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Art can end up answering questions or asking questions. . . . Most movies have messages that are in lock step with the status quo. . . . Culture enables people to see possibilities in themselves and what they can do. . . . Something being awarded or praised for being anti-capitalist should have the intention of taking down capitalism.
-BOOTS RILEY1
Boots Rileys artistic practice constitutes a mode of engagement that spans and coheres his labors as a community organizer, vocalist rapper, songwriter, screenwriter, and producer. And now, too, as filmmaker of Sorry to Bother You (2018), what Robert K. Beshara describes as a dystopian satire,2 a kind of fantastical imagining that in the American specificity the representation of absurdity, humanity is ever more debased and compromised yet committed to a historical project of world-making. It is a project of survival, Riley asserts, in which the protagonists work together to change how we survive . . . how we are most free to live if people democratically control the wealth that they create with their labor.
Rileys long history of political engagement and remarkable musical, and now even cinematic, accomplishments points to the convergence of art and politics that distinguish him as an intellectual engagé who deploys art in the service of social causes that he believes in. Indeed, Riley personifies what Antonio Gramsci coined an organic intellectual, a term describing someone who represents the subaltern from which they are bounded to and identify with as a social class or group. In this emancipatory endeavor, the central obstacle, Riley contends, is people thinking that we cannot do anything about the way the world is.
Two central and relational precepts inform Rileys stance and cinematic practice: First, that culture can enable people to imagine possibilities and see possibilities in themselves and what they can do; and second, the historical necessity of culture "to get people ready" and its limitations in that absent a "movement around material issues," culture is largely symbolic.3
By design, Sorry to Bother You challenges audiences to interrogate these precepts in counterpoint to the dehumanizing, systemic, and relentless pursuit of surplus. While each protagonist in the film is an archetype of sorts, complicit in or a challenge to the status quo, some...