Sinners and the General State of Things

Summary

In 'Sinners and the General State of Things,' The Morbid Zoo offers a thought-provoking dissection of how modern art critiques and cultural narratives intersect with mainstream media. The video explores the impact of negative criticism platforms, the nuance of a gangster vampire movie set in 1932 Mississippi, and broader themes addressing cultural preservation, artistic authenticity, and the intrinsic value of art beyond consumerism. Highlighting Ryan Cougler's film 'Sinners,' the discussion delves into music’s generational bridge, vampirism as a cultural metaphor, and the ongoing battle between innovative expression and capitalist-driven art. This critical reflection on art urges viewers to recognize the intrinsic human connection in creative endeavors.

Highlights

• 'Sinners' is a must-watch film that blends history, blues, and the supernatural with stunning execution by Ryan Cougler. 🎬
• The film uses vampires as symbols of capitalist art consumption, highlighting the need for genuine cultural engagement. 🧛‍♀️
• The critique underscores the importance of not viewing art merely as a marketable commodity. 🤑
• Discussion on how artistic endeavors help maintain cultural integrity and human dignity. 🌍
• The analysis critiques the trend of prioritizing negative criticism over meaningful artistic contributions. 🚫

Key Takeaways

• Art should connect and transform us, not just serve as a product. 🎨
• 'Sinners' uses music to explore cultural and historical continuity. 🎶
• Vampires in the film symbolize the dangers of seeing art as mere consumption. 🧛‍♂️
• Ryan Cougler demonstrates the power of art to ignite dialogue about society. 🔥
• Criticism should focus on uplifting creativity, not just tearing down. ✨

Overview

In a captivating piece, The Morbid Zoo examines the intersection of criticism, art, and culture through the lens of Ryan Cougler's film 'Sinners.' Set in 1932 Mississippi, the film intertwines the blues, gangster lore, and a supernatural twist to underscore the deeper conversation about art's role in society. It boldly asserts that art is not merely for consumption but for connection and transformation—arguing that music and film should evoke and challenge cultural continuity rather than just entertain.

Vampires in 'Sinners' are presented as metaphors for the cultural predators of the art world. These characters highlight the risks and downsides of treating art as a consumable product devoid of deeper value. Through a vivid illustration of an era when blues music served as a unifying cultural force, Cougler critiques modern tendencies towards creative commodification and highlights the unnoticed undercurrents of oppressive dynamics within art consumption.

Cultural preservation and artistic integrity are paramount themes in the discussion. It's argued that art, lacking vulnerability and genuine expression, simply minimizes human experience. By examining how 'Sinners' facilitates a dialogue between past and present through its rich narrative and musical homage, the video underscores the critical need for artistic evolution and reiteration across generations.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Overview The author reflects on the film 'Sinners,' which they recently watched twice, in the context of broader concerns about the negative direction they perceive art to be heading. They express trepidation about adding to the negativity that pervades online discussions about art, acknowledging the role such negativity plays in sustaining certain online platforms that thrive on criticism, even when unfounded.
• 01:00 - 03:30: Plot Summary of Sinners The narrator expresses disinterest in participating in their current system, which causes issues when it comes to necessities like paying rent and buying food. They express disdain for their boss and clarify that despite the negative tone of their videography, they are not inherently driven to criticize. They desire to promote artistic and cultural events that are beneficial and interesting for societal development, but find it challenging to do so in the current climate.
• 03:30 - 06:00: Impressions and Artistic Evaluation The narrator discusses the current state of being an art critic when media seems to disregard the very concept of art. There's a feeling of depression and a lack of joy in criticism because comparisons require good examples, which are apparently scarce. The narrator hints that the discussion will focus more on personal reflections on artistic impressions rather than a traditional review, particularly mentioning a work titled 'Sinners.'
• 06:00 - 09:00: Vampires in Pop Culture The chapter titled 'Vampires in Pop Culture' discusses the impact and presence of vampire-themed movies in media. It opens with a current review of a newly released movie, 'Sinners', and the author expresses their eagerness to delve into the discussion of the film without waiting for wide access to it. Despite the potential for spoilers, the author chooses to explore the movie's plot and characters, focusing on the gangster twins, Smoke and Stack, played by Michael B. Jordan. They have returned to their hometown in Mississippi in 1932, setting the backdrop for the story's narrative.
• 09:00 - 13:00: Critique of the Art Industry and Cultural Commentary The chapter delves into the art industry, using the narrative of a movie set in Chicago as a critical lens. The plot involves characters using dubious funds to open a Delta Blues nightclub, featuring their cousin Sammy as the main act. Sammy emerges as the focal point of the story, with the movie's events revolving around him. The film unfolds on the club's opening night, which is unexpectedly interrupted by a vampire invasion. The storyline is characterized by its simplicity, potentially influencing audiences' perceptions based on preconceived opinions about the director's talent.
• 13:00 - 18:00: Musical Themes and Cultural Preservation The chapter "Musical Themes and Cultural Preservation" discusses the recognition of the movie 'Sinners' as a significant cinematic work. The speaker emphasizes the film's excellence and beauty, highlighting it as a confirmation of director Ryan Cougler's talent. They express a sentiment of having been deprived of seeing Cougler's full potential due to his previous work under studio constraints, and they regard this film as possibly his masterpiece.
• 18:00 - 23:00: Art, Vulnerability, and Societal Reflections The chapter 'Art, Vulnerability, and Societal Reflections' focuses on the personal impact of the movie 'Sinners' on the narrator, emphasizing how deeply it affected them emotionally. The narrator is concerned that their strong emotional response might overshadow a more detailed critique that could emerge upon further scrutiny. Despite this, they confidently rate the movie 10 out of 10 due to its profound impact. The narrator also reflects on the nature of movie reviews, noting that 'Sinners' defies conventional assessment criteria and suggests that it requires a deeper, more subjective analysis rather than a simple recommendation or dismissal.
• 23:00 - 27:00: Vampires and Human Condition The chapter delves into the essence of movies, suggesting that their significance lies beyond casting or franchise potential. Instead, the focus is on the music within these films, emphasizing that it transcends explanation and must be personally experienced. The author posits that a movie’s value is in the firsthand experience it provides, inviting readers to watch it personally and return for a discussion.
• 27:00 - 31:00: Critique of Modern Art Perception and Conclusion The chapter titled 'Critique of Modern Art Perception and Conclusion' centers on the theme presented in the piece 'Sinners.' It explores the concept of exceptional music transcending time, connecting ancestors with descendants. The narrative focuses on Sammy, whose exceptional blues abilities draw a vampire interested in this talent. This scenario mirrors the storyline of 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia'. A pivotal scene discussed involves Sammy playing his guitar, during which he is joined by the ghost, setting the stage for the vampires' appearance and the ensuing chaos at the juke joint.
• 31:00 - 33:00: Final Reflections and Outro The chapter titled 'Final Reflections and Outro' describes a mesmerizing scene blending different generations and styles of music. It features an African tribesman with a string instrument, a 1975 electric rock guitar player, and a modern DJ adding a hip-hop beat to a blues song. Ryan Cougler walks through a party where the rich diversity of African-influenced music across generations is celebrated, culminating in a beautiful and cinematic sequence where everyone is united in celebration.

Sinners and the General State of Things Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Good day. I saw Sinners twice this week and I would like to talk about it. I've been trying to figure out a way to say what I think about the general bad direction art is going in for a long time, which really seems like it shouldn't be that difficult for me since bitching on the internet is most of my income. But I am also hyper aware that there's a way to talk about how bad things are that will contribute to the badness. This is a platform that sustains its growth by prioritizing negative criticism regardless of the merits of that criticism. And that's a
• 00:30 - 01:00 system I have no interest in participating in, which is not good if you do have interest in other things like rent and eating food. I hate my boss is what I'm saying. Shocking, I know. Despite what my videography might imply, I am actually not a person who is especially energized by tearing things down. I want to talk about artistic and cultural events that I think are good and interesting and contribute to our general development as a species. And that's really hard to do right now. It's
• 01:00 - 01:30 really hard to be any kind of humanities or art critic at a point in time where every medium feels like it's going out of its way to disrespect even the concept of art. It's depressing. It gives me no pleasure even to complain about. At some point you have to have good things to compare the bad with. You have to have things that you can point to and say, "See, like that." So, this is really less of a review than just my overall thoughts about Sinners based on just
• 01:30 - 02:00 having seen the movie and not having access to clips and stuff yet. I'm just compelled by this movie and I think it needs to be talked about right now. I don't want to wait. I am going to spoil as much as I have to. Absolutely nothing is sacred. So, for anyone who really does just want a pure spoiler-free review, I suppose I will lead with a quick one right now. Okay. So, in short, Sinners is about a pair of gangster twins called Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who have returned to their Mississippi hometown in 1932 after making a bunch of morally
• 02:00 - 02:30 questionable money in Chicago. They're going to use all this money to open a Delta Blues nightclub, and they hire their cousin Sammy to play. Sammy is the real main character. It's really his story you're following. So, the movie takes place on opening night of their juke joint where upon the party is crashed by vampires. And that's the movie. It's a really basic premise. If you saw the trailers, you probably thought that it looked like a fairly average movie made by a director you either think is really talented or don't
• 02:30 - 03:00 have many thoughts about at all. So, if you've heard of the movie now, it's probably because somebody told you it was really good. If nobody has told you it's really good, I will. Sinners is really, really good. It's beautiful. It's a confirmation of all the promise Ryan Cougler has shown up to this point, and I feel almost cheated that he's had a whole Hollywood career without being able to show anyone what he can do without Disney breathing down his neck. I'm tempted to call this a masterpiece.
• 03:00 - 03:30 And really the only thing holding me back is the possibility that I might just be so personally affected by it that I could be overlooking certain details that might bother me later under more scrutiny. But I am very comfortable giving Sinners a straight 10 out of 10. I'm comfortable giving a 10 out of 10 to any movie that makes me feel the way Sinners made me feel. Part of the reason I feel like I can't just make this a should you go see it or not review, as if that's the kind of channel I am anyway, is because this is a movie that evades the kind of box checking a lot of
• 03:30 - 04:00 movies engineer themselves by right now. This movie isn't about who's in it or why. It's not about franchising. It is about music. And music can't be described or explained. It can only be experienced. I can't deploy any words here that will adequately reconstruct sinners in a form that you can accurately evaluate it with before you go see it. You must experience it for yourself. And when you do, you can come back here and we can talk about it.
• 04:00 - 04:30 Okay, it's spoiler time. Everybody out. So, the whole thing going on in Sinners is this idea that really good music dissolves the boundaries between ancestors and descendants. And Sammy's blues skill in doing this is what attracts the vampire to the party because he wants that skill for himself. It's a bit Devil went down to Georgia. The scene everybody is talking about happens right before the vampires arrive and everybody starts dying at the crest of the wave for this short-lived juke joint. Sammy gets out his guitar and starts playing. And as he's playing, he's joined first by the ghost of this
• 04:30 - 05:00 African tribesman with some kind of string instrument and then an electric rock guitar player circa 1975. And then a modern DJ lays a hip-hop beat on top of this blues song. And then in this massive oneshot, Ryan Cougler walks around this party where every conceivable generation of African influenced music is present. Everybody's partying together. And it's beautiful. It's beautiful. It's one of legit one of the most beautiful cinematic sequences
• 05:00 - 05:30 I've ever seen. It's like it's moving and it could have been so schmaltzy and self-conscious, but Ryan Cougler isn't interested in just telling you that blues is important to black music. He wants you to experience the ways all these genres of music intersect and are in conversation with each other. He wants you to feel it. And that means that the scene has this kind of sinister edge to it. It's intercut in the beginning with a flashback of the older blues player, this character named Delta
• 05:30 - 06:00 Slim, telling Sammy that this music is sacred. He says it's magic what we do and you feel it in the scene in more than just the presence of these future and past generations. There's just so much texture and mystery in it. You know, like the building is on fire and some of the tribal people in the party are wearing like traditional costumeuming that's really strange. And the entire scene just has this amazing tension. Like there's this feeling that the beauty of blues as an art form is
• 06:00 - 06:30 indistinguishable from its danger. And that's when the vampires show up. Vampire movies are always tricky because the monster is inherently sort of politically troubled. Like vampires are parasites first and foremost. They're people who have removed themselves from the normal course of human life and maintain their stagnancy by killing and consuming others. When the vampire metaphor arrives in Western Europe in the 1800s, it comes with a lot of racial anxieties. This fear a lot of old money types had about foreigners arriving on
• 06:30 - 07:00 your shores to buy all your land and steal all your women and like spread disease or whatever. Later, when vampires get sexy, it's because our cultural and economic conditions changed. Because when you remove all the metaphysical and spiritual features, being a vampire is mostly just living forever. If you imagine yourself primarily as a single individual moving through a world that revolves around you rather than as one thread of a larger cultural fabric across millions of people as our culture specifically tells
• 07:00 - 07:30 us to do, then being a vampire is really not so much a curse as just the ultimate American dream. Like to know me is to know how much I love Twilight, but the Twilight vampires are the absolute apotheiois of this, right? These vampires are less monsters than angels. They're exalted beings specifically because they resist the everpresent temptation of sin, which in the Twilight universe is basically represented by their desire to kill humans. So, as long as you're a decent person, being a
• 07:30 - 08:00 vampire is great. Twilight arranges its vampire metaphor the way it does because it's written by a Mormon housewife. And American Christianity is a tradition that sees sin as a constant temptation. It's something in us already as fallen souls, but it can be managed and resisted. And that's where we find our like grace or salvation or whatever. But Twilight didn't do the numbers it did because people connected with the idea that we're all capable of sin. The reason it was so successful is because it's a romantic fantasy. It's a
• 08:00 - 08:30 completely insulated and extremely individualized story. In Twilight, vampires are used as a device to illustrate the process of becoming an adult with agency. And it's the emotional charge that makes vampires a threat, not really the prospect of being a vampire itself. Being a vampire itself has no real drawbacks. So, we have this cultural spectrum between vampires being repulsive and vampires being sexy, which meant that when you made a vampire story up until very, very recently, honestly,
• 08:30 - 09:00 maybe up until this movie, you either had to manage this sticky possibility of accidentally demonizing a type of person or you have to turn into like a full Einrand greed is good libertarian objectivist to get your point across, which is fine if you're like a kid and you're still learning how emotions work, but then we grow out of that. now, don't we? So, the moral goodness or badness of vampires in recent pop culture has basically relied on the individual decision-making of the vampires themselves. That what makes you a good
• 09:00 - 09:30 person is whether you do good things and avoid doing bad things. It's a very utilitarian understanding of moral decision-making in the face of temptation. What sinners is doing is reframing vampires as both explicitly repulsive and explicitly sympathetic because it's making the case that it's vampirism that determines your behavior, not the other way around. Being a vampire makes you a terrible person by default. Not because it means you'll spread disease or loose morals or
• 09:30 - 10:00 whatever, but because being a terrible person is inherent in being someone for whom exploitation and eternal escape is always an option. Vampires and sinners are inescapably bad people. They're people who have had all the things that make humans redeemable taken out of them. So, this raises a question. What does Ryan Cougler think it is about humans that makes us redeemable? And what is it he thinks you have to do to damn yourself forever? What is the final
• 10:00 - 10:30 sin? As with all vampire stories, the sin is what the vampires are trying to seduce you with. What Remick is offering in exchange for Sammy's blues magic is what you might call hedonistic anger. He's making the case that the answer to oppression is to devote your life to the delirium of free consumption. Outconsume the people who hate you until everybody is brought together in a single homogeneous overpowering greed. Remick isn't lying. This is in a really twisted way true equality. Everybody's defining
• 10:30 - 11:00 themselves by exactly one common feature and that feature is appetite. The appeal of this is pretty obvious, I think. Otherwise, capitalism simply wouldn't be. Appetite isn't ideological. Its damages aren't personal. You have no control over the things you want. Get that bag, baby. A lot of people do this. It's kind of the driving ethos of the American art industry right now. For example, last year, middlingly successful pop star Jojo Siwa committed
• 11:00 - 11:30 to a rebrand. No longer content to sell out stadiums to children and appear on Dance Mom cringe compilations, she would now be the owner, nay, innovator of a bold new subgenre, gay-pop. The genre is, I said it back in the day when I first signed with Columbia. I said, "I want to start a new genre of music." And they said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, it's called gay-pop." And they were like, "What's that?" And I was like, it's like K-pop, right? But it's gay pop. Jojo's courageous leadership has ushered the gays into pop music.
• 11:30 - 12:00 What would they have done without her? This PR train wreck was absolutely intoxicating to watch, largely because of how delusionally invested in it Jojo was herself. This was not a cynical venture. She would talk with complete earnestness about the emotional beats she was expressing. She wants to grow up. This is about encountering her own sexual awakening and how someone with as big a personality as she has deals with that. And then she'd do that weird gyrating thing and scrape her vocal
• 12:00 - 12:30 cords together just in case you had any generous ideas about whether she might actually have talent. The reception of these interviews and Tik Toks of hers was generally to make fun of them and then essentially call them lies. Jojo Siwa is doing this out of desperation, maybe because of narcissism or manipulation or stunted development, but she certainly doesn't think of herself as an artist, and we should not take her seriously when she says she does. I disagree so hard. I think Jojo Siwa was being 1,000%
• 12:30 - 13:00 real with this rebrand. I'm sorry, but you simply don't tattoo iconography from singles you don't care about onto your arm. Jojo Siwa very much thinks she's an artist and the ultimate masterpiece she will bring to the world is commodification itself. That's why she's so open about how little she contributed to any piece of her single even though she claims it's self-expression at the same time. Originally I was scared of the lyrics. I was 18 years old. I didn't
• 13:00 - 13:30 want to say [ __ ] I didn't want to say I was a bad girl because I wasn't a bad girl. The artistic talent she's claiming is not singing or dancing or writing. No, her talent is packaging. Like I said, I will never ever claim to be a singer, but I will claim to be an artist. Okay. I am giving the world art and they might not like it, they might hate it, but they're enjoying it and it's become a bit of a guilty
• 13:30 - 14:00 pleasure for everyone. She believes the brand and business she's created is itself the art and that she should be rewarded for this creative vision in both financial and cultural capital. No one has made this dramatic of a change yet. No one has made in my generation this extreme of a switch and I am the first in the generation. It is very scary but someone's got to do it. What was really gross about Jojo's rebrand was how shamelessly derivative it was. the fact that she was lifting styles and
• 14:00 - 14:30 themes from other people with no respect at all for the history of what she was doing, much less any desire to credit those who came before her or try to work with other people in the same cultural space. Like a sexy glam Jean Simmons sea creature going on here. You know, the amount of references that people have told me I look like in this video that I have no clue what they are is sickening. I'm adding that one to the list, but I'll take it. Like there's a world where Jojo Siwa opens for Chapel Ran, you know? I mean, like it's a world
• 14:30 - 15:00 where she has more talent, but still that's that's what she should have been aiming for. What Ryan Cougler is saying with Sinners is that this kind of artistic parasetism is a core threat to human self-determination. There may be some crossover with bigotry, but bigotry is not at all necessary to make something like this happen. And though Jojo Siwa may be goofy in isolation, the trend she represents is dead serious. Not to be dramatic, but it's kind of an attack on the integrity of the human spirit. We don't make art because it's
• 15:00 - 15:30 cute or because we have nothing better to do or like even to fight the good fight or whatever. I've been seeing a lot of people say that blues and Irish folk were a kind of coping mechanism for oppression. And like I get what people mean by that, but we have to break out of this habit of framing art as having a direct utilitarian purpose. We don't make art to cope. We make art because art is how humans create meaning for themselves and each other. That can double as a coping mechanism. But I would argue that the reason genres like
• 15:30 - 16:00 blues and Irish folk go so hard is because they were made by people who were constantly having to insist upon their own humanity. And humanity is in a very real way made through art. Art and humanity mutually create each other. It's a truly self-contained system. both argument and justification in the same way that God is the father and also the son. Art is arguably the most important thing we do. This is why Remick's Irishness is such a tragic plot point.
• 16:00 - 16:30 He's a person whose cultural oppression at the point the movie takes place in is several hundred years ahead of black American oppression. And because of that, he's kind of a harbinger. Physically, he's free of all normal human concerns, but his music has sort of lost its spiritual freedom because it hasn't been allowed to influence the culture he's been imported to in the same way blues was able to. Ramik still has his music, but it doesn't hit the way he wants anymore. It's relegated to antique status. Beautiful for sure, but
• 16:30 - 17:00 only as an isolated aesthetic object. It's no longer an effective spiritual act the way it used to be. This is a really sad commentary on white American culture. Scotch-Irish folk music rules. It's awesome. The Rocky Road to Dublin is a banger song. There's no reason at all that Irish folk couldn't have had the same influence on American culture that blues did. Also, like uh it should be said like listen, I'm not an expert, but this doesn't look to me like a problem the homeland shares. Ireland
• 17:00 - 17:30 still has a really strong music tradition and there's still a huge Irish folk influence on global pop music. Hosier is a great example. So stick to the crater, the best thing in nature, for sinking your sorrows and raising your joys. And boys, I'd have wonder if lightning and thunder was made from the plunder of whiskey boys. But we had that here. We had people from the same place
• 17:30 - 18:00 with the same songs. Where'd they go? If we're going to go looking for Irish influence anywhere, it's got to be in country music. And the roots were there for a while. It's there in the outlaw country of Willie Nelson and Hank Williams Jr., Chris Kristofferson. It's in Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie before him. And the commonality among all of those people is that like blues, the Irish folk influence is about pain and hardship, especially the pain of marginalization and the few kinds of agency that are available to poor people specifically. So then lyrics wise,
• 18:00 - 18:30 right, what you want to do is think of a year in the 1800s, right? You want to think about something the Brits did. Say it again, will it for you? You want to think about something the English did. Take Copperhead Road. Kick-ass song. Clear Scotch-Irish roots that you will hear in any country bar line. Dance night. never come back from copperhead road.
• 18:30 - 19:00 [Music] It is about a Vietnam vet who comes back from the war, grows weed on the same land his dad made moonshine, and resolves to evade the DEA using tactics he learned from the Vietkong. That was in the 80s. What do we get from mainstream country today? Well, typically it's songs by guys who live in Oceanside estates, basically mocking white rural life. Backwoods legit. Don't take no lip. Shoot them back and shoot them back and shoot them back a spit. And because I know somebody's going to have something to say about this, I grew
• 19:00 - 19:30 up in Oklahoma, okay? I listened to a lot of country music growing up. My opinion is informed. This is my culture. [ __ ] you. The Irish folk influence is probably most visible in bluegrass. And bluegrass as a style was very present in American country pretty much until the early 2000s with people like Allison Krauss and the Dixie Chicks. But it really does seem like the Iraq war was the watershed that turned country into the representative genre of the American right, specifically the white American right. And at that point, bluegrass
• 19:30 - 20:00 becomes kind of a hipster thing. At its worst, it becomes stomp clap music. You know, the this like really curated fixation on vintage aesthetics. [Music] At its best, it influences bands like Lord Hiron, Josh Ritter, Punch Brothers, Sunkill Moon. All great musicians, but certainly not country and certainly not claimed as representative of modern American identity. When country musicians do pull more from this sort of class-based bluegrass tradition like
• 20:00 - 20:30 Casey Musgraves, there always has to be some kind of public debate over whether they really count as country because the unspoken standard around country music is that it can't ever evolve or develop ever again. And it certainly can't admit that white rural life isn't awful because of pronouns or immigrants or vandalism. It's awful because of dying communities and meth and teen pregnancy and lack of education and opportunity. The same as it was a 100 years ago. Rural life in country music must be scrubbed of any reference to this. It's
• 20:30 - 21:00 all sundresses and a cold beer on a Friday night and red dirt roads and it sucks. It's shallow. And this is largely what Remick is doing. His claim is that he'll give everyone the community they're seeking without the pain. But that's impossible because blues is pain. Finding fellowship in suffering is the entire point of the genre. There is no blues without pain. And denying the importance of pain to the human condition cheapens any art you try to
• 21:00 - 21:30 make, which is what's happening to mainstream country today in my opinion. One of the things I love about just the aesthetic language of this movie is that it's very nearly a musical just through virtue of the fact that blues and folk are both very narratively driven genres. Sammy's song I lied to you is basically an I want song. He doesn't want to be a preacher. He wants to play the blues. Remix music is also acting as a narrative device. He's describing in song his own predatory ambitions, his
• 21:30 - 22:00 grief and nostalgia, his anger and aggression. It's all there in the lyrics and arrangements of the songs. And even if they've lost the soul he's looking for, they're at least expressing something coherent and emotionally true. They perform the characterization for who Remick really is as a person that we wouldn't get otherwise just because he doesn't say all that much. He just doesn't have that much dialogue. That's how powerful certain genres of music can be. And I just don't see that kind of
• 22:00 - 22:30 dynamism or vulnerability in the overwhelming majority of modern mainstream country music. If country today isn't trying to sustain this weird tension between mocking and romanticizing rural poverty, it's hedonistic anger. It's emotionality focused not on the nature of your pain, but on who's available to get revenge on. You think it's a small town. That sucks. Art is not about achieving an end. Art is about
• 22:30 - 23:00 communion and transformation. It's about cross-pollinating your experience with other people's and celebrating the unpredictability of the result. In that big fancy beautiful oneshot dance scene, the unifying factor isn't that everybody is playing the exact same music or even playing the same song differently. It's that they're taking one musical tradition as a base structure and adapting it to the emotional conditions of their own times and places. One of the most interesting themes of sinners is the idea that there is a difference
• 23:00 - 23:30 between preserving a culture and freezing a culture in carbonite so you can own it and fetishize it and put it on display. This is a really sophisticated idea that I have never seen artistically expressed as eloquently as sinners does. Every generation of people in the dance scene possesses a completely different set of values and expectations of what the right way to be a human is. They all have their own gods and their own traditions and their own forms of dress and dance. And that's good. The clash
• 23:30 - 24:00 between different forms of creative expression are what's feeding everybody's soul and allowing them to reach across time and feel this sacred communion with both ancestors and descendants. The aesthetic details of what culture looks like can and will change. And it's not the end of the world. As long as you are honestly accepting the cultural inflection you've been given by your ancestors and adding your own evolution to it in turn, you are doing a good and moral thing. You
• 24:00 - 24:30 are doing a human thing. That is what's supposed to happen. Culture is a participatory process. And that participation is what the vampires have sacrificed in exchange for superficial safety and power. They have committed to never actually participating in the culture around them. All they can do is consume. They can never really create because a vampire's existence depends on being hidden both spiritually and literally. Never being able to see the sun is a double metaphor. You can never
• 24:30 - 25:00 feel warmth again and you can never exist in the light, which is to say you can never exist within the realm of public perception. You can never really be seen as you are or leave a cultural legacy. you'll always just be drawing off someone else's energy like a leech. At the same time, Cougler is also acknowledging that this isn't an opportunity to create some kind of other to attack. That's why Smoke and Stack are twins. I think he's not saying that vampirism is something some people are just too weak to resist or whatever. He's saying that barring luck and
• 25:00 - 25:30 circumstance, this will be you. That predatory impulse is part of the human condition. It's driven by fear and suffering and justified anger. And it's something we need to actively manage in ourselves because being oppressed yourself doesn't give you a pass to oppress others. At first, I didn't think much of the title, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. This is very much a movie concerned with how a label like sin is generated. All the people at this club are members of a
• 25:30 - 26:00 community that remains to this day overwhelmingly Christian. And at this time and place, blues was considered a dangerous form of music that could lead you to sin. Very much like jazz, very much like Bbop and rockabilly, disco and rock and metal and rap after that. And every generation has a sinful music genre. And the thing that makes music sinful is that it is kind of dangerous. Everybody has a club night they regret. You know, I don't trust you if you don't. The situations in which music cultures are experienced and developed
• 26:00 - 26:30 are not typically very safe. But the argument for anyone who is on the side of art is that that's because life is not typically very safe. The constructs we devise to control the experiences of ourselves and others and lock us into physical and mental safety are false. They're lies and they constrict every bit as much as they shelter. The spiritual power of blues or Irish folk for that matter is its vulnerability. And vulnerability by definition is
• 26:30 - 27:00 dangerous. It invites predators. So I the [ __ ] just happened? Oh my god, it's the cat. Oh Jesus. So the reason I think this movie is hitting so hard right now is because these are kind of the conditions we're living in. The art world has been effectively taken over by interests that want to suck all the life out of it and convert others to the same cause. And that blows. It's scary. It's depressing. It ruins the party. But the way Ryan Cougler is discussing this
• 27:00 - 27:30 problem is also kind of encouraging, I think, because the obvious monstrousness of the vampires acts as its own point. Cougler is implying that this kind of parasetism is so deeply offensive to the human spirit that we recognize it on site. There's an uncanniness about this kind of thing that we just have a natural aversion to even if we can't articulate what exactly is wrong. All of us are born with the ability to clock a vampire and compulsively reject it. I
• 27:30 - 28:00 think the upside of the current failure of the American art industry to produce anything people actually want to experience is that it's evidence that human beings recognize a vampire when we see one. It's why nobody bought Jojo Siwa's stupid rebrand. It's why everybody hates pretty much everything Disney is doing right now. It's why AI is so unpopular. It's why Kendrick hates Drake. Even if we don't have any formal art education, we respond with visceral disgust to the idea that art should just
• 28:00 - 28:30 be a matter of replicating the safest aspects of what came before. Because we know that it's an unnatural and deeply wrong and offensive thing to deny a generation's right to make something new out of what they've been given when their time has come. A few weeks ago, I was doing research for uh one of the Lord of the Rings videos I'm making, and I came across this react video of some zoomers watching Lord of the Rings for the first time, and one of them was talking about how he remembers being
• 28:30 - 29:00 about 10 and watching Return of the King on an iPad, and that being the first time a movie ever made him feel something. I think that's really sad, you know? I think it's really profoundly sad to have the first time a movie makes you feel something be 10 years into your life in response to a movie that was made long before you were ever born. We can't be doing this to kids. We can't be giving them this depleted cultural soil. It's not right. It's it's it's it's not
• 29:00 - 29:30 our right to do that. That's not a better world. The world is not made more effective or efficient by passionlessly fulfilling a formula and trying to appeal to some imaginary average viewer. I want the director's perspective. I want to be in conversation with somebody else's subjectivity because subjectivity is the source of all perception, all interpretation, and therefore all beauty. Why do these studios and the
• 29:30 - 30:00 tech bros who own them want to take all the beauty out of my world? Doesn't this place suck enough? And that's what makes vampirism a curse and a tragedy in this movie, right? It's that whatever ambition for endless love or ultimate happiness makes you a vampire to begin with actually makes achieving that love and happiness impossible forever. You're relegated to being this sad, empty creature that ruins other people's lives
• 30:00 - 30:30 for absolutely no reward. At the very end of the movie, we're shown that Stack gets to live his life as a vampire through all the amazing genres of music that come after blues, but all he can say is that he misses the original thing. He'll always be an outsider to the evolution of his own music. No matter what he does because in a very foundational way, it just doesn't belong to him anymore. Stack is not satisfied by the end. He's out of place. And no matter how good the music around him is,
• 30:30 - 31:00 it's always going to be something happening outside himself. He'll always be a stranger looking through the window because music is something that must be experienced. Not just in the moment of listening to the song, but in who gave the song to you and under which circumstances and what irreducible thing it is about you specifically that makes you either connect with it or dislike it. And his time to do that successfully has passed. You're not supposed to completely understand the new styles of
• 31:00 - 31:30 the generations that come after you. And that is okay. It's not for you. Our children have the right to live their own lives and make their own meaning out of the cultural objects we give them instead of just having to sit through millennial nostalgia vehicles. It's just a relief. It's a relief, you know, to have a director actually ask you to experience something with him instead of just lecturing you. It's like movies right now are constantly apologizing for
• 31:30 - 32:00 being movies. like, "Oh man, I'm so sorry you have to sit through this whole movie or whatever to get the message we're trying to tell you. If we could make it easier, we would." And I just find that really disgusting and demoralizing because I love movies. I love art. And I resent being told that art is not only this like meaningless optional luxury, but is also something that can and should be programmed and optimized and packaged for sale. There is no better feeling on this earth than
• 32:00 - 32:30 having a skilled artist use their medium to point at that kind of grotesquery and say, "Are you seeing this shit?" Yes, I am seeing this [ __ ] Sorry. It feels like something important is happening right now in the way we understand art and its purpose and change is hard and a lot of really stupid [ __ ] is happening right now. But this is the first movie in a really, really long time that has really made me feel like this time
• 32:30 - 33:00 period is a privilege to live through. It's an honor to be part of the story this movie is telling. That's the best possible thing art can offer, I think, is this reminder that you are here on purpose and other people are here doing this with you. Whatever this is, you know, and Ryan Cougler is not wrong. That's genuine magic. That's the spark of divinity that we all carry within us. If you draw the right symbol, strike the right note, you recite the right
• 33:00 - 33:30 incantation at the right time, you can perform alchemy, you can turn misery into community and community into strength. So anyway, let me know what you thought of Sinners if you've seen it. I'll be in the comments chatting. I want to talk about this movie. And I've got a pretty fat Final Destination video uh coming out hopefully before the end of the month. So, keep an eye out for that. Okay, goodbye. Oh, the summer time has
• 33:30 - 34:00 come and the trees are sweetly blooming. And the wild mountain time grows around the bloom and heather. Will you go lassie?
• 34:00 - 34:30 Go. And we'll all go [Music] together to pull wild mountain time. All around the blooming heather. Will you go lassie? Go. I will build my
• 34:30 - 35:00 love a tower near yawn pure crystal fountain. And on it I will pile all the flowers of the mountain. Will you go lassie?
• 35:00 - 35:30 [Music] Go and we'll all go together to pull wild mountain time all around the bloom and heather. Will you go lassie?
• 35:30 - 36:00 Go.