Process Stories, Prison Dramas
Greg Kwedar's Sing Sing (2024) is a new kind of prison text. By Ryan Vera
Ten minutes into Greg Kwedar’s newest film, Sing Sing, I had realized this was not your typical prison drama. On the one hand, this was not going to be a film with the religious symbolism of martyrdom or messianic power of Cool Hand Luke or The Shawshank Redemption. At the same time, this was certainly not going to be a piece of media that bore its soul in the visceral and violent manner of HBO’s OZ, whose writers exposed their characters to Machiavellian drama.
Not only is Sing Sing by far one of the year’s best films—and one that will no doubt be in conversation at next year’s Academy Awards—it is a film that intimately speaks of process and product; of the methods, meaning, and madness behind artistic creation; and of art’s redemptive value for a population oft forgotten by society: the imprisoned. Victorian writer Oscar Wilde’s line “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” speaks to a theme felt profoundly in the film. This is duly ironic because Wilde himself would be sentenced to two years hard labor in prison. Wilde would craft De Profundis while imprisoned and later reflect on his experiences to write “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a poem about the execution of another prisoner. Wilde found meaning in prison through the craft of artistic production; similarly, the prisoners in Sing Sing find that staging plays gives them that allure of “looking at the stars.”
The film focuses on a group of inmates, members of the very real Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program who stage plays for prisoners and the general public. In an early scene, the RTA members have to choose their next play, and one suggests they come up with an original comedy, reluctant to stage another drama that will remind them of their own trials and tribulations. The inmates banter about the artistic process while sitting in a circle. The film repeatedly returns to this motif of the circle, in which these novice actors draft their play and practice their monologues. The inmates offer suggestions, each more comedic and off-topic than the last: One wants cowboys to be involved; another suggests ancient Egypt as the setting; a fan of A Nightmare on Elm Street proposes adding Freddy Krueger to the mix, because why not? The group generates idea after idea without stopping and dubs their hodgepodge of a play Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code.
The film centers on the characters of Divine G, played by Coleman Domingo, and Divine Eye, played by Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin himself. Domingo’s Divine G is seen by the members of the RTA as their leader: a theater veteran, Shakespeare scholar, and playwright. Acting opposite him, Divine Eye is the newcomer, a feared presence in the prison who struggles to articulate his emotions, subject to tendencies of toxic masculinity. Divine Eye sees the warmups in the circle as goofy and corny, and when an actor interrupts his practicing of a monologue, he lets off, akin to Christian Bale freaking out over his method acting process being violated on the set of Terminator Salvation. “Trust the process,” Divine G repeatedly tells him.
The relationship between the leads remains tense as Divine G provides unwanted mentorship to Divine Eye, who has beat him for the role of Hamlet in their play. Divine G harbors his own struggle with self-hatred and despair as he pursues appeals for a murder he did not commit, and he holds on to the RTA as his only lifeline. Divine G tells Divine Eye to sell his performance by embodying his own dignity, to stop asking for permission to be on stage and instead let the audience be the conduit for his performance. There is an undercurrent of possible violence in this moment before Divine G finally decides to trust the process.
In a text like OZ, circles are associated with the image of prisoners ready to clash. The audience sees two prisoners shadowing each other, ready to kill at any moment. The camera zooms in on their bloodied visage. The prison alarms blaze. A prison lockdown is announced. A prisoner is tackled to the ground by correctional officers. In contrast, Sing Sing has no grand displays of violence and no large-scale prison fights. Instead, the film uses the circle motif to present the artistic process within a community. The camera follows Divine Eye round and round as he finally nails the iconic monologue in Hamlet and his fellow inmates rush in on him with raucous applause. The circle becomes a place wherein the prisoners vie for meaning and collaborate in the artistic process, allowing them to craft the perfect zombie walk, live through their monologues, and get in better touch with their capacity for craftsmanship and brotherly love.
Sing Sing isn’t a “prison text” like OZ, Cool Hand Luke, or The Shawshank Redemption. There are no grand prison break moments. There are no scathing monologues about the racialized prison industrial complex that Michelle Alexander dubs the New Jim Crow. There are no moments where the main character is a clear stand-in for Jesus. Instead, Sing Sing operates better as a collection of intimate moments about the creative process, showing a positive vision of masculinity and mentorship. In a moving scene, one of the characters, Dino, calls out the daily violence the prisoners are witness to, the violence that they have been taught to see as nothing more than daily minutiae, the violence that they have been shown to embrace as markers of their masculinity while in prison. This is the facade they are shedding by being in the RTA and being in the circle. Sing Sing isn’t really interested in “fighting the man.” Instead, it focuses on the intimate, human moments that arise when a spotlight and a conduit to create purpose are given to prisoners as they struggle to find meaning.
Ryan Vera is a writer and educator living in New York City.