Pick Poor Robin Clean (One More Thing I Love About Sinners)

I’m likely going to be thinking about Sinners for weeks, trying to unpack the various ways it works. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, since thinking about it is all I’m going to be able to do for a while. I looked into getting tickets to see it again with my husband, but just about every single IMAX showing in our area is sold out for the next couple of weeks.

Bad for me, but I like to hope it’ll dispel the notion that you can’t get people into theaters to see an original movie not based on any existing IP. Even after Ryan Coogler has repeatedly proven himself, and even after he’s proven that with Michael B Jordan and Ludwig Göransson he’s completely unstoppable, I’ve still heard people describe the movie as a “gamble” on Warner Brothers’s part. Which seems ludicrous.

In any case, this post contains tons of spoilers that could ruin the magic of the movie, so I strongly suggest avoiding the rest of it unless you’ve already seen it. And again, I implore you to see it in a theater, IMAX if possible if you can get the tickets, to get the maximum effect.

While listening to the soundtrack, I remembered one of the funniest scenes in the movie: when the trio of white strangers shows up at the juke joint, asking to come inside and join the fun. To show how much they just want to hear and play music, they launch into a jaunty and cheerful version of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” possibly the corniest and whitest rendition of a song that you could possibly imagine.

The funniest thing about this scene is how surreal and out-of-place it seems. The entire movie to this point has been a slow build-up to the opening of the juke joint, and we know that a showdown with some kind of supernatural evil is coming. Not to mention that it comes after a show-stopping sequence about the power of music to span across cultures and even across time, and it feels so small and awkward by comparison.

Earlier, Delta Slim told a story about playing music for a bunch of racist white people, and how they were so into it that they couldn’t help but stomp their feet — some of them were even on the beat, he says to a laugh. At first, this seems like another take on that gag: these corny crackers have no soul!

Of course, at that point the audience knows, or at least strongly suspects, that these corny crackers literally have no soul. When I was watching Sinners after months of seeing the trailer set up its confrontation between the creatures and the people inside the juke joint, I was initially confused as to why the movie included the scene showing original vampire Remmick attacking the homestead. Wouldn’t it have been stronger to keep it ambiguous until they show up at the front door? To keep up the illusion that these could just be a bunch of white people trying to get into a safe space for non-whites, until we definitively learn who and what they actually are?

Thinking more about everything that’s going on in this scene, I’m realizing that there’s nothing in Sinners that’s out of place, and hardly anything that has only one purpose. It’s crucial that everyone in the audience understands exactly what the threat is.

Part of the humor in the scene is the surreal irony of these people we now know to be supernatural monsters, singing happily a song about devouring a creature down to the bones. But we also know unequivocally, more than the characters themselves do, that these strangers must not be let inside.

Delta Slim’s story from earlier wasn’t just about a bunch of racist white people listening to the music of black musicians, of course. He tells it after they pass a chain gang, and he says that he recognizes everyone there. They’d been arrested by a bunch of Klan-supporting cops, and their music was the only thing that kept them from being lynched.

The characters make it explicit at multiple points that there’s a reason white people aren’t welcome in the juke joint. It’s not just another type of segregation; it’s self-preservation. Even being around white people was dangerous, since mobs would use any perceived insult — or invent a perceived insult if none actually happened — as a justification for violence. But the threat is a vague distant one if we’re thinking of it in terms of letting whites into a non-white space. Everyone in the audience understands it when it’s about inviting vampires come in.

Even in Georgia, I learned about Jim Crow and the history of the south in the period between the end of the Civil War and the civil rights movement. But it’s always been something that I know about intellectually, but never really understood. Every time I read or see a piece of fiction about life for black people in America in the first half of the 20th century — Lovecraft Country was the most recent example — I’m reminded that I’m basically incapable of understanding it, because I have no frame of reference. Even in Sinners, when the twins accuse the mill owner of being in the Klan, I assumed that they were being paranoid. Entirely justifiably paranoid, but still paranoid. And I’d assumed that that subplot was over, and the conflict would shift from human racists to inhuman monsters.

But even those of us who don’t have that frame of reference, to grow up in a world where every innocuous situation could potentially turn into a deadly threat, we still get it at a gut level when the intruders are literal monsters.

I’d first thought that “Pick Poor Robin Clean” was some kind of traditional Irish folk song, but it’s part of the blues tradition. The soundtrack includes both the version in the movie and the original version recorded by Geeshie Wiley. I interpreted the placement of these scenes, plus the choice of this song in particular, as a deliberate attempt to show the nuanced distinction between cultural appropriation and just culture. And also to show how we’re trapped in cycles of societal constructs that are designed to exploit and manipulate each other instead of celebrating our shared humanity.

It seems clear that the corniness of the vampires’ version of “Pick Poor Robin Clean” was deliberately comedic, to contrast its corniness with the showpiece celebration of musical history — musical rapture, even — that we just witnessed. They’re competent musicians; the notes are all there, but they simply don’t get what it’s all about. In the context of the movie, what seems to be important is that they’ve taken a rural black folk song, clumsily appropriated it, and we in the audience know that they’ve turned it into a threat. It’s key that it’s not an Irish folk song, because it’s not part of their lineage. Maybe there’s the implicit idea that they’re using a minstrel song to mock the people in the juke joint?

Later, though, after the vampires have turned most of the people in the club, there’s a scene where they’re dancing in a circle around Remmick, who’s singing “Rocky Road to Dublin” and Irish dancing. It’s a little difficult to be sure what to make of it — I know how I interpreted the scene, but it’s entirely possible that I’m being more magnanimous than Coogler intended. I didn’t see it as sinister (or at least any more than all Irish folk music seems a little bit sinister), and I certainly didn’t see it as a simple case of pitting whites with Irish heritage against non-white people with African and Chinese heritage.

Instead, it seemed pretty bad-ass. Like a genuine celebration of their culture and the music that’s carried it throughout history. It’s key to have all of the connotations of Irish refugees in America, people who had all the privileges of being white but were still treated as an ethnic minority, and who were protective of their own heritage and ties to their home country. But even if the vampires were carrying out a heartfelt expression of culture, it was still isolated, cut off from its lineage. In a sense, just going through the rituals.

I thought that was the only truthful part of what Remmick was claiming: he missed his home, and wanted Sam’s gift to “pierce the veil” and have that transcendent experience of connection. I didn’t get a feeling of debauchery or evil from that sequence, but of desperation. They’re furiously trying to recreate the scene inside the juke joint, but it doesn’t have the same sense of joy and celebration, but more like a heritage lost.

Because it’s hard for me to interpret the scene with Sam’s performance in the club as anything but a celebration of the power of music to transcend societal and cultural divisions and connect us all as humans. It seems deliberate to draw a line between African traditions of music and dance from their origins, to blues, and through funk and hip-hop, but every bit as deliberate to show the Chows connected to dance and music in the Chinese tradition.

It seems deliberate to have the scene earlier, when someone (Sam, I believe?) asks Mary, “What are you?” to which she replies “I’m a human being.” The question is intended to figure out why she’s the only white woman allowed into the juke joint, and she answers by explaining her ties to Smoke and Stack’s family, and the fact that she’s got black ancestry. But I think her first answer is the most relevant one. (And I thought it was especially satisfying to see her come back in the 1990s as a fly girl, suggesting that she finally lived in a time when mixed ethnicity was no longer a defining feature, even if it’d be far too optimistic to say it was no longer an issue).

For that matter, it seems deliberate to have Native Americans be the characters who try to warn the homesteaders about their new visitor. And why they left quickly, not just at the sight of a shotgun but at the Klan robes visible inside the house. I think it’s reasonable to assume that Remmick went to them earlier, trying to exploit their own ties to their heritage and possibly find communion there.

Of course I don’t think we’re supposed to believe the vampires, or even sympathize with them. But that idea of finding communion is legitimate. They describe what they’re doing as creating heaven on earth. Like most ideas intended to seduce, there’s a small element of truth to it, whether or not they actually believe it. They are all connected, regardless of race or ethnicity. But they’re still cut off from whatever divine spirit inhabited the juke joint earlier.

Sinners uses quite a bit of vampire lore, some of it just for plot purposes: aversion to garlic, holy water, and silver. But it emphasizes two aspects thematically, which are the inability to enter spaces without an invitation, and the inability to survive in sunlight. The latter is emphasized at the very end, with the song “Last Time I Seen the Sun.” So much of the story from “Pick Poor Robin Clean” onwards is about the (mostly white) vampires trying to enter a space that doesn’t belong to them, that again I could be misinterpreting what was intended to be an extended metaphor about appropriating a culture that doesn’t belong to you, with no sense of respect or acknowledgement that others have deeper ties to it.

But it’s such a strong image of the vampires succumbing to not just the silver in the guitar, but the morning light that finally destroys (most of) them. It reinforces that idea that they’ve been cast out. Similar to their soulless rendition of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” they’re a soulless simulation of humanity, never able to connect with the divine like even the most “sinful” humans can. And, as emphasized by the post-credits sequence, when Stack just wants to hear Sam play again, they’re always painfully aware of being cut off.

And the scene of the Klansmen attacking isn’t just a tacked-on action sequence, it’s an illustration of how they’re humans who’ve essentially cast themselves out of heaven. They’re contrasted with the vampires, who now become tragic if not actually sympathetic. If nothing else, at least the vampires are aware of their curse. The Klansmen can do nothing but subjugate and segregate, and they do nothing but destroy sacred spaces.

The title of the movie, and the repeated scene in the church that bookends the main story, invite the use of words like “sacred” and “divine.” But again, Sinners seems more interested in a type of multicultural, humanist spirituality that’s far older than Christianity. The church feels absent from this story. Not exactly evil, since Sam’s father welcomes him back into the church, but not useful, either, since the welcome comes with the stipulation that he give up the one thing that brings him closer to any notion of God.

It’s actually Annie’s Hoodoo that is of any practical use to the survivors — and as we saw earlier, she serves the community meeting them where they’re at, instead of making demands on them. She, Smoke, and their child are the only ones that we actually see finding each other in the afterlife, and they’re the characters we can most safely assume have been cast out by the church, labeled as sinners.

It all suggests to me that it’s about our connection to culture, and the free and joyful expression of it that ties us back to our most distant ancestors and forward to our descendants, and how that will outlast all of the societal constructs that try to divide and domineer us. It’s what lets us get a glimpse of the divine. And by choosing to share it, we form connections of shared humanity across cultures and we come closer to creating heaven on earth.