Sorry to Bother You Movie Analysis Essay Example

Imagine a reality of free healthcare, a stable job, sustainable living, and a built-in social system… a Worry Free lifestyle. In the speculative fiction Sorry to Bother You director and writer Boot Riley evaluates a magical afrocentricity universe in which capitalism reverts back to the necessity of slavery in form of a omnicent megacorporation named Worry Free. The cinematic piece has viewers following Cashus Green, a lower class African American who eventually fines his way moving up the conglomerate chain by finding his talent in telemarketing. Through social commentaries on slavery, capitalism, explotation of the public, and the rooted concepts of black pride. The satirical film Sorry to Bother You (2018) shares the troubles of African Americans based off of a science fiction reality set in Oakland California exploring how reclamation, black liberation, and revisions of the past and future molds the film to be afrofuturistic.

To present an afrofuturism artistic piece such as this film, director Boot Riley, reimagines the future containing megacorperations that explote workers in a failing economic system comparing this fiction possible reality to the faults of slavery in America in the past. This reimagined reality also expands of the ideas of non-western beliefs to speculate about the future. According to black and queer studies professor at Miami of Ohio Stefanie K. Dunning one 

concept that is shown throughout the film is considered, “the Weird as a device to reveal the spectral oddity of white consciousness about blackness The Black Weird, then, should be understood as a critical Reuleaux Triangle that encompasses elements of Afro-surrealism, Afro-Pessimism, and the Weird,” (Dunning). She further compares these themes to Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and even going back to early versions of afrofuturism in cinema such as Space is the Place (1974). These themes commonly found in afrofuturistic films includes the perspective and morality changes of Sorry to Bother You’s main character Cashus (Cash) Green. Cashus finds himself in a position to move up in life but, with the cost of “sucking up” to white people and capitalism. Throughout the movie Cashus enjoys his new lifestyle of success knowing that it involves the enslavement of others. His friends on the other hand, protest his new successes knowing the wrong-doing in it all as well as how it is affecting their lives. After learning the power hungry CEO of Worry Free, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), welcomes Cash to take part in an arrangement to smother work disagreements in knowing that their would be backlash which includes transforming individuals into horse-men which is referred to as Equisapiens, whom he thinks will be an all the more effectively controlled work force. After learning how insane Worry Free and the world in general has become Cash goes back to his friends and as a result stands up for his friends and the necessity for basic human rights. Which alludes to the history of African Americans throughout the United States evolution as a country. This ideology in the movie shows how revisioning of the future follows the patterns of how African Americans have been treated and how creative protesting has been apart of society even in the speculative fiction which is Sorry to Bother You. 

“I tried to change it. I tried to stop it but it's just right in front of their faces. They're turning human beings into monstrosities and nobody gives a —,” (Sorry to Bother You) Cashus says this in pure anger after finding the Equisapians in the film. A theme that is the foundation for afrofuturism is the reclamation of power this being on a world scale, to even the workplace. One example of reclamation from the movie is the protesting of the telemarketing company and the Worry Free corporation. Throughout the movie this is shown to viewers in a science fiction reality including the concepts of technoculture. Technoculture is essential to afrofuturism, the aspect of futuristic technology portrays to audiences the sense of science fiction and magical realism afrofuturisic films show. In Sorry to Bother You technology was also seen in the form of art, especially seen through the love interest’s character Detroit. Detroit is the creative character throughout the movie seen through her politically woke fashion, vandalism, and her own art exhibits that shares “Going Back to Africa” which alludes to non-western beliefs to speculate about the past/future. She also shares the negativity of the new technoculture especially within the telemarketing company. The technology seen throughout the film also is a spectacle of the 21st century problems that African Americans endure. Such as, the drug that is used to turn Worry Free workers into Equisapians. Drugs throughout American history have been a way to suppress black communities throughout the nation. In the film, the idea of turning Worry Free slaves into even more controllable/profitable assets via drugs. This is a direct connection to how drugs were experimented specific minority communities. Furthermore, one can conclude, “The film's references to slavery suggest not that contemporary capitalism is like slavery, but that it is slavery. In this way, Sorry to Bother You disrupts the temporality of the Western discourses of advancement, which want to define racism, bondage, exploitation, and oppression as things of the past. In doing so, Riley simultaneously confronts the notion of linear time, closing the loop between the past and the present (of the film), while eradicating the future,” (Durring). This specificity shares with the audience the struggles of African American’s by forwardly expressing in a fictional reality the real world realities.

Another real world reality Riley brings to light, by using the concept of technoculture and black liberation, is the exploit of the evils of capitalism. Author Paul McGuiness expands on this theme shown throughout the movie by stating, “The panoramic power of cinematic world-building enables representations of the ontologically reified but empirically elusive atmosphere of capitalist realism. Sorry to Bother You, we argue, rearticulates through Afrosurrealism the absurdity of capitalist realism’s whitewashing of its innately racialising violence,” (McGuiness). Violence throughout the film in underplayed and nearly overlooked which connects to the fact that the black community has endured violence that has been ignored for centuries. The director even makes a viral joke out of Cash being hit in the head and bleeding from a coke can which ironically makes him the face of the protest against Worry Free. Cash declines the CEO's proposal to turn into a man-monster, however is fooled into taking the powdered recipe which actually turns people into the Equisapian when he believes he's being offered cocaine. Cash at last uncovered the CEO's real intentions and joins the dissent against the telemarketing company and Worry Free. However, having been offered 100,000,000 dollars to act as Lift's double agent/a leader of the half man half horse population, in the end of the film Cash ends up living out the CEO's wish for the Equisapian people and become their leader but, the kicker is, leading them against the companies (or so viewers are to believe). This leadership position Cash is brought into is another foundation of afrofuturism and the call for black liberation in the afrocentric community of Oakland California. In the ending of the film it leaves the question of “what comes next?” - Cash could be driving a revolution, getting even with the CEO, or trying to find a cure. This closing scene opposes a conclusive, last outlining and is left vague so 'the system' may not set itself up for success or is showing how much more work there needs to be done. According to the director, “The struggle is not finished. It goes to a new level and continues. There is no pause. . . Cassius has become a monster, physically, but now he’s fighting. And that’s the ending: that we’re now involved in the fight” (Martin & Kamara). 

In the 2018 dystopian film Sorry to Bother You, audiences follow Cashus Green as he gets a telemarketing job and finds the commission paid job a dispiriting struggle as a black man selling to predominately white people over the phone. While doing so he has to use his “white voice” to actually become successful - in doing so he finds that he is selling slavery through a company called Worry Free and from their his entire world spirals into chaos and the constant questioning of morality. Using the themes of reasserting the right, black liberation, and revisioning of the past and future, Boot Riley expands this fictional universe into a satirical drama which draws eyes to examine capitalism, African American troubles (like drugs and slavery), and how technoculture plays into society. Afrofuturism is defined as “speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of the twentieth century technoculture—and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future,” (Pratt Insitute Libraries). Based on the thematic choices brought by director and writer of Sorry to Bother You this cinematic piece is considered to be afrofuturism filled with magical realism, afrocentricity, specualtive/science fiction, and using non-western beliefs to speculate about reality.