[A couple months back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either of us has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. I hope you’ve all had a chance to check it out already, and if not, that you’ll do so right now and then come back to read this weeklong series of posts inspired by different layers to this phenomenal work!]
[NOTE: I
tried to mostly avoid SPOILERS in Monday’s post, but I don’t think I’ll
completely be able to for the rest of the week (and in fact will be spoiling a
good bit in today’s post). If you haven’t seen Sinners yet, please do so
and then come back to read this series!]
On two stunning
scenes that embody the best of a foundational musical genre.
In lieu of
a full first paragraph of my own, I want to share three prior posts where I’ve
featured student work on the Blues and American literature and culture. Most
especially that includes FSU English Studies alum Sandra
Hamilton’s great Guest Post on the Blues. But I’ve also highlighted excellent
student papers inspired by Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues” in two
different semester reflection posts, here
and here.
Hope you’ll check out those posts featuring our awesome FSU students, and then
come on back for two layers to how Sinners BluesStudies.
Welcome
back! By far the most famous scene in Sinners—and justifiably so, as it’s
one of the most stunning cinematic sequences I’ve ever seen—is the central moment (that’s
only a snippet of it, but it’ll give you a sense) when main character Sammie
(talented young musician and songwriter Miles Caton, making his
film debut) performs his original Blues song “I Lied to You,” and the juke
joint transforms to become a home to musical performances from past and future,
many different cultures, countless communities. It’s a performance and sequence
so red-hot that it literally burns down the juke joint (well, I guess it metaphorically
does as the building remains standing after, but audiences watch it burn down at
the scene’s climax), but it’s also something much more powerful still: the most
evocative depiction I’ve ever encountered of the ways that music connects us,
across space and time, across culture and community, across identities and
stories, across all that can divide us. As I briefly mentioned in Monday’s
post, the film’s vampires seem to want something similar with their music; but
the truth is, their performances don’t come close to capturing these goals in
comparison with Sammie’s.
And then
there’s the film’s hugely important mid-credits scene (significant SPOILERS in
what follows—if you haven’t seen the film, stop reading, go see it, and stay
for the credits!). In it the film jumps ahead 60 years to show us an elderly
Sammie (now played by Blues
legend Buddy Guy), who has survived, successfully pursued his dreams of musical
stardom, and apparently opened his own Blues joint, named after a significant
love interest from the film and in which we see him reconnecting with multiple
layers of his past. I think this was my favorite scene in the film (a
competitive list to be sure), and the main reason is that it embodies something
very specific about both the Blues and African American art: the way that they
so often express hope not in spite of, but directly through, our hardest and
most painful histories and stories, personal and collective alike. I was
reminded in that moment of my favorite sequence of lines from Hughes’s “The Weary
Blues”: “Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool/He played that sad raggy tune like
a musical fool./Sweet Blues!/Coming from a black man’s soul.” Sinners is
about many things, as I hope this whole series illustrates, but at its heart it
seeks to embody (and does quite beautifully) something very similar to what
Hughes expresses there.
Last
SinnersStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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