Let’s Talk About How “Sorry To Bother You” Is My New Favorite Movie
LaKeith Stanfield can take all of my money, your money and Hollywood’s money with his last two years’ performances
LaKeith Stanfield is already firmly planted in social media and pop culture with his meme-ready, carefree black boy behavior and foundational roles in Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Donald Glover’s Atlanta. But it’s one thing to be a quirky sidekick and scene-stealer in a cultural staple like that seminal horror flick, or that noir sitcom. And it’s entirely another to make Hollywood turn its head enough to cast you as lead in a summer flick that will lean mostly on the expectations of your name and star caliber.
Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You — like Peele’s and Glover’s before it — is his master oeuvre. While twenty years of rapping the resistance may have stamped his place in the hearts of hip hop heads, this honest portrait of black paranoia in the workplace, based utterly on the ability to code switch with aplomb, puts him on a new level of artistic execution.
Your mans leveled up.
Which brings to me to my story.
I’m gonna be straight with y’all. I just got fired. There was a pretty way to put that but fuck it. I received payments (basically hush money) to stop working for a major corporation that pushed me to the side once I was no longer useful. And even though most of its employees are black, like any big company, it’s fueled by white leadership and values. The top class of the workforce there was mostly made up of code-switching, collar-wearing, white-woman-sporting men who, for worse, dictated the standard for advancement.
There’s nothing new about that story, no matter what generation you belong to. Often, the only way to climb that ladder is to sound/act/look as white as you possibly can, while never betraying any emotion. Especially, when you’ve been wronged or it’s clear that someone’s used you to drive a dishonest agenda.
From this skewed ethic, we get the phrase: “it’s not personal; it’s business.”
Well, I’d like to pose a different idea. It’s definitely personal when you fuck with my money to protect your reputation, or worse, to smear underlings on your soft-shoe jig to the top. That’s specifically very personal.
When I first saw the trailer for Sorry To Bother You, I knew it would intrigue the black audience for sure. We have all had to kowtow to white standards within the specific framework of our speech and tonality. The dubbed “white voice” appears here on full display where it once peppered countless black comedy routines and minstrel shows. The “joke,” as it were, is that we have to change who we are entirely in order to neutralize the threat. We have to make ourselves look safe for white folks or anyone trying to get close to white money.
In a sense, it’s the hidden section of our résumé that we reveal by showing up to the interview, turning our AAVE down, and turning the nonsense jargon all the way up.
“I’m a self-starter!”
“I’ve matriculated at some of our finest schools!”
“Ugh, I’m a nightmare without my morning coffee.”
“Case of the Mondays, eh Bob?”
And other such fuckery.
These filler phrases (and behaviors) wear on us like nothing else. The method acting of white existence is so constant that it’s tiring and I have trouble thinking of how fucking fatigued they must be doing the shit around each other. It literally sucks and is devoid of emotion. Its banal mantra of “kind regards” and “per your last email”s vacuums the meaning out of words and replaces them with passive-aggression and oneupmanship.
Sorry To Bother You doesn’t just appeal to the black audience and our endless fatigue, though. It’s the first film I’ve seen to elevate and entangle the issues of class and labor disparity within the black-at-work paradigm.
Stanfield’s “Cassius Green” calls out, with his blunt-smoking, suit-wearing trickster routine, the emptiness of success when it’s hinged on full character suicide and disloyalty. Like Sam Greenlee’s Spook Who Sat By The Door, the film uses the protagonist’s presumed sense of morality to continuously spin the narrative out of his control and into the laps of the powerful and corrupt.
On both sides.
You see, no character in this tale stands out as especially righteous or even right. Every role is jockeying for slightly more power, just from different parts of society’s identity spectrum.
I found myself doing the same at the nameless corporation that fired me. I could write a deck, speak with fluency and articulation, tell dirty jokes, rap the latest lyrics, and ultimately, please and appease each identity group I was supposed to belong to.
And it was like walking a tightrope. Depending on the meeting or the rank of the employees I had to impress upon, I rendered a version of myself that made sense for the situation. For the VPs and EVPs and other people who worked hard to be punctuated like that, I fake-laughed, noted their hobbies and dislikes, and spoke tenderly (but truthfully) when I had to deliver unpleasant news or explain poor results. For my cohorts and people who worked for me, I sometimes relaxed in my speech, traded in arguments about the latest Billboard hits or Top 5 lists, but did my best to seem stern when other consequences were at stake.
It’s exhausting and flies in the face of merit. And hard, substantial skill assessment.
“I’m good at things!” I wanted to scream. “Let me be good at those things. That should speak for itself.”
But that naïve idea, which underscores Sorry To Bother You, and many an honest worker tale, cuts against the American labor model. This model doesn’t require anyone to be good at anything. It requires the appearance of nonthreatening, smiling, no-excuse-making droids to simulate hours of labor so that those at the top can feel satisfied that everything’s on the up and up. That we’re experiencing growth Year-Over-Year. That we’re smashing all of our projected margins.
To that, Sorry To Bother You issues a hearty “Nigga please” by breaking the 4th wall that capitalism has erected, and spotlighting the innumerable shortcuts for those in the élite class to keep their boots strapped and gills coked.
But maybe more pertinently, the film shows that there is no escaping one’s own morality, nor the utter sabotage of it that white collar living demands. The hard caste system outlined by your blackness, your education, your wealth focuses its prime efforts on melting the spine of your core beliefs so that you ultimately feel too tired to either sell out or buy in.
You just are. You’re an instrument of a machine. Or you’re a product helping a machine. Or you’re a monitor of a machine. That’s it.
I’ve conceded to this reality.
Lakeith Stanfield’s Cassius Green, like most of us, tries his damndest not to surrender. Though I’ve made my own efforts to speak truth to power, to refute The Man, to bring soul into my work, I’ve accepted that the labor force, as seen by our masters, is a monolith.
It’s meant to question your value, demean your worth, and elevate the dishonest. There are no two ways around it.
Not even if you use your best “white voice.”
