Sinners

 I had heard good things about the movie, and while I think the Oscars are far from the metric one should judge films on, the fact that it broke the record on nominations was very impressive, so my best friend and I (he had already seen it) sat down and watched Ryan Coogler's vampire movie.

Sinners is a movie that, at its core, is pretty simple. It's a classic "besieged by monsters" movie, in which the main action (well, the back half of the movie) is primarily concerned with a group of desperate survivors trying to fend off an increasingly dangerous group of monsters, the cast dwindling (although not quite, because of the way the vampires work in this movie) as we're left to wonder who, if anyone, will survive.

One of the movie's most impressive feats is the characters Smoke and Stack, twin brothers both played my Michael B. Jordan, Coogler's constant collaborator. The technical wizardry, demonstrated early on in which Stack rolls a cigarette for Smoke, hands it to him, then lights the cigarette for him, pulled off so seamlessly that you could easily forget that that's the same actor on both sides of the frame, is complemented by Jordan fully realizing both brothers as distinct performances, so that the audience truly just accepts these as separate characters (costume choices aid in this, to be sure, but the performances do the heaviest lifting). It recalls Christian Bale's performance in The Prestige, though the nature of the performance is apparent from the characters' introduction.

Oddly, another movie that comes to mind here is From Dusk 'Til Dawn, which involves a diminishing group of survivors in a vampire-infested nightclub trying to make it to sunrise, and which also saves its supernatural reveal for its midpoint shift (well, almost - Sinners does introduce its villain, Remmick, in a scene in the first half of the movie, and his monstrous nature, but you're almost invited to forget you had seen that).

While the Smokestack twins are front-and-center, one could argue that the protagonist is Sammie, a musician who goes by Preacherboy because his father is a man of the cloth. The movie begins with his arrival at church, his beloved guitar reduced now to only a fretboard, covered in blood, and seeking his father's embrace, greeted with a presumably well-intended but missing-the-point exhortation to give up his music for a more pious path.

The rest of the movie (save the very end) is a flashback.

Smoke and Stack have come back to their home on the Mississippi Delta after fighting in World War One and then spending years in Chicago, apparently having ripped off the Italian and Irish mob up there, with enough cash to buy an old sawmill that they want to turn into a juke joint. The night that everything goes insane is their big opening night, with tons of people invited out there and Sammie, proving himself a brilliant musician, playing his first big, professional gig.

However, there are two important factors at play:

First, a man being chased early in the morning (just before sunrise) arrives at the house of a pair of southern white farmers (who notably have a klan hood in their home) begging to be let in, saying he's being chased by a group of Native Americans. Sure enough, a group of Choctaw hunters shows up at their door, and their leader calmly talks with the farmers despite their pointing guns in his face, asking after the man. Naturally, these racist assholes cover for the guy, and the hunters move on. Not long after, though, the man - Remmick - rips into the farmers' throats, drinking their blood and turning them into fellow vampires.

The way the vampires work in this movie is a little more akin to a zombie infection - there's no lengthy ritual, as in Dracula, in which someone must be compelled to drink the vampire's blood and then die. Here, it seems that anyone who is bitten and dies will, within minutes, become a vampire in their own right.

Furthermore, the vampires share something of a hive mind - Remmick gains the memories of all the people his brood turn, and they then all operate under a single will, which is his, which, in the case of these first two victims, honestly feels like an upgrade. But it does mean that there's no hesitation or doubt when a person is turned - they go from sympathetic human to fully-motivated-to-rip-throats vampire the moment they rise from the dead.

The other major supernatural element of the movie is the musical shamans known in various cultures as Filidh, Griots, or Firekeepers - the movie begins with illustrations and voiceover that speaks of these people who can, through their music, make a connection with spirits of the past and even the future.

And when Sammie takes the stage and performs his song, I Lied to You, we see this in action: as the music plays, dancing in the club and playing alongside him are other musicians from ancient Africa, but also from later in the 20th century, performing Funk and Hip Hop.

And this is why Remmick is here: as a vampire, he has been cut off from the spirits of his ancestors. We're never given an explicit origin period for him, but it's clear that he's many centuries old, from at the very least pre-English Ireland, but likely pre-Christian Ireland. Remmick wants to pull Sammie into his vampiric collective to appropriate this shamanic power and gain what his soul cannot have in his vampiric state.

Annie, Smoke's lover with whom he had a child that they lost in infancy, is also a magician of sorts, and explains that while a Haint might be a body reanimated by an evil spirit, where the body's original soul has moved on, a vampire has a trapped soul underneath the evil spirit that drives them. Thus, Remmick is something of a tragic figure in his own way.

In terms of plot, Remmick begins to pick off those who stray out of the club, turning them (vampires, like they do in a lot of vampire folklore, require an invitation to enter a building). Some of our core cast are turned surprisingly early, throwing the stakes into sharp relief.

The vampires are monstrous and evil, and it's particularly scary to see likable characters so quickly transformed into deadly threats. And yet, in a strange way, there's this kind of glimpse of something almost aspirational to them. The racial divides of the 1930s setting are irrelevant to the vampiric horde. In one of the movie's most iconic scenes, Remmick begins to sing staple Irish folk song The Rocky Road to Dublin, which serves almost as a battle song, and the people from the juke joint he's already turned dance around with him, singing along.

The hive mind is a distorted shadow of the way that music can synchronize peoples' emotions, creating a sense of fellowship and community. That was the whole point of the juke joint in the first place, after all.

I'm really curious to see what other peoples' takes are on the racial dynamics of the movie - obviously it's a primarily black group of people who are attacked by a white monster. But I think that there's a clever subversion of that assumption: one of the big problems with "whiteness" as a concept is that it's defined by negatives, more about who "isn't" than who is.

I'm half Jewish and roughly a quarter Irish (I think my grandfather might have also been partially Irish, and my grandmother, while mostly Irish, I think had a French ancestor somewhere in there,) which are both groups that have historically been deemed white sort of conditionally. To me, these identities are just part of the larger picture of who I am, but they are there.

Remmick initially tries to pass as another white southerner, and he fails to warrant an invite to the club when he first arrives playing music associated with Black southerners (I must plead ignorance on what genre it belongs to). The way he actually lulls Mary, Stack's childhood friend and lover, into coming out to him, is by playing Irish folk music - the specificity of something he's truly connected to, the authenticity, giving him the opening.

Now, obviously, that opening is to do something monstrous, and on a fundamental level, there's a degree of entitlement, appropriation, and rapaciousness that he has for this power belonging to a young Black man that, of course, fits in sadly consistently with how white people have treated others' cultures, bodies, and agency.

There are contradictory feelings here that I had watching the movie that I think are fully intentional: There's something tragically sympathetic about what Remmick is doing all of this for, even if he is a literal bloodsucking monster.

The title of the movie refers to the beauty of the "sinful" life that Sammie aspires to be a part of, despite the insistence of his father's piety. In their final confrontation, Remmick reflects that back on him - confronted in the pond outside of the club, Sammie begins reciting the Lord's Prayer, and Remmick joins him. Remmick explains that those words (whether it be the English version of the prayer or just the Christian prayer itself) elicit contradictory feelings in him - they bring him comfort even if he resents that they were forced upon his people. It echoes what Delta Slim (a fantastic Delroy Lindo), the older musician, says about how Christianity was forced upon Black people when they were taken as slaves, and yet we can see how even if forced upon them, some people, like Sammie's father, have found comfort and an identity in it.

There's a spirituality in the music that Sammie plays (and not just because he's a Griot), and in the social communion that he took part in. At the end of the movie (technically post-credits - I just watched a Patrick H. Willems video about the problems with such scenes, though this at least starts after only a few seconds of credits) we see Sammie as an old man in the early 90s, still playing the Blues, and as he tells... the people who come to visit him (er, don't want to spoil anything, though I feel like just saying this might have), up until the vampires showed up, Sammie was having the best night of his life.

The odd thing about this movie is that I don't think it's pretentious in the least. Ryan Coogler set out to make a solid horror/action movie, and he just happened to do it in such a way that layered in gorgeous period aesthetics, costumes, and music, actors giving fantastic performances, and rich, layered complex themes.

This is a movie that I think is finely made without being ostentatious (if I have one critique, it's the maybe heavier-than-they-need-to-be flashback inserts/montages that make it feel like the movie worries the audience isn't keeping up). It's the kind of solid-fundamentals filmmaking that feels like a breath of fresh air, and I can see why it got such a good reception.

The Tull Massacre: Revisiting The Dark Tower

(Heads up: there are going to be some spoilers in here for the ending of The Dark Tower series. It's been 22 years now, but I guess just, beware spoilers. I don't think I'm going to do a cut here.)

 One day when I was 17, I went to get a haircut at my regular barbershop the next town over. My mom drove me, as I didn't get a license until the summer before college, and as was her wont, we hung out in the bookstore around the corner from the shop after I was shorn.

There, I found myself enticed by the cover of The Dark Tower's second volume, the Drawing of the Three, its mysterious standing doorways capturing my curiosity. I had never read any Stephen King before, but decided to pick up the first book, the Gunslinger, along with George Orwell's 1984, which seemed a book I ought to read but to this day have never gotten around to (sadly, if anything, it feels even more relevant today).

The beginning of this insane epic full of time travel and journeying between alternate universes, is narrower in focus and brutally dark. The darkness of its opening, of course, was profoundly compelling to a teenager, for whom darkness can often feel revelatory. King wrote this when he was quite young as well - he began writing it in 1970, though it would first see print as five separate stories published in the late 70s and early 80s, when King had already established himself with novels like Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining.

The version I read was published in 2003, and was a revision of the original 1982 complete trade paperback version, adding in edits that linked more closely with the books that King had written since, including the as-yet-unpublished final three books. I think the intent had been to do revisions to books 2, 3, and 4, but I'm not aware of his actually doing this.

Having never read the 1982 version, I can't be sure which details changed, but I have strong suspicions, like the mention of a maddened Taheen trying to get back to Algul Siento, or the strange sense of deja vu that Roland experiences in these early moments of his tale (more on that in a bit).

I've been reading the now-yellowed pages of the very same book I read in high school, which, along with the others, has a proud place on my bookshelf (my copy of Wizard and Glass is on an extended stay at a friend's house; we'll see if she ever starts reading it again). Strange, of course, to think that the year I read it was closer to the book's original publication than it is now to the time I first read it. I remember finding yellow-paged books from the 60s and 70s as a kid, and now the very ones I bought new are aged in the same way.

Anyway, there's an odd kind of nested narrative in the early part of The Gunslinger. We begin with Roland (not yet named) chasing the Man in Black across the desert, alone in the wilderness, on his desperate, grim hunt.

Given where the final book of the series (not counting the Wind Through the Keyhole) ends, it would seem that any earlier events ought to exist prior to Roland's endless cycle. And yet, Roland seems to be experiencing deja vu in those prior events, before he even enters "the apotheosis of all deserts." I'm not sure if this is an error, or perhaps the subconscious knowledge of the loop entering even his reminiscences.

Anyway, the point is that we start off going backwards, an element that is present in this first part of book one but not really a thing at all until the very end of the saga.

Roland shares a meal with a man named Brown, a lonesome "dweller" out on the fringes of what little society is left in that part of the world, who seems to just be a kind guy willing to share his water and cook up a meal for a traveler. There, at Brown's coaxing (though Roland seems to need to tell his story anyway,) the Gunslinger tells him the story of how he killed off every man, woman, and child in the village of Tull.

Roland stops in this miserable little town - a misery that seems to be just about as good as one can get in the dreadful world he inhabits - and discovers that his quarry, the Man in Black, has passed through. Shacking up with the tavern keeper, a tragically trapped, aging woman named Alice, he finds out from her, in the inner-most Matryoshka doll of this story, that the local drunk and weed-addict (Devil's Grass, which sounds like just marijuana but seems like its effects are closer to crystal meth) died, only for the Man in Black to show up and resurrect him. But Nort, the dark Lazarus of Tull, is still an addict, lamenting that the man could have raised him free and clear of his addictions, but chose not to.

Because the Man in Black, Walter O'Dim, and as we'll learn later, also Randall Flagg (among myriad other names) is an absolute douchebag.

Out of either pure spite or just a desire to put another complication in Roland's way, he gives Alice a code-word (the word is Nineteen, a number that becomes a recurring sign whose meaning is still very much up to interpretation) that will cause Nort to tell her what he saw in the land of the dead, things so terrible that she will beg for death when she finds out (and, sadly, she does).

Reading this the first time, I had really imagined that Roland's world was truly separate from our own, and that its post-apocalypse was one of a separate history. Revisiting it, though, it seems clearly implied that All-World is a post-apocalyptic future of our own world, or at least one nearly indistinguishable from ours (later on, we'll discover that the world that Jake, Susannah, and Eddie are from is not technically ours/Stephen King's, because of a couple of differences, like Eddie's version of Co-Op City is in Brooklyn, rather than the Bronx. I think that King merely got the detail wrong, but ran with this idea). But I also think that trying to find where Tull would be found on a map is probably impossible, as the breakdown of reality is implied to also make consistent maps kind of impossible. I'd guess it's meant to be somewhere in the former United States, but that's so very long ago (Roland's fallen kingdom of Gilead itself rose from the ashes of the previous civilization).

Anyway, Roland is at his worst in this book - truly an antihero, dedicated to his quest above all else. He muses at murdering Brown merely because of the possibility that he's somehow some kind of trap laid for him by the Man in Black, though he at least catches himself and realizes that this would make him just as monstrous as his quarry.

But boy, this shit gets dark.

He comes to Tull following the Man in Black's trail, and while he gets the story about Nort, he also finds out that a charismatic fire-and-brimstone preacher named Sylvia Pittston took over the local church after the previous preacher left town. Notably, she seems to have come from the direction the Man in Black went, and though she preaches using Christian language, it's evident that she's an agent of the Crimson King, the supernatural tyrant who is the series' ultimate antagonist.

She convinces the townsfolk that Roland is "The Interloper," or in other words, the devil/antichrist.

Roland realizes, while she's giving her sermon, that she is touched by the Crimson King, and is convinced she's carrying one of his demons in her womb, which leads to a disturbing scene in which Roland (brace yourself) forcibly performs an abortion on her with his gun.

Now, reading it again, it even seems that this wasn't actually necessary - that his violation of her body reveals that she was never carrying anything in the first place.

It's a deeply uncomfortable scene, and really tests our ability to see Roland as anything even remotely heroic, even if in theory he's trying to purge some evil monster.

What follows is... well, to me it feels worse, but I'll acknowledge that there's a special horror to the kind of bodily violation that Roland performs that might hit a lot of readers harder than the massacre that comes next.

Roland finds the town seemingly locked down in anticipation of a massive storm, but it turns out it's all a trap laid for him, organized by the preacher-woman. Attackers burst out of the buildings, and hold Alice hostage. She begs for death, having been unable to resist the dark urge to say the word to Nort, the untold horror she has received making her prefer an end (we're left to wonder why death is preferable to living with the knowledge of death's true nature,) and Roland's violent skills go to work immediately.

The entire populace of Tull comes after him, whipped up into a frenzy. One is also left to wonder whether this is mere persuasion or if some kind of magic has set them to killing the Gunslinger - Roland sees that there are only 25 people in attendance at Pittison's sermon, and yet he winds up killing 58 people, including 5 children.

It demonstrates that Roland is a profoundly capable killer (it does help that he's one of the few people who actually has guns in this world, but even with a pair of six-guns, that means he had to reload both guns 4 times even assuming he kills every target with a single shot). He doesn't get out of the fight unscathed, but only one injury is actually serious, and that he's still able to dress and bind afterward.

And in this town full of corpses, Roland rests, eats the rest of the (probably mutant) beef they have, and then finally moves on.

Having already read the book, this entire volume sees Roland failing to recover his humanity - though he bonds with Jake, Roland ultimately leaves him to his death in the name of the quest. It's in the later books, when forced by his Ka-Tet, his surrogate family, to allow his heart to open again, that he gets his chance at redemption.

But this bleak, dark introduction shows us where he's at when the story begins, and shows us just how far he has to go.

Finally Finishing Midnight Mass

 Whoo boy!

Well, it took me, like, months, but I finally watched the final episode of Midnight Mass.

I've now, in overlapping fashion (though I think I watched Bly Manor all in one go) seen the first three of five of Mike Flanagan's Netflix miniseries. I think I'm with the general consensus that Midnight Mass is the best of the three, with Hill House in second (a close second, actually - the two shows are doing very different things) and Bly Manor, while it has its charms, comes in a more distant third.

Midnight Mass is a story about community, religion, conformity, and the desire to take control of one's fate. Our focal character, returning us to Crockett Island, a tiny community off the coast of Massachusetts (I think? It's definitely New England, but it could be another state. I might just be biased as a native Bay-Stater myself), is Riley, who is haunted (not literally - this show isn't about ghosts, unlike the previous two) by the young woman he killed in a drunk-driving accident. Having spent time in prison, he's released back to his family on the remote island, and must contend with the horror of his crime and how it has come to make his community feel about him, but also how difficult it is to come back to a dying, insular community.

Flanagan, I believe, drew on a lot of his own life experiences, including having been raised Catholic but finding he didn't believe as he got older.

Crockett Island is one where community is built around the local Catholic church, St. Patrick's.

I've already largely summarized this plot here, so we'll skip ahead to the end past a spoiler cut (it's a few years old, but I think still within the statute of limitations on spoilers).

Ambiguity, Sacrifice, and Tropes: Digesting the Stranger Things Finale

 This is going to be a full-spoiler... rambling about the ending of Stranger Things.

The internet is a place that monetizes polarizing opinions. We've seen the absolute havoc that that's wrought on our politics, but it also applies to our cultural discourse (which is not wholly separate). My initial impressions of the end of the series was one of qualified satisfaction. The show as always a bit messy, and I fully expected it to have a messy ending.

But I do think there are some valid questions to be asked about the intent in the writing of the series and ending it in this way. The Duffer Brothers have been fairly emphatic that, while they intend to keep exploring the universe of this show, they don't intend to revisit any of its characters - so the stories of all our Hawkins gang should be seen as complete (though I could for sure see a spin-off having a cameo appearance of an established character, or even bringing one in as a regular if they felt it would help the narrative or draw viewers).

We'll start needing to get specific soon enough, so let's do a spoiler cut.

Stranger Things: The Right-Side Up

 First things first, I think the show sticks the landing. There's no flagrant last-minute swerve that confuses or confounds, the characters remain true to themselves.

My immediate point of comparison is with Game of Thrones, whose ending (the last two seasons in general, but in particular the final wrenching heel-turn for one of its core protagonists) took a wrecking ball to the good will it had built up over the previous 8 years.

Stranger Things, while it has had fewer episodes and seasons, was nevertheless "running" for even longer, nine years, and so there was a lot of pressure to live up to its expectations.

I literally finished it just a few minutes ago, so these are my raw impressions, but broadly speaking, I think the show manages to end in a satisfying way. I'll get into specifics beyond a spoiler cut.

Spoilers Ahead:

Stranger Things Season 5, Episodes 5, 6, and 7

 Here's the thing:

Stranger Things came into the public consciousness out of the blue. I had not seen any marketing or build-up to its release in 2016, and so it came as a surprising, fun little relief for me. That was the year that my mother was diagnosed with what would prove to be (and it wasn't a terrible shock after the initial diagnosis) terminal cancer. I was home visiting her, along with my sister (who lives in New York) when we discovered the show.

It's funny to think that it was this word-of-mouth, out-of-the-blue thing, because now, Stranger Things is Netflix's biggest success story.

It doesn't seem that long ago to me, but I guess there are some who might not remember: Netflix didn't have original programming, originally. It was the premiere video streaming platform, really paving the way for that as a service (though before then it was the service that would send you DVDs in the mail). It was a big deal when Netflix launched House of Cards, a David Fincher-produced remake of a series from England (that most Americans had no idea existed) starring then-beloved actor Kevin Spacey.

But Stranger Things was splashy, a mix of nostalgia and fun sci-fi/horror storytelling with a group of remarkably effective child actors.

It's weird to think how the show has evolved since then.

In the final season's back half minus the finale, we learn some things about the cosmos of Stranger Things that are, frankly, kind of huge... but also the sort of thing it's fine to have saved for the end.

Given that this is a recap of nearly half the season (which is my own damn fault - I just wanted to go to the next episode and not pause to do a review of each one following my watch) there's a lot to talk about.

Actually, it's not a recap, per se - recapping can be useful in a review of this sort, but I'm assuming you've watched it if you're reading this, so we're going to kind of jump around to my thoughts about it.

There will be spoilers.

Stranger Things Season 5, Episodes 1-4

 While there are more out now, it seems fitting for me to write up my thoughts on Stranger Things' final season's first four episodes because they were all released as a batch in November. Netflix is stretching out the release of the season, but perhaps as a point of branding pride, they haven't done the sensible thing of just releasing an episode a week.

Anyway, first, an aside:

I started playing D&D a little before Stranger Things came out. The show makes Dungeons & Dragons a constant metaphor for the supernatural horrors that torment Hawkins, first naming the petal-headed monsters Demogorgons after the iconic demon lord from the game, then calling the Hive Mind that controls them the Mind Flayer, and then naming the former-human monster at the center of it all after D&D's most iconic Lich-god, Vecna.

The fourth episode of the season is called Sorcerer, which is a class in D&D. Unlike a Wizard, who learns magic by studying it and gathers all their spells into a spellbook, a Sorcerer is either born or transformed into one, their magic drawn upon by instinct and force of will.

Now, Stranger Things does have its anachronisms, and this is one of them: the Sorcerer class was introduced in 3rd Edition, which came out in the early 2000s. Perhaps this is just poor dramaturgy on the part of Stranger Things' writers, or a winking acknowledgement that this show, while set in the 1980s, is very much a beast of our modern times.

While most of my experience with D&D is as the game's Dungeon Master, I do, thankfully, also have friends who take on this role, and have been able to play as one of its heroes myself. It's often advisable to have a "back-up" character in mind, should something terrible happen to your main character. I love writing character backstories, so I created several back-ups for the character I've been playing for the past four or so years.

Among them is an elf sorcerer. In D&D, at least the current, popular 5th Edition, you also pick a subclass, which further fleshes out the sort of vibes of your character and gives you some unique abilities. The concept for this character was that he's a Divine Soul sorcerer, namely one whose sorcerous powers were granted by a god. And that god, very unfortunately for him, is Vecna (or, as he's known in the Exandria setting created by Matthew Mercer for the actual play show Critical Role, "The Whispered One.") This character, Spar, was kidnapped by Vecna's minions and held within the dark realm of the Shadowfell, a parallel plane sort of just on the other side of the mundane "prime material plane" reality, which is full of dread, horror, and the undead. Spar was kept in that plane for centuries (elves can live about ten times as long as humans in D&D,) where he was shaped and molded by Vecna's power to serve as some kind of vessel for him. However, after the events of Critical Role's first campaign, when the heroes (players) sealed Vecna away, he was able to be rescued, but would be haunted by the notion that he might be the evil Lich-God's contingency plan to somehow return.

I came up with this backstory years ago. But there's a very clear parallel here that I'll get into within the spoilers: