I thought this at first too, but I’ve since learned that that was a popular black song of the time. Probably to ingratiate themselves. So, more likely, the Klan couple learned the song from him. And he learned it from just being around.
If you’re familiar with Coogler’s work, he never has just bad guys and good guys. There’s protagonists and antagonists. Everyone is some shade of grey. His ‘villain’ in Black Panther was so right in his motives, they had to make him do a couple of pointlessly heinous things to offset it.
In Sinners, the protagonists here weren’t particularly good people either. They’re just less bad. Remmick is meant to be sympathetic. He thinks he’s freeing these black people from a world that wants to subjugate and kill them. He relates to their oppression. He hates the Klan. I think he sincerely wants to take away their pain. Stack and Mary seem to agree long after he’s dead.
The point of the movie wasn’t, ‘white people bad.’ Subjugation bad. Remmick became the thing he hated.
Good point. However, if you’re attributing the following to me, I don’t see any justification for such attribution in anything I’ve posted:
As for Remmick being meant to be seen as sympathetic: wouldn’t that make the Choctaw who were pursuing him, the bad guys?
He’s still a vampire killing people. He’s sympathetic, that doesn’t mean those against him are the “bad guys.” The only true “bad guys” in the film are the Klan.
Victim-to-offender “cycle of abuse”, to the power infinity.
Yeah, practicing vampirism is not a sympathetic trait as portrayed in the movie, but we saw plenty of sympathetic characters become vampires, so it’s not a simple goodies-versus-baddies situation. (As planetcory noted, it never is with Ryan Coogler.)
Eyebrows and Kimstu: fair points from you both.
My read (and the read of my companions who also saw it) was that the vampires offered unconditional acceptance and connection but the price, the damnation, was to be cut off from your culture and heritage. (This is stated explicitly at least twice.) The vampires were a swipe at the “colorblind” mentality that seeks to assimilate people of color into white culture. The vampires wanted to appropriate Sammy’s gift.
I think it’s the first vampire movie I’ve seen where becoming a vampire looked genuinely tempting.
Which is the point, I think. Life is probably easier in many ways when you’re willing to assimilate.
I just saw this film for the second time and it was every bit as good. I think it’s one of my top ten favorites. Everything is just so well done.
After I saw it I said, "You know Jordan Peele is watching this, thinking, “Well, shit.”
Which is the opposite of the Crossroads mythology which my Blues-obsessed brain kept trying to force on the narrative until I figured out it was a Vampire (not devil) film.
I was also thinking of the legend about Robert Johnson.
I think Peele watched it and said, “Hot damn!” Peele opened a door that this movie danced through, and he should be proud as hell.
When the vampires started Peace and Loving it, I thought about reading Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison way back in high school, and how the Communists tried to recruit Black Americans: the talk about racism may have just been a hollow and barely-sincere attempt to recruit the humans toward vampirism. “Barely sincere” in the sense that they weren’t lying, they just didn’t actually give a shit about racism.
Another interpretation I read suggested that the vampires were like the music industry: they wanted to come in and take the music for their own and destroy the community in the process, but they had to be invited in.
It was a rich enough tale to take on a lot of interpretations, and that’s fantastic.
Very late to the party – I just watched this on a plane, on my iPhone. My thoughts were just the opposite: a movie about opening juke joint in klan country, with that soundtrack, would have been fantastic on its own. So I absolutely loved the first half. Meh about the action half.
The Irish folk music made a great contrast to the music going on inside the joint.
I tend to agree. “Vampire” storylines are always morally messy: glamorizing vampires requires ignoring the fact that they routinely kill people—something that should not be ignored, in my view. (Justifying killing on the grounds that Group X has been exploited by Group Y for centuries is equally morally messy. Again, my opinion.)
I fully agree about the music. I’m still enjoying the mix of genres.
Interesting, because my opinion is that neither of those things happen in the movie. Vampires are not glamorized; they represent assimilation, which is tempting but ultimately damnation. And the only group in the film that is killed besides all the people of color in the juke joint is a group of KKK members who showed up to kill first.
I’ve mentioned in another SDMB thread that the character played by Hailee Steinfeld at one point comes into the dance hall (in Louisiana in 1932). One person there asks why an obviously white woman would want to come into a place where everyone else is black. She says that her mother’s father was half-black. In fact, Hailee Steinfeld’s mother’s father was half-black (and, furthermore, was half-Filipino). Presumably she was deliberately cast in the role because of this.
Other mixed-race/white-passing actresses auditioned for the part, e.g. Halsey, who is a quarter black. So I’m guessing they tailored the character’s heritage to match whichever actress they went with.
Who were the actresses who auditioned for the part beside Steinfeld and Halsay?
No idea. Halsey is the only one who’s talked about having auditioned. Talked about how few convincingly white-passing mixed actresses were available for the part, and thinking she had a good chance.
Can anyone suggest anyone else who would be right for the part?
I’m not really familiar with most actresses ancestry but Anya Taylor-Joy is part Argentinian and Spanish if that counts. I’m not sure Rashida Jones counts as white passing and she is the only other one that comes to mind. Then there are some “not really applicable” white passing Asian mixed ancestry actresses like Olivia Munn or Chloe Bennet.
Anya Taylor-Joy’s ancestry is mostly English and Scottish. Her father grew up in Argentina, but he’s descended from people who emigrated to Argentina from England and Scotland. Her mother was born in Zambia to parents who grew up in England and Spain. She has no African, Asian, or native American (or any non-European) ancestry. She grew up in Argentina until she was six and then her parents moved to England. Her accent sounds to me just like a fairly standard British accent, despite the fact that she spoke only Spanish until she was six.
Interestingly though, she was born in Miami, Florida while her parents were on vacation. I have no idea why any married couple would go on vacation while the mother was that close to the expected birthdate. Yes, Taylor-Joy’s an American citizen by virtue of being born in the U.S. This makes her like Saoirse Ronan or Nicole Kidman. Ronan’s parents were Irish citizens who were living and working in the Bronx until she was three years old, when they all moved back to Ireland. Kidman’s parents were Australian citizens who came to the U.S. for her father’s Ph.D. at the University of Hawaii and then his post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Health. So she spent a few weeks in Honolulu and then almost three years in Washington, D.C. before they all moved back to Australia. I would have guessed that Kidman didn’t remember living in the U.S. In fact, she was recently interviewed on The Late Show by Stephen Colbert, which has the regular segment where he asks guests a series of questions. One is what the guest’s first childhood memory was. She said that she remembered an incident when she was two years old while in Washington, D.C. Her parents were messing around throwing snowballs at each other. She tasted some snow on the ground then.
Rashida Jones could conceivably fit the profile for the character in Sinners. Her father was black and her mother was while. Meghan Markle is a one-time actress who could fit the profile. I doubt that she is interested in going back to acting.