It’s our anniversary!
One year ago today, full of questions and doubt, I launched this film/TV platform on Substack, Black Girl Watching. There was no guarantee of success. Criticism as a written art form—like much of journalism these days—was being pushed out in favor of social media influencers, vloggers and paid arms of the celebrity PR machine. People don’t like to read! the headlines often repeated. But I do. And if I do, I crossed my fingers that others might too.
And I believe in criticism as an art form; as an act of community love shared between the critic and the viewing audience; as an anti-fascist weapon to sharpen our minds and equip us to think critically about the art and messages and images we consume. And here we all are, one year later, from 500 subscribers at launch to more than 10 times that number of free and paid subscribers today! When you value my work, I get to pay bills and keep doing what I love, and I am so grateful for you!
Since that time, BGW reviews have gone viral dozens of times, landing this Substack on the list of the top 100 Culture newsletters and the top 100 TV/Film newsletters, peaking most recently at #12 behind Ava DuVernay after my review Wicked: For Good Lets Evil Win went viral!
And while my reviews for both Wicked: Part One last year and For Good this year have been instrumental in building the audience I have now, my Sinners review, “In Sinners, the Deaths Feel Like a Metaphor,” was my first viral piece on the Substack platform.
While I believe in telling my truth and backing it up with receipts in a review (hence my ever-present spoiler alerts), I rarely engage the filmmakers directly—that’s rude!—unless I really, really love the film. And y’all know, I really, REALLY, love Sinners.
Last month, at a brunch at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, I got to tell the filmmakers exactly how impactful this film has been for me.
I’ve been bugging ‘Sinners’ producer Sev Ohanian since I found out that the setting of Sinners, Clarksdale, MS., had a petition to bring the film to the community, since they didn’t have a movie theater. I reached out to Sev to alert him to the petition and he responded quickly, letting me know they were gonna make it happen! I also let him know about the many, many, pieces I had written about Sinners, including my Sinners syllabus, and kept him abreast of the Club Jukes I threw in L.A., first to benefit the Black non-profit community center Project 43, and then the free Club Juke celebration of my 40th birthday at The Gathering Spot LA. I couldn’t have been more thrilled to finally meet Sev in person at the brunch.
I keep watching and talking and thinking and writing about this film because the movie is a conjure, a griot. It lifts the veil between life and death and brings our dearly departed loved ones back to us.
“Every person on set brought with them a memory of a person they’d lost that they wanted to honor,” Ryan shared with me when I told him about how I saw my big cousin Eddie who passed away 14 years ago as the Smoke & Stack characters to my Sammie. Of course, the film is an homage to his Great Uncle James; his grandmother’s name is Sammie; and his aunts are twins. Costume designer and my Soror and fellow Hampton U. alumna Ruth Carter told me she put the clothes her mother used to wear on the train coming down to visit family in Virginia into the costume design for the train station scene where Stack reunites with Delta Slim and Mary.
I told the great Delroy Lindo that I saw my grandfather, who’s been gone 20 years, and some of my still-living uncles in Delta Slim. “We’ve never seen us like this on screen,” Lindo and I agreed. Yes, it’s Ryan’s brilliant script, but it was also every ounce of the cast and crew committing to a conjuring that makes the film feel the way it does for so many of us.
Michael told me the background story of my favorite image of Smoke and Annie. While the crew was setting up the scene for the characters’ reunion, Michael wanted some old-fashioned photos of the two of them, which birthed this image:
(I got the cast and crew to sign this image for me, but won’t share it or all of our convos because there are some personal messages I’ll treasure just for myself!)
Wunmi and I fangirled over sharing a legendary birthdate, July 31 (though we are one year apart)! And she shared how her final line as Smoke is dying, “I don’t want any of that *smoke* to get on her [the baby],” had a subconscious double meaning. That this killer- gangster persona that Smoke was carrying as a form of protection, first against his abusive father, then against the abusive world, wasn’t necessary where they were going. He could finally rest, and hold his baby and smile for the first time in the film, as Elijah, his true self. “Sometimes, Ryan doesn’t even know the genius he has, it’s just subconscious,” she said when they caught on to the power of that line and what it meant in the full context of the story.
“Every day was something like that!” Jayme Lawson who played Pearline shared. I told her how mad I was that she and Annie die in the film but I felt better when I saw that Pearline gets to live on as the name of Sammie’s club in Chicago; that his music honored her name and story and sacrifice for the rest of his life. “That wasn’t originally in the script,” she shared of Sammie’s club name. That was something Ryan came up with as they were designing the set for Sammie’s club and was a pleasant surprise for her. And me too! This one change saved my aching heart for the Black women griot characters in the film who didn’t get to live. The ancestors were working over time to get that idea into Ryan’s spirit!
My favorite part of the day was talking ancestors with Ryan. I shared with him about my great-grandmother, Other Mama, who was a root worker and is featured in my documentary ABANITU: A FAMILY DOCUMENTARY. Because of Sinners, my younger cousin who had watched the documentary, reached out to me to learn more about Hoodoo and root working. This film put us back in touch with our ancestors and ourselves. “Ah, man, that’s exactly what I wanted!” Ryan beamed. I could tell that just from watching the movie. This is ancestor veneration. This is why I write and study and make movies.
This is why movies will always be “that deep” to me. Movies can heal, instruct, connect and make whole. If you could do all that in a movie, why would you not do that?! I’m grateful that this movie exists, that it challenges popular Christian ideals that are rooted in anti-Blackness and anti-Africanness that were intended to sever us from our history and culture; that it connects us back to our ancestors and to ourselves. Sinners is a work of cultural criticism and I’m grateful for the reminder of how crucial this work of criticism as anti-fascist resistance continues to be.
Thank you for rocking with me this year and literally keeping me afloat. It’s only because of your support that I get to do this work that I love and feel is deeply necessary. Cheers to another year of resistance and building the new world we want to see in our art!
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
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