ryan coogler is every millennial filmmaker: what vampires should we slay?
the hidden messages behind the spotify playlist, the significance of THAT scene (it's not what you expect), hailee steinfeld's drool, explained, and other sinners seo topics
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, along with some seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. This week we’ve got hot takes on Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, the number-one movie in the universe. This newsletter comes out every Wednesday, which this week means Friday.
Sinners is the latest film burdened with the several-times-a-year task of "saving the movies." I would have thought A Minecraft Movie would have taken the hit this quarter, but that would be negotiating with terrorists, so here we are with another ecstatic news cycle about how the theater-going experience is alive again. That’s great, I guess, and the obvious thing to say about Sinners is that it's the exact sort of blockbuster that the world needs right now; that it's wonderful to see a big action movie shot on film instead of digital; that it's been so long since we've had a movie made for adults.1 I love all of this, I appreciate Ryan Coogler for doing it, I think Sinners is a great time and that everyone should go see it. And - I think the strain of salvation has stretched it, like so many saviors before it, across a few more constituencies than it can handle.
Sinners follows the beats of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, starting out as one kind of movie and ending up another. Like FDTD, it begins in the middlebrow, phases into an orgiastic club movie, and finally lets all hell break loose in the final, blood-soaked act. Coogler doesn’t hold his cards quite as tight as Rodriguez, but he kicks over the table just as fast, initiating the third-act turn with a vampiric sex act (Salma Hayek putting her foot in Quentin Tarantino’s mouth —> Hailee Steinfeld drooling into Michael B. Jordan’s) that leads to a bloodbath that doesn’t let up until the credits. From Dusk Till Dawn uses tonal inconsistency like a cudgel, but Sinners does its best to smooth over two genres - vampire schlock vs. historical drama - that our cinematic sensibilities treat like oil and water. The dissonance creates some interesting two-tone patterns. Let’s see what we can do with them.
(LOTS OF SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT. Go watch it this weekend and read this later.)
By my read, vampire movies are about one of four things:
Sex.
Life, death, or the lack thereof.
Immigration.
Parasitic relationships.
There’s plenty of sex in this movie, but outside the aforementioned drooling sequence it only happens between consenting alive people2. There is some discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of life vs. undead immortality, but for the most part death isn't a major theme here.3 As for immigration - the vampires are Irish, and though I would love to read a take that this film is about how Irish immigration destroyed America, I don’t think that’s what’s going on here either.
The vampire metaphor that Coogler actually works with is parasitism. A vampiric parasite drains the blood from its host: in Sinners, that blood is music. Coogler portrays music as the lifeblood of community, a power that brings humanity to transcendence but also attracts evil. The evil in this case is Remmick, an Irish vampire who travels the world seeking indigenous music to exploit like an undead Paul Simon. He needs blood, but he also needs tunes, and what draws him to the Juke Joint is the quality of Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore’s Robert-Johnson-caliber blues. Not just to listen to it, but to consume it - to experience it as if he made it himself.
Remmick’s musical parasitism functions in the Sinners world by mind-melding with fellow vampires; he drains his victims to consume their blood, but also to gain access to their musical talent. Remmick’s first act of vampirism is to consume the repertoire of a country Klansman and his wife. They teach him to play "Pick Poor Robin Clean," a cute ditty about cannibalism. When they perform it together you’d think it was a folk song straight out of the Child Ballads, but in reality it’s a country track from Texas blueswoman Geeshie Wiley. It's a peculiar choice by Coogler, who shuns the vast library of white horrorcore folk and instead opts for a deep-cut blues track by a largely forgotten Black woman.
The selection establishes Remmick as appropriative from the start. He drives the point home by splitting off from the original song after the chorus: Wiley’s version launches into a sardonic commentary on racist financial expectations filled with words I won’t type, but Remmick’s version replaces it with a spoken interlude about equality. He's discovered Black music, and he's already found a way to sanitize it into a squeaky-clean gospel of tolerance.4
As more and more of the Juke's crowd turns, the music doesn't get any bluesier; one of the film’s most surreal scenes is a horde of Black vampires dancing in step to “Rocky Road to Dublin.” Eventually there’s no music at all, singing giving way to messages of racial and religious harmony, allusions to a "new Klan" founded on brotherhood and fairness. When Preacher Boy murmurs an Our Father, the collective starts to chant along like a mainline Protestant church. The vampires get safer and safer, working the blues out of existence by sheer power of attrition.
This sanitizing narrative moves exactly opposite the musical narrative of the living, where sweaty sin of the Juke Joint contrasts the buttoned-up chastity of church. As the vampires amass, music gets more and more like Unitarianism; as the Juke Joint ramps up, music gets nastier - and more capable of bringing about transcendence. The dichotomy between church and blues is established in the opening shots as Preacher Boy, covered in blood and gripping a broken guitar neck, busts into a children’s choir performance of "This Little Light of Mine.” The point is clearest in the film's much-discussed griot scene, when Preacher Boy takes the stage and summons musical shamans through time and space as his music burns the Juke Joint to the ground. But it’s made most effectively in the Act II closer, set to Brittany Howard’s future-Best-Original-Song-winner "Pale Pale Moon"5: Jayme Lawson's Pearline transformed (no fangs necessary), the entire room thumping, sins of various sorts happening in every room to the foot-stomp beat.
This is the point that the drooling starts and the movie turns to splatter. I wanted the party to continue into the final act, for the vampires to start sliding in and turning the crowd one by one, for the frenzy of music to be tied to the vampire metaphor, or something. Instead you get one measly murder and the bosses pull the plug, shuffling everyone out the door like it's a St. Paul bar at 10pm. Music, just moments ago portrayed as an uncontrollable ecstasy, is suddenly subject to the legislation of common decency. We don't see another performance until the post-credits sequence. Instead we get a whole bunch of guns.
Music's last gasp is the climactic scene, when Coogler gives in to his own vampires and creates a superhero confrontation between Preacher Boy and Remmick. In a final act of desperation, Preacher Boy swings his steel guitar and wallops Remmick over the head, embedding the resonator deep in his skull. Does this work, as my friend Michael has insisted since 8th grade, because some vampires are "squishy?" Or is it something to do with the power of music? Whatever the physics, music is the subject of Remmick’s addiction, and when he mainlines the source straight to his head it kills him. An act of violence saves the day, and it sets us up for a final sequence, when the surviving Michael B. Jordan opens up his arsenal and massacres not vampires, who are no longer relevant, but the local chapter of the KKK, the enemy that is finally revealed as the true evil of the film.
If we do some genre-analysis combined with a look at classical film structure, we get the following plot outline:
Act I. music biopic / historical drama
Act II. supernatural musical
Act III. vampire splatter
And then, I would argue, a brief fourth act:
Act IV. action
If you think too much about it, this is a deeply cynical structure. Music is first presented as a force that occurs within the bounds of - and has the capacity to transform - history (I). Music then infuses itself into the essence of existence, escalating it to a transcendent peak that draws spirits, ancestors, and monsters across time and space (II). Just as it peaks, however, the ecstasy is sidelined by a conflict over control of music (church vs. blues? parasitism vs. authenticity? mainline liberalism vs. Blackness?) that can only be settled through violence (III). But in the end that conflict is deemed irrelevant (IV): the true battle is neither spiritual nor musical but purely material/historical, Black capitalist vs. Klansman, and the resolution comes at the barrel of a Tommy gun6.
This bums me out, and I think it bums Coogler out too, which is why he tosses in a post-credit scene where Preacher Boy escapes, moves to Chicago, and becomes Buddy Guy. His music is so good that the two surviving vampires (spitting into one another’s mouths for eternity) don’t even massacre him. Music wins: music is the true transcendence, capable of pausing even mind-meld white-woke evil; blues as the embodiment of the collective Black experience capable of de-vampirizing two (Black) vampires. It nullifies the harsh cynicism of the Rambo x Django conclusion and offers up a Clue-esque, multiple-endings approach. The material reality of racism or the power of music to elevate the eternal soul of the oppressed: which do you choose?
I don’t think Coogler is making an explicit statement about historical materialism, though. The cynicism results from form, not intent: Sinners is a movie with interesting ideas that can’t escape the bloat and chud-brained violence of the Marvel mind-meld that ate up the past decade of Coogler’s career. There’s a perfect 80-minute cut of this movie; there are maybe two or three of them. But it’s hard to find them when you feel obligated to provide two-plus hours and a boss fight. If Sinners is actually the salvation of movies, American audiences’ straight gate out of the dying MCU, then I guess we have to pay our devils their dues. We’re here to resurrect the box office, not to experience a consistent argument about music.
I think Sinners is good for movies, which I think are good for the world - the same way I think that Jack Black inciting children to riot in theaters has been good for our culture. And - this movie is a mess. It's a mess with great actors, beautiful sets, fantastic music, invigorating action, legitimately good and not-pandering representation. It's sloppy, but it's not slop; I loved being in a theater full of people who loved it. But for all it’s genre-melding and its ideas, it’s a 21st-century blockbuster at heart. Its central sin is how actively it insists upon Being A Movie at the sacrifice of being the movie it ought to be. It has all the elements of a little masterpiece, and in a world with a bit less pressure I think it could have been one.
Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, pledging me money (thanks!), or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I’ll be back next week with a review of Cronenberg’s The Shrouds.
I don’t understand this last sentiment at all, but everyone is saying it so I will too.
The sex, as a lot of critics have noted, is almost exclusively oral. When this fixation first started showing up in the script I was sure we were heading in a Trouble Every Day direction, but the, uh, eating stays euphemistic. Like so many almost-realized metaphors in this film, this seems like a missed opportunity.
The exception is the post-credits sequence, which I’m not going to consider here because that scene, though cool, has almost nothing to do with the rest of the movie.
I learned this as I was checking links and don’t have a good way to incorporate it, but Geeshie Wiley’s intro describes her song as “the new Cock Robin.” “Cock Robin” is an English nursery rhyme about birds and other animals killing each other; Wiley’s interpretation puts her in the perspective of the killer instead of the investigator and explores the materialist motives for murder. So we’ve got a gory English folk song, reworked by a Black woman, sanitized by an Irish vampire, performed by the undead Klan, as an audition to get into a Black club (!) The best thing about Sinners is how full it is of these sorts of musical resonances.
Calling it now. Also, while I’m at it, calling Pizzaballa as pope. You heard it here first.
A previous version of this essay called it a Gatling gun. Sincere apologies to the the estate of John T. Thompson family for this oversight.
Like the movie itself (I guess), there's irony wrapped within irony here. I mean to say, this is a sprawling review, and yet a thing of beauty, inscribed with much artistry and exquisite detail. I didn't follow every link, but how could the reviewer have possibly known of a "vast library of white horrorcore folk"? Is there such a thing? I clicked and, sure 'nuff, I received. Now that's arcana!
And here's one more level of irony: if parasitism is a major theme of this film, it spills over into the review, for I will never see a vampire film (let alone a splatter movie), yet I thoroughly enjoyed imbibing the fine words of this piece. Parasite, indeed. Reckon I'd better subscribe.