Review of Sorry to Bother You (2018) by Jake C — 06 Aug 2018

To the chagrin of its critics-who seem to think that (some sort of idealized) politics-writ-large requires the seriousness of realism, whatever the utter ridiculousness and absurdity of our actual social era-this is truly a sui generis work of equal parts anger and hope, a magic realist embodiement of Marx's famous witticism that history occurs "first as tragedy, then as farce." In his brilliant debut, rapper-cum-director Boots Riley exposes the tragedy of our political moment, the exploitation of the American workforce and the double consciousness demanded by racist institutions, by making a farce of late capitalism, mocking the vulgarity of the wealthy with the bawdy strokes of broad comedy. If it seems unfocused, it's because our era is so widely awful as to need a scattershot sort of satire; if it seems weird, it's because this moment in our history is itself run through with unstable contradictions; if it seems manic, it's because the movie merely is responding to and reflecting manic times.

"Sorry to Bother You" is not just meaninglessly repeated catchphrase of telemarketers at the end of their rope, as alienated from their work as they are from the prey on the other end of the line. Beyond that, it is also a call to wake up from the peaceful, easy false consciousness of capitalist ideology (hence the tagline, "Destiny is Calling," which recalls the hopeful determinism of historical materialism). It is a call to cast aside the unreal excess and benefits afforded to the small portion of winners under capitalism-invariably white sociopaths, willing to overlook the suffering of the masses that they themselves cause-and to take up and link arms instead with the proletariat.

Because the film functions like a wake up call for the sleeping giant of the general populace, it inherently will make its viewers uneasy: There is no option to simply sit back and relax and watch the events on screen unfold, for the movie demands action of you, implicating every viewer either in a system of oppression or a movement of revolt-where do you stand? how will you answer this call? This is part of what makes the film so difficult to classify, what makes its postmodern genre of strange magic realist satire hard to digest for some critics. At every stage, "Sorry to Bother You" resists Hollywood's standard humanist tropes and narrative structure, refusing to make compromises with the familiar filmic fantasy of happy endings for messianic heroes. It is that rarest of birds, a work of art that bastardizes and weaponizes the aestheticization of politics, turning the tools of fascists and neoliberals against their own power structures.