My 10,000 word essay on ‘Da 5 Bloods’ is in ruins

I wanted to call the essay “10,000 Words for 10,000 Ships: A Defense of Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods.” But I didn’t finish the essay. I worked on it a couple hours a day for about a week. I worked on it a while in the dining room as my daughters watched Disney+. I worked on it for a while in a closet I pretend is an office. When I switched writing locations, I moved the laptop with its several open tabs and a stack of several books with me.

From what did the film need defending? Well, in an article titled “Vietnamese Lives, American Imperialist Views, Even in ‘Da 5 Bloods,’” Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote some lines that I quoted in my abandoned drafts and that I will quote here too. He wrote:

“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: to be helpful, rescued, blamed, analyzed, mocked, abused, raped, killed, spoken for, spoken over, misunderstood or…