This article contains detailed spoilers.
Ryan Coogler’s fantastical new Black horror film, “Sinners,” is a critical smash, a box office hit. But the director’s latest collaboration with the actor Michael B. Jordan has also left viewers with plenty to unpack. Jordan plays the “Smokestack twins,” Smoke and Stack, who return from working with Al Capone in Chicago to open up a juke joint in their Mississippi hometown. They arrange for their cousin Sammie, the blues-loving son of a disapproving preacher, to perform for the opening. But Sammie’s talents quickly attract a group of white vampires who threaten to overtake the town.
“Sinners” is a work that’s interested in moral dichotomies. There are monsters and victims, of course — it’s a vampire movie. But when the film’s characters, objects and themes are examined through the lens of its political subtext, quite a bit is revealed about how “Sinners” defines good and evil in this supernatural version of the Jim Crow South. What follows is a spoiler-filled breakdown of what the film considers sacred, and what it deems profane.
The Sacred
The Guitar
Sammie treasures his guitar, given to him by Smoke and Stack, who told their cousin that it once belonged to the Delta blues great Charley Patton. The guitar represents the storied history of Black music, as when Sammie (Miles Caton) plays in the twins’ juke joint and summons Black artists and music makers from the distant past and future. Sammie’s music also attracts Remmick, the main vampire (played by Jack O’Connell), but also ultimately destroys him: In a confrontation, Sammie smashes his guitar over Remmick’s head, giving Smoke the opportunity to stake him.
Having survived the vampires, Sammie wanders around clutching the broken neck of his guitar, still believing it was Charley Patton’s. Smoke eventually reveals that Stack had lied and that the guitar had belonged to their father, proving that there’s power even in one’s personal legacy. Even though the guitar doesn’t belong to a blues legend, it doesn’t mean that an artist like Sammie can’t elicit the power of Black culture through it.
The Church
The main chunk of Sammie’s story begins and ends at church. His father, a preacher, insists that Sammie quit the blues and pursue the same vocation. The church scenes frame the vampire horror, showing the place of worship as a safe place for the Black community. But it’s also where Sammie feels alienated by his father; it’s an institution of traditional values that can be limiting.
The Juke Joint
It’s telling that the old sawmill the twins buy from a Klansman for their juke joint has floorboards still stained with blood; this is the traumatic foundation on which the club is built. The juke joint brings the community together and allows them a space for their Black joy. Sammie’s father dismisses such establishments as breeding grounds for sin, but this is Sammie’s haven, even if for just an evening. That the vampires can’t enter the space without an invitation also indicates the allure and power an exclusively Black space can have.
Smoke
From the twins’ first appearance onscreen, it’s clear that they will inevitably be split up. The cold, ill-tempered Smoke seems like a good candidate for the role of the “bad” twin opposite the still-crooked but more felicitous Stack. But Smoke ends up with the action-hero-style shootout against the local Klansmen who planned for the juke joint patrons to become a bloody sacrifice to the vampires.
Smoke is also protected by a partner who represents a sacred virtue: Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) clings to her protective charms and takes care of the locals, even when they can’t entirely compensate her. She is also the first to figure out they are up against supernatural entities. Annie represents Black faith and mythologies. Her knowledge and concern are what keep Smoke safe until the end, when he’s fatally shot by a Klansman in the film’s final confrontation. Smoke dies with dignity. As he’s dying he sees Annie and the baby they lost, dressed in white as though they’re angels plucked from heaven. Smoke is offered the hero’s death.
The Profane
Vampires
The supernatural ghouls in this movie are actually just white appropriators who want to use Sammie’s music as a way to connect with their own ancestors. Remmick shares that he was a victim of colonialism and had religion foisted onto him. His attack on the juke joint is symbolic of how colonialism is an ever-perpetuating system. After Remmick and his fellow vampires turn most of the Black partyers into bloodsuckers, they all join in with their own style of revels in the woods, singing and dancing to Irish folk songs.
This scene is meant to parallel the sacred, transcendent celebration of music and dance that took place in the mill. Trying to lure Sammie and the others, the vampires promise an eternal life of equality, a post-racial future where everyone is assimilated. Remmick’s offer is a gilded kind of erasure, where one’s Black identity becomes irrelevant.
Money
Money is supposed to be a great equalizer, but the twins find that it can’t actually buy the respect, stability and freedom they seek. A lot of money changes hands in the lead-up to the film’s twist into supernatural horrors; the twins go around town haggling for food and services for their establishment’s grand opening, and the locals balk at their fortune.
In the world of “Sinners,” money is never sacred. So much of the currency shown in the film is tainted by the context in which it was gained or is being used. So Annie dismisses Smoke’s wealth as blood money earned from illegal dealings in Chicago while Mary, Stack’s love interest, marvels at the gold coins Remmick offers her before he turns her into a vampire. In “Sinners” money can never be a tool for liberation; it’s just another means of oppression.
Mary
Played by Hailee Steinfeld, Mary is a former flame with whom Stack cannot envision a future. That’s because she’s mixed-race, and passing as white in her daily life. But while she can slip in and out of her Blackness, she doesn’t fit in to either the Black or white community. When she arrives at the juke joint, she is nearly declined entry. It’s significant that the character who moves between racial identities is the first of the partygoers to be turned by the vampires; she can find something resembling freedom in their post-racial world.
Stack
Stack is a victim of an old racial trope — a Black man who meets his downfall due to a white woman. (In this case, it’s the light-skinned Mary, who lives her life as a white woman.) While Smoke dies a noble death and rejoins his Black family in heaven, Stack is resolved to an eternal half-life where he is no more free than he was before. So when, in a mid-credits scene, the vampires Stack and Mary visit an older Sammie (played by the famous blues singer-guitarist Buddy Guy) and offer him the same eternity, he turns them down. After all, Sammie has already secured an eternal life for himself that’s far more precious than what Stack and Mary have: He has continued to play his music, meaning he is a part of the past, present and future of Black culture. He’s already part of an undying legacy.
Maya Phillips is an arts and culture critic for The Times.
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