By Devyn Springer
“…on the agenda of the bourgeoisie there is—there can be nothing but—violence, corruption, and barbarism.”
– Aimé Cèsaire
It was clear from the conversations in the full theater that none of us really knew what to expect from Boots Riley’s highly anticipated film debut Sorry To Bother You.
Having spent the previous two decades earning his spot in hip-hop history as the frontman to political hip-hop band The Coup, I knew I was in for something radical. With song titles like “Kill My Landlord” and “5 Million Ways to Kill a C.E.O.”, and tracks that reference the Mau Mau Uprising and Mao Tse-tung in tandem, I hoped that the same revolutionary discourse in Riley’s musical work would find its way to the big screen under his directorial eye.
While many of us speculated about what this film may hold, we also found ourselves daily and anxiously speculating about what the future may have in store for us given our current situation within a seemingly endless racist-capitalist-imperialist monster.
Riley manages to tap into this speculative anxiety that’s currently prevalent in youth, using that sentiment to drive an underlying tone in the absurdist and artfully created plot. What may lie ahead of us in a world of mass incarceration, capitalist domination, feckless journalism and entertainment, and senseless violence is exactly what Riley explores, making the broth of this film so bizarrely believable.
Given that the standard of “critical” journalism has been sadly misguided over the past decade, of course most STBY reviews tend to focus almost too much on Riley’s commentary on race via the absurd “white voice” the characters use for mobility. Yes, this is a defiantly important part of the film, as it shows whiteness as a tool for upward movement within a capitalist society—racial capitalism—but it misses the mark when imagined as the overall message one should take away from such a layered, comical critique of society and the future we’re headed towards.
With race lining each step of the movie’s grand statements, this film is anti-capitalist at its core—communist to be specific—and it uses an astoundingly intentional handling of violence to illustrate this. Reviewers omitting appropriate detail to the stark anti-capitalist messages in the film do so by intention, via liberalism. Sorry To Bother You, in all its creative experimentations and plot quirks, takes an approach to violence in many forms, from many angles, and ultimately makes the viewer recognize it as a potentially emancipatory tool; something that is rare and dangerous for Hollywood.
The plot is straightforward: A young Black man, Cassius “Cash” Green” (Lakeith Stanfield) is the anti-hero stuck between an existential nihilism and economic wrought, living in his uncle’s basement with his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson). Cassius finally lands a job as a telemarketer, and is soon left with many decisions, including crossing a picket line, all for the allure of riding in a (literal) golden elevator. What unfurls from here is an odd and often hilarious series of compromises, concessions, disappointments, and bewildering surprises, yet the violence of the capitalist world remains clear.
In an opening scene, Cassius turns on his television to a show called “I Got The Shit Kicked Out of Me” where, as the name implies, viewers watch as guests have the shit kicked out of them. This is the entire premise of the show and we’re shown flashes of it often throughout the film. We learn it’s America’s most watched show with over 150 million nightly viewers. I’m instantly reminded of hit series Jackass and Fear Factor, which both centered the violent, gross, and sometimes unimaginably weird world of what we call entertainment television.
Each time the program is shown it is typically in brief between flipping through channels, or as decor to some conversation, but still enough for one to see the totality of the simple program: People are punched in the face, gangs of men hit someone being restrained, the host makes the guest swim through the “pool of piss,” faces are bloodied, all while the audience dies of laughter and joy off-screen.
This TV show has a rather obvious symbolism, one that comes into importance later in the film. As violence permeates all areas of the settler colonial capitalist project, we become desensitized to it and we fetishize its occurrence where it intersects with grotesque, intriguing, voyeuristic, and otherwise perceivably distant occasions.
In our real world where millions of people play video games like Call of Duty, praising the advent of head shots and “kill streaks,” where folks pore over images of abused refugees online, or they look cautiously at videos of police violence that are too salacious for them to not view, as critics praise the more gory, abusive, manipulative, and utterly violent horror films, it’s hard to believe we don’t already have a show on air called I Got The Shit Kicked Out Of Me.
This saturation of violence creates facets of our very identities, and shapes our perception of daily occurrences; how one comes to know oneself as American, as the other; how fist fights and bullets are rightfully called violence, but the structural violences of gentrification, homelessness, and hunger are not labeled such. How the wage and labor exploitation that the characters in this very film fight is reasoned with rather than struck against. In I Got The Shit Kicked Out Of Me, we see violence as desensitized and fetishized, not much different than how most popular Hollywood films portray it, and what we see is violence as commodity, violence as entertainment, ultimately.
This is not the only way we see violence as commentary or plot progression in the film. While most films show protests, riots, and clashes with arms of the state as romantic, exciting, and voyeuristic events, Riley shows the true nature of what occurs when police crack down on a protest: blood, mass arrests, naked fear, heavy items being thrown, blunt objects to the face, brutality, and a potent power imbalance in which the police are allowed to rampage through a crowd.
Truly, we’re exposed to the barbarism of the colonizer’s world of which Césaire forewarned. While watching these scenes, I felt my skin crawl and I shifted in my chair; not that they were unbearably realistic, but because they were rooted in a well choreographed reality I recognized from my own protest-riot-organize experience. This handling of violence must be intentional from Riley, as he circumnavigates the Selma (et al) track of violence portrayal which Hollywood foams at the mouth for and instead gives us a less fetishized, grassroots view of the state violence on protesters, all while the “Power Callers” and news telecasters observe, virtually unphased, as the protesters getting the shit kicked out of them.
As film critic Eileen Jones notes, Riley goes through painstaking attention to characterization to craft a Cassius Green that viewers can identify with; we empathize with his poverty, relate to his borderline depression and nihilism, and are enthralled with his quirky relationship with Detroit. The “apocalypse” in Cassius’ mind is tied to his need for money, making the viewer root for him with our own pride attached, and thus the concessions he makes to realign his class interests hurts the viewer twice as hard.
Once Cassius finally ascends into money, an advent which climaxes once he is invited to a lavish billionaire’s party, we see the society of the rich as an ultimately decedent, drug-infused, libertine, and violent one. The rich watch the news footage of protesters getting abused for cheap laughs and camaraderie, they speak of forced labor jokingly, talk of weapons sales as small talk, indulge in massive amounts of drugs, and force Cassius to sing and dance for the rich, white master.
Eventually, Cassius stumbles onto a mixture of forced labor and eugenicist science. He sees what he considers an irredeemable violence that the white billionaire tries to rationalize. In this scene, we’re introduced to the ways violence is rationalized, reasoned with, and tempered for the sake of capital, for the sake of money and esteem and class; we are shown the extreme lengths to which violence and class fight to outlive one another.
Detroit (my favorite character), also portrays the multilayered violence of the film. From her commentary of neo-colonialism in the Congo through a violent performance art piece, to her very visualized characterization; she’s often shown wearing gigantic earrings that read things like “MURDER MURDER MURDER” and “KILL KILL KILL.” In another scene that takes place on the bed between Detroit and Cassius, Riley’s handling of interpersonal violence is put on display by the lack thereof, as he foregoes the racial stereotypes the viewer expects to see, that the tone, through anticipatory camera angles and suspenseful music, prepares us for.
And what may be the two most important scenes related to violence are almost snuck in through quick passing lines. As Cassius desires to share with the world the irredeemable violence that he’s seen in hopes of inspiring mass moral outrage, he decides to go onto America’s most popular TV show I Got The Shit Kicked Out Of Me.
On the show, he himself must undergo a series of violent events—getting his ass beat and being dumped in a pool of shit—before he’s allowed to show the video to 150 million viewers. To his surprise, the reaction is lackluster; a few gasps, mild shock, and appearances on a few late night talk shows. Because of society’s desensitization to violence, they largely don’t care. “They’re so used to seeing violent shit,” Cassius says at one point, “they don’t even really care.”
This, of course, is a masterful culmination of the violence which loosely appears throughout the entire film. And by placing said violence throughout a film about telemarketing, where the workers’ complete alienation stars as a central theme in the film, we are left with powerful post-exploration of alienation and violence. After the world doesn’t care enough, the only option left for the protesters is violence.
In the final scenes of the film, Cassius, Detroit, and the other workers-turned-organizers devise a plan that rests on strategic, tactical violence to defeat the oppressive forces of the state.
Here, Riley ruptures the idea that violence must rest within the dichotomy of avoidance or fetishization, and instead uses the final scenes to reclaim and transform it into a tool of emancipation. What would have been a massacre of protesters by the state turns into a revolutionary and triumphant defeat, wherein the subjects of the video he shared—possibly the most marginalized folks in the entire society of this film—violently save the day.
It’s wonderful, exciting, and powerful in its terminal reclamation of violence from the oppressor’s monopoly we see it in for the rest of the film. The film certainly should be critiqued for its apparent lack of TLGBQ representation (in a world created by a Black communist that features a workers’ uprising, this specific lack of representation is disappointing, but not totally surprising), the transmogrified bodies of the most marginalized workers, as they uprise, felt particularly queered in their discursive positioning.
These bodies are otherly, strangely sexualized, and must be seen in the context of the most oppressed in his fantastical fictive society. Their organized violence progresses the scenes as not just a ‘saving the day’ moment, but as a discourse on violence both as a weapon of the rich and as an inevitable emancipatory tool of the most oppressed.
What we have in this film is meditation on and critique of many things: racism, capitalism, violence, and the future. Sorry To Bother You illustrates the anxiousness of our dispossessed future, painting with vivid colors an absurd, afro-surrealist, and sporadically sci-fi picture of that vampiric falling empire Bob Marley sung about. For fans of political comedy, sci-fi, and surrealism, as well as those like me who spent years listening to and appreciating The Coup, I recommend you go see this film.
Devyn springer is a cultural worker and Digital Media Director for the Walter Rodney Foundation. You can find Devyn on Twitter at @Halfatlanta
At RaceBaitR, we pay our writers entirely through donations. Donate monthly or one-time to support compensation for Black writers and independent radical media.
