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ItalianoRyan Coogler’s ”Sinners”
| When you are black, the greatest crime you can commit is daring to feel and express joy in front white people. This rang true during colonialism, it rang true during segregation, it rings true today. Watching “Sinners” as a non racist white person in big 2025, the horrors in the first act might not be immediately obvious. The viewer wouldn’t be at fault for mistaking the first act as a feint to lure the audience into a false sense of safety, after all, nothing bad happens. We watch black people do regular things like, go to Church, buy a building, play beautiful music, do business, grieve a lost child and rekindle with family. We even explicitly hear someone say the KKK doesn’t exist in these parts anymore (which you’d be stupid to believe but I digress). For all intents and purposes, this opening is painfully lacking in the type of tension that leads to fear and horror. If you are white, the tension likely doesn’t begin until Remmick is introduced, and shown for what he is, something very uncharacteristic for horror movies. In horror movies, mystery, suspense, gore, terror, and shock are the source of tension. This leads into the horror movie problem of the “Big Bad” not being shown completely until the end, because whatever you can imagine, the costume designers and VFX artists couldn’t live up to. Watching “Sinners” as a black person with the slightest awareness of the world we live in, you are aware this is a horror movie immediately. Black people are happy, black people are doing business, black people are making music white people aren’t profiting off, black people are creating a society. The source of tension isn’t the villain, or the unknown. The source of tension is both the characters and the racially aware audience knowing how this ends. Your joy as a negro is a crime, and God help you if a white person sees it. The main theme of Sinners is the most prominent expression of joy, black music and dance. The protagonist's main goal is to build a successful juke joint for black people. The antagonistic force to their goal is white supremacy. The brilliance of Remmick as the antagonist is that he… gets it. To understand Remmick as the major villain we must understand the minor villain. Hogwood is a member of the Klan, his motivation for attacking the juke joint is one of active racism. With the theme of music, his goal is to kill black music. In today’s world Hogwood backs the blue and doesn’t like rap, all they talk about is guns and bitches. Remmick as the main villain is very different. As an Irish-American he suffers similarly to black people, he has to be actively anti-racist and he is very much a target for the Klan. Remmick actively seeks to own black joy and he does this through vampirism. As a vampire he gains access to the memory of those he turns and this leads him to target Sammy. When he first introduces himself to the juke joint, he plays some music. Later on after feeding on a good amount of black people some new music is played and the difference is striking, the music and dance is still Irish but distinctly blacker. Remmick relishes in being able to openly sing a song of his people loudly, Remmick understands black pain, he recognises the importance of music to the oppressed. Remmick being Irish is simply brilliant, black joy is not off putting to him, it just has to belong to him. Remmick loves rap music, today he’d show up to every Kendrick Lamar concert, make sure you know BLM, have black friends, but he’s not here to share in black joy. He’s here to own it As a black person, not being owned by white people is your greatest sin. |
Just me yapping about a movie #Minor Spoilers
Tillagd 9 jun 14:36 Film- och bokrecensioner #Personligt #minor
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