Sorry to Bother You: Reflecting on Modern Capitalism and Satirical Black Cinema

Spoilers ahead

I first watched Sorry to Bother You when a friend dragged me to a somewhere-in-nowhere cinema in Astoria, Queens, during the sticky summer of 2018. I walked in, popcorn-armed and blind, trusting her taste. No trailers or Reddit threads to prepare me. My friend had claimed she desperately needed to rewatch this “masterpiece.” 112 minutes later, I walked out frowning, the theater’s tube lights settling in the sourness of reality. Some who have already watched this Boots Riley-written feature have called it “Get Out on acid”—one of the weirdest “trips” they have ever experienced. I too was left off-kilter. But while the comparable Jordan Peele thriller garnered massive global acclaim, Riley’s film didn’t do as well commercially despite a generally favorable critical response. Most primary criticisms included a somewhat haphazard execution of ideas and a risky third act that loosened the film’s potential for an airtight suckerpunch. At the time, I agreed. I thought the film was good but also wacky, unsettling. It made me feel uneasy—until unease became the norm in 2020. 

This year, I became an officially unemployed person, which is how the film’s protagonist Cassius Green—pronounced “cash is green”—starts his narrative. His name cleverly sets up almost the entire film in three syllables, although you may not realize it. But it is exactly the kind of subtle, even poetic symbolism the entire film hinges on, eventually achieving an expansive, layered social commentary couched in slapstick, symbols, and a Salvador Dali-esque absurdity. I didn’t think of all this the first time. But after returning to this “masterpiece” two years later in the economically rocky, post-COVID climate, I had a different perspective. A recent graduate watching people get laid off, I stayed up thinking about being green for cash that is green in a world where the future is flimsier than a dollar bill. I decided to rewatch the movie to revisit the very themes that my own life had begun adopting. 

Sorry to Bother You is effectively set up in three acts. In the first, we see Cassius (Lakeith Stanfield) and his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) shacked up in his uncle’s garage. They’re broke but in love. Detroit is an eccentrically-dressed artist who twirls signs on street corners. You don’t really know what to make of her yet; there’s commentary seeping out of every scene’s pores which only sinks in later once Cassius gets a job. He applies to work at a telemarketing company with fake documents and accolades to prove his worth and pay the rent. The interviewer catches on to him. There’s a collective intake of anxious breath. But then the interviewer laughs. You don’t need anything to do this job, he smirks. You can cheat the system. And everyone whoops because he got the job, he got the job, he got the job for nothing. 

Sorry to Bother You is evidently going to be about labor and capitalism, but it is also just as much about race, as the two are so inextricably entwined, particularly within the American landscape. Cassius, his uncle, his girlfriend, and his best friend who work alongside him are all Black. Blackness is its own character in this film, as much as it is in real life, as this year’s incendiary #BlackLivesMatter movement and discourse have shown us. When Cassius first starts his job, he struggles to connect with the customers he’s calling, which is fatal, in a way. This is a work landscape wherein the success of your connections with people are literally proportionate to how much money you make. Cassius is just another fish in the drab, tube-lit sea that is the call center, a space often regarded as one of the bleakest sites of the lowly worker’s plight. Initially, we see Cassius get hung up on by predominantly white, wealthy people at the other end; the calls are directed in a surreal fashion, allowing him to physically drop into their dinner parties or toilet breaks. The effect is strange but striking, a literal representation of the “invasion of privacy,” and lingers within the audience’s memory, setting the surreal tone which will later only be heightened. But Cassius overcomes this challenge, like many Black employees, by learning to code-switch; he takes the advice of an older Black coworker named Langston (Danny Glover) to use his “white voice” while on the phone. Riley makes the directorial decision to dub Cassius and other Black characters in the film with the voices of white people, which not only draws attention to the outrageous absurdity of the need to code-switch, but also achieves a strange, dark comedy that deepens the emotional texture of the scenes. Riley’s choice blends tragedy and comedy with the finesse of reality itself, effectively executing the exact purpose of surrealism. 

Code-switching works. Because adopting the markers of whiteness helps drive POC up the ladder of social mobility. Cassius soon becomes incredibly successful and is promoted to Power Caller, a mysteriously vague and grandiose job title that mirrors much of the names of existing “top positions” in companies today. On his first day of work in this new position, Cassius gets to enter an elaborate, gold elevator to go “upstairs,” mimicking the corporate power hierarchy. A ditzy white coworker punches in an insanely long elevator code, which is odd but laughter-inducing, and reveals an interesting complementary symbol to code-switching: the Black employee must learn complicated “codes” to enter higher, whiter spaces, and can only be given these codes by white people or anyone with access to their power. 

Cassius’ ascent provides an important pivot to the film, for it occurs in tandem with the unionization of the workers “at the bottom” of Regalview, the telemarketing company. The union includes his best friend Salvador (Jermaine Fowler), Langston, an Asian American named Squeeze (Steven Yeun), and Detroit. At first, Cassius is enthusiastic about participating in their plans, but as he benefits from the privileges his promotion affords him, his intoxication with the glitter of capitalist ascension, and its charm on his life that transforms his garage shack into a modern interior designer’s paradise, blinds him to the grassroots resistance of his closest friends at Regalview. They continue to fight for the rights and pay they deserve, independent of how productive their (non-white) bodies can be be for any company. 

The second act offers a story we’ve seen before: the one of the sellout. But we see how powerful the allure of this Faustian trade can be for a Black person seeking success and a comfortable life that hinges on the flow of money and the labor that bodies can provide in exchange. This structure is complicated by the color of those bodies with power, and those that must work for the people in power to get even a whiff of success, which is where Riley's acidic racial commentary is made salient. In the modern American capitalist model, those in power who are predominantly white or who adopt whiteness (as a Power Caller, you must always use your “white voice” and dress in twee, Western-style suits) will exploit Blackness. They will specifically exploit the parts of it they deem profitable (i.e. the soft power of their culture, music, fashion, connections, the body itself) while asking that Blackness to turn on its own self, to have to mirror whiteness to claim any power that’s tangible (i.e. money, influence), and never allow Blackness to attain and express power independently. 

Then, the film’s gamble: the third act. The themes of race, labor, capitalism, and power that Riley takes his time sowing all collectively explode here. Cassius “selling out” has strained his relationship with Detroit and alienated him from his friends and the Regalview union. While trying to go to work amid union protests outside the Regalview building, Cassius is hit on the head by a protestor with a soda can, caught on camera and made into an instant viral sensation—in a funny but eerily similar fashion to current day events, the audience realizes, slightly horrified mid-chuckle. But the stomach of the film truly turns when Cassius is invited to a party held by the CEO of WorryFree, a large corporation that secretly sells weapons and slave labor through Regalview, employing needy people “for life” under the guise of giving them food, housing, and supposed lifelong security. It’s a modern-day slave contract, one that still exists if we look at the setup of some of our own world’s large corporation structures today. It’s ironic to note here that Cassius initially becomes a Power Caller so he can pay back his uncle and prevent him from joining WorryFree, only to end up in a position that enables the very injustices WorryFree commits, trapping those like his uncle. 

The CEO of WorryFree is cheekily named Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), perpetually and cleverly dressed as an Orientalist white-person-who-found-enlightenment-in-India-while-working-at-McKinsey type, or a Silicon Valley tech bro who converts to Hinduism after one yoga retreat, clad in linen scarves, tunics, and harem pants, claiming his calling is to lead the world to a better place (think: an Adam Neumann). One of the film’s most memorable and well-directed sequences occurs at Lift’s party, attended exclusively by white people and the only other black Power Caller, Mr. Blank (more on him later). Lift asks, then commands, Cassius to rap for everyone even though he doesn't want to. Despite his protestations, the white crowd begins chanting: “Rap! Rap! Rap! Rap!” over and over, going just an extra, uncomfortable beat too long for it to turn from slightly funny to straight-up horrifying. The scene cuts to Cassius standing on a stage of sorts with the white crowd below him; the hierarchical mise-en-scène wants to suggest Cassius, the Black person, is in power here, but he struggles to spit out any rhyme. Lift looks darkly at him with a test in his gaze. Cassius switches tack. He starts chanting the N-word, over and over to an imaginary beat. The crowd erupts. They chant it with him until the whole room is “rapping” the N-word for what seems like an indefinitely long minute. As an audience member, you’re left cold. This is the performance of Blackness so many white people expect and accept, one in which Blackness must denigrate itself. Blackness seems to be afforded the false gleam of power, to be “lifted up to the stage,” but at the cost of self-humiliation and pain. 

The performance is a success, and Lift invites Cassius to his office. He offers him cocaine on a plate with a horse image on it before the real offer: to become a WorryFree puppet. Lift has decided that Cassius can be the chosen leader, a “Martin Luther King”-type figure for the workers at WorryFree, in exchange for an insane amount of money. Here is the crossroads between individual advancement and morality and ethics—the ultimate choice upon which the film’s commentary revolves. While this scene is grotesquely disturbing, Stanfield and Hammer’s stellar performances inject that dark comedic element to it. The audience enjoys this psychologically gory moment. To stall his response, Cassius, like anyone, goes to the bathroom. But he stumbles into the wrong door. And the film opens up into act three.

If the film has been surreal until now, it follows with complete fantasy. For out stumbles a few shackled creatures, half-human half-horse. They’re called equisapiens: humongous, whimpering animal-like creatures with enormous “horse dicks.” Your hands will fly to your face because what the hell is Riley doing? Cassius flees from these creatures, who scream to him for help, and returns to Lift. The equisapiens are revealed to be genetic modifications produced by WorryFree to make the workers more productive, thus more profitable. In order to mutate, the workers are made to ingest a white powder. Cassius remembers the “cocaine” he just snorted with growing horror.

Once the initial shock of this twist subsides, you realize Riley’s narrative decisions. The equisapiens is an almost on-the-nose metaphor, playing on common labor-oriented idioms: “work horse,” “beat a dead horse,” “horsepower,” “hung like a horse”, “dark horse”. It also illustrates, literally, the dehumanization of labor to the point of modern slavery. What is doubly disturbing is that the equisapiens were originally Black workers, which you can tell by the accents and vernacular they speak in—here, the commentary is even more barbed. This is the dehumanization and objectification of Black bodies, which are simultaneously denigrated for their muscular bodies/strength, fetishized for their sexual prowess (especially amongst males), and then used and abused for the hardest of labors at the cost of their sanity/loyalty/ethics/bodies/sense of self. 

Bodily violence, particularly violence towards Black bodies, is an ongoing motif throughout the film. Think about Cassius getting hit by the soda can, which is subsequently made into a popular meme. This feels reminiscent of the way the media recently dismissed rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s shooting, which many on Twitter argued would receive more appropriate solemnity and coverage if the rapper were a white woman. It also harks back to the memeification of Breonna Taylor’s murder and speaks to the general dismissal of Black trauma and pain as public entertainment, a notion that uncomfortably recalls both the past and present, from the long history of practices such as lynching to the circulation of phone recordings and memeification of police brutality towards Black people in the streets in 2020, that continue to perpetuate Black trauma as theater. Additionally, Riley’s film is interested in how quickly and easily we regard human violence and pain in general as forms of entertainment. For instance, the protestor who hit Cassius with the soda eventually goes on TV to profit off the meme it produced, harnessing the power it gives her. The act of profiting off Black pain in this way is a clever callout to Kendall Jenner’s controversial 2017 advertisement in which she offers a Pepsi can to a policeman to defuse a BLM protest—in order to sell the drink and also her image, she uses a legitimate revolutionary movement as a vehicle for capitalist profit. Riley also often inserts clips of a fictional TV show in the film called “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me,” which is eventually woven into the actual plotline. This may represent real shows such as Fear Factor and Wipeout that profit from making a spectacle of people hurting one another and experiencing physical pain and violence. Of course, this violence may be psychological as well. Reality shows such as Love Island often pit people against each other, the emotional burden falling disproportionately heavier on brown and Black people. The truth is, society enjoys inflicting and then watching its own pain in order to laugh away the very pain they have created.

The idea of violence against Black bodies is explored from another angle through the character of Detroit, and as a woman writing this, I would be remiss to not devote a section on her. Detroit is a beautiful Black female artist and a quirky rebel. She wears T-shirts that say “THE FUTURE IS FEMALE EJACULATION” and makes her own politically-conscious earrings that read “MURDER MURDER MURDER” and “KILL KILL KILL” or “TELL HOMELAND SECURITY” and “WE ARE THE BOMB.” During an interview with Vogue, Riley talks about Detroit’s style, sharing that “[Detroit is] someone who is always trying to make a statement, she’s using every inch of her body, every inch of every wall around her, to talk about what’s going on.” During my first viewing, I was especially critical of Detroit as a character and the kind of performance and commodification of feminism and general political activism she embodies through her style. I thought of the times I would visit certain shops in New York and see all sorts of badges, merchandise, and paraphernalia in these artsy, liberal spaces for sale at steep prices—homemade items that you could use to virtue signal (perhaps literally represented by her sign twirling in the film) how feminist and woke you are, a practice I’m seeing manifest in a new form on Instagram and other social media, with people feeling the need to post and repost colorful, pretty, or artistic political infographics that may contain false/wrong information but end up gaining traction because of their attractive packaging. 

My criticism of Detroit is not unfounded, and even Cassius himself makes it explicit in a fight with her. Detroit makes art about colonialism in Africa and Western imperialist exploitation of African labor, land, resources, bodies, and culture. But she is seen putting on a “white voice” (dubbed by Lily James) in order to sell her art to wealthy white people, effectively profiting from a history of pain and trauma that she does not have intimate access to. What is most striking about this scene is the instance where she puts on an art performance in which she is nearly naked in front of a live audience and encourages them to throw stuff at and hurt her. Detroit recognizes the need to “sell her trauma” as a Black person to achieve upward social mobility; in that sense, she is not far off from Cassius, who she so bitterly judges for his own decisions at Regalview. She self-inflicts and then profits off the spectacle-making of pain and violence on a Black body (especially a female Black body) because she recognizes, whether consciously or subconsciously, that this is how she can benefit from the system and how she needs to participate in it to move upwards. On my second viewing of the film, I was more empathetic of Detroit because I recognize why she did what she did even if she played somewhat complicit to the very system she based her identity around rejecting. This is a reality many Black women, and other women of color, choose in order to advance within a modern capitalist, racist system in which the female body is so often objectified and used as currency, a site for both capitalism and racism to manifest. 

Riley’s script is as tight as his direction; every name unfolds with multiple meanings. Apart from Cassius’ full name invoking money, his name also holds several literary connotations: in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the character of Cassius is known as the conniving sellout who is looking out for himself. Similarly, Detroit’s name is even more symbolic: the city of Detroit in the U.S. has overtones of capitalism and the American workforce. It is known as the birthplace of Motown and the American auto industry, as the place where assembly line production was famously streamlined. But just as important is the man who is nameless: Mr. Blank. He is the real sellout, firmly ensconced as the Black man who has traded in his identity, his name, and his sense of self for money, power, and capital advancement. Mr. Blank is always speaking in his white voice and wears an eyepatch over his left eye. He acts as a foil to the unionized resistance, who call themselves the “left eye activists,” because he has lost his vision there. While the equisapiens represent the dehumanizing diminution of Black bodies under the capitalist system, Mr. Blank acts as the signifier of what a Black man who succeeds within this system can possibly end up like: astray from leftist ideals, one who has lost his own voice, sense of self, name, and the ability to see clearly and advocate for his community. 

“If you show people a problem but not a solution, their reaction is to get used to it.” This line, spoken by Regalview union leader Squeeze, is one of the most memorable moments from the script, speaking heavily even to our current global climate. Riley, in the midst of this absurdist cinematic chaos, does not fail in providing a possible solution to the madness, and that solution is revolution. Without giving away too much of the ending, Sorry to Bother You as a project, which places itself within a current revival of Afro-surrealism in art, seems to suggest that we need to be more radical in our answers to the states of society that govern us and our living, especially in 2020. The response Riley suggests seems motivated by an Audre Lorde-ian approach: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” It has never been more urgent to go back to the art we have produced as a society to look back at ourselves: who are the masters, who are the slaves, and what can we do to their house with the tools we’ve been given or choose to create?

Vamika Sinha is the co-editor-in-chief of Postscript Magazine.