By Eden Omari

“Harrowing! Alex Haley’s Roots on steroids with an Irish vampire added.”

Black culture has significantly influenced American culture since before the blues. Hip hop’s domination worldwide, enduring influences of music genres, trailblazing artists, our language vernacular, our Trayvons, Breoannas, Amadous, George Floyds, Black Lives Matter, President Barack Obama, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, our poet laureates and now Sinners. Blacks frequently reform the ways they signal each other, and just when America is beginning another phase of “Black fatigue,” writer/director Ryan Coogler says, “Not so fast.”

With his pedantic storytelling, culture critics are airborne in their shock and delight of this almost too clever film for them. Not every viewer will grasp the plethora of historic references, but every viewer is promised a mesmerizing rich cinematic, haunting film experience, starting with pop culture icons like the red pill (Smoke’s hat) and the blue pill (Stack’s hat, both played by Michael B. Jordan) and the pointed thematic whites (vampire) versus the Blacks (townspeople). Combating Hollywood’s colorism, there are no light skinned Black actors cast, they’dve been in the big house. The three majority cast constitute the ushering annihilation of entire races.

Established in the Jim Crow South, it’s a film about legacy, identity, beauty and depth during one of Black America’s most harrowing centuries, steeped in gruesome horror. It’s a fresh retelling and melding of stories of the slave descendants, Chinese, Indians and the Irish. When the Mississippi Choctaw Indians warned the settlers of the evil that was coming, they lied, harboring and nourishing the evil (vampire), hell on earth transpires.

 Hearing the original dialect of the Choctaw Chahta, and the soaring scene where the young gifted guitar genius Sammie (played by Miles Caton and based on the life of Robert Johnson), conjures manifestations of dancers from every culture throughout time was beautifully chilling. Indicative are the many who love the “devil’s music,” but not so much the people who originated it. The indelible rendition of the tune “Rocky Road to Dublin” and the Irish gig performed by actor Jack O’Connell as the 1,500-year-old vampire, Remmick, still  lingers. It was sickening AND sickening and the best portrayal of a vampire since Stuart Townsend in Queen Of the Damned (2002). Each bite of the vampire(s) is a mutilating lynching representing future generations lost.

Blacks glean empathy — what it feels like being the majority and being fearful of what will transpire when people of color become the majority and (racially motivated) power roles get flipped (Smoke and Hogwood, played by Dave Maldonado). The raging hate that some whites feel about Blacks, and vice versa, and the degradation that Blacks continue to endure would be, in total, unsurvivable for most. Is this the real impetus of race hatred?? Fear? Sinners compels a deeper dive, emphasizing what side you’d be on, knowing that each decision you make will escort a damning consequence.

Themes: Us pretending not to be on the side of the bad guy. Our secret internal need for revenge, power and control. The times we urged another’s misery and the times we inflicted the pain firsthand. When we devised clever ways to covet another’s belongings and the battle to keep it. Believing the unbelievable while protecting those who mean us no good. Rapturing the gifts, talents and flesh of another (sports team owners) and the modern day slavery that pursues (our prison industrial complex).

The betrayal of your allies — even your own kin can be turned against you without much finesse. Combatting and rejecting the seducing invitations of immortality and power, understanding that no matter how valiant the efforts, Blacks can never be retributed, and their worldly afflictions will continue in angst and strife for time in perpetuity.

Here’s the real horror. Given opportunity, would I become delirious with power like Nat Turner joining rank in the slaughter with recalls of my maligning and threatening experiences by whites guiding the axe? Will nightmares of my uncle’s brutal beating by police and the judges bias sentencing? Or will it be the powerlessness felt as a young “boy,” or the humiliation felt watching my mother shamefully yet cleverly code switch around white folks be the impulsion? Will it be my father’s stories of despicable treatment as he cleaned their offices, the rising threat of “Karens” and “Kens” or standing at all my brothers’ coffins too often, or the George Zimmermans and Kyle Rittenhouses still walking around free? DWB, Proud Boys, the spitting on the ground when we pass by or the fact that Blacks struggle to prosper without threat or tarnish being the culminating result (Greenwood Tulsa OK-Flint-Katrina-Watts-redlining-the enduring white supremacists — on and on). 

Will the Mandela Effect impelling the majority to thrive in the bosom of their brethren while continually repudiating the unequivocal holy terror of the Black American experience deliver the decision? Or shall we convene a Hoodoo (Annie) and have our guitars save us from ourselves?

Sinners is available streaming via HBO, Apple TV and more. 

Eden Omari is an author, actor and retired school teacher. He has resided in Eugene on and off for 15 years.