Sorry to Bother You: Fantasy and Social Commentary
Boots Riley’s film Sorry to Bother You is a playful and fantastical commentary on the gritty and painful realities of American capitalism. The film has two layers that tackle two fairly distinct issues that converge beautifully in the colorful, afrofuturist film. One layer handles the struggles of lower class Americans to survive the oppressively rich companies that control our salaries, our comfort, our lives. The other layer is about code-switching and what we will do to survive in this world of WorryFrees and Regalviews. These themes converge under the umbrella of Afrofuturism when our hero, Cash, is forced to come to his senses when faced with the possibility of transforming into a horse-human-hybrid: an equisapien.
To be honest, this film had some pretty depressing aspects. The only way for Black folks to work their way to the top of Regalview marketing is to put on a “white voice”. Even the badass, “woke” artist, Detroit, puts on a white voice to sell her pieces, so the audience is forced to acknowledge her hypocrisy. Our main character, our “hero”, Cash, starts his journey by crossing the picket line and is only convinced to switch sides when his own life is threatened. Hell, he doesn’t even retain his literal humanity by the end of the film. Yet, somehow, it ends on a hopeful note. We get to witness what promises the beginning of a revolution. And the film utilizes magical realism and straight-up sci-fi to convince us of this.
One thing I can definitively say about Sorry to Bother You, is that it keeps you guessing. If you showed me the last frame of this movie before I watched it, I wouldn’t believe it was the same story. However, by the end of the story I didn’t question one bit of it. By integrating bits of magical realism from the start, like the way Cash literally drops into peoples’ lives with his phone call, or his distinctly voiced-over White Voice, Boots Riley eases the viewer into the colorful, comic book-like world until we don’t even question when a mutant horse-man falls out of a toilet stall. These fantasy elements are also what give the viewer hope that the characters’ seemingly futile struggle may actually be worth something. In that fun, comical way, Riley is telling us that if a sellout horseman like Cash can start a revolution, then maybe we can, too. And that hope, that use of fantasy to convey such a powerful message, is what makes this film distinctly Afrofuturist.
