Sinners

I think this movie sacrifices a bit too much thematic rigor in exchange for Hollywood mainstream palatability. Sure, it was cool and fun, but I felt more interested in what it had to say about race relations in the Jim Crow South. Yet I’m unconvinced that this movie is making any sort of novel statement about it. It’s like a “2020 BLM Instagram story infographic” level reading of race history. I just wanted it to go above and beyond what I already knew, and it certainly had the potential to do so, yet it didn’t really seem to do that. 

Yes, I know that Black culture is consumed like candy and co-opted by predominantly affluent suburban white people. Yes, I know about how the Christian pastoral and appeals to universal humanisms were historically a thinly veiled tactic to conduct racial uplift. This film certainly gestures toward that stuff. Yet it seems to stop there, doesn’t go any further, and I wish it did. At a first glance, I don’t really think it has made a novel or unique argument about race in America beyond a surface level understanding of how Black culture is consumed in order to provide sources of pleasure and entertainment for non-Black audiences, and a world in which Black culture was not perpetually co-opted by mainstream white civil society for profits may be idyllic and sublime. These are things that people in Black studies, scholars who study the legal history of race, and Black filmmakers have been writing about for decades now, so it felt like, while watching this movie, I was hearing the same argument for the umpteenth time. I just wanted to hear something with more rigor, some more chutzpah, and some more Fanon, and that didn’t really happen. 

Of course, that may not be the purpose of the film, and I’m not going to argue that Ryan Coogler needs to write a peer-reviewed journal article about American race relations. To be clear, I think it is callous to argue that Black art needs to justify itself by creating new knowledge for the audience to consume -- that simply feeds back into the exact expectation that the film is critiquing. I just think an outstanding movie for me would rigorously develop its premises, and this film feels as though it is not living up to the promise that its premise seems to set up. Take Spike Lee's works, like Do the Right Thing, or Donald Glover's Atlanta — each takes a perspective on the color line that combines and synthesizes its premises to create a coherent statement about what it intended to reveal. In Sinners, instead, it felt like the emphasis was placed on chiming the like-button on my neural synapses and dopamine receptors. Which is fine, I guess, but doesn't really match my personal preferences.

I am excited to see where Ryan Coogler takes his creative vision, though, and it seems like the wave of race-conscious horror-adjacent films that have appeared in the wake of Jordan Peele is a promising genre.