The home has gone into foreclosure, and unless Cash can earn enough money, he and his uncle will be evicted. Initially jobless, Cash lives in his uncle Sergio’s garage. In “Sorry to Bother You,” Detroit works as a sign twirler. Such conditions for Black Californians have resulted in the re-gentrification of California’s coastal cities as Black workers and the Black poor are pushed further inland. Simply put, as formerly incarcerated shipyard worker turned author Chester Himes showed in his 1945 novel, “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” the California Dream is a nightmare for African Americans. Black wages there are on par with the national trend, while the income of a white family in the Bay Area is twice the national norm. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the setting for “Sorry to Bother You,” the median income of white households commonly exceeds $110,000, while those of Black households barely exceed $40,000. Instead, the millenials Cash and Detroit struggle with the alienation of unemployment, underemployment and meaningless labor. There are no acts of extreme fratricidal violence, nor is Black life defined by exceptional moments of police terror, though these incidents exist in the film. Like the vastly different films of a generation earlier, such as “Boyz n the Hood” and “Menace II Society,” or the historical drama “Fruitvale Station,” Riley’s film in many ways captures the particular contradictions of Black life in California. “Sorry to Bother You” explores the life of Black youth in the postindustrial cities of the U.S. “Sorry to Bother You” is best placed in the tradition of Black revolutionary cultural work, including the late Amiri Baraka’s Afro-surrealism, the late Aimé Césaire’s poetic knowledge and radical scholar Robin Kelley’s freedom dreaming. In this sense, the 1999 comedy “Office Space” is an absurdist film. Absurdist works of art are defined by their focus on the inability of their main characters to find purpose in life. Some critics have described the film as an absurdist dark comedy. Sharing its name with the concurrently written 2012 Coup album, “Sorry to Bother You” stars LaKeith Stanfield from “Get Out” and “Atlanta” as the protagonist, Cassius “Cash” Green, and Tessa Thompson from the motion picture “Dear White People” and “Selma” as Cash’s girlfriend Detroit.ĭistinguishing itself from the horror film “Get Out” and the Afro-futurist “Black Panther,” “Sorry to Bother You” is the result of the revolutionary communist worldview of Riley, whose activism preceded his career as a cultural worker. A surprising blockbuster film of this summer is “Sorry to Bother You” by Boots Riley of the Oakland-based rap group The Coup.
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