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captainsamuelmorrigan · 3 months ago

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Hello, I have a list of Sinners takes (more so critiques and issues about the current state of the Sinners fandom). It's going to be a long one, so sit tight! For a full disclaimer, I am a black person—listen to my voice and other black voices. This list has three items.

(Before anyone says anything, yes fandom is fandom. People are going to do what they want and that's within their will. I'm not coming here to forcibly say that you can't do anything, but I'm here to preach my word and perhaps it'll make you ponder in your own time.)

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Short answer? I hate it. But you aren't here for the short answer and neither am I. There are a couple of different reasons why shipping Preacher Boy Sammie and Remmick together, in my opinion, is wrong, and that's what I'm here to discuss. I first heard this take when I had just gotten out of the movie theatre and went to favourite Tumblr tags. I see someone saying something along the lines of, "Oh, Sammie and Remmick were so down bad for each other/Remmick wanted Sammie so bad." On TikTok, there's a video of a person saying this quote:

1. Sammick.

"Maybe I've missed it, but I haven't seen this take on Sinners yet— but Remmick was down bad for Sammie. Another thing that movie lacked was queerness, and I'm gonna put my queer little lens on and I'm gonna say that dude wanted Sammie. Yes, he wanted his musical talent, but I do think you could interpret it willingly that he was also just down fucking bad for him. Because that look in his eye, oh, 'Is that my soulmate? That's my soulmate.'"

Not only am I black, but I am also queer, and the following statement could not possibly be queerphobic under any circumstances: it is dangerous to romanticise the point of Remmick and Sammie's relationship and what Remmick was supposed to symbolise. If you know things about history and have ever wondered, "when did the Irish become white?" Your "when" should be directed to a "how." There's a book titled How the Irish Became White. Irish people were victims of colonialism and oppression, as they were othered by the rest of Europe due to their appearance, culture, language and religious practices. When they came to America, they would often be excluded in a lot of white spaces, and be painted with racist imagery in the media. The suffering they endured is incomparable to black people, as all oppression is, but it was still bad.

Now, back to the question of how did the Irish become white? It's simple. They became their oppressors to other black people. In the time of slavery, many Irish slowly integrated themselves into whiteness by showing their distaste for black people and actively participating in anti-black racism. They became overseers of plantations, practically carrying out the master's orders onto slaves.

This is something the movie was trying to tell us. Remmick is jealous and hurt because he is an Irish man who has been forced to cut himself off from his culture, and is being forced to forget himself. He wanted to see his ancestors again, and so he promised many a place of sanctuary and freedom, love and acceptance, when all he was doing was playing the role of his colonisers. Colonising Sammie's sound for his own benefit. He is a branch of white supremacy that's talked about much too little, and that is the white supremacy that's infatuated with black culture. So infatuated that if you called them racist, they would gasp, and like Remmick, say, "We believe in equality." Remmick isn't in love with Sammie, he is acting out of hurt and executing it like his oppressors did. It is supposed to show the hypocrisy of this rhetoric. You aren't changing your life and you aren't changing others, you are forcefully making them a part of your image because you've forgotten the sight of a mirror. You've forgotten the height of your father and the song of your mother. And from @/snarlmalden

"The portrayal of white people who have been violently separated from their own culture stealing the power of black culture and music to try to get reconnected was SO literal and somehow not at ALL heavy-handed or trite. Fkn remarkable."

Another problem with Sammick is how uncomfortable I find that people are with black love and queerness that doesn't centre white people. This also has to do with how people treat Stack and Mary versus Smoke and Annie (mind you, the main couple of Sinners). People will hate Annie, ignore her, and rather pay attention to how sexy the relationship between Stack and Mary is. It doesn't come out of nowhere. It isn't an original thought. People are uncomfortable with black love that doesn't involve a white, white passing or light-skinned person. People are uncomfortable with black film that doesn't involve or centre a white, white passing or light-skinned person. More on that later.

I think queerness in the media is extremely important, I say that as a queer man. It should be absolutely become more of a commonplace thing that it isn't phenomenal if we have a queer movie or queer main character. However, black queerness is an entirely separate conversation than the one that Sinners is. Like I prefer to keep saying, Sinners is a conversation. It's a discussion. It's also a mirror for you to reflect on how you respond to all of the things that are presented before you. As a black person, a white person, an Asian person, an indigenous person, a mixed person whose black passing or someone who exists in the one drop rule. Black queerness is something entirely separate from the message of this movie that I agree, should be tackled and talked about. However, what you need to understand that for this movie specifically, it would be too much for the runtime.

Black queerness isn't something that should be belittled, and all queer conversations should be good. They should be quality. The only way they would be able to discuss black queerness in a slightly above mediocre fashion would mean they would have to pull much less attention from the other messages in the movie. This movie already says so much about our struggles, and a problem I keep seeing with white queers is that they always want to insert themselves into our conversations. Into our struggles. Into our oppression. It is not The Oppression Olympics, and you don't have to be included in every single conversation of another oppressed person. It is okay to know where you stand, and to butt out when necessary.

I can't talk about Jewish struggles because I'm not Jewish. I can't talk about physically disabled struggles because I'm not physically disabled. I do not need to insert myself in other forms of oppression to prove that I am oppressed, and someone else's oppression doesn't take away from mine. These kinds of people are what Remmick's character is for. The hypocrisy of it all. The misplaced anger of it all.

Everyone deserves representation, And like my boyfriend said, things don't have to be queer to be enjoyable, and if you can't enjoy good, meaningful non-canon queer media, then stop inserting yourself in that media. Stop interacting with that media. You do not need to protest a film that did nothing wrong if the worst it did was not include you in its conversation. It's okay not to have a seat at the table.

2. Christians seeing Sinners and missing it.

I don't shame religion or religious people. I am not anti-religion. However, I'm seeing a lot of specifically black Christian people missing the meaning of a movie that's talking about them. So let me put it in a few phrases that I'm posing as questions.

Back in that day, they wouldn't let us read nor write. They didn't want us to. However, they gave us bibles and let us (and even encouraged us) to have our churches and experience the gospel for ourselves. Why do you think that is?

Back in that day, they would take our practice of Christianity or relationship to God and deem it wrong or immoral, and they put the fear of the devil in us if we had practiced it. You know, something similar to the phrase, "If you keep dancing with the devil, one day he might follow you home." Why do you think that is?

Back in that day, they would call our practices, our music and our culture devil worship. A sickness. Something deeply wrong with us or the world we grew up in. So they sought to change our ways and make us fear it. Forget it. Hate it, even. So much so that we end up seeing movies trying to tell us things they've hidden from us so discreetly that we're calling what we saw in there the devil, rather than the truth. Why do you think that is?

Where do you think the hate came from?

And where else does it go?

Preacher Boy didn't choose the devil. He chose himself. He didn't deny himself a God to worship, but he knew that some words can't save you from an evil that was placed in you. An evil that was taught to you. A hatred that was taught to you. That's why, when Preacher Boy began to pray, Remmick recited the prayer with him. He knows your words. He's the one that spoke them to you in the first place.

That's all I have to say about that.

3. The centring of whiteness and why I think Sinners hates you.

I don't hate Remmick. I think he's a very important part of the conversation of Sinners, so I don't hate his function in the story. I love it. But I'm coming to realise that a lot of you don't understand the point of why he's here.

I see so many posts on the Sinners tag that only talks about Remmick, why to empathise with him and how he's just [insert defence], or how hot he is. However, what I don't see is these same people showing that they understand the point of the movie or why he's there to begin with. What he's there to symbolise. What it says about you.

You can say white supremacist phrases, have white supremacist takes, and fall victim to micro aggressions without considering yourself racist. You can do all that and still post "black lives matter" when asked of. I never see as much praise for Annie, the leading lady, as much as I do Mary. So much of it comes down to sex appeal, and I've seen actual people say Annie sucks and how nothing she did worked because she was the one who died. She was the one who didn't conform to Remmick. These are the same people saying Sammie chose the wrong path by not giving up his guitar, but there will be plenty more on that later.

I feel like there's an underlying bias towards Remmick with many particularly white and queer Sinners fans that they themselves are unaware of. Do I blame them? Yes. Do I understand why? Also yes. You, a white person, cannot empathise with a situation that I, as a black American experience in day to day life. To be born black is a taboo, a curse, or at least that's what's been taught to us for centuries. Not just us, but you too.

This morning, I go on TikTok. The first video I see is from a woman (@hereciasmansion) who went to see Sinners for a second or third time in a 70-milimetre IMAX screen, one of the only eight (?) in the United States. This one was in Indiana. After crossing a state border over the course of two hours, she reaches the theatre and watches a very magical experience. The visuals were phenomenal and the staff were kind.

However, at the very end of the movie, at one of the final scenes when the Klan members came to Stack and Smoke's land that they bought from them to shoot it down, Smoke carries out his word of if they trespass, they will be shot on sight. The Klan member was shot and lying on the floor, bleeding. Smoke looks at him and asks if he has a cigarette. The Klan member yells to him, "Go to hell!"

And what does this woman, sitting in the theatre see and hear? After sitting through a good two hours and fifteen minutes of a spectacular movie, after seeing all that it's about, a white man looks at the black couple next to him and repeats the same words: go to hell. Suddenly, above her and who she was travelling with, all hell breaks loose. She says,

"In that moment, looking around at everybody's faces, and hearing the conversations happening around me, I watched the crowd segregate itself. The 'I just came here to watch a movie' crowd separated itself from the 'they doing too much' crowd, which separated themselves from the 'I just wanna know what's going on right now' crowd."

I would recommend watching her entire video, which I will link here. But, to summarise, if you've seen the movie, you know that Klan member dies. Smoke finishes him off. When that moment happened, the entire theatre sans the people involved in the conflict, began applauding. In that moment, she knew that everyone was applauding for different reasons. In her words,

"There was a group that was clapping because, in their head, a character in a movie died. But then there was another crowd that was clapping because it felt like the character on that screen was in the movie theatre sitting next to us. And what felt like a victory on that screen, most of us are never gonna see."

These spaces that we create for ourselves might be the closest thing black Americans get to freedom, and yet you come into our spaces expecting a movie with black people in it rather than a black movie. You expect objects instead of life. You expect a shallow pool rather than the ocean. You expect a white lie instead of the black truth.

How much did you understand what you walked out of? How much did you catch the point? How much did you have to look at yourself to understand what was happening, if you even reflected at all?

I'm leaving this quite open ended because I'd like to spark a discussion about this. I'd also like to spark a discussion with yourself, especially if you're a white Sinners fan. I think I've said what I wanted to say in bulk, but there will always be more to say and more that I will say. So I will leave it at this statement:

Sinners is a mirror, though to some, it's just glass.

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