Casper Andreas | Ett sista farväl (A Last Farewell) / 2013

the intolerable silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Casper Andreas (screenwriter and director) Ett sista farväl (A Last Farewell) / 2013 [13 minutes]

Erik (Tomas von Brömssen) is an angry old man. We first see him sitting at his computer, but unable to write, irritated with the of his daughter, Malin (Liv Mjönes). She is pregnant, but he is cruelly dismissive of her, lecturing her even for asking if he has some herbal tea since she’s not supposed to drink coffee. 

    He is rude her, impatient for her to be gone.

   All of this seems difficult to explain until she reveals that she has just been to her papa’s gravesite, which Erik has evidently failed to visit.

   And gradually we begin to realize that Malin is the daughter of two gay men, one of whom, Leif (Iwar Wiklander). We also begin to perceive that his anger with Malin is that she has bought the pills Leif requested to take his own life. How could she do that to his own lover, her own papa?

    The rudeness continues until she is forced to leave. And suddenly we now realize another reason why Erik desires to be left alone. In her absence he begins a conversation with his dead companion, furious with him for having committed suicide so that he might no longer suffer from the disease which would kill him in a few months.

     Erik argues that he would have looked after him, cared for him and, despite Leif’s suggestion to the contrary, he would not have felt put upon, would have gladly nursed his husband into his grave.

    Leif continues to argue that is not Malin fault for doing what he asked. Yes, he admits, he did not end his life for Erik’s sake, but for himself, he was in pain and afraid. And the decision he made was a selfish but necessary one.

     Moreover, he counsels Erik, he cannot be angry with Malin for the rest of his life. Surely he will be delighted with the grandson, unable to resist loving the child.

     Speaking to the vision of Leif in a chair, he suddenly realizes that it is empty, and that he now lives alone even though he will always sense Leif’s presence in his life. Leif’s voice suggests he somehow go back to writing, about the two of them and Malin, that he find a way to say farewell.

     Before she has even returned home Erik calls his daughter asking if she might accompany him to the grave the next morning. The healing has begun.

     This lovely short Swedish film reveals what all gay men who have been in a long relationship must surely feel with the death of the other. In this case, Erik has a daughter they shared. If I were to survive Howard, or were Howard to survive me, the utter loneliness would be nearly unbearable, the sense of emptiness profound and debilitating just as it is for Erik. We have both willed our bodies to a research center, so there will not even be a grave to visit to symbolically say goodbye.

    At least Erik will son the voice of a crying grandson in the house and perhaps live long enough to speak to him and share with him his love of his other grandfather. Without that the silence will be nearly intolerable. I am certain I will fill the room with meaningless conversations to Howard until death silences me as well.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

Douglas Messerli | Battlefields / 2025 [Introduction]

battlefields

by Douglas Messerli

 

It was fascinating to me that in March of 2026, at the very moment the US President had almost single-handedly taken a nation to war—with the help, of course, of the Israeli militarists who have long been seeking to find a major world power to help them wipe out one of their most potent enemies without any stated reason except for his personal dislike of the Iranian government, and, most importantly, having received not a single congressional vote or any evidence of major support from the citizens—that four of the titles I first saw were all about doing large-scale battle on national landscapes.

     For Ryan Coogler’s Sinners the war involved an uprising of Mississippi Delta blacks simply seeking out their private enjoyment after their long days of working the cotton fields, interrupted by Irish vampires, serving as a threat of assimilation and destruction to their culture, and ending in an outright rebellion of the last survivor against the Ku Klux Klan, emblem of the white bigotry that had destroyed so many black lives for centuries. If it was a valiant fight, it was alas, as history has shown, a losing battle.

    So too did blacks and whites lead a rebellion this time against the political right and wealthy industrialists in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Here a Weatherman-like radical group, the fictional French 75, worked, often successful, to free immigrants detained by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), blew up corporation headquarters, and robbed banks to sustain their activities. The military right of the US came down upon them with full force,

almost totally silencing them. Yet their worst enemy was simply time, as the first generation of radicals grew into middle age, and drugged and drank themselves into oblivion. Yet even hidden away in a small California town, the “hero” and his daughter still came under siege, in this case because of a personal vendetta by one of the military rightists who having fathered a black child and who was seeking entry to one of the most elite racist organizations that made even the Klan look like a small town operation. If “Rocketman” Paul Calhoun / now renamed Bob Ferguson is not precisely an innocent, his daughter Charlene/Willa (the offspring actually of the mad military racist Lockjaw) is guilty of nothing but existing; and the new battles that all must suffer this time round are simply those of protecting the future from the brutal hate Lockjaw and the American industrial complex represent.

       Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent focuses in on another national landscape, that of Brazil under the 1970s military dictatorship, filled with corrupt police forces and spiteful industrial chieftains who, almost in reverse of One Struggle After Another, turn innocent researchers, outspoken women, immigrants, gay people and others into rumored political dissidents so they might have recourse to murder them. Unlike the former political activists hiding out with new identities in a safe town in California, the stragglers who have made it to the underground safe house in Recife have done nothing but attempt to live good everyday lives, only to find themselves described as Communists, queers, and other kinds of outsiders who must be destroyed to save the fascist government. The battles they must undergo are daily struggles just to survive, and, in the end, that survival also entails the next generation, since they will surely lose out in the complex plots against their living.

     Finally, in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, the young hero of the work seems to be battling the entire nation, his working-class Jewish family and neighbors, bigoted Southern whites, a mafioso figure, and the affluent elites—as well as the worldwide Table Tennis Association—just to get his chance at the American dream of becoming the world ping-pong champion. One by one he wards them off only to also get caught up with a man who describes himself as a vampire. And like the others I describe above, Marty realizes that despite all of his desperate battles, his dream also represents a lost cause, having finally been defeated by the powerful forces which control his world.

      All of these works, every one of them representing moral individuals who attempt to defeat the evil forces of self-interest, greed, and hate, lose most of their battles, recognizing that in the worlds that they inhabit they will always be outsiders. And, accordingly, all four of these works contain, as James R Dubro has described them, “queerish” figures. Vampires, by their very definition, represent in their attraction to all sexes for a source of blood, serve as stand-ins for bisexual or queer individuals, desiring to consume and take over the bodies of both males and females with whom they come in contact. The number of male on male bodies in Sinners alone suggests a bloody orgy more than zombies feasting on the living. And in Marty Supreme the vampire pen manufacturer is more interested in actually paddling the behind of the young Marty that in getting behind him in support of his table tennis career.

      Some of the first for whom militarists and fascists come when pretending to crack down on “so-called” moral turpitude (usually a cover for their own truly immoral behaviors) are members of the LGBTQ community, actions which in The Secret Service are satirized by the press by describing them as attacks of the hairy leg now on the loose after having been found hanging from the jaws of a tiger shark.

    In One Battle After Another the younger generation for which the central figure fights, Charlene/Willa may have found a way to escape the sexual and gender-related predatoriness that dominates the older generation by refusing to define themselves and their friends in those terms, arguing for their own non-binary categories.

     The sad thing that keep haunting me, however, while watching all four of these films was that we come out of the theater facing no more of a morally defined world than when we entered. In one of their cases, no matter how many battle these heroes won, they lost the war, being outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the forces of evil.

     Leaving the theater I still had to return home to the news of Trump and his numerous minions in government and across my nation who were ready to whip up a chaos of divisiveness and hatred instead of seeking to serve a united people with empathy, care, and hope.

     There was a reason, I believe, behind the selection of his year’s best film by the American Film Academy being One Battle After Another and the Cannes Film Festival chose Mendonça Filho as best director. These films revealed the battles that most of us were engaged in now almost every day of our lives.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2026).

 

Joachim Trier | Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value) / 2025

the end of the struggle

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier (screenplay), Joachim Trier (director) Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value) / 2025

 

After characterizing at least 4 of the 2026 Oscar nominees (all films from 2025) as works representing life as a battlefield, I realized that Joachim Trier’s powerful film Sentimental Value could also be seen as representing “one battle after another.” But here instead of being performed on a large-scale cultural battleground, the struggles occur within—within the self and family, not generally publicly enacted but privately experienced, often without words. Although the Borg family are all basically employed in jobs that entail the use of public language—the mother, Sissel Borg, who has just died as the movie opens, was a psychotherapist, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) is a noted filmmaker, the eldest daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) a respected actor, and the younger daughter Agnes borg Pettersen (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) is an historian—they live as do so many characters of Scandinavian theater and film they live concealed lives, unable to fully express their emotions and problems to others. One might argue that condition is a given in most of Bergman’s films and Ibsen’s plays, for example.

    As surely Agnes knows better than anyone else in this film, history is hidden in this world and even the lovely red-painted Oslo home which has been in the Borg family for several generations, and in which Gustav’s mother, arrested and tortured as an underground agent during the Nazi control of Norway, committed suicide, and in which her lesbian sister* later partied, turning up the music when the neighbor’s complained, convinced that it was one of them who had called the Gestapo on her sister, is in decay.

     But it is also a house of wonderful memories for the two sisters, Nora and Agnes, who during the fighting battles between their parents—ending in their divorce and Gustav disappearing from the girls’ lives—formed a close bond of dependence. The house, in fact, almost becomes another character in this comedic-drama, as the narrative voice I presume to be Nora’s commenting, the house prefers its endless family noises to the quietude that has, over the years, descended upon it.

      Her father later paints it white and refurbishes it into a modern gray and vacuous domain.

   After a scene that establishes one of Nora’s major phobias, a terrible case of stage freight that sometimes creates almost a melodrama behind the curtain before she is able to go on for her insightful performances, quietude once more descends upon the house, as the two daughters host a respectful after-funeral party. Here we also meet Agnes’s husband Even (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud) and another central figure to this work, their delightful young son Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal), who loves his aunt Nora so much that he even proposes marriage to her—when he grows up, an offer so innocent and beautiful that it almost chokes up the actress who, although she is having an affair currently with a theater colleague, Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie), clearly has been unable to sustain relationships.

     Into this fraught situation, after years of absence, comes charging Gustav, who as usual given his narcissistic behavior, has missed the funeral, but is now ready to take over the home which he still owns.

     Although Agnes might have imagined that she and her family might have remained there, what most troubles the two daughters is not that he might now sell it, but that he has so suddenly bounced back into their lives after having so emptied it. Agnes, with her historical perspective and given the fact that as a young child she appeared in one of his best films, a time in which she was able to truly bond with him, has a much healthier relationship with Gustav than does Nora, a sensitive being who he has basically ignored, claiming that he cannot he bear to watch theater and accordingly has missed almost all of her performances over the years.

     But now suddenly Gustav is not only returned home, but wants to use the house in his next film, after what has clearly been a dry period in his creativity. Not only that, he has written a script, purportedly based on events in his mother’s life (the one who had sweetly kissed her child goodbye before hanging herself), but wants Nora to play her own grandmother Karin!

     Both women are angry and hurt, but Nora, in particular, not only turns him down but quietly berates him for his selfishness, for being a man whose only foci in life are the various casts in the films he is currently shooting. For his part, Gustav excuses his behavior by claiming he is, afterall, a great artist who cannot be bound by the typical familial conventions.

     It is, of course, for these very reasons why Sissel has divorced him and sent him spinning off into a world of fame, while she has remained responsible enough to raise their daughters alone.

  We can see the problems Nora and, to a lesser degree Agnes face are generational in their development, a young boy having been betrayed by a mother, the mother’s sister positioning herself somewhat outside of the general culture in sexual relationship, and the boy turned into a selfish, seemingly disinterested father. He does not even know, apparently, of Nora’s own suicide attempt.

     Director Joachim Trier gives Agnes a significant role in this film, particularly since she later visits the National Archives of Norway to read about her grandmother’s statements of her torture, her mother never having revealed them to any of her family members; and it is Agnes who first strongly summarizes her father’s intrusion into their life when he attempts, behind her back, to engage her son Erik to play the young boy in the movie (just as she has previously played a young girl in another film). Yet central links of this heritage of suffering are Karin, Gustav, and Nora, those whom one might describe are the true carriers of the familiar and cultural rejection and the suffering which results. None of them can fully express their pain and rid themselves of their ghosts Even visits to psychiatrists only remind the remaining survivors of Sissel’s, Gustav’s wife’s occupation. And Agnes’ role of the conciliator can only go so far.

     After Nora rejects the role of playing her father’s central character, Gustav accidentally encounters the US movie star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) at the Deauville American Film Festival, who has been particularly touched by seeing an earlier film, the one with Agnes as the child, of Borg’s career. What his family see as his failures, she perceives as the innate qualities of a good director, the focus only at one who is at hand and those engaged with him at moment; and when she hears of his new project, she is only too happy to take on the role of Karin.

     With her signed, Neflix is ready to produce the work, allowing Borg to imagine a new impetus for his end-career vision. He insists on using his usual cinematographer, Peter (Lars Väringer), now retired; but when he visits Peter to offer him the job he his startled by his colleague’s now frail health, and is even more frustrated by the producer’s attempt to interfere with his choices. In Peter, obviously, he recognizes what he himself may soon be facing.

     Although he works carefully with Rachel in explaining the script and setting out scene after scene, even translating the full work into English since she cannot speak Norwegian, she herself gradually begins to see problems with her abilities to comprehend and express the character he has created. Why does a woman with a young child suddenly lock herself away to destroy her and surely her son’s life? But, obviously, that is the very question for which Gustav is seeking an answer.

     She also senses that she is just not right for the role, particularly when he orders her to dye her blonde hair to match that of Nora’s. And finally, she meets up with Nora herself, attempting to explain to the increasingly prickly daughter, even more angry now that her father has seemed to find someone to replace her, the doubts about her ability to properly play the role and her frustrations in deciphering the essence of the text.

    The acting of all the characters in this work is of the highest quality, each of them given full roles to explore their characters. But what Matt Bullions, writes in the Salt Lake Film Review about Fanning is particularly telling about the artistry of Trier’s cinema:

 

“…Strangely enough, Elle Fanning delivers one of the film’s best performances as the American actress who comes into Gustav’s project after Nora has declined it. Fanning is always great, no question, but it would be easy for this script to paint her as silly or as the dumb American, but her character is awarded the same empathy as everyone else. She’s not some kind of flaky coastal flibbertigibbet, she’s a professional who’s serious about the work she’s doing. And the more attached she becomes to these people, the more that’s emotionally at stake for her, and Fanning plays this remarkably well.”

 

     After having investigated her grandmother’s prison experiences, Agnes finally forces herself to read her father’s script, realizing what Rachel has begun to suspect, that this work is not totally about Gustav’s mother Karin but about the nexus I earlier mentioned. This film is as much about Gustav’s failure to love and explain his behavior to Nora as Karin was unable to provide to her son. Just as the suicide at film’s end is an expression of Karin’s own failed attempts to express her pain and horror, Agnes beings to suspect her father sensed that his own edler daughter has attempted such an act for the very same reasons.

   Agnes, having for days been unable to contact her sister, finally visits her, bringing with her the script for Nora to read, and even demanding that together they play out a particular scene which reveals the fusion of Karin and Nora.

   The two sisters lie down in bed and hug to re-express their deep commitment to one another, Agnes finally admitting to her sister, with great wisdom, “But we didn’t have the same childhood; I had you.”

    Putting away her resentment, even her fears, Nora takes on the role that Rachel felt unable to portray, the last scene of the film, which we have seen described earlier, now performed the way it surely was meant to be: the woman saying goodbye to her son (now played by Erik) before turning back and entering into the room where she hangs herself. As Gustaf explained early on to Rachel, we do not see the act, we only hear the stool on which she stool being kicked away.

    But this time Gustav quietly praises the scene with the words, “Perfect,” as Nora looks at him with a rewarding smile. We don’t hear a stool being kicked away; of course that might happen in the editing of the film, but perhaps it has also been cut, Gustav himself refusing to repeat the terrible act now corrected by his late admission of love to his own daughter and his grandson.

   As Rolling Stone reviewer David Fear nicely expressed it, in this film we get something that can’t simply be classified as another “dysfunctional family drama.”

 

“Sentimental Value is essentially a double act between Skarsgård and Reinsve, and these two performers play off each other in a way that’s recognizable to anyone who’s struggled with paternal baggage, by which we mean everybody. It’s also using the prickly dynamic between father and daughter to explore how storytelling can both mask hurt and facilitate healing, and doing so in a way that goes way beyond heroes and villains. Not even a meta ending that pushes that idea to its logical breaking point can sour you on it. What you’re left with is one the best movies about how family means always having to say your sorry — and why, in the end, it’s better to forgive than forget.”

 

    Trier’s film was awarded the Grand Prix at The Cannes Film Festival in 2025.

    

*One of the reasons I watched this truly wonderful film was that I had heard that it featured a lesbian character. I watched this film through with complete enjoyment and wonderment, and upon finishing realized that I had absolutely no memory of a lesbian scene. At first I was convinced that the source material had simply misunderstood the sisterly hug and expression of mutual commitment as a lesbian scene. But then I remembered a narrative moment in the film describing the house’s previous tenants and returning to the scene saw quite clearly a couple of full on kisses of Gustav’s aunt and her lesbian friend. I realized that I have now seen so many queer films that I has simply not noticed it as an expression of anything but enjoyment and love, and had been totally unable to even recognize as anything out of the ordinary. Isn’t this what we of the LGBTQ community have been seeking all along? When even the gay historian becomes blind to the idea of exceptionalness or something being “out of the ordinary,” then perhaps we truly have made progress. But, I suspect, for the average heterosexual viewer this would have been greeted still with wide-eyed awareness of something odd and different is going on in this scene. I have to say, with “queerish” events occur in so very many of the Oscar nominated movies, one might happily grow blind regarding sexual difference. Perhaps I am fortunate that this year as long determined to be the last year in which I explored queer experience in film. Soon, we may see it in almost any film without blinking an eye.

 

Los Angeles, March 15, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

 

 

Ryan Coogler | Sinners / 2025

one bite after another

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ryan Coogler (screenwriter and director) Sinners / 2025

 

I can’t imagine what kind of reefer Hollywood Academy Award voters were on in nominating Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners for 16 awards, the most of any film in history. Perhaps some of that voting was the product of justified guilt for ignoring so many amazing pictures featuring black stories and casts over the years. And in some respects, it was inevitable that such a well-made movie with strong audience approval, excellent acting, historical significance, including a fair sampling of blues songs as well as early American Irish music should be showered with approval.

     Indeed, the first half of this film, featuring the return to Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932 of two World War I veteran brothers, Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan) to the Delta after work for the Chicago mob for seven years which has made them substantially rich is a fascinating period piece in which we are immediately immersed in the Jim Crow world of poor black cotton sharecroppers, hidden Ku Klux Klan members, Asian shop owners, along with a brief history of the Blues, which first found root in the Mississippi Delta. Smoke and Stack, tired of a world not so very different from the Delta, except that Chicago is filled with skyscrapers where the Delta is deep in plantations. They are also clearly on the run after apparently being involved in a heist from criminal syndicates.

     Violent as the gangsters with whom they have been consorting, they are nonetheless likable enough and made even more appealing by their desire to use their ill-gotten money to open a juke club in an old sawmill they buy from the Southern bigot and local KKK leader Hogwood (David Maldonado).

    Their first day back features them traveling around the area as they seek out provisions and a sign from Clarksdale grocers Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li), and collect performers Sammie Moore, aka Preacherboy (Miles Caton), their cousin who plays guitar and sings quite beautifully and full of soul, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a local harmonica player and musical legend, and Pearline (Jayme Lawson) a married singer to whom young Sammie is immediately attracted.

   Along the way Stack verbally teaches his young cousin how to properly perform cunnilingus. Meanwhile Smoke visits the gravesite of his infant daughter and nearby his estranged wife, Annie (a standout Wunmi Mosaku), a Hoodoo healer, who insists the mojo bags she has given him and his brother has protected the two them. They also hook up for a quick session of anal sex that briefly restores what remains of their enduring love. Annie is furthermore procured to be the night’s cook. A heavy-set sharecropper Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) is paid to be the joint’s bouncer.

    Along the way Sammie also encounters Mary, Stacks’ passé blanc ex-girlfriend who is furious for him having left her and arranged for her marriage to a while man, mostly, we discover, to protect her from discovery. But the trouble is that she is unhappy in the life she leads and wants a return of their former relationship, definitely dangerous territory for a black man in the Delta.

    In these few hours we get a sense of the entire community in a nutshell, witnessing the hard lives of almost all the Delta individuals of color and ethnic difference, including the Choctaw Indians hot on the trail of a dangerous Irishman Remmick (Jack O’Connell) who has saw protection in the house of a poor Irish couple, whose lean-to house is little better than the shacks in which the black sharecroppers live.

     And when the joint gets jumping, the liquor flowing, and we witness all too brief performances of Delta Slim, Sammie, and Pearline, we are all ready to sit back and enjoy a full history lesson in the importance of music, performance, and backroom sex in the lives of Delta blacks. With this cast of interesting performers who knows what might happen?

    But already in these scenes, director Ryan Coogler seems impatient with his carefully-researched and beautifully filmed story, pushing the envelope with what I see as a far too obvious and unnecessary history lesson about the influence of Blues by weaving in performers all the way from early jazz, rock, and hip-hop along with a DJ needle drop in sampling, as if he needed to hit us over the head to make it clear just how important the Blues where if fomenting and formulating musical traditions in this country. As critic Robert Daniels summarizes on Roger Ebert.com, describing Sammie’s performance: “his music becomes a phantasmagoria of African drummers, an Afrofuturist electric guitarist, and even Chinese dancers.”

    And while Sammie, Delta Slim, and Pearline seem to be all capable performers, we want to hear more without the theatrics, to actually hear them play and sing. What we are given are momentary segments much like the dancing in musicals such as Chicago where camera is so very busy that what we get is a blur of hands, torso, and legs instead of a full performance. To know the Blues, as it is clear Coogler does, you have to be given the time to fully listen.

    We immediately recognize, however, something hokey about this; the fine-tuned history has been usurped by the historian. And almost as suddenly he has seemed to lose interest in the period piece with which he has begun, shifting quickly and quite stumblingly into a new genre as the three Irish vampires knock the Choctaws have been hunting down come knocking at the juke place door.

     As somewhat of a specialist in genre, I have no problem with a healthy mix of literary or cinema forms. But as Daniels observes in his review:

 

“Vampire movies often struggle to be inventive. The formulas and mythologies of the subgenre are tried and tested, repeated and reworded: Stinging holy water, foul garlic, burning sunrises, and firm wooden stakes through the heart are the primary tools wielded against the undead. Oftentimes, the biggest change from story to story is merely the setting, whether it’s a far flung Eastern-European country, an American urban locale, or a stifling desert. Knowing those limitations, I have to give Sinners a sweaty, gory Southern Gothic horror musical, some credit. It’s a messy picture that throws the kitchen sink at the genre and, yet, somehow, often misses.”

 

    I also have no general complaint against the genre and have written extensively about the subject from F. W. Murnau’s 1922 masterwork, Nosferatu, Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula and George Melford’s Spanish version shot on the same set, to Carl Theodore Dryer’s Vampyr which appeared in 1932, the same year as the events in Coogler’s movie, into the several 1960s and 1970s lesbian suck fests by Jean Rollin, the 1979 Werner Herzog reconfiguration in Nosferatu, The Vampyre and numerous others. In a 2008 academic essay I even argued that just two years before the events in Sinners Mississippi writer William Faulkner wrote a brilliant kind of Southern gothic vampire work in As I Lay Dying. So I know something about the genre.

      In more recent decades, as the genre as become even more popular, it has alas often been confused and intertwined with the zombie movie, gory, bloody mass attacks that on occasion Coogler’s film seemingly mimics, even though Annie quickly perceives that the beings the survivors are facing ain’t not haints (a restless, often malevolent ghost or evil spirit), but these dead men and women still haunting their own bodies.

     I can also well understand, vampires or not, why the black partygoers at the Sawmill might not wish to easily invite in some white “friends.” As the Stack and Smoke make clear, if a black man stares too long at a white woman he will probably be subject to immediate arrest if not strung up on a hanging tree.

    But why choose the very next to lowest rung on the horrible Southern hierarchy, the Irish dirt farmers, as the villians of this piece?

     I also realize, of course, that the vampire films and fictions were most often metaphors for something else. In the beginning, the vampire was an illicit lover who instead of inseminating his victim with semen sucked out the vital juices of the desired lover (male in the earliest vampire’s example, although when he fails with Thomas Hutter he goes after Hutter’s wife) or primarily female in Dracula’s case. Overall, we might argue, however, that early vampires were, up until Rollin’s films female on female examples, equal opportunity sex fiends, bisexual men who didn’t much care from what sex they got their necessary blood. And in Sinners that remains true, the film showing us both men and women busily gnawing on members of the same sex.

    I am quite willing to agree with The New Yorker film reviewer Richard Brody that the vampires in this film represent the white desire to assimilate and take over black music (exemplified by the young Sammie, for whom Remmick has a particular attraction). But, I still don’t quite get the necessary Irish connection; were the dirt-poor Irish whites those most desirous to incorporate, assimilate, and steal from the black arts, particularly, given as this film shows us they have their own quite dark musical traditions, as in the midst of the vampire attack the original Irish trio and all of those who have already been “turned” stomp out some lovely Irish ballads?

     This group of vampires, moreover, seems to have developed into a same-thinking community who share one another’s thoughts like the human replacements of pod-people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

     Unfortunately, as Stack himself is transformed into a vampire by Mary, sitting atop him drooling with impatience for his blood, Cornbread turns enemy, and even Grace’s husband Bo Chow becomes a threat ready to return home to turn their young daughter into one of them, as the  vampires now claiming welcome into the juke hall, begin to look more and more like something out of The Night of the Living Dead and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dawn to Dust, cult pop films that in my estimation lack the subtlety and artistry of the first third of this film. By the end of this sequence, the dead and the living have pretty much ended up in a huge bloody brouhaha that might be described as one bite after another in humorous comparison to Paul Thomas Anderson’s film One Battle After Another of this same year.

   As the morning sun pops into view our vampires are burned alive, finally leaving only Sammie, Smoke, and a hand full of others still alive in living flesh and blood, Sammie having gone back home to his preacher father for forgiveness without, we soon discover, any intent to give up his music. And in this sense he is the true hero of the film, and the lone survivor of his Delta world.

     In short, Coogler has not so much “transformed” his original film or even extended it, as he has dropped down another work with similar characters upon his original movie like Dorothy’s house landing upon the witch in Munchkinland, blowing the first part of the film to smithereens like an angry gifted child grown impatient with being a truly restrained and talented artist.

    Even worse, he then quickly hurtles off from Marveland, a world of comic book pop-up figures, rocketing back to his early Rocky franchise, Creed (2015) wherein Smoke pulls out his tommy guns and Rambo-style shoots down the entire KKK crowd who come looking for trouble early the next morning. Even wounded and dying he does away with the final surviving bigot Hogwood, suggesting that what the Moore brothers were really seeking all along was just to be able to repeat the American pattern of violence and revenge, not create or sustain black art.

    As a reward for clearing out the Delta from the white bastards, he is transported straight to heaven where Annie and his infant child are waiting for his embracement.

     Is this really the masterpiece we’ve all been waiting for?

    But even then Coogler won’t give up, quickly transporting us in the early credits to a New York of current times where an older version of Sammie is now performing. After the show he meets up with two vampire survivors, Stack and Mary, now dressed in semi-Hippie attire, who explain that they were forbidden by Remmick from touching Sammy, now about to die in any event. Together they agree that on that long ago day, which Sammy describes as the best day in his life, they had finally really gotten their act together. Too bad Coogler didn’t let us truly experience it more fully before he thrust us back into the violent, racist world of today.

 

Los Angele, March 14. 2006

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2006).