![]() ![]() How do you get from Memphis to London? And they knew who he was! And, what was his name, James Earl Ray? What, he got arrested in London? He assassinated Martin King, Jr., and he’s able to get out of the country? Come on now. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I., they weren’t helping either. He was assassinated because he was fucking with people’s money. And the scene we have, his speech, which he gave at Riverside Church, April 4th, 1967-he died a year later, to the day. So when he came out against the war, that was it. And wars-people make money! How much money did Dow Chemical make being at war making napalm? probably felt that he got stabbed in the back. felt betrayed, because they had been partners on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He wasn’t talking about, let’s let Black people drink out of a white water fountain, or ride the bus. When he came out against the war, he’s talking against the war machine-big money. King, I think that that’s what got him assassinated. He lost prime years of his athleticism, which you can never regain. Ali had a heavyweight-champion belt stripped from him. Both were critics of that war, and both of them carried a great price. King speak at this church in Brooklyn Heights. But my mother’s old friend took me to D.C., back in the day, on that Eastern Shuttle, with the Poor People’s Campaign. And not just the TV-the stuff that we’d seen out on the streets, because there was a war in America, too, a war about the Vietnam war. Was your home the kind of home where you would sit and talk about the stuff you were seeing on the TV? Our conversation began with Lee’s own experience of that moment. In one of the flashback sections of “Da 5 Bloods,” the men learn that Martin Luther King, Jr., a much-mentioned guardian angel in Lee’s films, has been assassinated. The bloodshed, social strife, distant war, and sudden upswellings of domestic revolt on display in that era constituted Lee’s earliest conscious exposure to politics, and, via television, also became his introduction to American visual culture. “ Da 5 Bloods” is also a revisitation of the cultural milieu of Lee’s youth, during the great conflagrations of the late sixties. ![]() “Da 5 Bloods” is, like many of Lee’s films, a kind of personal archive: it pays homage to, among other works, John Huston’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” which Lee assigned to me as homework, and “ Apocalypse Now,” which was, for him, a formative moviegoing experience. And we talked about the movies, both his own-from “ Do the Right Thing” to “ Bamboozled,” his satire about minstrelsy and modern show business, to “ BlacKkKlansman”-and those that shaped him. In June and again in February, we talked about the state of New York and the country, the coronavirus pandemic, and Lee’s relationship with the New York Knicks. My interviews with Lee have been condensed for length and edited for clarity. Just after our last conversation, HBO announced that Lee was at work on a multipart documentary for the network, “NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021 ½,” which will narrate the past two decades in New York, bookended by 9/11 and the coronavirus, and will première later this year. In between, Lee had released another movie, the performance film “ American Utopia,” a cinematic reimagining of David Byrne’s recent Broadway show. Donald Trump, whom Lee consistently referred to as Agent Orange, was still President. I first spoke with Lee about the movie in June, just before it was released, while protests, sparked by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, raged in American streets. With one exception, he appears only during the film’s extended flashbacks, and therefore seems, uncannily, like a spectral visitor. Boseman plays Norman, the unofficial and unsubtly Christlike leader of the group, who did not survive the war. And then there’s the sight of Chadwick Boseman, who died not long after the movie’s release, at the age of forty-three, of cancer. First, by a soundtrack that leans heavily on Marvin Gaye’s classic protest album, “What’s Going On,” making Gaye, with his wistful cynicism-“ Are things really getting better like the newspaper said?”-almost a character in the film. To watch it is to be haunted, in multiple ways. The film is a pointed and melancholy meditation on warfare, memory, mammon, and trauma undiluted by time’s passage. Decades later, the group-played by Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., and, in what may be the performance of his career, Delroy Lindo-returns to Vietnam, in order to reclaim a treasure that they left behind. ![]() Spike Lee’s “ Da 5 Bloods,” released last summer on Netflix, is the story of four friends who served together during the Vietnam War. ![]()
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