Sinners:

Viral Cinema with Hot Buttons

Responding to the buzz, my ex and myself went to see the now Academy Award winning film Sinners at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, a theater that maintains all the Deco glory of an early Twentieth Century movie house, at a time when every movie theater in nearby downtown Berkeley has been closed since the pandemic. That’s significant. Can cinema be said to have a future when the most significant college town on the West Coast doesn’t have a movie theater near its campus? Do college kids care about going to the movies? Is the cinema experience, if not dead, then dying? The Grand Lake Theater does a lot of heavy lifting as a Temple to Cinema, a syncretic art form that had been the signature medium of the Twentieth Century. An art form that in terms of immersive power, has surpassed almost every art form before it, going back to cave paintings. It was a good place to see the film. Director Ryan Coogler, an Oaklander, said that seeing movies at this very theater was what planted the seed of his becoming a film maker. Unfortunately the film is, technically, a musical and the sound system was wanting. I could barely make out half the dialog which I attributed to reasonably correct Southern accents that had been carefully coached into the actors, many of whom were not from the Clarksdale Mississippi location.

My ex didn’t like it. “I don’t like the Blues,” she said. I love the Blues, ever since I sought them out after reading the scandalous Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods and saw the Walter Hill film Crossroads, both of which were my introduction to the legend of Robert Johnson. And I loved that an Oakland black guy made the movie. I like Oakland’s lack of pretensions and cultural mix, if San Francisco feels too stuck up I decompress by going there. And Sinners, by Oakland native Ryan Coogler, has done what good art should do. Inspired arguments, critical examinations, hostility, love, hundreds of You Tube video essays with even Slavic Marxist philosopher Slovaj Zizek commenting on the old story of the Blues being an act of resistance to the racial oppression experienced by African Americans in the first half of the Twentieth Century, and why that matters in the Twenty-First Century.

Being a lover of both cinema and Blues I was interested enough to see it again on the big screen and managed to see it on Imax in San Francisco, without my easily distracted ex. The second time I was won over by the sheer love and artistry present in this movie. Not just Michael B. Jordan’s eerie ability to impress the audience, and myself, that the twin brothers “Smoke” and “Stack” were similar but different men, the lush cinematography, the attention to period 1932 details, the cultural richness present in each frame, the timely considerations of race, racism and authenticity, but the excellence of the sound. The Sony Metreon sound let me pay attention to every nuance of dialog in the buildup, and the artful way the music blended seamlessly into the story being presented. It’s a awesome film made by a director, writer, cast and crew who were in love with the subject matter and acting in the belief and attitude, in the Age of Robotics and AI, that humanity and art actually matter.

So why bother writing about it? Plenty of people have. Do I have any irons in the fire? Yes, I do. The villain is Irish. That’s an “in.”

There are criticisms that the film makes a case for cultural essentialism, phenotype as the foundation of “authenticity,” coming from the same positions that argue people blighted with European backgrounds are all “privileged,” have no cultures of their own, steal everything, etc., and that, furthermore, anybody who is not Indian should not be allowed to do yoga, but especially not “white people.” It’s stupid stuff that conflates any cultural blending, even respectfully, with “Black Face” or not respecting the origination of cultural form, but that’s not always what is happening when someone makes a meal that isn’t directly sourced from their national origin. And this stuff is everywhere right now. Americans are obsessed with race, and rigid understandings about just what “race” even means. And the statements and themes about race that become official are often not effective. I’ll stand by that. My proof? If we really had our shit together racism would be an ugly memory of our barbaric past and we’d all be uniting together in hating ignorance, disease, the infirmity of old age, asshole teen agers of any race, not getting laid, overdue bills and bureaucratic incompetency like a big American family of grievance kumbayaing together over the things we could collectively say “fuck you” to. But we don’t. Two steps forward and one step back. Again and again.

I’ve written a lot of amateur history in Species. I scrupulously avoid writing about racial identity. Since everyone else does why bother? It doesn’t mean I don’t care, it’s just a lose lose proposition. Believe it or not, before the Cancel Mob decided to go after Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird it was long considered an “anti-racist” text. It’s now “problematic” since it has been re-defined as a “white savior narrative.” Or the problem is the perspective in the book is that of a white teen aged girl (Harper when she was a kid) and, as one trendy queer identified academic I was acquaintances with said “White people? Who cares?” The academic was white BTW. I suspect the real problem with To Kill A Mockingbird is that the story is centered on a positive relationship between a widowed father and his daughter. Positive dads? Not where we’re at right now. People want Bastard out of Carolina a working class white Southern Gothic that significantly has no positive male characters. I don’t criticize the late author Dorothy Allison, who was writing from experience, I just notice the book’s popularity coinciding with attacks on Harper Lee.

Another thing about Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winner, her father, the good white liberal lawyer Atticus Finch doesn’t “save” anybody. He defends a black man in the bad old Jim Crow south that Harper Lee grew up in against false accusations of rape but fails to convince the jury of his innocence. Lee didn’t let anybody off the hook. Individuals don’t change the system. So TKAMB is not a “white savior narrative.” It’s just a book with (outnumbered) good white people in it… for shame.

I’ve seen one Marxist criticism of Sinners that argues the film sets up a “false” positive of Black entrepreneurship as “saving” the black community. Problem is I saw the film, twice, and the brothers, “Smoke” and “Stack” Moore don’t save the community of non-white Clarksdale with their business acumen. They fail miserably. Sinners is not an Entrepreneur Savior narrative anymore than To Kill a Mockingbird is a “White Savior Narrative.” Both works are… complex.

I’ve watched Ryan Coogler’s movies since Fruitvale Station and noticed the shout outs to Oakland in Black Panther. People and place matter to him. This has heart as opposed to just dollars in it. And yes he is African American and if you are African American why shouldn’t you speak to the Black experience? I also believe he has taken his dollars and put it back into the community that produced him… (I haven’t seen the books, but young Black Oakland is jumping culturally right now). I also think he has an awareness of how community is held together not just by blood, but by shared story telling, folklore and creation.

The beginning of the film has an expositional voice over where a woman’s voice talks about the magical/shamanic story telling traditions of Ireland, West Africa and the Choctaw Indians, the three ethnic groups whose historical experiences inform the film. She points out that these timeless voices in each culture channel emotion and memory and prophecy, and that they open doors that let everything in, including evil. Cue the Delta Blues.

Behind Coogler’s script is the story of the Blues. Principally the story of Robert Johnson and Son House, seminal Delta Blues Men. The Blues was considered the “Devil’s Music” as the lyrical considerations were often about the kind of fun that hard working, marginalized, long suffering people sought enjoyment through: liquor, fornication, fighting, music about the same. It was in conflict with Gospel which was about gratitude to God and Jesus, listened to by the same community of poor southern Black people. Son House was a paradox in that he was a Black Baptist preacher who also was a Blues man. “I became a preacher, ‘cause I didn’t want to work” House crooned with some degree of humor on “Preacher Blues.”

The story is that one day in the 1930’s Son House and some other Blues Men were playing their guitars when a kid named Robert Johnson showed up wanting to jam with them. He was terrible and got roundly excoriated by the older men until, his ears burning, he slinked off and disappeared for a few months. He showed up again thereafter, and to the amazement of the older Blues Men, he could play his guitar like it was a piano. He could play like the Devil! And Robert credited the Devil.

According to the famous legend, he went out to the crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 49, then outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi, at midnight where he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for guitar lessons from hell and came back one of the greatest Blues Men of All Time. That’s what he said anyway.

Anthropologically you might say this version of the Faust myth trickled down to infiltrate the culture of poor southern Christian Black people. It’s just as likely that it trickled up as the great novelist/anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston observed the story of the Bokor Man in Haiti, regarding making pacts with the darker spirits in exchange for earthly power. Either way, whether making deals with dark gods or the Devil, it usually is a bad idea in these stories. But there is also mitigating circumstances to be considered in the Cosmic Courts of the Just. I mean if your life is starvation and violence anyway, how could hell be any worse?

Robert cut some records in the Thirties. His haunting wails can still be heard as well as the goosebump sense that, when you listen to him, you are hearing the voice of a man who knew he was damned. By the time he hit 27 he was dead, reputedly poisoned by a jealous husband of one of his many female admirers with lye in his whisky. Terrible way for anybody to die.

Robert Johnson lived on though. He ended up being the principal lyricist for the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton.

Now this myth might not be literally true. There is a suspicion that the “Devil” doesn’t literally exist, and is actually a scapegoat for the sort of rotten things human beings like to do anyway but don’t want full credit for. It is likely that Robert invented this story to spook off those who might have wished to do him harm. Mess with him and you were messing with the Devil. Why would he do that? Who would do that? A pretty man, singing pretty music and making cash money doing it, who was Black in a super racist south where murdering anybody who wasn’t white was business as usual? And murdering people, without racial consideration, because there’s plenty of murder to go around anyway? Not to mention women liked him and there were a lot of jealous men… If God is too far away maybe there are other options.

This core myth is reinterpreted in Sinners along with a “White Devil.”

I can’t accuse people who got their back against the wall of not being open minded. You’re in survival. Perspective has to be narrow. The 21st Century, as opposed to the 1930’s, is different. It’s all about meta-dialect.

So why is the Irish guy the bad guy? SPOILER ALERT Smoke and Stack get their cousin Sammy, who is a budding great Blues Man and whose father is a disapproving Baptist minister, to be the key musician at the juke joint, a refurbished mill they have bought off a “not racist at all” southern white Bubba with money they’ve jacked from the Irish and Italian mobs they used to work for in Chicago, and a bunch of ordinance they’ve been hanging onto since the Great War they both fought in. They are both men who inspire fear and respect in the community they haven’t returned to in seven years. An older Blues Man tells Sammy that the Blues is “the one thing that is ours” unlike Christianity that was imposed. He tells him that it is “a powerful thing.”

Despite the warnings he gets from his father Sammy plays at the juke joint for his gangster cousins, after getting it on with a pretty married woman (the movie is called Sinners after all) and brings the house down. In the process, if you like this sort of montage, and I do, Sammy brings the spirits of all who have come before in the Black community as well as the Chinese ancestors of the Chinese couple whose wholesale/retail operation supplies the food. Spirits from the future, hip hoppers, turn tablists a Bootsy Collins like rock guitar player, all show up too. And so does Remmick, an Irish vampire.

We see Remmick, partially burning in the daylight, being chased by Choctaw Indian Vampire hunters and taking refuge with a hillbilly couple who turn out to be Klansmen. Trusting the white guy over the Native Americans the Klansmen get whats coming to them as Remmick eats em and turns them into vampires. Later, after dark, they show up as a pale trio singing outside the juke joint and begging admittance. Considering the problems of what would happen if white people got in a fight, or got indigestion, or anything, in a black club in Mississippi circa 1932 they are denied entrance. One vampire trope that is adhered to here is the idea that vampires can only enter a place with permission. Smoke’s HooDoo practicing lover Annie, who is an expert on “Haints” knows what to do.

I won’t go further into the plot. There’s some great musical scenes and choreographed human vs. vampire action but what’s important to notice is the themes. And the emotions. Remmick, for instance, isn’t racist. In fact the two Klans people, as vampires who partake in the communal vampire mind, are all over the racist thing now. “We’ve got a new Klan” says the girl Klanswoman who has now become a much more woke member of the undead. This new “clan” is where everything is shared and Remmick, the Master Vampire, has access to everyone’s memories, thoughts, erotic moments. The only thing is: nobody has their own shit anymore.

Things go south. Remmick wants Sammy because he sees that Sammy can summon ancestors. Remmick’s jigs and reels haven’t been able to summon his own long dead people, maybe Sammy can help. But Remmick doesn’t ask. He just takes. Is Remmick supposed to be Bono? When Remmick gets his hands on Sammy, Sammy remembering his father’s warnings about the evil of the Blues starts to say the Lord’s Prayer and Remmick joins him saying “The men who taught me that are the same men who stole my father’s land.” Remmick, the Irishman, was also a victim of colonization and in turn has become a colonizer. Cue discussions on cycles of abuse.

Personally I can handle an Irish villain. I also think Ryan Coogler is aware that the Irish have a history of being exploited and of suffering as well, but making the vamp a Mick does open a potential for problems and, all things considered, is a gutsier choice than just making him a stereotypically English or East European baddie. Because it does open the discussion. That said I don’t know if he is aware that the Haitian Loa of Death has a red headed Irish girl as a consort (or the similarity between Irish slang and Jamaican slang). And thanks to the film’s extraordinary success, others will ask these questions. Count on it.

There isn’t any absolutely pure culture. The Italians jacked tomatoes from the Americas. Pineapple came to Hawaii via Peru and the Americans. Things blend. They are not pure. The Blues utilized Asian and European musical instruments. You tell me who invented the turn table. Les Paul came up with the electric guitar, and Jimmy Hendrix and Link Wray took it places. The effect of music is ineffable ultimately. It’s up to your cultural framework how you take it (I have a hard time with Chinese opera, but that’s just my hang up. I mean I love Chinese people).

So does Sinners inspire dialog or is it the sort of moralistic intersectionality lecture, like those stupid Buzz Feed articles by non-Japanese people that were about shaming Manet, and anybody who liked “white” Impressionistic shit, for painting his wife in a kimono because it theoretically “hurt” Japanese people for doing that? The vampires in Sinners have a hive mind, like the Hive on Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus. When everything is totally accepted as mutually shared property and no cultural differences exist or are respected, and no difference is recognized between Shakespeare and JK Rowling, is anything of quality? And is a zonked out group mind truly human with all the difficulties that accompany being human strategically erased for something non-human? Human discomfort is the condition by which great art is created. No conflict, no beauty. Art that can inspire heart opening or tears or self remembering or a collective emotion? Gone with culture blended into a bland food court monopoly of endlessly blinking lights tapped into by a population with shattered attention spans, and lacking all agency, where our sonnets and sexuality and grief are fed back to us like baby food with the spark all but removed and replaced with mechanistic triggers to keep the victims’ (that is us) transfixed on the pornography while our vital blood is drained from us. So I don’t think this movie is an intelligence insulting moralistic lecture about the general evil of Whitey. It has genuine emotion. And, like real life, it is complicated. And I felt the same thing watching it that I’ve felt when I’ve watched what I thought was truly Great Cinema: The Last Illusion, Fire Walk with Me, La Dolce Vida, La Strada, The Searchers, Throne of Blood, The Seventh Seal, Metropolis, Paths of Glory to name a few. But there is a history of skin color racism that can’t be ignored, and the film addresses it without putting a period on it. Because we’re not at the period of the sentence of centuries of bullshit yet. We’re probably a long way off. But in the meantime art that can inspire is still being made, and still getting noticed.