(Watch Sorry to Bother You before reading this.)
Someone on Twitter not too long ago drew a disparaging point of comparison between modern comedies and the classic cut-ups of yesteryear. The gist of the complaint was that while Keaton, Chaplin, and their peers came to fame playing working men, with the plots of their films often being instigated by the eternal hunt for the extra buck, modern comedies like your Hangovers and Horrible Bosseses and so on exclusively revolve around wealthy (usually white) people with lifestyles and lives that come nowhere close to capturing how many people in America actually live right now (I can’t find the tweet now so unfortunately I can’t give credit where it’s due, but if you know send it my way so I can). Everyone owns nice houses in the suburbs and drives the latest cars and has the newest appliances. No one’s operating under debt, no one ever thinks anything of splurging on thousands of dollars for a week or more off gallivanting around on whatever mayhem makes up the plot of the movie, and no one ever seems to have a problem ducking work whenever they see fit. These are movies by rich people, about rich people, but always with an insultingly thin proletarian layer rubbed on top like a lick-and-stick tattoo.
Sure, characters in movies and TV shows will often complain about being broke or having to work, but the realities they portray are ones in which every single person has a bottomless bank account and can walk away from virtually any problem scot free. How many times in a movie or sitcom have you seen someone lament how broke they are while lounging around a 1000 square foot apartment in the middle of a major metropolitan city they apparently pay for as a waitress.
It speaks to an industry that knows it needs to make product that is relatable to regular, working class people, but that has no idea how such people actually live. I look at a movie like this year’s terrific Game Night, and for as excellent as the film is, it’s also presenting an adult world that I, as a 28-year old, don’t recognize at all, even though the film’s ensemble is skewed towards my age range.
There is a comedy film that came out in 2018 that is an accurate portrayal of what it feels like to be an adult in this day, a movie feels of a piece with the classical ‘everyman’ comedies of yesteryear. That movie is Sorry to Bother You.
Yes, the one with the equisapiens, that one.
Boots Riley’s electric debut film may be a pointedly exaggerated satire with a pop art visual style and ease with absurdity that eventually accelerates into out-and-out science fiction and magical realism, but for all that Sorry to Bother You is a funhouse mirror caricature of our world, it still manages to feel deeply plugged into the actual trials and tribulations, into the actual way it feels to be alive and plugged in, of what is going on in the world right now.
Just a quick aside: Sorry to Bother You also has a lot going on besides this, including deep-tissue commentary on class, capitalism, racial identity, the media, plus all the stuff with equisapiens (remember those guys? That was wild), but I’m going to leave those on the backburner for the moment and let other, smarter writers dig in.
Sorry to Bother You depicts adults in their twenties and thirties who are educated and engaged and genuinely trying to do the proverbial “do something” with their lives. In the version of this movie made in the ‘90s, our hero Cassius “Cash” Green (Lakeith Stanfield) probably would have been portrayed as a Clerksian slacker who gets dragged off the couch to prove himself to a girl or something. But the Cassius of 2018 is already up-and-at-‘em as the movie starts, desperately hustling to try and get any kind of job. And that’s the case with most of the characters that surround him, including his girlfriend Bianca (Tessa Thompson), friend Salvador (Jermaine Fowler), and co-worker Squeeze (Steven Yuen). Everyone is hustling, everyone is trying, and everyone is struggling to strike a balance between being able to pay their rent while still finding time and resources to pursue the things they care about, be it a good time out, or changing the oppressive workplace, or investing in personal projects. That last one strikes me the hardest, as it’s reflective of not only myself but many, if not most, of the people I interact with online and in life. Everyone has something they’re chasing or trying to build, be it a website or a podcast or something else entirely, but passion often has to be tempered by the realities of paying bills and keeping a roof over your own head.
But it’s not just economic pressures that Sorry to Bother You depicts with bullseye accuracy, even as it’s pitched at a frequency that closer resembles a live action Adult Swim cartoon rather than, I don’t know, Blue Collar or something. It’s this whole insane era, where a wrinkled orange turd sits in the White House tweeting out his advancing dementia, and angry people set their Nike shoes on fire, sometimes while still wearing them, in protest of another guy having protested (with non-fire means), and every day plays like the third act of an overwrought political thriller, a disaster movie, and, well, an absurdist satirical comedy, all rolled into one blob of insanity and fed to you second by second by algorithm-driven social media.
When astronomers observed gravitational waves they said could theoretically wipe out the earth, a lot of people’s reaction was to shrug and say, “Bring it on.” I roll at eyes at any white person loudly opining that this is the worst era in human history, or even just the worst era of American history (seeing as we’ve got a couple genocides under our collective belt), but it certainly seems like it has to be the most exhausting.
That exhaustion is part of Sorry to Bother You as well, baked in alongside the class commentary. Riley packs his frame with so much detail and so much incident that it would be impossible to absorb it all in one go. From Tessa Thompson’s constantly shifting wardrobe to every detail of Armie Hammer’s house to the film’s entire shotgun-blast approach to tackling any and everything that Riley wants to address, Sorry to Bother You is an exhaustive film about being exhausted, a surreal film about being alive during a surreal time, and an overwhelming film about a man who is overwhelmed.
That feeling of being overwhelmed is I think the diamond kernel beneath the excesses and scatter of Sorry to Bother You. In one of the film’s first scenes, Cassius admits to Bianca that he struggles to find meaning in his day-to-day struggles given his knowledge that one day, millions and billions of years away but still, the sun will go supernova and wipe everything out. If everything is doomed to be erased, then what’s the point of doing anything? Bianca chides Cassius for these concerns, but they obviously linger with Cassius over the course of the film, driving him in his “fuck you, I got mine” attitude towards his co-workers as he progresses up the corporate ladder.
The film returns to this conversation in one of its final scenes, as Cassius and Bianca reunite and return to their original, humble abode. Cassius himself laughs off his earlier concerns even though things are still just as crazy, overwhelming, and potentially, probably doomed as they were at the start. But what Sorry to Bother You articulates through the journey Cassius goes on is that while maybe things themselves don’t have an inherent meaning, people do. And it’s in the bonds we form with people that we can find things to care about and treasure as we inhabit this insane rock revolving around a sun.
Sorry to Bother You is a film formed by and about a delirious time in human history, but for those audience members who see in the film’s characters their own horror and frustration and intermittent hopelessness, it offers not only laughter but an honest sense of both hope and recognition.
“Yeah, everything is fucked up,” the film seems to say. “Come on, let’s go see if we can’t make it a little bit better.”