Trip Jennings

This weekend I saw Sinners, the latest movie from director Ryan Coogler. Coogler is best known for the Rocky sequel, Creed, and the two Black Panther films.

Some people have described Sinners as a vampire horror flick. OK, sure, there are bloodsuckers and copious amounts of the red stuff, with plenty of jump scares. But saying Sinners is a horror flick is like saying Chinatown, the 1970s noir classic, is simply a movie about a private eye hired to trail a husband who is believed to be cheating on his wife. Inspired by the early 20th century water wars between a growing Los Angeles and the water-rich Owens Valley,

Chinatown also is about money, power, and corruption — and how the country’s second-largest city came to be.

Like Chinatown, Sinners is about many things all at once — not the least of which is American history, Western civilization, and the many moral questions we should wrestle with as beneficiaries of this complicated legacy.

This sounds overly grandiose, I know. I am open to the suggestion that I am so bewitched by the film that I have lost all perspective. But in the days since seeing Sinners, I can’t shake it as a stream of novels, histories and cultural studies I’ve read over the years have leapt to mind as I’ve ruminated on Coogler’s film.

Some of these books are famous, some are not. I am thinking of novels such as The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Fledgling by Octavia Butler, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, as well as Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley, White Tears by Hari Kunzri, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

The histories loom just as large: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, South to America by Imani Perry, How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill and Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop by Jeff Chang.

Here’s my confession: This column is as much about how reading can enrich one’s appreciation of a particular film, musical piece, artwork, or sculpture, as anything.

As I watched Sinners, scene after scene evoked a period of American history I’d read about, or an idea I’d encountered in a novel, or deep, uncomfortable questions I’d encountered in essays about the many influences that shape a musical genre, and who has the power to name it and, in turn, benefit financially.

Set in the 1930s Jim Crow South, Sinners is, of course, a commentary on White supremacy in the United States. But it is also about a particular time and place. As a native Southerner, I felt a twinge of homesickness for the heavy, humid air of summer and the idioms and cadences with which Southerners often speak to one another (Living around the country has taught me that White and Black Southerners have more in common than many people suspect, even if our politics sometimes separates many of us.)

But it is not just about Southern racism. It is about race in America as told through the lens of the Great Migration. From 1915 through 1970, millions of Blacks escaped the harsh conditions of the South — the terror of lynching, the backbreaking work and limited economic and educational opportunities — for a better life in the North, Midwest and West only to find that the utopia they expected north of the Mason-Dixon did not exist (Two major characters in Sinners set up the story when they return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Miss. after several years in Chicago.)

It also is about the tug-of-war between religious faith and the outside world (A major character in Sinners must decide between a peripatetic lifestyle of a blues musician and his father’s wish that he follow in his steps as a preacher. As a child of a Presbyterian minister who wondered why her seminary-trained son never followed her into the pulpit, I felt this storyline acutely).

It is, unexpectedly, also about Christianity’s destruction of and intermittent integration of Indigenous belief systems into its cosmology over the past 20 centuries as it spread across the globe. (This is represented in Sinners both by a female root doctor, a traditional healer in the rural Black South, and a 1,000-year-old vampire who remembers Christian priests taking his father’s land as they destroyed the pre-Christian culture made up of a mixture of pagan and Celtic influences.)

And it is also about music and its transcendent power to transport us to another plane of existence. At the same time, it is about who has the power to commodify this potent human creation.

I apologize if my musings give the impression that Sinners was dull, an exposition of complicated historical and sociological ideas. It is anything but. It is a fast-moving, entertaining film. After seeing it, in fact, I was shocked to learn its running time is longer than two hours. It felt much shorter.

And that is a mark of great filmmaking, when a movie chock full of this many ideas feels this tight.

That is my way of saying, I hope you’ll give Sinners a chance. It’s worth your time,

Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth.