[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]
On one fraught
and one crucial meaning of unfinished business in Spike Lee’s recent film.
In Da 5 Bloods (2020), one
of Spike Lee’s more underrated joints (due at least in part to its release directly
onto Netflix during
Covid), four Black Vietnam vets (Norm Lewis, Delroy Lindo,
Clarke Peters, and Isaiah Whitlock Jr.) return to Vietnam nearly half a
century after the war (along with one of their sons, played by then
up-and-coming, now-disgraced Jonathan Majors) in search of both the remains of
their charismatic squad leader (the always-great Chadwick Boseman) and a
buried cache of stolen gold that he helped them hide before he was killed. As
he so often does, Lee combines multiple genres (in this case a war film, a
heist film, and the “one last roadtrip with old friends” genre, among others),
defying easy categorization and creating a sprawling and messy but always compelling
and at times transcendent work that is well worth checking out if you haven’t
had the chance.
In terms
of its depiction of the end and aftermaths of the Vietnam War, I’d say that Lee’s
film focuses on the idea of “unfinished business,” in two distinct ways. The
more obvious is also to my mind more problematic, as the film’s premise echoes
the narrative of the ubiquitous POW/MIA flags
that have, at least at times over the last few decades, been used as cover
for extremist anti-government rhetoric (seriously, check out that Rick
Perlstein column if you aren’t familiar with that movement’s appropriation of
the flag). In particular, Lee’s film gets dangerously close at times to
stereotyping (if not downright racist) depictions of its Vietnamese secondary
characters—of course Lee has never been shy about
grappling with uncomfortable questions of prejudice
between as well as toward various communities, but at its best in his works
these themes implicate all the characters; whereas in Da 5 Bloods, the
anti-Vietnamese prejudices sometimes expressed (or at the very least implied)
by his protagonists are much more one-sided. The worst of the POW/MIA
narratives implies that the war itself is “unfinished business,” and there are
moments in Lee’s film where we feel the same.
But there’s
a second way to think about “unfinished business” in Da 5 Bloods, and I
think it’s a significantly more meaningful as well as productive lens. More
than 300,000
Black Americans served during the Vietnam War, comprising more than 16% of
the armed forces (despite numbering less than 12% of the US population at the
time), yet I would argue that our collective memories and representations of
Vietnam vets have not done anything like justice to that community. To do so
would also require us to put them in conversation with Black soldiers during
WWI and WWII,
and the broader question of African
American military service—itself a frustrating bit of national “unfinished
business” to be sure. But such complementary broader frames shouldn’t overshadow
the specific stories of Black Vietnam War soldiers, casualties (like Boseman’s
character), and veterans (like the other four main characters), stories that, despite
our consistent cultural focus on the war and its aftermaths, remain largely
untold. Lee’s film represents a crucial starting point for rectifying that omission.
April
Recap this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Representations of the war you’d highlight?
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