After the fact, I pondered why I felt like I had to list my bonafides, in order to prove that I wasn't just opposed to this sort of movie.
Surely no one cares whether I do or don't like campy zombie movies. The stakes of this opinion are not very high. Even if there's someone out there who thinks I "didn't get" that it was deliberately bad in some respects, well, so what. I can't usually control what other people think, especially in a group where I've met none of these people in real life.
However, I did continue to have to sort of defend myself by saying things like "it was lacking a certain something" and "it didn't hit my sweet spot." Making sure they knew that I had a sweet spot, and that under the right circumstances this sweet spot could be satisfied by campy zombie movies.
It made me think a little bit better of people who protest they aren't racist, and to prove it they mention that they have a Black friend.
Of course, if they are actually racist, well, I don't think better of them on that score. But I do think better of the instinct to prove you like something by talking about a similar kind of thing you like.
Maybe it would be easier to talk about this in terms of movies, while still keeping the racial component.
Sinners has been an interesting movie to have in the zeitgeist. Because it is so clearly defined as a Black movie, liking it or not liking it could appear to speak volumes about the rest of your preferences, and indeed, about you as a person who either prejudges or does not prejudge people.
You can be in one of two camps:
1) Liking Sinners, which proves you might like other Black movies and are, in theory, not a racist;
2) Not liking Sinners, which means someone could think you don't like Black people.
I'm in the former category, as you would know from the fact that I ranked Sinners as my #2 movie of 2025. And I do, on some level, feel like that opinion relieves me of the need to defend some of my other choices. My lowest ranked movie of the year, the Ice Cube version of War of the Worlds, obviously stars a Black guy, as well as some of the rest of his Black family members, though the rest of the cast is multi-racial. I thought the director, Rich Lee, was also Black, but I just looked it up and discovered that he is not. In any case, I didn't have to defend myself against hypothetical accusations of racism for hating War of the Worlds because Sinners was propping me up, at least this year.
I've got some other friends here in Australia who are in the other camp, who have lots of things they nitpick about the movie -- which I do acknowledge has some pretty significant pacing problems in its second half. They seem to feel less guilty about potentially being thought of as racist, or rather more secure in their own progressive core, because these guys don't worry too much about talking about all the other Black movies they love. However, I have an American friend who sends out his rankings to a group of people in an email, and this year he said, regarding his middling ranking of Sinners:
"And in 2025 the biggest question that I will get is “What is your goddamn beef with Sinners? Are you a goddamn racist?” I assure you that I am not a racist. I just don’t really like it when actors play more than one role in a film…specifically, I REALLY don’t like it when the same actor play twins (except for The Krays and Dead Ringers)."
In starting off with a discussion of a 40-year-old zombie movie, I've worked myself around to something a bit more interesting here. Why do we worry so much about being misconstrued here? Do we worry that it's actually true?
No I don't think that's it. But it's more like a couple lines of dialogue I always think of from Glengarry Glen Ross, where Ed Harris and Alan Arkin are discussing the fact that Arkin's character, who proclaims his innocence, gets nervous talking to the police. Harris assures him it's not because he's guilty of anything or has anything to hide, in fact, just the opposite: "You know who doesn't get nervous talking to the police?" Harris' Dave Moss asks. "Criminals."
So an actual racist would never talk about his possibly fictitious Black friend, and an actual person who doesn't like campy zombie movies would never pretended he liked them. (Though, I suppose, if the Black friend were actually fictitious, that might say something ... usually in this situation, the person is just exaggerating the closeness of their relationship with some Black guy they know.)
Okay that's about enough of that.
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