Monday, July 16, 2018

Sorry to Bother You

This richly inventive satire may have been 10 years in the making but it speaks trenchantly to our moment.
The title is the telemarketer’s opening gambit, but it also works as a pseudo-apology to the film viewer for interrupting his entertainment-time with a rude awakening to our harsh social reality. The profit-uber-alles ethos is propelling us into a fascist state. 
The initial satire targets corporate salesmanship. Management create an illusion of “family” and “team” to harness their commission-only drones to sell delusions of success through unnecessary products like encyclopedias. (There’s an endangered species.) This is a bleak view of our gig economy.
But the telemarketer’s prime customer has a larger humanity to numb. They offer Worry-Free Living, a sweeping assurance policy that will guarantee its clients a life of work, “security,” minimal comfort, in short, an updated version of slavery. Company head Steve Lift carries the promise of improvement in his name. 
Even its glossy commercials reveal the system’s total abandonment of privacy, of individual living. In exchange for guaranteed — i.e., unending — labour the clients enjoy living in rooms full of bunk beds, with drab uniforms and meals of slop provided. This is the no-worry life that can seduce individuals to resign their humanity. The ads don't even try to hide this dehumanizing.
In offering to meet all its workers’ earthly needs, that company seems to promise a kind of socialism. Instead it delivers a tyranny, a total reduction of its workers to a brutish life. Here the film parallels the conversion of the pretence to populism in America and Europe into right-wing fascism.  
Company head Lift takes his dehumanizing one step further. He is using a drug to turn his serfs into equine-sapiens, humans with exploded muscle strength but with the heads of horses. This brutalizing makes human labourers all the more efficient. For a saving grace, they get the horse’s schlong too.  Every cloud….
Our nebbish hero Cassius Green grabs the telemarketing gig as a last resort. His surprising flair gets him promoted to Power Caller, which llifts him to meeting the impressive Steve. Having succeeded as seller, Cassius is now converted to product. Lift offers him $100,000,000 to undergo the horse change and work as the company’s agent in the workers’ union for five years, after which a serum will — hopefully — return him to human normalcy. He gets to keep the schlong.
Instead of accepting Cassius tries to expose Lift’s nefarious scheme. But the company’s spectacular profits valorize even that evil practice. Money talks; who knew? Only by submitting himself to painful abuse and humiliation on TV can Cassius air his scandalous revelation. It falls to the artists to convey the harsh reality which entertainment glosses over.
Hence the political activism of Cassius’s artist girlfreind, Detroit. She swings a sign-company’s advert on a street corner, but her real calling is politically driven art. In addition to her paintings and sculpture, she does a performance piece in which she also maintains dignity in the face of the audience’s (invited) abuse. That anticipates Cassius’s strategy. 
Detroit’s very name evokes the America of economic and racial injustice. In his name Cassius combines the “slave name” of the revolutionary fighter Mohammad Ali with the society’s exclusive hunger for the long green, which also reduces Cassius to Cash. 
The central characters may be black but in the film’s major concern race gives way to class. The traveling labour organizer -- aptly named Squeeze -- is Chinese. This struggle is not black vs white but Haves vs Haven’ts. 
In their speech style Cassius and Detroit have left behind their street-smart. They speak white like Will Smith. But Cassius’s sales success lies in his affecting an even whiter tone, the voice of the Privileged/Confident/Carefree. That’s economic not racial. That class voice sells and makes him a huge success—only to doom him to fulfill his user’s baser intentions. Cassius’s success not only pulls him away from his striking colleagues but dooms him to his boss’s designs. 
This dystopian Oakland satires sends a clear message. Voters of the West unite. You have nothing to lose but a dehumanizing tyranny.

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