I love this picture so much and have always wanted to use it.
I am going to get to Sinners but before I get there I need to say a little about my own particular history with the music known as the blues.
Me in my early twenties with a stack of blues records and an Octavia Butler book
both of which seem relevant for talking about Sinners
When I was a teenager, a combination of some references in a comic book and my dad's record collection got me into the blues. My favorite song was Smokestack Lightning by Howlin' Wolf. I remember presenting it in an eight grade musical appreciation class and everyone just staring at me perplexed. I did this at a time when the default position for a lot of kids of my high school was something called "Classic Rock." This meant that when I talked about things like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, or Lightnin' Hopkins, my classmates knew about them through Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton. Listening to the blues was a lesson in cultural appropriation before the term existed, or at least before I knew about it. A music created by and for black people lived on in its primarily white reception if not complete appropriation.
I still think that it is one of the greatest songs of all time
One of my greatest musical memories of this period of my life was going to see John Lee Hooker at Oberlin College. It was the perfect time to see him, before his career went through a later revival after The Healer, which brought him to larger venues and when he still had the energy to really play. It was seeing a great musician in a small and intimate venue. I even got his autograph after the show. As much as it was a memorable show I can't say that I remember everything, but I do remember that it was at Oberlin, and the audience was mostly, if not exclusively white. Even seeing a living bluesman was more like going to a college museum than seeing an actual performance. The blues was made into something past even as it lived on.
Thanks to the internet I was able to find this advertisement for the show I saw
All of this is probably too long of a premise to a brief commentary on Sinners, a movie that I am still processing and will have to see again (hopefully on IMAX). It is necessary preamble because it what I brought to the movie, as a fan of the blues and as someone who has thought about what it means to be a white fan of the blues. Spoilers follow.
Sinners is about two brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan), known Smoke and Stack who return to Clarksdale, Mississippi, after fighting in World War I and working for Al Capone, with plans to open a juke joint. It is set over twenty four hours in which their dream is both realized and turned into a nightmare. By the end of the night vampires and the Klan will appear to ruin the party. Ryan Coogler has referred to his film as something of a cinematic gumbo, a mixture of gangster movie, historical drama set in the Jim Crow south, and vampire movie. If you look you can find references to a film festivals worth of films, From Dusk 'til Dawn is an easy one, but unfortunate since it is not a good movie, personally thought less of Tarantino than Carpenter's love of the siege movie, there is even a great reference to The Thing.
Lets talk about vampires and the blues. At first glance they have little to do with each other, but vampires are a kind of folk tale, one that is continually told and retold. (For some of the blues histories and legends invoked in this film see Samuel James free Substack on it) These tellings, like covers of a blues classic will include different aspects. Not every version sounds the same. Some vampire fear crosses, some do not, some can turn into other animals, most cannot, almost all are killed by sunlight. Coogler's film keeps one important tradition and adds another novel take. The important tradition is that vampire cannot enter a space unless invited. To this he adds a new take on the legend, a vampire gains the memories and knowledge of the person it drinks from, including the ability to speak mandarin, or, potentially, to play the blues. These two aspects reveal a lot about the film.
First, there is the matter of the invitation. Smoke and Stack are not just throwing a party, they are trying to start a business, to make a living. This is difficult when the people who are going to their juke joint are not just poor, but subject to such pervasive exploitation. There is an interesting scene in the film where one of the customers tries to pay for his drink with company scrip from the plantation, literal wooden nickels. The brothers reluctantly agree to accept them, but in doing so they know that they are undermining their own bottom line, community conflicts with commerce. When an Irish immigrant and two white farmers show up, pockets filled with coin, and looking for a good time, the brothers are tempted to let them in even though the risks of integration are as great as the financial gain of paying customers. Unbeknownst to the brothers, these are the vampires, they cannot enter without being invited.Turning them away potentially saves them.
One of the first victims of the vampires is Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) the bouncer and doorman. Who gets let in and who isn't is an important question for this film, but it is the opposite of what one thinks. With the exception of a brief shot of "Whites Only" waiting room at the train station, there is not much about the racial exclusion of the Jim Crow south in the film, at least overtly, instead the film flips that narrative, focusing on the spaces such exclusion left in their shadow. These are not just negative spaces, spaces excluded from the dominant white culture, they are the spaces in which culture is actually created, and spaces that the vampires of appropriation are always trying to get into with their pockets of gold coins.
There is not a lot of backstory to the vampires in this film. The original vampire comes from Ireland, and is some sense prior to the divisions of race that made this country. Their supernatural predicament, they cannot enter unless invited, intersects with their cultural situation, being white. Earlier in the film the first vampire, the one from the old country, is taken in by the farmers simply because white skin, even white skin burned by the sun, is more trustworthy than the Choctaw vampire hunters who are after him. In Sinners believing in whiteness is a deadly mistake. It is Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) the white appearing, mixed race former girlfriend of Stack who goes after the vampires in the dark, with the idea to see if they would be safe to let into the juke joint. She is turned into a vampire, and because she is welcome in the juke joint due her family connection.
This brings us to the second aspect of the vampires, they not only drink blood but memories. Sinners opens with a brief narration about music, its power to connect the past, present, and future. In the narrative of the film it is Sammie (Miles Caton), a blues guitarist and cousin to Smoke and Stake, that is shown to have this gift. This gift is brought to life in the most powerful scene of the film in which we see the past and future of the blues, from drum beats to bass samples. You really have to see this scene; I do not think that I can do it justice. The implication of this is that if the vampires get him, get his memories, they will possess the power to access the past and the future. Sinners makes sucking blood not just a matter of living off of the life force of others, but an ability to capture memories and experiences without having to live through the history that made those experiences. Vampires thus illustrate the relationship of black culture to the dominant culture in America, the blues, funk, techno, and hip hop, have all entered into mainstream society, but they do so in a way that is often disconnected from the individuals and the living experiences which shaped them.
In the film Sammie is saved from both the bloodsucking vampires and the Klan. He lives on and is played by Buddy Guy in a mid credits scene. Given the actual history of blues music it is hard not to see this as almost a counter-history. In reality the vampires seem to have won, they bought their way into the juke joint and sucked the life out of it. That seems to describe a world in which more people know about Eric Clapton than Lightnin' Hopkins. Not that Sinners needs a sequel, but one where Eric Clapton and Keith Richards turn out to be vampires, living off of the memories that they ingested through blood, would really work. The vampires may have won and keep winning, but Sinners reminds us how much of life is fighting for those moments that cannot be captured by the vampires.
Like I said, I have not finished all of my thoughts, but it is hard not to think of this movie now, this stunning combination of history and myth as being premiering at exactly the moment when black history is being erased. In the film, after Smoke survives fighting vampires, the Klan shows up to burn the whole place down. They do not want to suck the blood of black music and culture, turn it into their memories, they want to simply destroy what they never even bother to understand. These two villains, vampires and the Klan, appropriation and annihilation, have been the twin evils that black culture, but, as the film is quick to remind us, also indigenous, Chinese, and other cultures have had to face in this country.
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