What’s this all about? I turned 30 on Sept. 26, 30 days from the start of this series. To celebrate, I’m watching one movie a day for 30 days and spending 30 minutes writing about each one. This post is about 2018. Click here for the original newsletter in the series. Other entries: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017
As I said in 2018 about this movie:
First, you think it’s about race. Then, class. Then, activism. Then, capitalism vs. socialism. Then it violently becomes about all of the above at once and never looks back. One helluva debut.
I don’t know how to describe this movie and the impact it had on me without spoiling the entire plot, so here goes.
Cassius Green (pronounced “Cash is Green,” played by LaKieth Stanfield), is a down-on-his-luck worker in an alternate-reality version of Oakland, Calif. He lives in a garage apartment with his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson). He eventually gets a job as a telemarketer for RegalView. He has trouble making sales until an older worker, Langston (Danny Glover) tells him to use his “white voice” to make himself sound more appealing to white people over the phone. Cash taps into his inner Caucasian — his “white voice” is performed by David Cross, to great comedic effect — and is soon leading the company in sales.
But this new esteemed status also exposes him to the terrible working conditions at RegalView. Cash’s coworker Squeeze (Steven Yeun) stages a protest. Cash attends and think he’s going to be fired, but is instead promoted to the elite position of Power Caller.
Once he becomes a Power Caller, Cash is exposed to even more RegalView secrets. Not only are the working conditions terrible, but RegalView also secretly sells military arms and obtains cheap labor from parent corporation WorryFree, where employees sign lifetime contracts to live and work in factories. Naturally, many condemn WorryFree as slave labor.
Cash is conflicted about all of these atrocities, but he still uses his white voice to get paid and become more successful. All of his newfound success causes Detroit to break up with him. Later he is invited to a party at the home of WorryFree CEO Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), who goads him into rapping for an entirely white audience. Cash also uses his white voice here instead of his own, to thunderous applause. Later, Steve takes Cash into his office and gives him what looks like cocaine to snort.
It’s not.
Cash takes the drugs, and here’s where the movie moves beyond a surrealistic comedy/satire into macabre horror territory. Cash goes to the bathroom, and finds a half-human, half-horse man chained in a stall, begging him for help. When Cash confronts Steve about this, Steve tells him that the “Equisapien” he just saw is a new Worryfree creation, a better, faster, stronger worker —erm, “workhorse”— created by ingesting white powder that looks like cocaine. Cash fears he took it, but Steve assures him he just did some coke.
However, Steve offers Cash $100 million to become an Equisapien for five years so that he can be an inside man in the workforce to act as a false revolutionary figure and tip WorryFree corporate off about any unionization, protests or uprisings.
Cash refuses and later discovers the Equisapien he found in the bathroom stole his phone and recorded a video pleading for help, which Cash releases to the public, finally thinking that would be the thing that takes WorryFree and RegalView down.
It doesn’t. Instead, it turns Steve Lift into a revolutionary cult-of-personality figure not unlike Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. WorryFree stock rises to an all-time high and Lift is hailed as a leader in scientific development.
In one last-ditch effort to bring down the company, Cash frees all the Equisapiens, reconciles with Detroit and Squeeze and leads a workers’ protest on RegalView. After the protest is over, Cash moves back into the garage apartment with Detroit and all seems well.
Until he starts to grow horse nostrils. Then, newly transformed Equisapien Cash leads a revolt and attacks Lift’s house. Roll credits.
I had no clue where this movie was going when I first saw it. The trailers advertised it as a satire on race, highlighting the “white voice” jokes and building to a critique on the current stage of capitalism. That horse twist, and the subsequent commodification of protests, turn this into a timeless piece of biting satire. That, and the casting—Hammer was perfectly cast as a privileged white dude in 2018, but later allegations of cannibalism and abuse color his role here a bit differently. (The fact that he’s still headlining the upcoming “Death on the Nile” proves this movie’s point about money and revolution; Hammer was never “canceled,” he was just laying low.)
I thought about this timely and prescient movie nearly every day last summer, when protests against police killings of Black people reached a fever pitch and corporations desperately tried to get out ahead of any bad press they thought might happen in regards to race or identity.
Organizations that previously never mentioned their diversity initiatives were suddenly tweeting #BlackLivesMatter and hiring for diversity, equity and inclusion positions. And yet, many people praised these same corporations, who have repeatedly been accused of predatory working conditions, whenever they tweeted something that acknowledged Black lives have value or that racism is bad. It was the equivalent of every major brand making their logos rainbow-colored for Pride Month, then going right back to business as usual once June ends.
In addition, Celebrities were making their stances on race known before anyone could accuse them of staying silent, often with statements that weren’t all that thought out. And while all of that may be genuine, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of it was all rooted in money, or a fear of losing profit. How many of those corporations still kept up their DEI initiatives a summer later, when it wouldn’t bolster their stock prices? Anecdotally, in North Texas, not a lot of them did.
The whole thing became what seemed like a game of optics and a race for who could profit the most off of other people’s pain, which is the root of what “Sorry To Bother You” is saying:
The revolution will be televised, and marketed, and posted to social media, and commodified, and profited off of.
Up next: The first of two Christmas movies in this series, Greta Gerwig’s beautiful 2019 adaptation of “Little Women.”
Letter of Recommendation
“Sorry to Bother You” director Boots Riley first envisioned the movie as a concept album, which he released in 2012. You can check that out here:
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