Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the first six here, here, here, here, here and here.
I love a good vampire movie. I enjoy the hell out of Lost Boys and Near Dark. Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula has been one of my favorite movies since I was a teenager. (It’s a festival of ridiculous over-the-top nonsense, but…like…perfect ridiculous over-the-top nonsense.) I probably watched my old DVD of Blade dozens of times back when.
And speaking of primitive technology, back when my iTunes library was my pride and joy, it was stuffed full of Robert Johnson and Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie McTell (along with all the classic rock and metal you’d probably guess from my t-shirt-wearing habits, and the indie stuff you might guess from doing the math on what was playing on college radio stations when I was in my twenties). I love that stuff. I saw Buddy Guy in concert a few years ago with my friend Ryan and it’s probably on my shortlist of all-time favorite concerts.
So, last year when I was chatting with my sister-in-law about horror movies and she mentioned that she’d seen Ryan Coogler’s new movie Sinners, which she described as being a bit like Dusk Till Dawn in a juke joint, I was very excited to see it. And I wasn’t disappointed. I’m a huge sucker for Tarantino-ish dialogue, and the combination of that, a soundtrack I loved, and a very well-executed action-horror siege with cool creepy vampires made me very happy when I first saw it in the theater, and again when I watched it on HBO with a couple of friends in my living room months later.
All of which makes it a little odd, I know, that I’m about to recommend a highly critical review, but (a) the author of the review cheerfully acknowledges that it’s a very fun movie and (b) the second he told me his criticisms of the movie’s racial politics (in a group-chat discussion months before the review came out in Current Affairs, back when we’d both just seen it in the theaters) my instant reaction was “yeah, good points, that all seems totally correct.”
This is, I suppose, my way of saying that you shouldn’t take my endorsement of a negative review as “don’t see the movie, it’s trash.” Movies have levels. Enjoy it for what it is. God knows I’ve enjoyed myself watching a very long list of films with much worse politics than Sinners.1 But I also think Touré has Coogler’s racial ideology dead to rights. And honestly, even if you’ve never seen it, even if you have no interest in seeing it, you should read the review as a thoughtful and accessible reflection on the topics he uses Sinners to explore.
As a professor of African American history, whenever I come across a black-oriented historical movie, the first thing I think about is whether the film makes my job harder or easier. Films like A Soldier’s Story, Glory, 12 Years a Slave, and Free State of Jones have enriched our understanding of the complexities driving American race relations. These movies—along with independent films like Nothing But a Man and Killer of Sheep and David Simon’s brilliant television drama, The Wire—offer explorations of human frailties and vulnerabilities that are alive to the possibilities available to human beings in their distinct times and locations. As good art invariably does, each takes some artistic license. However, the filmmakers’ sensitivity to context helps them avoid the kinds of anachronistic cliches and character archetypes that treat contemporary values and aspirations as eternal truths.
Sadly, he argues, for all its very real virtues, “Coogler’s action-horror epic joins a long list of films that make it harder to teach the complex forces shaping the history of race in the United States.”
Why? The first reason has to do with what he calls “the ‘know your power’ ethos" reflected in the heroism (both ass-kicking and entrepreneurial) of Michael B. Jodan’s twin characters Smoke and Stack. This is “the presumption that belief in oneself and assertion of one’s ‘worth’ will translate into triumph.” In context, it’s a cathartic fantasy. (Who isn’t going to cheer watching the KKK being blown away a vengeful Smoke?) But, Reed points out, there’s an uncomfortable echo of Kanye West calling slavery a “choice” born out of “mental slavery.” Arguably, this is the flip side of the Afro-Pessimism expressed by the twins telling young Sammie that Chicago is just “Mississippi with taller buildings.” On the surface, these are opposite perspectives. (One holds that racial oppression is permanent and inevitable, the other that it can be overcome with individual grit.) But they both represent a failure to grapple with the basic insight that particular structures of power arise for historically contingent reasons, evolve over time, and can be overcome by collective action under changed historical circumstances but also, while they’re in place, they deeply shape the options available to individuals. Until you’ve internalized all of that, it’s easy to ping-pong back and forth between deep pessimism and belief that you can overcome just by being an indomitable badass.
Reed is particularly attuned to the way the the “know your power” ethos (or at one point in the essay the—ahem—“power of BDE” ethos) of the film plays out with the idea of the juke joint as something the twin badass gangster-entrepreneuers with hearts of gold are doing for the community. The interests of everyone within the black (and Asian) community) are portrayed as in alignment, to the point that Smoke and Stack playfully encourage potential employees to ask for higher wages. In real life, as Reed spends some time pointing out, the track record of black capitalism creating wealth that will somehow trickle down to everyone else who shares the same skin color or cultural background is Not Great.
His other main issue is about the film’s very deep commitment to the idea that cultures have permanent transhistoric essences, the common property of everyone born into the culture (and which can be illegitimately “appropriated” by those without the right ancestral bona fides). This shows up in particular in the much-praised “piercing the veil” scene:
Though Sinners presumes culture can transcend time and place, the film suggests it does not transcend peoples. This is first revealed by the spirits Sammie conjures—B-boys and B-girls, West African musicians, and funk artists commune with black Americans, while the Monkey King and characters from the Beijing Opera commune with Delta Chinese. […] In Sinners’ racial allegory, culture is not a constellation of beliefs, practices, customs, or vague sensibilities that are the learned product of ever-changing shared experiences; culture is intrinsic to the soul of a people.
As he goes on to note:
This is no mere inference. Coogler has said as much.
In a post-Black Panther interview about racial identity, Coogler claimed his childhood in the Bay Area was marked by pain he attributes to his ignorance of his African ancestry. He laments that he was taught that African Americans have a “bastardized culture” because they had been stripped of “the things that made [them] African.”
Coogler saw an opportunity to heal his childhood wounds when Marvel hired him to write Black Panther. He would ultimately convince the studio to finance a research trip to South Africa, where he was eventually invited to participate in a ritual that was purportedly thousands of years old.
When he and his companions arrived at the house where the ritual took place, Coogler observed a checklist of scenes reminiscent of his experiences in his hometown of Richmond, CA. He noticed “young cats” congregating in front of the house. As he ventured inside, he saw “OGs, aged 50 to 70,” clustered in one section, while women were preparing food in the kitchen. Finally, in the backyard, Coogler observed young men, about his age, sharing “a real cool African beer” as they cooked recently slaughtered livestock.
According to Coogler, the familiarity of the above scenes made him feel “completely whole.” It demonstrated that “this evil thing they did to us,” slavery, “could not wipe out what we were for thousands of years.” He concluded that black Americans remained essentially African, despite their separation from the continent. “Even though we were told you was being hood or being something else, we was being true to what we’ve been for thousands and thousands of years.”
In a truly excellent bit of bone-dry understatement, Reed comments:
Since I have observed similar scenes at transgenerational gatherings hosted by black Americans but also Puerto Ricans, Jewish Americans, Italian Americans, and gun-loving Midwestern WASPs, I drew a very different conclusion about the scene Coogler describes.
Indeed. Cue the classic Stavros Halkias observation about every ethnicity describing its uniqueness in ways that would pretty obviously apply to most other ethnicities.
Read the whole essay here.
Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Vigilante movies! Tough-cop-who-plays-by-his-own-rules movies! All the Sean Connery Bond flicks! Hell, I’m someone who thinks Red Dawn holds up surprisingly well. I don’t go to the movies to see my worldview reflected back at me. (Which is not to say I don’t think it’s worth keeping your brain turned on and thinking critically about the ideological dimensions of what you’re enjoying. You can do both.)
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