If you haven't seen SINNERS yet, you need to run to a theatre and watch it NOW.
There's so much I loved about this movie. The performances, the bold storytelling, the care they took in handling the history, and the music! I love Rhiannon Giddens' work and it was great to see it featured here.
Of course lots of people will rave to you about how good SINNERS is. Coming at this from an Irish-diasporic perspective, I wanted to talk about some things I loved about the vampires. Specifically Rennick.
Warning: spoilers ahead!
I loved that Ryan Coogler made Rennick an Irish vampire. Yes, vampire legends come out of Eastern European folklore, but our vampire stories come out of 19th Century Ireland. Bram Stoker (the author of Dracula) and Sheridan Le Fanu (author of Carmilla) were Anglo-Irish writers (i.e. they belonged to the English Protestant colonial class in Ireland.) There are strong arguments for seeing both "Carmilla" and Dracula as being about the Irish colonial experience, reflecting Anglo-Irish guilt over imperialism's parasitism of the countryside. (And fear of native unrest, too.)
In "Carmilla" and Dracula, the title vampires are colonizing figures who threaten modern English (or Anglo-settlers) with absorption into a their community. They also signify native resistance to empire (as seen through their link to the historical land, "savagery", and their affiliation with "foreign" others -- including a Black woman in "Carmilla.")
In Sinners, Rennick likewise seems to be a colonizer who is also anti-empire and anti-racist. He offers the heroes of the movie an alliance against the KKK. All they have to do is let him absorb them into his interracial community. More specifically he wants Sammie, the transcendent artist, to join his cult.
So far, a lot of people are reading Rennick's desire to absorb Sammie as being about the white appropriation of Black culture. I think that interpretation is valid. However, Rennick's desire to dismantle the Jim Crow world raises questions for me. I guess a lot turns on whether you believe Rennick is a figure of genuine resistance or just a force for empire in a different incarnation.
Rennick's biggest musical number is "The Rocky Road to Dublin". Rennick lies several times about where he's from ("where are you from" being an important question in this movie), but by this time he sings "The Rocky Road" he's come out as a vampire and an Irish one at that. He leads the multiracial vampire collective in a rousing rendition of this 19C Irish song and shows off his dancing steps.
"The Rocky Road to Dublin" is a 19C Irish song from that point of view of an Irish seasonal farm laborer walking across a hostile land (first Ireland, then England, where he's going to work in English fields). The movie emphasizes the first verse, where the singer shows that he's proud of where he's from (despite his poverty) and is keeping his culture alive with him. (He'll "cut a stout blackthorn to banish ghosts and goblins.") In the final verse, the singer is subjected to racist insults. When he gets into a fight with Englishmen, the other Irish laborers hear his accent and jump in to help. In Ireland, they're from different places, but in England, they're all Irish. Together, they clear "the rocky road to Dublin".
Rennick's song is about solidarity in the face of racism and the discovery of shared community in a foreign land. It's a song that's reiterates his promise of solidarity to the juke joint audience: join us and we'll protect you. But it's also a potential threat. Sung in an English pub, it literally "shows the numbers" of the Irish diaspora and their unity, and promises they're ready for a fight. Sung by the vampires, it carries a similar message: We didn't used to be a collective, but now we are. If you fight one of us, you fight all of us.
I've seen interpretations of Rennick's song that claim it's "soulless" because it doesn't summon spirits from the past and future. But the vampires *are* the spirits from the past and future. Rennick's from the past, prophesizing an interracial collective. His group also lures Mary to her absorption with a version of "Wild Mountain Thyme" that wasn't published until the 1950s (they're in the 1930s). So I don't think we're meant to look at this or other vampire musical numbers and think, "that isn't 'real' culture".
It also isn't clear that joining the vampire community destroys Black identity. Critics read Rennick's first version of "Pick Poor Robin Clean" as a song about white appropriation (though the juke joint audience seems to like it, they just don't think it's "blues.") But the vampires sing "Pick Poor Robin Clean" a second time too, this time as a mostly Black collective singing it as a threat to the juke joint audience.
Then there's the ending. If you leave as the credits start to roll (as many in my theatre did) you'd buy into the "vampires are evil, religion and the blues are opposed" conflicts of the 1930s. But in the middle of the credits we get a second ending set in the 1990s, in which we learn that Stack and Mary survive as Rennick's vampire "descendants" and reconcile with Sammie. (There's a third ending at the end of the credits with Sammie singing in church that I see as reconciling the religion vs blues conflict.)
In the 1990s, Stack and Mary have changed their look, but they remember who they are. This invites us to remember details from the 1930s, which in retrospect reveal that the vampires aren't part of some generic hive mind puppeted by Rennick but retain their feelings about their families. The vampires share a culture and can speak each other's languages, but they're also individuals and they still care about "where they're from." Vampire Stack complains to Rennick that his brother "lacks vision" and Vampire Mary is clearly upset when Annie dies. Thanks to vampirism, Mary and Stack survive into an era where they can be together in public as a seemingly interracial couple -- the era that Rennick promised them.
There's a price to this of course, and to Stack's pursuit of a life of accumulation. (Mary goes out to the vampires to find out if they're willing to pay; Stack's name emphasizes accumulation.) As a vampire, Stack isn't "free." He's trapped in the material world until he dies.
I buy that the vampires are "stuck" (to use Annie's phrasing.) They sing traditional music and take other people's songs, but they don't create songs of their own. The song that attracts Remmick to Sammie is the one that Sammie wrote himself. In the future, Mary and Stack clearly consume culture, but they don't compose music. OTOH, they never did: more people consume art than create it.
As with the two brothers, and the religious life vs the blues life, I don't know that we're meant to think that one binary is evil and the other good by the end of the film. There's the path that Sammie wants to choose, and the path that his father / Rennick want him to choose, but at the end of the credits, those paths seem closer together than they did in the main film.
I'm not going to pretend I have a coherent "take" on SINNERS. I think it's a movie that requires repeat viewings, in part because it's full of ambiguities and contradictions. But I think Rennick's character is fascinating and the role that vampirism takes on in the film is really interesting.
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