Whether of Not "Sinners" Wins the Oscar, Ryan Coogler’s Genre-Bending Film Signals a New Era for Original Cinema
Nominated for a record-breaking 16 Oscars, "Sinners" has been a critical and commerical success. Film Quarterly takes a closer look at the film in an article by Anthony Michael D’Agostino entitled, "Mouths & Mirrors in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners." We asked the author about the film's appeal and his assessment of its importance to film history.
While Ryan Coogler's Sinners isn't the frontrunner for the Oscars at the moment, it has gathered important recognition in terms of both awards and critical acclaim (and oddsmakers are debating whether or not its recent win for best cast ensemble at the Actor Awards—formerly the SAG Awards—has improved its best picture chances at the Oscars). What is it about this vampire story that seems to patch into our moment in terms of its wider cultural resonance and its critical/box office appeal?
Although I too have heard that the film is not the strongest contender this awards season, I would offer that Sinners’ record-breaking sixteen Oscar nominations—including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Director—is something of a watershed in and of itself. In a film industry that largely seems to run on reproducing the success of prior hits, Sinners is completely unique, an unforeseeable hybrid genre experiment—a Black vampire-horror movie that is also a Jim Crow South period piece—whose fresh juxtaposition of tried-and-true cinematic tropes (weren’t vampires kind of “over”?) in a new formulation excites, entertains, and produces hours of water cooler discussion and millions of lines of social media engagement. What’s more, the film has had an important ancillary effect, making audiences wonder: why haven’t they seen more media this confidently creative and original recently? In that sense, Sinners’ success is a bell weather for audiences’ desire for original cinema, something truly “new” besides the endless series of adaptations, sequels, reboots, or nostalgia projects that dominate both big and small screens these days. In a way, Sinners’ break out success highlights just how rigid the rules of genre, theme, and content in Hollywood have become, and offered proof of concept that audiences will come to the movies to see something they haven’t seen before. Especially if it comes from an auteur, like Coogler, they believe in.
What drew you to Sinners as a contributing editor of Film Quarterly, and what is your main critical argument about the film? What is it about the film that you believe will prove durable for viewers and cultural critics alike?
I was struck with how Coogler’s film is wrapped in culture-making. Of course, Sinners is about culture—about black history, and appropriation, and what we owe our ancestors, descendants, and each other. But, at the same time, the audience’s decision to buy the movie tickets to such an experimental, generically unique film on its opening weekend, making it such a blockbuster success, is culture-making, even political, because it sent a message to Hollywood and America, more broadly, about the stories audiences want to see: stories about people of color occupying genre spaces usually siloed in whiteness (like vampire stories) that nevertheless feature history, music, and politics that are distinctively black. My critical argument is that Sinners repurposes common tropes of vampire literature familiar to readers of Irish literature as devices to reapproach contemporary debates about appropriation and assimilation. I strongly believe that Coogler’s weaving together of themes from canonical literature, classic horror movies, and black culture constructs a kind of crossroads, not unlike the metaphysical convergence of past and present conjured by Preacher Boy’s music in the film, that invites black creatives to rethink appropriation as a practice that can be deployed ethically in the project of reclaiming cultural space. I suspect, in five or ten years, we will think of black period pieces as pre- or -post Sinners in much the same way we think of black horror, now, in terms of before and after Jordan Peele’s Get Out. It’s a movie that changes what we think of as possible for a movie.
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