“I don’t like that electric shit as much as the real,” the menacing vampire Stack (Michael B. Jordan) tells elderly blues musician Sammie Moore (Buddy Guy) at the very end of Ryan Coogler’s already classic Sinners. The film’s final aesthetic statement can be read as an ambivalent denigration of the film’s own aesthetics; at the conclusion of his (at least fairly) big budget, commodified Hollywood production, Coogler condemns an earlier (supposedly) commodified art form, hankering for the “real” acoustic blues over its (whiter?) electrified successor. The sinner of the title, in this context, may be Coogler himself—though it’s significant that the movie is, in many ways, a celebration of those who aren’t saved.
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Coogler is probably best known to mainstream audiences from his work on the two Black Panther films and the Rocky sequel Creed. Sinners, in contrast, is not a preexisting property. Instead, it’s part of the new, post-Jordan Peele wave of Black horror. The Smokestack twins, Smoke and Stack (both Jordan) return from Chicago with a stack of ill-gotten gains to set up a juke joint in Mississippi. They hire a young Sammie (Miles Caton) to provide entertainment, and other townspeople to cook, decorate and run the gambling table. Opening night is an enthusiastic success—until Irish vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) is attracted by Sammie’s performance, and starts turning the Black patrons into soulless monsters who feed on their friends and family.
To some extent, Remmick stands for the predatory violence of whiteness; he’s an avatar of the lynch mobs which targeted successful Black businessmen for retaliatory violence. It’s no accident that before attacking the juke joint, the first two people he turns are a Klan couple, who rescue him from Choctaw vampire hunters on the basis of his wealth and white skin privilege.
The metaphor is more complicated than vampires as white people though. At the beginning of the movie, a voice over narrative explains that great musicians—griots or blues musician—can part the barrier between past, present, and future, living and dead. That’s a way to celebrate heritage; the film’s most bravura scene depicts Sammie performing as his audience shimmies and intermixes with traditional African dancers and drummers, electric guitarists, hip hop DJs, and other music makers throughout history, the camera sliding through space and time in a sexy, sweaty celebration of roots, innovation, love, and art.
The magic, though, has a dangerous downside. Remmick is a music lover himself—he appears at the juke joint initially playing Irish/folk tunes on a banjo (which Coogler of course is aware is an African instrument.) When he creates or turns new vampires, he gains all their knowledge and skills; he wants to take Sammie so that he can take his skills and connect to the past he’s lost. “I want your stories and I want your songs” he tells Sammie as he prepares to bite.
Remmick talks about the English coming to take his father’s farm, an obvious connection to the Klan which rolls in to shoot up the juke joint once the vampires are gone. In that sense, the Irish vampire and the Black people he’s turned share a cross-racial history of marginalization and violence. “I am your way out,” Remmick says, and while he means a way out of mortality, he also obviously means a way out of white supremacy and oppression. The dead (supposedly) have no prejudice; their eternity is egalitarian. Remmick promises to go feast on the Klan next, offering an interracial brotherhood and an interracial and bloody revolution.
The film plays with the idea of a vampire utopia, but it doesn’t really believe in it. Remmick may have been oppressed once, but his white privilege saves him early on in the film, and he’s ultimately the ruler of the Black people he turns; they’re so in his thrall that they all cry out in pain when he’s wounded in the head. He wants to own Black people and especially Black music in order to reconnect himself to a kind of authenticity. That makes him perhaps less like a white lyncher, and more like a white executive, who offers Black performers money, fame, and a chance to dance with and for white people—for a price. The main vampire musical number is an Irish jig; it’s hard to call it liberation when you’re literally dancing to a white man’s tune.
Coogler doesn’t want Black people to sell their soul to the white man—but also, he’s clearly aware that his own career has been predicated on just the kind of bargains Sinners seems to repudiate. Black Panther and its sequel exist in a massive studio system controlled by white people, and for all their audacity, they make ideological and aesthetic compromises as a result.
Sinners with its triumphant final scenes of a Black man murdering his way through a bunch of white supremacist Klansmen, goes places the MCU films very deliberately avoided. Those vampire dance scenes, though, have a chilling power which is hard to entirely refuse—and the last scene of the film also deliberately vacillates. Sammie has kept his soul (unless you count going electric as selling out.) Stack and his girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) have not. But the vampires—who after all look like movie stars Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld!—embody sexy, menacing cool. Submitting to the teeth of the white devil has put them beyond the power of whiteness. Or at least, white people haven’t killed them yet.
Coogler isn’t really defending his work in mainstream film; he’s not exactly forswearing it either. Instead, in that last scene, Stack and Sammie agree that the single night at the juke joint, before the vampires, was the best day of their lives. “No doubt about it. Last time I seen my brother. Last time I seen the sun. And just for a few hours, we was free.”
That freedom was illusory; the leader of the Klan sold the brothers the juke joint land, and planned to kill them all even before they took possession. The venue was doomed financially anyway; the patrons only had company script, making it impossible for them to sustain their own gathering places and their own art. In a white supremacist country, in a white supremacist world, there is only white man’s money, and all the music is played at white man’s sufference. There is no place under the sun for justice, or for Black people. And yet, Coogler suggests, art—whether music or movies—can gives us, however briefly, however compromised, a vision of a better world.
"In that sense, the Irish vampire and the Black people he’s turned share a cross-racial history of marginalization and violence."
Van Morrison, whose music can best be described as a fusion of Black American blues and Irish romanticism, is a real world reflection of that shared history.
Thanks for this, the subtleties of the movie are really playing around in my brain and while I may never feel smart enough to get it, your take helps me get some closer.