The New York Times - USA (2020-06-25)

C4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020

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CHARACTERS IN ART

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THIS WINGED

CHARACTER FROM

AN EARLY 20TH

CENTURY WORK IS SO

NAMED “BECAUSE SHE

MENDS THE POTS AND

KETTLES”

Yesterday’s Response:

WHAT IS ALBANY?

turns a defeat by Vietnamese people into a
conflict that is actually a civil war in the
American soul, where Americans’ greatest
enemies are actually themselves. In one of
the stranger twists in self-aggrandizement,
Hollywood renders Americans as the anti-
heroes, which might seem odd given that
Hollywood is America’s unofficial ministry
of propaganda.
The reason for this troubling treatment is
simple: For Hollywood, and for Americans,
it is better to be the villain or antihero rather
than virtuous extra, so long as one occupies
center stage. For Vietnamese people, as
well as Laotians, Cambodians and Hmong,
their role is almost always that of the extra,
their function: to be helpful, rescued,
blamed, analyzed, mocked, abused, raped,
killed, spoken for, spoken over, misunder-
stood or all of the above.
So, when Spike Lee’s new movie “Da 5
Bloods” was announced, my feelings were
mixed. On the one hand, I am an admirer of
many of Lee’s movies. On the other hand, I
feared that Lee, despite being a Black
American with a powerful, necessary voice,
would, in the end, be an American. Could his
antiracist critique overcome the invest-
ment in American imperialism that most
Americans have without knowing it?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. “Da 5
Bloods” is a lesser Lee movie — honestly,
it’s a mess — whose characterizations of
Vietnamese people are inextricable from its
political failures.
I feel almost churlish writing this, given
the urgency of Black Lives Matter that Lee
gestures to and given how Hollywood —
and America in general — has mostly
erased, ignored or distorted the history of
Black people. It’s been a decades-long
struggle for Black talent in film to tell Black
stories with Black actors as stars and with
Black writers, directors and producers be-
hind the scenes. In this context, “Da 5
Bloods” rightfully deserves its moment as it
recounts, in unique Spike Lee fashion, the
experiences of some of the Black soldiers
who fought in disproportionate numbers
during a war whose racism cut both ways,
against Black (and Brown and Indigenous)
American soldiers and also against the Viet-
namese (and Cambodians, Laotians and
Hmong).
I stand with Black Lives Matter and
against anti-Black racism, but still, as I
watched the obligatory scene of Vietnam-
ese soldiers getting shot and killed for the
thousandth time, and as I felt the same hurt
I did in watching “Platoon" and “Rambo”
and “Full Metal Jacket,” I thought, Does it
make any difference if politically conscious
Black men kill us?
“Da 5 Bloods” remains a “Vietnam War”
movie about fighting an American dirty war
again, except that it puts Black men in the
spotlight, and it eliminates the worst of the
anti-Asian, Yellow Peril racism that charac-
terizes the genre. What remains, however,
is evidence that while Lee means well, he
also does not know what to do with the Viet-
namese except resort to guilty liberal feel-
ings about them.
As a result, the Vietnamese appear as the
tour guide, the sidekick, the “whore,” the
mixed-race child, the beggar and the face-
less enemy, all of whom play to American
desires and fears. In a particularly absurd
moment, a Vietnamese gangster threatens
the Black veterans as he recounts the My
Lai massacre. While acknowledging the
massacre of 500 Vietnamese civilians is im-
portant, it is also a clumsy exercise in Amer-
ican guilt that relegates the Vietnamese to
victimhood, which is how Americans prefer
to remember them, except when they re-
member them as Vietcong.
The sense that Vietnamese people must
be victims also plays out in an episode
where a vendor tries to force one of the
Black veterans, Paul (played by Delroy
Lindo), to buy a live chicken (something
that no Vietnamese I know has ever heard
of ). The situation escalates rapidly, and the
vengeful native screams at the Black veter-
ans that they killed his mother and father.
While this might have happened, it’s ex-
tremely rare. Many American visitors to
Vietnam remark in amazement that the
Vietnamese have seemed to let the past go.
This is true. We have no time to hate Ameri-
cans because we hate one another more,
given that our war was actually a civil war
(plus, the Vietnamese really hate the Chi-
nese the most). The Americans and the
French, our former colonizers, are seen as
walking wallets, not to be offended.
Being a victim, over and over again, be-
sides being traumatic in real life, is really

boring onscreen, and Lee understands that

basing a Black story on such an experience

is a losing proposition. His strategy in “Da 5

Bloods” echoes Francis Ford Coppola’s in

“Apocalypse Now,” which he makes refer-

ence to often — reserve the starring role for

American men who struggle with their own

heart of darkness. In a brilliant perform-

ance, Lindo becomes a kind of Black Ahab,

driven by demons until he meets his fate.

“Da 5 Bloods” shows Black men as agents of

their own destiny, capable of both heroism

and horror, as we all are as human beings

whose inhumanity is an inextricable part of

ourselves. This complex subjectivity is

what white Hollywood has mostly denied

Black people, and it is what they deserve.

But so do the Vietnamese, Laotians, Cam-

bodians and Hmong.

Perhaps this is asking too much from a

Black story, but it’s Lee himself who sets the

high bar. “Da 5 Bloods” clearly aspires to be

a movie that jabs at American racism and

imperialist warmongering, but whereas it

succeeds at the former, it fails at the latter.

Why? In putting Black subjectivity at the

center, Lee also continues to put American

subjectivity at the center. If one can’t disen-

tangle Black subjectivity from dominant

American (white) subjectivity, it’s impossi-

ble to apply a genuine anti-imperialist cri-

tique. Hence the marginalized Vietnamese

continuing to serve their role as excuses for

a Black drama staged against America’s

Black-white divide.

This is not an argument for more Viet-

namese inclusion. It’s a demand that we

recognize how decolonization and anti-im-

perialism are impossible if we keep reiterat-

ing the imperial country’s point of view,

even from the minority perspective.

The political ambitions of Lee’s movie are

clear from the two Black intellectuals he in-

cludes at the beginning and ending. The

film starts with the classic anti-racist, anti-

imperialist quote from Muhammad Ali

about the Vietcong: “They never called me

nigger.” It’s sad, then, that Paul’s response

to the chicken seller is to call the Vietnam-

ese “Gooks.” Yes, Black soldiers used this

slur, and the slur says a great deal about

Paul’s traumatized internalization of rac-

ism. But Paul’s justification rings hollow

when he says that if Black people can call

themselves by the worst slur possible, he

can use the Vietnamese slur. No. Black peo-

ple can call themselves whatever they

wish; that is their right. But we don’t get to

call Black people a racial slur, and they don’t

get to call us one either. Lee’s attempts to

provide anti-racist alternatives — another

Black veteran connecting with his mixed-

race daughter, or a donation to a demining

effort — fall under the category of liberal

condescension, the rescue narrative with

Black saviors instead of white ones.

But don’t listen to me. Listen to the Rev.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose impor-

tant speech “Beyond Vietnam” is quoted at

the film’s end. The fact that most Americans

know “I Have a Dream” but not “Beyond

Vietnam” is testimony to the depth of Amer-

ican propaganda, the willingness of Ameri-

cans to want to feel good about the Ameri-

can Dream and their reluctance to confront

the American Nightmare. In the American

Nightmare, the severity of anti-Black rac-

ism is inseparable from the endurance of

American imperialism. As King said, Black

Americans were sent to “guarantee liber-

ties in Southeast Asia which they had not

found in southwest Georgia and East

Harlem.” He condemned not just racism,

but also capitalism, militarism, American

imperialism, and the American war ma-

chine, “the greatest purveyor of violence in

the world today.” In another speech, he de-

manded that we question our “whole soci-

ety,” which means “ultimately coming to see

that the problem of racism, the problem of

economic exploitation, and the problem of

war are all tied together.”

“Vietnam,” meaning the “Vietnam War,”

continues to haunt this country, which was

built on war and for war. American cinema

and storytelling play their role in these

wars, including our current “forever war,”

by reiterating, again and again, the central-

ity of the American male soldier’s experi-

ence, mostly in white and now in Black.

Making a “Vietnam War” movie in this clas-

sic mold, except with Black men, Lee can-

not overcome the imperialism that is as

American as slavery and genocide. He

overlooks the more radical possibility that

King outlined in “Beyond Vietnam” when

he called on Americans to listen to the

“voiceless ones.” King meant the Vietnam-

ese, but the “voiceless ones” are anyone the

United States confronts with its massive,

multicultural war machine, including, now,

Iraqis and Afghans. “Here is the true mean-

ing and value of compassion and nonvio-

lence,” King said, “when it helps us to see

the enemy’s point of view, to hear his ques-

tions, to know his assessment of ourselves.”

King knew that the only way to save a ra-

cially divided America from itself was to

have white Americans listen to Black peo-

ple, and he knew the only way to save an

imperial America from itself was to have

Americans listen to those it normally

prefers to kill and silence through massive

firepower, whether ordered by the Penta-

gon or Hollywood. I wrote about this in my

2015 novel, “The Sympathizer,” which in-

cludes a depiction of a Hollywood “Vietnam

War” spectacle that looks suspiciously like

“Apocalypse Now,” but with a little tweak-

ing — change the white guys to Black guys

— could be “Da 5 Bloods.” I created a narra-

tor who was as complex as Delroy Lindo’s

Paul, who spoke back in tragedy and an-

guish to American racism and imperialism.

The novel was rejected by 13 out of 14 edi-

tors. The one who bought it was British.

I suspect that one reason for these rejec-

tions is that for Vietnamese people, we are

often only heard by Americans when we are

apologetic for our existence and grateful for

our rescue by Americans. It is bad manners

to point out, as I have done, that we wouldn’t

have needed rescuing by Americans if we

hadn’t been invaded by Americans in the

first place. The reality, however, is that it is

up to us to tell our own stories and create

our own narrative plenitude. Other Ameri-

cans won’t do it for us, even those Black

Americans like Lee who understand too

well the pain of narrative scarcity.

But the true urgency here is not only for

self-representation and the need to recog-

nize ourselves so that others will recognize

us, too. What is also crucial is the need to tell

stories differently. “The master’s tools will

never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre

Lorde once wrote, and indeed, a war story

that repeats a purely American point of

view will just help ensure that American

wars continue, only with more diverse

American soldiers and ever-newer targets

to be killed or saved. What kind of war story

sees through the other’s point of view, hears

her questions, takes seriously her assess-

ment of ourselves? Would it even be a war

story? And isn’t that the story we should

tell?

ESSAY

Vietnamese Lives, American Imperialist Views

IMAGES BY NETFLIX

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of “Nothing
Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.”

CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1

Top, from left: Norm Lewis,

Delroy Lindo, Johnny Tri

Nguyen and Clarke Peters in

Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.”

The film puts Vietnamese

characters in secondary

positions. Middle, the movie,

with Chadwick Boseman,

left, and Lindo, echoes the

approach of “Apocalypse

Now” in some respects.

American subjectivity is at

the center of the film, as in

this scene, above, with Le Y

Lan and Peters.

Being a victim, over and

over again, besides being

traumatic in real life, is

really boring onscreen.