Weekend Review(s)

 Blob: A Love Story, by Maggie Su and Sinners, written, directed and produced by Ryan Coogler

So, this past weekend, I finally opened up a book lent to me by my colleague, whose description of it at our regular staff meeting a few weeks ago started with, "I have feelings about this book, but I don't know if I love it or I hate it, or maybe both. I need someone to read this so we can talk about it." Sold!

We (me + spouse, not aforementioned colleague) also finally achieved a date, although frankly, it was more effort than it should have been, but that's okay. So we managed (after a couple tries) to successfully get tickets to Sinners, at the newly renovated Epic Theatre in St. Augustine--which is very definitely much more swank than it used to be. Yippee!

What to talk about first??? Let's start with the book, since I finished it on the way to the theatre (I had about 20 pages left, and I just couldn't wait till bedtime).

My borrowed copy of Blob: A Love Story is now in the hands of to its next office recipient, because my initial comments about it intrigued her enough to snag it as I was returning it to its actual owner. So this review is going to be casual rather than careful, since I no longer have a copy for reference, and that's too bad, because Blob merits a careful review. For instance: I enjoyed it from about page 2, but I knew I was really in love (it is, after all, a love story) when I hit the sentence: "My parents, those level-headed mousekillers, would know what to do." That's a paraphrase, and I can't give you the page reference. But it's there, and it's...perfection.

Maggie Su can fucking write.

The main theme of Blob is the desperate, ugly, uncomfortable, inevitable stretch of time that all of us must--somehow--navigate in order to become, well, an actual person. For Bob (the eponymous Blob), this is literalized. For our narrator and protagonist, this is externalized in her efforts to make B(l)ob into a person; her failures, visible to her because externalized as this bizarre person-making project, eventually and finally make manifest her own necessary grappling with person-becoming-hood. I don't know how to say more without spoilers. 

Or you could say: Girl meets Blob, tries to make Blob into Ideal Boyfriend, fails, learns that Love isn't Coercion, and in Respecting the Other learns to respect herself.

Or, you could say: wow, that girl really just needed some competent academic advising. But perhaps that observation is a bit...particular to my specific locatedness in the world. 

Sinners.

I had no notion, really, of what we were walking into. I am late to the genre of scary movies (a deficit of growing up CofC), so I am not going to say anything insightful along these lines. And I don't know that I can avoid spoilers here, and I think I probably need a second viewing at least to really catch all the things. But a first viewing is enough to show you that something weird, interesting, complicated, historical and multi-faceted is going on with this story.

Mainly, what I want to capture here is a sense of the after-movie conversation we had in the car and walking around the grocery store on the way home. We started with the observation that the (spoiler) vampires in the movie appear at the door with a strange, insipidly harmonized and repetitive Irish-y folk song, and that Irish music (much more musically interesting and compelling) shows up again in the vampire gathering. This is a symmetrical contrast to the visually and musically stunning scene in the Juke, where the musical ancestral spirits are conjured by the talents of the human geniuses playing and communing. The contrast is of the celebration of multiplicity and diversity (humans in the Juke) to an assimilated univocality (vampires). But it would be a mistake to collapse vampirism onto white culture simpliciter (represented through the Irish). Instead: we ought to read the assimilation of Irish distinctiveness into the vampiric assimilative univocality as tragic, a commentary on the rootlessness and existential restlessness of an unmoored identity that finds its only definitive reference point as endless, insatiable desire for dominance. The vampires are code for Whiteness, absolutely, but a Whiteness that, as a void, erases Irishness along with erasing everything else. 

Further: this vampiric Whiteness is not just simple racism, as if the vampires are just the monster symbolic form of the Klan. Because the Klan is there too--as itself. Klan racism is battled straightforwardly in the last scene of the movie--vicious, brutal, direct racism is confronted directly. As a separate battle. So...the vampires aren't Klan. They're a different kind of racism. An assimiliative, inclusive, kind of racism. A tokenist, "fellowship of love," spiritual-rationalized kind of racism. Soft white supremacy, as contrasted with direct brutal violent white supremacy. Maybe, DEI-correct white supremacy.

Anyhow, these are first draft uncensored thoughts. I'd love to hear your responses to the movie when you see it!