[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 another
important layer to the film’s mid-credits scene, and why I love it so much.
First things
first: the most beautiful romance in Sinners, and the one that produced the
other closest nominee (alongside the mid-credits scene, as I discussed yesterday
and to which I’ll return in a moment) for my favorite scene in the film (one
located right at the conclusion, and one that I’m not going to spoil), is between
Wonmi Mosaku’s Annie and Michael B. Jordan’s Smoke (one of the two twins Jordan
plays). Maybe I’m biased because both that romance and that stunning climactic
scene also connect incredibly movingly and importantly to their shared experience
of parenting, at its most tragic but also and especially at its most enduring
and defining. But in any case, Annie and Smoke are one of the most moving and inspiring
couples I’ve seen on screen in years, and I didn’t want to share a post about
romance in Sinners without paying tribute to them (and once more to Mosaku’s
captivating performance, as I did in Tuesday’s post as well).
But Sinners
features other romances too—indeed, the subject of every post in this week’s
series could be connected to a couple—and one that grows in depth and
significance across the course of the film is that between Michael B. Jordan’s
Stack (the other twin) and Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary. What seems at the start of
the film to be just a pair of resentful exes (if exes with a very complicated personal
and familial history, as Mary’s mother had basically raised the twins after
their own parents passed), and then evolves into a lustful and ultimately destructive
reunion, becomes (again, SPOILERS aplenty here) in the mid-credits scene a
literally eternal romance, with both Stack and Mary now vampires who are
together in the 1990s (and dressed appropriately, in a very funny visual gag)
and seemingly will be able to stay together for all time (unless someone stakes
them or they get caught out in the sun, anyway). I wrote in Monday’s post about
how Coogler complicates his vampire villains, and this final depiction of
vampires in the film does so even more fully, as I would argue we have to be
excited that this couple have been able to get and stay together, and that’s
thanks to head vamp Remmick.
But their
shared vampirism is not the aspect of Stack and Mary’s identities that makes me
love this scene and romance so much. The pair are an interracial couple, and
not just in the obvious sense—Mary (apparently
like Steinfeld herself) is herself 1/8th African American (an identity
category known for a long time in American history and culture as an “octoroon”),
making this pair even more fully multiracial and cross-cultural than they might
appear. I don’t imagine that Coogler was thinking specifically of William
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! when he wrote that aspect of the
character, but that’s one of our most prominent cultural
depictions of this identity category, and moreover I would put Sinners
alongside Absalom on the short list of cultural works that deal most powerfully
with intersecting themes of race, region, history, art, memory, and more. And
of course multiracial identities and interracial romances aren’t just the stuff
of American literature and film and culture—they are at the heart of our collective
histories, including if not especially our
legal and political ones. Just one more way in which the stunning Sinners
is a must-watch for all AmericanStudiers.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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