Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is currently dominating the talk of the critics. It’s an obvious Best Picture nominee for the Oscars, it’s a lock, don’t give out the award at all unless it goes to OBAA, etc, etc - It’s a good movie; I saw it on opening weekend and enjoyed it. My marker for “Good art” is if it lives on in my head long after I’ve left its presence or duration, and indeed I’ve been thinking about the themes of failed revolutions and generational responsibility in the days since.

But it’s nothing compared to how much of my mental real estate is still occupied by Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, half a year after its release.

ABUNDANT SPOILERS FOLLOW

In a relatively brief runtime (certainly compared to One Battle After Another), Coogler manages to unfold an entire cosmology of American music. A thousand excellent takes have been spun about “The Scene” surrounding the protagonist’s song “I Lied to You”, with it’s calls to the past, present, and future of the blues specifically, and I don’t intend to add to the pile here. But this movie is something that I - and I think many others - struggle to describe in simple terms beyond “Vampire . . . musical?” It’s rigorous, it’s sexy, it’s terrifying, it’s fun, and there’s a lot to unpack.

The most comic moment in the movie - in my estimation - comes right after the central musical showcase, as the small [white] vampire band introduces themselves and angles for entry to the juke joint that contains all of our beloved [black] principal characters. “Y’all Klan?” asks one of Michael B. Jordan’s twins, from just inside the threshold. Remmick - the head undead, played by Jack O’Connell - responds with a shocked, wounded “Sir! . . . We, we, w- we believe in equality . . . and music!” This is a riff on one of the themes of the film: that the language of white liberals can’t be trusted on its face. They want something in exhange for their efforts at inclusive utopianism. NYT critic Wesley Morris put this central tension of the movie best: that perhaps “Black art is doomed to be coveted before it’s ever just simply enjoyed”.

The attempted entry audition continues from there, with the vampires breaking into a song-and-dance rendition of “Pick Poor Robin Clean”. The immediate impression for viewers is of a minstrel show, missing only blackface to complete the effect.

This particular song is a curious choice by Coogler. The lyrics fit; they’re peppy and sinister at the same time, showing the menace under the vampires’ outward smiles. But the song itself is not from the minstrelsy tradition, instead apparently landing on the director’s radar from a 1930 recording by Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, of a much older song that comes from the Black folk blues tradition. This isn’t a composition by a white minstrel meant to mock or caricature black folks - it’s an authentic work of art. And the vampires have stolen it for their purposes.

I’m not the first to note this narratively-important theft, but another point in the movie caught my attention, and I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else. Later, after the vampire masks drop, after the juke joint is attacked, after a lot of blood is spilled and consumed, our heroes are barricading themselves and preparing for worse. Off in the distance, they hear Remmick begin to sing, slowly, eerily:

Then off to reap the corn . . . And leave where I was born . . . I cut a stout blackthorn . . . For to banish ghosts and goblins . . .

A million Irish ears perked up at this, I’m sure. “The Rocky Road to Dublin” is a session staple, played by trad musicians in pubs and blasted from dorm stereos on Saint Patrick’s day on at least three continents. Everyone’s recorded it: The Chieftains, The Clancy Brothers, The Pogues, Dropkick Murphys, The Dubliners, The Young Dubliners, and plenty more I’ve yet to come across. It’s ubiquitous and easily recognizable; a perfect musical avatar for Remmick’s character, who we’ve learned is Irish, very old indeed, and simmering with rage over a disposession centuries prior.

The beat drops, the song kicks into gear and we, the viewers, have a close view of a witches sabbath. Remmick is surrounded by his newly-made dancing vampire army, and he executes what looks like a Sean-nós dance in the Connemara tradition. The song is a slip jig (in 9/8 meter), but no one seems tripped up by it. It’s a proper Céilí, but . . . with vampires. With all its grim Irishness, it’s possible that this party has been set up by Coogler as a counterpoint to “I Lied To You”, with all its celebratory Blackness. But I have another take: I think it’s a mirror image of “Pick Poor Robin Clean”.

This is because “The Rocky Road to Dublin” is itself something akin to a minstrel song.

Time for a sidebar: The ancestors of the Irish and their diaspora suffered immense calamaties over centuries: conquest, disposession, famine, and transport. And I - one of their descendants - am here to tell you that it doesn’t even begin to approach the horrors inflicted on Black Africans and their descendants over centuries of chattel slavery. Some of my fellow Irish Americans like to suggest that since we were once told “No Irish Need Apply”, our grievance is equivalent to that of Black Americans. Y’all can miss me with that; if anything, the privileges we’ve gained through our envelopment into whiteness should have us working all the harder to achieve real equality for everyone in our society. And we have no shortage of things to atone for in the world of minstrelsy.

But “The Rocky Road to Dublin” is worth looking at more closely, and its politics are . . . complicated.

The song was written by an Irishman, D.K. Gavan, in the 1840s or 1850s for an Englishman, Harry Clifton, to sing on the Music Hall circuit. Clifton was one of the most popular performers of the day, and as part of his large repertoire he included this one by Gavan, listed as an “Irish Comic Song”. Listening to the lyrics, it’s very easy to imagine Clifton putting on an exaggerated brogue and waving his walking stick as he sings from the perspective of his drunken, brawling, seasick protagonist. The song contains a multitude of stereotypes, and in malicious hands they would be at best unflattering to the Irish.

This image is redolent of minstrelsy, with its mocking tone and adoption of the worst possible perspective on an entire people. But the Irish were not the only group under the lens in the music halls; the English lower classes were sent up for their accents, and aristocrats were targeted for “womanizing and idleness”. And the concert tradition that included Clifton was by available accounts wildly popular on both sides of the Irish Sea:

[Clifton’s] popularity in the Irish metropolis has even increased during the present season, his principal songs being of the “Genuine Irish School”, as acknowledged by the best of critics: the Irish Public.

–From a Notice in The Era newspaper, 1859

These may have been largely Anglo-Irish audiences, or otherwise differentiated by class or religion. It’s difficult to know what an Irish peasant in the 1860s would have thought of “The Rocky Road to Dublin”, and they may never have heard it, much less interpreted an offense. But there is an indication that at least some of the targeted group was in the audience, and in on the jokes. Contrast this with minstrel performances for exclusively white audiences, by white performers in blackface, with the implicit or explicit goal of portraying former slaves and their descendants as less than human - this is a startling difference in degree.

We can also consider the fate of the song itself as a telling contrast: after being carried through the music halls by Clifton and others, “The Rocky Road to Dublin” was dormant for a time before its revival in the folk fervor of 20th century as a wholly Irish anthem. It is now owned by the Irish and diaspora, claimed from its origins of mockery and recast as a tale of determination against long odds. In interviews, O’Connell has discussed how meaningful the song and dance are to him as an Irishman now far removed from the era of Victorian oppression.

The minstrel tradition on the other hand is dead and buried, though it lasted far longer than it should have. Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” is a dystopian look at how plausible it would be for minstrelsy to return in the 21st century, feeding on wounds that haven’t healed. Childish Gambino’s “This is America” incorporates minstrel tropes, but as part of a wholly-new, righteous criticism. In general there are no examples I can find of “reclaimed” minstrel songs in the current canon of Jazz, Hip Hop, Soul, or the Blues.

But in the movie, there outside the juke joint, Remmick is proudly owning what was once a satirical song. He’s inviting those he hasn’t yet captured - those he covets - to join him in this revenge. Sinners is laden with complex metaphors and parallels; in places where they seem incomplete, they’re provocative. It’s a film about Black art in America, with a goal of reclaiming part of a vast history. And in it, Ryan Coogler found a moment to humanize the literally inhuman antagonist by showing how the Irish have reclaimed part of their own history.

Cover image: A Lion Comique at the Oxford, by Joseph Pennell, 1890