Black Flesh and the Refusal of Capture

The world seen is not “in” my body, and my body is not “in” the visible world ultimately: as flesh applied to flesh, the world neither surrounds it nor is surrounded by it…Flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance… it is a fragment of being.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” The Visible and the Invisible, 1968

In Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners (2025), before skin, there is the flesh. Black skin has a home in this film, which is to say it has a “host site,” but is there a home for Black flesh? In this film, the home for Black skin lies in the ability to possess skin through epidermalization. As Frantz Fanon explains, epidermalization refers to the “epidermal racial schema” of Black pathologies, the process by which the Black subject becomes pathologized within the imposed meanings of their skin (Fanon 84). In other words, Black skin marks an irreducible vulnerability—it becomes a kind of radical affectivity whereby it is both “nothingness and infinity” (Fanon 108). However, Black flesh is a praxis best thought of as an unmediated state of paraontology where flesh comes from substance but continues its existence through a metaphysical site of resistance. Flesh, in this sense, exists not as an object of representation but as a living resistance to form: a refusal of containment that gestures toward a freedom not yet realized.

Thought of in this way, Black flesh disrupts what one might call the home, or permanent status of Blackness, because Black flesh lies in the metaphysical “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” as Hortense Spillers reminds us (67). Spillers articulates the theft of the body as not merely the literal capture and subjugation of Black skin but also as the violent abstraction and restructuring of what a body is and its relation to the flesh. The “theft of the body” signifies an epistemic dislocation that reorganizes subjectivity itself. Of course, Spillers understands flesh as a kind of paraontological nonbeing. She is after this notion of being beyond ontology (to pull from Nahum Chandler and Fred Moten). Nahum Chandler proposes the idea of paraontology as a critical reconsideration of the “hierarchies and orientations” of relation. Whereby ontology studies the account of Being, paraontology disrupts the “predication or ground of Being and the telos of Being” (Chandler 2018). Whereas Chandler constitutes paraontology as desedimentation of the distinction among Beings, I think of Black flesh as a continued disruption of traditional ontology. Regarding the concept of the body, the Black body is not just exploited physically through the demarcation of Black skin but ontologically reconfigured. While the theft of the body denotes a brutal imposition of meaning, Black flesh marks something that refuses full capture—something that lives beyond degradation as a metaphysical substance of resistance that lies beyond scientific origins. And in Sinners, it is this lack of understanding Black flesh as resistance that leads to the failure of its antagonist and the leader of this vampiric order, Remmick, which I will explain later. For now, understanding the distinction between physical Black skin and metaphysical Black flesh provides an analysis of Black identity and resistance through a multifaceted approach to Black being, and I do this by studying the aesthetics of violence alongside skin and flesh. The aesthetics of violence in Sinners performs a radical rupture of Being whereby the film signals the refusal of Black flesh to be possessed. Black aesthetic violence becomes a mode of expression that disfigures ontological legibility because it pushes against the aesthetic violence against Blackness, which functions as a metaphysical resistance where Black flesh is always already existing outside of the logic of possession. The relation between Black aesthetic violence and the aesthetics of violence augments the deviation between philosophical pathology, or the decay of Blackness, and a creative radical rupture of violence as aesthetic. For me, Black aesthetic violence maintains a resistance for redemption because modernity is always already violent against Blackness, so Black aesthetic violence becomes transformation through redefining violence as a creative force where identity and expression emerge.

To further understand this distinction between skin and flesh, I pull from Frantz Fanon and Hortense Spillers. On the one hand, Fanon analyzes the Black body under the physicalized dimensions of racialized embodied skin—the very epidermis or stratum corneum of the body (84). On the other hand, Spillers delineates the distinction between the body and the flesh by emphasizing the dehumanizing pathological impact on Blackness (67). Antiblackness and white supremacy are the systemic forces designed to maintain captive Black flesh as pathology, where there is only absence and/or deficiency, but Black flesh refuses this full capture. This refusal, however, is not a static resistance but a generative movement where Black flesh is “fundamentally ambiguous” (Mbembe 129). Black flesh, as Achille Mbembe might say, is a fugitivity in motion, or Black flesh is a mode of being that vibrates between enclosure and escape. In this movement lies the possibility of where home might lie for Black flesh. As such, by studying the aesthetics of violence in the film Sinners through the perspectives of physical Black skin and metaphysical Black flesh, I argue that we can understand the complexities of Black embodiment and recognize the spectrum that Blackness exists as a radical mode of being and world-making.

Sinners is a film about the refusal of full capture. After all, where does Black flesh go when it cannot return to the body? The film makes clear that home, for Black flesh, is not a fixed geography but an unfolding metaphysical condition because this flesh lingers even in dispossession. The film’s recurring motif of doors and thresholds complicates the idea of home as a safe or stable physicalized site. Indeed Sinners begins with a prolepsis of the guitarist and singer Sammie bursting through church doors, wielding a broken guitar, with his vest and shirt bloodied and ripped, and a large gash on his face. It is no coincidence that this Black southern gothic horror film begins in the church, with the churchgoers draped in their all-white Sunday best. When Sammie bursts through the church doors in the opening scene, it is not simply an act of intrusion but a declaration that Sammie is not at home. We know from Sammie’s clothes that Sammie is out of place: he does not belong in this place of worship. The still shot of Sammie in the background, and the churchgoers in front of the shot, creates a silhouette where Sammie is the black figure that stands out under the cross above his head. The church, a site of sanctity and belonging, becomes both refuge and refusal. In this film, home is not found in architecture but in vibration, in the sonic resonances that Sammie carries throughout the film. We can think of the broken instrument as an extension of flesh: a wounded yet living archive that bears the scars of capture while hinting towards a rupture of existence. Coogler positions sound itself as a mode of resistance where the vibrations that emanate from Sammie’s guitar create a fugitive frequency that cannot be mapped or owned. The music becomes flesh. It is a metaphysical improvisational home that outlasts displacement. As Sammie’s father, Jedidiah, makes the claim earlier to his son, “You keep dancing with the Devil… one day, he's gonna follow you home” (Sinners 10:12). Here, “home” is always already under attack. In the film, home can be understood as Black—in all its nuanced manifestations as skin, flesh, and thought.

Black bodies lose control of their skin in Sinners. The vampires in this film take over the body of their victim, which is to say they take over their physical skin, and thus dwell in the home of Black skin. While this is not new to narratives on vampires, the attention to race in this film creates a narrative where the demarcation between skin and flesh is even more present. The desire for both skin and flesh is, of course, the premise of the film. This desire for skin and flesh signals a shift from mere appropriation to a more insidious form of ontological extraction. The film thus dramatizes a racial economy of white desire where Blackness becomes both commodity and metaphysical excess. In this film, while skin can be worn, the vampires want more than skin. They want to fully colonize Black flesh. Yet, every attempt to capture Black flesh ends in rupture, as the flesh continually resists whiteness’ hunger for possession.

Sinners dramatizes this aspirational need for a metaphysical surplus of Black flesh. The first moment we see a Black vampire is through the character Cornbread. When Cornbread gets bitten off-screen and returns to his post as the guard of the juke joint, viewers learn that there is something off about his flesh. Not only does he speak differently, but his gesticulations are off. The vampires’ failure to fully inhabit Cornbread’s Black flesh reveals the limit of their consumption and dispossession. His broken, or failed, speech and uncanny gestures register as a kind of ontological glitch, a failure of the possession of his flesh. Here, the film offers a paraontological critique by staging the impossibility of fully capturing Black flesh. Annie notes this glitch (and it is no mistake she, the conjurer, notices this) and explains that he is a “haint,” which is a southern term for a ghost or spirit. A few minutes later, though, she quickly corrects herself telling us that these are “vampires,” not ghosts; and that distinction is important because with vampires, Annie explains, “the soul gets stuck in the body.”

The “soul” here can be thought of as a kind of individuation of Being, not to be confused with Black flesh. While the soul is trapped in the body, the flesh escapes. The film’s attention to haunting and possession understands the southern gothic genre as coalesced between home and displacement. The film’s primary setting, the juke joint, which serves as a gathering place for music, gossip, and desire, becomes a temporary home for Black flesh. This space serves as a fugitive site that resists not just the white vampiric world, but it resists whiteness itself. Coogler constructs the juke joint as both a metaphysical and material threshold where the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers 67) are inscribed in song, movement, and even sweat. This is where the film’s aesthetic violence lives. The aesthetic violence lives in destruction and creation, which disrupts order. Through the juke joint, Coogler visualizes what Saidiya Hartman calls “wayward lives” (Hartman), which we can think of as those practices of freedom that occur in the interstices of domination against law and order. The juke joint’s lights, smoke, sound, and later fire all echo the improvisational practices that define Black flesh as beyond the confines of nation, property, or form, which Remmick appears to so desperately want. Remmick attempts to grasp this notion of metaphysical Blackness by way of Sammie.

As Remmick stares into the juke joint, it appears he wants to consume Black skin. However, we learn later in the film that Remmick simply wants Sammie because he heard his Black voice and wants to take his flesh from him. Remmick argues that it is only through Sammie that his vampiric tribe can truly be free through the “gifts [Sammie] can bring” to him. By wanting Sammie’s “gifts,” he wants his irreducible talent that is Black flesh. An easier explanation of Remmick’s thinking of Black skin and flesh would be through Frantz Fanon’s concept of ontological absence. Fanon writes, “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (83). The attention to surveillance here marks the threat of Blackness as an ontological escape from the presupposed enclosure of what Blackness might look like. Remmick constantly surveils Blackness, with the most preeminent moment being while Sammie performs in the juke joint. As Sammie performs, Remmick surveilles in awe of what he thinks is the grandeur of Blackness. Through Sammie’s voice, Coogler renders the impossible audible with the sound of Blackness being beyond possession. How interesting, then, that these vampires need not only Black skin but the very essence of Black flesh—the creative force that exudes a certain cultural cachet of Blackness. Sammie becomes not just a physicalized vessel of desire, but he is a figure through which the film articulates the irreducibility of Black flesh lies. In other words, Black flesh can be imitated and even fetishized but never fully taken. The desire to possess Sammie echoes beyond historical attempts to appropriate Black cultural production. Sammie’s voice, rhythm, and very sound appear, to Remmick, as a fugitive order that he needs for survival. Coogler, of course, refuses this fantasy of possession. Towards the climax of the film, each time Remmick reaches for Sammie, the film ruptures through sound distortion, flickering lights, and fragmented editing, thus reminding viewers that Black flesh will not yield to cinematic containment either.

Although we don’t get any background into Remmick’s epistemological understanding of the power of Blackness, he does, it appears, understand Blackness as beautiful. Despite many readings of Remmick under a postcolonial guise, especially because he is Irish and as such already a subjugated figure, Remmick is an unmediated spirit trying to grasp ontology. There is a social and political decay that Remmick possesses. Beyond the obvious fact that he is a vampire who must kill to be replenished, Remmick wants Black bodies for their stories, for the “hieroglyphics” of their Black flesh. It is as if Remmick moves from culture to culture to “join in the madness” of a “violent quest for grandeur” (Mbembe 133). In this way, Remmick wants the “harmonic disruption” (Moten 203) of Blackness. He wants the aesthetic violence that Blackness possesses. This aesthetic violence can be better understood as the fugitive moment in and out of social form and imposed ontological logic. Black aesthetic violence, in the film, is the moment in which Sammie sings and bridges together the gap between past, present, and future by way of the irruptive force that Blackness carries. Blackness resists the precise rules of whiteness through the fugitive figures of Smoke, Stack, and finally Sammie. The condition, or institution of whiteness, maintains that Black skin is burdened by Black flesh. Whiteness does so by way of speaking of Black flesh as corruption. Black flesh corrupts the relation between body and soul by enacting Blackness that breaks measurability. Sinners presents corruption through the paradox of home. The film shows us that Black flesh is the refusal of capture and the creation of home as transient. Although we see Black skin as something that can be put on, Black flesh resists this type of commodification through the resistance of Black metaphysical paraontology. We can understand this as the metaphysical Black elsewhere that carries memory, pain, and possibility all at once. In doing so, this flesh resists the normative political discourse of Blackness.