What Is 'Sinners' Really Saying?

Who gets in, and why?

This article will spoil the entirety of the film Sinners. If you don’t want that to happen, read no further.

“What’s the difference between yogurt and white people? If you leave yogurt alone for a few hundred years, it’ll grow a culture.” I don’t remember the first time I heard that joke, only that it was sometime in the middle of my high school years, and that I found it funny enough to relate it to my favorite teacher, whose class was AP European History. I remember she winced a little when I told it, and did not laugh, which surprised me, because surely a history teacher of all people would get it, right? In retrospect, I think she was just surprised by the glibness of it, the ease of its dismissal. But she also probably knew then, as I do now, that it’s hard to make a counter-argument without sounding like a white supremacist. Those people love to talk about “white culture” as if it’s a shared, coherent experience, and not a splintered smattering of ethnic identities that have only the one real thing in common. Irish people and Italian people and Swedish people certainly all have their own cultures, right? Putting all these conflicting perspectives under a skin-colored umbrella is convenient for racists, but totally nonsensical in practice. That claims to “white culture” always seem to trace back to ancient Rome or Greece, as though people descended from English settlers could trace their ancestry back to anything but hog farming peasants, is equally spurious.

All of this to say that there’s an easy way to read Sinners, the new film by Ryan Coogler that’s lighting up the internet, and there’s a true way, and there’s a truer way, and none of them are really wrong but the reading gets harder as you travel down the line. The film takes place in Mississippi in 1931 and concerns twin brothers, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who have returned to their hometown from Chicago where they made a fortune (through not-exactly-honest work, we can immediately infer by their demeanors) which they now intend to use to start up a juke joint in their community. The film’s surprisingly elongated first act has the brothers, industriously nicknamed Smoke and Stack, assembling a diverse band of partners, employees, and performers from among their former friends and neighbors (including their cousin Sammie, whose youth belies a startling talent as a blues singer) so that they can open the place that very night. As the party stretches into the wee hours of the morning, the Club Juke gets a visit from a trio of white musicians led by a man named Remmick, who politely asks to be let inside. He and they are outsiders to this community, not to mention actual vampires with fangs and all, so they need an invitation.

This rundown of the film’s first seventy-odd minutes omits a lot of detail and texture, and purposefully so. This is the most surface-level possible reading of its premise, and from it we can draw an obvious conclusion as to the film’s themes. The white vampires are clearly an allegory for contemporaneous (and contemporary) racism, violent interlopers who descend on a black-owned business to wreak havoc and spill blood. There are a lot of movies like this, or at least it feels like there’s been following the success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out. The “social thriller” was all the rage for a minute there, though Peele would never claim to have invented it. We know this because the release of Get Out coincided with a series of screenings at Brooklyn Academy of Music programmed by Peele under exactly that descriptor, including race-themed horror like Candyman and Night of the Living Dead as well as films with slightly more oblique connections to social issues like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby, plus Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which Peele acknowledged Get Out as a genre-fied take on. Peele’s own directorial work would move on from easy allegory into much knottier and richer territory (Nope is one of the best American films of its decade) but the form he popularized has kept on chugging. One can probably watch Sinners in this context and enjoy it perfectly well. After all, there are the other two members of Remmick’s band to consider, whose house Remmick hid out in earlier in the film before turnign them. Remmick glanced a Klan outfit in their house and appealed to their racist inclinations so that they’d let him inside.

There’s more going on here than the basic dynamics of racial animus, though. Remmick’s plan isn’t to simply kill everyone in Club Juke, you see. He’s after Sammie in particular. Sammie has a rare gift, the ability to make music so profound that it can conjure spirits from across time and space. We see a demonstration of this in the film’s most bravura sequence, a single-take tracking shot through the juke joint that shows Sammie’s performance summoning black musicians from the past and the future, old African drummers and Prince-style rockers and modern DJs all existing at once in the same space. This is Coogler’s big headline statement, that black American culture is a continuous line from centuries-old African heritage to the modern day, that the art black Americans produce today comprises the accumulated legacy of those who came before them. Sammie’s power reveals the thread of history; the song he sings is one song, an iteration of ideas that his forefathers carried with them and a basis for future innovation. That, Coogler is telling us, is what capital-C Culture looks like.

It’s this ability that Remmick wants to exploit. He’s been around for a long, long time, possibly well over a millennium, and he wants Sammie to raise up the spirits of his own past so that he can see them again. Remmick himself isn’t up to this task. The first time we see him perform it’s in the immediate wake of Sammie’s time-collapsing solo, and it’s cute, but not exactly stirring. The vampire trio sing “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” which is one of those old traditionals whose origin can only be traced back to the collective folk consciousness of the late 19th/early 20th century. (Keep that idea of a collective consciousness in mind for later, by the way.) The best-known recordings of “Pick Poor Robin Clean” are by black blues artists like Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley (whose version makes it to the Sinners soundtrack) and Luke Jordan. The lyrics of their versions have the singer refer to him or herself as an N-word and a “coon,” in a verse which Remmick’s version omits. Remmick tries to enter the joint by performing a sanitized pantomime of black music; his performance is technically adept but lacking authenticity. It’s enough to make the occupants of Club Juke suspicious of the group, and refuse to let them inside. Even Ludwig Göransson’s score makes a point of this musical disconnect. While the rest of the score uses instruments and sounds authentic to blues music of the period, Remmick’s motif comes with a thunderously anachronistic electric guitar.

The apparent metaphor here gets a little clearer when you remember that Sinners represents Ryan Coogler’s first original film since his debut feature, 2013’s Fruitvale Station. That’s a decade-plus career spent in other people’s playgrounds, first in the legacy sequel Creed and then twice in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with two Black Panther films. Creed was highly acclaimed, and Coogler was celebrated for elevating what could have been an IP cash grab into a genuinely stirring sports drama by putting his personal stamp on the material. His first Black Panther was a cultural event, though its sequel was understandably roughshod given it was preceded by the death of Chadwick Boseman. On the press tour for Sinners, Coogler was surprisingly honest about how it actually felt to make those films. He referred to Creed as “their thing,” meaning Sylvester Stallone and the other Rocky producers, and Black Panther as an “open directing assignment” for which he was “thankful” that the studio was “interested in my perspective.” That doesn’t exactly sound like a man who feels like he has auteurist ownership over three-fifths of his filmography.

Once Sinners came out, it was clear why he chose this moment to speak openly about those feelings. A story about a black artist being preyed upon by a white devil who hoped to steal his talent and use it for his own ends? Sound familiar? Kevin Feige and the other higher-ups at Marvel Studios and Disney may have been interested in his perspective on Black Panther, but at the end of the day, was he just allowing them to use his identity to launder their messages? Plenty of hay has been made about the politics of Black Panther, none of which I feel suited to relitigate. Suffice to say that, removed from its moment as a pop culture phenomenon, many have taken a critical look at what the film is saying about revolutionaries and monarchy and the relationship of American intelligence agencies to the black community. And yet, partially because of Coogler’s involvement, the film resonated. It felt authentic.

Things in Club Juke spiral out of control rapidly. First, the white-passing Mary (who has a black grandparent, and feels more connected to her black community than to white people) takes it upon herself to leave the club and get Remmick’s measure. Her ability to exist both in the juke joint and alongside Remmick’s trio is a pointed statement. The film refers to this earlier with the Chinese family, parents Grace and Bo and their daughter Lisa. Bo runs a general goods store patronized by the town’s black citizens, Grace runs the store’s counterpart for whites. In another unbroken tracking shot, Coogler shows Lisa traveling from the black side of the street to the white side; by not breaking up this action with a cut, Coogler demonstrates how the racial dynamics of the time allow Lisa to exist in both worlds. When this idea is revisited with Mary going out to speak to Remmick, Coogler cuts the action in typical shot/reverse. Mary’s situation, we are thus told, is more complicated, her status among both black and white people tenuous and vulnerable to revocation. Still, she’s able to get in the door where Remmick can’t, so naturally she’s the first to be turned. Then she bites Stack, and things really start to fall apart. The club’s patrons are evacuated, and Remmick turns every last one of them.

One interesting addition Coogler makes to vampire mythology is that Remmick’s victims share a hivemind. His thralls feel his pain, and to some degree he can influence their minds. When we see him and the former club patrons dancing and singing to an Irish folk song, it feels like a sickening violation has taken place. Is this how Coogler sees his franchise work, as a white manipulator’s grotesque puppetry of his body and soul? Does he feel some guilt for having allowed this to take place? After all, vampires have to be invited in. And think about the pleas the vampires make to the few left inside Club Juke, the way they appeal to a sense of unity and racial camaraderie. One of Remmick’s original trio, the woman in whose house we spotted a Klan outfit, proudly declares that she intends to “start a new Klan, based on love.” It’s a comically absurd promise, recalling the dad in Get Out who claimed he would have voted for Obama a third time if he could’ve. Remmick insists that he believes in equality, that he wants everyone in the club, just for one night, to be a family. It’s a seductive promise.

This is a compelling reading, especially for people who were disappointed to see a talented filmmaker like Coogler shackled to something as bland and anti-art as the MCU for so many years. Audiences were already prepared to receive Sinners as Coogler’s coming-out party as an original filmmaker even before it was clear that the film was about him doing just that.

The devil, as ever, is in the details, though. I think Coogler is expressing even thornier feelings in Sinners than just a frustration with how he and other black filmmakers have been treated by Hollywood. Those feelings are present, certainly, but Coogler dots his landscape with complications. Perhaps the most significant is that while Remmick has a southern accent, he’s Irish; not descended as an Irish-American, but actually from Ireland, and due to his vampire immortality he’s from an Ireland of long long ago. He’s old enough to remember when Christian missionaries spread across the country in the 5th (!) century, forcing on him and his kin a religion he never asked for. When he tells Sammie that he’s lost his people, he means it. The Irish had a more recent history of racialization in America, of course. Irish immigrants were refused admission to whiteness for a while, subjected to similar negative stereotypes as black people. This makes Remmick’s appeal to equality and unity feel less like a seductive lie and more like an honest attempt at connection. After all, he did seem to suck the racism out of that Klan couple, who reveal that it was their uncle who sold the twins the building, and that he intends on showing up in the morning to lynch them. When Remmick showed up on their door, they were warned by the Choctaw men hunting him that he was “not what he seemed.” Did they refer to his vampiric secret, or to the fact that he was not as ideologically aligned with their virulent racism as he claimed to be? One wonders what the Klan couple would have thought of Remmick if he’d shown up on their porch speaking in an Irish accent, rather than a southern one.

The SmokeStack twins aren’t quite what they seem, either. In the film’s first half, Coogler portrays them with an edge, as violent and crude as you’d expect gangsters to be. It’s more than just their personalities, though. They talk about Club Juke like it’s a refuge, a safe space for their people. But they aren’t opening it out of the goodness of their hearts, they’re doing it to extract cash out of a community so poor that they have to pay for drinks with plantation money. This isn’t to say that Smoke and Stack are the film’s “secret villains”, only to say that everyone in Sinners is portrayed with equal parts sympathy and skepticism. Everyone has their own ends, none totally full or totally lacking of moral value. Coogler isn’t simply saying that his own artistic goals are perfectly noble and that he allowed himself to be seduced into working for a corporation. He’s interrogating his own intentions, too, thinking about what he would sell to people if he could speak only with his own voice, and if that product really is worth more. It’s a remarkable display of emotional nakedness.

I’m admittedly uneasy about the much-ballyhooed mid-credits scene, simply because I think the simplicity of that initial cut to credits is so effective that the film doesn’t need an extra ending. I do think it’s interesting, though, that Coogler seems to take from the ending of Blood Meridian here. At the end of that book, the now-grown Kid meets Judge Holden once again in a club/bar, and Holden doesn’t seem to have aged. Holden tells him that he is “the last of the true” just as Stack decries that only Sammie is capable of recapturing “the real.” Stack and Sammie’s encounter ends less violently than Blood Meridian, though I think the allusion implies further complication regarding Stack and Mary’s immortal existences. Who exactly are they going to feed on after they walk out that door? Nothing in Sinners has simple moral clarity.

Well, one thing certainly does. If you want to watch a film about slaughtering mayo-ass Klan thugs, Sinners makes room in its buffet for that dish as well. After Smoke and Sammie part ways, the man who sold the brothers the warehouse—who insisted that the Klan no longer existed—rolls up with his admittedly un-hooded buddies to lynch the people they think are still inside the building. Having been tipped off by the vampires the night before, Smoke greets them with a Tommy gun that tears all dozen-or-so men to shreds, a blood orgy that knows it is only pretending to be satisfying, that knows whatever catharsis it generates is pointless in light of what took place the night before. He and Stack never see each other again (it goes uncommented on that Stack, who lives on in eternal life, has lost the ability to see his own reflection).

I’ve seen the film dismissed as too on-the-nose or obvious by people who don’t seem to grasp all of its dimensions. (Many such cases!) If Sinners is about anything in simple terms, it’s about hope and naivety, about the desire to create something good and how inextricable creation is from material conditions. The film’s tagline tells us that “We Are All Sinners,” every character and even the viewer implicated by their desire for something better, by the hope that that something can exist without some moral cost. That’s not to make a moral equivalence between Remmick and Smoke/Stack. But it’s key that the only person to get away from the massacre somewhat clean is Sammie, who clings to his guitar like it’s the only thing in the world. Art may require sacrifice, Coogler says, but it’s the only thing that will keep you alive until sunrise.