On my first watch of Sinners, I was perplexed why Ryan Coogler used Irish music to represent vampirism engulfing black American culture, given that if any one group of white people on Earth could be said to be oppressed, it’s the Irish. A rewatch, a dive into the lore, and further contemplation revealed more nuance than that; the evil vampire Remmick is considerably older than our conceptions of race, and Coogler has essentially described him as such, and the musical sequences – particularly Remmick’s hive mind dancing to “Rocky Road To Dublin”, the second most bitchin’ musical moment in the film – are too awesome to really think Coogler is saying the music itself is evil.
(Compare this to the one bluegrass song we hear when the vampires are initially trying to get into the juke joint. I’m amazed Jack O’Connell, Lola Kirk, and Peter Dreimanas managed to suck all the life out of the song and present something so empty.)
Of course, part of the vampire mythos is that vampires are cool and seductive. If not literally, then at least in the sense that they’re trying to negotiate their way into victimizing you. This movie’s second half relies heavily on the tension of the vampires trying to talk their way into the bar; comically incompetently, in the case of Cornbread, who fails even before they figure out he’s a vampire specifically. More convincing is Remmick trying to sell the characters on the idea that they can transcend racism through the immortality of vampiricism.
But Coogler also hits on the necessary horror and sadness of vampires. Remmick is arguably around a thousand years old; all the people he ever knew and cared about are long dead and never coming back. The first half of Sinners has worked so hard to sell music and community as one and the same; most obviously, in the most bitchin’ musical moment in the film, as Coogler establishes communal connection not just across space but across time. But also in smaller ways; my favourite being making fun of people who aren’t in the community, who get the vague idea of the blues but don’t even know how to clap on time.
Who does Remmick have to share his music with? Coogler’s twist on the vampire genre is to lean in on the ‘mesmerism’ aspect and turn them into a hive mind, with Remmick at the top controlling all. His rendition of “Rocky Road To Dublin” isn’t a community embracing joy together; it’s one guy forcing his taste onto everyone, trying to reach into the abyss and bring something back. Michael B Jordan looks faintly ridiculous as Stack, and Jack O’Connell looks furious, as if Remmick is vaguely dissatisfied.
There are two angles through which one can look at this. The first is poignant; Remmick is lonely. One of the upsides of the internet age is seeing people form communities, and seeing people try to get into those communities and fail. I’ve seen white people trying to work their way into black communities, men trying to get into female communities, and so on, and Remmick reminded me of so many of those incidents. Remmick tries appealing to Smoke and the juke joint through the same rhetoric – we’re all human! We’re all equals! We just want to love!
In my experience, the way to bridge gaps between people does not involve ignoring that those gaps exist. If I have an easier time relating to women than most men – and I don’t think I do – it’s because I recognise the differences in our experiences, our expectations, and the world’s expectations of us (the fear of sexual assault doesn’t permeate the way I see the world because I haven’t been threatened with it since the age of eleven, for example). The nice thing about community is a pre-existing sense of intimacy, and there’s nothing as offputting as an assumption of intimacy that doesn’t exist.
The second angle to see this through is an extension of the first, and it’s also really, really funny. Given that the current main complaint of horror is that it’s dedicated to a metaphor to the point of choking interpretation and, more importantly, horror out of a story – something that arguably began with The Babadook, where the title monster is actually just depression – it’s hysterical to me that Coogler has created a story where capitalism and white supremacy are actually extensions of vampiricism.
Coogler isn’t saying anything so simple as “vampires are just white people”; he’s reaching back further, presenting a primal urge that has expressed itself, here and now, as a white guy trying to eat black people for their music. I suppose you might even call this ‘sin’, though I struggle to attribute any one sin to what Remmick is doing. It’s not quite greed, it’s not quite lust, it’s not quite gluttony; it’s the urge to devour people and communities to fill a cheap desire, like a hit of heroin over the spiritual connection of community. I’m forced to rely on Terry Pratchett’s definition of sin: what happens when you start treating people like things.
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About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
I will cop to liking and being moved by the metaphor in The Babadook–it helps that the film is relentlessly scary until then–but the “everything is metaphor/it’s really about trauma” approach really is sapping the life out of the horror genre. Sinners doesn’t have that problem at all, and I love that it comes down to the implicit reversal you mention: Coogler makes the vampirism feel like a genuine archetypal force that is, in one form or another, at the back of major social problems, not just a way to talk about them. He lets the genre aspects have their own weight and gravity.
Got a real laugh out of that “The answer is no, but read this anyway” excerpt, by the way.
For pacing reasons, I left out that like many things that become popular, the original use of direct and clear metaphor works for me in The Babadook because it’s fairly honest and nuanced about it; Mr Babadook may be depression, but very little of his actual expression is tied into that so schematically (depression rarely has ever come to me in the form of a picture book beforehand). Its descendants have tended to try and make everything map to the point of not really being a metaphor anymore, and more importantly, putting the metaphor over emotion. Coogler and Sinners exist outside the question of metaphor entirely.
(Thank you!)
Mr. Babadook is not depression, in the same way the Overlook Hotel is not alcoholism. They are entities that feed on and are in some ways created by human impulses but they are monsters before they are metaphors. And I think there’s an interesting parallel of “you have to live with it” with the endings of The Babadook and Sinners, and that works because the it the characters are living with is a physical thing (that has been invited in).
What did we watch?
The only thing I have to report of any kind from the weekend is The Rehearsal finale, and I don’t know if it says something about me, or what that something is, that the big finale reveal had me thinking “oh of course Nathan would do that” and it took me hours of reflection to realize it was objectively audacious and insane, let alone more so in the level of commitment required.
Planet Of The Apes (2001)
For the most part, this uses the basic premise to tell a typical dumb late 90’s adventure film. The traces of Tim Burton left are the implied romantic subtext between a man and a talking chimpanzee, and the satirical elements mainly brought to ape culture; all the main apes draw very heavily from cheesy comic books in particular. Tim Roth’s Thade is my favourite, where he’s practically a snarling cartoon villain right out of Saturday morning in the 80s, committing to the snarling expression at all times and even finding nuances within it. But it has a bad habit of discarding ideas and then throwing them away artlessly for others; the emotional arc is genuinely incoherent. It’s too polished for a Tim Burton film and too sloppy for a normal Hollywood film.
Even as a preteen, the ending was totally baffling.
Hoo boy. Saw this one in the full-price theater. That ending went over as well as a big whoopee cushion. And my gods, this was made in 2001?? My mind had relegated this into 1997/1998 territory for some reason.
It very strongly feels like a 1997/98 film.
Final Destination Bloodlines
Well, sort of. My wife and I went to see this in Uruguay, for kicks, even though it was dubbed into Spanish and we only know enough to fumble our way through asking for directions and ordering in restaurants. But we figured this is a franchise where the main appeal is gory, complicated death set-pieces that are wordless anyway, so why not? And indeed, even missing the exact meaning of most of the dialogue, this was kind of a blast: fantastic, imaginative kill sequences, engaging enough characters (Erik, Howard, and Bobby were my favorites), and some good humor. “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” turning up as a needle drop as bodies go splat from a great height really amused me.
It was also interesting to see how clear and universal the first section of the film is, before it necessarily gets into the particular lore of the franchise: there’s a simplicity to that 1968 flashback premonition that means it could almost work as a silent film. (As long as you scored in the right music.) Young couple in love, nervously out-of-place in a wealthier space than they’re used to (Iris looking around at the other women and then smoothing down her pretty-but-not-fancy dress is the kind of great silent detail that sequences is so good at), pregnancy, etc., etc. It’s all done through simple, vivid, visual storytelling–probably the kind of thing you can only do when you’re working with archetypes rather than trying to convey anything too specific or with too much history (I was vague on why Stefani’s mom had left the family until I checked Wikipedia, for example).
Hacks, “A Slippery Slope”
Excellent stuff. More thoughts over on Nath’s TV round-up.
Southern Comfort
Rewatched for Movie Club. Since I’ve written this up before, I’ll just say that this was the first time I noticed a key bit of sound design: the background noise of insects and birds becomes oppressively, jarringly loud when the men first stumble back to land after the shooting, and it’s a great way of emphasizing how impossible it is for them to think in that moment and how it feels like the very landscape has turned hostile on them. And the final act led me, for obvious reasons, to also rewatching:
Yum, Yum, Yum!: A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking
Les Blank on Cajun cuisine. This is unsurprisingly excellent Blank, with an obvious love for food, community, and process: I love how much time we spend on slicing garlic and green onions, explaining the preparation of tongue, skinning frogs, etc. The most memorable part of this for me will always be the guy who talks about going to Disneyland, seeing what seasoning-spackled monstrosity they were passing off as “Cajun-style” fish, and then washing the fish off in his hotel room so he could enjoy its actual flavor. But all of it is good, and–to tie it into today’s article–one of the ways it’s good is in looking at how a real culture can never be completely commercialized. The cooking style we see here isn’t just tied to things that can be stolen or even lovingly, respectfully homaged, it’s also rooted in an incredibly specific landscape and set of people. This is a way of life where a recipe for duck includes an explanation for where to hunt the duck, because a key part of the flavor comes from what the duck itself has been feeding on.
Hell yeah Hill and Blank! Yum Yum Yum has the guy with the enormous smoke pit in his back yard, right? That is some fucking culture. And it is amusing to imagine Blank making a documentary in the background of that last, incredible sequence of Southern Comfort, he’d probably clock the outsiders but go back to whatever was happening food-wise while their situation resolved itself.
Live Music over Zoom – This weekend was – and still is – Balticon, a scifi convention we used to go to pre-COVID (and might actually go to again someday except there is always something else competing for time or money). It offers a virtual option, so I Zoomed in for a panel and some of that wacky fannish music no one outside of scifi fandom knows about. Including a concert by an amateur orchestra that plays video game music (they were pretty good for amateurs), a sing-along of classic filk songs (if you don’t recall what filk is, please ask) where I heard a lot of voices of friends, and a virtual concert by my wife. It was sparsely attended, but she was still happy to perform. I guess hearing her sing isn’t a big deal for me, but I still get a kick out of it.
Kojak, “The Queen of Hearts Is Wild” – Welcome to the fifth and final season of Kojak. Two things have changed: 1) there is a new opening theme with new opening credits. The new theme is okay, the new credits are overly frenetic and very flashy – the name “Kojak” literally flashes by one letter at a time and could just as easily be a 70s ad for Kodak if you change that one letter. It also shows a lot of shots of our hero in NYC. Maybe because…2) That is all of NYC we will get to see this season, filming having moved to LA entirely. Anyway, we start the season with the arrest of a suspect in a series of robberies and murders at grocery stores. The one reliable witness? The girlfriend of a mob boss who refuses to help. Never mind that Kojak is told “hands off” by the FBI. Turns out the woman is actually undercover. And did I mention she’s a Black woman? Interracial relationships were starting to be seen on TV by now – The Jeffersons was already on for two years – but the matter of fact handling of both her dating a white man and being an undercover Fed is remarkable for the time. The brave woman is played with aplomb by Paula Kelly, who would later get two Emmy nominations and was also big on Broadway for a while. Script by a young Donald Bellisario.
Frasier, “Roz’s Turn” – Roz tries out for a job as a host, but an offhand remark by Frasier to his scheming agent Bebe that he would hate to lose Roz costs Roz the gig. Bebe episodes are hard to figure because Bebe is so over the top evne as Harriet Sansom Harris is so good. What undermines this, however, is that never before or since do we hear Roz wants to be on the air.
M*A*S*H, “Love and Marriage” – An enlisted man wants to marry a local woman of ill repute, and Hawkeye and Trapper want to stop this until they learn the enlisted man is part of a scheme to get her into the US to sell her wares. Dennis Dugan is very good playing the seemingly innocent but clearly scheming kid. Meanwhile, Korean surgical aide Mr. Kwan wants to get home to his wife before she gives birth, but for some reason that is not so easy. This is Soon Tek Oh’s first appearance. Way too many closeups here, and some odd behavior by the gang when Frank actually fires a gun and no one goes running.
Salazar Knight’s YouTube channel, “Grant Morrison’s Batman” – Knight is a Batman superfan who has done extensive analysis of Batman comics, analysis I usually agree with. For this long vid, he read every issue of Batman written by Morrison, and I think he really nails it. But there was one really interesting thing. Knight always calls Morrison by their name. (Morrison has identified as nonbinary for a few years now.) No use of “him” thankfully, but also no use of “them.” I really wonder if Knight avoided any pronouns to avoid anyone getting upset one way or the other. Given that Knight is already likely to get smoked for his opinions about the comics, I can’t entirely blame him for avoiding extra angst, but if you’d normally use a pronoun and don’t, that is not ideal.
Woo live Zoom music! Hell yeah to your wife putting on a concert!
The Day Of The Jackal — the original film, and I am very skeptical of making this story a TV show because of the momentum and anti-characterization at play here. Grant lays it out better than anyone — https://www.the-solute.com/anatomy-of-ownage-the-day-of-the-jackal-year-of-the-month/ — but this is a procedural of forces and actions, we never “know” the Jackal outside of what he does (and the ending is a funny reveal in this regard) and the opposition may have the wonderful faces of Lonsdale and Jacobi but it is still a bureaucracy with a zillion other faces in play, the tension is the lack of alignment in the opposing parties’ strengths and weaknesses — the Jackal is agile and ruthless but has no allies that he can count on (and indeed he kills pretty much anyone who helps him) while Lonsdale et al are plodding and reactive but legion — the same guy who the Jackal fools at the end is still puttering around and able to be his undoing. And as filmmakers, Zinneman and crew are on Team Lonsdale in method — this moves from place to place and scene to scene with an apparent lack of vim that ticks up in intensity to that final setpiece, it’s wild how many real places are here and the coordination emphatically achieves the result they’re going for. Ladies and gentlemen, we got em.
Live music — “Shreddy Mercury” is a great name for a band, even if they did not play any Queen. But the cover band at the free spot played a lot of 70s stuff, Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder came off quite well, and the crowd of 20-somethings was very enthusiastic! My old ass bounced halfway through but encouraging to see the youths headbanging to “Good Times Bad Times.”
Coogan’s Bluff — young Clint goes to New York City and gets radicalized by damn hippies and damn bureaucracy, it is very amusing to draw the line from this to Eastwood and Siegel’s later team-up in Dirty Harry. Here, Clint gets his man and actually shares a cigarette with him! And this is after getting his ass kicked quite a bit and fucking up royally to kick the plot in gear! Clint is also a real asshole, he’s got confidence to burn and knows it, how odd to see him without wear and tear that helps ground his arrogance. But to be fair to Clint, while he is running around a ton of great NYC locations (the final chase scene at the Cloisters is great) he also goes to a hippie dance party where Lalo Schriffin’s “The Pigeon Toed Orange Peel” is playing in an endless loop and this is the absolute worst kind of Strawberry Alarm Clock-ass hippie garbage rock, boo live music, Clint should’ve shot everyone there getting their groove on to this shit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=184uovqxj2M
Woooo live music and bouncing halfway!!
I appreciate The Day of the Jackal more now that I know about France in the 60s. I get why you might want to take the elements of the story and decouple them from that era, but I don’t think you will improve on it.
I’ve heard another band around here called Robert Shredford, and I guess this is what we’re doing now.
Doctor Who, , most recent. The hook is way more interesting than whatever the main point of the episode is. A utopia-dystopia powered by a wish? Doubt threatens reality? Very cool. Whatever the Rani is doing? Russell Davies at his laziest.
Classic Doctor Who, The Mark of the Rani. The Rani’s plans are much more down to earth here. Very funny dynamic of the Rani having little patience for the master’s and doctor’s dick measuring contest. The 6th doctor’s garish wardrobe makes you think he’ll be soft, but he’s such a dick to peri. They should bring back a little question mark embroidery.
Last of us . Remember when tv seasons used to happen every year? Anyway; ending on a cliffhanger like that and waiting at least two years for the next season is the sort of thing that tv execs used to understand was fatal to the show.
The revenge plot, and the extent to which she’s pursuing this recklessly and monomaniacally, is really stretching credibility here.
For years, I wondered if anyone would bring back the Rani. Then I watched the two serials with her, and decided the fans who would have been fine if she never came back were right. So naturally, she came back. (I think RTD and Moffatt and Chibnall have covered every classic character but Romana and the Valeyard.) And yes, the Sixth Doctor was pretty awful at that point and it took a lot of effort by the writers and by the actors to fix things even a little.
Mad scientist girl boss who looks down on the juvenile male antics of the master and the doctor has a lot of potential as a recurring villain, but not if every time she or the master shows up it’s do bring about the end of the universe.
They need to retcon the timeless child retcon and bring gallifrey back. It’s been 20 years! They’ve done as much as they’re going to do with “the last of the time lords.”
I am both lagging behind on the Gatwa run – I feel like I did with the Capaldi era, great actors, forgettable stories, no urgency to avoid spoilers – and most of the stuff with the Timeless Child (don’t know if I will catch up on Whittaker). But I have a sense that the attempt to make the stakes bigger and bigger has take away a lot of the fun.
oh absolutely. And they did this for most of the season finales, which is another point in favor of 10-13 episode seasons, so you have more time to explore weird little one off scenarios. But also all the Davies and Moffat seasons have suffered from apocalypse inflation for the finales.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
First time. A good time at the movies though not as fun as any of the post-Brad Bird movies. The first half works overtime to connect with the story of previous movies to very little effect, bringing in old clips and writing in some quick story reveals to try and amp up the emotional stakes
but that fell cold for me. That’s all quickly dispensed with though, and once the series’ trademark ludicrous action sequences and far-fetched cockamanie schemes start piling up things improve and you get the momentum these movies are very good at, even as they bloat past the two and a half hour mark. Shoutout to Hayley Atwell, series newcomer Katy O’Brian, Shea Whigham (even though he’s stuck with the worst of the aforementioned reveals), Nick Offerman and Lucy Tulugarjuk, as well as a surprise return from one of those perfect 90’s supporting faces, who shows up here weathered but surprisingly happy. Good ending to the series, though it’s far from its peaks (the first movie, Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation), a slight downgrade from Dead Reckoning, and if it’s not the final one* it will probably feel like this movie’s initial sweatiness and overwrought writing will have gone somewhat wasted.
*I’m guessing Paramount will want to keep going without the 62-year old Cruise, and it’s not like they don’t have a huge, proven cast that can take over. Hell, bring back Paula Patton and Jeremy Renner.
“Who does Remmick have to share his music with? Coogler’s twist on the vampire genre is to lean in on the ‘mesmerism’ aspect and turn them into a hive mind, with Remmick at the top controlling all. His rendition of “Rocky Road To Dublin” isn’t a community embracing joy together; it’s one guy forcing his taste onto everyone, trying to reach into the abyss and bring something back.”
The two big musical setpieces both involve extension — Remmick’s is outward in space and body, he is the radius of an expanding hive mind that draws from his existence; while Preacher Boy’s extends through time, back to the ancestors and forward into the future. The second is community and it exists in difference along a continuum, Remmick was taken from his past and has no future he cannot steal. He got fucked into that existence but he does not need to maintain it, I think, and that is what the epilogue opens up — freed from his influence, two vampires are cut off from the past but are still able to access it without stealing it. Remmick’s need is very real but it is just his. I am wondering now if Ryan Coogler is a fan of Ennis and Dillon’s Preacher, which is also largely about an Irish vampire cut off from and yearning for community, and the selfish ways this manifests.
Broke: “vampires are just white people”
woke: white people are just vampires.
But for real though using supernatural horror as a vehicle for themes instead of as a 1:1 allegory is the way to go.
Making Remnick a southern white instead of irish would make the movie too allegorical. White southern life (and American life generally) is too often vampiric on Black life, most obviously for music and cuisine but also for the actual
labor that made everything right down to the raw materials of the film industry (film is made from cotton). Klannula would be almost too obvious, though it’s weird that I don’t think anyone has actually done that. Get Out is close, but not literally vampires.* Having that theme in the background by having Delta slim talk about it and then making the bad guy not be racist is clever and really elevates the movie from the purely allegorical movie he could have made. It sets up a stronger contrast between competing models of community. One reaches both forward and back, transcending but not annihilating the self. The other is a hive mind cut off from its past and its future.
You could do an adaptation of the Stoker book by sending a Chicago realtor to a Mississippi plantation. You could have the demeter be a Mississippi river steam boat. Then Klanula gets to Chicago and starts preying on Chicagoans. I’m throwing this idea out for free. I have a feeling there’ll be some increased demand for movies about imperial / colonial / racial violence being brought back home in coming years, for broadly obvious reasons.
What Did We Play?
1. Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter – Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics on Nintendo Switch
Beat arcade mode during the week. Another fun fighter, smaller in scale and with a less wild tone than Marvel vs. Capcom and Marvel vs. Capcom 2, which is welcome change in terms of variety. And I appreciate a final boss, Cyber Akuma, that feels in line with the rest of the game, and that the gimmicky sub-boss this time, Apocalypse, turns out to be quite easy. Moving on to X-Men vs. Street Fighter sometime this week.
2. Gradius: The Interstellar Assault – Nintendo Classics Game Boy on Nintendo Switch
This got uploaded during the week and I gave it a try. I never knew that there was a Gradius game on Game Boy and this is a very good take on the series, with great controls and presentation and level design way beyond what I expected from Game Boy. It’s not too hard at the start and it’s got basically all that makes Gradius games good, so I might give this a full playthrough. Just now realized that I’ve never finished a Gradius game.
3. Tetris DX – Nintendo Classics Game Boy on Nintendo Switch
Played a few rounds. It’s GB Tetris in color with great music, so it’s all good. Also, I realized that the attract mode here (meaning the stuff that comes up if you leave the title screen idle for a minute) includes not only gameplay but original, custom-made animations that don’t play anywhere else in the game that I can find and where made just for this. That’s a nice detail and interesting to think that they went through the effort of doing this for a bit that not only most people will skip past but that consumed AA batteries just to watch on its original release. They’re very nice animations, I must say.
4. Arcade Archives PAC-MAN on Nintendo Switch
Read somewhere that it’s the game’s 45 anniversary and played this for a while. It’s such a perfect game still. There’s hardly any better sound than the chime that comes on when you get an extra life. Happy birthday you yellow glutton.
I finished Legacy of the Wizard, which while on the whole being pretty impressive given the limitations of the time (great soundtrack in particular), also feels like it would be deeply frustrating and drive me mad without a guide or save states. But hey, it’s a box I’ve been meaning to check off for a long time, and now I have.