Sinners: A Meditation on Forever

(Note: It's a film analysis. No spoilers in the traditional sense, but a discussion of themes. It still may be too much for some people. I get it. No pressure. It’ll be here when you’re ready.)

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is as good as everyone says it is. A film about Black people in the 1930s Mississippi Delta attempting to exert autonomy over their lives through the alternate paths of life and death, it’s an epic dark romance told through a tale of “cosmically horrific vampiric violence.” The IMAX format does it beautifully, just like Coogler said it would. It pierces the coherence of the audience’s sensory perception by immersing the viewer in the overwhelming scale of antagonistic relationships, whether they’re taking place in the expanse of a cotton field or at the hands of vampires. There are significant White and Asian characters, but they intervene to bring to a finer point the fact that the Black sharecroppers driving the plot occupy a singular existence. If all goes well and everyone survives, the White characters will go back to being townspeople, the Asian characters will go back to being shopkeepers, but the Black characters will either go back to the plantation or live in precarity as plantation refugees.

The thing about vampires is that they don’t just take life, they trade life for an eternal death that looks like life. Coogler’s use of vampirism interrogates the value of eternity to people who are already socially dead - meaning, living under the perpetual threat of white supremacist paramilitary violence (the Ku Klux Klan) and relegated to stealing moments of enjoyment for a few hours in the day from dusk until dawn as a reprieve (the juke joint). Vampirism isn’t just horrific because the figure of the walking dead is scary, it’s horrific because, to the socially dead, the concept of eternity may be equally as horrific. For Black sharecroppers, the options are between life on the plantation - its own kind of living death - and the eternal death of the vampiric, which abandons life in order to claim power over death. In other words, both paths offer lives that are also deaths - one seemingly more sinister than the other.

Still, the juke joint is a spaceship. While in there dancing and singing the Blues and being in love, Black folks try their hands at transcendence. In that Black-owned place where they do their best to inhabit desires that seem to be of their own making, they’re briefly able to transport themselves from the limitations of their time. They’re relatively untouchable because no one can gain entry unless they allow it. Unlike billionaire-funded space travel, access isn’t a matter of the whims of the wealthy. It isn’t an opportunity for gratuitous claims to the future sold to the highest bidder. What matters is why you want to get in - are you trying to accelerate death or not? Better yet - what’s your relationship to eternity? As privatized entities continue to explore expanding human life into space, Sinners explores what’s at stake in the expansion of Black people’s social death into the afterlife. The vampires don’t just want Black bodies, they want the Blues forever and ever amen.

Coogler’s progression from the Afrofuturism of the Black Panther films (made in the still-warm afterglow of the Obama era) to the Afrosurrealist horror of Sinners (made in the now, as we come to terms with the fact that the Trump era isn’t a fluke) is poignant. As is his decision to release a film exploring the quandary of eternal death during Easter weekend’s celebration of eternal life. Sinners isn’t about supernaturally snatching life back from the grave. It can’t be. The question of what’s required in order to resurrect a dead body isn’t one that vampire films seriously consider at all. Because even if eternal death can be vanquished and the characters survive their harrowing nights to make it to sunrise, they still have to go back to where they came from. They still have to deal with their lives, whatever those may be. But maybe with clearer understandings of the spiritual forces at work around them and renewed ambitions.