Sinners is a truly remarkable movie, with Ryan Coogler cashing in his franchise filmmaking credit to tell a unique story that depicts people and politics that conservatives around the world would like us to believe are culturally irrelevant; but which have conversely dominated at box offices and award galas. But it’s not just Trumpite America which this undermines: Coogler’s story also offers a powerful rebuttal of establishment liberalism, which has spent decades using the Black community as electoral capital – but in the service of a subtler conservatism, rather than meaningful change.
It took me until Friday to finally watch Sinners, and I honestly regret that it took me so long.
That regret is partially born of the fact that so many people who know me knew that it was an amalgamation of things I would love – and yet I didn’t make the time to watch the film until the day of a movie quiz I expected (correctly) it would feature in. The fact I am so pig-headed, so far up my own backside, that I wouldn’t just take someone else’s word for a film I would so blatantly enjoy until I could justify it on my own terms, as though it was my idea, is one of those things that makes me wonder how the people who care put up with me.
There’s probably a critique of my own critical style to draw out there – but that’s not what I want to talk about today. The other half of my regret is where I want to focus; at how spectacularly I have misjudged Ryan Coogler. I have not seen Fruitvale Station, and so my only prior knowledge of his work came from his writing and directing of franchise movies – Creed and Black Panther – and while there is some argument that those films have an original voice in spite of that, I felt that more often, that voice was undermined by the need to play up to the established expectations of Hollywood’s mainstream.
Particularly, the legacy of Black Panther – which features a likeable CIA agent trying to help a resource-rich, progressive, Afro-futurist society that currently exists beyond the US’ field of influence; and repeated insistence that the continent of Africa is beautiful and precious, but a visual reluctance to actually locate any of the actors there, rather than placing them in front of CGI vistas glaring out of LED screens in an LA backlot – seemed to give me pause for thought. Sinners’ poster invokes that particular Marvel style of having layer-upon-layer of characters wedged into the frame.
That is probably the most pathetically superficial take that could have kept me from what was actually one of the best films I have seen this decade. Possibly longer.
This is a joyous explosion. It is Coogler’s wild, dangerous, exuberant escape from franchise filmmaking, from cinematic universes, from telling stories in any voice but his own.
Sinners is packed to the rafters with things you are unlikely to have encountered in this form of unmistakably Hollywood production. It features depictions of body types and forms of intimacy which have been frozen out of the mainstream; it explores unsung histories, folklores and traditions forcibly buried by colonisers and overseers; and it dissects direct and covert forms of racism and white supremacy in a way that feels genuinely remarkable for it to have passed anywhere near the studio system.
Coogler held out for absolute authority on the film’s final cut, before aligning the film with Warner Brothers as a distributor. Perhaps he was able to hold out for that precisely because he had previously played the studio game so effectively, showing he was a safe pair of hands with franchises before cashing in on that reputation to do his own thing. But even if that was the case, it was a brave move to do so with this film, because Hollywood has a long history of freezing out even its most successful artists the moment, they start posing questions to the system that studios have built their fortunes and power from.
Of all the challenges that Sinners makes to the status quo of America’s modern elites, however, I’ll be focusing on one in particular – one which probably unnerves the elites which bankrolled the project most uncomfortable of all. Supposedly progressive Hollywood continues to toot its own horn for every representative first, but throws its talent to the dogs the moment it hints at unionisation, ICE, or – god forbid – Palestine; and will present the informants who enable that persecution with lifetime achievement awards and standing ovations. And while it has thrived at the box office, and in award season, Sinners presents a clear attack on that same white liberalism.
Extractive identity politics
When he signed the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon B Johnson supposedly joked its concessions would see the Democrats lose southern states “for a generation”. Before him, fellow Democrat President Woodrow Wilson supposedly reviewed Birth of a Nation (a movie presenting the Klan as heroes) as “like writing history with lightning” – though later condemned it when the movie faced a public backlash.
Even after the abolition of slavery (which some Democrats opposed and others supported), the Democratic Party has what you might call a complicated relationship with race. That is to say, as a party formed predominantly concerned with the preservation of private property, on behalf of wealthy white businessmen, its support for other ethnic communities has been opportunistic at best. Racism has historically been a bulwark of capitalism, enabling its systemic inequalities – and excusing a lack of action to address them – and so Democrat policy throughout the years has only sought to challenge white supremacy, or align itself with the Black community, when it becomes politically expedient.
Often the Democrat presidents who utilise this tactic have also made a great deal of alleged Irish roots. Most famously, JFK won an election promising to deliver equal rights for Black Americans – before dragging his feet over the matter for two years, instead concerning himself with international affairs (yes that is intentional). Half-a-century later, Joe Biden’s Democrats spent the run-up to the 2020 courting the Black Lives Matter movement, happily benefitting from the political capital the group which had bravely opposed Trump’s first flailing attempts at American brown-shirtism – only to spectacularly renegue on any promises of meaningful change.
Carter, Clinton and Obama also deployed similar tactics en route to the White House. Each with a similarly distant connection to Irish heritage (the most recent family member each had there left before 1853). Exactly why that is, there is some speculation of. It is of course reasonable that they genuinely identify as Irish, but it is also likely among these lifelong careerists that they saw it as an easy way to appeal to leftist voters by dining out on Ireland’s reputation for radical and anti-imperialist politics. And similarly, these decrepit, ideologically and spiritually hollow men have seemed all too happy to suck the life from the Civil Rights movement, to appear like they are still alive, still human, and perhaps even to feel that way themselves.
But each time, either way, it boils down to the politics of self-service. And for all their trumpeting of the idea that they want to build a broad coalition of the oppressed; to supposedly realise the American promise of freedom and community for all; that really boils down to begrudging, minimal actions at best, token appointments and co-option more generally. And should the communities within that coalition dare to ask what’s in it for them; should they threaten to up-end the way this still inequitable and exploitative society that benefits white liberals works, they are reproached, belittled, and silenced. You are free in this unity, as long as you do as you are told. As long as you aren’t too loud. As long as you don’t mention the brutality at the periphery of society, which is continuing as normal. As long as you aren’t too Black.
In Sinners, we see a similar phenomenon. In the 1930s Mississippi, twin protagonists Smoke and Stack (both a now-Oscar-winning Michael B Jordan) open their own juke joint – a place for Black Americans, financially betrayed after emancipation, toiling in the same fields as their enslaved ancestors to connect with blues music – and to reconnect with the historic cultural and musical traditions the blues were born from – they unlock a beautiful, miraculous force that enables those in attendance to celebrate themselves, where they are from; while empowering them to dream about where they want to go. When their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) lets rip with a song about his love of this space, a blissful scene of revelry unfolds in which hundreds of years of diverse culture, past and present converge, brought to life by the joy and confidence of everyone in the building – including two characters who are Chinese, who also bring forth the spirits of traditional East Asian performers.
This is a multi-cultural scene of rapturous empowerment – and one where different ethnicities can converge and enrich that sense of freedom too. It is not the ‘melting pot’, not an amorphous monoculture, it is a space where each person brings something unique to the table, and the resulting clamour sounds all the better for it.
That power also, tellingly, attracts an Irish American vampire (Jack O’Connell). The long history of occupations from England, and later Britain, to Ireland, has seen him broken and transformed into his present state – remade in the extractive image of his own oppressors, while divorcing him from the same sense of history, or community and culture that he sees in the thriving juke joint. Watching from the shadows, he wells up at the beauty of the scene before him – and for a moment, we are there with him. He is also a victim of a horrific historical process that has made him a stranger to himself – to the things which should make him feel alive. Later when he is embraced by a growing horde of his thralls, revelling in a wild rendition of The Rocky Road to Dublin (which takes its lyrics from a D. K. Gavan poem about a Galway man who seeks his fortune under British occupation, only to find himself humiliated and alienated), you see a stiffness in his body exit, a weight lift, as he dances freely to music which once made him feel the way those in the juke joint felt – and in those moments, O’Connell’s performance is genuinely moving.
The enemy within
What goes on to make the film so unnerving – at least from my perspective – is the way that feeling of love motivates him to act in such a monstrous manner. He is not interested in existing alongside this, or even as part of it; Remmick is interested in making it his. His vampirism is metaphorically the extractive seed planted in him by the colonisers who robbed his ancestors of their freedom – and it is now such a part of him, that even when he witnesses such a wonderful expression of liberty, his instinct is immediately to bring it under his control. Remmick later claims to want to bring everyone together as one big family, but really it is the promise of an amorphous monoculture, an electoral coalition all geared toward Remmick’s needs. He needs to bring Sammie under his control, and to help him feel connected to his heritage, to make him feel alive. And anyone standing in the way of that is either to be converted or silenced.
I am white. I also have a lifelong love of folk and the blues. Whenever I put on a record drawing on or tapping into those traditions, I feel more alive, like I am hearing something ancient and sacred – something which European elites have also spent centuries beating out of my own ancestors. There is something really terrifying about Remmick’s character to me, in that there is a version of me in there, where this becomes about passive consumption, rather than engagement. And I think one of the great things about Coogler’s work here, is that while first and foremost he is telling a story for Black audiences, the likes of which Hollywood’s elites tried to ensure would never see the light of day, he also gives white audiences an opportunity to see that dangerous part of ourselves writ large – and to root for its destruction. To metaphorically live out that Zizekian point, that we must kill the part of ourselves which conditions us to reinforce the ruling ideology of our time. (And aside from everything else wrong with it, this is why the criticism of some people that Sinners lacks ‘universality’ because it focuses on Black protagonists is utterly blinkered.)
This is possibly the most biting part of Sinners’ allegory for modern politics, though. If we are going to give ourselves the chance to burst beyond this limited, extractive economic and ideological existence we find ourselves trapped in, and feel alive again, we can’t expect to do that with more force, or more exploitation. We need to move away from performative firsts, and hollow ‘unity’, and beyond the faux-intersectionality of establishment liberalism.
When this film went into production, a floundering Biden administration was preparing for what it thought would be a re-election campaign. Biden 2020 had prevailed thanks to a coalition of different communities – including activists who if it couldn’t coopt, it had sought to silence the moment the borders, the police, or an unfolding genocide, became its problem – but when that coalition asked for anything to be done, that suddenly was something to be vilified, and punished. It was consumption, an extraction of energy, not a conversation. And when the Harris campaign picked up where the doomed Biden adventure left off, it was already clear it was a position that could no longer hold. In its wake, a more overt white supremacism has taken its place – but the lesson must not be mistaken for “this is what you get if you don’t toe the line”.
The lesson is that if we mean to change things – even in the most repressive environments of the Jim Crow south, or a world currently being ravaged by the schlubby American fascism of Donald Trump – ‘resistance’, cannot be confused with the phony, extractive identity politics popularised by white liberals anymore. Change must not centre on what everyone else can do for me, but what I can do alongside everyone else.