Posing Questions in Boots Rileyâs Sorry to Bother You
Necessary spoilers below
Boots Rileyâs Sorry to Bother You will likely be compared to Jordan Peeleâs Get Out as the must-see satire/horror story of contemporary (Black) American life this year. Certainly both films have in common, beyond their genre bonafides, rumination on the commodification and labor of Black life and the compromises upwardly-mobile Black men make under White supremacist racial capitalism. Yet whereas Get Out was more invested in the psychic labor Blackness does for Whites and only obliquely alluded to the politics of labor, Sorry to Bother You directly attacks the question of (Black) inequality and labor struggles under racial capitalism. Yet while a politics of labor is what is most immediately attractive about the film, I think ultimately the film shows that the resistance that comes from a labor politics is wholly insufficient for actually challenging racial capitalism, and in this may be directly addressing pertinent questions on the Left.
Drawing on the film criticism ofFrank Wilderson, he argues that power to pose the question is the greatest power of allâ (viiii), and that in the 60âs and 70âs a series of Black filmmakers did precisely that, motivated by the Black Power movement, Watts Rebellion, and Black Liberation Army to directly address the possibilities and costs of Black people on the move towards freedom. Certainly Riley could be seen to be motivated by contemporary concerns in the questions the film poses. Only a couple fantastical twists truly separate his Oakland from the nightmarish caste society of the Bay Area. He also depicts a vibrant political movement of union organizers, black-clad anarchists and DIY-artists, and the requisite police violence and repression they confront. Yet Wilderson also argues that there is a difference between the question of the Workerâalienated by labor yet positioned within civil societyâand the question of the Slave whose exclusion forms the very possibility of the worldâwhile the Slave labors they are fundamentally defined by their openness to gratuitous violence, fungibility, and natal alienation. Where the Worker wants to overthrow capital, the Slave wants to destroy the world itself, and it is only the âruse of analogyâ that depicts the question of the Slave as the same as the question of the Worker.
So despite Cassiusâs presence as a Black man, alongside other Black co-workers, much of the film poses the question of the Worker. Cassius is forced to sell his labor to survive, he feels alienated from any potential life possibilitiesâsee his constant concerns about who will remember himâand survival under capitalism forces him to become estranged from his loves ones and culture, to adopt the eponymous White Voice that sells access and power to the world. Then there is the mega-company and capitalist villain of the movie WorryFree, who force workers into lifetime contracts in return for food and shelter. Within the movie itself this is critiqued as a return to slavery, yet curiously most of the workers depicted are White. We should also remember from Wilderson that  while the Slave performs labor they are not defined by it. Slavery itself was not a contract but pure violence and extraction. It is also striking that we see repeated signs that complete families can join WorryFree, as it at least points to the maintenance of a family structure under extreme labor exploitation that was not true of slavery. So while WorryFree is the satirical endgame of the Workerâs alienation and exploitation under capitalism, it is not the same as being a Slave.
Why does this matter politically? Because within the film a politics of labor organized around the Worker ultimately appears wholly inadequate to the problem of racial capitalism. The organizer Squeeze attempts to form a union at Cassiusâs telemarketing company Regal Wave, and the conflict of the film initially comes from Cassius being a scab and betraying his fellow workers. Yet there is never a culmination to this union plot line: we do not see the moment of victory, one of the activists who strikes Cassius with a soda can sells out to get her own TV endorsements, and at the (pseudo) end of the film Cassius plans to go back to work at the company. The character who would be the viewerâs locus of Leftist identification, the Asian-American Squeeze, appears competent but equally as interested in his sexual pursuit of Detroit than meaningfully challenging capital. There are repeated scenes of workers striking outside the premise, but they appear cyclical, another example of labor spinning its wheels without purpose or catalyst to a qualitatively different stage of struggle.
This is where the twist of the film occurs (one I was not prepared for at all) and swerves towards the position of the Slave and the radicality borne from the question of the Slave. WorryFree is literally turning humans into horse-humans, or equi-sapians, to replace its own workforce with the promise of being stronger, more productive, and more obedient. While again equi-sapians are made for the purpose of labor, that is not how they are defined for the viewer. Their being is open to gratuitous violence, as we first see one screaming in pain and begging for help, they are fungible in that they cross the threshold of both the Human and Blackness, and there is an implied degree of natal alienation or at least exaggerated and aberrant sexuality (through the jock of the benefits of having a horse penis). Yet where the equi-sapians appear as victims initially, in the climax of the film they appear as themselves the subjects of politics through the only action that could be meaningfully possible, the rejection and destruction of racial capitalism. As the strikers attempt to keep out the scabs, only to be violently beaten down by the police, it is the equi-sapiansâfreed by a changed-of-heart Cassiusâwho appear to fight off the police with their enhanced strength. Not a workers strike but the specter of a Slave revolt is what appears as a decisive blow against capital. While the scene ends with a declaration of solidarity between the workings and the equi-sapians, there is a striking difference of capacity between them.
This is reinforced through the bait-and-switch ending. Cassius, who initially appeared to have harmlessly snorted coke, did actually take the equi-sapian drug and begins to transform. The film cuts off here and goes to credits, yet cuts again to WorryFree CEO Steve Liftâs house, where the newly equi-sapian Cassius appears leading an army(?) of his fellow equi-sapians to invade the house, where the film then cuts to credits without showing the implied violence against the CEO after his door is broken down. Perhaps they do find a cure, or perhaps they merely kill the CEO. Yet whereas the Regal Wave strike stayed at the workplace and was ineffectual until the appearance of the equi-sapians, it is the equi-sapians who charge directly into the lair of capital, as embodied by the CEO.
I find another similarity here to the climax of Get Out, where the main character must also violently confront his White captors and literally kill them. Both films tarry with depicting Fanonian violence of overcoming White supremacist racial capitalism. This is not a gratuitous violence, as critics of Fanon often allege he endorsed, but simply the reversal of the violence imposed on the main characters. As oppression is maintained by the pure force of violence, its inversion is necessarily a violent upheaval. I donât think its a coincidence that the revolt of the equi-sapians raises both the specter of the Slave revoltâas the creation of âcomplete disorderâ as Fanon and Wilderson puts itâand of a revolt against the Human itself, as the originary differentiation that separates (White) Man from his others and opens the zone of fungibility that the Slave occupies. In some ways the equi-sapians are more Black than the actual Black characters we see on the screen, as both open to the gratuitous violence of the Slave but also enacting a gratuitous freedom that is more often associated with the eruption of Blackness on screen, as in 70âs films such as Bush Mama or The Spook Who Came in from the Cold, depictions of Black revolutionaries in movement.
This is all to say that while it is easy to see an insightful critique of contemporary capitalism in the film and a rumination on struggle against itâas prominent these days from post-Occupy activists to the DSA and Sandernistasâthe question of the Worker is not what actually motivates radical change. It is the question of the Slave and the ensemble of gratuitous violence, gratuitous freedom, and complete disorder that portray the briefest glimmer of revolutionary change. It is the question not of anti-capitalism but of anti-Blackness and the end of the world.
A last note, certainly compared to Get Outâs well-oiled machine of cringe comedy and suspenseful horror, Riley has made a much more uneven film. The satire ranges from directly on the nose to overly broad, the romantic story between Cassius and Detroit mostly does not actually develop or change, and is used to reflect more on Cassiusâs developments than Detroit. Detroitâs plot line is a satire of the art world that feels done before (though also a sign that Detroit has less room to critique Cassius than she admits). While certainly the Bechdel test is not the end all/be all of ethical film criticism, it is noticeable that the film fails it. A stinging, genre-infused satire for Black women remains to be made.




















