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Boots Riley - Bringing Rebellion to the Forefront with “Sorry to Bother You”

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Boots Riley - Bringing Rebellion to the Forefront with “Sorry to Bother You”

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Boots Riley - Bringing Rebellion to the Forefront with “Sorry to Bother You” | The Daily Show

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Most Honest Moment In Music History! TLC - "We Are Broke As Broke Can Be"

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Most Honest Moment In Music History! TLC - "We Are Broke As Broke Can Be"

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The left eye reference seen in the movie goes hand in hand with this particular moment when the girls talk about being underpaid.

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Most Honest Moment In Music History! TLC - "We Are Broke As Broke Can Be" | @GhettoFlameTV

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Sorry to Bother You gets everything right about the horrors of viral fame

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Sorry to Bother You gets everything right about the horrors of viral fame

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Talks about how society glorifies going viral and how the internet could make or break you.

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Boots Riley's directorial and screenwriting debut Sorry to Bother You is the low-budget breakaway of the summer. An absurdist comedy with touches of magical realism and science fiction, it's about a young black telemarketer named Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) who is struggling with his personal ethics as he learns that betraying his friends and adopting a "white voice" (provided by the ever-lurking comedy weirdo David Cross) will help him win out in a near-future bizarro capitalist dystopia. Picked up by prestige hitmaker Annapurna at Sundance in January 2018, Sorry to Bother You is a critical success that hit theaters at the right time as movie audiences are still riding the high of Jordan Peele's racially frank horror satire Get Out, and indie studios are enjoying a windfall of Academy recognition and financial success.

The movie has its weak spots. Co-star Armie Hammer is poorly suited to satire; he's so straitlaced, he recently got in a Twitter fight with a journalist who pointed out that he is "simply a beautiful, pedigreed white man." And Stanfield, who steals his scenes in FX's Atlanta by consistently undercutting expectations for logical movement, thought, and expression, is misused in such a straight-faced, sincere role. Watching them play foes is like watching an awkward network TV crossover. Beyond the synergy of their dual recent come-ups as indie darlings, it's unclear why writer-director Boots Riley wanted to maneuver them into the same room.

Hammer's bro-y tech CEO, whose grasping corporation, WorryFree, is a parody of WeWork living spaces and Amazon "productivity" standards, is a first draft of a postmodern villain. He loves cocaine and naked ladies, like all movie rich guys. He wears loose-fitting skirt-pants, as the requisite New Age-y element to ground him in that Silicon Valley false-enlightenment culture. We've seen far better satire along these lines recently, with Tilda Swinton's Ivanka Trump-inspired agro-chemical tycoon in Bong Joon-ho's Okja and Maria Bamford's improbable, overlooked skewering of Elon Musk and Netflix, which she somehow executed in her Netflix show.

But Sorry to Bother You really shines in its B-plots, the aggravating events that needle Cassius' conscience in tandem with the main conflict. His use of "white voice" makes his friends distrust him. His relationship with his principled, unbelievably cool artist girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson, whose every entrance is an event, built around the audience's need to read her earrings) is threatened by a hot labor organizer (Squeeze, played by The Walking Dead 's Steven Yeun) with the apparent means to go from town to town and just live his values. Cassius' day-to-day anonymity is destroyed after he breaks a picket line and gets pegged in the forehead by a flung can of soda. The thrower, a winking white lady who shouts, "Have a cola and smile, bitch," becomes a viral internet hero, and Cassius becomes her punchline.

The soda can moment is an obvious inversion of Kendall Jenner's now infamous Pepsi commercial faux pas. In April 2017, Jenner appeared in one of the most poorly conceived ad ideas in living memory, resolving the tension at a laughably bland protest (picket signs had messages like "Join the conversation" and "Love") by handing a cop a can of Pepsi. It was easy to see the blatant disrespect for the Black Lives Matter movement, and the historically unsubstantiated idea of the way police behave at a protest. Viewers were duly mortified and horrified, and the Twitter jokes were deservedly vicious.

But in Sorry to Bother You, the moment is more complicated. The police in this movie are almost irrelevant. When the protestor throws the bottle, she's targeting a fellow wage slave who should be her ally, and he would if circumstances allowed him to simultaneously have principles and make enough money to support himself. As a black man, Cassius is struggling to succeed in a biased system that benefits her more than it does him, even as it benefits almost nobody. The moment blows up on YouTube and becomes profitable for the young woman - removing her from the labor struggle and nabbing her a cola commercial deal - in a way it probably would not have had the roles been switched. He's the hero, so we root for him and against her.

But how hard, hypothetically, would it have been to write the movie the other way? Last March, Dayna Tortorici, writing for n+1 ahead of the Women's Strike - an event with far less enthusiastic participation than the Women's March just two months prior, largely because of confusing conversations about privilege - argued that when workers strike, we "invite one another to see how our work is interdependent, see the ways we are compelled to exploit one another." Sorry to Bother You accepts that invitation, and openly considers how workers muddy the issue when they police each other's virtue, instead of questioning the policies that try to turn them against each other.

Society has only recently started grappling with the way the internet fame machine is primed to create ethical confusion. It makes public personalities out of people who don't want it, can't handle it, or are only doing it because they don't see other options. The internet used to be seen as a democratizing force, but it has given undue credence to heinous systems of thought and to total idiots like the monster bros of YouTube who egg their followers into coordinated harassment campaigns and shirk responsibility for any fallout, or the teenagers who upload a joke between friends and enjoy a few perks - free sneakers, 10 minutes with Ellen DeGeneres - and then become the victims of a swatting hoax for no apparent reason.

The ascendance of someone like Cardi B, who makes the whole process feel like a net positive, but is, in fact, a miracle, and the exception to a rule of internet celebrity that almost always steals ideas from young people, particularly young people of color, and leaves them with nothing to show for their creative work. What the internet looks like now is an option like any other in America - which is to say, not a very good one.

At one point in Sorry to Bother You, Squeeze tells an exasperated Cassius that he can't blame people for ignoring the evils of WorryFree, a corporation that wants to popularize voluntary slavery as a way for workers to assuage their anxiety about the future by selling that future to someone else. At some point, a problem becomes so big and complicated that undoing it or even acknowledging it stops feeling like a choice, and people's priorities turn to live inside it with as much peace of mind as possible.

In this film, at least, peace of mind in this context is defined by financial comfort, not physical comfort. People hurting for money in Riley's dystopia appear on a game show called I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me, which involves getting beaten in exchange for cash. Cassius' head wound from the soda can refuses to heal, but he accrues enough money to pay off his uncle's debts, buy a sleek new car, and rent a chic downtown apartment. He wanders around dripping money and blood. Achieving financial stability is a painful process here, and it leaves scars.

Achieving financial stability is a painful process here, and it leaves scars

That trade-off should be familiar, given that the depravity of the game show is only negligibly more literal than the ones that are actually part of American culture. The thrill of shows like Wipeout and American Ninja Warrior is the thrill of watching someone smack teeth-first into a large piece of plastic in exchange for money and attention.

One of the more remarkable things that Sorry to Bother You accomplishes is a subtle but convincing argument that when it comes to the lived experience of a typical worker, there are not so many differences between the internet age and the preceding one. With a Coke can, Riley crystallizes an image of the superpower of capitalism, which is its deftness with misdirection. The same week Sorry to Bother You hit theaters, Katherine Cross wrote for The Verge about the still-unfolding "Plane Bae" controversy, in which two people flirting and possibly hooking up on an airplane were turned into a viral news item without their knowledge, resulting in a fun 15 minutes of fame for the man involved and relentless, slut-shaming judgment for the woman.

"The story's charm disguises the invasion of privacy at its heart," Cross said. "The way technology is both eroding our personal boundaries and coercing us in deleterious ways."

Capitalism still has a place for telemarketers in cubicles, and it's made room for the internet culture machine as well. Both mine a nearly infinite resource of human hearts and minds and make their money off cheap, plentiful resources: words and voices, warmth and charisma. The economy of personality promises that the only thing you have to monetize is something inherent in yourself - not a skill or a learned trade or even a talent, but an unquantifiable personal appeal - you can still have everything you've ever wanted.

And no matter who wins, someone is losing. Cassius helps exploit the labor of an anonymous woman who turns the tables and becomes famous by exploiting his image and his suffering at her hands. The film doesn't even need its shocking twists about WorryFree's victimized workforce. Sorry to Bother You is sufficiently radical long before those particular victims arrive, and it hits much closer to home when it's smacking people in the face.

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Sorry to Bother You is exactly right about the horrors of viral fame

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The film, a wild writing and directing debut from The Coup frontman Boots Riley, is a radical statement about capitalism and the internet long before the big twists hit. Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson star in a story that's somewhere between a grim science fiction dystopia and a full-on assault on the pitfalls of capitalism, corporate greed, and internet culture.

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Could 'Sorry To Bother You' Really Happen?

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Could 'Sorry To Bother You' Really Happen?

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Talks about the analogy between worry free and the concept of the movie.

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Boots Riley's incendiary Sorry to Bother You is a complicated, unique, and excellent film--now that it is widely distributed, go see it.

I'll wait.

Okay, welcome back.

A science fiction comedy with strong absurdist elements, it follows Cassius "Cash" Green (Lakeith Stanfield, who really shines here) who accepts work as a telemarketer at a mysterious company called RegalView. The work is terrible, but Cash is desperate to make a living. A co-worker teaches him the secret to success-to find and use a "white voice" in order to succeed in the company's sales efforts. Cash soon finds he has a knack for it, and he is quickly propelled to the rank of "Power Caller" where elite salespersons make deals for everything from weapons to landing contracts for a controversial company called WorryFree
(There are some spoilers ahead but I'm going to try hard to avoid the most interesting surprise of the film).
WorryFree is a controversial company who promises lifelong security for workers who live and labor onsite under conditions of what many in the film's world call modern-day slavery--in effect, WorryFree contracts out alternatives to free waged work, and they have a secret project that dives even deeper into those morally disreputable waters, and trying to find full replacement for human workers... to avoid full spoilers, I'll put it that way.

Cash navigates his upward momentum securing contracts for this shady company while his personal life is thrown into disarray as his artist girlfriend (Detroit, played by Tessa Thompson who also gives a truly great performance) and new coworkers take issue with his new shady occupation and his lack of participation in his coworkers' attempts to unionize at RegalView.

In short, the film has many themes that are applicable to modern issues. It highlights:

The desperate measures people often have to go to succeed in the modern economy, and the moral compromises they face if they want economic success.

The barriers faced by union efforts against companies and governments that reject union rights and oppose worker empowerment.

The increasingly vapid directions modern entertainment could go.

These are just a few elements of its complex tapestry of meanings. A major theme, however, is the threat of corporate attempts to find pliant or subservient replacements for workers in the modern economy, and its this theme I want to focus on. Could workers be truly displaced?

While Sorry to Bother You is a science fiction comedy with absurdist elements, attempts to find more subservient sources of labor has long been a preoccupation in capitalist history into its present. Earlier periods of capitalism relied for hundreds of years on widespread slavery to coerce people into producing goods and services for a growing capitalist economy.

While enslaved people obviously resisted on a wide scale and weren't the subservient labor force early capitalists intended, this project (tied to other logics of power like the practices of colonialism and the social construction of the modern ideology of race) stemmed in large part from a desire to find a source of cheap and compliant labor for the early capitalist economy.

This same desire underpins the widespread use in the global economy of low wage labor under authoritarian governments, where labor under harsh political conditions does exist and many industries take advantage of it. (Check out Human Rights Watch's links on sweatshops and extractive industries, for example).

You can simultaneously see this in the rise of robotics and AI development. While AI will be able to perform some functions better than human workers in the longer run, another significant reason for the development of robotics, automation, and AI is to enhance profits by increasingly transferring work to capable but agency-free machines which can perform tasks yet don't need breaks, never ask questions, and can't unionize.

The rebellion of artificially intelligent robotic workforces has indeed been a staple of science fiction, notably as the background in Battlestar Galactica (where the Cylons were created as a pliant labor force before they rebelled) and Blade Runner (where, similarly, Replicants were bioengineered androids built as a labor force before rebelling... note a pattern here?).

In this vein, debates have been raging recently over how many human jobs will be lost to the increasing implementation of robotics. While some predict a negative impact on work, other analysts think such concerns are at least partially overblown or otherwise more complex.

The bottom line issue that Sorry to Bother You underscores is this: there is a persistent tendency in the capitalist economy to search for subservient sources of labor, from seeking low wage work under authoritarian governments to using automation and AI which replace human workers entirely.

Of course, I'm not saying our world will become an exact mirror of what happens in Sorry to Bother You, but it calls attention to real tendencies and issues that we have to take seriously. The larger question, then, is what to do about this dangerous potential? The film highlights both resistance from coerced labor populations and unionization as solutions to these otherwise inevitable social ills. Watch the film and tell me what you think!

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Could 'Sorry To Bother You' Really Happen?

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Boots Riley's incendiary Sorry to Bother You is a complicated, unique, and excellent film--now that it is widely distributed, go see it. I'll wait. Okay, welcome back. A science fiction comedy with strong absurdist elements, it follows Cassius "Cash" Green (Lakeith Stanfield, who really shines here) who accepts work as a telemarketer at a mysterious company called RegalView.

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Why is Mr. Blank’s name bleeped out in Sorry To Bother You?

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Why is Mr. Blank’s name bleeped out in Sorry To Bother You?

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Goes into detail about how the character lost his identity trying to fit in.

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Mr. Blank is Cash's alter ego.

His name is bleeped out because he doesn't actually exist - he is a part of Cassius (Cash). He represents what Cash thinks he'd have to be like to succeed in RegalView's Power Club.

We first see Mr. Blank as Cash looks at him standing in front of the gold elevator and envies him. He is polished and powerful. He works upstairs. He wears cool 70s suits and has perfectly coiffed mutton chops. Kind of looks like he's stepped out of a Blaxploitation film. Dude is a caricature.

Also: he wears a smooth leather eyepatch.
"Eyepatches are a handy symbol of tunnel vision, of the kind that's necessary if you're going to consecrate your life to a heroic yet ultimately futile quest for vengeance," says Anne Billson.

Mr. Blank's tunnel vision is that he does everything he can to be respected, in a company that is morally bankrupt. He symbolizes what Cash must sacrifice to be successful in such a company. He is happy that Cash is succeeding, but encourages him to do things he isn't comfortable with: he tells him not to go meet with his friends because the company party is more important, and tells him to meet with the CEO when it is clear that Cash is humiliated by the party, and just wants to go home and be with his girlfriend.

At said party, when the CEO tells Cash to drop his white voice, he also drops the idealized version of himself (the version who is respected because he exists to please) and is then immediately dehumanized in rapidly escalating ways. Which leads to turning him into a horse person.

The fact that the horse people, who the CEO keeps chained in his basement, are naked (as he brags about their penis size) is because his company fetishizes workers and does not see them as human. Just like they fetishize Cash as a Black stereotype.

In the end, Cash can never exist as Mr. Cassius, because he is a complex person with contrasting values from the ones this workplace demands. Cash realizes he doesn't aspire to be the kind of person who goes against his morals for power. Mr. _______ is a part of Cash, but he is a fragment. Grass is always jade (not olive) type shit.
What do you think of my theory? What are yours? Let me know in the comments, or tweet me EDIT 1: The 'You Will Never Know' Theory @evelynrockon

EDIT 2: The Devil Theory .

EDIT 3: The Pop Culture Reference Theory
Boots says there are 7 letters in his name.

Konval on Reddit thinks he's Mr. Lucifer.
EDIT 4: The Confused Theory
This character name is a reference to The Color Purple.
Here are a couple ideas as to why Mr. _______ in that novel.

EDIT 5: The Everyman Theory
This tactic was also used in Kill Bill 1, to dehumanize The Bride/Beatrix. Analysis here.

Another interesting theory from CJfox1983 on Reddit below. My theory might substantialize theirs - if Mr. Blank is a part of Cash, he technically IS playing both sides/leader of the Left Eyes (at points), and the character also represents his internal struggle. The party is his breaking point.

Theory from morxle on Reddit  - Mr. Blank is a real person who has lost his identity.
Mr. Blank is a recruiter for young Black men who he promotes to Power Caller and guides them to what they think is success, but eventually tricks them into signing their life away and becoming horse people at the CEO's house. Mr. Blank gets to live in his present form because of this deal.
EDIT 6: The Hello, My Name Is Jim Crow Theory

Saw the film again with my friend Mirvet. Her reading of the character is the most insightful, as usual.

So why the bleeping out of his name? Boots might be referring to the references above, but ultimately - it doesn't matter what Mr. Blank's name is. He lost his identity a long time ago.

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Why is Mr. Blank's name bleeped out in Sorry To Bother You?

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Mr. Blank is Cash's alter ego. His name is bleeped out because he doesn't actually exist - he is a part of Cassius (Cash). He represents what Cash thinks he'd have to be like to succeed in RegalView's Power Club. We first see Mr. Blank as Cash looks at him standing in front of the gold elevator and envies him.

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Sorry to Bother You Has an Eerily Familiar Villain

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Sorry to Bother You Has an Eerily Familiar Villain

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This gives us an idea of how c.e.o.s of companies are selfish and is analogy to super villains and having bad intentions.

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Sorry to Bother You Is a Dystopian Send-Up of Dystopias
As its hyperzealous CEO, Lift invents an impossibly hare-brained scheme to keep his semi-voluntary employees compliant. (I'll avoid revealing the major spoiler, but just know that it involves mandating corporeal modifications of a particularly extreme variety.) The twist itself is unexpected and disorienting, but Hammer plays the character with such a recognizable panache that it's almost tempting to nod along as he explains the absurd plan.

Steve Lift is charismatic, passionate, arguably brilliant. He rejects criticism with self-promotion. He draws in both employees and detractors as though they are longtime friends, then quickly reasserts his own power whenever necessary. He is meticulous and quirky. It's hard to watch him and not think of any number of Silicon Valley's mononymous technocrats: Travis, Brian, Elon. That Lift at once inhabits and transcends the uncanny valley is reflective of both the character's idiosyncrasies and the flexibility of truth in the era that Sorry to Bother You represents.

Lift is a perfect avatar for the sort of iniquity that's most highly rewarded in Silicon Valley and in capitalist circles well beyond the gates of Menlo Park, Cupertino, and Mountain View. Whether Lift is a malicious mastermind or just a kooky founder whose ambitions led him to murky ethical decisions is hardly important. Regardless of his intent-genocidal, benevolent, whatever-his actions are harmful. It's less relevant whether Lift sought to become evil and more important that he enacts it with such a clear vision. Speaking about Lift in the same IndieWire Studio interview, Hammer emphasized the CEO's peculiar, consistent logic:

[Lift is] a guy who doesn't consider himself like a fanciful, crazy character. He is 100 percent enmeshed in his own reality and believes that what he's doing is totally logical. And so the more illogical and crazy it is, the bigger a challenge it is to really sort of take on that role and be like, 'No, this guy makes a lot of sense.' And the only way a character like that, who's so over the top, works from an acting perspective is if you, who are playing the character, thinks he makes a lot of sense, which is a fun challenge.

Hammer's Lift does make a lot of sense if you see him as a stand-in for the kinds of leaders who operate their companies with ruthless attention to maximizing profits and marginal focus on the health or human rights of their employees. Even his location serves to underscore the disaster that someone with Lift's power and priorities can sow, largely with impunity (and often with praise even as these violations are discovered). Worry Free's exploitative ad campaigns target people like Cash's uncle, a longtime Oakland resident constantly under the threat of eviction. In this, Sorry to Bother You is as much a character-driven story about the gentrification of Oakland-and the Bay Area writ large-as it is an absurdist anti-capitalist fable. Riley juxtaposes the din of Cash's garage dwelling with both his new apartment and, more importantly, Lift's luxe mansion.

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'Sorry to Bother You' Has an Eerily Familiar Villain

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Sorry to Bother You Is a Dystopian Send-Up of Dystopias As its hyperzealous CEO, Lift invents an impossibly hare-brained scheme to keep his semi-voluntary employees compliant. (I'll avoid revealing the major spoiler, but just know that it involves mandating corporeal modifications of a particularly extreme variety.)

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What Sorry to Bother You Gets Right About Memes

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What Sorry to Bother You Gets Right About Memes

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Memes are often seen on social media to make fun of a social issue or to go viral.

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First, the video takes off, getting 11 million views. This would seem to be a victory for the strikers. Their cause got noticed! Surely that would help them.

But it doesn't, at least explicitly. Instead, we see people from the conglomerate for which Green works watching the video and laughing their asses off. He might be one of their own, but hey, it's a good video, lol.

Then, the woman who threw the can of soda at his head signs a marketing deal with the soda company. She makes enough money to "buy two white children."

Green is mocked as he walks through the streets. But he's famous now. And as such, he can get himself onto the most popular show in the film's world, I Got The Shit Kicked Out of Me, where he delivers a video clip smuggled out of the bad company that seems like it should be the death knell for its plans.

His explosive revelation-that the company is creating horse-human hybrids to labor for them-lands him on all kinds of talk shows, but it does absolutely nothing to the company, which sees its share price skyrocket on the back of this scientific "advancement." Green sees the incident-the can colliding with head and hair-turned into a Halloween costume. Kids parade through the streets wearing ... him.

And finally, during the climactic scene of the strike at the telemarketing center, all the strikers wear the costume, helping to camouflage their defenses against the strikebreakers.

In the end, the meme itself is powerful. It spreads to tens of millions of people. It makes one woman rich. It helps market soda. It makes Green (temporarily) famous, which allows him to get out his message (even if that ultimately failed).

But it has no political impact. The only entities that it incontrovertibly helps are the sell-out can thrower and the soda company. Everybody else enacts themselves through the meme, using it as part of the bricolage of their lives, but that's it. Everyone uses these memes to describe the world around them-not because they mean anything, but because that's just what's in the air and on the internet.

The moment in the film recalls, in some sense, the instant that alt-right figure Richard Spencer got clocked in Washington, DC.

Whatever you think of "punching Nazis," we can all agree that watching a Nazi get punched or even having very detailed discussions about punching Nazis on Twitter is not the same thing as actually punching a Nazi or stopping the spread of white supremacists by other means. The meme and the discourse are not the act.

In Oakland, million-dollar homes sit on the same block as homeless encampments and artist studios and falling-down houses seemingly transported from post-Katrina New Orleans (which, come to think of it, could also be worth a million dollars). The rise of social media, the proliferation of memes, the election of Obama, the election of Trump, and everything else that's happened since the Great Recession has done nothing to alleviate the suffering of the people of our city.

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What Sorry to Bother You Gets Right About Memes

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First, the video takes off, getting 11 million views. This would seem to be a victory for the strikers. Their cause got noticed! Surely that would help them. But it doesn't, at least explicitly. Instead, we see people from the conglomerate for which Green works watching the video and laughing their asses off.

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Sorry to Bother You Is Fizzy, Flawed, and Fascinating

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Sorry to Bother You Is Fizzy, Flawed, and Fascinating

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Boots Riley uses Scifi fantasy to make analogies and relations to issues in todays society.

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Our hero, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), or "Cash," lives in his uncle's garage in Oakland and is struggling to find a foothold in a society dominated by a conglomerate called Worry Free Living. Employees of Worry Free dress in jumpsuits, get free room and board (in shoebox apartments), and spend their whole lives doing menial work. Cash and his girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson), an activist-artist, cling to their independence but struggle to stay afloat, so Cash gets a job at a telemarketing firm called RegalView to try and make ends meet.

The film's first big metatextual gag is the "white voice" that Cash adopts to rise through the ranks at his job; when he speaks on the phone to customers, the comedian David Cross's voice comes out of his mouth, in a perverse, particularly surreal illustration of code-switching. Riley turns the dull art of cold-calling into a literal intrusion, visualizing Cash's desk smashing through the ceilings of his customers, and turning his phone conversations into face-to-face confrontations. These little set pieces crackle with DIY wit as they paint a searingly silly vision of living paycheck to paycheck in America.

I appreciated the blunt-force satire of Sorry to Bother You' s first half, as Cash and his "white voice" rise through the ranks at RegalView and he gets promoted to the company's luxury-branded top floor, where the cold calls target major conglomerates rather than people at home eating dinner. Cash's central conflict is navigating the eternal trade-off between one's success and one's moral code-he lives extravagantly, but it's a reward for fundamentally unfulfilling, potentially evil work. As his coworkers at RegalView try to unionize, Cash is caught between old friendships and loyalties to the bosses.

That's when things go from trenchant to deeply weird. Cash begins working with RegalView's top client, Worry Free, and draws the attention of its comically evil CEO, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), whose plans for the future of the American workforce horrify in entirely unexpected ways. At this point, Riley is throwing concepts at the audience so thick and fast that he doesn't really give himself time to reckon with his bigger ideas. Cash, played with laconic charm by Stanfield, is a relatable hero, but Detroit is ill-served by Riley's script, existing primarily to explain the film's heavier themes and scold her boyfriend for his ethical lapses.

Sorry to Bother You's deliberate lack of panache is sometimes a huge strength, particularly in its most chilling set piece, in which Cash is asked to rap in front of Steve and his coterie of rich hangers-on. But when the film introduces its wildest plot twist, it lands flatly; your mileage may vary, but the broad metaphor Riley introduces about the fate of Worry Free's employees is too thuddingly obvious and impersonal for me, shocking and ghastly for the sake of it. Still, the twist is also an admirable risk. Especially as the newest crop of homogenous summer blockbusters arrives, it's hard not to appreciate a movie taking such bold narrative swings. As an unsubtle work for an unsubtle era, Sorry to Bother You deserves to be one of the season's cult hits.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

David Sims is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.

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'Sorry to Bother You' Is Fizzy, Flawed, and Fascinating

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Our hero, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), or "Cash," lives in his uncle's garage in Oakland and is struggling to find a foothold in a society dominated by a conglomerate called Worry Free Living. Employees of Worry Free dress in jumpsuits, get free room and board (in shoebox apartments), and spend their whole lives doing menial work.

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What 'Sorry to Bother You' Says About Identity and Modern Capitalism

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What 'Sorry to Bother You' Says About Identity and Modern Capitalism

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The movie goes into detail about integrity and the idea of selling out. Also things such as capitalism.

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Summarizing Boots Riley's subversive debut feature, Sorry to Bother You, can prove to be as elusive as leading an equisapien to water and making it drink.

As FSR's own John DeLillo pointed out in his review, the film "defies description or analysis," and yet it is this quality that makes analysis all the more enticing for viewers to try. I left the theater shocked and energized but unable to properly put my fascination with what I'd just witnessed into words. All I could do was to simply return to a painfully general take, that Sorry to Bother You "just has so much to say." And that it definitely does, and it's all genius and wild and layered. But I wanted to be able to say why. I wanted to read as much as I could about the film. I wanted to know more.

Cut to some months later, when personalities from Janelle Monae to Guillermo del Toro have commented on Sorry to Bother You 's genre-bending brilliance. In following the conversation surrounding the film, I noticed another voice offering some interesting takes: Sage Hyden, creator of the YouTube channel Just Write. Watch Hyden's "2018's Weirdest Film and the Psychological Toll of Modern Capitalism" below.

Hyden's latest video essay takes a closer look at the Sorry to Bother You script and brings it into a psychological context. He posits that the film's principal aim is to portray the effects of economic injustice upon the mind and to show, in turn, how those effects feed back into and strengthen capitalism as a system of oppression.

The essay was released just ahead of one of the biggest Oscar snubs of the 2019 awards season. Many saw Sorry to Bother You as a "feasible but surprising" contender, especially in the Original Screenplay category. And yet, when this year's nominations were announced, the expected yet still disappointing outcome emerged, with a nod nowhere to be found for Riley's electrifying film.

Original screenplay for Boots Riley. https://t.co/xh65gLqzuv

- Amy Nicholson (@TheAmyNicholson) January 21, 2019

The snub resulted in some righteous "if only"s from many residents of Film Twitter, which Riley himself responded to. In a Twitter thread, the writer/director clarified that Sorry to Bother You 's smaller "For Your Consideration" campaign was a factor in its lack of formal recognition from the Academy, and that the real benefit of engaging with the season at all was the exposure that it afforded the project.

But the largest factor as to why we didn't get nominated is that we didn't actually run a campaign that aimed to get a nomination for Screenplay or Song. We didn't buy For Your Consideration ads in the trade magazines and we didn't service the whole academy with screeners.

- Boots Riley (@BootsRiley) January 22, 2019

When considering the screenplay snub in the context of Hyden's essay, there's one point in the video where Hyden leans into Carl Jung's psychoanalytic theory of the persona. Paraphrasing a quote that the essayist uses from Jung, a persona is essentially a set of socially accepted behaviors that people endeavor to adopt themselves. This definition is used to frame protagonist Cassius Green's constant "white voice" code-switching as an act of relinquishing independence.

By this token, perhaps we can think of Sorry to Bother You as existing in defiance of an awards season persona; after all, both the film and its creator seem to escape simple characterization within the Hollywood system and have instead been recognized not by their participation in the machine, but by operating outside of it (or, at the very least, alongside it as a means to an end). Really, it is for this very reason why all of Sorry to Bother You 's twists and turns make us want to "know more": it's because everything about the film defies expectations, even when you think you've predicted what's coming.

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What 'Sorry to Bother You' Says About Identity and Modern Capitalism

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Summarizing Boots Riley's subversive debut feature, Sorry to Bother You , can prove to be as elusive as leading an equisapien to water and making it drink. As FSR's own John DeLillo pointed out in his review, the film "defies description or analysis," and yet it is this quality that makes analysis all the more enticing for viewers to try.

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Sorry to Bother You review – Boots Riley finds soul-selling comedy gold

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Sorry to Bother You review – Boots Riley finds soul-selling comedy gold

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The movie goes into detail about how the term "sell-out" has negative connotation and how the term is applied to people who use assimilation as way to get ahead.

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Sorry to Bother You review - Boots Riley finds soul-selling comedy gold

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A likable loser takes cold calling to a new level in Riley's gleefully anarchic directorial debut

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Sorry to Bother You review – white privilege gets a wacky wake-up call

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Sorry to Bother You review – white privilege gets a wacky wake-up call

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The movie goes into detail about white privilege and how people who dont identify as white have to assimilate to fit in or to even get ahead in a job.

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Sorry to Bother You review - white privilege gets a wacky wake-up call

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Lakeith Stanfield plays a black call-centre worker whose fortunes improve when he adopts a 'white voice' in Boots Riley's cheerfully anarchic satire

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Boots Riley Breaks Down 'Sorry To Bother You'

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Boots Riley Breaks Down 'Sorry To Bother You'

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The movie tackles the idea of code switching and assimilation that goes on in the workplace

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Everyone is talking about the film so fantastical and comedic, yet so real, that audiences leave the movie theater stumbling over their mental response to the movie. It was like that with me. The first time I saw Sorry To Bother You, I sat in the theater for 20 minutes post-credits. Processing. It was super funny. And a lot of it is over the top. But then again, given our scientific advancements with cloning food and animals, maybe it's not. It's tough to describe the full plot without giving away the full point, but suffice it to say that it's about a guy named Cassius (Lakeith Stanfield) who becomes a telemarketer at a company where most employees are downtrodden and underpaid while those who master code switching appear to be rewarded in full. Emphasis on reward.

Other important characters include Cassius' custom-suited, weird eye patch-wearing boss portrayed by Omari Hardwick (who also stars on cable drama ) and the impeccable Tessa Thompson (just coming off an incredible season headlining ) as Cassius' artsy, sign-twirling girlfriend Detroit.

The film is described by its distributor, Annapurna Pictures, as "comedy/fantasy/sci-fi." There are elements of horror, elements of fantasy and elements of dark humor. It is not surprising to have people compare it loosely to the feeling you got when you first saw "Get Out." Of course, people who are familiar with telemarketing jobs will get a kick out of it. And people who have to code switch at work -- or at play -- will cringe at moments or nod in understanding where Stanfield demonstrates "talking like a white person" while on the phone at work. Anyone who works for a corporation that provides a "campus" where food, drink and even shelter are provided might at times have a few disturbing thoughts, prompted by Riley's film, that go right along with the sort of tale horror master H.P. Lovecraft often alluded to in his creepy stories of company towns.

The nuances are many, and director-writer, and rap guru, Boots Riley nimbly weaved in issues surrounding unions, selling out, leaning in and saving face. I talked with Riley about the film and its top-tier production team, which includes Forest Whitaker and MACRO's Charles D. King, and how he managed to get it ready just in time for the Independence Day week. Here's what he had to say.
Is this a message movie? Or isn't it?
Everything is. That's my point. Message movies, especially the ones that we don't think are message movies, are the ones where the message is so close to what we're used to the real world telling us that we assume it's like real life. Every piece of art is someone communicating an idea to you.
How long did it take to create?
We did 61 locations in 28 days. We shot 12 hours days. We were working hard and working fast.
It was truly funny but some parts were painfully funny.
Here's the thing. When you talk and analyze the way the world is, in order to do that you end having to talk about the contradictions of the world. Contradiction is similar to irony. And irony is a lot of what humor is about. That same contradiction is why some things are sad. It's all the same thing.
People are comparing the anticipated success of this film to Get Out and Black Panther, though each film is decidedly different from each other. These same people say this is the third in the "trilogy" of great black films. How do you interpret such comparisons?
One, those are two great movies. I could be compared to worse. But two, we published this screenplay in 2014, so if it's a trilogy, you know... Just saying. But yeah, what they're hitting on is there is a zeitgeist happening and it's not connected to film or to people live tweeting Oscars So White. It's connected to the fact that there's a Black Lives Matter movement and people are looking for ways to change things, and before that, there was Occupy. People are looking for ways to express power in their life. An easy consolation for companies is to say "We're gonna give you some films." But also, on a less cynical side of it, art has to answer the movement that's out there. And this is a product of that, of those times that are happening.

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Boots Riley Breaks Down 'Sorry To Bother You'

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Everyone is talking about the film so fantastical and comedic, yet so real, that audiences leave the movie theater stumbling over their mental response to the movie. It was like that with me. The first time I saw Sorry To Bother You, I sat in the theater for 20 minutes post-credits.

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We Talked To Boots Riley About Making 2018’s Strangest Film, ‘Sorry To Bother You’

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We Talked To Boots Riley About Making 2018’s Strangest Film, ‘Sorry To Bother You’

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The film seems to challenge the capitalism the goes on in the media industry in a number of ways.

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"One thing you won't hear from people is that they were bored, right?"

Boots Riley and I are supposed to have a quick 15 minute chat, but that doesn't happen. We're almost at time when I squeeze in a question about his debut film, the blistering satire Sorry To Bother You - and Riley really runs with it, doubling our time on the phone.

Specifically, I've asked about Sorry To Bother You's soundtrack, composed by Merrill Garbus. Better known as tUnE-yArDs, Garbus' recent songs like 'Colonizer' question her right to make money off Caribbean and African soundscapes.

Given that Sorry To Bother You, at its log-line, is about a black telemarketer who realises he can make more sales by using a (overdubbed) 'white voice', Garbus' distinct vocal-loops throughout bring in the other side of the equation. Is Garbus' inclusion on that some sort of pointed refraction?

The short answer is no ("Well, she [also] lives in Oakland..."). The long answer is more complicated, a 10-minute tracing of love and theft that covers George Clinton, Talking Heads, MGMT and The Beastie Boys, though Riley's less interested in calling out appropriation than its driving forces.

"If you went in a time machine and played ['black music'] for black folk 60 years ago, they'd would be like 'that's some white shit'," he says. "The chords that are being used, all of that stuff, it's bouncing off of each other. The question has to do with power."

Across our chat, Riley's answers wrap their way around my questions, redirecting them to constrict the chances of being misunderstood. Where most artists might be merely worried about their image or sales, Riley has been continually committed to one overarching cause - the end of capitalist exploitation - since joining Oakland's labour movements as a teenager.

And in 1991, he co-founded Oakland marxist hip-hop group The Coup. 'Not Yet Free', a highlight of their 1993 debut album Kill My Landlord, spells out the group's mantra: "Capitalism is like a spider, the web is getting tighter/ I'm struggling like a fighter."

Over the past two decades, Riley has not only rapped about the oppressive forces of the police state, imperialism and racism, but actively worked against them, becoming a well-known face in Oakland through organising direct actions for union issues, housing and wealth distribution. As we chat, he's driving around the city: he apologises as he continually says hello to people and gets briefly stuck into conversations, before coming back to our own. Because now, with Sorry To Bother You, Riley has a much bigger opportunity, one worked towards slowly.

Written in 2012 (and accompanied with a The Coup album of the same name), Riley has hustled hard to get the film made, using almost every connection he had to get the script into the right hands. Those hands were novelist Dave Eggers', who published the screenplay via McSweeneys in 2014.

After that boost, he hustled more: now, the film's being celebrated as one of 2018's sharpest satires. Not to mention, it's a rare beast - an unapologetically anti-capitalist film coming from inside the machine (in Australia, Universal is distributing it). As Riley told The New York Times, art isn't equal to direct action, but "it tills the soil and gets people ready". Cold-calling rarely works.

Sorry To Bother You, But Do You Have A Moment To Overthrow Capitalism?

Loosely built off Riley's own telemarketing history, Sorry To Bother You follows Cassius aka Cash ( Atlanta 's Lakeith Stanfield). He's down-and-out at first, before he quickly climbs the telemarking ranks when an older black colleague (Danny Glover) tells him to use his 'white voice' (dubbed by David Cross) on the phone.

Soon, he's scouted for a more ethically dubious but high-paid telemarketing gig for Worry Free, a manufacturing giant operating on indentured servitude sold as benevolence by a handsome, enigmatic leader (Armie Hammer).

No spoilers, but things soon spiral out of control - 'crazy' and 'insane' are among the words most commonly used in reviews, though that's underselling it. You merely need to look at how tech-giants have swallowed Riley's hometown of the Bay Area (and, soon, New York) to see that Sorry To Bother You is ridiculously not-so ridiculous.

Eggers says he loves its "dirty kind of surrealism", how the crazy co-exists with the gritty realities of Oakland's economic, racial and class divides. "Your dreams don't have high production values! Your nightmares are rough," he told the NYT.

It may describe the film's feverish tone - and its sharp cuts and visual trickery, too - but Riley isn't a fan of that quote.

"With the 'not high production values', I wouldn't have called it that at all," he told me. "[Eggers] hadn't seen the movie yet at that time, which he had said to them. He just knew that I was doing it practically. Here's the thing: quote un-quote 'high production values' means CGI, [and] that shit looks ugly. People put up with it because they have to. You can make a skyscraper get up, walk over and take a shit and it wouldn't even be amazing."

"You can make a skyscraper get up, walk over and take a shit and it wouldn't even be amazing."

He has a point. Throwing money around won't make film magic by itself: for proof, look towards the cultural ambivalence surrounding Avatar's impending four (!?) sequels. Unlike Pandora, Sorry To Bother You might've been made on a tight budget, but its world feels decidedly lived-in.

From Cash's compact garage-room to his cars' broken windshield wipers controlled by string, we get a sense of scale for the ways the grind works away at people bit-by-bit, eroding them into vulnerable positions.

"I started off communicating to my department this idea of beautiful clutter," he tells me. "So, I think that's how you can describe this movie... I like the idea of this messiness of life. And to that extent, when people get budgets and things like that for art, sometimes they try to make it cleaner - they do that with music, too.

"You go to the studio, the top producer somewhere... they make it all sound clean and beach and that's stupid. [Or] you look at the production design on different rooms and there's the Hollywood version of a kid's messy room, you know what I'm saying? But this real messiness in our lives that gets cut out - it's something I wanted and is very related to the funkadelic.

"I don't like any art where the only thing about it is that it has a different message. I'm not interested in making that kind of art. To me, all of the little details, the craziness, all of that stuff, comes from a certain place: ideologically, it's built from the way it really is in the real world. It comes from a certain root, a problem, which is how the system of capitalism is made, is built, on exploitation. It comes from those things. For me, the art part of it is all of those little things, all those tiny details, all of that stuff."

Which can make for an overwhelming watch. That's the point.

"We tried to drive people up into a frenzy with it at certain points," Riley tells me. "That's very much, from a musical side, what I would do in a show: gauge 'how long can I keep people in this building?' 'How can I set that up to here?' 'When do I need to give them a break?'

"One thing you won't hear from people is that they were bored, right?"

'There Is Nothing New About Silicon Valley'

Like Get Out (and, in one episode in particular, Atlanta) before it, Sorry To Bother You translates realities of being black in America into a social horror. But Riley is quick to shut down any calls that his film is a reaction to the Trump-era of open white supremacy.

After all, it was written in 2012 - he even took out lines about 'Making America Great Again' so people didn't limit the film's message to the current moment, or to the tech world.

"Here's the thing," he says. "People keep drawing a line to Silicon Valley, but I'm drawing a line to capitalism in general. I mean Silicon Valley is just the new bully in the street. There are parallels in mining industries, in early industrial industries - there is nothing new about Silicon Valley.

"Silicon Valley is just the new bully in the street."

"My film is not a critique of the tech industry. My film is a critique of capitalism. And this same stuff has been tried for a long, long time.

"The way the tech industry leaders try to present themselves as cool, and new and innovative, that's the same way, you know, a lot of these robber barons were presenting themselves. Right now, we look at the top hat and handlebar moustache as the sign of a villain, but back then it was the cool, sleek thing, right?

"And, you know, mining towns - all of these [ways in which] people get conscription is just how capitalism has worked. It goes in a spiral, so similar things happen."

Still, there's an undeniable brazenness to 2018's powers, the way tech-giants can promote ethical services while openly underpaying and abusing workers. Sometimes, it feels easier to quell your outrage: what can you even do?

In Sorry To Bother You, characters struggle against the machine in a variety of ways. Cash shrugs off his job by saying he's just looking after himself, while his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) tries to change the world through art and Instagrammable earrings, and telemarketer Squeeze (Steven Yeun) prefers direct action.

Riley believes the latter is the only way out. In the meantime, he'll keep tilling the soil.

Sorry To Bother You is in cinemas now.
Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. Follow him on Twitter.

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We Talked To Boots Riley About Making 2018's Strangest Film, 'Sorry To Bother You'

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"One thing you won't hear from people is that they were bored, right?" Boots Riley and I are supposed to have a quick 15 minute chat, but that doesn't happen. We're almost at time when I squeeze in a question about his debut film, the blistering satire Sorry To Bother You - and Riley really runs with it, doubling our time on the phone.

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Sorry to Bother You Director Boots Riley on Art, Activism and the Optimism of Fighting Back

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Sorry to Bother You Director Boots Riley on Art, Activism and the Optimism of Fighting Back

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The film goes into detail how politics can be seen in the workplace.  Boots Riley wanted to show this in his him and wanted the world to see it from his point of view.

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Sorry to Bother You Director Boots Riley on Art, Activism and the Optimism of Fighting Back

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'Sorry to Bother You' writer and director Boots Riley talks about art as activism and how his dystopian fantasy of a movie is actually about optimism.