This article contains Sinners spoilers.
In a movie suffused with otherworldly musical sequences and phantasmagorical imagery, it is easily the weirdest thing we see. Jack O’Connell’s presumably thousand-year-old Remmick is performing a Celtic jig from his homeland, and freshly turned vampires like poor disfigured Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), lonely Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), and even rebellious Stack (Michael B. Jordan) are prancing right along with him in the river dance.
Only a handful moments earlier in the film, these same people, all Black or of mixed heritage, were communing with a different kind of spirit when they thrived and writhed to the sound of a blues guitar so true that it connected them with their ancestors and descendants. For a glorious moment, the past, present, and future coexisted, with the sounds of rhythmic drums, electric guitars, and propulsive spoken verse melding together into a harmony that is the African American and larger diaspora experience.
But that was their party and their fleeting moment of escape. Before the night is out, it’s been rendered as illusory as Stack and twin brother Smoke’s ownership of this slaughterhouse-turned-juke joint. Now many of those same souls have been “seduced”—or forcibly attacked—by a smiling white devil who offers pledges of comity and fraternity. And those forced to buy into that lie repeat it like an unconvincing PSA that would one day be placed before the grandkids they’ll now never be allowed to have. Among the first to be turned, Cornbread bemoans to Smoke “why can’t we all just get along” and be “polite” to one another? He pleads this even as his new employer angles to literally rip Smoke’s throat out and watch him bleed out on the slaughterhouse floor.
For all the imagery of vampire fangs and crimson-red eyes, the story of Sinners is one that’s as old as the cotton fields it’s set in. It’s an American tragedy.
“The film for me personally was a reclamation of a time period and a place that my family doesn’t talk about much,” Ryan Coogler previously told us during a preview of Sinners’ trailer back in January. The director was referring specifically to Mississippi where his maternal grandfather grew up, as did a beloved uncle who would only speak of the land of cotton while blues records played. “It’s a lot of feelings associated with our history. We go there, showing these people in their full… humanity.’”
Coogler refers to the generation on the screen at the juke joint as his grandparents’ era. And they’re depicted as just as wild and free-wheeling as the generations who preferred rock ’n roll or rap over the blues and jazz. That is demonstrable in the sequence where the guitar and voice of Miles Caton’s Sammie conjures ghosts. But it is also the story of how each generation must face levers of control and coercion—of white faces promising equality and unity, even while they have a literal klansman among their ranks.
Indeed, the first time we meet the film’s vampiric villain he has mysteriously escaped Indigenous vampire hunters who surely have a tale to tell of their own while chasing this revenant across the hills. He is spared, however, by faces who trust a white man first, much to their sorrow soon thereafter. Before Remmick turns this dirt poor couple attempting to muddle through the Great Depression into undead lackeys, the vampire clocks the husband as a klansman after spotting a hood in the house.
Later we learn from the same ghoul that by drinking this shit-kicker’s blood, Remmick realized the Klan never intended to let Smoke and Stack keep the land they bought with their own hard-won money. The plan apparently was to slaughter as many Black men and women as possible to make a lesson for any other entrepreneurial men of color in the area. The vampires just got there first.
It’s as sickening as it is unsurprising, and it belies the real-world insidiousness of Remmick’s offer of immortality. He claims that he does not see race or religion among his flock. But if you join him, even as free a spirit as Stack is consigned to dance to the vampire’s drum; to play the white man’s music; and to have his own individuality and heritage sapped away and appropriated.
So this is also, of course, the story of Mississippi and the larger American South that birthed the blues. It’s no accident that Coogler captures the rolling fields of cotton in wide, painterly IMAX lenses. This is the coveted cash crop that so many Black Americans’ ancestors were torn from their homeland to pick, toil, and die over. It is also the same crop that similarly enslaves in all but name the neighbors of Stack, Smoke, and Sammie throughout Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Sammie’s father, a preacher at the nearby plantation, laments his son’s secular, heathen music. However, he himself like his father before him is trapped on the same plantation that perhaps two generations prior was tended by literally enslaved people. After the Civil War and emancipation, though, white Southern fears of William Tecumseh Sherman’s promises of 40 acres for every freed Black man proved unfounded. President Andrew Johnson returned most plantation land to its previous white owners, and to make up for the loss of Black slaves, the remnants of the planter class trapped newly freedmen into Faustian sharecropping bargains. Black farmers were “paid” with a share of crop they could sell, but it would never be enough to make up for the land and tools rented and leased to them. They would be caught in a cycle of debt and poverty that would become generational.
Sharecropping was still the law of the land in the Jim Crow South of 1932 when Sinners is set, and many Black men who believed they could beat the rigged game were terrorized or worse by the Klan and its institutionalized ilk. Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) tells the story in the film of a bandmate who dreamed of using a tiny fortune they made to open his own store. He was lynched before he reached a train out of town. And a few years earlier, and a few states over from where Sinners is set, white neighbors grew so indignant of an emerging Black upper-middle class in Tulsa, Oklahoma that in 1921 they murdered nearly a thousand of them, including by dropping bombs from the sky in World War I era airplanes.
Remmick seems to offer a theoretically less cruel sense of conquest, even if it’s by drinking actual life blood. But it’s really not that different than the white record producers of Carter family who might pay Lesley Riddle for writing a song, but never gave him copyright credit. They never let him truly own his own music. Certainly Elvis Presley got a lot richer singing “Hound Dog” than Big Mama Thornton.
Sinners contextualizes how much of this was Smoke and Stack’s past while relying on the audience to fill in the gaps we know from their future. The vampire getting Black converts to insist on the need of politeness and community might even be viewed as a cynical wariness to those who yearn for a “post-racial” America when 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, Southern states are still attempting to whitewash the horrors of slavery out of our history books and classrooms. Encourage future generations to go back to the plantation.
Hence why the real catharsis of Sinners is not Smoke staking the fanciful monster that claims to date back to the days of St. Patrick. It’s Smoke slaying a much more tangible creature by emptying a tommy gun clip into the local grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He doesn’t really defeat the system, of course. In fact, Smoke dies from a bullet wound he picks up during his fire fight with the lynch mob. The American system is rigged, and the dream of his and Stack’s juke joint could never be long-lasting. But for a brief and beautiful moment, it’s real. And in the here and now, that white old bastard is still worm meat.
It’s a momentary victory like that night at the party, or any other where Sammie grows into blues legend Buddy Guy. And it can be savored by sinners and saints alike.
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