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At first I had no compelling reason to watch Da 5 Bloods—not being a fan of war movies—until a fellow writer in New York remarked to me that Spike Lee’s new Netflix movie is like a ‘Vietnam bingo’, replete with stereotypes of Vietnamese people, and that the author Viet Thanh Nguyen was calling them out on Twitter.

I immediately went to Nguyen’s feed. As an Asian writer living in the US, I’m always interested in what the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the MacArthur Genius Grant for his first novel, The Sympathizer, has to say on Twitter. And his tweets are always witty and wise, like his pinned tweet:

‘Writers from a minority, write as if you are the majority. Do not explain. Do not cater. Do not translate. Do not apologize. Assume everyone knows what you are talking about, as the majority does. Write with all the privileges of the majority, but with the humility of a minority.’

And his tweetstorm about Da 5 Bloods was epic. He was ‘live tweeting’ the movie because he had seen ‘almost all Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War’ and knew how to detect badly written Vietnamese characters. I couldn’t stop reading and didn’t care about spoilers even though I hadn’t seen the movie.

To understand what Nguyen was talking about, I eventually slogged through two and a half hours of Da 5 Bloods. Despite a 92 per cent ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I found it a disappointing mess. Like Nguyen, I like many of Lee’s films, but this won’t be one of them. There were jarring twists and an improbable denouement, and also the offensive stereotypes Nguyen had drawn attention to on Twitter.

I was curious, though, about what film critics had said about Da 5 Bloods, and if they spotted the same hollow portrayals of the Vietnamese people. Richard Brody, the New Yorker, said the film ‘exalts the unacknowledged heroism of black Americans and creates a place for them at the center of modern culture’. A.O. Scott, the New York Times, called it ‘an argument with and through the history of film’. Ann Hornaday, the Washington Post, saw it as ‘another film that uncannily meets its moment’. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker, imagined viewers ‘being swayed, even at home, by the surge of its indignation’.

Not a word about the shallow depictions.

These white critics were acutely aware that they were reviewing a movie about black Vietnam War vets, conceived by a black auteur, in the wake of the chaotic and angry, sometimes violent, Black Lives Matter protests that erupted with George Floyd’s murder on 25 May and lasting through to his funeral on 9 June. Netflix released Da 5 Bloods on 12 June. And I understood that in this traumatic moment in history, they had to be circumspect and deferential, cautious even, to prove their solidarity with African-Americans.

As an Asian, I’m also firmly in solidarity the Black Lives Matter movement, as I’m sure many Asian-Americans are, believing that minorities must band together right now and organise against a racist government with fascistic fantasies. That we need to elevate each other as we feel the same anxieties about race in America—the attacks against Asians increased after Trump weaponised Covid against China by calling it the ‘Chinese virus’.

But it doesn’t mean that I have to like a black film populated by bad caricatures of other Asians, that I feel the need to elevate a mediocre movie out of political allegiance. Just because Asians have allied themselves with black Americans it doesn’t mean that we cannot have an honest conversation about a film like Da 5 Bloods. A bad movie is a bad movie. Don’t even let me start on Crazy Rich Asians!

So, with that out of the way, and inspired by my writer-friend’s comment and Nguyen’s tweets, I decided to construct a Vietnam War bingo, a glossary of ‘obligatory’ Vietnamese stock characters in most Hollywood’s movies about the war, also found in Da 5 Bloods. Imagine a 75-ball bingo card with the title:

SPIKE LEE’S VIETNAM WAR BINGO

First row: Thich Quang Duc / Ho Dinh Van / Ho Chi Minh / General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong (Bay Lop) in the head / Phan Thi Kim Phuc (the ‘Napalm Girl’)

Nguyen said these are classic images of Vietnamese death, and ‘that’s all the Vietnamese are known for, being victims’.

Second row: Fall of Saigon / boat people / Apocalypse Now (the nightclub) / maimed beggars / tour guides

Nguyen was appalled that Lee had turned a Vietnamese action star into a tour guide. He exclaimed: ‘JOHNNY TRI NGUYEN just walked in. He’s super hot but look what they did to him here. Fuck. Watch him in his brother Charlie Nguyen’s THE REBEL. HE FUCKING KICKS FRENCH ASS. Now he’s the tour guide.’

Third row: uncles who look like Ho Chi Minh / helicopter from Apocalypse Now (the movie) / faceless VCs getting killed / woman firing rocket launcher / Vietnamese shouting incomprehensibly

Nguyen wrote: ‘Faceless NVA or VC being killed. Obligatory. Woman firing the rocket launcher gestures at the GIs worst fear—a woman who they didn’t rape or pay for sex but who would cut their balls off. See Full Metal Jacket’.

Fourth row: mistresses / bar hostesses / whores / bastard children (mixed race) / Hanoi Hannah

And he added, ‘Vietnamese soldiers getting killed. Fuck. It’s a movie but it still hurts. That’s our place in the American imagination. Tour guides. Sidekicks. “Whores” and lovers. Bastard kids. The enemy getting wiped out facelessly. Does it matter if Black guys are doing it?’

Fifth row: floating market / river hawkers selling live snakes and chickens / faceless gangsters getting killed / female VC assassin / Vietnamese being called gooks

Nguyen tweeted indignantly, ‘Then Delroy Lindo argues that Black men calling each other N____ is the same as a Black man saying Gook. Uh, no. Black people can call each other that, that’s their right. We don’t get to call Black people that. And they don’t get to call us Gook.’

Here are some of Nguyen’s thoughts on these tropes:

‘Basically, for American movies of the Vietnam War, it doesn’t matter whether the American is the hero or antihero as long as the American is the center. Better to be villain or antihero than virtuous extra (that’s for the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong).

‘And in the end, despite the needed focus on Black experiences it was still mostly an American movie that reiterated many, many American war movie tropes about Vietnam, with the Vietnamese in the margins, as always. Black subjectivity at the center, yes, but still American subjectivity.

‘If you can’t disentangle Black subjectivity from dominant American subjectivity, it’s hard to have a genuine anti-imperialist critique. Hence the marginalized Vietnamese. This is not an argument for more Vietnamese inclusion just to have Vietnamese faces and voices.

‘As always, it’s a demand that you can’t decolonize and de-imperialize if you keep reiterating the imperial country’s point of view, even from the minority perspective. Don’t believe me, read Martin Luther King, Jr. Everybody read that. Really.’

BINGO!

• Tags: Free to read, Notebook, Peter Yeoh, Spike Lee, Vietnam