In this, Riley gives us one of the year’s sharpest pieces of political art. It’s a perverse critique of human capital-the gig economy, mass incarceration, and an underpaid workforce collapsed into one sinister illustration-and an existence that doesn’t feel too far from what one possible future holds in false utopias like Silicon Valley. Individuals who sign up live in prison-like accommodations, eat scraps, and work as indentured servants for the rest of their lives. WorryFree, however, is anything but paradise. Its deranged visionary of a CEO, the bro-y, coked-out Steve Lift (a role Hammer was destined to play) offers people lifetime employment, housing, and food in exchange for non-stop labor. Riley’s gonzo dystopia begins to unfurl in greater detail once Cassius settles in on the executive level, where he sells slave labor “over the phone.” RegalView, as it turns out, is part of a larger corporation called WorryFree Solutions. (According to one of her t-shirts: “The future is female ejaculation.”) “I’m just helping folks fix it.” But it’s too late for Cassius intoxicated by the taste of success, he refuses to join their cause, even as his artist girlfriend, Detroit (a radically enchanting Thompson), finds his new situation at odds with her own beliefs. “Trouble’s already here,” Squeeze (Steven Yeun), the lead organizer, says at one point. The tsuris surrounding Cassius worsens as coworkers form a union and threaten RegalView brass with a strike. For black people, in particular, success has its own fine print. These are questions of survival Riley is volleying at us-what, exactly, are you willing to give up for the American Dream? Your friends? Your principles? For someone like Cassius, there are always conditions to Making It. Cassius is wedged between doing what is right and what is profitable one reason he took the job in the first place was to help his uncle save his home, which was in foreclosure. He becomes the company’s top salesman, earning the title of “Power Caller” and a promotion upstairs, where it’s required he talk in his white voice at all times.īut professional advancement comes with a moral clause. On the advice of a coworker (Danny Glover), Cassius begins to use a “white voice” when speaking with prospective customers-what white people “wished they sounded like,” Glover explains-and its pay-off is immediate as it is hilarious (Cassius's white voice is orated by David Cross). He’s a damaged soul eager for anything other than failure and hardship. The disaffected Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) is hungry to prove himself. At RegalView, a low-level telemarketing firm in Oakland, one path to success presents itself in the form of code-switching. The hunger to succeed personally, and even more so in one’s professional life. In Boots Riley’s trippy new film Sorry to Bother You, hunger is the main throughline.
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