Sinners (2025).

The world of filmmaking seems to be at a transition point.  Each year seems to show more signs that the Los Angeles studio system, which has acted as pretty much the main hub for the creation of cinematic stories (what film producer Lynda Obst once referred to as the "Old Abnormal"), is slowly coming to an end.  Or even if it never amounts to a complete end, there are signs that the traditional production stage economy that used to be the very lifeblood of Hollywood is no longer capable of adapting to the ongoing advance of the digital age.  Instead, they're relying now on a kind of latter day model of old world patronage, where various wealthy Silicon Valley types are now buying up and merging studios in an effort to help them avoid bankruptcy.  It's kind of ironic, in a way.  That's because it's almost as if Tinseltown is retreating back to a strange parody of glory days during it's Golden Age.  They seem to be trying to see if the old Media Mogul Model is what's needed to keep things afloat.  The trouble here is I don't see any sign that most of the current crop of studio owners have any of the interest, foresight, or genuine dedication and creative vision that old timers like Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle, and Darryl F. Zanuck used to have that allowed them to turn MGM, Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox into the pioneering juggernauts they once were.  These days, Hollywood is a shadow of its former shadows, and everything that once defined it as an industry is slowly winding down.

The most notable fallout from this ongoing development is the obvious lack of individual talent on display in the contemporary studio system.  This is has been a slow dawning realization on the part of audiences, as it becomes clear that most of the actual content coming out the Valley these days is confined for the most part to endless tentpole franchise products, and somehow none of them manage to do the legacy media they're depicting any good.  That's because the studio model is running on a paradigm which won't allow for the presence of actual filmmaking talent for the most part anymore.  One gets the sense that if this legacy revival had happened during the mid-90s, when Hollywood was still riding easy in the traces, then the results would have been a bit better.  Those were the days of Lynda Obst's "Old Abnormal".  The "New Abnormal" (as she once referred to the current studio system) seems to be incapable of figuring out even the basic rudimentary elements of churning out a good movie crop.  Then again, it's also possible to notice similar developments happening across a multitude of businesses in the ongoing early half of the 21st century.  We seem to be in an age of what's best described as "Stupid Industrialism".  It's all a version of the "boom-and-bust" entrepreneurship that gave American its Gilded Age back in the 19th century.  The difference is the modern industrialists of our era seem to suffer from a curious malady.  It's as if they couldn't run a business to save their own lives.

You almost get the sense that some of these guys (and they are all men, for the most part) never even learned how to make a simple amount of change at a cash register before.  It's disconcerting to say the least.  That's the kind of careless outlook that causes problems due to lack of foresight and knowledge of basic economics.  I don't think this Country has ever seen such a considerable lack of economic and business illiteracy at any point in its history before.  It's the kind of thing that spells trouble sooner or later, and in the field of the Arts, one of the logical results of such illogical reasoning is the tendency to smother any up and coming creative talent out of sight and out of mind.  It's what makes the emergence of someone like Ryan Coogler all the more remarkable in an industry that is, for all intents and purposes, on it's last legs.  The future breakout director was born in May, 1986, and grew up a product of San Francisco's Bay Area.  While he was born in Oakland, he spent the majority of his childhood and the rest of his high school years in Richmond, California.  In interviews, Coogler presents himself as a soft-spoken yet articulate, and clearly intelligent man, yet one who seems to be ill at ease with the entire ethos of Hollywood's showbusiness celebrity machine.  This might just be to his personal and professional credit.  As he's made clear more than once, even he's surprised to be in the spotlight.

What's remarkable about Coogler's upbringing is how little of it seems to prepare you for the expectation that you were seeing the development of a future cinematic talent.  Coogler admits that films and moviemaking was sort of the furthest thing from his mind as he grew up,  In first high school and then college, his biggest achievements were in the world of sports.  Coogler proved himself a natural athlete on the football field, and so for the longest time, it looked like he might have grown up to be a pretty decent sportsman.  Then while a student at Moraga's St. Mary's College, Coogler and his fellow teammates where signed up for a creative writing course as part of his football scholarship.  It's there the director came under the mentorship of Rosemary Graham.  She seems to have been the one to spark an interest in the Arts for the first time, and at one point Coogler was given the assignment to try his hand at writing a legitimate screenplay.  This was a standard part of the course; just a simple creative exercise that in most cases was meant to fulfill the curriculum requirements, and that's how it remains for most students who take such courses.  However, to both Coogler and Graham's surprise, it seems the assignment he turned in was actually a cut above the rest of the students taking her required curriculum.

To his own surprise, Coogler, discovered that he had a natural talent for scriptwriting.  Graham recognized this and called him into a meeting where she did all she could to encourage him to both recognize and develop his gifts to their full potential.  Coogler listened to her advice, and began to jot down ideas, and draft more screenplays, while at the same time starting to familiarize himself with the mechanics of filmmaking.  On the technical side of things, he became such a good student, that he eventually learned how to manipulate the way the camera frame presents the story to the viewer in a number of creative ways.  More important than this, however, he discovered that Graham was right about his natural talents as a writer.  So he kept at it, and remained a serious student of the craft, to the point where he would end up producing and directing a series of short films.  In time, some of these efforts would land on the film festival circuit.  It was while he was still at film school that one of his teachers pointed out that acclaimed actor Forest Whitaker was sending scouts out to look for up and coming talent, and Coogler's teacher suggested that he contact the Ghost Dog in order to see if maybe he could impress the Hollywood professional enough to gain a foot in the door.  So a meeting was arranged, and Coogler got a chance to pitch a number of creative ideas to direct as his first film. 

One of them was a script called Fruitvale Station, which was based on the real life story of Oscar Grant, and his death at the hands of the Bay Area's Transit Police.  Whitaker could tell that Fruitvale was the one project Coogler was passionate about, and that the script had all the ingredients necessary for a good film.  So with his help, Coogler began production of Fruitvale in July of 2012, and had its premiere January 19th, 2013.  It was during the production of Fruitvale that Coogler would first meet and collaborate with Michael B. Jordon, an actor who would go on to become integral to the director's latest project.  The success of Fruitvale Station was enough to bring Coogler's name and talents to the attention of the Hollywood studio system, as the director soon found himself tapped to helm the big budget tentpole franchises for both a Rocky Legacy sequel, with 2015's Creed, as well as the two Black Panther films for Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe.  While each of these later efforts have brought Coogler's name to a mass awareness, the director has also said that he was anxious to craft a story of his own.  Something that would allow his own voice and talents to have their say in the same way as his debut feature did.  Yet there also seems to have been an awareness that this was something he would have to fight for in a studio system that valued cookie cutter products rather than individual talent.

So what Coogler did was to allow his for-hire-work to buy him enough clout so that he could bankroll his next project, which was meant to be much more personal than his regular studio gigs, and produce it under the banner of his own production company, Proximity Media.  Drawing back from a lifetime of movie watching, book reading, and personal experience listening to Blues music with his uncle, and a fascination with Irish culture, Coogler came up with an idea Inspired by films such as Night of the Living Dead and From Dusk Till Dawn, and novels like Stephen King's Salem's Lot to craft the tale of a group of desperate survivors holed up in an abandoned sawmill, as the try to survive the night with a hoard of ravenous vampires trying to break in and tear the main cast apart.  In addition to the films of Quentin Tarantino and George A. Romero, Coogler has also cited the comedic and surrealistic period dramas of the Coen Brothers, as well as an episode of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone as key influences on his story.  Coogler would slowly assemble all of these elements together into a script which came to have the title of Sinners.  With enough clout on his side, Coogler reached out to the man who helped launch his directing career, and together he and Michael B. Jordon set about to craft the kind of old time B-Movie fright film that used to be such personal favorite crowd pleasers from their childhoods.

The final result was a film that saw its nationwide release in American theaters on April 18th, 2025.  I first heard about Sinners as a bit of word of mouth mentioned online, in passing.  There was a Twitter conversation going on where one of the participants was raving about this brand new Horror flick that left those who saw it eager to talk about it.  What I recall everyone going on about was that it had this climactic ending shoot-out between Michael B. Jordan and the KKK, and that it was one of the most awesome spectacles anyone had seen in a movie theater for quite a while.  Being the complete pure fool I am, I waited and bided my time before finally deciding to sit down and take a look at it myself, and even then a major motivating factor behind that was because I'd just come from watching another fright flick that left me aggravated with boredom, and so I was stuck casting about for anything that would lighten the load.  Since the film I'd just watched was a vampire related tale, I remembered that Coogler had also made his own film tackling this same ancient myth of the Undead.  So I finally sat myself down, and let the story unfold.  What happened next more than lived up to the hype, and the main reason for why that is comes down to the story Coogler has to tell, and what it means in real life.

The Story. 

"There are legends of people… born with the gift of making music so true… it can pierce the veil between life and death..."

American history is no stranger to controversy.  We are a Country with a proud outlaw culture, one that we tend to lionize for a variety of motivations.  The annals of America's past are rife with examples of lost souls who, for one reason or another, chose a life on the boundaries or margins of regular society, and then proceeded to make themselves into modern folk legends.  It's how a man like William Bonney was able to transform himself into the frontier myth that was and remains Billy the Kid, or how John Wesley Harding was able to later be immortalized in the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song.  There are a lot of reasons for why Americans choose to turns certain outlaws into idols, or even latter day folk heroes.  Part of the reason for this might be because we feel it's possible to justify being an outcast if you can prove it's in the service of a nobler ideal, a morality that transcends the everyday hypocrisies of a runaway American Dream that results in a society that is indifferent, at best, or else plain corrupt at worst.  There are countless examples of men and women who have turned to crime as a result of feeling abandoned, that their society as a whole has turned its back on them.  Nowhere is this more clear than in America's history of racial prejudice.  Ever since Plymouth Rock, we've been more or less two Nations in one.  The light half is always striving to be a more Open Society, while the dark half seeks nothing less than total, and permanent enclosure, an American were everyone is subject to who is in, and who gets to become "othered" for one reason or another.

There is a third aspect of life in these United States which has become a growing source of public fascination with the advent of the Digital Age, and the creation of online social media.  This would be the curious phenomenon that many Americans have of somehow just vanishing into thin air.  This Country has managed to assemble an impressive, some would even call it a morbid back catalogue of ordinary or notable citizens who became famous precisely for the way that they seem to have just dropped off the map.  The most famous, of course, remains the mystery of what might have happened to the groundbreaking pilot Amelia Earhart, though she's got good company in the form of similar individuals such as the Yuba Five, Joseph Balderas who appears to have been swallowed whole by the Alaskan Tundra, the crew and passengers of Malaysia's Flight 370, the curious case of the Missing 411, which is the tally of missing persons who have vanished in and around America's National Parks.  And then, of course, there are the countless travelers who have made their way into the Bermuda Triangle, only to vanish into the lost annals of contemporary urban folklore.  One of the most remarkable incidents in American history, however, is an event where all three of these peculiar strands of the Nation's character came together on a collision course for one, single night, and left a lingering mystery in its wake.  This is the event that some still refer to as the Clarksdale Midnight Massacre.

In the annals of the world of Organized Crime, and of America's Outlaw Culture, the career of the Smokestack Twins is perhaps the most meteoric.  It comprises a brief span of noteworthy activity, which then comes to a screeching halt that has left both professional and online investigators scratching their heads ever since.  The lead up to the events that happened that fateful and unexplained evening in mid-October of 1932 have been combed over since the aftermath of the event, in the hopes that some light might be shed on the mystery of what happened to a group of 50 missing people.  While it is possible to answer some of the gaps, the unfortunate truth is that there are still a lot of blank spaces to the puzzle waiting to be filled in.  The following reconstruction of events is therefore necessarily incomplete due to lack of evidence and any kind of reliable witness testimony.  What happened one fateful night in a disused sawmill on the outskirts of Clarksdale amounts to one of history's greatest unsolved crimes, and that also makes it one of life's strangest anomalies.  It is just possible to describe a vague yet definitive rough outline of the moments leading up to perhaps the most mysterious example of vigilante hate in Mississippi history.  Beyond a certain point, however, everything becomes guesswork and theory.

There may very well be no definitive answers here.  What we do know is this.  The two main players at the heart of this story were born roughly around the year 1895.  That was the year Allie Moore, nee Walker, gave birth to a pair of identical twins.  Their birth was difficult, and as was often the case back then, their mother didn't survive the ordeal, and the Twins were left in the care of their father Adam Moore and his brother, their Uncle Jedediah (Saul Williams).  Their Uncle Jed was a the local Baptist preacher for the Tenant Farming community attached to the Sunflower Cotton Plantation, and together, he and Adam christened the boys as Elijah and Elias Moore (Michael B. Jordon).  Very little is known about the Twins' father Adam Moore, although a plausible speculation is that he was the product of an abusive home environment.  It's an educated guess, based on the way Mr. Moore brought up his sons with a heavy hand.  All the available evidence says Adam Moore was looked upon as the community ner-do-well, and by all accounts, he was more than happy to live up to his bad reputation.  He was a notorious town drunk with a hair trigger temper, and was always willing to let his fists settle any arguments.  Moore took this same social practice and applied it regularly to his own surviving sons.

Elias and Elijah both grew up under a roof where the love and affection of a healthy, functioning family was denied to them.  Perhaps the worst injury came from the fact that rather than stepping in to help the situation, there came a point where Uncle Jed decided to turn his back on his own brother and nephews, and instead left them behind by entering a Seminary, and devoting himself to life in the pulpit.  This choice was seen by many of Clarksdale's Sunflower community as Jed's way of trying to make a clean getaway from the clouded reputation that always hung over his family.  As a result, the Twins grew up learning very early lessons that no good would come from their immediate family.  The art of survival therefore rested on both their shoulders, and the Twins soon learned how to look out for each other.  They did this by learning how to hold their own, and have each other's backs in a fight.  They began to build up a shared reputation in town as the sort of tough guys you didn't want to mess with, and it didn't take them long to be able to back up their claims.  They'd learned how to be resilient fighters at the hands of their own father, and it was one of the few lessons of his that they could put to good use.

From there, it wasn't long before the Twins garnered a reputation as Clarksdale's local bad boys.  This dubious prestige was cemented forever when Elijah was forced to kill Adam Moore, after his own father came close to beating Elias to death in a drunken rage.  By the time Elias came around, his elder brother was halfway finished burying their father.  The only worldly possession he left his sons was an old Cyclops Resonator guitar that still worked, despite its age.  It's said that the Twins held on to this final piece of their father's life.  It was the closest thing they ever had to a memento of him, yet this part might also just be old town gossip and rumors.  From that point on, while they were never driven away by their community, Elijah and Elias did find themselves treated as something less than outsiders, yet they always found themselves being held at arms length.  This local dread might have extended to any possible job opportunities they could have been offered, yet this is just more speculation.  What isn't however, is that it didn't take long for the Twins to decide to enter the world of Southern gangland crime.  One possible motivation for this choice is they figured, if you can't be loved, then be feared.

So Elias and Elijah started out on a new career, one that consisted at first of petty crimes such as theft and larceny, and then little by bit they began to find ways of climbing a different sort of social ladder.  With each successful theft, each backdoor exchange of booze, each quiet yet efficient "exchange" of money, Elijah and Elias found themselves garnering a different yet genuine form of acclaim around town.  It was always based more on fear than out of any simple form of respect, yet America has a way of treating its outlaws as heroes, and soon this is the kind of reputation the Twins enjoyed.  In an era where headlines were dominated by the likes of Bonnie Parker, Babyface Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Clyde Barrow, and John Dillinger, the exploits of the the two brothers soon began to find space for itself in newspapers among the same select set of company.  Their big break came when the made a successful robbery of the First Bank of Clarksdale in February of 1924.  That was the first time their escapades landed them on the front page.  While they were never caught for the crime, word of mouth spread their reputation through the community grapevine, and pretty soon the Moore Brothers became known as the Smokestack Twins.  Despite their fame, the siblings had very few close personal friends.

The handful of people who came closest were Cecille Winters, the midwife who helped birth Smoke and Stack, and who took the brothers in out of the kindness of her own heart after the death of their father.  It was there that Stack, or Elias Moore first met Cecille's daughter Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), and while she raised the Twins as her own, this didn't stop first a budding, then growing interest, and at long last an actual relationship to spark between Stack Moore and Mary Winters.  Smoke, or Elijah, meanwhile was having similar luck when he met and fell for Annie Clayton (Wunmi Mosaku), a local healer and physician who was brought up by her mother in the family's long-lived tradition of traditional African spiritualism.  Despite what seemed to be a gulf of personal differences between the two, Moore and Clayton married, and soon gave birth to a young daughter.  There appears to have been a brief window of time when it looked like the Moore Brothers would be able to set aside their criminal activities, and perhaps even settle down as regular family men.  What dashed this potential hope to pieces for each of them seems to have come down to two factors.  The first was the death of Elijah and Annie Moore's daughter Susan while she was still in infancy.  The tragedy was enough to drive a wedge between the partners, and Moore soon found himself back on the road doing illegal jobs and making deals. He was joined soon after by Stack.

In the young Twin's case, it all came down to the racist social politics of his time, and how both he and Mary became victims of it.  Cecille Winters was of mixed race heritage, and her daughter Mary was capable of being mistaken for white.  It left both her and Stack in something of an unwinnable situation for their time.  A Black man being seen in close and friendly intimacy was something unthinkable for the majority racist population of Mississippi.  If anyone ever found out that Stack was in any way sweet on Mary, he could find himself lynched and hanging from a tree in a heartbeat.  If Mary was discovered to be Black, she would become a victim of the Jim Crow South's One-Drop Rule, which would see her subject to all of the segregation laws on the books in that decade.  One of the sanctioned penalties for trespassing these laws also included lynching.  It was enough to result in a misguided attempt by Stack to set Mary up with a white husband in the hopes that she would be kept safe there.  Mary Winters appears to have grasped the logic of this move, and yet it didn't stop her heart from breaking.  With both of their personal lives shattered through tragedy and circumstance, the Smokestack Twins needed an opportunity to put some distance between them an Clarksdale for a while, and they got their wish.

America entered World War I in April, 1917, and neither Smoke nor Stack waited to receive their draft notices.  Instead, the Twins made a beeline for the nearest recruitment office, and soon found themselves in uniform.  From then until November 11th, 1918, there is a notable and obvious gap in the criminal record of the Smokestack Twins.  There are at least two notable bits of information about them before the brothers set off for Europe.  The first is that Annie Clayton Moore re-established contact with her husband long enough to present him with a Mojo Bag, a traditional African good luck charm meant to keep the wearer out of harms way.  Whatever wedge might have existed between the two partners, the former Mrs. Clayton still appears to have been close enough to her husband to be willing to do what she could to see that he came back in one piece.  For what it's worth, such an item was recovered among the remains of the sawmill massacre later on, so there appears to be at least some historic veracity to these claims.  What's harder to verify is a claim that the last thing the Twins did before leaving to join the army was to take their father's own Resonator guitar, and leave it in the care of their Uncle Jedidiah and his family.  The account says it might have been a gift intended for one of their young cousins.  However, since there's very little proof to back up this account, it has been dismissed as local rumor.

What is known is that both Twins served together during the War, and each of them came back together, intact and alive.  While they may have emerged from the carnage intact, it was clear that Smoke came away from the battlefield with a manageable yet genuine case of PTSD, and his younger brother Stack was busy feeling lost and adrift.  He felt they both needed a change of scene, and so it became his idea to hit the Clarksdale First National in 24, and parlay that stash to buy themselves a trip to Chicago.  Stack's idea was that a clean break from the past could be had there.  In the Windy City, they would be able to make real names for themselves in what was then one of the main hubs in America's underworld of Organized Crime.  Smoke agreed, being of pretty much the same mind as his younger sibling, and so for a time, the Twins' exploits coincided with the criminal empire of none other than Al Capone himself.  And yet seven years later found them returning to Clarksdale, in the Autumn of 1932.  The Twins never bothered to explain why they chose to return home from the promises of big city life.

All they are ever rumored to have said is that, "Chicago ain’t shit but Mississippi with tall buildings instead of plantations."  To be fair, there may be a fair amount of truth to this report.  The benefit of hindsight has allowed us to make better sense of the Twins' time in Chicago's gangland empire.  The gist of it is that they did in fact arrive in The Second City in the hopes that they could at least be accepted as legitimate "business partners" by the various kingpins and crime lords who ruled Chi-Town with an iron fist.  The realization that nothing separated the racism of the South from that of the North seems to have been the biggest professional disillusionment of the Twins' careers, and they soon decided to take their chances with the devil they knew.  Before they left, however, Stack appears to have insisted that they not go home empty-handed.  He wanted to depart the Big Shoulders on a good and heart "Fuck you" note to all the "peckerwoods" who tried to pull the same insulting bullshit on them as the men who handed out Company Scrip back in the cottonfields.  The plan he came up with was simple, yet complex. and it involved each brother going to work for the two main mobs at large in Chicago.  It's believed that Stack was in charge of casing the joint of Capone's operation, while Smoke did the same for the headquarters of the Irish Mob.  Together, they made off with $250,000 dollars in Mob cash.

In addition, each of the Twins was able to filch up to forty cases of Italian and Irish whiskey, with not a drop of bathtub gin to be found anywhere in the stock.  From there, the Smokestack Twins made their way back to Clarksdale, with what they both hoped would be the promise of a real fresh start this time.  One where, in Stack's words, they could be really free.  The Twins plan upon return was simple.  They would open up their own Juke Joint on the outskirts of Clarksdale, with both of them going into the enterprise as legitimate businessmen (or as legit as they could be in an era when Prohibition was still in effect, and there were still plenty of "traditional deals" to be made here and there).  The main point was that it would be their own place, for their own community.  The kind of establishment where people could come to regularly in the evenings to listen to good music, and drink some of the finest alcohol this side of the Mississippi.  

"There are legends of people… born with the gift of making music so true… it can pierce the veil between life and death. Conjuring spirits from the past and the future. In ancient Ireland, they were called Filí...In Choctaw land, they call them Firekeepers. And in West Africa… they’re called Griots."

We now come to where the narrative thread of events begins to unravel past a certain point.  It doesn't just become difficult to read, either.  It's as if a giant hand drew an eraser across the board, and more or less wiped out whatever vitals clues are necessary for investigators and the curious to ever make sense of how the night of the Massacre unfolded.  There is a brief window of time when most of the actions from the main players can be recalled with a fair degree of accuracy.  A week or two before the fatal events of the evening took place, the Smokestack Twins arrived back in Clarksdale, and chose to keep a low profile.  This appears to have been Stack's idea.  It's possible that he wanted to open their new establishment in style.  The best way to do that was the make Club Juke the kind of announcement that caught the community by pleasant surprise.  To that end, several things had to be in order.  The first task was to even find a good place to set up their music club.  After casting about, both brothers agreed on what seem to find a likely looking candidate, in the form of an old saw mill that used to belong to a neighboring plantation.  The mill and plantation were long since defunct when the Twins laid eyes on it.  Which made negotiations a bit easier, as a piece of property with less value for others was easier to handle.  The Twins discovered that the owner was a Roger Cornelius Hogwood (Dave Maldonado).

When it came to the Asking Price, the old mill was well within the Twins currency range, and so the Twins agreed to meet with Hogwood on the morning of October 15th to close the deal, and buy the mill off him then and there; cash on the barrelhead, as they used to say back then.  What was said between Hogwood and the Twins will have to remain a mystery, yet it is known that the deal must have gone through well enough, as Hogwood departed for the mill at 9:43 in the morning, and arrived back in town at around 11:56 with a 150 dollar bonus in addition to the agreed payment.  What is now clear in hindsight is that Roger Hogwood was nothing less than the grand wizard of the Clarksdale chapter of the KKK.  The old saw mill the Twins purchased was part of a longtime murder racket, one that Hogwood and his associates had played on other victims in the past.  The Klan would bait their chosen targets, all of whom were African-American, and then lie in wait until as many of them were in the mill as possible, and then barge in and lynch every last one of them, then and there.  The land purchased by the Smokestack Twins wasn't just a simple defunct manufacturing plant.  It was a killing floor.  Perhaps a better description would be to call it a feeding place for animals, ones that hid behind white masks. 

To be fair, this fact alone offers a great deal of explanation for what happened next.  The most logical train of events that evening is self-evident enough.  The Twins gathered the resources and man power they needed to set Club Juke up in time for a grand opening.  Investigators figure that setup of the club must have begun early in the afternoon, and was finished sometime just before sunset.  It's possible to give a clear estimate between how much time the patrons of Club Juke had for what they all thought would be just a fun evening of music and refreshment, and yet that's also the point at which the strangeness factor kicks in.  Local and Federal law enforcement were later able to determine that Hogwood spent most of the afternoon of Oct. 15th more or less lying in wait, biding his time as the Sun went down.  At approximately 3 AM on the morning of Oct. 16th, Hogwood departed his home in Clarksdale to make the rounds gathering up his regular posse of fellow Klan members, and together they set out for an establishment that the Smokestack Twins mistakenly assumed belonged to them.  

They are estimated to have arrived somewhere between 8 and 9 on the morning of Oct. 16th.  And here is the point where that giant eraser seems to come out of nowhere and wipe the slate of the crime scene so clean in places that there's too much room for speculation, and there are places in online True Crime and Conspiracy forums where you can still find plenty of rumors to suit your taste.  The official conclusion by law enforcement remains what has been set down on record.  At an undetermined yet definite point on the morning of Oct. 16th, Cornelius Hogwood and his chapter of the KKK descended on Club Juke, and proceeded to attack and lynch the patrons huddled inside.  It's held that the attack came in two waves.  The first was when the Klan charged the mill, taking everyone inside by surprise, and then atrocities started.  It is estimated that those patrons who were able to keep out of the Klan's reach and escape the gunfire made a beeline for the woods surrounding the mill.  After an undetermined amount of time, these patrons returned to the killing floor, possibly as part of a larger band of posses, and proceeded to deal out justice to Hogwood and the Klan with their own hands.  It's clear that the second fight was more brutal than that first assault, and Hogwood and his chapter all perished there.

This much is known for certain, not a single one of the Klansmen there that day ever came back home alive.  All of the perpetrators were found lying on the ground outside of Club Juke.  The cause of death in each man there was proven due to multiple gunshot wounds from either a Thompson Gun, or a else a military grade, repeating automatic trench rifle.  The latter weapon was found positioned outside the club, mounted with a clear line of sight on the entrance.  It's determined that this must have been a safety precaution taken by the Smokestack Twins, and while it didn't do them much good, it helped get the job done.  It's further theorized that both parties ultimately wiped each other out in this second skirmish, hence why not one of the plantation workers who came to Club Juke that night ever returned home to their friends and families.  It's concluded that what happened that night at Club Juke was one of the worst incidents of hate crime and attempted genocide in the annals of America's troubled and ongoing history of racial strife.  All of this makes perfect sense, and is able to wrap the whole mess up in as neat of a bow as possible.  There's just one glaring problem with the official account of the Clarksdale Massacre.  All of the evidence found on the ground paints a different picture of the crime.

It doesn't so much tell a clear tale of what happened that night, as it hints at a situation that is far stranger, weirder than local law enforcement would either surmise or allow.  There were elements of the crime scene that were withheld from public awareness for the longest time, until in 1969 a woman named Lisa Chow (Helena Hu), the daughter of one of the confirmed victims of the Club Juke Attack won her FOIA court case demanding that the case files of the incident be released for the sake of the Clarksdale victims families.  The court's decision in Ms. Chow's favor marked a victory in a very personal and long crusade taken on by her and others who felts not just that the official record was incomplete, but that it also withheld a full sense of justice for what happened to her friends and loved ones.  When the files were finally made public, however, the picture they painted was not just a grisly, but also an unexplained one.  Long story short, there proved to be too many anomalies to the event for local and federal officers to ever truly arrive at a complete conclusion to what happened that night.

The most notable abnormality is best stated in the form of a question.  How can 40 of 50 people all gather together in one place, and then just disappear?  The police were able to recover three victims' bodies from the scene of the crime, and yet the state in which they were found somehow managed to bring up more questions than answers.  Of the five remains of the Club Juke victims recovered at the site, most of them looked as if they had been torn apart by a pack of ravenous wolves, yet the bit marks matched those of humans, along with several traces of human saliva found in the wounds.  The most gruesome example of the victim's fates seems to have been reserved for Lisa's parents, Bo and Grace Chow (Yao, Li Jun Li), along with that of a Mr. Peter Mathis, a local musician known as Delta Slim (Delroy Lindoo), and including the remains of Annie Clayton Moore.  The anomalies found in these remains go as follows.  Of all the victims to meet their fate at the hands of the KKK, the late Mr. Mathis appears to have been attacked with the greatest amount of ferocity.  He was found with his limbs scattered, or discarded a few feet away from his body.  I don't mean that the Klan hacked him to pieces with a machete.  I mean all the evidence pointed to the man having one arm ripped clean from his body, while the other was worn down almost to the bone.  The ferocity of the event was staggering.

No human being, not even an lynch mob is capable of that level of physical strength.  The only elements of Delta Slim's remains that were left intact where a liver so riddled with ARLD that the coroners were able to conclude that even if he'd never attended Club Juke that night, Mr. Mathis still had probably no more than a year and a half of life left in him.  The other untouched element of Mathis's remains was the contents of his stomach, which was found to contain half digested elements of garlic.  Things become even more puzzling when we turn to the cadavers of Annie Moore and the Chows.  Mrs. Moore was found with a gaping throat wound, and a stake buried in his chest.  The bite marks from the neck wound match the same pattern as those found on Mathis, yet Clayton had sustained just one of that particular injury.  It's even possible to say that the bite isn't what killed her.  The stake through her heart accomplished that with ease.  Rigor mortis was found to have set in quickly as a result.  The one finding that turned everyone's heads was the discovery that the fingerprints left on the stake belonged to those of Mrs. Moore's very own husband.  This same peculiar pattern repeated itself with the Chow couple.

The charred carcasses of Grace and Bo Chow were discovered huddled together just inside the club, near the big barn door.  This would naturally fit the assumption that the Chows were victims of some of the worst sort of typical Klan brutality.  However, the immolated remains of Mrs. Chow were found lying atop those of her husband, and while the damage was considerable, it was possible for the coroners to make out that before she succumbed to her injuries, Grace Chow had managed to stab her husband through the heart with a stake of similar make and model as the one used on Annie Moore.  There are just two oddities left that investigation has been unable to account for.  The first is the state in which the barn was found when the police finally arrived.  The other has to do with the footprints.  When state and federal law enforcement arrived at Club Juke, they found the doors all neatly locked, with the entire facility and its parameters secured.  If there were no signs of a massacre lying around, one would have passed right by thinking nothing was amiss.  What can't be explained is why the doors were locked tight if it was the goal of the Klan to get inside and turn the place into a slaughterhouse?

The very nature of Hogwood's motivation was to get inside as soon as possible, and yet there is in fact no evidence that any of the Klan ever made it past the driveway.  Then there's the matter of the footprints, two sets of them, and these are the points that really set the hair on end.  One pair begins in the middle of the floor inside the mill, and then makes their way outside, where they come to a brief stop at the body of Elijah Moore, who was fatally injured in what turned out to be his final shoot-out with the Klan. Hogwood, his final target, was lying beside him, the grand wizard's stomach almost coated and shredded with lead.  In contrast to the unaccountable anomalies inside, "Smoke" Moore's injuries are self-explanatory, the only notable thing about his death is that he seems to have removed his wife's Mojo Bag and thrown it aside. At some further undetermined point, the second pair of prints emerge from the woods surrounding the mill, and join the first set beside the corpse of Elijah Moore.  They then seem to pause for a moment by the Mojo Bag, and then set off together down the road, on a route that leads out of town, and away from Clarksdale all together.  Here's the part that no one has ever come up with a good explanation for.  It has to do with the question of where the footprints come from.

The first set started inside the the mill; investigators were able to determine that much.  The trouble is they seem to just appear at one point, in the dead center of the killing floor, and then proceed to leave the building.  It's as if one minute the space was empty, and the next someone was there.  Furthermore, the prints don't come to the usual pause and shuffle that accompanies trying to open and close a door.  The stride maintains an unbroken pace, and one officer on the scene even took photos that show the prints making uninterrupted indentations in the grown, as if the door wasn't locked at all, and the walker just went right on through as if the barrier wasn't there.  The second set of footprints, meanwhile was traced as far back to a small bog not far from the mill.  At some point before the owner of the prints started walking, they were first seen crawling on hands and knees as they made their way through the mud and out of the thickets.  What set the investigator's teeth on edge was seeing how the feet and hand prints appeared to have emerged either from the bog itself, or else from a soft patch of Earth and mud very close to it, as if someone was sleeping lying in wait somewhere near or under the soil, or in the bog itself, and then just chose to crawl out of their own accord.  Now, to be fair, it is possible to find a logical explanation for this discovery.  One of the patrons ran and hid away in this part of the forest.

Elementary and all that.  Except the bog was discovered to be treacherous, and anyone who tried to hide in that mud wouldn't be able to pull themselves out without the aid of extra help.  Also, it looks as if whoever chose to hide in the bog deliberately covered themselves up beneath the mud and water.  It was at this point that investigators began to consider giving up, as they now couldn't tell what to think.  Then it was decided that the best course of action was to trace the route of the footprints and see where they led.  Police and Federal Agents followed the path left in the road by these unknown travelers for a couple of yards before they were forced to come to an abrupt halt.  The trail ran cold, but not for any logical reason.  The owners of the prints didn't decide to deviate and leave the road into the neighboring fields.  There were no signs of a passing truck or any vehicle that might have come along and picked up the two potential hitchhikers.  Instead, the best way to describe it that the prints came to an end in the same way that they began.  One minute you're following the tracks in the dirt, the next minute they don't break stride so much as seem to vanish into the same unknown aether from which they appear to have come from in the first place.  One officer on the scene even thought to ask, "What did they do, just jump up into the air and takeoff?"  The only thing they could tell was that one of the feet might have belonged to a woman, judging by the size and indentations of the imprint compared to the other set.

That was where the investigation itself began to grind to a halt.  Police work can only go so far when the scene of the crime refuses to cooperate.  The only remaining normal aspect of the case was that Elijah "Smoke" Moore had died under violent yet normal circumstances, after succumbing to his shotgun wounds due to significant blood loss and organ failure.  The rest remains a mystery, one that continues to be a highly invested and heated topic of debate in the circles of both True Crime and Unexplained Phenomena.  There have been books, podcasts, and even a smattering of YouTube documentaries devoted to what all can agree still counts as one of the worst events of racial violence ever committed in the long and often problematic history of the United States.  In the end, perhaps there will never be anything like a definitive answer to whole truth of what happened out in the woods of Clarksdale on that terrible night.  What can be known for sure is that many of Clarksdale's Black community lost their loved ones, and in a way, that will always remain the most important part.  It's the fact that others have valued the worth of a single human life cheap based on the color of one's skin.

There is no room to go into the social conditions and racial politics that allowed men like Roger Hogwood to get away with what they did time and again at Club Juke.  What's important is that the Smokestack Twins and the members of their community came together to try and make a stand against a system of oppression that held power over their heads and tried to control them all in various damaging ways throughout their lives.  Even if it's true that there were no survivors of the Clarksdale Massacre, that still doesn't erase the fact that they all managed to find at least one moment when they were able to achieve some sort of victory over their oppressors.  The one galling part is that we may never know just how they did it, or what became of their remains.  It's a question that haunted Ms. Lisa Chow to her final days.  In the end, the Club Juke Incident has become one of those fascinating moments when all of the most troubling and intuited strands of American history somehow manage to come together and coalesce into a series of flashpoints that are able to leave a lasting impact on the minds of future generations.  The one bright spot remains that the owners and patrons of Club Juke found some way of fighting back against their oppressors.  Yet history has taken an eraser to that moment for some reason.

What remains is to see how we can learn from the lessons that those brave souls might be able to pass on down to us and to future generations, as it's no secret we're living in a time where any valuable lessons from the past could be of service to us in the here and now, and also perhaps even for times to come.  One final thing is still certain and constant.  American history is no stranger to controversies, or mysteries.  Everyone has a secret, and some of us have dark sides, which we never show to anybody, except perhaps behind masks.  Even if it is a burden, it's our job to make sure none of us are forced to bear too much of it by learning and knowing when to lend a helping hand.  As for the mysteries of life, the proverbial woods are full of them.  My only hope is that in discussing the events of the Clarksdale Massacre, we remember to do so in a respectful way, one that allows the missing 50 to have their dignity beyond just being the victims of the Jim Crow South.  It's an event that serves as a silent witness to three strands of the American mind coming together to tell the story of how sometimes the rebel outlaw can be just the sort of hero that people need in times of trouble, especially in the face of systemic oppression.  It also serves as a reminder that sometimes life offers no easy answers, yet that's not the same as giving up hope.  Nor does it mean some mysteries can't be solved.  It's just a matter of time, patience, and a willingness to shine a light in all the dark parts of life so that others aren't afraid.

"There are legends of people… born with the gift of making music so true… it can pierce the veil between life and death. Conjuring spirits from the past…and the future.  This gift can bring healing to their communities… but it also attracts evil...

Three Themes.

One of the great things to be said about some films, is that they are of such a high caliber of well-crafted storytelling, that you realize you're dealing with a story of multiple layers, with each one somehow melding with and into one another, so that the final product presents no signs of narrative dissonance.  Instead, any and all threats of discordant false notes are blended into a seamless whole, with the final results suggesting a rich tapestry composed of many parts, and yet with each element finding the right way to come together and allow the story to achieve it's maximum possible effect.  All of which is to say that, in case you can't tell, I came away really impressed by this picture.  In fact, it's almost possible to claim that Ryan Coogler is guilty of giving both audiences and critics something of an ongoing and endless feast for the mind to chew on for decades.  All of it is because the director has managed to pack an incredible amount of complex and important material into a somehow neat and compact frame of reference.  He's managed to tell a story with a method of execution that seems so effortless on the surface, that the narrative's inherent simplicity is able to almost deceive the viewer into missing all the subtleties that are going on as the movie unfolds.  Coogler seems to have found the perfect combination of straightforward narrative whose uncomplicated setup is precisely what allows the author all the room needed to take a simple pulp premise, and elevate it into a form of genuine art.

On the surface, Sinners tells the story of one wild night when the grand opening of a new juke joint gets turned on its head with the introduction of a vampire threat.  Once that happens, the plot itself becomes something of a riff on the original setup of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, with a little bit of John Carpenter's The Thing thrown into the blender for good measure.  All of it is a premise that most of us have seen before in one way or another.  Even if we've never seen either Night or Thing, the influence from both films has gone on to cast so big a shadow on the pop culture mindset that it's all become a series of tropes that most of us tend to take for granted as something that's always been "just...sorta...there, you know?"  What becomes evident on repeat viewings is that it's clear Coogler has a sharp-eyed fans awareness of the materials he's working with, and it's this long-held affection for the tropes that makes him eager to see how to breath new life into them in a way that honors what came before, while also making sure the film inspires future creators who might be watching from the aisles.

The final result is a movie where the simplistic nature of the plot is the very thing that allows the story to grow in complexity as Coogler works his way around an ongoing series of themes, topics, and ideas revolving around the heated topics of race relations, bigotry and social prejudice, and the very question of what exactly it means to be a free person of color in a world where slavery not only survives, but can also take on many deceptive forms.  The result is a film that functions as this neat little macabre fairy tale, which somehow also manages to open out into a grand vista of many parts and concepts, all working together like a fine piece of craftsmanship.  As you might guess, this is the kind of film that will easily lend itself to ongoing discussion and debate.  This is the sort of picture that deserves to have entire critical studies dedicated to it.  There have been a number of them released in the scant amount of time between now and the film's original debut, yet something tells me we're still busy waiting for the real bumper crop to come along.  In the meantime, all I can do here is contribute my own two cents to a continuing conversation where I'm already sort of late to the party; sorry about that.  To make up for it, this review will focus in on three points that I don't think I've seen discussed in all the other articles and video essays that have long since attended the film's release.  One of them is plot lore focused, while the remaining two are thematic.  One focuses on pinpointing the importance of the character of Remmick.

The second will at least try to make an examination of the film's core concepts of music in its relation to the differences between the idea of true and false communities of fellowship.  In particular, these notions will all be examined under the rubric of what I've chosen to call the Open Dance, and the Closed Dance.  I'd like to look at the dynamics of this film under such a rubric, because one of the fundamental concerns of Coogler's film is just how possible is it for any society to have any genuine form of inclusiveness where racial barriers aren't an obstacle.  There are scores of articles and videos out there detailing this film's use of music, however I'd argue that the way the movie utilizes the idea of the Dance is an underreported aspect that's also present in the events of the narrative, and that maybe a quick look at how Remmick, as a member of the Undead, stands in relation to the idea of a truly Open Dance, and it's community can help create a better perspective on how the film tackles its subject of community under threat. It's true I'm sort of going very far out on a limb here.  However, I can't shake the notion that this is an unexplored avenue worth looking into, and it might even help as a good lead in to the third and final topic.  This would be the suggestion that the final message of the film might be considered as the director's commentary on his own personal circumstances as an African-American artist trying to be his authentic, artistic self in the current chaotic state of the Hollywood studio system.

It posits an idea I don't think I've seen others discuss elsewhere.  This would be that the film is in part an indictment of the way the current American film industry tends to denigrate, cheapen, and undervalue Artists of Color who are trying to get their own genuine stories, and artistic expressions heard in a business that often claims to be on their side, and yet which then often marginalizes them by turning their struggles into a series of hollow, one-note ideas that often tend to miss the whole point of the challenges that minorities, and minority artists face as part of a regularly "othered" segment of the population.  All of this is possible to talk about because it's clear that Coogler has written and crafted a movie that fits in with the notion of the Horror Film as a product of a particular context.  We'll get to just what that context is in time, as it functions as part of the movie's core.  For the moment, though, lets have fun trying to decipher a bit of the film's lore.  Let's try to figure out something about Remmick.

The Question of Remmick.

There've been debates back and forth about just how old the film's central vampiric villain truly is?  A lot of this is down to the charismatic performance of actor Jack O'Connell, and the brilliant screenplay produced by Coogler, which allows the film's monarch bloodsucker to be endowed with a level of tragic pathos that you don't see quite as often anymore in most portrayals of vampires in Horror fiction.  What makes it work is that it all stems from a place of genuine loss and oppression.  It's something that has garnered numerous commentary from both fans and critics.  In delineating the character and motivations of the monster at the heart of the film, Coogler made sure Remmick's actions were tied into the actual history of racial prejudice that even the Irish immigrants to America have experienced as part of this Nation's troubled legacy of discrimination.  As Zac Morris recounts in his in-depth analysis of the character, "Remmick represents Irish immigrants who arrived in America as an oppressed group.  At first, they were seen by some as this...inferior group; stereotyped as violent drunks in political cartoons of the era."  And here Morris does provide us with a typical example of the racist depictions that the White population of the U.S. were even willing to use against their own.  He continues, "Over the timespan of generations, the Irish assimilated, and are basically seen as just White (ibid)."  

It says a lot about the power dynamics that a ruling class is willing to put in place to protect their own interests.  It speaks of a mindset that can't fathom the idea that fair play is an actual thing which exists in real life.  It speaks of a thought process where perfect paranoia is able to achieve as complete a state of self-delusion is possible, and what makes it dangerous is that it's all based around a warped perception of threat when one doesn't exist.  There's an expression that goes, "To the carpenter, all the world is a nail."  It's possible to make a riff on it that describes the racist mindset, "The bigot is convinced that all the world is against him, so the ends justify the means in evening the score and odds."  The trouble is delusions remain as figments of the imagination, even if the bigot thinks otherwise.  So of course innocents are going to suffer when a lunatic really puts their mind to it.  I'd argue it's something like an axiom which can be used for the benefit of sanity and a just social policy, if only enough people would come together to help solve the problem of systemic racism in this Country.  In a way, that's also what makes Remmick such a potent threat as a villain.  He's had plenty time to not just become aware of prejudice, but also to study it for centuries, and learn how to weaponize the bigotry of others to his advantage.  In this sense, Remmick can be read as an allegory for people who find ways of profiting off the suffering of others by leveraging racism to their own personal, and above all, self-serving ends.

It's a powerful theme that cries out for further exploration, and it's to Coogler's credit that he does such as good job of it here.  There is just one question about the film's vampiric antagonist that has left many viewers scratching their heads.  Just how old is Remmick?  How far back does his own personal history go as an immigrant from Ireland, and hence how much of his original country's "Troubles" has the vampire seen and witnessed through the passage of history.  This is a topic that has engaged a great deal of debate among fans, with some positing that his life extends as far back as Ireland's pre-Christian era.  Some like Morris, on the other hand, argue that the character was probably meant to be seen as being born somewhere around the late 14 to early 1500s, for as Morris puts it,: "In the 1500s, King Henry the 8th broke away from the Catholic Church in Rome, and created the Church of England; causing Ireland to become the target of a violent religious overhaul.  Under Henry's daughter, Elizabeth I, the English crown began seizing Irish land, replacing Irish families with English and Scottish settlers, and forcing their Protestant beliefs onto the population.  Which is probably what Remmick means by, "Forced those words upon us".  It's likely Remmick lived through a time when the Irish fought to hold on to pieces of their culture."  I'll have more to say about that culture later as this review travels on.

For now, it's enough to say I think I might have stumbled upon a bit of overlooked historical trivia that might help solidify Morris's take on Remmick's age as the definitive one.  One of the proofs Morris brings up in support of his claim comes from the Rocky Road to Dublin scene, where Remmick leads his group of vampirized thralls in a hearty dance number, all of which is set to a killer rendition of the traditional Irish folksong.  What's significant about that scene for Morris is that Coogler and the film's dance choreographer, Aakoman Hasani Jones, point out how the specific moves Remmick uses is in fact an authentic Irish dance from the 16th century.  One other factoid that needs to be added to that is the nature of Remmick's Irish accent.  Throughout most of Sinners' runtime, the villain speaks in an ordinary American Southerner's voice.  It's the kind of dialect that is still common in and around the Southern half of the Mississippi river valley.  However, at a crucial moment during the film's climax, this speech pattern begins to slip, and Remmick's original Irish brogue can be heard slipping through, especially as he and Sammy begin to recite the Lord's Prayer.  It's then that Remmick tells both the protagonist, and us the audience about "those men" who took his land and life away from him, and forced "those words" upon him and his people.  It's the specific type of Irish accent that is important.

The particular style of Irish speech that Remmick uses is the one that is still recognizable from the Emerald Ilse to this very day.  What needs to be kept in mind however is precisely when the modern Irish dialects where first created, and soon became the defining norm of the country?  If you can answer that question, then I'd argue you'll know how old Remmick is.  Let's put it this way.  If his roots extended further back in time to before the arrival of the first Christian missionaries to Ireland, then his original native tongue would have been Celtic, and not the Gaelic of the later Middle Ages.  What has to be remembered and kept in mind is that the English-Irish speech, and the eventual defining lingua-franca they spawned was a very a late-come phenomenon in the history of human evolution.  The first recognizably English form of speech didn't emerge in Britain until near the close of the Medieval period, and in Ireland, it was Gaelic that still reigned supreme as the mother tongue until roughly around the start of the 1500s, when the English began their brutal colonization of their next door neighbors.  

It was the Tudor Insurgency which kicked off the establishment of English plantations on Irish land that kicked off a brutal history of unlawful subjugation and displacement of Ireland's native Celtic population.  Part of the fallout from this history of ongoing persecution was the establishment of the Irish form of speech that we are still familiar with.  This came about from roughly the 15 to the 1700s, when native Irish citizens were forced into adopting the fast evolving modern English forms of speech and writing.  The result saw a coercive decline, if never a complete disappearance, of the Gaelic way of talking that had been Ireland's natural development.  The modern delivery that we think of today as typically Irish was a pattern of communication that was forced upon a subject people.  It's all very much as Morris describes it.  Remmick is "someone who's identity has been fractured and reshaped across centuries.  Much like the histories of colonized peoples, whose stories were suppressed, or re-written by others.  Colonization often destroys records and traditions, and real experiences are replaced with the colonizer's version of history."  The deliberate implication here is this is something that has happened not just to the Irish, but also to African slaves stolen away from their own homeland, and brought to American shores in chains to be defined as someone not worthy of the natural rights due a human being.  It's all part of the colonizer's way of trying to see if it can succeed in stripping away humanity.

In the case of someone like Remmick, this would have meant both seeing and hearing the Gaelic tongue he was taught to speak as a child get taken away, as the modern Irish language was most likely, and quite literally beaten into him by the British plantation masters who treated him with the same kind of savagery that English colonists in America treated both Blacks and Native Americans.  Remmick most likely learned to become an Irishman at the taste of the lash.  If this is the case, then the way it helps pinpoint the villain's origins to no earlier than the 16th century is down to the fact that it was Gaelic, and not the far older Celtic language from which the modern Irish accent developed.  The Celtic language traces its roots in Ireland as far back as 500 BC.  This language began a natural, gradual evolution into the Gaelic tongue sometime around the 4th to 5th centuries AD.  That sort of thing takes time, and the very fact that the evolution from Celtic to Gaelic was natural, whereas the development of the Irish-English accent was not is a clue to Remmick's age.  If he had been around since Before the Common Era, his way of speaking would have sounded far different from the natural brogue the character uses when addressing Sammy near the end.  The original Celtic language would have sound that different from what we now recognize as Irish, and it would have been obvious through trace hints in Remmick's own speech if he hailed from the time of the Druids and Romans.  The fact that his Irish is the clean and fluid version that we know today proves that while he's old, he's not an ancient of days.

This means that Morris's assumption is the correct one.  Remmick really is a man born in or around the 15 to 1700s and who lived through a traumatic and painful period of hostile transition in Ireland's history.  He got to experience it all first hand as he had his land, and maybe even his family ripped away with him.  While we never learn the full details of how he became a vampire, it wouldn't be out of the question to discover that Remmick made a choice to become one of the Undead in exchange for the ability to strike back at his oppressors in a way that would make them fear him to their core.  Even if this plan worked though, it's obvious that it came at a heavy cost, as it caused him to live past the span of a normal human life.  It was obviously long enough for him to see all of his well-laid schemes come to nothing as even if he managed to kill off the English plantation colonists who took his land, he still lost his family, and there was nothing that one vampire could do to halt the now inevitable evolution that Ireland underwent as it was carried forward into the modern era under the yoke of the British crown.  These are all brutal facts of history that Coogler was well aware of as he crafted the character of Remick, and it's clear he meant all of this to be embodied in the story's portrayal of it's main villain.

The True and the False Dance, and the Communities they Spawn.  

This next part deals with perhaps the most complex and vexing part of Coogler's movie, one that has been the source of many debates as to what the film means.  While I don't know that I can offer a complete answer to that question, there are a number of vital sources the director has drawn upon in crafting his story that can help make better sense of certain elements in the picture.  In order to do that, this segment will have to focus on the two main driving factors of the movie's plot, both of which are drawn from real life elements of Native African and African-American traditional beliefs and folk customs.  These two intertwined subject are the Griots and the Conjurors.  In addition to these still vital parts of Black culture, we'll also have to take a quick side glance at certain parts of ancient Celtic Folklore, in particular as they relate to the topic of the Fili, the traveling bards who once functioned as a key source of communal life in Irish culture and history.  What unites all three of these topics in Coogler's plot is the way each centers around the subject of music as a communal experience, and as a form of cultural preservation.  It's the idea of music as the storehouse a culture's memory.  This is a generally recognized aspect of the film, and one that has generated a good deal of critical commentary.

What I'd like to do here, though, is to see if we can dive deeper into the topic by going back to the source material that Coogler drew upon in constructing his story.  I want to do this in order see if we can find out more about the actual historical content that informs the story of Sinners, and then read that back into Coogler's film in order to see if it helps us get a better picture of its larger meanings.  And here is where a careful study of Griots and Conjurors comes into play.  Both parties form an integral part of the traditional heritage of the African Diaspora in America, and the practices of both subjects tie into the idea of Dance as a potential creator of both African-American communities, and of communal space.  And in order to explain why that is, we'll have to examine each practice one at a time.  Once you have a knowledge of how Griots and Conjurors form an integral part of African-American communities, then the way Coogler utilizes each role within his film brings us closer to a better understanding of what the story is about.  We'll start with a look at the Griots first, followed by examining the surprising way that Conjurors related to Black Churches in American history, and how both are related to Celtic traditions.

A: The Griot.

In order to get a proper read on where Coogler is coming from in his use of traditional African spiritual and musical practices, the best place to start is with the film's main lead.  Surprisingly enough, though, this isn't either of the Smokestack Twins, but rather Club Juke's resident band member, Sammy Moore.  He's our P.O.V. for most of the runtime, and since the film opens and closes from his perspective, it soon becomes obvious that the figure of Sam is the actual protagonist whose progress we are meant to follow over the course of one crazy, vampire infested night.  What makes Sam integral to understanding Sinners more complex themes stems from the fact that he's the one character who is deliberately portrayed as having a special gift.  It comes in the form of his skills as a budding Blues musician, and a specific way he has not just of playing, but also tapping into the music he performs for others in a way that, as the film's dialogue has it, can pierce the veil between the living and the dead, along with times past and future.  This is a very specific skill whose overall nature gets highlighted in what many consider the movie's main set piece.  It's the moment when Sammy makes his big stage debut in front of an audience who know him as the local preacher boy, hence his eventual stage name, and who are just curious enough to see if he has the talent necessary to be a good singer who knows his way around the guitar.

What follows is a hallucinatory, yet mesmerizing segment, in which Sammy proves that he's not just good at the guitar, but that he is gifted with the ability to tap into some larger, Macrocosmic level where the barriers and layers of reality are able to break away, and soon all the eras and people from African history are able to join in with their Diasporic American descendants in a vast conflagration of dance and song.  It's often regarded as the film's big showstopper moment for plenty of good reasons.  The one that I personally find most notable is how there are moments in the sequence which are subtly meant to imply that at least part of what we're being shown is the legacy that Sammy will eventually leave both to the world of American Blues, R&B, Rap Music, and Rock and Roll in general, as well as to African Americans in particular.  This is hinted at as a future electric guitarist (who is strongly implied to a copyright friendly version of Funk legend Bootsy Collins) is seen in the act of taking the 1930s acoustic Blues number we are watching Sammy play and sing in the moment, and then amplifying it to the next level for a future audience raised on the sounds of Psychedelic Rhythm and Blues.  The reach or influence of Sammy's music is further demonstrated by the way Collins is shown matching the moves and gestures of Sammy's future stage persona, down to the way he leans on a speaker while casting the music forward out into the eager and waiting arms of its listeners.  This happens constantly in the scene.

Every piece of sound on display is united by not just the way future sub-genres of African-American music (such as Rap, G-Funk, Hip-Hop, and Soul) are implied to be sampling various aspects of the song the Preacher Boy is singing, but also how his skills, and hence his eventual fame and reputation will one day eventually precede him.  This is briefly, yet carefully hinted at in one blink-and-miss-it call forward moment, where a Turn-Table DJ is seen calling out Sammy's name to what is implied to be a packed stadium of fans.  The implication being that one day Sammy's fame will allow him to command the kind of sold-out venues where he can soon have whole crowds hanging on every note he plays, and the DJ is there to introduce him.  The entire Surreal Montage (as it's called) is nothing less than Coogler's tour-de-force shorthand description for the ways in which African music in America has been able to build off of and Inspire its own continuation across generations.  It's a show instead of tell version of the ways in which all the disparate genres of music present in the scene are able to exist solely because the Black artists of today know about, and are often able to find all sorts of ways of honoring the musical architects on whose shoulders they all stand.  It also it meant to highlight legacy of survival and perseverance of the Black community through music and song amidst a violent history of oppression.

As Jacob Slankard wrote in his examination of the sequence for Collider, "it's a jaw-dropping metaphor for the interconnected tendrils that minority cultures weave to create greater bonds and how they intertwine and get historically passed down, remaining strong against the efforts of dominant cultures to scrub them away (web)."  In addition to demonstrating the ways in which African American songs and communities are able to move forward by building off of their shared pasts, the scene is also narratively important for the way it's meant to highlight the nature of Sammy as the protagonist.  Tying back into lines of dialogue spoken in the film's opening monologue, the implication is that Sammy's gift for music stems from his belonging to a family with a long and specific line of African musicians known as Djali in their native language, or Griots in French-English translation.  It's here that Coogler shows his penchant for packing in a lot of thematic background complexity as the main character's West African Griot background is one of the two primary cultural engines driving the film's story, and as you might guess, it all boils down to a series of older traditions that, while still well known and prevalent in various African societies across the globe, is essentially one of life's great known-unknown factors for the rest of us.  It means that trying to explain Griots is like trying to fit all of their history into a thimble.

It can't be done in the strictest sense, so all I can give anyone here is the barest of bare-bones outlines.  On one level, it's correct to describe Griots as a tribal musician common to African culture.  At the same time, this is a role where music and song are meant to take on a greater level of responsibility than most of us in the West would ever consider placing on the shoulders of even our most famous musical acts.  A Griot is someone who is expected to not just know how to sing or play a number of traditional African tribal instruments.  In doing so, the Djali must also serve as a keeper of the collected wisdom and knowledge that their tribe has gathered throughout the course of history.  As a result, the position is inherently seen as being connected with African methods of learning and education, and is practiced as such even today in places like modern Senegal.  A contemporary Griot performer, Yacouba Sissoko, describes the obligations of being a Djali as akin to functioning as "living history books".  It's a practice that is consonant with Africa's cultural oral tradition of transmitting education.  In African society, this means that developing a proper historical awareness relies on two known interrelated subjects.  There's the history of the tribe you happen to belong to, and then there's the history of the African continent as a whole.  It means the country's learning and teaching methods have a dual-minded aspect in its process.

For the purposes of Coogler's story, what matters the most is the Griot view or theory of music, and how it uses the art of Dance and Song to help build and strengthen communities.  The way it does this is by viewing music as not just a particular kind of artificially created sound that can be used as a form of diversionary light entertainment.  With all due respect, it seems very much as if traditional Griot beliefs do not function at all like that.  Rather than seeing music as an accidental and minor byproduct of human evolution, the Djali believe that music itself is something like an elemental force at work in nature.  In the words of scholar Thomas Hale, "What distinguishes the verbal art of griots and (female, sic) griottes from those who fulfill some of the same functions in other societies—such as poets in the Western tradition—is that the speech of these African wordsmiths combines both poetic art and, in many cases, a much less clearly defined power. In the Mande world it is known as nyama (114)."  This is a shared concept that the Griots have in common with the Dogon tribe of Mali, and is perhaps best summed up in the pages of African Philosophy in Search of Identity, by D.A. Masolo.  It's there he describes it as, "The substance and life-force, Nyama, spread out in the universe, was divided, from the beginning of the world, to all animals and at times communicated also to certain inanimate beings (80)."  The closest parallel this concept has in Western thought is Plato's Theory of Forms.  This is the belief that reality as we know it structured by a series of Eternal Ideas, the highest being the Good.

In fact, it's somewhat interesting how neatly Plato's Ruling Ideas match up with the concepts centered around the Nyama of the Griots, especially when you consider the fact that scholars hold that the Classical Grecian thinker might have derived a lot of his philosophy from Egyptian sources.  It raises the interesting question of whether Nyama might have been at least part of the source material behind the Theory of Forms.  One of the other Griot beliefs is that the arts of Dance and Song can be used to tap into this Vital Source, and that humans can use it to "pierce the veil" as Coogler's film says.  Here's another striking coincidence, as it lines up nicely with the Greco-Roman concept of the Musica Mundana, the idea that it's possible to find the right musical chords or ritual dance steps which will help the singer or the dancer to step in tune with the harmony of the cosmos.  This notion seems to find its ancient African equivalent in the musical customs surrounding the Kora, or African Lyre.  It's a 12-stringed guitar which serves as the most common instrument in Griot culture, and whose construction was meant to stand as a microcosm of the elemental music that guides the universe.  It's the Griot's talents as a singer, and his skill with the Kora that allowed him to tap into the rhythms that pattern the nature of reality, and so allow him and his audience to transcend the limits of time and space.

This is basically the tradition of African culture that Coogler seems to have encoded in some form in the character of Sammy.  It's a gift the protagonist remains forever unaware of, except in his nascent love for, and skill at playing the Blues.  The interesting part is that the story doesn't see this lack of ancestral knowledge as a hindrance to Sammy's extra-musical abilities.  Instead, the film depicts this inheritance as managing to survive across the ages, and in piercing the veil between all spaces and times, a Griot descendant is able to do just like his forebears, and allow his audience to partake in a great Macrocosmic Dance, which seems like a moment in which the main character is able to tap into some kind of music of creation, for lack of a better word.  It remains the most iconic moment in the film, and might just go down in the future as one of the greatest moments in cinematic history.  What's interesting to note is that this isn't the end of Coogler's background material.  In addition to the art of Africa's Griot tradition, the director also makes sure to incorporate the tradition of Conjuring into the plot's makeup.

B. Conjurors.

This is a subject which seems to represent a second major strand in the film's portrayal of early 20th century Southern African American culture, and it's also the one aspect of the film which seems to have generated some heated controversy from both fans and others.  Rather than wade into the weeds of the audience reaction, I'm instead going to focus on what I learned from a careful study of the actual source text that Coogler drew upon for his portrait of Annie Moore, Smoke's estranged wife, and full-time Conjure Woman.  The first and most obvious thing to say is that she's meant to represent an aspect of real life.  There really were African, and later African American women in the segregated South who brought over to these shores a long established tradition of healing through folk medicine, herbal remedies, and charms such as the Hoodoo Bag that Smoke wears throughout the majority of the narrative.  As portrayed by Wunmi Mosaku, Annie is one of Coogler's bravest, caring, and smartest characters.  She's also the one element in the story that most readers seem to have difficulty getting a good read on in terms of what thematic purpose she might serve to the story.  Now, to be strictly honest here, I did not set out to find at least on potential answer to what Annie represents.  In fact, I was looking for something else when I found out that Coogler had consulted the work and personal help of scholar Yvonne Chireau to help Mosaku with constructing the Conjure background of Annie's story.

No matter how strange it may seem, it's Chireau who goes a long way toward settling one of the more contentious debates about the meaning of Annie's presence in the movie.  In fact, once Chireau's explanation is in place, it sort of creates this lens that helps make sense not just of Ann, but also of Sammy, and even Remmick's background.  In order for that to happen, however, we've got to let Chireau explain the logic that Coogler let her bring to the film.  She wasn't even all that enthusiastic to be part of the project, if you want to know the truth.  She'd spent her whole life studying the folk beliefs and customs that enslaved Africans and their later American descendants brought over with them to these Shores.  And she was familiar with Hollywood's dubious track record with the representation (or lack thereof) with these folkways and customs on the big screen.  "I’ve gotten these calls before, for what turned out to be awful films that distort and misrepresent Hoodoo or Vodou. So I’m often really picky about who I work with. And even then, they screw up (web)."  Coogler and his assistant were able to convince here that, “we really, really want to get this right.”  Chireau's eventual thinking on the matter became "that this kind of work makes an argument for what we do. I’m a religionist; you’re a religionist. When movies and TV take religion seriously, it helps the audience get curious about religion. It helps them see that religion matters, and that they maybe want to learn more about it. So in a way, this movie is making an argument for the study of religion (ibid)."

What's interesting about her train of thought is that is sort of flies in the face of all the logic and propositions I've run across in all the debates had about the Conjure and religious aspects of the film whether pro or con.  If anything, Chireau's opening insights tend to sideswipe out of left field, and leave the debate on a different footing altogether.  This is because it seems that the point of view Chireau brought to the table was one that history seems to have, not overlooked, so much as left in the dust.  The specific lens she brings to the film is best described as a relic that most of us have forgotten was ever there to begin with.  It's for sure a fact that the historical snapshot Chireau brings to the table was one I don't recall ever hearing about at any point in either high school or college history courses.  That's because the full spectrum of the past has a nasty habit of falling through the cracks of time, and that means a lot of our ability to understand where we come from tends to get unavoidably blurred and sometimes even indecipherable.  That's where Chireau's work on the intersection between Christianity and traditional African Conjure beliefs proves to be something of an eye opener on an overlooked aspect of America's Pre and Post-Civil War chronology.  The first point is that there even was such an intersection to begin with.

While most of us tend to see Christianity as a Dogma that always held itself above the passing parade of folkways and superstition, it turns out that a closer and careful look reveals that far from soaring above such a topic, its seems as if the Church has been more than happy to wade in among the most interesting sort of spiritual beliefs in its long history, and regardless of sectarian interests.  Chireau's basic finding amounts to just this.  Far from being at odds with the normally accepted set of Christian beliefs, it seems that traditional African folk traditions such as the Hoodoo or Conjure practices were able to find a surprising amount of accommodation within the American Church.  It's a topic that Chireau devotes an entire book-length study to, entitled Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjure Tradition.  It's there that she elaborates further on the idea that the Church didn't necessarily turn away such practices at the front door.  "Instead of viewing supernaturalism as a marginal subset of African American religion, I have identified supernatural practices as they ap- pear within and outside black spiritual traditions. These include those that might be classified as “magical,” whose participants claim an allegiance to conventional spiritual authorities (e.g., Christian ministers, or members of black churches) while taking part in Hoodoo, Conjure, and root-working practices.

"Take for example a former slave, self-proclaimed preacher, and healer in a 1930s Texas community by the name of William Adams. Adams, as did others in his day, found in the Christian scriptures a timeless collection of potent spells, charms, curses, and esoteric lore. “There am lots of folks, and educated ones too, that says we-uns don’t understand,” he claimed. “ ‘Member the Lord, in some of His ways, can be mysterious. The Bible says so.” Spiritual powers and supernatural abilities, he argued, were available to those who were divinely gifted or specially inspired by God. This book considers other cases as well, such as that of Bishop Charles Harrison Mason, the founder of what would become the largest African American Pentecostal denomination, the Church of God in Christ. Mason possessed an uncommon fascination with strangely formed natural objects—objects that were reminiscent of the “roots” or magical artifacts used by black Conjurers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mason, however, described his roots as “wonders of God” and contemplated the miraculous as he delivered sermons to his Afro-Christian followers (4-5)."  The entire study just goes on like this in the same vein throughout the rest of its pages, as Chireau details one similar case study after another.

We hear, for instance, of how "Another slave, known only as Elihu, was recognized by witnesses as “an old and creditable member of the church,” who was “as punctilious as a Pharisee” in his own religious observances, according to one nineteenth-century writer. Elihu, however, also placed great faith in charms, Conjure, witches, spells, and his own gifts for the “miraculous cures” of animals and humans that he performed in the South Carolina countryside. Other black preachers of note explored equally eclectic spiritual venues. John Henry Kemp, a slave in Mississippi, considered himself a loyal representative of the True Primitive Baptist Church, who preached “one faith, one Lord and one religion.” Kemp was also gifted with the ability to determine the future, to read palms, and to cure sickness with the aid of “charms, roots, herbs and magical incantations and formulae” for “those who believe[ed] in him (15).”’  Once the samples begin to pile up, and all of them detailing the same process of a peculiar yet easy and genuine sense of integration between the American Church and traditional African spirituality, an alternate picture of the history of the African American Church different from the one we might have heard about doesn't just begin to emerge, what also becomes apparent is that it's just possible that this integration of traditional spiritual practices with Christian devotionalism might very well have had some sort of hand in shaping the nature of the overall expression of the Church as it still currently exists on American shores.  The best summary Chireau gives for it all goes as follows:

"Given the sparse historical evidence—and the extent to which African religious practice was suppressed in America—the claim that European American spiritual beliefs and practices may have actually sustained African traditions might appear to be contradictory. And yet certain elements from indigenous African religions, particularly those with European cognates, are discernible in some of the earliest descriptions of black American “magic.” To take one example: both Africans and Europeans in colonial America held certain common cosmological perspectives, such as that of a universe that abounded with divine activity and power. Both groups incorporated their otherworldly visions into their understanding of earthly experiences. English Protestants often read un- usual events as evidence of the divine presence in everyday life, acknowledging the activity of a creator deity who operated through omens and portents within the natural order, or signs and wonders in the heavens, a philosophy known as Providentialism. “Comets, hailstorms, monster births and apparitions” and other disruptions of the ordinary were demonstrations that foretold God’s will or signaled His displeasure with humankind. Africans’ understandings of the universe were also inspired by visible manifestations of spiritual forces within nature. They too viewed thunder, lightning; and other elements as heralds of sacred hierophanies, the awesome presence of numerous divine beings. These conceptions of the supernatural held firm for their free black descendants in America, who glimpsed the power of God in catastrophic earthquakes, lunar eclipses, and meteor showers.

"The informal nature of European-derived supernaturalism may have facilitated its integration into African and African American cosmologies. Parallels can be seen in both groups’ perceptions of the invisible world. Many Anglo-American Christians, for example, believed the celestial domain to be occupied by an almighty, benevolent deity and a host of spirits, including angels, archangels, and other more malevolent entities, powers, and principalities. Similarly, West and Central Africans would have viewed the cosmos as a heavily populated world in which a reciprocating traffic of invisible and visible beings moved, interacted, and influenced each other. While Anglo-American Christians utilized a col- orful language of “wonder” and “remarkable providences” to bear wit- ness to the proximity of the supernatural in their lives, Africans depicted the universe in myth and beckoned the timeless inhabitants of the spiritual world with ritual. In some cases, images from European folklore wove their way into the cosmologies of Africa. The earthly reality of witches, demons, and other purveyors of misfortune underwrote the oral traditions and beliefs of both races. Stories passed on of restless souls and apparitions—such as “Raw Head and Bloody Bones,” a fiendish specter appearing in African- and Anglo-American folklore traditions— demonstrate the assimilation of European and African supernatural motifs into a shared complex by whites and blacks (44-45)."  What can't be disputed is that Chireau has conjured a mental world picture that fits right in with the secondary world of Sinners.

When it comes to how all these elements are brought together and portrayed in the finished film, Chireau actually chimed in her two cents, and what she says is interesting for the way it contrasts with the rest of the commentary that has grown up around this film.  In the same interview above, it's noted how the film presents a less purified and pristine picture of the history of the African American Church, especially as we've come to know and think about it in popular culture.  Rather than being this Hallmark Card copy of the regular Protestant ethos that has traditionally defined the nature of most American expressions of Christian faith, Sinners instead chooses not to whitewash all of the stranger and esoteric elements that have been an integral part of the Black religious experience in this Country.  The final result is something of a hybrid picture, it's not something that can fit any of the easy categories that either fans or critics of this film use to describe it.  Instead, it comes at us as an out of left field phenomenon, and most of us are left having to reconsider what we think we know about the African Diaspora history in America, and the ways this has defined and influenced Christian belief in the U.S.

Chireau acknowledges all of this by making perhaps the most startling statement anyone has ever made about Coogler's film.  "There’s a lot of Christianity in Vodou, in Hoodoo. Hollywood really struggles with the complexity of that. And what we’re seeing in Sinners isn’t removed from what the characters’ enslaved ancestors might have done, but it’s also not removed from Christianity. And contemporary Hoodoo practitioners give us a lot of clues about what it might have looked like for Annie to be a Conjure woman in the 1920s Mississippi Delta...Sinners really captures the complexity of Annie’s religious identity. This isn’t “voodoo ooga booga.” The film shows that Hoodoo is part of the Christian heritage, part of Black religion’s heritage...For me, this is a work of fiction, but it’s a historically accurate film. It centers Black religious experience, challenges how we think about what America is and what it does (ibid)."  Beyond that point, it's easy to imagine some claiming that all Chireau has done is to leave herself and others open to the charge of blasphemy.  The best response I've got to that is just five words, and they serve as a good lead in to the last ingredient that Coogler uses to tell his modern day vampire flick: The Celtic Cross of Ireland.

C. The Fili.

The trick with Sinners is it's a film that deals with historical obscurities.  We're talking now about all those points of cultural reference which have fallen off the map due to time and tide, or else they were erased by various forms of  successful colonial suppression, most of which were of a violent and bloody nature.  A combination of the two is what's allowed even modern day Blacks to forget that they're ancestors practiced a hybrid form of Gospel worship back during the Jim Crow years in the South.  It's also what's led to the erasure of the Celtic strain in Irish Christianity.  Here is where the work and nature of the film's third major point of reference, the Irish File, or Fili comes into play.  Let me just say up front, that while I had to do a bit of searching in order to discover the nature of African Griots and their history, it was still relatively easy compared to the dearth of information available on the Irish Bardic tradition.  That's because it seems that no one has bothered to take an interest in the Fili for their own sake.  Instead, they have been relegated to a sub-topic, something mentioned in passing as part and parcel of the ancient Celtic world of the Isles, and most of it told from an Anglo-Saxon perspective.  

That right there is explanation enough for why most viewers of this film never even heard of the Fili until Coogler was so considerate enough to bring them to our attention.  It's a living example of the effects that generations of cultural colonization and elimination can have on the values and traditions of an entire people that were once thought of as timeless and permanent.  To carry the comparisons the film makes between Irish and African cultures, the main reason why the Griots are still a viable cultural tradition is because despite the flowering of human trafficking from the 17th to 19th centuries, no white slaver was ever truly able to subdue and conquer the African continent itself.  Ireland, in contrast, is just a simple island, the smallest portion of the ironically named United Kingdom.  Therefore it was no trouble at all to see that entire nation brought under the heel of the English crown, who then proceeded to try and remake the land, its people, and their customs in their own image.  They were successful to a very considerable extent, to the point where the Celtic tradition in Christianity has long since dwindled to a small underground stream of thought in the history of Religion.  It was within the world of Celtic spirituality, and later on, Ireland's Medieval expression of Christianity, that the Fili were first born from, and then, for a time at least, managed to thrive in.  It's what explains the thin historic paper trail.

What little I've been able to discover about the Fili boils down to just this.  In both ancient and Medieval Ireland, they were any one person who could fulfill the role of both poet, singer, and seer.  In modern day terms, the Fili were the designated Lore Keepers of Ireland's history and heritage, at least so far as it all went from before, during and after the Bronze Age, and up all the way to Shakespeare's time.  Like the Griots, it is possible to speak of Fili as living history books, and so anyone who managed to achieve that title were considered as part of Celtic Ireland's privileged classes.  This is because the Filid were often seen as crucial to the administration of the country and the work of its people.  Another way to describe Fili from the era of the Celts would be as someone who had trained themselves to recall the history of their civilization and the human history that helped to create it.  This knowledge of memorization extended all the way to famous military heroes, all the way to the various myths, songs, and beliefs that we'd now classify as the folklore of ancient Ireland, but which the Filid of those times would have regarded as either actual history, or else stories directly inspired by it, much the same way Texans sometimes still like to spin tall tales about the life of Davey Crockett.  For the ancient Irish, this sort of role was taken by Epic tales on the exploits of Finn McCool, and Cu Chulainn.  National myths such as these, along with Ireland's rich history of Fair Folk beliefs were part of the Fili repertoire.

It all amounted to a pre-Renaissance version of the Art of Memory, with another way of describing the Fili as being someone who could learn to turn themselves into living Memory Palaces, with a vast store of the knowledge of Ireland itself in their heads.  This was a role open to women as much as men, and it says something about the esteem with which these bardic historians were held that one famous bit of folklore from Ireland's past concerns the words of Feidelm, a women Fili and prophet who legend has it foretold a momentous battle in Tain Bo Cuailnge which is part of the Ulster Cycle featuring the exploits of the aforementioned Cu Chulainn.  As was reported in Sinners part of a Fili's job was to serve as a bardic singer; someone who could recite the country's most cherished legends, historical events, and myths in an entire catalogue of ancient song, most of which has been lost to time, or which survives the way most folk music does to this day, as bits and fragments of forgotten music repurposes into more familiar song ballads and the like.  All of it was bulldozed away by later English military conquests.

What is notable about all this Irish history, however, is just this.  Very little of it happened until later after the Middle Ages, with the coming of Modernity.  In fact, one of the most notable, even peculiar aspects of Irish history is precisely the way it interacted with the arrival of the first Christian missionaries to the Emerald Isle's shores.  Perhaps the most shocking thing about the eventual conversion of Ireland to Christianity is how relatively undramatic it was compared with later cultural assimilations that occurred during the Reformation and the various Conquests of the New World.  Instead, what happened for the most part was that missionaries such as Bishop Palladius, or Ciaran of Clonmacnoise would wander from one Irish settlement to the next, and simply preach, and that was predominantly it.  They had there fair share of pushback, of course.  Yet the key thing is that even then, none of it resulted in massacres, crusades, or martyrdoms.  It was just a handful of new believers trying to share their own Gospel inspired way of thinking with other Celts, and perhaps the real oddity is twofold.  The first is that it happened with such relative ease, the second is the specific form this eventual national conversion took when it became the majority religious outlook of the country.

If I had to offer an explanation of how such a thing could occur, then it might have something to do with just plain good timing.  What I mean by that is it's possible that the first Missionaries to Ireland came along at just the right point in time during the evolution of the nation's cultural outlook.  Culture itself isn't a static thing.  In order to survive, it has to see if an entire way of thinking can change in ways that help it adapt to the times its living in and through.  It seems that one of the reasons Polytheism is no longer the dominant trait of belief that it used to be back during the Bronze Age is because such a system was seen as holding enough value for the vast majority of the world's population to adopt it as the truth.  As time when on, people began to gain a greater understanding of the natural elements around them, and places like Mt. Etna no longer became the dwelling place of Hephaestus, the metal-smith of the Olympus, but instead the Grecian people just came to realize that volcanoes are a natural part of the Earth's ecosystem, and so while it needs to be handled with a proper amount of caution and respect, there's no need to try and placate it as if it had an actual intelligent personality that you can just negotiate with.  Jean Seznec describes this process of mental evolution in his anthropological study, The Survival of the Pagan Gods.  It's there he offers a theory for the evolution of Polytheistic decline.

According to Seznec, the Polytheistic civilizations of ancient Europe "found themselves in a dilemma from the moment they first began to rea- son about their beliefs; for “the myth really possesses its full significance only in those epochs when man still believes himself to be living in a divine world, with no distinct notion of natural laws; but long before the end of paganism, this first naiveté had disappeared.” Indeed, the effort of modern mythographers, since early in the nineteenth century, has been to recover the primitive mentality by way of philology and anthropology, and to recapture the intuitions of the earliest periods.

"The ancients, however, in their inability to “investigate the origins of their own culture, to learn how their legends were formed and what may have been their earliest meaning,” evolved contradictory theories in order to render them intelligible—theories which are brought face to face, for ex- ample, in Cicero’s De natura deorum. In essence, these may be reduced to three: (1) the myths are a more or less distorted account of historical facts, in which the characters are mere men who have been raised to the rank of the immortals; or (2) they express the union or conflict of the elementary powers which constitute the universe, the gods then being cosmic symbols; or (3) they are merely the expression in fable of moral and philosophical ideas, in which case the gods are allegories. Now it was thanks to these interpretations, which were proposed by the ancients themselves and which integrate mythology in turn with world his- tory, natural science, and morals, that the gods were to survive through the Middle Ages, preserved alike from oblivion and from the attacks of their enemies (4)."  What Seznec proposes, then, is that the history of Polytheism in places like Greece, Rome, and Ireland traces a line of development that is based entirely on the extent of man's knowledge of the natural world itself.  In the earliest times, our perception of the cosmos was of miniscule creatures at the mercy of great unknown forces.  It's this lack of knowledge which led the Greeks to call the ocean Poseidon and that thunder came from Zeus.

As a culture begins to arrive at a more informed, or relatively enlightened view of the Chain of Being, then the ancient beliefs are revealed as myths, and hence the culture will move on from this earlier form of pre-Socratic thought.  It's this very process of evolutionary paradigm shift which allowed the Greeks to move beyond Olympus towards the field of rational enquiry embodied in Classical Philosophy.  It may just be possible that part of the reason Missionaries like St. Brendan found Celtic Ireland such an accommodating setting in which to establish the Christian Church is because the Emerald Isle was starting to undergo its own version of collective ontological set switching.  Even if this was the case, then there is one vital aspect of the Christianization of Ireland that sets it apart from that of Greece. 

When the spirituality of Ireland is thought of at all by most Culchie (as the Irish refer to most outside observers) we tend to think of two things, either the country's Celtic past, or else it's the ever-looming presence of the Catholic Church.  What most non-Irish fail to notice is the curious phenomenon of how sometimes you'll come upon ruins of ancient church sites, and you'll find iconography from Celtic myths displayed alongside figures from the Bible.  If you hold to the view that the Christian Faith forbids those kinds of displays, then it's as if at least some of the churches in Ireland (in particular the older ones) are all prepared to echo the same sentiment from The Princess Bride: "Get used to disappointment."  It probably also doesn't help that sometimes you'll run across designated Holy sites where Catholic and pre-Roman Celtic statuary sometimes share the same ground, and most of the locals never bat an eyelash at it.  Some of them even tend to treat such sites as pillars of national pride.

That's because the development of the Celtic Church in ancient Ireland presents one of, if not the sole, unique case of religious syncretism in history.  Part of the reason the conversion of the country to St. Patrick's way of thinking went so smoothly is because the majority of the visiting Missionaries decided not to colonize, but instead to adapt the expression of their Faith to ways of speaking and thinking in which the ancient Celts were already used to.  In other words, if someone like Brendan wanted to talk about Moses and the Prophets, he wouldn't do so by first dismissing the heroes from Ireland's Celtic pantheon.  Instead, he would point to these very same myths and ask the people to consider the ways in which Cu Chulainn was like Moses, or perhaps even served as an allegory of pre-figuration for the story of the Exodus.  It was this and similar processes of rhetoric and persuasion that accounts for why the earliest surviving churches in Ireland can feature displays from both myth and Scripture as part of their architectural framework.  It serves as a now mostly silent testament to the fundamentally syncretic turn that Christianity took as a result of becoming an inherent part of the Irish character.  

It details nothing less than a demonstration of Ireland's own version of a Conjure Church, a place of worship in which the tenets of Christianity somehow manage to thrive alongside beliefs in Faes and charms.  Perhaps the best example of the way early Irish Christianity mimics it's later African American counterpart is the way the Celtic Faithful utilize the figure of St. Brigid of Kildare.  The lady in question was a normal, practicing Abbes who founded a monastery in County Kildare during the 5th century.  The achievement was so successful that she is now venerated as one of Ireland's Patron Saints.  However, it's the method the Celtic Church used in creating the traditions surrounding Brigid's feast that tells just how intertwined the new Christians still were with their previous Celtic identities.  In many of the older iconography, Brigid the Abbes is combined with the figure of Brigid, a mythological goddess who formed part of the folklore surrounding the Tuatha De Danann.  For the record, that one particular myth is probably the closest Ireland ever got to its own analogue with the Greek Olympus or the Norse Valhalla.  The point is that it servers as a further correspondence to Conjuring in the African Church.

In each case, what we've got is concrete proof that there was a time in the past when there was less of a divide between the practices of African Tribal Traditions, or even the world of Irish folklore than there is today.  In both cases, the word we're looking for to explain what's going on is religious syncretism.  It's where a meeting of the minds can sometimes take place between two differing sets of faith customs, and the result can sometimes be a form of cultural exchange and integration where the traditions and beliefs of differing cultures and worldviews somehow manage to come together to form a strange yet genuine form of co-existence, where each practice is able to functions as itself under a fundementally inclusive paradigm.  The funny thing is how in cases like this, both traditions manage to avoid the over-arching threat hanging over the heads of the characters in Sinners.  

There's little to no threat of cultural assimilation, and a form of open cultural dialogue and exchange takes place without either side somehow ever losing their unique and distinct identities.  It's a far cry from the promises that someone like Remmick makes in Coogler's film.  It's also a forgotten tradition for the most part now, yet it was once a vital part of the history of Christian thought in Ireland, and what's remarkable is how well it jibes with Chireau's description of African Christianity.  The Fili were able to thrive in their new Pre-Renaissance Christian environment because their roles as living Memory Palaces meant they contained the vast amount of knowledge of the Celts stored in their heads, and rather than letting them fade away, the Irish Missionaries insisted on hearing the various strands of folklore, mythology, and history preserved in the minds of the Fili.  It's because of this shared effort of cultural remembrance that figures like the goddess Brigid, the Tuatha De Danann, and stories of the Fair Folk were able to survive no longer just in the Irish memory, but instead became a worldwide cultural heritage.  This is the background knowledge that Coogler drew from to craft the character of his villain. 

  

When it comes to how all this ties into the character of Remmick and his portrayal in Coogler's film, then we've reached the point where I'll have to go back to a bit of fan speculation, yet it's one that at least draws upon actual material given to us by the movie itself.  For instance, in the opening scene, the viewer is presented with a series of woodcut style drawings depicting various cultures (African, Native American, and Irish) and the various bards, wise men, and troubadours who were said to have a supernatural musical gift.  There's a number of interesting details about the Fili woodcut that's worth commenting on here.  The first is that it's clear from the the dress code on display that the people illustrated in the drawing are meant to represent the Early Modern, or Renaissance period in Irish history.  The type of Elizabethan shirts, hats, and ruffs would have all been seen as out of place and outré during Geoffrey Chaucer's time, yet were considered the clothing of a well-bred gentleman in the heyday of the Globe Theater.  This is the only snapshot the viewer is given of the kind of background Remmick comes from, and its clear it's meant to represent an Early Modern scene in Ireland's history.

The second aspect to notice is one figure in particular amongst the gathered group in the picture.  He's noticeable for how familiar he looks.  In fact, he bears an uncanny resemblance to the film's main villain.  It's easy to see how fan theories can spin out of just a single frame of film, and I'm aware of at least one that posits the idea that Remmick might have been a Fili himself once, back when he was a human in the Age of Spenser and Shakespeare.  I can see and understand where the logic of this theory comes from.  At the same time, I think it needs a bit of modification.  The reason for this is because it's clear from the Irish woodcut picture that even if the dancing man is meant to be Remmick, he's still not showcased as an example of a Fili.  That role is clearly meant to belong to the fellow strumming the lute.  It's clear that it's his playing which is responsible for the image of the spirits emerging out of the camp fire that everyone is gathered around, and he bears no resemblance to Jack O'Connell.  It's clear he's an older man, for one thing, with a different build and sense of mannerisms.  The dancing man presents this hyper-active, caught up in the moment vibe, whereas the lute player is shown to be the one who is clearly in control of both the music and it's effects.  Thus he's the actual Fili in shown there.

Now with that said, there's still the question of why does one of the dancers in that image look like Remmick?  Well, here's where I'd like to offer an alternate fan theory, if I may.  It might still be possible to claim that this picture represents the single snapshot we as viewers ever get of Remmick's past.  The major distinction is that while he's not the Fili player in that woodcut, it might make sense to think of him as the lute player's apprentice.  In other words, it might make more sense to view the lute player as an Ollam, which was the title given to a Fili master.  Back in Ireland's ancient past, the post of Ollam Erenn was the highest position any Fili could have achieved.  If you'd won that post, you were considered the Master Poet of Ireland, the one person most responsible for the nation's lore, history, poetry, myths, dances, and songs.  If that sounds like a lot to put on the shoulders of someone, bear in mind, this was a pre-literate, pre-social media era.  The only way any country could maintain it's culture was by word of mouth, all of which was kept alive through continuous communal customs and rituals.  It's the only natural means that humans have once all other attempts at preserving our histories and cultural heritages don't exist.  So of course a Master Fili would be responsible for Ireland's lore.

If we go with the idea that the lute player in Sinners is an Ollam (if maybe not the Master Poet of Ireland), and the dancing man is meant to represent Remmick, then it's not too out of place to posit that maybe Remmick was the player's Flescach, or "Wand Bearer", which was a common term used to describe any beginning student who was training to become the next line of Fili of Irish culture.  From this angle, the full meaning of the woodcut becomes a bit more legible.  It's meant to function as an illustrated snapshot of Remmick's past.  We see him at possibly his last fleeting moment of happiness as a mortal human, surrounded by his mentor the lute player, his friends, family, and maybe even his clan.  It's even possible to take the picture and alter it in such a way as to tell what might have happened next.  All that needs to happen is for the other figures in the portrait to slowly vanish one by one, while the faint sounds of echoing screams can be heard in the distance.  This would represent the downfall of both Remmick's clan and his people as they fall to the full might of the British crown as it slaughters whole swaths of Ireland's population, and everyone Remmick ever knew falls to English colonization.

At last there are just two illustrated figures left in the woodcut, those being Remmick, and his lute playing Master.  Then even the Fili vanishes from sight, except for the lute, which is left hanging in mid-air, before it bursts into flames; a final symbolic victim of genocide.  With the burning of the lute, the communal fire begins to extinguish, and the spirits of the past and future begin to fade away with it, leaving Remmick now completely alone in the frame.  He's no longer depicted as dancing.  Instead, he's just this lone figure in a blank landscape, except for a hill in the distance, and an illustration of the Sun in the sky.  The illustrated Remmick is no longer smiling, and his eyes have taken on a darker cast.  The image of a lake appears at his feet, and his reflection can be seen in it.  At last, the Sun begins to sink out of sight, until it too disappears behind the hill, leaving Remmick's figure shrouded in darkness.  After a beat, his reflection mirrored in the lake also vanishes, and soon the figure's eyes start to glow.  Everything Remmick once knew is now gone, and the former dancing man, is now the Undead Man.

That at least gives you one idea of how the character's back story came about.  In that sense, the full meaning of the vampire at the heart of Coogler's film starts to become a bit more clearer.  Remmick is best seen as a symbolization of the worst case scenario of what can happen to any member of oppressed peoples, it also makes him perhaps the best illustration of why so many of us choose to fight back against that kind of systemic evil.  It seems such atrocities carry too much of a risk that it will turn some of us into the very monsters we wish to avoid.  That's got to be the best argument out there for trying to "stay in the light", as they say.  That just leaves us with what Coogler is doing with all this material.

D. A Southern Gothic Tragedy.

Stephen King uses a number of terms to describe what he sees as a cluster of constant ingredients that the American Gothic story keeps circling back to, time and again.  These key phrases are: Microcosm and Macrocosm, along with a pair of related markers known as Dionysian and Apollonian, respectively.  What I'd like to posit now is that this specific set of vocabulary can be of service in helping us to get a better clue of the larger picture Coogler is busy painting for his audience.  Specifically, it helps us understand the film's presentation of the Dance and how Remmick and the other characters relate to this gift of music.  This strikes me as at least a possible valid enough reading of the movie, because it's clear that this music gift of otherworldly Song, and its power to bring people to together in a community is the closest thing the movie has to an over-arching symbol, or continuous motif.  The idea of Song and its Communal Dance is what opens the film, and the final scene functions as a ringing affirmation of that initial setup once we reunite with the remainder of the film's main cast, as they are portrayed several decades down the road.  It's a closer that restates the original sentiments expressed in the opening, and we'll get to that importance of that in a minute.  For the moment, let's look at the film using the key terms that often become a part of a good Horror story, at least according to Stephen King.

Now, just to answer one obvious objection up front, for those who worry that I might be putting words in the director's mouth, it should be noted that Coogler himself has said that King's 1975 novel Salem's Lot was one of the key source materials that he deliberately drew upon in constructing the movie's depiction of vampires.  This statement is born out during the film's final confrontation between Sammy, Smoke, and Remmick, where it's clear Coogler is using King's narrative retro-fitting of the prior mythology established by Bram Stoker's original Dracula.  In Salem's Lot, King doesn't throw out the guidelines that Stoker's novel laid down.  Instead, it's more that he introduces some interesting wrinkles that make the task of staking on the Undead a bit more of an interesting challenge.  It's these elements from King's work that Coogler incorporates into Sinners' narrative.  Therefore I'd argue it's not too far off the mark to use King's own thoughts about these four ingredients as staples of the Horror genre when the film's own director acknowledges a great deal of influence from the creator of Salem's Lot.

With this in mind, one of the constant ideas that King posits as part of the modern Gothic tale is that: "First, a microcosm serves as the arena where universal forces collide (297)."  Second, this Gothic arena "functions as an image of authoritarianism, of imprisonment, or of “confining narcissism (ibid)."  This outline serves as a surprisingly apt description for the Jim Crow Plantation setting that the main cast finds itself a perpetual victim of in Sinners.  It's also interesting to note in terms of the movie's inciting action.  The entire plot is kicked off because Smoke and Stack want to create a safe space for the people of their hometown.  The establishment of Club Juke is meant to strike a blow against the dominant racism that controls the community's lives, as seen in the form of bigoted pigs like Hogwood.  The central tragedy at the heart of the film is that despite the Twins best efforts, they both live long enough to see their place of freedom become a Gothic prison they must hide inside in order to keep free from the threat of the monsters lurking outside.  It's in these moments were part of the meaning behind Remmick and his thralls becomes the most obvious, as its clear they function as a symbolic stand-in for the same cultural appropriation that would bring Black music into the mainstream, while consigning its artists to the fringes.  However, bear in mind, I said that it had real world personal resonance for Coogler himself.  It's the other aspect of the film's presentation of vampirism we need to explore.

We'll get there soon enough.  However, right now its enough to first note the most obvious aspect of what vampires mean in the film, and to then take it further up and further in.  That's because Coogler isn't content to just leave things at the level of one-for-one allegory.  He's also interested in exploring the mindset that helps create and perpetuate racism, and it's here that the other three thematic terms King mentions come into play.  According to King, "the horror tale generally details the outbreak of some Dionysian madness in an Apollonian existence, and that the horror will continue until the Dionysian forces have been repelled and the Apollonian norm restored again (422)."  Most of Coogler's film is concerned with an attempt by two of the protagonists to craft such an ordered safe space for themselves and their community.  Smoke and Stack both hope that Club Juke will be the one place in segregated Clarksdale that will allow their fellow sharecroppers and plantation workers at least one moment in their day when they can remember that they are human beings above all else.  It's to the Twins' credit that part of their goal is dedicated to perhaps the noblest truth out there, and they are both smart enough to recognize that fact.  Like all great tragedies, however, the plan carries a fatal flaw within itself.

Smoke and Stack both believe in the value of their community, and their wanting to give something back to the folks from their own hometown is a standing testament to it.  It's all the more poignant if you include some of film's expanded lore material, where it's revealed that the Twins were always looked on with some suspicion growing up, due to the bad reputation that their old man had around town.  When Smoke killed his father with his own bear hands, most of the Black community in Clarksdale thought it was just a case of a bad apple never falls far from the tree.  So the town basically expected the pair to each live up to the images the town had of them in their collective heads, and the irony is that both brothers decided to more or less oblige them without protest.  For not one but each of them to come back later on and try to give back to the same community that originally cast them out makes the big-heartedness of their gesture all the more remarkable.  It signals an unspoken motivation on the Twins to start again in their own home on a better, and more well-regarded foot.  It's little details like these which make the tragic flaw at the heart of their venture stand out in ironic crystal clarity.

The Smokestack Twins may have been trying to provide a safe place for the African-American citizens of Clarksdale to be themselves, and yet it's not enough.  It doesn't do much to better the conditions of the formerly enslaved families of their community.  All it does is give them a place to hide.  The Club doesn't allow its patrons to be considered as actual citizens.  That's the vital point that both Stack and Smoke seem to miss, perhaps until its too late.  In order for Clarksdale's Black community to truly be free, they must be recognized as valid members of a Democratic American society.  It's the one service that Club Juke can't provide for any of them, and it speaks of an unspoken sentiment that a vampirized Stack later throws back right into his elder sibling's face: "We’ve been running around everywhere looking for freedom.  You know damn well you was never gonna find it."  The worst part about this exchange is that while it's true Stack is speaking from an essentially brainwashed perspective, there are hints in the brothers' earlier interactions that indicate this might very well have been the worst possible fear lurking somewhere in the back of Smoke's mind, at least, and in the best Southern Gothic tradition, his own sibling becomes one of the monsters, and then proceeds to throw that fear back in his face.

There's also the fact that what the Twins regarded at first as a possible safe space is later revealed to be not any kind of home.  Instead, as Remmick reveals to the cast, the Club itself is one big Gothic trap set up by the KKK, who use it as a place to lure unwary victims to their eventual death by lynching.  It's this revelation that unmasks the Club as what Stephen King refers to as a Bad Place, a "gothic house" that "functions as an image of authoritarianism, of imprisonment, or of “confining narcissism (297).”  Or as one of the other vampires says, "This was no juke joint.  No club.  This here’s a slaughterhouse.  It’s a goddamn killing floor."  Or to put it another way, the one place the Twins they thought they could run away to and use as hiding place turned out to be the very same spot under the bridge where the evil troll lies waiting claim his victims.  The KKK has effectively used the Smokestack Twins to become their own jailers, and then invite the rest of their community into one big prison cell to await their slaughter.  What makes it all the more tragic is that these turn of events are in perfect keeping with a common trope in Horror fiction, where the protagonist's own blindness is what leads him to danger.

In this sense, Coogler's film truly does deserve to be called a textbook example of the Southern Gothic, as it's a narrative in which not only are there monsters roaming about, but also, "in what might be termed a psychological pathetic fallacy, the physical surroundings often mimic the inward-turning of the characters themselves (ibid)."  As Stephen King further observes, "The bare situation is enough to delineate the conflict in" Sinners"; in its way it is as clearly a conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysian as Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," or Bram Stoker's Dracula, or Salem's Lot for that matter (275)."  King has one further observation that connects well to the Terror at the heart of Coogler's narrative.  "We may also find ourselves returning to the tension between Apollonian and Dionysian, since this tension exists in all horror fiction, the bad as well as the good, leading back to that endlessly fascinating question of who’s okay and who isn’t (265)."  It's that last question that preoccupies the remainder of Sinners runtime, as the few remaining members in the cast find themselves scrambling not just to keep the vampires outside, but also how to determine which of those inside still count as human.

It's often treated as a fun little scene, and that's true to an extent (it's where Delroy Lindoo and Jayme Lawson both get their moments to shine, for instance), however I think this ignores the way in which this scene acts as, if maybe not the ultimate nadir for the trajectories of the various characters, it is perhaps the one point in the plot where Smoke's efforts at crafting a safe space gets turned on its head in the most darkly comic manner possible.  Elijah Moore is a man who settled for trying to run away from his problems instead of trying to help solve them, to the point where he'd rather hide himself away from others, with the possible exception of the community that represents the closest thing he ever had to a home.  And so now things are reversed to the point where a large handful of that community is dead, and now he's having difficulty telling whether he can trust the few remaining companions he has left, or if he'll have to drive a stake through one of them.  What gets talked about the most from that scene, aside from its comedy, is the fact that Coogler said he borrowed from John Carpenter's The Thing in order to craft it.  However this still doesn't acknowledge the more or less Classical Tragic quality of the scene for the character of Smoke, nor how its driven home when his worst fears are realized a bit later.

It works because it functions as an illustration of what trying to run and hide from racists can lead to, instead of remembering that you are, after all, a Man, and that this should be enough for you to take a necessary stand against the kind of injustice that guys like Hogwood love to dish out to others who never deserved it in the first place.  It's Smoke's failure to take this precise course of action that, in pretty much classic Shakespearean fashion, leads to the loss of all those he loved.  A lot of it could be down to the way he let others define him, thus letting himself be defined in ways that "men" like Hogwood would approve of, even if he puts on a brave show of standing up to racists.  He still gets caught out playing by the KKK's rules in the end ,and it comes with the sort of cost you might expect.  It's these small and subtle moments that still tend to get missed by even the film's most ardent fans that all point to Sinners being one of the best examples of Tragic Southern Gothic Horror out there.

E. The Dance and the Undead Man.

By now, we've come pretty far in our analysis, yet there are three unanswered questions left to examine..  The first is what all of this exegesis still might have to do with the topic of the Dance, and how do the film's vampires factor into it.  The third question we'll get to in the conclusion of this essay.  For the moment, there's still one more critical term that applies very well to this film.  If the main setting for the story of Sinners is one that functions as a Microcosm for the threat of racism, and the ways in which citizens either mange or fail to deal with the problem, then there's also one final element which acts as an urgent and much needed counterpoint to all of unflinching violence and Tragedy that Coogler's script presents us with.  This would be the constantly recurring topic of Song as it's expressed in the rhythms, harmonies, and chords of the Delta Blues, and the way this has of brining the community together in celebration of the promise of a hoped for freedom.  The most common way in which this hope is expressed is the manner in which good music is the sort that makes you want to get up and dance to the beat.  Coogler takes this notion of Song as an Inspiration to Dance, and imbues it with a great deal of existential import.  Here is where things become sort of difficult to describe, as I can't say I know just what Coogler's exact thoughts were when he crafted this element of his story, at least not beyond a certain point.

There's a great deal to the way Coogler presents the power of music in this film, and most of what I can grasp of it is pretty much the same as others have figured out.  It's meant as a celebration of Black culture in America, and how first the Antebellum slaves, and later their future and present day descendants used Song as a method of both resistance and resilience in the midst of years of suffering and real life tragedy.  Then there's that other aspect the director attaches to it.  It's the one puzzle piece of his picture that Coogler sort of forces us to decipher on our own.  The best place to start would be what we can learn from the dialogue.  As Del Lindoo's character Delta Slim describes it, "There's magic in what we do.  It's sacred, and it's big."  While this information is scant, it's obvious enough that Song, and its ability to get others to join in the Dance is something the director sees as having some sort of existential weight, for lack of a better term.  The other important line of dialogue states that, "With this ritual, we heal our people, and we be free," which points to the idea that music can have an obvious social import, and yet it's clear the words are meant to evoke something more which at the same time is able to take up the suffering of the Black community and make them whole.  For what it's worth, here's the best that I can make out of all that, and bear in mind, this is going to be like a very poor translation.

It seems most likely that Coogler gets this notion of Cosmic Music from at least two sources.  One of them is the African Griot theory of music as a powerful natural element that the singer taps into not just to achieve a good artistic effect, but also cause the music to become a celebration that effects the entirety of the listener, in such a way as to turn the music itself into a kind of Dance in which all find themselves drawn to.  What's interesting to note is that while Sammy's West African ancestors might have seen their Mississippi Delta descendent as tapping into Nyama, or the Vital Life Force of the universe, Remmick might have viewed the piercing of the veil as an unexpected yet powerful demonstration of someone who managed to tap into one of the Three Noble Strains of Dagda's Harp.  This is a similar concept to the Griot Nyama, except its an analogue from Celtic folklore.  "Within the myths, legends, and lore of Ireland, spanning from pre-Christian oral tradition to modern day, music features strongly as a source of connection with the “Otherworld,” or the realm of the gods, the fairies, and the dead...In Irish mythology, the Otherworld is the source of all music, and experiencing music serves a metaphysical link to that world, which always exists at the edge of our consciousness... 

"The myth of the Dagda’s harp is a foundational story of the Irish cosmology which demonstrates this relationship. This myth specifically illustrates how music was believed to act as a bridge between the sacred and the mundane, facilitating the integration of the mythology into daily life, and shifting consciousness into states of ecstasy, grief, and sleep. These powers of music ensured connection and right relationship with the natural and spirit worlds."  Further info on this concept can be found here.  What's noteworthy about this Irish equivalent of Cosmological Music is that as a vital part of Irish culture, it was of course part and parcel of what all Fili's were expected to learn, whether they be a master or an apprentice.  Not only did recitation of these myths form a vital core of Ireland's bardic tradition, it was also another aspect that was allowed to exist and thrive alongside and even within the Celtic Church, at least until the Reformation colonization started by King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth.  What this means in terms of plot is that we have a Bluesman meeting up with a former Irish Bard, and part of the clash comes from the way Sammy and Remmick serve as positive and negative mirror images of one another, and how each of them don't just relate to this elemental power of Song, but also how each utilizes this gift allows them to create different musical expressions of the Dance.

I'm not even talking about the obvious difference between African American Blues and Irish Folk Music.  I'm talking about what each singer does with his respective musical tradition.  Both the hero and the villain serve as men who either have, or once had a vital connection with the power of Music and Song, which is treated here is as something akin to a Platonic Archetype, something that's part of a greater ontological structure which sustains the life of man, and the world as we know it.  What this means then is that if the Juke Joint and the people inside it all serve as a collective Microcosm of the American South and the racism embodied in it, then it's Sammy's gift of song that functions as a kind of stand-in for, or pointer to the larger Macrocosm that defines the ruling ideal of this film, which means that it's plot ultimately centers around how the various characters in the play orientate themselves toward it as the narrative's moral center.  You've got both Smoke and Stack, for instance, who claim to be trying to create a safe haven for their African American community, and yet the plot makes clear their shared fatal flaw.  For all the Twins' tough talk, they've each let their fears of Jim Crow get the better of them.

Rather than making the right choice to take a stand against their situation, and the entrenched systematic racism that is its defining feature, the two brothers decide on the metaphorical equivalent of hiding their heads in the sand, and in doing so place themselves at the mercy of the very monster they were trying to avoid.  It's true that Smoke eventually does realize he has to take some kind of stand, and does so with a tour-de-force blaze of glory at the end, the fact remains that this was the one option he was trying to avoid in the first place, and its a flawed policy that Smoke holds to even before the true Horror begins to show up on his doorstep.  There's an earlier scene between Elijah and Sammy, where Smoke grills the young Blues prodigy about what he wants to do with his future.  Sammy tells him that he plans on making a living playing guitar, that he wants to try his luck in Chicago the way Smoke and Stack once did.  The major difference is he plans to make it stick.  To Sam's own shock, Smoke tries to dissuade his nephew from essentially taking charge of his own life and destiny, instead telling him about an all Black community nearby where Smoke wants him to go.  This scene is crucial for the larger events that follow, because its the one point where the film's Microcosm defines itself against the Macrocosm of Music and the Dance that shapes the ultimate background of the film's secondary world and it's hero.

Smoke does nothing to encourage his own family here.  Instead, he sticks to his self-ingrained character flaw by telling his nephew to forget about playing the Blues, and to go hide himself away in another safe space where he thinks the Klan won't bother him.  The idea isn't just kind of self-defeating to the point of absurdity (if the Klan practically controls the Jim Crow South, then what on Earth makes Smoke think they'll leave an all-Black town alone?) it's also a case of Elijah being true to his own cowardice, even going so far as trying to intimidate Sam by pulling a gun on his cousin and threatening him with it.  It's telling that in this moment, Sammy is able to call his his bluff, and there's not a damn thing Smoke can do about it, and the character clearly knows it, which is why he does nothing when Sammy declares his intent, and then simply goes on his way.  It's one of the film's quieter moments, and perhaps that's what makes it's importance all the easier to overlook, when it fact it might just be the real pivot point on which the entire plot turns.  It's where the story arrives at a crossroads point, where two of the three main leads declare where they stand in the Microcosm of their surroundings, and how their choices in that moment define them in terms of the Macrocosm.  Smoke makes what is essentially a coward's choice, and he pays for it later on.  Though to be fair, he recognizes this and makes up for it.

Sammy, on the other hand, chooses the opposite direction.  The opening moments of the film establish him as a young man who knows very well the situation he's in, and the simple fact is he's had enough of it.  He wants a real life, not one that forces him to be a chattel slave in all but name on paper.  He sees the Blues as his ticket out of here, and it's a choice he ultimately never wavers from.  It's to his credit then that Sammy, whether knowingly or not, embraces his ancestral gift, and leans into it in a way that allows this choice to tap into the great Macrocosm of Music and Dance that is the film's central core.  In doing so, he proves himself to be the real hero of the film.  It's also what makes him the movie's Apollonian main lead, someone who represents the American Black community's ability to take charge of themselves, and assert their own rights as natural, free citizens in a healthy American society.  It's also this choice which marks him out as a positive doppelganger to the film's villain.  If Sam Moore ultimately is presented as this Apollonian artist who can bring justice, fairness, and above all, a sense of hope and positive change to his community through his gift of Song, then Remmick is the film's Dionysian agent of disorder.  Someone carries the forces of chaos and Old Night to wherever he goes.

I've described Remmick and Sam as doppelgangers of one another, and that is because each of them represents a polar opposite reaction to the forces of colonization, genocide, and prejudice.  Whereas Sammy uses his musical gifts to transfigure the sufferings of his people, and thus create a viable expression of cultural power and resilience which allows him and others the strength to fight back against their oppressors, Remmick is someone whose entire being is defined by loss, of family, his land, and eventually his entire home and its artistic heritage, and he's let it fester and whither him into a literal walking corpse.  In that sense, he's a man who has let himself be conquered in several senses of the that term.  He's someone who is consumed by a profound level of sadness, and yet he never seems to consider finding ways in which to channel all that anguish into positive ends.  Instead, it could be implied that it was being a victim, perhaps even the sole survivor of a genocidal campaign of English Plantation settlement that ultimately drove Remmick to seek out some supernatural means of retribution against his oppressors, and while he might have found a method of paying the British colonists back, it also turned out to be one of those choices that robs you of your humanity, and turns you into a monster.

With a perfect sense of irony, he found a full proof way of fighting back against the unlawful presence of British colonization, yet in doing so, he fulfills the words of Charles Dickens.  He's forged a new set of chains for himself, "link by link and yard by yard."  These are the chains of vampirism, "and of his own free will", he now wears them.  The result is that Remmick now lives the life of an Undead Man, someone who is always in a state of dissolution, and who always needs to prey upon others to keep one step ahead of some final reckoning.  In terms of the film's larger themes, a part of what he represents is the worst case scenario of what racial injustice can do to a person.  Coogler intimates through Remmick that what makes prejudice a literal social disease is that it always carries the risk of turning the oppressed into just another oppressor.  Remmick is someone who has experienced oppression at the hands of the British Empire, and it's broken his mind to the point where he's let it turn him into the very thing he claims to be against.  He likes to claim that he's against racism in all its forms, and yet his actions speak of someone who has becomes obsessed less with any genuine equality between races and more about trying to recapture a past that's so dead and gone it's left him as a man without any country.

In addition to this, it's implied that for Remmick, the worst part about being and Undead Man is that it has effectively cut him off from the Macrocosmic source of Music and Dance that he used to know as a human.  If we go with the theory that Remmick was once an apprentice Fili, someone who was training to become a high ranking bard of his nation's heritage, then part of what might be driving his actions is the felt loss of that ability to tap into what the African Griots refer to as Nyama, and what Remmick and his ancestors might have thought of as Musica Mundana.  He might have been a man who once might have shared in the same musical gift as Sammy, where he had a nascent talent to pierce the veil of Song.  The one interesting question that such a theory raises is whether or not Remmick's version of this same Gift also allowed him the bonus of Second Sight.  In other words, could he also see his ancestors when he was still a living young bard in training?  This is where Coogler's story really doesn't seem to provide any concrete answers on that score, I'm afraid.  What is certain is that Remmick is now able to see and witness the ultimate results of this Gift, how some music is capable of tapping into a Dance that spans across ages, and yet is somehow able to unite different points of time and space into All Times.

Whether or not this was something he could do when he was still a human being, it's certain that being a Creature of the Night has now left him with the ability to see this otherworldly Dance that he's now forever barred from, and it's pretty obvious that it's this desire to join in that Dance once more that seems to be Remmick's ultimate motivation.  The trouble with this goal is twofold.  For one thing, as a vampire, Remmick who might be able to still see the Dance, yet it's implied he can never really take part in it, and this is something the villain spells out in his own words: "I wanna see my people again. I’m trapped here. But your gifts can bring ’em to me."  These words seem to hint that while Remmick still has a Second Sight ability that allows him to see the Dance, whether or not he ever could conjure it up with his own skills as a possible Fili, it's clear he can do no such thing now as a monster.  In fact, he utilizes music in the film in the exact opposite way that Sammy does.  Whereas Sammy composes songs that results in the crafting of an essentially Open Society, Remmick calls upon his own musical heritage for the purposes of sheer control and domination.  His big moment comes when he gathers his new made followers together in a meadow, and proceeds to belt out a recital of The Rocky Road to Dublin.

It's an absolute banger of a scene, and often gets talked about as the second best sequence in the movie.  It's also always compared with the I Lied to You scene from earlier.  There's a very good reason why those two sequences tend to stand out in viewer's minds, yet its a pretty ironic one.  That's because it's clear Coogler wants to demonstrate exactly how Remmick functions as a vampiric doppelganger to Sammy's gifted talents as a Blues musician.  That's because it's the one moment that showcases Remmick's nature as a walking, talking inversion of every value that Sammy stands for.  It's a crucial plot point that's made clear with a little bit of comparison between the film's main heroic protagonist and the villain.  Sammy's gifts come to him in a natural way, whereas Remmick has stripped this same talent away from him by choice, thus allowing an unmanageable grief and anger to be his guiding light.  Sammy is the most optimistic and idealistic character of the entire cast, whereas Remmick is a lost soul in full surrender to an essentially cosmic sense of nihilism.  It's this same optimism that not only fuels Sammy's drive to change his life for the better, but that also adds a bit of fuel to whatever Fire it is that powers the ability of his music to pierce the Veil.  Remmick can see this gift, but he can never use it.

It remains an open question whether this musical gift was a shared one between an ex-Irish Fili and a West African American Griot singer, yet it's their respective reactions to that same gift that further highlights the greatest differences between hero and villain.  The effects of Sammy's premier at Club Juke amounts to more than just the debut of new musical talent (though it does turn out to be just that).  It also serves to conjure up a specific type of Dance.  It's one that exists in a state without coercion.  It's one that becomes nothing less than a celebration of the full meaning of freedom in its ultimate Democratic sense.  Everyone there at Club Juke is free to sit back and contemplate the Dance as it unfolds, or else they can always get up and enjoy it by joining in.  All the Dance moves of the Club's patrons are simple, easy, and each step and swing belongs fully to each.  You can tell that everyone in this crowd is no one but themselves, and none of them seem to be lonely.  Nor is it limited to the African/African Americans.  In addition to spirits from the past of the African tribal experience, we see a few that harken back to the legacy of Asian arts, in the form of a pair of Chinese opera performers, signaling that Sammy's music is of the type that truly celebrates all the diversity that life has to offer.

Now compare this to the later sequence featuring Remmick and his new made hoard of followers.  It's a scene laced with fine layers of irony.  For instance, it's clear the antagonist means for the spectacle to be a moment of celebration for the new family he seems intent on creating for himself, one where the stated goal is to be a focus on "fellowship and love."  However, the actual practice of Remmick's dance belies the falsehood behind his words, and perhaps even his genuinely intended aims.  For starters, he immediately centers the festivities around himself, rather than letting the Dance itself be the focus of attention.  For another thing, none of the participants are ever really allowed to be themselves.  They aren't even permitted to mingle freely like they did during Sammy's performance.  Instead, they are a hive mind under the control of the vampire monarch.  It means that everyone is stuck to a specific place where they're ordered to go (and does that remind you of anything when applied to the lives of African Americans?), they must step in time to a specific rhythm, rather than being allowed to find their own footing in it on their own, as even most traditional Irish dances tend to play out in real life.  Everyone one except the head vampire travels in a circle, yet they're never allowed to interact with one another in a way that is normal for this kind of celebration.  Remmick, meanwhile, is the one who occupies the spotlight.  He takes up center stage and never interacts with others, thus making it all about himself.

The worst aspect about Remmick's performance is the underlying hypocrisy that his actions create as they clash with the inherent message of the traditional Irish ballad he's reciting.  Rocky Road to Dublin is a narrative song detailing the common prejudices that Irish immigrants faced in places as near as Great Britain, including the usual derogatory slurs directed their way by English settlers in their own communities.  It also chronicles how the narrator is able to triumph against his oppressors when he unites with his fellow Dubliners and takes a stand for not just his own, but their whole collective dignity.  For Remmick to take one of the most affirmative anthems in Irish history and make it all about himself is a gesture that flies straight in the face of the meaning of the song.  It serves as a double irony because one thing the film makes clear is an inherent bond that Irish Folk Music shares in common with the Blues, as both are genres of song and storytelling that stem from the experience of suffering born of racism.  By turning a group of African Americans into vampires against their will, and then forcing them into lockstep with a song none of them most likely never knew before, and not giving them any choice in the matter, Remmick is not only guilty of the racism he claims to abhor, he also insults the spirit of his own legacy as its embodied in Rocky Road, thus making him the worst sort of hypocrite.

It's with all these facts in mind that the idea of a True and a False, or an Open and Closed Dance begins to make a bit more sense.  It serves as the best possible metaphor not just for the contrasting styles of Sammy and Remmick, it's also a good shorthand term for the two opposing philosophies that the film puts in the spotlight.  Each one serves as the container for two clashing viewpoints, or a pair of competing Microcosms.  In one of them, Sammy's music is one that exists in an ongoing and persistent search for the kind of order to be found in a truly Open Society.  His songs advocate for the African American community as a collective of natural citizens with an inherent dignity that grants them the right to exist as human beings.  Remmick's goals, by contrast serve to perpetuate the same microcosmic prison that King talks about, one that is defined by the overruling narcissism of the film's main antagonist.  Remmick's entire arc is that of a man who turns himself into a monster in his inability to properly deal with the historical trauma inflicted upon him.  Rather than use it as a spur to solidarity first with his own Irish heritage, and then extend a laurel leaf to another culture in a similar situation, Remmick instead turns his entire world into a distorted Gothic reflecting mirror where it's all about him.

Conclusion: A Timely and Future Classic of Gothic and General Cinema.

I'd like to leave this review off with a consideration of a handful of topics that all seem to be interconnected by their presentation in this film.  This would be an examination of the meaning of the vampirism that serves as the Horror the underlies Coogler's story.  I'll then leave off with what seems to be the real life applicability that Coogler means for us to takeaway from behind and within all the fantastical seeming elements of the film, and how this ties into the presence of two important final aspects of the Coogler's opus.  One of them proves to be an integral part of the movie's conclusion, the other is something of a surprise, as it lies waiting to be discovered in a music video that acts as a bit of supplementary promotional material.  That last bit might sound like focusing on a piece of unimportant surplus, however there is one element to Rod Wave's promotional video for Sinners that I think helps make the ultimate meaning and takeaway that Coogler was aiming for a bit more clearer for viewers.  If all of this sounds like a comedown of sorts from all the high sense of exploration to be had in the paragraph above, then it helps to bear in mind that all of those elements just outlined are the bells and whistles that are meant to go together in the service of the narrative.  It is the story that comes first, last, and always in terms of importance, and the whole point of the type of film Coogler is making is that it fits in neatly with a specific category of cinema that Stephen King talks about in Danse Macabre, this would be the Horror film as a form of social commentary. 

"If horror movies have redeeming social merit," King writes, "it is because of that ability to form liaisons between the real and unreal—to provide subtexts. And because of their mass appeal, these sub¬ texts are often culture-wide. In many cases—particularly in the fifties and then again in the early seventies—the fears expressed are sociopolitical in nature, a fact that gives such disparate pictures as Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist a crazily convincing documentary feel. When the horror movies wear their various sociopolitical hats—the B-picture as tabloid editorial—they often serve as an extraordinarily accurate barometer of those things which trouble the night-thoughts of a whole society (139)."  I think King gives the best definition of the type of modern day fairy tale yarn that Coogler has spun for theater-goers.  It's the idea of the Horror film as a commentary on the nightmares of the audience.  In this case, the spotlight is shown on the very identifiable fears that have haunted America's Black community since the discovery of the New World, and the Puritans landing at Plymouth Rock in the 1600s.  To say that Sinners is concerned with the ongoing blight of racial prejudice in America is a bit like saying that Niagara Falls runs downhill.

In some ways, Coogler is at something of a disadvantage, because the unnoticed problem is that his examination of bigotry in America is so self-evident that it's easy for the specific way he addresses the subject to get lost in a haze of commentary that is by now well familiar to American armchair politics.  The forest Coogler is wading through is so big and all-encompassing, that it's often difficult for audiences to stop and pay attention to which specific trees he pauses at to mark as important, and why that is.  For instance, it's easy for the film's very specific portrayal of vampirism, and the type of racism it might very well be addressing, to get overlooked.  To be fair, this is an understandable point.  Racism is one of those real life fears that has become so all-encompassing in recent years that it's almost become a question of not being able to tell who you can count on as an ally.  And yet what few people notice is that this seems to be the precise point that Coogler is addressing in his film.  It's a commentary on the troubled racial politics of the era in which is it made, and of how this applies to a specific aspect of the situation that both African and other American minorities seem to have found themselves in of late.  This is the scenario where you turn to someone who says they are in your corner, and want to help.  Then, next thing you know, they turned right around and trivialized your struggle with cliches.

The struggles and sufferings of the Black community aren't addressed in any proper manner, and are instead made a victim of the cultural assimilation that doesn't offer a cure for the disease of racism, and instead seems to function as an arm of the same systematic prejudice that tries to deny the African American citizen his or her full rights.  There's less of a need to keep the chattel in line through violence when you can just lead them down blind alleys where a series of carefully intricate social traps lie in wait from them.  That what's the nature of cultural assimilation seems to be, and this seems to be the final message the film has deliver on the nature of modern prejudice.  It's one of the big takeaways from the movie's final scene, where a now elderly Sammy meets up with a vampirized Stack 60 years down the road.  The denouement of their final meeting is a study in contrasts.  The first half of which amounts to Stack admitting that he's now a man who lives only a kind of half-life, and that the last time he was ever truly free was for one brief moment that night at Clube Juke, when he and Mary joined Sammy in the Dance.  That whole exchange and statement seem to be Coogler's final word on the nature of how modern African America has somehow found itself caught in a trap of cultural assimilation, and the result has left this segment of the population struggling with a profound moment of identity crisis.

It's a powerful and heartbreaking note to leave the film on, and part of the problem is that it's clear this isn't an issue that can stay confined to the monsters on the screen.  In the best tradition of the Horror genre, the Terrors that stalk the unlighted corners of the screen serve as potent metaphors for the obstacles that American Blacks have had to put up with in the long campaign for social acceptance.  In addition to this collective aspect of the plight, I think it's also possible that Coogler has thrown in a bit of his own experience with this same phenomena, and the way he found it waiting for him even in Hollywood, the one place he might have thought would be open-minded enough to let him have his own voice as a Black artist.  I'd argue that if there's any personal subtext to this film that stems from the life of the director, then it would have to be the horror of Coogler's discovery that modern Hollywood seems to have given up on the progressive ideals it once didn't just espouse, but also practiced for one brief shining moment.  Instead, this final, late stage iteration of Tinseltown is one that's pretty much forgotten even its own identity, and is instead willing and ready to get on the cultural appropriation and assimilation bandwagon.  In that sense, you could argue that Hollywood is dead, and what's left in its place is just another form of a plantation town.  However, Coogler doesn't leave things on a bleak note.

While admitting that modern African America finds itself caught in a trap of cultural appropriation, he also indicates that he sees a light at the end of the tunnel, and that rescue strategy comes in the form of two remaining aspects at the end of the picture.  One of them is the casting of Blues legend Buddy Guy as an older Sammy as this elder statesman of a time which is gone by in one sense, and yet which still remains all too relevant in another.  It's implied that Sammy is the film's secondary world version of Guy, and that vampiric encounters aside, a lot of the real life music legend's story is applicable to Coogler's musically gifted guitar player.  As the survivor of a bygone time, Guy's presence suggests the history that lays behind the struggle for Black equality.  He's someone who's lived long enough to see the worst that man's inhumanity can do, and yet he still plays on because he realizes none of it can negate either the value of good art, or the way it can sometimes help show the the inherent dignity of man, no matter the color of the skin.  It's a point that seems to be driven home on the bonus content of contemporary rapper Rod Wave's accompanying music video for the film.  This time the message is more implicit through the imagery shown in the performance piece.  For instance, the singer can be found riding around the countryside in with a pair of passengers in the back, and they have pale eyes.

It's a clear symbolic portrait of the degradations that cultural appropriation can inflict on the Black community, where individual human beings can be reduced to a zombie like state, making Coogler's project something akin to a latter day version of the Invasion of the Body Snatcher's trope similar to Jordon Peele's Get Out.  However, the music video also features a moment when the singer meets up with a man who is clearly from an older generation.  This white-haired gentleman carries a calm, dignified quality about him, and in the music video, he presents Wave with a book which is implied to be a photo album of memories.  The presences of this Elder figure seems to make him a representation of that first generation of 20th century activists who kick-started the Civil Rights Movement in the 20th century, and in that sense the video can be spoken of as being all of a piece with the overall parting message of Sinners.  This seems to be a very specific call to action.  Coogler is urging his audience to both acknowledge the rut that the Black community currently finds itself in, and yet reminds us at the same time that this is no reason to just give up.  Instead, he implies that steps need to be retraced a bit.

The current generation of Civil Rights activists needs to remember where they came from, and the legacy they now represent and carry forward with them.  The figure of the older Sammy and his music video analogue all seem to point to the thinkers and movers of the classic Civil Rights era.  Coogler's film intimates that if there's any way out of the current rut of cultural appropriation, then it lies in the recalling the lessons taught to us by now almost forgotten names like Joseph McNeil or Ezell Blair, who took a stand by sitting at a segregated lunch counter in order to demonstrate that human beings don't deserve to be treated as second class.  Or Freedom Riders like Charles Person, Mae Francis Moultrie, and John Lewis.  Everything about the ending implies that this generation should look for answers to the current racial dilemmas, and remember who they are by looking back to those initial moments of Inspiration to be found in the Civil Rights Movement.  Throughout this review I've kept coming back to the image of the Dance, and how it can foster a community of others.  If I had to suggest what kind of relevance this image has for both the movie and its applicability outside of the theater, then it might be to suggest that Sinners is a film that advocates a remembrance of the ideal of the Beloved Community.

It was the goal of equality that Martin Luther King Jr. spent his whole life working to achieve, and the film's use of Song as a generator of the Dance, and of the way that same Dance can help to create communities all seems to point to that one big lesson that King always taught.  I'm not sure how trite or mundane that sounds, yet that seems to be the best takeaway I can offer as to the ultimate meaning of a film like Sinners.  It's a film with a great deal of social commentary in its story, and all of its points back to the Civil Rights Movement and its goal of the Beloved Community as something that still represents the best of African America, and that it still continues to be the aim for which it needs to strive for if it ever wants to be able to call itself free.  As you might guess, this has all been a hell of a lot to talk about.  That's because Coogler is one of those rare filmmakers who is able to take a great deal of complex thoughts and ideas, and somehow fit it all into a well paced runtime full of action, excitement, drama, great characterization from people you grow to care about, plenty of the thrills and chills you'd expect from a good Horror movie, and all of it is topped off with an absolute banger of a soundtrack.

This is one of those films that rewards you for being intelligent without having to ever sacrifice any of its entertainment value for one single second of the movie's frames.  It is a consummate work of cinematic art at every conceivable level, and one of the other things to be grateful about it is that it does force the critics to try and see if we can't elevate our game to meet the critical standards of evaluation that a feature like this demands from its audience.  That's because we're not dealing with a tentpole product with all the soul, meaning, and personality sucked out of it.  This is a legitimate story told from an authentic artistic perspective.  It's the kind of movie Hollywood only pretends to care about these days without ever bothering to put its money where its mouth is.  It's perhaps the best example yet of how the genuine voice of an indie filmmaker can triumph over the system, and for this and all of the other reasons discussed above, I am more than gratified to be able to give Ryan Coogler's Sinners my highest recommendation.  It's a great film with an important message, and a wonderful scary movie.