Coincidentally, given your call back to Get Out, I wrote a review of that movie that said something similar: it did not have anything even remotely meaningful to say about the black experience except, perhaps, the lead character's desperate politeness in the face of these weird fucking rich white people--a group director Peele clearly did not understand.
Some quotes to show I'm not making it up and saving you a click:
"I enjoyed this movie far more than I expected based on the rapturous reviews, which promised a scathing satire on race relations in America cloaked in a horror film an exquisite comedy of manners, an alarming portrayal of white racism. As is so often the case, the movie’s creator doesn’t come near to achieving his stated goals. Jordan Peele isn’t the compleat observer of American mores that he–and many others–think he is, so his movie fails to uncover the “insidious qualities” of white liberals....
In fact, the interpretation as offered up by Jordan Peele and his following in elite circles makes the movie absurd.
Given a surgical procedure that implants their consciousness into another body, guaranteeing virtual immortality, rich white people would say “Great! Now find me a cute/buff white body that no one will miss.” (They’d also demand a plastic surgeon get rid of the scars.)
Rich white people do not want to be black. Nor do they want to be Hispanic, southern or eastern Asian, of course, but Peele’s horizons don’t extend that far.
Happily, the movie itself makes no such claims. The movie portrays members of this weird, creepy organization who want to be black. The (largely pointless) video forcefed to Chris makes no mention of race. We only learn that the Armitages limit their procedures to black folks through Chris’s discovery of Rose’s photo album, coupled with Jeremy’s takedown of Dre. Jim (the only authentic rich white guy to be found in the film) confirms that only black people are hosts, and he makes it clear that the “organization” has some sort of fetish on the topic.
That these particular white folks aren’t normal is supported by the party scenes themselves. Look, I worked almost exclusively for rich white people as a tutor for four years, including for folks who have been at one time or another on the Forbes 400. Rich white liberals from the boomer generation on down just aren’t that gauche. The Armitage guests are creepy, touching hair, feeling biceps, asking about his sexual prowess. Their cars are all wrong, too. But my experience isn’t necessary here. Only idiots with critical faculties completely removed would see these cultists as typical rich white folks.
And here’s the thing: the movie thinks so, too. What else is the point of Jim Hudson, played by the always note-perfect Stephen Root? Jim isn’t a cultist. He’s the real thing: a rich white bastard in all his authentic, heartless glory. He says so expressly in the video, but we don’t need to be told. At the “party”, Jim is the only one who treats Chris like a human. He’s a rich white bastard, but he’s no racist. More importantly, he’s not a cultist.
I kept wondering throughout why so many critics–and Peele–invoked the Stepford Wives until I realized that they were referring to the cheerful black servants Walter and Georgina. Just as the men of Stepford turned all their womenfolk cheerful, sex-ready, and compliant by making them all robots, so too did Dean and Missy turn black people into servile peasants, eager to please their masters.
But Walter and Georgina aren’t servants. They’re just pretending to be servants for Chris. Walter and Georgina are Grandma and Grandpa, pretending to be servants to fool Chris. They are fully empowered players in this horrific game, welcoming the bidders to the new auction, messing with Chris’s phone, doing everything they can to kill Chris when he escapes. All we’re seeing is the facade. Homage to Stepford, certainly, but Walter and Georgina aren’t even remotely parallel.
Of course, the entire “servants” fakeout is a giveaway of itself. Rich white people don’t employ blacks as servants. That’s what they have Hispanics for, and why so many white elites resist any sort of immigration restriction. Maybe people were so eager to see racism that they missed the obvious, but I was instantly skeptical. Liberal white guilt about black servants reigns supreme; no Obama liberal would have them. By the time Walter was chopping wood–I mean, really. Chopping wood? For what, exactly? –I’d called the plot twist. Walter was a white guy in a black man’s body. Betty Gabriel, singlehandedly responsible for every jump-scare in the film, impeccably represents as a little old white woman who can’t quite get comfortable around “colored people”."
It's a nice tight little horror film. It's just not in any way a serious commentary on black and white America.
There is a twisted symbiosis, since at least Baldwin, of white elites listening rapturously to black people telling them what white people are “really” like.
The moment art is required to be a vehicle for politics, morality, or social instruction, its imaginative power drains away. Art matters precisely because it is not reducible to a message. It is its own thing. Sometimes, two paths in a wood are just that and a poem about them is just about taking a walk with a friend.
I was just discussing with a friend Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow. It, I am convinced, is just about a wheelbarrow. And that fact in no way diminishes its power.
Yes, the standard reading that Sinners is about cultural appropriation does not hold because the “white” vampires are explicitly coded as Irish. Unless we think Ryan Coogler is so dumb that he doesn’t understand culture or history, this means the vampires are…
-Of a culture that is richly musical
-Of a culture whose musical tradition is not connected to Black R&B, emerging separately from it
-Of a culture that’s historically been marginalized and even colonized
So yeah, it ain’t about white cultural appropriation.
But he’s also not pushing against that interpretation, and given the folkways of the whites who lived near blues-playing blacks (or the European history of the instruments the blues was played on), there’s really no way to keep any of this quarantined.
My read was that it's about cultural appropriation, or more accurately culture assimilation, in general. The Irish were fully consumed by the omniculture, now it's the black folks turn. You can lock the doors and keep them out for a while but eventually someone will let them in, or their money will be too good to pass up.
Yeah except the movie's Irish are coded as really really Irish. They read as FOREIGN in the South, not amalgamated into it. We also see the Irish vampires killing white people, right?
So while I like your read in theory, I don't think it's texturally supported
I think that's why it works for me though. The stupidest version of this movie would be to have the Klan members, or some WASPy carpetbaggers, be the vampires. And when they bite black people they turn them white. That's not an Oscar-bait movie though that's a Wayans brother movie.
Because the main vampire is from a culture that's already been assimilated he's a cautionary tale of what would happen if Sammy gives in. His motivation is explicitly to regain the feeling of having a soul by absorbing black culture. And hey look, everyone's enjoying the Irish dance! Irish, white, black, it doesn't matter - is that so bad? Just sell out, man. Make another Black Panther sequel, people loved the first one. But if you sell your soul you'll spend the rest of your time trying to get it back.
But Irish culture is just as valid as Black culture so that doesn't make sense. You're not 'selling out' if you sing Go Lassie Go/Wild Mountain Thyme. Both Irish and Black music came from long periods of marginalization, poverty, repression, and musical interest/talent.
That's why the cultural appropriation lens makes no sense. And again (since you ignored it the first time) the Irish are NOT presented as assimilated. They are decidedly *foreign.* And we see them preying on white people. The text doesn't support your reading of the film.
The head vampire makes an aside about his pagan traditions being coopted by Christianity. I think the subtext is there, it just runs a little deeper than might be evident through a solely American lens.
Exactly! The head vamp even makes the analogy to English vs. Irish, devilishly trying to woo the Black holdouts. That was one of the best scenes in the movie but it came and went fast.
In a country with such a high degree of residential segregation, as well as our more modern estrangement from each other through us all being entombed in algorithmically customized social media chambers, most non-black people are really only exposed and educated on the African American experience and history and oppression through immaterial media portrayals in the first instance. In some ways I guess it stands to reason then that the realm of the immaterial and the onscreen portrayal is where the "opposition" to that becomes focused.
I think this is an underrated aspect of American culture and race, post civil righte era. There are a handful of places in the country (Atlanta, parts of suburban Washington, DC, parts of LA) where you will encounter something high popular culture struggles to deal with, that being black affluence. This is confounding to too many important cross partisan shibbeloths to register in the higher echelons of culture, even if you can catch glimpses of it here and there in reality TV and sitcoms that no one actually watches and definitely isn't celebrated. It results in a very narrow, overly pious mirage, which includes in the Oscar's discourse.
Anyway it reminds me of the below scene from the rightly short lived Clerks: The Animated Series where Randal is trying to get sympathy for Dante from a jury comprised of very wealthy black NBA players. The situation is of course ridiculous and falls below the sensitivity standards of anything I can imagine being released today but I think effectively satirizes just how weird and in a way weirdly racist in its own right this stuff can be.
I guess I really am old and white (and maybe Irish, though my grandmother never told me so): I found the most-mesmerizing music in Sinners "The Rocky Road to Dublin." I thought Sinners was a pretty good vampire movie. I did not care about or even notice any cosmic significance.
It's a point in Coogler's favor (and adds to the complexity of the film) that he treats that scene with the same reverence and respect as he treats the blues musical scenes.
Everything you've written here is a major reason why I've soured on Oscars discourse and movie discourse in general since the late 2010s or so, and I suspect it's one reason why a lot of normies are less interested too. It's all so exhausting, angry, anxious, sweaty, etc. that I've moved away from it and more toward sports in recent years. There's less culture war in the latter.
"I don’t intend to dismiss the reality or importance of the history of Black people not receiving due credit or payment for their cultural contributions, but I do confess that such concerns seem remote when I drive through New Haven and see impoverished Black children living in crumbling lead and asbestos-filled houses."
Yes to this as well. I feel the same but with inner city Baltimore.
There is no group of people more racist to blacks than white liberals. It's astonishing that blacks en masse, particularly those in the entertainment field, don't tell them to fuck right off.
What’s sad is that sinners is not about race at all. It’s about sin and those who feed off it. The whole movie is full of sin and those who commodify it. It’s called Sinners for a reason. The young boy who just wants to sin (play music) doesn’t redeem himself after going to hell, no he doubles down and meets the devil again right before he dies in a state of sin. We are all sinners but this movie is sin personified as vampires or the evil that stalks all of us in sin. No one is the hero in this movie and the fight with the white man at the end is perfect. The sinner meets the devil and becomes the vampire who kills all the “bad” people and ends up with his illegitimate innocence in some kind of white heaven. It’s the best picture of the year because what’s it all for this sin? It’s for sinners. That’s it.
I watched Sinners for the first time last night. I am sure the below interpretation is not what Coogler intended, but let me know your thoughts. I am mostly trolling.
I think the movie dramatizes the political dilemma that Black people face: communism vs. Black Nationalism. I think the vampires represent something like communism (lol). It is led by white people, but it is ostensibly welcome to everyone and yearns for Black people to join in. Some Black people are converted and join the cause and try to convince the rest of the community to also join in, but the movie’s heroes refuse to do so, partially because doing so compromises the unique history, tradition, culture of being Black. Why subsume that to a broader leftist project?
I think this also works when you think about the fact that the leftie vampire commune promises to protect Smoke and the rest from the KKK, but the former refuses this offer, and ultimately dies in the shootout. So a broad pan racial commie coalition is the only way to defeat the far right, but joining it requires Black people to deny the uniqueness of their experience and tradition. So the hero does not join, and gets killed by the Klan instead. But he keeps his Black identity.
“I find this a little confused, given that the music played by the Irish vampires is so explicitly not an example of “cultural appropriation” in the way often said of rock and roll.”
Can we take a moment and unpack “white people stole rock and roll from black people”, after twenty years of this getting repeated so often on social media that it’s become assumed to be true?
Because despite any technicalities of what the Irish vampires are playing, that’s the assumption being made, and the image being pushed onto everyone.
You say all this, talking up a storm about how the discourse over black people has taken on this immaterial, performative nature...and yet you capitalize the B in black, which remains the most performative, immaterial virtue signal that progressive media developed when all this began with Trayvon Martin's killing.
The big issue in this essay is about the performativity of white people when it comes to black culture as a means to commodify the latter. What better example of that performativity than a pointless, useless capitalization that did not happen on any regular basis pre-BLM, has never been given any meaningful explanation by the various institutions and outlets that use it, and does absolutely nothing to better black people's situations?
While I don't think this is the biggest takeaway from this essay, I do agree with you on the merits. I've stopped doing it myself. It's very performative.
On a related note...I find it funny that some parts of right-wing media (Compact, et al) are doing their own hand-wringing because After The Hunt didn't get any recognition during awards season, because "liberals are too afraid to admit MeToo was a mistake!"
I watched it, it was fine (Julia Roberts accusing the second female lead of being in a fake relationship with a NB was funny, and that whole scene kind of reminded me of a scene late in the Lebanese film The Insult). But, contra the right wing/anti-woke sentiment, I think the real problem was precisely what was hinted at here in this article: The Oscars are trying (and failing) to be populist, and After The Hunt's setting of Yale is very much the opposite of that.
Should there be a critical take on MeToo, something that causes the introspection that some non-progressives are desperate for? Perhaps. But I think for that to happen, the "anti-woke" need to admit what MeToo was in the end: A power struggle between different sections of elite society. And that kind of subject doesn't really win awards, even in non-populist moments.
It seems we’re feeling our way through: Wasn’t Tar sort of meant as an antidote to #MeToo as well?
For myself, a reckoning about the gleeful removal of norms about “innocent until proven guilty” would be what I’m looking for, complicated by the recognition that *a lot* of awful things were done to women that were difficult, if not impossible, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
True of many issues concerning all of us who are human. It doesn't mean we throw away our processes or convict people (either in court or in public opinion) just to make a point.
“OBAA is a movie with some Black characters and some Hispanic characters but Sinners is unquestionably a Black movie. As such it has been hung with all of the baggage that falls on Black movies during awards season“
I don’t think it’s the casting that makes it a “Black” movie in this sense, it’s whether the movie is or isn’t preoccupied with white people. Moonlight; Pariah; even Crooklyn tell stories without concern about what any white people within (or without) of the movie think of them.
The part in Sinners when the vampire turns to the camera and says "THIS IS NOT UNIQUE TO THE BLACK EXPERIENCE, THE IRISH WERE CONSUMED BY THE OMNICULTURE AND THE NEXT INTERESTING MINORITY GROUP WILL BE TOO" seemed heavy handed but I guess it still didn't drive the point home.
Despite that I thought the movie had interesting things to say about cultural assimilation. Coogler said it was the most personal movie he's made and I imagine he struggles with selling out black culture in blockbusters like Black Panther or Creed, versus taking wooden nickels to make more authentic films like Fruitvale Station.
Of course to Freddie's point was there any group more ~jazzed~ about Fruitvale Station than white cinema nerds? Certainly more black people watched and enjoyed Black Panther even though it was targeted at the broader American and Chinese audience.
Coincidentally, given your call back to Get Out, I wrote a review of that movie that said something similar: it did not have anything even remotely meaningful to say about the black experience except, perhaps, the lead character's desperate politeness in the face of these weird fucking rich white people--a group director Peele clearly did not understand.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/get-out-a-scathing-satire-get-out/
Some quotes to show I'm not making it up and saving you a click:
"I enjoyed this movie far more than I expected based on the rapturous reviews, which promised a scathing satire on race relations in America cloaked in a horror film an exquisite comedy of manners, an alarming portrayal of white racism. As is so often the case, the movie’s creator doesn’t come near to achieving his stated goals. Jordan Peele isn’t the compleat observer of American mores that he–and many others–think he is, so his movie fails to uncover the “insidious qualities” of white liberals....
In fact, the interpretation as offered up by Jordan Peele and his following in elite circles makes the movie absurd.
Given a surgical procedure that implants their consciousness into another body, guaranteeing virtual immortality, rich white people would say “Great! Now find me a cute/buff white body that no one will miss.” (They’d also demand a plastic surgeon get rid of the scars.)
Rich white people do not want to be black. Nor do they want to be Hispanic, southern or eastern Asian, of course, but Peele’s horizons don’t extend that far.
Happily, the movie itself makes no such claims. The movie portrays members of this weird, creepy organization who want to be black. The (largely pointless) video forcefed to Chris makes no mention of race. We only learn that the Armitages limit their procedures to black folks through Chris’s discovery of Rose’s photo album, coupled with Jeremy’s takedown of Dre. Jim (the only authentic rich white guy to be found in the film) confirms that only black people are hosts, and he makes it clear that the “organization” has some sort of fetish on the topic.
That these particular white folks aren’t normal is supported by the party scenes themselves. Look, I worked almost exclusively for rich white people as a tutor for four years, including for folks who have been at one time or another on the Forbes 400. Rich white liberals from the boomer generation on down just aren’t that gauche. The Armitage guests are creepy, touching hair, feeling biceps, asking about his sexual prowess. Their cars are all wrong, too. But my experience isn’t necessary here. Only idiots with critical faculties completely removed would see these cultists as typical rich white folks.
And here’s the thing: the movie thinks so, too. What else is the point of Jim Hudson, played by the always note-perfect Stephen Root? Jim isn’t a cultist. He’s the real thing: a rich white bastard in all his authentic, heartless glory. He says so expressly in the video, but we don’t need to be told. At the “party”, Jim is the only one who treats Chris like a human. He’s a rich white bastard, but he’s no racist. More importantly, he’s not a cultist.
I kept wondering throughout why so many critics–and Peele–invoked the Stepford Wives until I realized that they were referring to the cheerful black servants Walter and Georgina. Just as the men of Stepford turned all their womenfolk cheerful, sex-ready, and compliant by making them all robots, so too did Dean and Missy turn black people into servile peasants, eager to please their masters.
But Walter and Georgina aren’t servants. They’re just pretending to be servants for Chris. Walter and Georgina are Grandma and Grandpa, pretending to be servants to fool Chris. They are fully empowered players in this horrific game, welcoming the bidders to the new auction, messing with Chris’s phone, doing everything they can to kill Chris when he escapes. All we’re seeing is the facade. Homage to Stepford, certainly, but Walter and Georgina aren’t even remotely parallel.
Of course, the entire “servants” fakeout is a giveaway of itself. Rich white people don’t employ blacks as servants. That’s what they have Hispanics for, and why so many white elites resist any sort of immigration restriction. Maybe people were so eager to see racism that they missed the obvious, but I was instantly skeptical. Liberal white guilt about black servants reigns supreme; no Obama liberal would have them. By the time Walter was chopping wood–I mean, really. Chopping wood? For what, exactly? –I’d called the plot twist. Walter was a white guy in a black man’s body. Betty Gabriel, singlehandedly responsible for every jump-scare in the film, impeccably represents as a little old white woman who can’t quite get comfortable around “colored people”."
It's a nice tight little horror film. It's just not in any way a serious commentary on black and white America.
There is a twisted symbiosis, since at least Baldwin, of white elites listening rapturously to black people telling them what white people are “really” like.
Nice. Feel like I've read a mashup of Roger Ebert and John Roberts here.
The moment art is required to be a vehicle for politics, morality, or social instruction, its imaginative power drains away. Art matters precisely because it is not reducible to a message. It is its own thing. Sometimes, two paths in a wood are just that and a poem about them is just about taking a walk with a friend.
Your comment reminds me of the poem "Ars Poetica" and it's famous closing lines, "A poem should not mean / But be."
I like that!!
I was just discussing with a friend Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow. It, I am convinced, is just about a wheelbarrow. And that fact in no way diminishes its power.
Yes, the standard reading that Sinners is about cultural appropriation does not hold because the “white” vampires are explicitly coded as Irish. Unless we think Ryan Coogler is so dumb that he doesn’t understand culture or history, this means the vampires are…
-Of a culture that is richly musical
-Of a culture whose musical tradition is not connected to Black R&B, emerging separately from it
-Of a culture that’s historically been marginalized and even colonized
So yeah, it ain’t about white cultural appropriation.
And yes the KKK scene is horrible
But he’s also not pushing against that interpretation, and given the folkways of the whites who lived near blues-playing blacks (or the European history of the instruments the blues was played on), there’s really no way to keep any of this quarantined.
My read was that it's about cultural appropriation, or more accurately culture assimilation, in general. The Irish were fully consumed by the omniculture, now it's the black folks turn. You can lock the doors and keep them out for a while but eventually someone will let them in, or their money will be too good to pass up.
Yeah except the movie's Irish are coded as really really Irish. They read as FOREIGN in the South, not amalgamated into it. We also see the Irish vampires killing white people, right?
So while I like your read in theory, I don't think it's texturally supported
I think that's why it works for me though. The stupidest version of this movie would be to have the Klan members, or some WASPy carpetbaggers, be the vampires. And when they bite black people they turn them white. That's not an Oscar-bait movie though that's a Wayans brother movie.
Because the main vampire is from a culture that's already been assimilated he's a cautionary tale of what would happen if Sammy gives in. His motivation is explicitly to regain the feeling of having a soul by absorbing black culture. And hey look, everyone's enjoying the Irish dance! Irish, white, black, it doesn't matter - is that so bad? Just sell out, man. Make another Black Panther sequel, people loved the first one. But if you sell your soul you'll spend the rest of your time trying to get it back.
But Irish culture is just as valid as Black culture so that doesn't make sense. You're not 'selling out' if you sing Go Lassie Go/Wild Mountain Thyme. Both Irish and Black music came from long periods of marginalization, poverty, repression, and musical interest/talent.
That's why the cultural appropriation lens makes no sense. And again (since you ignored it the first time) the Irish are NOT presented as assimilated. They are decidedly *foreign.* And we see them preying on white people. The text doesn't support your reading of the film.
The head vampire makes an aside about his pagan traditions being coopted by Christianity. I think the subtext is there, it just runs a little deeper than might be evident through a solely American lens.
or the subtext is just kinda muddled
Exactly! The head vamp even makes the analogy to English vs. Irish, devilishly trying to woo the Black holdouts. That was one of the best scenes in the movie but it came and went fast.
In a country with such a high degree of residential segregation, as well as our more modern estrangement from each other through us all being entombed in algorithmically customized social media chambers, most non-black people are really only exposed and educated on the African American experience and history and oppression through immaterial media portrayals in the first instance. In some ways I guess it stands to reason then that the realm of the immaterial and the onscreen portrayal is where the "opposition" to that becomes focused.
I think this is an underrated aspect of American culture and race, post civil righte era. There are a handful of places in the country (Atlanta, parts of suburban Washington, DC, parts of LA) where you will encounter something high popular culture struggles to deal with, that being black affluence. This is confounding to too many important cross partisan shibbeloths to register in the higher echelons of culture, even if you can catch glimpses of it here and there in reality TV and sitcoms that no one actually watches and definitely isn't celebrated. It results in a very narrow, overly pious mirage, which includes in the Oscar's discourse.
Anyway it reminds me of the below scene from the rightly short lived Clerks: The Animated Series where Randal is trying to get sympathy for Dante from a jury comprised of very wealthy black NBA players. The situation is of course ridiculous and falls below the sensitivity standards of anything I can imagine being released today but I think effectively satirizes just how weird and in a way weirdly racist in its own right this stuff can be.
https://youtu.be/XntzroLn-3A?si=cwULvoM1IYO2zr0L
I guess I really am old and white (and maybe Irish, though my grandmother never told me so): I found the most-mesmerizing music in Sinners "The Rocky Road to Dublin." I thought Sinners was a pretty good vampire movie. I did not care about or even notice any cosmic significance.
It's a point in Coogler's favor (and adds to the complexity of the film) that he treats that scene with the same reverence and respect as he treats the blues musical scenes.
Everything you've written here is a major reason why I've soured on Oscars discourse and movie discourse in general since the late 2010s or so, and I suspect it's one reason why a lot of normies are less interested too. It's all so exhausting, angry, anxious, sweaty, etc. that I've moved away from it and more toward sports in recent years. There's less culture war in the latter.
"I don’t intend to dismiss the reality or importance of the history of Black people not receiving due credit or payment for their cultural contributions, but I do confess that such concerns seem remote when I drive through New Haven and see impoverished Black children living in crumbling lead and asbestos-filled houses."
Yes to this as well. I feel the same but with inner city Baltimore.
There is no group of people more racist to blacks than white liberals. It's astonishing that blacks en masse, particularly those in the entertainment field, don't tell them to fuck right off.
What’s sad is that sinners is not about race at all. It’s about sin and those who feed off it. The whole movie is full of sin and those who commodify it. It’s called Sinners for a reason. The young boy who just wants to sin (play music) doesn’t redeem himself after going to hell, no he doubles down and meets the devil again right before he dies in a state of sin. We are all sinners but this movie is sin personified as vampires or the evil that stalks all of us in sin. No one is the hero in this movie and the fight with the white man at the end is perfect. The sinner meets the devil and becomes the vampire who kills all the “bad” people and ends up with his illegitimate innocence in some kind of white heaven. It’s the best picture of the year because what’s it all for this sin? It’s for sinners. That’s it.
I watched Sinners for the first time last night. I am sure the below interpretation is not what Coogler intended, but let me know your thoughts. I am mostly trolling.
I think the movie dramatizes the political dilemma that Black people face: communism vs. Black Nationalism. I think the vampires represent something like communism (lol). It is led by white people, but it is ostensibly welcome to everyone and yearns for Black people to join in. Some Black people are converted and join the cause and try to convince the rest of the community to also join in, but the movie’s heroes refuse to do so, partially because doing so compromises the unique history, tradition, culture of being Black. Why subsume that to a broader leftist project?
I think this also works when you think about the fact that the leftie vampire commune promises to protect Smoke and the rest from the KKK, but the former refuses this offer, and ultimately dies in the shootout. So a broad pan racial commie coalition is the only way to defeat the far right, but joining it requires Black people to deny the uniqueness of their experience and tradition. So the hero does not join, and gets killed by the Klan instead. But he keeps his Black identity.
That's pretty good actually
“I find this a little confused, given that the music played by the Irish vampires is so explicitly not an example of “cultural appropriation” in the way often said of rock and roll.”
Can we take a moment and unpack “white people stole rock and roll from black people”, after twenty years of this getting repeated so often on social media that it’s become assumed to be true?
Because despite any technicalities of what the Irish vampires are playing, that’s the assumption being made, and the image being pushed onto everyone.
You say all this, talking up a storm about how the discourse over black people has taken on this immaterial, performative nature...and yet you capitalize the B in black, which remains the most performative, immaterial virtue signal that progressive media developed when all this began with Trayvon Martin's killing.
Like seriously, not even the Reeds do that.
I capitalize that shit too. So does the woke Wall Street Journal. Who cares? Way to be on top of the big issues in a 2,300-word essay.
The big issue in this essay is about the performativity of white people when it comes to black culture as a means to commodify the latter. What better example of that performativity than a pointless, useless capitalization that did not happen on any regular basis pre-BLM, has never been given any meaningful explanation by the various institutions and outlets that use it, and does absolutely nothing to better black people's situations?
While I don't think this is the biggest takeaway from this essay, I do agree with you on the merits. I've stopped doing it myself. It's very performative.
In the immortal words of Jalen Hurts, “Keep the main thing the main thing.”
On a related note...I find it funny that some parts of right-wing media (Compact, et al) are doing their own hand-wringing because After The Hunt didn't get any recognition during awards season, because "liberals are too afraid to admit MeToo was a mistake!"
I watched it, it was fine (Julia Roberts accusing the second female lead of being in a fake relationship with a NB was funny, and that whole scene kind of reminded me of a scene late in the Lebanese film The Insult). But, contra the right wing/anti-woke sentiment, I think the real problem was precisely what was hinted at here in this article: The Oscars are trying (and failing) to be populist, and After The Hunt's setting of Yale is very much the opposite of that.
Should there be a critical take on MeToo, something that causes the introspection that some non-progressives are desperate for? Perhaps. But I think for that to happen, the "anti-woke" need to admit what MeToo was in the end: A power struggle between different sections of elite society. And that kind of subject doesn't really win awards, even in non-populist moments.
It seems we’re feeling our way through: Wasn’t Tar sort of meant as an antidote to #MeToo as well?
For myself, a reckoning about the gleeful removal of norms about “innocent until proven guilty” would be what I’m looking for, complicated by the recognition that *a lot* of awful things were done to women that were difficult, if not impossible, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
Vaguely, but to the right it wasn't enough. They thought it was a copout that the lead being taken down was a lesbian rather than a straight man.
But that in and of itself gives their game away: They feel resentment that straight men were being "unjustly" attacked for "being men."
True of many issues concerning all of us who are human. It doesn't mean we throw away our processes or convict people (either in court or in public opinion) just to make a point.
“OBAA is a movie with some Black characters and some Hispanic characters but Sinners is unquestionably a Black movie. As such it has been hung with all of the baggage that falls on Black movies during awards season“
I don’t think it’s the casting that makes it a “Black” movie in this sense, it’s whether the movie is or isn’t preoccupied with white people. Moonlight; Pariah; even Crooklyn tell stories without concern about what any white people within (or without) of the movie think of them.
The part in Sinners when the vampire turns to the camera and says "THIS IS NOT UNIQUE TO THE BLACK EXPERIENCE, THE IRISH WERE CONSUMED BY THE OMNICULTURE AND THE NEXT INTERESTING MINORITY GROUP WILL BE TOO" seemed heavy handed but I guess it still didn't drive the point home.
Despite that I thought the movie had interesting things to say about cultural assimilation. Coogler said it was the most personal movie he's made and I imagine he struggles with selling out black culture in blockbusters like Black Panther or Creed, versus taking wooden nickels to make more authentic films like Fruitvale Station.
Of course to Freddie's point was there any group more ~jazzed~ about Fruitvale Station than white cinema nerds? Certainly more black people watched and enjoyed Black Panther even though it was targeted at the broader American and Chinese audience.