Sinners and the Power of Cinema for Good or Evil
Sinners isn't just about the power of music. It's also about the power of cinema to bring healing or evil.
“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.” So declares the opening narration of Ryan Coogler‘s triumphant blockbuster Sinners. “This gift can bring healing to their communities, but it also attracts evil.”
The narration establishes the rules of Sinners‘ world, in which vampires lay siege upon a juke joint in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi. It also foregrounds one of the movie’s primary themes: the power of art to bring good or evil into the world. During its theatrical release earlier this spring, many of Sinners‘ viewers keyed in on music as the movie’s primary focus, and with good reason. The film begins and ends with musician Sammie, played as a young man by newcomer Miles Caton, and as an icon by living blues legend Buddy Guy.
Still, Sinners is implicitly just as much about the power of its own art form, cinema. As a filmmaker as innovative as Coogler knows all too well, cinema has had the power to attract evil, an evil that Sinners addresses directly and often.
The Corrupting Power of Cinema
Early in Sinners, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) take a look at the timber mill they will soon turn into a juke joint. Although pleased with the premises, the brothers grew up in the area and haven’t forgotten the existential dangers facing Black people in the region, so they press Hogwood (David Maldonado), the white man selling the mill, about potential trouble from locals. With a condescending smile, Hogwood dismisses their concerns. “You know the Klan don’t exist no more,” he sneers.
Anyone familiar with the history of cinema knows that the man is lying. After all, Sinners takes place in 1932. And while the original incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan had faded by the mid-1870s, it was in full force again by 1932. What accounted for the change? A movie called The Birth of a Nation, which was released about 17 years before Sinners takes place.
Directed by D.W. Griffith and based upon the Thomas Dixon novel The Clansman (1905), 1915’s The Birth of a Nation is a white supremacist epic about that rewrites the actual history of the Reconstruction era which followed the Civil War. And in Birth, Griffith follows two families, the Camerons and Stonemans, as their fortunes change and shift during the alleged indignities the white planter class endured before the birth of the Klan. Steeled by the violence of the war, Benjamin Cameron (Henry B. Walthall), aka “the Little Colonel,” holds fast to his principles about the separation of races. But the Stonemans, led by the idealistically foolish Austin (Ralph Lewis) and misled by their mixed-race friend Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), support integration and enfranchisement of the newly-freed Black citizens.
Within Birth of Nation‘s worldview, desegregation is the root of all of America’s problems, including the Civil War and even the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The movie always portrays Black people (most often portrayed by white actors in blackface) as bestial and foolish, unprepared to join civilization and eager to take any advantage over white people, particularly women. In one of the movie’s most infamous scenes, a Black character called Gus (played by white actor Walter Long) takes a law legalizing marriage between races to mean that he’s been granted any wife he wants and attacks Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh), who only escapes by leaping to her death.
Griffin goes beyond the standards of early melodramas to ratchet the racism to absurd degrees, made worse by its pretensions toward historical accuracy, complete with citations and quotes from academics (including some from President Woodrow Wilson, the original novel’s former roommate and the man who screened The Birth of a Nation within the White House, making it the first movie to receive the honor). The movie proved to be a smash success with white audiences too, touring around the country and allowing Griffith to demand certain standards for performance.
It’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying The Birth of a Nation without being racist. But the movie hit hardest among the most active racists in its audience, who took inspiration from the movie’s warnings about enfranchising Black people. And these proto-cosplayeres wanted to have their own spectacular adventures in terrorism. Following the release of The Birth of a Nation, Ku Klux Klan chapters were established around the country, with the film serving as a primary text (as depicted in Spike Lee’s BlackKklansman).
It would be too kind to Klansmen to suggest that The Birth of a Nation entranced them, compelling them to evil through the power of filmmaking. However, it’s clear that the film and the incredible sensory experience it provided drew forth something inside of them and compelled them to make it real. Or, as the narrator in Sinners put it: The Birth of a Nation attracted evil.
Two Types of Art
The most striking scene in Sinners occurs about one-third of the way through when Sammie finally gets to show off his skills. As Sammie plays, Coogler’s camera weaves through the dancers in the juke, highlighting not just the way the music drives their bodies but also the way it connects them to something greater. Appearing next to the dancers are figures from their cultural past and present, griots from African tribes, funk performers from the 1980s, and dancers from today. The sequence visually realizes what the voiceover at the start described, the way some artists can conjure spirits and heal communities.
It’s a piece of bravado filmmaking too, one that’s been rightly praised time and again. The scene uses cinema’s mixture of sound and moving pictures to make a complex point, one felt as well as it is understood. In it Coogler demonstrates his mastery of the form and uses it to assert the beauty and validity of Black culture—even aspects that haven’t had time to be reclaimed, such as the twerking cheerleader who appears among the dancers.
However, the sequence doesn’t treat music as an inherent and unimpeachable good. Shortly after Sammie’s performance, a trio of vampires arrive at the juke, led by Remmick (Jack O’Connell). As they try to convince doorman Cornbread (Omar Miller) to invite them in, they try to downplay his reasonable fears about white people in a Black space by referencing the universal language of music. According to Remmick, it was the music that drew them and they want to participate in that sound.
While the initial diddy they play fails to convince anyone onscreen or in the audience, the vampires get a second song later in the film that proves a much more effective number. As Remmick leads his growing throng, which now includes Cornbread and others from the juke, in the Irish folk song “Rocky Road to Dublin,” Coogler’s camera once again moves through the group and underscores the power of the tune. A deep sadness and emptiness has replaced the joy of Sammie’s tune. Instead of connecting to the future and past, Remmick’s song can only look backward, mourning the humanity he lost when oppressors and colonizers invaded his native Ireland centuries ago.
Both of these scenes feature wonderful music. But moreover, both feature wonderful filmmaking. By giving the vampires a moment of humanity, Sinners does what Birth of a Nation never would. It stretches its imagination past fear and sees the human beings crushed under cycles of hate and oppression. It loves cinema not just for its spectacular nature, but for the immediacy it brings, for the way it makes people richer and closer and easier to perceive.
Redemption Through Sinners
The vampires are the central threat of Sinners, figuratively and literally. After Remmick has been defeated and after the morning comes, Smoke still must deal with the Klan. The last action set piece of the movie finds Smoke gathering the weapons he collected while serving in World War I and preparing for, as he puts it, the devil he knows.
Sure enough, the sneering white man named Hogswood returns the next morning, bringing along his fellow Klansmen. But they don’t offer much of a fight. At this late point in the movie, Sinners knows that we’re exhausted from the experience, emotionally drained and no longer able to even feel fear after the horrific sights we’ve witnessed. So it gives us nothing but catharsis, as Smoke spends his dying moments killing off the Klan, before getting to reunite with his wife great love Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) and their child in the afterlife.
The Klan killing scene is thus a punctuation mark, and in more ways than one. It brings Smoke’s story to an end, yes, but it also closes out the movie’s statement on the power of cinema. The Birth of a Nation may have invited an evil to the art form, but Coogler’s putting an end to that. Through Sinners, he’s definitely killing that evil. Not for good—more hateful films will be made and more hateful people will love them. But he’s reminding us that cinema has a power, the same power that the griot described at the opening of the movie; the power to heal and power to draw evil; the power to sin and power to redeem.
Sinners is now available to rent on streaming services.
Written by
Joe George’s writing has appeared at Slate, Polygon, Tor.com, and elsewhere!