Early on in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, wet-behind-the-ears telemarketer Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is smarting from yet another person hanging up on him. His co-worker Langston (Danny Glover) gives him a much-needed tip: success in this game requires him to ditch his natural tone and start speaking in a “white voice” (“I’m not talking about Will Smith white,” he says). Suddenly, people stop slamming their phones down and start listening. His sales increase. Then they skyrocket. Cassius’s “white voice” (dubbed by Arrested Development’s David Cross) gets him promoted up and up until he is elevated to a “power caller”, an exclusive broker to the wealthiest 1%.
It is a symbolic narrative that will be familiar to fans of Get Out: the one way for black people to truly succeed in a white world is to become, figuratively and literally, white. In many ways, Sorry to Bother You is very much a post-Get Out experience, despite the fact that Riley had been trying to make the film for many years (the screenplay was published in full in McSweeney’s Quarterly in 2014). “Unfortunately, the world hasn’t changed enough to make the movie irrelevant,” he told the audience at this year’s Sundance, where the film picked up the much deserved Vanguard award. “It’s of the time and the movement going on right now.” Both films are genre-blending comedy-horrors addressing heavy concepts such as systemic racism and oppression, the theft and repossession of black bodies by white America, the dark reality of labour in capitalist society and the way in which these villainous forces are disguised.
Like Jordan Peele’s instant classic, Sorry to Bother You (directed by musician-turned-director Boots Riley) is a “social thriller” (a term first coined by Peele) where the villain is not just one person or family, but an insidious idea at the root of society itself.
These movies ask the viewer: what if you found out you were living in silent solidarity with the most diabolical villains ever? Would you recognise it and would you do something about it? In Sorry to Bother You, Riley observes the many ways in which capitalism (and the forces that uphold it) manipulates, controls and ultimately destroys the individual.
Although Sorry to Bother You could be perceived as an allegory for slavery, the movie doesn’t poke at white guilt or mine it for punchlines as much as Get Out (remember Rose’s father: “I would’ve voted for Obama a third time, if I could”). Instead, with wit and wackiness, it scratches around at the idea of how readily we are all willing to ignore the obvious horror in front of our faces at all times.
Set in Oakland, California, where writer-director Riley was born and lived for 30 years, the theme of rising rent, lower wages and fewer careers couldn’t be more relevant. Oakland and San Francisco are among the most expensive cities to live in the US, by a considerable margin. Cassius takes the telemarketing job out of desperate economic necessity: he is down and out and living in his uncle’s garage with his girlfriend (Tessa Thompson). Stanfield had previously appeared as the unsettlingly bodysnatched Andre in Get Out (“I find that the African-American experience for me has been for the most part very good”) but here his “white voice” is played for laughs: a code-switching nod to the likes of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy who both did “white voice” in their standup routines, exposing some uneasy truths. In Sorry to Bother You, Glover’s Langston spells it out for Cassius: his “white voice” succeeds because it sounds like wealth – a cadence that rings with a happy-go-lucky economic solvency.
“In America, you see people who are code-switching all the time,” says US writer and broadcaster Touré, “not to become some sort of Oreo but being able to adopt that sort of white voice to make white people feel comfortable and then being able to switch back and speak to black audiences and send the message of: ‘I’m still one of you.’ You see that in Barack Obama, you see that in Oprah Winfrey. I’ve never seen a film that deals with code-switching in such a great, subversive way. It’s important and valuable but also problematic and fraught with pitfalls.”
The film’s “of its time” satire feels starker and more batshit than Get Out, too, possibly due to its timing. Although Peele’s film has been seen as a icy comment on Donald Trump, it was made in the Obama era and released in the States only a few days after Trump’s inauguration. Sorry to Bother You comes out at a very different time, in an era of child separations, the continued visibility of the “alt-right” and a toxicity around the word “immigrant”.
Indeed, the stakes are naturally much higher for any “social thriller” that comes out post-Trump’s first year (see also: The First Purge). Speaking on the theme, Peele told Business Insider last year: “The best and scariest monsters in the world are human beings and what we are capable of especially when we get together.” His forthcoming film Us, featuring warring couples, one black (Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke) and one white (Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker) follows this blueprint. “I’ve been working on these premises about these different social demons, these innately human monsters that are woven into the fabric of how we think and how we interact,” he said.
This is where Sorry to Bother You is coming from, forming part of the “movement” Riley speaks about. In a New York Times profile of Stanfield, he is singled out alongside the likes of Donald Glover, Issa Rae and by implication Janelle Monáe, creatives who subvert the normal tropes assigned to black stars in the public sphere. “(Stanfield)’s interested in being weird and holding that space that, particularly for artists of color, hasn’t always been accessible,” Stanfield’s co-star Thompson told the NYT: “The folks that take that and own that, those outliers, are remarkable, and really important culturally.”
In these terms Sorry to Bother You can be seen a victory lap; both Stanfield and Riley have taken a cinematic universe most associated with surreal white auteurs such as Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze and repurposed it for an all-black cast and world in the same way that Get Out reignited the horror genre by bringing diversity into the room. By the normal rules of Hollywood, an oddball character actor such Stanfield would be relegated to a “kooky best friend” role, but in Riley’s universe he’s the lead.
“To see this epic allegory about race is interesting,” says Touré. “In America we are constantly talking about race, even when we’re pretending that we’re not talking about race.”
Sorry to Bother You is in cinemas soon
