Keep the Trophy: Sorry to Bother You is My Movie of 2018
(After Black Panther, which deserves an Oscar…)
Who gives a ____ about a _______ Oscar? — word to Public Enemy
Oakland artist, activist, writer, and director Boots Riley politely asks to borrow your brain and proceeds to turn it upside-down in his directorial debut, Sorry to Bother You. Here is the trailer. You know when trailers give too much of the story away? That is the least of your worries here.
The star-studded film can only be properly described by Riley himself as an “absurdist dark comedy with magical realism and science fiction inspired by the world of telemarketing.” Riley, also a musical artist and front-man of the political hip hop group, The Coup, first wrote the screenplay for Sorry to Bother You in the early 2010s. With little to no resources to make a film in 2012, he and his band opted to make an album by the same name inspired by the screenplay.
Starring Lakeith Stanfield of Atlanta and Get Out fame as Cassius Green, Sorry to Bother You is as immensely colorful as it is horrific. The film screams in protest against the injustices of modern cut-throat capitalism, while humorously depicting how a young Black man has to navigate America by way of code-switching. Rather than solely discussing the film on the merit of its absurdity or stunning visuals, Sorry to Bother You will be reviewed and analyzed in conjunction with its terrific commentary on race. Though I will refer to specific scenes of the film throughout, there will be no direct “story-ruining” spoilers in this review.
Cassius Green, ironically nicknamed “Cash,” is a young man in Oakland, California with nothing but a handful of change and an old sedan to his name. While living with his uncle (played by Terry Crews), Cassius is urged to get a job. With the help from his friend, Salvador (Jermaine Fowler), Cassius scores a job as a telemarketer at RegalView, where he flounders in selling miscellaneous merchandise to customers in the Bay-Area. Cassius nervously and apologetically calls customers, using the film’s catchphrase, “sorry to bother you,” in an attempt to maintain a conversation — conversations that ultimately result in Cash being hung-up on. His struggle continues until his coworker, the older, mentor figure, Langston (Danny Glover) gives him a pro-tip.
Use your ‘white voice,’ Langston advises Cassius.
Cassius, perplexed, mentions that people already believe he “has a white voice” by speaking in a proper manner. Langston jeers that he isn’t referring to “Will Smith” white: a white voice that is still Black, but palatable to a white audience. Langston then demonstrates his “magical” white-voice abilities, and the world of Sorry to Bother You begins to truly open up. Cassius discovers and harnesses his “white voice” to work his way up the ladder, eventually becoming a wealthy Power Caller at RegalView.
What Langston showed Cassius was a lesson in code-switching. Code-switching refers to the ability to adapt to multiple environments as a minority — to be a cultural chameleon. In an interview about the film, cast-member Terry Crews described a component of the Black experience is the ability to be bi-lingual: to “speak” like a Black person and a White person. Cassius is required to change his voice to find any success as a professional telemarketer, reflecting the way society views people of color, all the way down to dialect, voice, and inflection.
In the film, the magical white voice that Cassius, Langston, and Omari Hardwick’s character, Mr. _____, put on is literally an audio overdub of white actors’ voices. Boots Riley’s innovative, yet simplistic portrayal of the white voice portrays just how absurd having to “talk white” is. The white voice as shown in Sorry to Bother You is no different than minorities feeling the need to wear certain hairstyles or change their preferred name in order to acquiesce to dominant society. Even the film’s star once went by “Keith Stanfield” instead of Lakeith to have a more “resume-ready” name.
Boots Riley, with help from his production team and the excellent Lakeith Stanfield-led cast serves up an important, but not overbearing, commentary on the pervasive societal issue of racism and classism with a side of hilarity and two extra helpings of WTF. Though it’s unlikely to receive any recognition from the Academy, it doesn’t need it.
Sorry to Bother You is one of the best films 2018 had to offer.
Side note: this film lowkey had one of the funniest, yet awfully underrated moments of 2018. Serving as a commentary on how Black culture is appropriated and made out to be a spectacle, Cassius is asked to get up and speak at a lavish company party. His boss, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), hits Cassius with the playful, yet racist as hell micro-aggression almost every Black person over the age of 8 has heard: “I know you can bust a rap.”
With money as his motive and people pleasing as his purpose, Cassius agreed and initially rapped a few bars that the crowd had no interest in. He then opted to repetitiously chant “N***a s**t, n***a s**t, n***a n***a n***a s**t!” and the crowd went wild. I could not stop laughing.
Perception is Reality. P // R is a cultural publication that seeks dismantle misconceptions surrounding the perception of black creators, and present some real people, really being real, for real.
— Ave.
