[COLUMN] Sinners is Tale of Creativity, Commerce and Ownership | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which opens this weekend and is a delight. It’s one of the most enjoyable cinematic experiences I have had in a long time. It’s pure popcorn cinema. So, if you want to see the movie blind, feel free to bookmark and come back to this piece later. It’s honestly great, though.

The thing about vampires is that they have to be invited in. However, money opens doors.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners arrives in theatres this weekend. It is a film about art, commerce and ownership – and the complicated dynamic that exists between these three forces. Sinners tells the story of two twins, Smoke and Stack (both played by Coogler regular Michael B. Jordan), who return home to the Mississippi Delta to establish their own speakeasy after having spent years working in Chicago “for Capone.” These are two men trying to make something that they will own.

Much of the first half of Sinners is concerned with money and profit. Everybody is looking out for their own financial interests. Smoke takes a trip into town to haggle with Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo Chow (Yao) over the cost of designing menus and signs for the joint. Parking his truck outside, he pauses to explain the importance of negotiation to a young girl (Aadyn Encalarde), offering her 10 cents a minute to watch the trunk – only to help her negotiate up to 15 cent a minute.

Meanwhile, Stack finds himself recruiting entertainment for the evening and so seeks out veteran blues musician Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo). Slim already has a longstanding arrangement with another institution. Stack is offended, insisting that he’s offering Slim a high wage. Slim responds pragmatically. “You’re not offering me $20 a night,” he advises Stack. “You’re offering me $20 tonight.” Slim explains the financial risk of leaving a steady gig for a new enterprise - the long-term cost of giving up a safe bet for a risky gamble.

Everything in Sinners has a price, and that means that it comes at a cost. Stack arrives to find Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) picking cotton with his expectant wife Therise (Emonie Ellison), who understandably has very little time for Stack’s foul mouth and criminal ways. However, Stack is able to convince Therise to let Cornbread work the door at the new juke joint by promising ample amounts of money. In the end, it’s all financial.

Even Smoke’s trip home, to visit the grave of his dead infant child comes with a financial undercurrent. He reunites with his estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), shocked to discover that she is still accepting “plantation money” from the local African American population, notes and coins that have no financial value outside this small local economy. Smoke offers Annie real currency. “Your money has blood on it,” she counters. Smoke replies, “All money has blood on it.”

Sinners is ultimately revealed to be a vampire movie. Vampires are a flexible metaphor, they can represent any number of ideas. However, they are often an expression of the parasitic impulses of hyper-capitalism, often upper-class predators that literally feed off the blood of the common people. Karl Marx himself embraced the metaphor, arguing that “capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”

This metaphor is so central to the vampire that it even manifests in stories more preoccupied with other aspects of the creature. In Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) is a manifestation of what Stephen King described as “the ultimate zipless fuck”, an expression of sexual and cultural repression. Still, Orlok corrupts through greed, convincing Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) to abandon his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) with the promise of commission on a land deal.

Sinners explores the idea of vampires as financial predators. The vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connor) constantly leverages money to get what he wants. When he seeks shelter in the home of Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke), he convinces the couple to let him in by offering gold coins. When Smoke and Stack refuse to allow Remmick entry to the juke, he alludes to carrying coin in the hope that he might entice the gangsters to let him in.

The vampires are ultimately able to infiltrate the speakeasy when Stack sends his lover Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) to feel Remmick out, after it becomes clear that the local population does not have enough government money to make the speakeasy financially viable. After Cornbread is converted to a vampire, he tries clumsily to trick the group into inviting him back in, and – when that doesn’t work – his last-ditch effort is to ask Smoke for the money that he is rightfully owed for his services.

However, Sinners is not concerned with capitalism in some vague and abstract way. It is concerned specifically with the intersection of art and finance. Remmick is not drawn to the speakeasy by the promise of food or even money. He is instead lured by the purity of the blues music performed by young Sammie Moore (Miles Caton), which is so powerful an expression of the human soul that – in one virtuoso sequence – his performance literally transcends space and time.

Remmick wants Sammie because Sammie’s playing is so raw and spiritual that it can cross the barriers of reality and allow communion with the spirit world. Remmick sees in Sammie the potential to be reunited with his lost loved ones, a family from which he has been separated by hundreds of years. Remmick can play music himself, but evidently he lacks that power. As such, Remmick seeks to convert Sammie, to harness and exploit his gift for his own ends.

This is the cautionary tale at the heart of Sinners, the fear that the commercial demands of creating a space for art and community inevitably demand some sort of horrific compromise. Sammie laments that he can’t survive playing music. Mary tells Sammy that she’d like to tell him that all that matters is the joy that he derives from making music, but concedes, “That’d be horseshit.” Survival requires a willingness to deal with unpleasant and unpalatable forces. However, that also comes with a cost. “You keep dancing with the devil, one day he's gonna follow you home,” Sammie’s father, Jedidiah (Saul Williams), warns his son.

So much of Sinners is about the question of what it means to have and to retain ownership of something. Smoke and Stack have returned home from Chicago to claim a corner of the world for themselves, seemingly struggling to find a place for themselves in the big city. When Sammie asks why the pair didn’t stay in an ostensibly progressive major city, Stack laments, “Chicago is just Mississippi with skyscrapers instead of plantations.” Freedom must include economic freedom.

Ownership is not merely financial. Sinners returns repeatedly to the idea of organized religion, in particular Christianity. Jedidiah is a preacher who believes Sammie should use his gifts in service of the church, which Sammie rails against. Slim argues the blues are a more worthy pursuit, as they were not externally imposed upon African Americans like Christianity. Remmick acknowledges Protestantism was forced on Ireland by colonial powers.

In contrast, Sinners is built on the widely-held contention that the blues are an “authentic African American artform.” The blues don’t belong to parasitic predatory vampires like Remmick or gangsters like Capone. The blues don’t even belong to a church operated by Jedidiah. Instead, the blues are a young and emerging artform that are still being shaped by artists like Sammie and Slim. Within the world of Sinners, the blues serve as a metaphor for unfettered artistic creation and ownership.

There is a sense in which Sinners feels somewhat autobiographical for writer and director Ryan Coogler. Coogler is one of the most interesting and promising directors to emerge from Hollywood in recent years. Although he only really became a household name over the past decade or so, Coogler first broke out with Fruitvale Station, a movie about the last day in the life of Oscar Grant (Jordan). Coogler immediately marked himself as a talent to watch.

However, Coogler followed up Fruitvale Station with three successful and popular movies that were all tied to existing intellectual property: Creed, Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. These movies were all financially successful and positively reviewed. Creed revitalized the Rocky franchise and led to two sequels, the second of which is directed by Jordan. Black Panther was a genuine cultural phenomenon and a rich corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Coogler proved himself very adept at handling these established and familiar brands. He produced (and wrote) Warner Bros.’ intellectual-property-laden sequel Space Jam: A New Legacy and he consulted with Pixar on Soul. He recently reconfirmed that he is working on an X-Files reboot, reportedly even meeting with the show’s original creator Chris Carter about the possibility. Coogler is very good at making these kinds of intellectual property plays.

This is the way that Hollywood tends to work these days, snatching up young and promising independent filmmakers to work in the meatgrinder of franchise storytelling, making movies about subjects that they have no real ownership over. Some, like Josh Trank, are crushed in the machinery. Some, like James Gunn, feel perfectly at home in it. Even older directors like James Mangold seem largely trapped by this corporate gravity.

There was a time when this sort of franchise work could be a stepping stone to other work that was more distinct and unique, like Christopher Nolan interspacing his Dark Knight trilogy with The Prestige and Interstellar. There are still directors like Jordan Peele, who seem able to chart their own course within the studio system, but those are the exception rather than the rule. Sinners is Coogler’s first truly original film since Fruitvale Station over a decade ago.

It is clear that the concept of artistic and creative ownership outside a larger structure – whether “canon” like the church or “corporate” like Capone’s outfit – is on Coogler’s mind. Indeed, the director very literally owns the film. In 25 years, copyright on Sinners will be passed directly to Coogler. He acknowledges in interviews that this a largely symbolic gesture, that “the only motivation” was the importance of owning a movie that is itself about creative ownership.

There are moments in Sinners that feel personal and attuned with Coogler’s position in the industry. In particular, the conflict between Smoke and Stack, both played by Coogler’s regular collaborator Michael B. Jordan, feels like an artist navigating their own very conflicted relationship to the balance between art and commerce. It is ultimately money that comes between Smoke and Stack over the course of the film, the question of whether to compromise integrity in the face of financial necessity. Smoke and Stack are often treated as two halves of a whole, but they are of two minds on this question of commercial compromise.

There are smaller touches within Sinners that suggest an artist navigating his own desire for artistic expression with the compromises that have to be made on these projects. The Ku Klux Klan haunts Sinners, which is set relatively shortly after the box office success of The Birth of a Nation helped to resurrect the racist organization. Smoke and Stack buy the property that they plan to develop from local Klansman Hogwood (David Maldonado), because compromises need to be made.

This builds to a cathartic confrontation that throws Smoke into conflict with the local Klan. There is something deeply satisfying in watching Smoke just tear through wave after wave of bigots and racists using a Tommy Gun. It is a sequence that feels in conversations with criticisms of the perceived delicacy of Coogler’s approach to confronting racism in Black Panther and Wakanda Forever. Those films had to tiptoe around the point.

It seems unlikely Disney would have allowed such a satisfying moment on screen because of how it might have been seen to damage their brand. It would have caused trouble with reactionary audiences and upset the shareholders, a consideration that has led the studio to remove trans characters from their shows. As Hogwood lies dying, he gasps, panicking and pleading, “Wait, I’ve got money.” Smoke responds by pumping the bigot full of lead, in one of the movie’s most satisfying beats. Some things are more important than money.

Sinners is a remarkable work from an incredibly talented director. It is impeccable crowd-pleasing filmmaking. However, it also feels like a deeply personal work from a filmmaker navigating his own relationship to the commercial and creative constraints that exist within the current industry. Sinners is not only a film about what it means to create and then to own that which one has created, the film itself is a literal expression of that idea, which gives its argument teeth.