Ryan Coogler’s Sinners Predicts its own Meta

by Tanmay Jain

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⚠ SPOILER ALERT: Vampires and Spoilers Ahead

David Fincher’s The Killer, a story of a meticulous hitman, was an overt metaphor for his own strive for perfection and precision in his film-making over the last two decades. Martin Scorcese’s Silence, the story of Catholic missionaries persecuted in Shogunate Japan, was based, not so directly, on his crises of faith. Ryan Coogler goes a step further, and makes a film that doesn’t reflect upon his journey as a creative or as a person but upon the journey that was yet to come. 

Sinners tells the tale of a vampire horde hunting the Black community behind a newly founded “Club Juke”, owned by the duo Michael B Jordan and Michael B Jordan. Their main target, however, is the young Blues musician, Sammie Moore, played by Miles Caton. Sammie’s talents bring to life the folktale of music that has the power to bring together the past and the future, the dead and the alive. With his song, comes forth the vampires. Leading the hunt is Remmick, who counters Sammie and the blues of others from Club Juke, like Pearlline and Delta Slim, and the entire history and future of the art; with a country tune that refuses to evolve. 

The vampires offer to our protagonists equality through assimilation. When Remmick grabs Sammie, he says, “I want your stories, I want your songs”. The history of African-American music is riddled with stories of artists being taken advantage of by their agents, and their record labels, who end up owning the music that they never had any authorship in. Culture, owned, commodified, sold. And the film business is no different. Coogler’s deal with Warner Brothers is making headlines, as Sinners has become the first film by a Black director where the rights of the IP returns to its author. The studio executives are scared, as per the hundred headlines about it. 

When Sammie finally escapes Remmick and the other vampires, he returns to his pastor father, who begs him to let go of his guitar and of the “devil music”. The “devil music” that invites the vampires. But Sammie persists. He sticks to his music, he risks the evil, and he survives. Was the deal Coogler signed part of the intended plot, or just a lucky coincidence that made his film a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or would it just have been too depressingly ironic to allow the story of Black artists fighting to own their art be owned by some faceless company? An endless horde where everyone is “equal” to another, except when it hurts the one at the top, it hurts them all.

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