SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

I may not know shit from shinola but it’s pretty clear to me that Boots Riley’s new film SORRY TO BOTHER YOU is one of the weirdest, most transgressive broadly-marketed comedies that (some of) you will (maybe?) see this year (or likely next year, once Boots is given a best director or at least the compensatory best-screenplay Oscar nod).

On the heels of the (womp, womp) shocking critical and commercial appeal of GET OUT we have what seems like an easily-loglineable premise: a streetwise Oaklander hustles his way up the corporate ladder in a Telemarketing firm by turning on his trust-inducing “white voice”.  Ha ha ha, YT’s be dopey, it’s funny because it’s true.  But what seems like an easily understood joke—the apodictic code-switching that is almost incidental to life as a minority—quickly becomes something truly, deeply more trenchant and frightening: it isn’t human behavior but human systems that perpetuate the socio-economic loops that benefit a select few.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen: this is a cautionary tale.  But in true Marxist fashion, we aren’t being cautioned against what could happen but rather what already is: this is late-stage capitalism, baby, and y’all is fucked.

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You’re too deep into the film by the time you realize you have no idea what you’re in to/in for.  If you are sitting on the aisle you may consider leaving, not because the film is bad or not entertaining, but because it feels wrong—almost like you walked into the wrong theatre and although all the actors and lensing and setting are what you expected, the mise en scene is askew.  I’d like to report that that off-beat wrongness abates as the film continues for two hours and settles into its groove; but I can’t, because it doesn’t.  Wrongness is at the heart of this film, this story, and the economic system it lacerates.  But not just any wrongness, wrongness with just the right number of 0’s on the end of its grubby check.  For something this periodically-asinine, surreal, and madcap there is uncanny sense that only something as fucking absurdist as this can really capture what capitalism is all about.  It’s frightening because it’s true.

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SORRY TO BOTHER YOU is sorry to bother us, the casual viewer expecting a GET OUT, with something as un-filmic as dystopian Marxism.  That’s the brilliance, it leads with an apology in its title, but never apologies again.   The relentless film cashes ever check it writes.

But if a film requires the rich and subtle tones of metaphor or characters with complex emotional motives to be a success—STBY is a failure even before it begins.  even so, this is a capital-A Art because in its crash-and-burn spectacle it has ideas to spare, and not all of them belong to Karl Marx.  In fact, I don’t remember a film with a higher ideas-per-minute ratio.  Yes, my friends, debts are indeed owed: and not just from Management to their slavish employ.   The smart weirdness about STBY is that you can’t quit tell what homages are overt.  Is that Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL or just general Monty-Python-ness? And clearly George Orwell owns the anthropomorphic denouement, right? Yet most of the cinematic and theoretical references are more obtuse or feel deeper-set in the genotype—somehow they are if not un- than certainly pre-conscious.  Friedrich Engles via Louis CK’s Pootie-Tang; Mike Judge with melanin; a Gondry/Kauffman mindfuck with Tarrantino gumption…or (deep breath)… UHF, Requiem for a Dream, On the Waterfront, Black Mirror, and a couple of Spikes (Lee and Jonze) added to the punch (shit this is sort of fun—I could literally keep going forever, which is the point). 

The pastiche is a purposeful and postmodern inversion on what is an uber-modernist narrative (the Labor Rises to Overthrow a Monopoly of Capital, yada yada).  By mooring us in a something a bit hackneyed and Orwellian, while unmooring us by denying a simple and compact stylistic genealogy, Boots Riley pulls a number on all of us.   We can rejoice at the “left-eye rebellion” and the triumph of Art, but ultimately are we indicating or being indicted?  When the smoke clears, is our conscience clear…but also will our checks clear?  (Just checking.)    

Or will our nostrils flare when we discover we’re one of Them too?