Sorry To Bother You

And Punishing The Medicated

We’re back! I missed y’all, and I’m glad we’re back in the groove. Hope you enjoy this week’s entries, and thanks for sticking around. To new followers, we’re back on schedule, thanks for joining me!

“Sorry To Bother You”, Boots Riley’s tonally-adventurous satire, is one of those movies that feels like its on its own island. Having been released in the Trump era, it’s being watched by me in a second Trump presidency, after no lessons at all have been learned. This is a movie that asks you to commit to the idea that America is a capitalist hellstate for low-income minorities in urban environments, and you’re watching it in an era when most of America has voted to expand and extend that specific capitalist hellstate. It should be a confirmation of the film’s themes. Instead, it makes Boots Riley’s fable seem like transmissions from another, better world. Every social apparatus was in place for you to learn from this movie, guys. The problem certainly wasn’t that Riley was too subtle.

Lakeith Stansfield is Cassius, broke as a joke and living in his uncle’s (Terry Crews) garage. Desperate for money, “Cash”, as he’s called (THIS IS A HINT, GUYS) gets a job as a telemarketer. It’s slow-going as he realizes that you’ll only make serious money on commission, until he realizes he can code-switch, using his “white voice” to close sales from buyers who find more comfort in his nasally Caucasian drone (provided by David Cross).

Cash rides into a promotion as a Power Caller, taking him to the inner realm of RegalView, a company that, like many shady corporations in movies’ past, isn’t forthcoming as to what they do, because it seems like they do almost everything. Unfortunately, climbing the ladder also means kicking it from above. The telemarketers under him propose starting a union, but RegalView makes Cash’s Power Caller status depend on leaving the union behind. Conflicted by his closer relationship to RegalView’s shady parent company WorryFree, Cash becomes a double agent, working with a group of fired employees to take the company down from within. Cash, the Average Dude, somehow makes the miscalculation that he can fool a company this big.

I’ve selected this movie for this particular theme week for how it handles the issue of race, particularly within regarding its exploitation from within the American economy (which becomes gradually more specific throughout the film). But “Sorry To Bother You”, which has a punchy comic energy provided not only by Riley’s direction but also the music from his hip hop collective The Coup, tackles so many provocative everyday issues. Cash is, on his own, a critique of liberal mores – initially outspoken against capitalist structures (along with his artist/goddess girlfriend Tessa Thompson), he becomes quite easily seduced by the lure of WorryFree (as represented by a shady — even for him — Armie Hammer). But within this character’s adventure is a tale of the uneasy, consistent conflict between disinterested businesses and the unions that would call those employees of said business their members. The movie also finds time to challenge the accepted narratives of the military industrial complex, the uneasy back-and-forth between consumer satisfaction and exposure to race, and the American tragedy of the Equisapiens.

The narrative spins off into wild directions, becoming a modern “Soylent Green” (not the spoiler you think it is!) as if made by legendary agitprop photographer/filmmaker William Klein. Cash, who uses his “white voice” around the office with other Black characters with the sounds of actors like Patton Oswalt, sees the world through Stansfield’s quizzical deadpan. Thompson, meanwhile, gets to glisten and glimmer as a performance artist who, at one point, performs a monologue from “Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon” and thus achieves all-time cinematic immortality. The film is loaded with familiar faces, including Jermaine Fowler, Steven Yeun, Danny Glover, Omari Hardwick and Kate Berlant, but you also get an all-timer of a cameo by Ghost Dog himself, Forest Whitaker. Whitaker ends up being a key player in the film’s suggestion regarding the shifting Overton Window, as the “slave labor” accusations surrounding WorryFree begin to gravitate towards a decidedly new direction. “Sorry To Bother You” seems like it should be “a movie of our time”, so why is it that when I mention Equisapiens, no one knows what I’m talking about? A guy named Boots making a movie about corporate worker exploitation was somehow not obvious enough for the general public.

I’ve mentioned before how a new administration arriving in the White House soon means a drastic expansion of our carceral state. Private prisons will bloom, as ICE will push to incarcerate millions of illegal immigrants. The failed proposal of Matt Gaetz to run the Department of Justice further suggests Donald Trump will be moving to imprison his enemies, as promised. What was once a joke is nonetheless serious policy being discussed by unserious people in serious positions. Along with the Supreme Court’s rulings this summer that a bribe isn’t a bribe if it’s a tip, and that the President has immunity should he decide to violate the law, tells you in which direction the wind is blowing as far as criminal justice.

So let’s recap: you could end up in prison if you violate state or federal code, but also if you are an illegal immigrant or even a naturalized citizen by childbirth, or if you are a political dissident and/or journalist. And maybe also if you have ADHD.

Robert Kennedy Jr., currently angling to run the Department of Health And Human Services, has proposed the idea of “wellness camps” where people who are on drugs/medication will grow organic food for the general public. Kennedy’s proposal is for three or four years spent at these camps where people can wear themselves off the medication they are taking while also participating in, basically, slavery. This is a preposterous plan that will very possibly never become policy (I hope). But this is a look at the policies of the incoming government that just won the Presidential popular vote. When in doubt, send them to a camp. The whole world is now a correctional facility.