Sinners - Irish Demonization?
Sinners - Irish Demonization?
Just watched Sinners
Can anyone enlighten me on why they picked on Irish immigrants? Did blues get coopted by Irish historically?
I don't get it
29 comments
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I wouldn't say they were picking on the Irish? They gave him a sick song and dance number to Rocky Road to Dublin.
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He was literally the personification of the Devil. How is that casting not picking on them?
They literally made him more evil than the KKK
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Yeah but they also made him really cool and charismatic and he absolutely killed it on the Irish folk songs, while the KKK were just some fat white doofuses. Like, clearly the Irish vampire gets more respect here.
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He was consumed by the devil. He was hollowed out and dehumanized by being forcefully assimilated. He's making a futile attempt to save himself by bringing in Sammie when in fact he's already lost his soul.
He can perform the music and art of his culture, but it's not for the sake of his heritage or to bring people together in community. It's to fill an emptiness within himself brought about by the vampire that turned him.
He was made into a monster, forced into living a half life, convinced that he can undo the harm done to him by harming others.
I don't see him as the personification of the devil so much as a casualty of the devil.
You see in the movie that the other people who become vampires act in ways they wouldn't otherwise.
His Irish heritage wasn't vilified and at no point did a character conflate his heritage with his villainous acts.
The rest of the cast were wary of him more because he was white in a space for people of color.
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Remmick is a metaphor for assimilation, like the protagonists he is part of a diaspora from an culture obliterated by colonial rule. Unlike the protagonists the Irish and other white settlers were afforded the opportunity to assimilate into white America at the cost of their individual ethnic cultures. This emptiness is what leads to the fetishization and desire to appropriate other cultures which remain distinct due to not being afforded the same opportunity to assimilate. The movie explicitly mentions the Filí, a type of Irish bard that played an equivalent role to Sammie in using music to connect people to their shared cultural history. The reason Remmick is so focused on getting Sammie to join his literal hive mind is that he is so desperate to feel that shared culture and ancestral connection that he doesnt care that it isnt his culture or his ancestors.
Ironically, as an Irish person, the scene that I resonated with the most was Sammie's song. I thought it was the perfect visualisation of how folk music can allow a culture to survive and connect with their ancestral pasts even when they have been long forgotten. Irish trad music and contemporary music that evolves from it is one of the very few unbroken threads to our shared past remaining.
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in my opinion it's actually a genius parallel.
Here's a good read on it: https://www.thewrap.com/sinners-irish-vampire-meaning-history-explained/
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I think part of it was because bluegrass is the other music genre associated with the improvised south and that has roots in Irish and Scottish folk music.
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the Scotch-Irish of Appalachia
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Cause Irish are the blacks of the whites.
Same as Fillapino are the Spanish of Asia.
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And that makes it better?
Imagine if he made the vampire Jewish (arguably the blacks of the whites). Wouldn't you see a problem with that?
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It's about their history with colonialism if you want a serious answer.
But yeah it makes it better
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29 comments
They picked the villain to be Irish because theyve also had a history of colonization and the vampirism is an analogy for assimilation.
Irish being colonized, not coloni-zing.
Wouldn't it make more sense to make him British?
The Irish were (are) colonized. They were originally an out-group, but were subsumed into "whiteness" at a later point in history.
Vampirism represents this assimilation.