Subterranean: ‘Sorry to Bother You’ vs. corporate greed

Review of Sorry to Bother You

**** out of five stars

Currently showing at Celebration! Cinemas and

by Walter G. Tarrow

More than a year ago, in May 2017, I submitted my second movie review for townbroadcast.com It was a review of Get Out, the horror comedy about a young black man seduced into, trapped in, then escaping from, a fantastical nightmare world of modern day white privilege, and slavery in the extreme (a literal complete physical takeover by the slave master). This freshman feature from comedy writer and actor Jordan Peele went on to garner numerous awards including an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Now we have Sorry to Bother You, another black man’s view of White America. Whereas in Get Out, the “villains” were a group of country club cultish upper-class whites with a handful of African Americans as their victims, in Sorry, the bad people are privileged whites blended with a smattering of minorities. Mixing is good and encouraged provided the benefactors are the global corporate military industrial complex and the ultra-rich. And a clear path to the riches of the American Dream is presented to those, regardless of color, who are willing to pay the moral price, adopt the soulless bankruptcy of winning no matter the cost and selling out your friends, your family, your people.

Those in the corporate see no black, brown, yellow or white, but only green. And the ultimate green solution (it just occurred to me that the Charlton Heston minor classic Soylent Green has a similar central theme to Sorry but its resolution is to the problem of feeding an overpopulated world not monetizing labor) is to create not only an economically enslaved work force but to engineer that labor force into beasts of burden carried to an absurd extreme.

In an alternate Oakland, California, Cassius “Cash” Green (yep, there’s that color again) as played by Lakeith Stanfield (Get Out, Atlanta) is an unemployed black man living in his uncle’s garage with his performance artist girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson). Pressured by his uncle for overdue rent, he gets an entry level job as a telemarketer. He does poorly until his older co-worker Langston (Danny Glover, Lethal Weapon) tells Cash to use his “white” voice.

Once he masters that, Cash is on the express elevator to the top, and comes into direct contact with the man behind it all, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name), motivational speaker and corporate mastermind. And once he’s at the top, Cash has to decide if he will stay true to his friends, including union organizer Squeeze (Steven Yuen, Walking Dead) leading a strike against the telemarketing company, or turn his back on them and drink the Kool-Aid.

There are some cute cinematic tricks like literally “dropping in” to a person’s home when making a telemarketing call, and a painfully mocking sequence at one of his parties where Lift asks Cash to rap.

A bit heavy handed with the symbolism and metaphor (there’s an actual golden elevator door that leads to the top), Sorry lacks the focus, clarity and immediacy of Get Out, and opts instead, in scattershot fashion, to say a little about a lot of things including inequality, bulls**t jobs (I’m reading an excellent book by that name by David Graeber), organized labor, corporate greed, performance art, protest and rebellion. Whereas Get Out got its message out while in the theater, Sorry asks for contemplation after viewing, discussion and perhaps a rewatch or two to get its varied points across.

A simple moment in the movie encapsulated for me how I might understand the Black Experience a little better. Lift says to Cash, “this is your opportunity. Don’t f**k it up.” How often do we expect a black man to “f**k it up?”

Sorry to bother you, but I bet a helluva lot more than we do with white people.