A pop culture glossary for watching ‘Da 5 Bloods’
Through their blistering engagement with history, pop culture and headlines, Spike Lee’s movies always brim with references, and “Da 5 Bloods,” his new feature on Netflix, is no exception.
The drama follows four Vietnam veterans, “The Bloods” — Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) — who return to the country with a dual purpose: to recover the remains of their fallen comrade and to retrieve the gold they buried.
A critique of U.S. exploitation of African Americans in war and in general, “Da 5 Bloods” is also an adventure film and a caper movie, filled with callbacks to Lee’s other works. Below is a guide to some of its many allusions and shoutouts.(Warning:
Spoilers follow.)
Operation Junction City. The Bloods’ guide asks if Paul was involved in Operation Junction City, and Paul replies that they were all there. The 1967 operation, a joint effort between the United States and the South Vietnamese, was one of the biggest campaigns of the war. Combat lasted 82 days but failed at its primary mission, capturing a communist central office that turned out not to exist, because the Vietcong kept its planning facilities mobile.
Milton L. Olive III. As a contrast to the “Rambo” movies, which Norm describes as Hollywood trying to go back and win the Vietnam War, Otis says he would be the first in line for a movie about a “real hero, you know, one of our blood.” He suggests Olive, who was killed at 18 in 1965 after falling on a grenade to protect other members of his platoon. He posthumously received the Medal of Honor and was the first African American to be given that award for Vietnam.
Crispus Attucks. In a flashback, Norman (Chadwick Boseman), the lone Blood who didn’t survive the war, argues for taking the gold bars they’ve recovered from a downed CIA aircraft. Norman proposes they take the gold in the name of “every brother and sister stolen from Mother Africa to Jamestown, Virginia” and “for every single Black boot that never made it home.” He notes that African Americans have died for the United States since Crispus Attucks. Generally regarded as the first fatality in the American
Revolution, Attucks was killed when British soldiers fired on colonists in the Boston Massacre of 1770. The historical record is spotty, but in a recent book, historian Mitch Kachun says it is generally presumed Attucks was a man of mixed race who was probably a slave in Massachusetts until 1750. After liberating himself, he became a sailor and a dockworker.
Morehouse College and Edwin C. Moses. Paul’s son,
David (Jonathan Majors), wears a Morehouse cap, a reference to the historically Black college that is also Lee’s alma mater. The director’s second feature, “School Daze” (1988), set at the fictitious Mission College, drew on his experiences there. In “Da 5 Bloods,” Paul tries to help an imperiled David by reminding him about another distinguished Morehouse alumnus, Edwin C. Moses. Moses won two Olympic gold medals in the men’s 400-meter hurdles in 1976, when he set a record for the biggest winning margin in the history of that event, and in 1984. In between, he graduated from Morehouse in 1978.
“Apocalypse Now.” Lee nods to “Apocalypse Now,” Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnamset
riff on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” in a number of ways. Minutes into “Da 5 Bloods,” the movie’s logo makes a surreal appearance in an “Apocalypse Now”-themed nightclub in current-day Ho Chi Minh City. The Bloods’ trip upriver is reminiscent of the journey in the Coppola film, and when their boat departs, “Ride of the Valkyries” plays. The Wagner composition is featured in a prominent sequence in the earlier movie after Lt. Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) orders his troops to blast the music as they attack a Vietnamese village.
Hanoi Hannah. The North Vietnamese radio broadcaster — real name: Trinh Thi Ngo — had the mission of demoralizing U.S. troops, delivering propaganda that might lead them to abandon fighting. In “Da 5 Bloods,” she announces the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and asks Black GIs why they would fight for the United States, especially when they are overrepresented among the troops. In a 2018 remembrance about Hannah, former TV news reporter Don North recalled that she “regularly addressed her comments to Black American GIs.” He added that she delivered news of the 1967 Detroit uprising. While “American military stations were quiet” about events in the city, he wrote, “she broadcast every detail she had available.”