TLDR:
This movie is important.
The Long Version:
The new film by Boots Riley, Sorry to Bother You, is a sharp-witted metaphor for today’s prison-industrial empire. Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson lead the diverse and fiercely talented cast in this summer’s dark comedy blockbuster. This film is a cold, Dr. Seussian perspective on the suspicious systems that make the elite so comfortable.
With corporate malevolence and racial politics at the forefront, Sorry to Bother You highlights the pseudobulbar affect; that which makes us laugh in discomfort. Riley’s use of outrageous magical realism is not so other-wordly, in a dystopian Oakland, billboards everywhere portray a prison/work program offering “housing, food, employment and lifetime salary..” called ‘WorryFree.’ Corporate CEO, played by Armie Hammer, promises “freedom” ad nauseum, deep cut to the Aushwitz slogan, “arbeit macht frei,” “work sets you free.” The uncanny marketing strategies beckoning previously middle-class families into corporate for-profit prison system is spine chillingly relevant.
Today, there have been multiple cases as well as confessions made by active law enforcement officers that affirm discrimination towards poorer communities. While the Black community in America makes up only 13% of the population, it makes up a whopping 60% of prison population. It is important to note the incentive to incarcerate pays enormous profits. When huge corporations sponsor such correctional facilities, prison owners get huge payoffs when cells are full, meaning there are more inmates to churn out products that we buy for as cheap as possible. Making this system a modern day plantation, i.e. institutional slavery. Companies like Whole Food, Aramark, B.P., Victoria’s Secret, McDonalds, AT&T, etc., receive outstanding payoffs from skimping disgustingly on prison wages. Due to LFOs (legal financial obligations) former inmates can actually finish their sentence with outstanding debt, starting the dangerous cycle again and tethering them to the system for life.
Lakeith’s character Cassius, nicknamed not-so-ironically, “Cash” Green gets a job as a telemarketer and quickly realizes, through coworker (played by Danny Glover), that he could quickly rise through the corporate ladder by using his ‘white voice’. Once Lakeith gets promoted to the ever-vague and dazzling ‘upstairs’ he’s told that he can now only use his white voice, like an identity castration. It’s important to note that ‘upstairs’ seems exempt from all laws governing drug use, where cocaine seems to flow freely. This spectral device of dubbing white people’s voices over characters of color and the juxtaposition between minimum wage and higher status jobs pays homage to the beginnings of modern day racism.
During Nixon’s infamous 1969 War on Drugs, Angela Davis wisely states, “it’s during this time that ‘drug’ began to stand for ‘race’,” because one cannot wage war on a drug, the P.O.C. community became the scapegoat. John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s advisors, was caught confessing:
“the Nixon campaign had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities…Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Politicians like Nixon persuaded poor and working class white people to back his campaign by antagonizing people of color. These communities become the excuse for bigger institutional deficiencies such as corporate racism fueled by greed and pharmaceutical corruption. The rise of narcotics such as crack cocaine began to display outright disparities in the law. White people were policed much less (if at all) for their increasing use of powder cocaine, while the black community was increasingly institutionalized for their use of crack cocaine. Both the same drug, administered differently, began to shed light on deeply rooted institutional racism.
Once Lakeith’s character receives ‘power caller’ status and promoted to the glamorous ‘upstairs,’ he realizes quickly that instead of selling vague investments, upstairs he is selling people; prison labor.
As long as insidious organizations are lining the pockets of wealthy white America, the exploitation of unpaid labor will remain burning in the underbelly of our country, and over time this fire will end up burning us all.
Ever since the onset of the civil rights movement, white American power and credibility has been questioned- when power is threatened, the need to oppress or validate one’s superiority is heightened. As this fear grows, ignorance is passed down through generations. Today, our divided nation stands against conditioned discrimination based on stereotypes made and perpetuated by our predominantly white media and politicians.
Riley creates a world that looks and sounds a lot like ours, but through his lens the inconsistencies or rather consistencies of today’s barren job market are illuminated. This film is another sobering extension of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, putting a mirror up to the white communities that were shocked by Trump’s election. Hopefully we won’t need another film or social atrocity to wake the voting power of the left. Sorry to Bother You gives you the pill, but you still have to take it.
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