Mary and Grace Are Blameless – Sinners Movie Review
Before I even watched Ryan Coogler’s new movie Sinners, I heard a lot of discourse online surrounding characters named Grace and Mary. After watching the film, I do not believe these women can be blamed for the events that transpired with the vampires.
Sinners Movie Review
Before I begin, I would like to preface that I thoroughly enjoyed the film. The plot was solid, the music was amazing, and I enjoyed the tidbits of history, folklore, and mythology we got sprinkled throughout.
However just like with Black Panther 2, the inclusion of occult historical facts, places, and memoirs essentially mixed with certain casting choices alongside the shoehorning of Africa into each story’s narrative always makes me feel like I’ve been slapped across the face twice after watching Coogler’s films.
A lot of Ryan Coogler’s films are coded – meaning they can be read at least two different ways – three, if you prescribe to the pan-African themes ever present in his narratives despite having no real necessity to the film or its identity aside from a superficial level.
A Historical Analysis of Sinners
I have an entire (somewhat) in-depth study of Black Panther 2, its real world history and the mythology based on real-life exploration of places named in news articles in America that I wrote a few years ago now that I will release soon. Both Marvel, DC Comics, and anime borrow – and draw inspiration from American historical events and mythology.
If Ryan Coogler is indeed the one writing these films and utilizing occult methodologies and histories, he should then know the true complexion of the Choctaw Indians in Sinners. And not cast the mongoloid-Asiatic phenotype and their people just as he did the Mayans in Black Panther 2.
There is even this wild scene in Black Panther 2 where Quetzalcoatl is in front of one of his murals on screen and the mural depicts the actual dark-skinned male deity as it does in codices and temples like the Bonampak murals.
Juxtaposed to this we have Tenoch Huerta in his portrayal as Namor – looking absolutely nothing like the deity he is attempting to depict.
I have nothing against the actors’ portraying these characters in either film, but if Ryan Coogler indeed is looking at actual history through an unbiased lens, he should have come across the phenotype and complexion issue – and primary sources like:
Historical Researches on the Conquest of Peru, Mexico, Bogota, Natchez, and Talomeco in the Thirteenth Century by the Mongols by John Ranking
Or the more contemporary:
Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians by Tatiana Seijas
When Rocks Cry Out by Horace Butler
If we are reading Sinners in an occult manner, the Negroes and Colored folk of the 1930s fell into their “sinners” category because they turned away from their Creator. So in a biblical (and historical) analysis of the film, because “Grace” or God’s Grace left these people, they were sent to slaughter by the Beasts of the Field – in this case, Remmick and his Vampire Coven.
We could also add in Sammie, Smoke and Stack’s family being Sharecroppers as a result of losing their ancestral lands and subsequently, becoming employed on the land. In that time period (1930s) cotton was the most lucrative crop, alongside tobacco.
(Unless their last name is “Moore” in reference to the Moor-ish belief that Africans have a claim over American lands. Or then again, it could be reference to the Lenni Lenape tribe of Present-Day New Jersey all being reclassified with that last name, as “Delaware Moors” in the same racial mutt tri-category as the Appalachian “Melungeon” group).
Smoke and Stack mention trying to “runaway” to what appeared to be a “Black Wallstreet” but ultimately were not admitted due to their heritage (as in – their father had ill repute amongst their people and his brother, Sammie’s father. Which is why Sammie’s father didn’t want him having that guitar, as it was his uncle’s.)
Since the Smokestack twin’s father was considered “the devil”, the Black Wall Street “where folks were doing good” didn’t want to risk the twins messing things up due to their inherited nature in their bloodline, so they turned to a life of crime: pimping and gang activity, living amongst “foreigners” to survive.
(I put quotations around “Black Wallstreet” because this phrase was used before the “Wallstreet” we now envision in New York even existed, allegedly. The most well-known Black Wallstreet in Tulsa during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was located within the boundaries of an Indian Reservation.)
We could also mention that if Remmick was a supposed Pict around the time of Saint Patrick’s crusade, he should have a different complexion. Also, Scotland was Ireland, and Ireland, Scotland in Pre-Christianity Celtic days, but that is an entire (lengthy) conversation for another time.
A Spiritual Analysis of Sinners
Continuing on with the theme of lost Grace, we have Mary – a “passing” woman in the Mississippi Delta who was in love with a “Colored” man, Stack.
Mary is, of course, the biblical mother of the Jesus/Iesus figure in modern day Christianity. At this time, precursors of the Holy Trinity figures – namely Egyptian iconography – have been discussed ad nauseum regarding its true origin. If we take the origin to be actual Egypt – Tamari and not Kemet – alongside the Mississippi being the Nile or Euphrates River – we are again brought back to an American origin in this story.
If we read this character spiritually, then Mary is a stand-in for the biblical mother and Stack, the “anointed one”, or a Child of God. Because Grace left the pair, this Adam and Even pair were forced to roam the earth for all of eternity never being able to “be fruitful and multiply” – rather only allowed to be “trapped in sin” living as “sinners” who could only come out at night and had to be invited into a dwelling.
Essentially, leaving Mary and Stack as spiritually homeless and hollow beings with trapped souls that could not join their ancestors in the afterlife for all of eternity.
Juxtaposed to this we have Annie and Smoke – the more logical twin.
Because Grace had left them, Annie and Smoke were not allowed to procreate, having their child die in infancy. Annie was also marked for death due to her association with the “sinner” Smoke, as a crow flew over her home and onto her roof after the “devil’s child” visited her.
Annie practiced Hoodoo, an American version of Voodoo spiritually local to the Delta region, while actual Voodoo is usually associated with the Old Egypt location of New Orleans, or even Haiti – which historically has always been a part of the Americas.
Annie worked her “magic” – which was really just her spirituality being in-tune with her ancestors in her native dwelling – to keep both Smoke and Stack safe on their adventures amongst the foreigners.
If you noticed, Stack was not able to bite his brother Smoke due to Annie’s mojo bag pouch around his neck. Smoke only perished because he took Annie’s “protection” off after he had lost her, his brother, and everybody else of significance in his life.
By “rolling the dice” through a divination, Annie learned from the spirits that she would not survive the fight with the vampires, and that is why Annie commanded Smoke to stake her heart if she were bit, so that she could be with the ancestors.
Annie said she had “someone waiting for her” on the other side, and when Smoke was close to passing after his fight with the Klan, we see all three of their spirits – their family together with the child lost – reunited in the spirit world after Grace had left them in life, but accepted them in death so that they could still be together without pain or suffering.
We could also address the historical context here of these “White Klan members” (personally I think the original Klan members were “Black” like Clayton Bigsby after the Civil War hence the need for the gowns, but I digress); Those men only tried to get over on the Negro population by ambushing them and catching them off guard or by surprise in large numbers.
A similar situation happened to Delta Slim’s friend when he tried to escape North with all of his hard-earned money.
I think that speaks to the few newspaper reports we have of historical lynchings involving “angry white mobs” against a single Negro male or multiple Negro women and or/Colored residents in cities, towns, or historic “Black Wall Streets”.
Historically, we could also question why Coogler decided to cast an African woman from another continent with different ancestry to play Annie, an American Hoodoo practitioner – but that is a conversation for a different time.
A Literal Analysis of the Movie Sinners
A literal interpretation of the Sinners movie without the spiritual, historical, or cultural context would be: African-Americans have always been oppressed and have nowhere to run to – even in death.
Never you mind that the term “African American” was re-popularized by Jessie Jackson in the late 1980s, and because of this every person once classified as Indian, Mulatow, Colored, and/or Black after this new “African American” designation is credited as “the first writer” or “the first lawyer” concerning any achievement despite it being the same group of people throughout history. Despite it being an erasure of history, accomplishments, and heritage that goes unchecked in the failed notion of “equality” and “social justice”.
Because everybody hates Black People, they are treated as slaves picking cotton, lynched when trying to escape the situation, and everything they create is “destroyed by others” because racial groups like “the Asians” are more “adjacent to whiteness” when in reality, Grace was just worried about her daughter and Mary just wanted to be with the man she loved, Stack – racism, colorism, supernatural vampire situation aside.
But no, a literal analysis of Sinners on the very basic surface level would have you believing Remmick is like a music label executive, a literal “white” or “Jew-ish” culture vulture who wants the African American Sammie’s “stories…songs” to profit off of because he has no culture of his own.
Never you mind Remmick has been walking around with thousand+ year old gold coins as a remnant of his lost culture and ancestral lands due to Christianity, and leads with the gold to both Mary, Bert, and Joan because he believes them to be white and greedy ‘Christians’ like the men who stole his ancestral lands and subdued his people’s pagan minds with Christianity.
The film would also have you thinking that Mary is a selfish white-passing woman who caused trouble for Stack, meanwhile she saw Remmick’s vampirism as a way for them to all achieve “equality” so that her desired relationship with Stack could become a reality that was not possible in their current lives.
Or that the Choctaw’s literally did get Remmick’s wife as he told Joan and Bert, as a ring could be seen on his finger when he first approached the Juke Joint to audition for admission with the creepy Pick Poor Robin Clean historical blues song which is a double entendre – or has a hidden meaning because he’s a vampire – just like the movie Sinners.
We could also make the argument because Remmick had just lost his wife – possibly the last string that still tied him to his Pictish culture – he sought to create a coven to have a new “family” for “the night” to heal his grief. Stumbling upon Sammie’s musical talent was just a happy coincidence that could reunite him with the wife that was just taken from him, along with all of the others he’d lost along the way.
I could go on at length – but I just wonder what Ryan Coogler’s end goal is with Sinners.
Is the message that Christianity is a cult religion forced on a people to subdue their minds and that only by becoming pagan “monsters” together can different groups escape its oppression?
Or, is it that history and its accounts are not as they seem, and Coogler is bringing attention to this with the forced juxtaposed dichotomy of what is shown on screen in despite of the cognitive narrative of his stories?
Let me know your thoughts and leave them in the comment section below! Also be sure to follow us for more Vampire Movie Analysis! Until next time ~
“This world is a shadow of the real one”.
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