This article contains optical spoiler sinner.
sinner It is a symphony of vampire bites, gunshot wounds, people are hidden in their hearts and burning alive. Ryan Coogler's film about twin gangsters, trying to hit Jim Crow's wealthy Jim Crow South quickly turns to supernatural horror when an ancient vampire seeks a path to incorporate Juke Joine built with the twins' independent gains. But the real horror in the film is Jim Crow's economics, which drives every event in the plot, including the bloody massacre of vampires, ultimately cutting the musical craze and twin dreams.
Kugler's films tend to incorporate profound historical studies that are cleverly revealed through brief, missed moments and story details. sinner There are almost two movies: a vampire slaughterhouse movie, which is also about the nearly impossible period of upward liquidity in the quarantine economy. Sawmills converted to automatic point joints become a bleeding trap with no escapes, just like the system they were born and seeking to transcend.
The film’s main character, Chimney Twins, is known as Smoke and Stack (both by Michael B. twins, said Chicago was just “the tall building in Mississippi” and audiences could speculate on why, but history offers at least one possible explanation. In 1919, after the end of World War I, Chicago’s black veterans would witness one of the worst racial riots in the lynching “Red Summer,” thanks to a name called Eugene Williams (Eugene). Williams’s black teenager died, who drowned a white man while swimming in Lake Michigan. Williams apparently crossed the invisible white line, and the man who killed him was executing. Police refused to arrest the perpetrator, killing dozens of black and white men in the subsequent violence, which led the white mob to cross the black community.
As the Equal Justice Initiative notes, Black World War I veterans, some of whom defended the community during the riots, were often attacked for racial violence rather than admired for their service. Apartheid lawmakers fear they will return and expect to be seen as equal. Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman warned that military service was a "short step in the conclusion that his political rights must be respected." Historian Chad Williams The Torchbearer of Democracy: African-American Soldiers in the World War I Era “The conflict in the South and the major urban races of the post-war era reflect the conscious determination of many black veterans and are inspired and politicized by the experience of their military to resist ongoing conquest.”
This background helps explain the twins’ fanatical attitude towards the white joints purchased in the movie. When the smoke and stack tell him they will kill any KKK members who invade their property, the seller secretly insists that KKK no longer exists. In fact, Klan's second incarnation is still influential, but Klan denied it was a common propaganda strategy. Later, we learned that the capitals the twins used to buy the property were stolen from Irish and Italian mobs in Chicago, and the twins came for it before returning to Mississippi. Otherwise, it will be difficult for them to obtain seed capital. As legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran pointed out in his study of the racial wealth gap, white banks at that time generally did not provide credibility to black borrowers.
Jim Crow's strict separation of economy is perhaps the most eye-catching shot in the movie American female woman Lisa Chow talks with her mother in a white shop on the street. Before this we only showed the black side of the town, where the food also maintained a store. The strafing footage shows that the town’s white residents are only feet away, but they may also be on another planet. Part of a group of Mississippi immigrants known as "Delta Chinese" is neither black nor white, and can also be sold to two customer groups at the same time.
However, the twins soon discovered that the quarantine economy that deprived them of seed funds meant that their customers were unable to pay for their products in cash. Web Du Bois wrote in 1907: "The black peony is offset by eternal debt or small criminal judgment; his rent rises at the cost of cotton, and his chances of buying land are opportunities that do not exist or exist in sterile areas. Mob." This century-old observation is almost a summary of the film scene, but there are no vampires.
The film conveys two forms of peony that stand out in the southern 1930s - labor arrangements are not far from slavery. One is a criminal lease, which we see as Stack, his cousin Sammie, and an experienced bluesman known as Delta Slim Slim Pass in the chain to Juke Joint chain. Since the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery “unless punishment for crimes”, many southern states passed laws that, in fact, allowed authorities to arrest blacks for minor crimes such as “wandering” or “wanderers” and then forced them to work for free in outrageous circumstances.
Another is shared, with details being the catalyst for the final vampire massacre. Early in the film, we see Sammie, the son of an aspiring musician and missionary, picking cotton in the early morning so that he can fill the quota and play the guitar for the rest of the day. Under the Sharecropping system, landlords keep black and poor whites in debt-irrelevant cycles, no matter how hard they try, and will inevitably continue - Du Bois describes it as a form of serfdom. The landlord will pay Sharecroppers on a "script", paper or wooden token, which can be used to purchase highly marked items from the landlord's own store. As writer Michael Harriott points out, Chows’ shops will be one of the few places in the town where black residents can expect fair prices.
The twins successfully pack Juke joints with Sammie’s guitar-intoxicated customer, Delta Slim describes black music as a kind of magic, and in another compelling scene, Sammie plays the spirit of the ancestors and descendants of the revelers in Sammie. But the twins soon discovered that most of their customers could only buy drinks with scripts, meaning that even investments were impossible. Their business faces other hurdles: one plot where the twins steal electricity for Juke joint recalls the fact that much of the South keeps the demand for poor economies poor and underdeveloped until new deals under FDR have electricity.
Elsewhere in the movie, Remmick, an Irish vampire hunted by Choctaw vampire hunters, deceived his way to protect a pair of Klan members living near Clarksdale and turn it into creatures of the night. Shortly after Stack realized that Juke Joint wasn't making enough money, Remmick appeared in his offspring. Attracted by Sammie's performance, they asked for invitations but were rejected because of the whites. Another aspect of the era is that white businesses can be sold to black customers, but black businesses are limited to black customers. As vampires, they were forced to wait outside. When the stack's old flame Mary and an eight-year-old Mary learned from the stack that there was no doubt that Mrs. Octoroon was willing to go and see if Remmick and others owned our currency.
Mary becomes the first automatic point chain victim of the vampire and is then invited inside, where she quickly lures and kills Stark, and later rises again as a vampire. But the whole reason this happens is that it is nearly impossible for blacks in Jim Crow to run profitable businesses. If the chimney twins could borrow capital from white banks, they wouldn't have to rob the mob and leave Chicago. If Sharecroppers pay with actual money, then Juke Joint will be profitable. If Juke's joints were profitable, Mary would never walk outside and be rotated by a vampire. The economic restrictions imposed by the quarantine ultimately put the twins and their clients in the supernatural horror of Remmick.
Interestingly, Kugler treats Remmick with sympathy, which prompts Remmick's own experience of oppression and his destined search for long-dead relatives. Remmick is a monster, but his home is colonized by some violent troops who bring twin ancestors to the United States. The tragedy of persecuted people brings bloody conflicts between each other beyond their control, a consistent theme in Kugler's film, including his two Black Panther Movie.
The only pure monster in the film is Ku Klux Klan, who appears at Juke Joint the next morning, kills the twins and retrieves the property Klan Leader sells to them, thus taking the money away. In the early days of the film, in the story of Delta Slim passing through the chain gang, this result was foreshadowed earlier in the film. Slim recalls a friend who was lynched for carrying too much cash, a group of white men think he had stolen it. Slim's story illustrates Jim Crow's deadly capture of economics 22: Whites can take it away by force, no matter what black people get.
The final conflict between Smoke and Crane ended with a satisfying Western-style gunfight, but also showed that the twins were always doomed to fail. The power of Clarksdale will never let them flourish. That's another horror story, it's even more horrible because it lacks any supernatural element. Unlike vampires, Jim Crow's economy is real, and it has shaped the United States to this day.
We receive a commission when you purchase a book using the links on this page. Thank you for your support Atlantic.