In “Sinners,” Sin isn’t a Crime, it’s a Wound.
This post is part of my ongoing effort to better understand the films that move me. I write this not as an authority on the film, but as a viewer engaging with a film in a good faith effort to understand its thematic nuances. I acknowledge my own lens and limitations, and I welcome conversation from those who experienced the film differently.
*This piece contains spoilers for “Sinners.”
Much of the present discourse around Sinners focuses on who the titular sinners are and how much sin we’re willing to tolerate in ourselves and others. Sometimes the degrees of those sins. But that wasn’t the question I walked away with. The theme of temptation didn’t come through as strongly for me. All of the characters have their own sins, and to varying degrees: Smoke/Elijah abandoned Annie after their son died; Stack and Mary have engaged in a two-fer of premarital sex and sex outside their race; Mary’s own existence is the result of a mixed-raced relationship; Annie engages in hoodoo and other mystical practices violating Christian doctrine; Pearline cheats on her husband with Sammie; Sammie hangs out with “un-Christian-like” people in the bars and juke joints he performs at — and those bars and joints have become his own temple, replacing his father’s church and wishes for him.
Rather than emphasizing the severity of individual sins, Sinners seems more interested in the source of all the characters’ sins. They all face consequences — death or something else — but not in proportion to the severity of their sins. I didn’t pick up on tension in the film around who sins more or whose sin is greater. The “something else” refers to the fact that the form of punishment, and whether it’s redemptive, depends on the character’s core values and who they really are revealed to be. Smoke, Annie, and Delta Slim die, but it’s a redemptive death because they’re shown to have reckoned with their past sins. Stack and Mary are punished too. They’ll never again feel the sun’s warmth or any warmth (i.e. that of a lover) because . . . well it’s not clear, because they broke anti-miscegenation laws? Or because Stack doesn’t see anything wrong with the crimes* he and Smoke committed in Chicago, it’s just an eye for an eye?
*“Sinners” isn’t explicit about why Smoke and Stack returned to Mississippi when they did, though one exchange alludes to the fact they robbed the Irish and Italians both of their liquor, to play them off against one another and buy themselves time to escape before the Europeans put two-and-two together.
The film isn’t about temptation so much as it is about legacy. The original sin at the heart of Sinners is America’s original sin. America’s original sin — slavery — and its parallel failures around immigration shape the characters’ identities and motivations more than any temptation to individual vice. I see that as playing a larger role than any modern-day temptation towards material pleasure or vice. Smoke and Stack try to make their way in Chicago out a false belief they could escape Jim Crow, only to find it very much still exists, just not so overtly as to be given a name. We meet Cornbread and his wife in the cotton fields working as sharecroppers, the South’s new slavery. Sammie too, introduces himself as the son of a preacher and of a sharecropping family. In the first scene after the title card, we see Sammie walk through a community of sharecroppers, where the families live in cramped, intergenerational cabins; it’s morning, but they’ve already been at work for several hours and it’s hot and muggy.
Though Remmick presents himself as an Irish man in the 1930s, the film implies, and Coogler has confirmed, hat Remmick came to America with the wave of Irish immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s fleeing poverty and famine. Although by the film’s time frame, the Irish were considered “old immigrants” (immigrants from northern and western Europe were considered “good immigrants” by many Americans by this period because they assimilated into American culture easier than the “new immigrations” from southern and eastern Europe with more varying religious and cultural backgrounds) at the time of their arrival, they followed the too familiar pattern of immigration narratives in this country of individuals and families lured by the American Dream and better prospects, only to find desperation, poverty, and exploitation were the only things waiting for them. Around this same period, Chinese immigrants were also arriving in America and were subjected to similar racism and discrimination and mockery.
It goes without saying the experiences of immigrants who chose to come to America, and Africans who were enslaved and forcibly brought cannot be compared. But using music and the horror genre, what Sinners identifies is that these three groups of people — the descendants of the enslaved, and the Irish and Chinese immigrants — all suffer under American capitalism ran by white men pursuing and protecting their interests. They all lived in a country that prides itself on a national dream they were, are, and continue to be barred from participating in. They were discriminated against, mocked, their labor exploited, and therefore experiencing systemic poverty; music was one of the only ways they could express themselves, their emotions, and feel connected to home. Each feels a connection to a homeland they cannot return to, a cultural and spiritual exile that music bridges. Music not only functions to express themselves and their feelings—we see the Black men working in a chain gang in the cotton field that Delta Slim shouts to—but it’s also a call to their ancestors and land of origin. It’s a way to carry a piece of home with them; and when recited or sung, a way to feel, at least in the mind if not the body, like they’re back at home, in their home country, however fleeting.
Music has a dual nature—expression and release—that reflects the film’s broader dualisms: twins, Christianity, race—as a spiritual outlet for the African, Irish, and Chinese communities, it’s also their means of literal release from bondage in America. They’re entrapped, physically and spiritually, in America and unable to return to their ancestral homes. Coogler visualizes that entrapment through horror, specifically the vampire metaphor, making literal the soul-draining effects of forced displacement and systemic oppression.
For Remmick, his native Irish folk music is a coping mechanism for the pain but is also his key to freedom. It will re-open or reverse the portal that will release him from his vampiric nature and be re-united with his ancestors. Thus, the vampiric tie is not only a tie to the family he left behind, be that a wife, parents, friends, nieces/nephews, but also to his home. A tie that wants to be reunited with his ancestors and contemporaries back in the Emerald Isle. The pain of longing and suffering results in the vampiric soul that became manifest. The horror is that suffering is so deep that it needs to come out by preying on other people, but the way to release it is through music. Sinners’ prologue links the African, Irish, and Chinese mythologies as all containing a music savant figure, who can bridge the past, present, and future with his gift. Someone whose music is both moving and celebratory but is also capable of channeling evil forces into the natural world.
Remmick is called to Sammie and finds Smoke and Stack’s juke joint, Club Juke, because of Sammie’s music, and he senses that Sammie is the powerful musical figure who can open the portal or reverse the portal that will allow him to finally be reunited with his ancestors. Remmick himself isn’t that figure in Irish folk music, and it seems that no one in his circle of Irish descendants is either, but he senses Sammie is. He wants to possess Sammie to free himself and his people. But Stack and Mary are the two who are bitten instead of Sammie, incititing a fight for survival among the remaining protagonists against Remmick who won’t give up until he’s free of the natural world.
What does it mean that the vampire is white and preys on the African Americans and the Delta Blues, instead of the other way around? I think Wesley Morris has a successful argument in his piece that Coogler is commenting on the vampiric nature of white musicians stealing and usurping Black music for their own pleasure and profit. Remmick certainly fits that mold in that he presents himself as appreciating the blues music he hears and wants to be allowed to listen and celebrate it but really intends to use Sammie and his guitar for his own gain.
However, I’m struck by the Irish dance “celebration” that Smoke and company discover outside Club Juke after Stack and Mary are attacked. They find both the Irish descendants but also Stack, Mary, and Cornbread dancing around Remmick who is performing a traditional Irish jig. It’s the grandest, most perverted version of music’s power to be a means of expression of personal identity and home—it’s a loud, proud, perverted sense of joy in the openness of expressing Irish culture and music. And the fact everyone is dancing, including Stack and Cornbread, symbolizes the theme that traditional/folk music and dance are one of the only means of expression to the exploited in a capitalist system. For those without a voice, a means of protest, music is one of the only tools to give themselves a voice.
What Remmick promises, the allure of vampirism, is that the vampires all have a collective conscious. That conscious can have a few different interpretations; for one, equality in that they can erase one another’s pain; that they lose part of themselves and individuality in handing over their memories to the group; “mine” becomes “ours. Or third, that it is a handing over of pain and memories to the group, but it’s also the building of an American cultural consciousness. With each new victim, Remmick claims their memories, but he’s also assembling a cultural memory of the peoples who came to America from a place of pain and found that pain exponentially grow the longer they lived in America. A cultural memory, a pattern, of America generation after generation ostracizing anyone who isn’t white and male and born within the borders of these 50 states.
American music is chiefly influenced by traditional African music and Black artists, arguing Coogler’s case that the Delta Blues is America’s chief cultural accomplishment, and perhaps most significant contribution to all of music. But I read the Irish folk scene as the fact that Coogler is also aware of how the experiences of Black Americans, Chinese Americans, and Irish Americans are interconnected, particularly in the Mississippi Delta. He’s pointed out his first name, Ryan, is Irish, and he’s discussed how he and Sinners composer Ludwig Görannson examined musicology and found intersections and ties between the traditional music of Black Americans and Irish immigrants. The vampire dance is symbolic of the assemblage of America’s cultural memory that is filled with the stories of people from other countries and continents with common pains. The barn-burning-psychedelic dance scene is both a celebration and a warning of this fantastical power; the Irish jig is the acknowledgement of and imprinting on the American cultural memory what that celebration cost.
By recasting vampirism as a metaphor for cultural theft and longing, and by placing Black and immigrant music at the center of this story, Sinners reframes horror not as supernatural but historical. Sin is structural and institutional. The eponymous sins don’t refer to an evil or material vices, but the centuries-old suffering that created the need to commit them. Thus music, the Delta Blues, progresses from a dual nature to having a trinity role: it’s a purveyor of hope, bringer of pain, and salvation. Not because it absolves guilt, but because it reconnects the characters to something older and more essential than the country that’s failed them. It calls back to ancestors, to land, and love. It’s their portal not to heaven, but to home.
