“Sinners”, and the Use of Irish Identity in the Culture Wars
Who decides what your history means?
What with it being December, People are composing their “best of” lists of movies for the year, and on many of them Sinners will be close to the top. The action-horror movie about vampires in the early 1930s deep south caused a big splash on release; for maybe the first time since Oppenheimer, here was a big hit that wasn’t a sequel, a remake, or a comic book movie. It also helped it had a majority black cast, leaned heavily on the black american experience, and touched on fashionable themes about white supremacy, colonialism, and race. Its success seemed at last to indicate there’s still a popular appetite for entertaining movies full of ideas, in particular progressive liberal ones cherished by media commentators.
Part of its success also hinged on the unexpected way it touched on Irishness and Irish culture, thus surfing a rising tide of Irish cultural cool, as represented by Paul Mescal, Kneecap, the activities of Diageo’s (almost certainly London-based) marketing department, and so on. There’s a plot summary here; but basically the main villain is revealed in the course of the movie to be Irish, turned undead around the arrival of Christianity in his home country. His driving impulse is to recreate the world lost to him through time and oppression. This character, Remmick, is an outsider in the world of the Jim Crow south and is portrayed as unprejudiced in comparison to other white characters. He states (with at least a little sincerity) that part of his goal in making vampires is equality. Throughout the movie he converts the characters to vampirism and in doing so makes them part of a vacant, post-racial hive-mind. This creates an unexpected tension that allows the film to touch on the similarities of Irish and Black American culture, which forms one of the main themes of the movie.
The impact of music in different communities and the purpose of musicians in preserving an authentic and spiritually nourishing culture that links a people directly with their ancestry is the beating heart of the film. In particular it advances the perspective that white people have a parasitic relationship with black culture, formed in order to address their own deracination, materialism, lack of authenticity, and the spiritual thinness of what passes for their own culture. This is expressed through a pair of matching scenes at the centre of the film. In one, young bluesman Sammie begins singing in a juke joint and in doing so conjures visions of black musicians throughout time, from shamanic african dancers to hip hop DJs. This is contrasted with a scene where the lead vampire inspires the rest of his cult in a gigantic, frenzied dance-rendition of the 19th Century Irish traditional song “The Rocky Road to Dublin”, about an Irishman forced by economic circumstance to leave his home and travel to England, and the difficulties he encounters on the way.
Sinners was made by someone with a genuine affection for Irish culture and music. Ryan Coogler, who wrote and directed, has spoken eloquently about it. Unfortunately for an Irish person, the central point of the movie is not to explore, understand or sympathise with the Irish experience but to use it as a mirror to create a flattering image of the black experience, and to attack what it sees as the infecting poison of whiteness - of which Irish people (being western europeans) are unavoidably carriers. As such, however sincerely well-meaning its identification with Irish culture is, it is also representative of the tokenisation of the Irish experience in the discourse generally; the way that events in Ireland and Irish history, as just another piece of rhetorical ammunition to be fired as a shot in someone else’s war.
