Da 5 Bloods is a deeply disturbing movie.
It is the beginning of summer. I have not taught in a few weeks. My clinical work is going well. I have been sleeping well. But not the night after watching this
film. It took forever to get to sleep
and then I woke twice, each time for an hour.
I know that I had been dreaming, but I was unable to recall the dreams that,
I presume, woke me – and I think this meant that they were too difficult to
dredge up – they contained, I believe, ghosts of the film that I had blocked
from conscious awareness but that were haunting me.
Da 5 Bloods is a buddy film.
Four of the five “Bloods” get back together – they reform the gang – and
have a reunion in Vietnam – the place where they met and fought together. The opening video – in true Spike Lee style –
integrates real life footage (which he does throughout) of Muhammed Ali
talking about why he is not going to Vietnam to fight against people of yellow
skin who have done him no harm at the behest of the white man who has done the
black and brown skinned men and women in the United States great harm. This statement returns to mind when, in a flashback, the North Korean radio propagandist points out to the black men in the
trenches that though they make up 13% of the people back home, they make up 35%
of the people fighting in Vietnam.
The opening scene is of the reunion of the four in the
hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. Paul (Deloy Lindo) is the one we are
worried about from the get go. First of
all, he is wearing a MAGA hat and defending voting for Trump – a weird thing in
a Spike Lee film – but he is also just a bit too boisterous, a bit too paranoid
about the people buying them a drink in the bar, a bit over the top about
everything. We aren’t the only ones
worried about him – his son David (Jonathan Majors) shows up unannounced to watch over him during
this trip. The war has destabilized him
and he is returning to the scene of the crime.
We sense that there will be lots of triggers for him.
The ostensible reason for the reunion is to recover the body of the KIA leader of the bloods, Stormin' Norman, played in the flashbacks by the actor who played the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman). The hidden reason is that this will also allow them to recover war booty – CIA gold that was to be delivered to allies. Da 5 Bloods were sent to retrieve the booty when the plane carrying was shot down, but they were fired upon, losing Norman, and they buried both him and the gold before beating a hasty retreat. Their agent for converting the gold into cash is the war time girlfriend of one of the bloods, Otis (Clarke Peters), Tien (Lê Y Lan) who brings in a French agent as a go-between. Otis discovers that, unbeknownst to him, he is a father.
The 4+1 Bloods hire a guide to get them to the edge of the
bush and then to pick them up a few days later.
To skip spoilers you may want to go to the next paragraph. As they travel to the site, the events that
led to the death of their leader and the burying of the gold are told in
flashback. We learn that the leader
taught the men Black History – and we get a very contemporary lesson about
Black Lives Mattering. As they recover
the body of the leader, they also find the gold. This creates the kind of divisions that large
amounts of money create, and they run into the Viet Cong whom the French
Intermediary has tipped off, and they have to fight for their money and do not
emerge from the jungle unscathed – the firefights and the fear of mines are, I
assume, a big part of what fueled my lack of sleep, along with the archival
footage and photographs of war atrocities that were sprinkled throughout.
The relationship between Paul and his son David and Paul’s
personal arc are at the center of this film.
One of the features of the Vietnam War was that our soldiers were not
paired up based on geographic commonality, as has been general
practice in wars. This particular group of Da 5 Bloods clearly
forged close bonds in the war, but after the war they went their separate ways because they didn't come from the same community –
and therefore returned to disparate parts of the country without any of their war buddies
to support them and with a country that was hostile to the war and taking out that
hostility on the veterans. Alone and besieged, Paul found love. He married
a woman whom he loved and they had a child.
This should be where the narrator says, “And they lived happily ever
after.” That did not happen.
I believe that one of the semi-universal experiences of men
when their first child is born is that they are displaced in the hearts of the
woman they have been loving. This woman
becomes enamored of an interloper – their infant child. Fortunately for the child, the father feels love - boundless love - for the child, too. But I think that Freud’s
vaunted Oedipal triangle – which he tells from the perspective of the male
child wanting to murder the father and marry the mother, glosses over the
parental involvement in this triangle – and especially the father’s envy and
(usually fortunately quite unconscious) murderous rage towards the child. (There’s a lot more going on in this little
triangle, but let’s just stop there for now…).
Paul’s love for his son was complicated by not just losing his wife’s love, but her life. She died in childbirth. And the open hostility that Paul bears towards his son is difficult to witness. Especially because his son is, despite the hostility, basically a good kid. We see Paul’s love – and his son’s desire for that love, but we also see Paul’s paranoia crush his expression of his love – and we see Paul abandon his son after accusing his son of being disloyal and after having humiliated his son in front of a potential love interest. We see Paul as the worst kind of monster - the unchained Oedipal father.
And then we see Paul taking off through the jungle on his own, and we are privy to his thoughts. We hear him working out, in his feverish way, what has brought him to this moment. We finally are able to go back to the heart of the firefight and to see the intense guilt that Paul has borne – his sense that he is responsible for too much for any one person to bear. And we transition, from hating this dangerous and trigger happy guy to feeling for and with him – partly as a result of seeing that his paranoid suspicions have been borne out – but mostly as a result of seeing how dangerous it is for him to love, and what a relief it is for to be finally freed from his obligations (and the symbol of his backpack hanging out of his reach is a brilliant poetic statement of this).
This film, as an historic piece, is, I think, intended to
help us share in the outrage of the ways that the ghosts of our forebearers
have created a mess of things for us.
There are ghosts galore in this movie.
If the goal of psychoanalysis is, as the analyst Hans Loewald has
maintained, to make ghosts into ancestors, this movie makes some progress towards
that goal by humanizing this group of GIs who are haunted by those ghosts. The Vietnamese do not fare so well – but I
think they are casualties of friendly fire.
We need to resonate with heroes – and in this case, those heroes are the
African American men who served in a war that was not of their own making, one
that still rages within them. We can,
through empathizing with the crazy among us, see their sanity. And when we do that, we can begin to spread
that empathy – to understand (and this is very difficult to do) how the ravages of slavery and then almost two centuries of post slavery oppression continue to play a part in complicating their lives.
If we can do that – if we can practice the kind of radical empathy that
this film encourages us to engage in – if we can see Paul (as we were able to
see the Joker) not as biologically paranoid – or raging – or defective person –
but as a human being, we might begin to make a step towards the kind of
reparations that matter. Doing that is not going to be easy - we need to allow his ghosts to haunt us - we will have many sleepless nights. But we might begin
to welcome our brethren into the society and the country that they have helped build and defend because they are what we are, citizens and humans, with all of
the complicating factors that go along with both of those designations. Black Lives Matter.
Btw, Spike Lee complained in an interview that if NetFlix
had given him the money that was given to Scorcese to make the Irishman, he,
too, could have made the old men in the movie young in the flashbacks with
CGI. This film is much stronger for the
contrast of the old men being themselves as young soldiers. Their age and Norman’s youth – and his leadership
and shaping of them – sends a message that I think may register unconsciously –
we are never too old to learn. We are
also never, no matter how old we get, not the people that we were when we had
formative experiences. Just as the
censors ended up helping Casablanca become a great film, I think the lack of
CGI money helps deepen the impact of this film and to create it as a much more
powerful moral statement. Stagecraft often trumps effects, and here I think that is nicely done.
To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here. For a subject based index, link here.
For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter, John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.
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