Why "Sinners" is the argument for DEI Hollywood needs

Why does Hollywood have to keep learning the lesson that authentic, creative celebrations of non-white cultures are also profitable?

(Be warned: This essay discusses plot points from the new movie Sinners)

Sitting in a move theater on Sunday, watching the grand spectacle that is Ryan Coogler’s horror movie/tone poem Sinners, I couldn’t stop chuckling.

Not just because the movie has its funny spots, including a great moment where one of Michael B. Jordan’s characters shoots a guy in the behind who is trying to rip him off. And not just because he’s crafted a story about vampires in the Mississippi Delta that feels both vibrantly fresh and achingly familiar.

I was laughing because Coogler, in crafting a successful film that is not just rooted in Black and non-white culture, but is a carefully-crafted, earnestly made love letter to it, he has provided the strongest argument yet against the toxic fiction that more diversity, equity and inclusion in a democracy is somehow bad.

Even as weak-kneed film studios and profit-focused media companies roll back DEI programs and offer mealy mouthed equivocations in the face of Donald Trump’s war on diversity, Coogler has stepped forward with a boldly creative film which simply proves, through its excellence, the value that comes from unleashing the creative spirit fortifying people of color.

Sinners is a movie which wears its themes on its sleeves. The vampire who threatens the rural honky tonk owned by Jordan’s characters in the 1932-era Jim Crow South is white. And he’s drawn to the place by the bold, pulsating creativity of Miles Caton’s Sammy “Preacher Boy” Moore -- a spellbinding blues singer whose talents are connected to a continuum of Black musical creativity which cuts across time and geography. The way Coogler illustrates this, with a magical musical sequence set in the honky tonk which includes a Black funk rock guitarist and African drummers, is one of the film’s most impressive sequences.

“In a lot of ways, Africa explained Mississippi to me,” Coogler told journalist Jelani Cobb for a feature story in The New Yorker, describing the impact of his first trips to Africa. “I realized, ‘All right, African Americans are extremely African.’ We may be more African than we know. With this film it was, like, ‘Oh, we affected this place [Mississippi].’ We brought Africa here.”

Jordan plays twins, named Smoke and Stack, who return to the Delta after years in Chicago, fortified with money earned from up North, hoping to build a life for themselves in their old hometown. But the evil and soul-killing exploitation of the white man’s world, embodied in the mysterious vampire drawn by Preacher Boy’s gifts, comes calling to threaten their dream.

It is a tale as obvious and clearly drawn as the wide vistas Coogler captures with his IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70 cameras – a pioneering combination which makes the film such a visual treat. Here’s a video where Coogler explains some of his production choices.

But because the writer/director is such a talented craftsman, we drink in every permutation of the story, even though we mostly know exactly where it is going. And because Coogler has built his brand around elevating Black centered stories which make room for other cultures, moving through Sinners also feels like a family dinner which makes room for everyone, from Native American vampire hunters to Chinese shopkeepers.

So why did Hollywood not see this success coming?

I have a few thoughts:

Hollywood still struggles with stereotypes dressed up like industry facts. Years ago, Hollywood executives would explain their reluctance to fund big movies centered on Black people and culture by saying the movies “didn’t travel,” or didn’t perform well overseas. But plenty of movies have busted that paradigm, from Coogler’s own Black Panther films, to Hidden Figures, Moonlight -- even Will Smith’s 2013 science fiction boondoggle After Earth made three times as much money overseas than in America, earning nearly $250 million worldwide. Too often, I think Black-centered projects have suffered from assumptions that audiences somehow cannot make the leap that Black audiences often do – seeing themselves in stories told about people who don’t look like them.

(Even Ben Stiller noticed Hollywood’s myopia when it came to Sinners.)

Hollywood has a tough time giving Black filmmakers the same respect as great white auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan. I remain mystified by the buzz over Coogler’s deal with Warner Bros. which allows rights for the film to revert to him after 25 years. At a time when there is more content in front of consumers than ever – and debt-laden Warner Bros. Discovery needs a movie hit badly – why wouldn’t the guy who directed the most profitable movie in 2018 cut a deal to participate in the profits of his current film and own his intellectual property after it has been fully exploited by the film studio? Especially since other filmmakers, like Tarantino and George Lucas have managed to craft similar deals? Near as I can tell, Lucas’ ownership of Star Wars didn’t kill movie studios. So why would Coogler’s eventual ownership of Sinners?

Too much of the press which reports on Hollywood proceeds from the perspective of the people who run and own everything. One of the underappreciated consequences of the hollowing out of modern news outlets is that reporting on Hollywood has become much more specialized. So trade publications and hyper-focused news outlets like The Wrap, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and Puck are leading coverage of Hollywood issues. And too many of these outlets, chasing a wealthy and monetizable audience of Hollywood players, create coverage which reflects their assumptions and biases back to them. I remember seeing this many years ago, when Deadline ran an ill-considered piece asking if the push for ethnic diversity in casting TV shows was “About Time or Too Much of Good Thing?”

This is, of course, something we’re struggling with in the wider world now, thanks to the anti-DEI fairytales spun by the Trump administration and propaganda-filled outlets like Fox News Channel. It is tough to convince Hollywood that, by making more inclusive and diverse TV shows and films, you’re actually making them less predictable, more appealing to a wide range of consumers and more likely to involve super talented people who might not be white.

In other words, you make them better.

Fortunately, Coogler has given us Sinners, a film which makes all those arguments and more in an engrossing, entertaining movie that will likely become one of the most profitable projects of the year.

What more proof does Hollywood need that DEI is G-R-E-A-T?