which it was created. But the cliché skews what the film may be accomplishing. Anointing a movie as a parable for the Trump Era gives our dumbass president too much recognition, allowing him to become the sun around which all social developments revolve. But the label is also minimizing: It removes the values being assessed from the long arc of American history. When we say an injustice is reflective of the Trump Era, we downplay the fact that those injustices have been part of the American story from the very beginning.
The genius of Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, his latest film which is now streaming on Netflix, is the way in which Lee manages to condemn the brutality the Trump Administration has wrought while connecting those horrors to the historical, systemic failures of this nation. In an interview with Variety this week Lee called himself part of “a long line of educators,” and Da 5 Bloods makes no secret of its aim to educate its audience on how the past is hardly even past.
The film centers on four black Vietnam War veterans (the self-titled Bloods) who return to Vietnam with two missions: to find the body of their friend Norman (Chadwick Boseman), the fifth member of the Bloods who died in the war, and to find a stash of gold bars they buried during the war and never retrieved. This plot is a deliberate historical corrective: Vietnam War films overwhelmingly focus on white soldiers, despite the high number of black soldiers in the conflict proportionate to the general population (at one point, the Bloods commiserate over the popularity of Rambo). Lee also sprinkles in vignettes about various little-known figures such as Crispus Attucks, a black man and the first person to die for the United States during the Boston Massacre. Such stories of black heroism go so far in Da 5 Bloods as to offer the men existential protection.
From Attucks to the Bloods, Lee positions black Americans as a focal point of American military history despite their own country’s disregard for the rights they were supposedly fighting for. It’s a plight shown to be never-ending: whenever Da 5 Bloods flashes back to the Bloods’ time in battle, the old men portray the younger versions of themselves, a visual literalization of the way in which they were never able to leave the war behind.
One member of the Bloods, Paul (Delroy Lindo), struggles mightily to escape the horrors of the war—he visibly wrestles with PTSD, leading his son David (Jonathan Majors) to tag along for the treasure hunt and keep an eye on his dad. All of the Bloods have been deeply affected by the war, but the trauma bubbles to the surface with Paul. Bitter and disillusioned ever since Norman’s death, he proudly unveils his “Make America Great Again” hat as the Bloods set off into the Vietnamese jungle.
Spike Lee knows this symbol will draw attention. But rather than use the presence of the MAGA hat to take empty shots at Trump, the accessory informs the depth of trauma from which Paul suffers. Only in the psyche of someone so deeply haunted could Trump’s destructive ideology muster appeal. “I’m all fucked up inside,” Paul admits one evening to a fellow Blood, Otis (Clarke Peters). “I’m broken, man.”
The hat fails to confer on Paul the power he hopes it might give him; as we later see, wearing the hat only signifies power for those with the resources to wield it. “Make America Great Again” is rendered worthless because the phrase was never intended to help people like Paul to begin with.
This is the heart of the sermon in Da 5 Bloods: past is present, present is past, and the war against black people never really ended. (This condemnation of violence against the oppressed can be extended to the Vietnamese people, too; Lee pulls no punches in denouncing American war crimes.) Midway through the film David meets Hedy (Mélanie Thierry), a white woman running an organization that defuses old landmines in Vietnam. “It's strange how a war never ends for those involved,” she says, explaining her family’s connection to the Vietnam War. As things intensify in the film, Vinh (Johnny Nguyen), the Bloods’ tour guide, remarks that “After you’ve been in a war, you understand it never really ends. Whether it’s in your mind or in reality. These are just degrees.”
This is no hyperbole: the return to Vietnam really does bring the veterans back to battle, and Da 5 Bloods is a bracingly violent affair. One sequence in particular, involving an active landmine left over from the war, is frightening and utterly thrilling. More than a dissertation on American history, Da 5 Bloods is filled with gripping action and complex character relationships. It’s got the anti-imperialist heist movie excitement of Three Kings, the frenzied descent into madness of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the moral righteousness of a Spike Lee Joint all wrapped into one.
“We’ve been dying for this country from the very get,” Norman says in a flashback, as he justifies the theft of the gold bars. “Hoping one day they’d give us our rightful place. And all they give us is a foot up our black asses! I say the U.S.A. owes us.” He’s right, but Da 5 Bloods is ultimately a cautionary tale, condemning historical injustice but warning against trying to correct it via personal enrichment rather than collective action and love.
Lee has always been an optimist, and a lover. We remember the death of Radio Raheem and forget the reconciliation at the end of Do the Right Thing, recall the assassination of Denzel’s Malcolm X but forget Sam Cooke crooning over his body that a change is going to come. Lee’s films often focus on the worst of America, but he clearly loves the nation; he wouldn’t pay it so much attention if he didn’t.
Love is the solution in Da 5 Bloods, whenever possible. The relationship between David and Hedy is one of the most dynamic in the movie, and suggests their love might be more feasible in a world not saddled with the burden of historical trauma. But Lee has faith in people, no matter who they are, as long as they’re putting in the work to prevent the next bomb from going off.
A lesser filmmaker may have stopped there, with a plea for generic compassion, but Lee makes it clear that his idea of love is a tangible one, found in the act of paying it forward to those working for a better America, a greater America, in the truest meaning of the phrase. “I wish I could turn back the hands of time,” Paul laments late in the film. “I can’t. Nobody can.” And Da 5 Bloods agrees. But in loving one another we can move forward, overcoming the past toward something resembling liberation.
The film concludes with Martin Luther King, Jr. reading from Langston Hughes’ iconic poem Let America Be America Again: “America never was America to me.” In Da 5 Bloods this has always been true, and the pain is deeply felt. But Spike Lee, ever the optimist, sees a future where America will be.