In the wake of George Floyd, Spike Lee asks: ‘Will history stop repeating itself?’
Spike Lee’s new film is a powerful and timely examination of war, racism and the betrayal of black Americans by their own country.
It’s worth remembering, says Spike Lee, “the first person to die for this country in the American Revolutionary War was a black man, Crispus Attucks, in the Boston Massacre. We’ve been fighting for this country that we loved more than the country has loved us.”
Lee has always been fascinated by history, and the connections between past and present. And as protesters this week took to the streets day after day across America, following the death of a black man, George Floyd, at the hands of police officers, Lee responded in his way.
Last Sunday, he released a harrowing short he calls 3 Brothers. It begins with a question: “Will history stop repeating itself?” He uses footage from the end of his 1989 film, Do The Right Thing, in which a character called Radio Raheem is choked to death by police officers, intercutting it with mobile phone images of real deaths: Eric Garner gasping, “I can’t breathe”, held down by police officers, one of whom has him in a chokehold, and Floyd, who used the same words, struggling for his life, as an officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes. (The officer has since been charged with second-degree murder, and three other officers with aiding and abetting a murder.)
Talking about the short on American TV, Lee spoke about the protests across America that followed Floyd’s death. “How can people not understand why people are reacting the way they are,” he said. “This is history again and again and again ... People are reacting the way they feel they have to, to be heard.”
History is woven into the fabric of Lee’s new film, Da 5 Bloods, which comes to Netflix on June 12. It is a drama, an adventure, a war story, a sometimes comic tale of old friends, a father-son narrative, a meditation on the meaning of the past, the Vietnam War and black American experience, in which the voice of Marvin Gaye almost functions as a character. “Like a lot of my films, it’s not just one thing,” says Lee. “It’s a gumbo dish. You put it in the oven and it all comes together.”
Da 5 Bloods is the story of four black Vietnam veterans, members of the same squad, who reunite decades later in Ho Chi Minh City with two goals. They want to retrieve the body of their beloved squad leader, who died in combat. And they want to find a cache of gold bullion they buried in the jungle.
When Lee returned from filming in Thailand and Vietnam, however, he knew there was something missing. “Once we came back from the jungle, it hit me that we needed a prologue and an epilogue,” he says. And he knew where to find it. He turned to the archives.
His documentaries make up a substantial part of his body of work, and his features have often incorporated documentary elements. “In a lot of my films in the past I have used archival stills, newsreel footage, for example Malcolm X, which opens with the Rodney King beating. And most recently BlacKkKlansman: the climax with the debacle in Charlottesville that resulted in a young person dying,” Lee says.
“It didn’t take long for me to think of two great Americans — not only great Americans but great humanitarians — who spoke out against the immorality of the Vietnam War when it was not popular to, and they paid a price for it.”
The first voice we hear in Da 5 Bloods is that of Muhammad Ali, “who was stripped of his heavyweight title, robbed of the peak years of his athleticism,” Lee says, “because he refused to go to the Vietnam War. He said, ‘No Viet Cong ever called me n…..’. And the epilogue is with another great critic of the war, Dr Martin Luther King, who paid a greater price than Ali. He paid with his life. Those are the bookends of the film.”
Initially, the screenplay by Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo was about a group of white Vietnam veterans. When Lee came on board with his BlacKkKlansman co-writer, Kevin Willmott, they made some crucial changes. “That script was great,” Lee is quick to say. “That’s the reason why, for a time, Oliver Stone wanted to do it. So it’s not like Kevin Willmott and I had to rewrite from page one. A lot of that stuff was there. But we had to change it to be black soldiers. And it changed the perspective. It changed the viewpoint.”
Understanding history was very important to the figure at the centre of Da 5 Bloods: the lost member, the squad leader they called Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), a charismatic soldier who brought his men together, an idealistic figure who conceives of a plan to seize the CIA gold bullion and take it back to the US to use for the benefit of the black community. Half a century on, the remaining Bloods aren’t necessarily of one mind about what to do with the treasure, something that inevitably brings trouble.
On the edge of the group is Paul (Delroy Lindo), a tormented figure who, to the shock of his friends, announces that he voted for Trump, and who wears a MAGA hat for much of the film. “They all have PTSD and all except Paul got counselling for it,” Lee says. “He never did, so he has demons.” It’s a ferocious, intense performance from Lindo that Lee calls “tragic, Shakespearean”.
“In the first film with me, he played West Indian Archie in Malcolm X, and a drug dealer in Clockers. And he played my father, my real-life father, in Crooklyn. So it’s been a while since we worked together, but it was like we had never stopped. We had that bond, that relationship.”
The four actors, almost all of whom are in their mid-60s, play their younger selves in the flashbacks. This was inevitable, according to Lee. “We barely got this film made. Every other studio turned us down. Netflix were the salvation.” But, he says, “I knew we weren’t going to be able to add another $100m to the budget for de-ageing.” And casting younger actors to play these characters wasn’t an option, he says. “For me that rarely works.” Better to embrace the possibilities imposed by necessity. “Yeah, they’re going back to the memories of themselves at that age. And audiences get it.”
Netflix, as it happens, had already teamed up with Lee for a series adaptation of his first feature, She’s Gotta Have It, which ran for two seasons. It is also the home to The Last Dance, the recent series on Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, in which Lee featured in a couple of episodes, both as a director and co-star of the very first Air Jordan commercial and as a Knicks megafan constantly frustrated by Jordan’s brilliance.
Alongside the four vets, there is an unexpected fifth member of the party, Paul’s son, David (Jonathan Majors), who learns about the trip and decides to make his way there to support his volatile, haunted father, with whom he has a difficult relationship.
There’s another significant presence in the film, a transforming one. Half a dozen songs from Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On punctuate Da 5 Bloods. “His voice is another character in the film,” says Lee. “His voice, his music, his genius, his humanity.”
The album is a song cycle about the war, which came close to Gaye through his brother, Franklin, who served in Vietnam. Lee says he believes that “two things gave him the impetus for one of the greatest albums of all time … Those letters that Franklin wrote to Marvin, first-hand accounts of the horrors of the Vietnam war” and “seeing the black soldiers coming back from Nam and the devastation they took”.
What’s Going On “was something I had to have. The album came out in 1971, so that was at the height of the Vietnam war — so it was very organic, very natural, to have those songs in the movie”.
In Da 5 Bloods, there’s a reminder of the French colonial presence in Vietnam, and its legacy. “That’s why we have those two French characters,” Lee says. There’s a young woman, played by “the wonderful Melanie Thierry”, whose family owned rubber plantations and who now works for a non-profit organisation dedicated to defusing mines. “And there’s my man, Jean Reno”, as a fixer who will find a buyer for the CIA gold the four friends plan to retrieve. “Nobody plays a villain better than him in my opinion.”
Lee felt it was important for Vietnamese characters to be part of the story. They include Da Bloods’ tour guide, Vinh Tran (Johnny Tri Nguyen) and Tien Luu (Le Y Lan), a woman with whom Otis had a relationship decades earlier.
With flashbacks involving Viet Cong soldiers, he says, “Kevin Willmott and I, my co-writer, we were not going to make the Vietnamese villains, we were not going to dehumanise them”. There’s a flashback in which the five ambush a group of Viet Cong; we can hear the Vietnamese soldiers talking to each other, and the conversation is subtitled. One of them is talking about finding a poem in his backpack that his wife had left for him.
“The Viet Cong were human beings,” Lee says. “It was an immoral war and Vietnam was righteous … and 50 years later, people still mourn the loss of their mothers, their fathers, their sons, their daughters, their friends.”
In flashback there is also the figure and voice of Hanoi Hannah (Ngo Thanh Van), a Vietnamese broadcaster who made programs targeting American troops. In Da 5 Bloods, she directly addresses black GIs, highlighting racial injustices among the troops and at home. “She existed, she’s a historical character, I found her clips on YouTube,” Lee says. “We put in a couple of words, but that was from an actual broadcast.” In Da 5 Bloods, she’s at the centre of the scene Lee says is his favourite: through her propaganda broadcast the soldiers learn about the assassination of Martin Luther King. It’s a potent mix of elements: of newsreel footage of the funeral, of outpourings of grief and protest across American cities, of the broadcaster’s smooth voice and insistent words, and the soldiers’ devastated response.
Among the voices from the 1960s and 1970s Lee uses in the prologue, in a montage of images, music and newsreel footage from America and Vietnam, is Black Panther activist Bobby Seale, speaking days after Martin Luther King’s assassination, talking about war after war in which black soldiers fought. “And we were promised freedom, and we didn’t get it. And here we go with the damn Vietnam War, and we still ain’t getting nothing but racist police brutality, et cetera.”
The final moments of Da 5 Bloods feature a brief clip from a famous Martin Luther King speech on April 4, 1967, when he condemned the Vietnam War. King quotes from a Langston Hughes poem about his complex, divided feelings for the America he knows too well and the country that it might still become. “And before Langston Hughes,” says Lee, “there was the great W.E.B. DuBois, who talked about the duality of being black and descended from Africa — stolen from Africa — and brought to the United States. It’s schizophrenia dealing with this from day one. And then it really magnifies itself when we black people have gone to war for this country.”
Da 5 Bloods streams on Netflix from June 12.
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