This post will not be about that huge horse-like cock that appears in the excellent film Sorry to Bother You. I will indeed ignore it (for now) and turn your attention to that floating apartment in the middle of the movie. I will not explain the posh apartment’s function in the plot or how it ends up in the center of Oakland, which is now gentrified because San Francisco is the most expensive city in the US. But this post, which promises to be brief and not to refer to critical theory of any kind, will explain what it is that makes this apartment float.
Now, recall how the former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis, described the science fiction film The Matrix as a documentary about the actual state of things in the 1990s (the ideological peak of neoliberalism, globalization routinely advertised as nirvana, the Great Moderation, etc.). Well, Boots Riley’s surrealist film about a black worker who gets a job at a telemarketing company and soon rises to the top of this firm because he can magically talk like a standard American white man is also a documentary. It’s about our post-Long Recession moment, a time when trillions of public dollars are pumped into stock markets (to keep them afloat), first by quantitative easing and then by deep corporate tax cuts.
It’s also a time when houses are financial assets that are super-inflated. The whole population of the present period has lost complete contact with anything that looks remotely like economic reality. No one is anywhere near the ground. Everyone, poor and rich, are in the air and suspended there. The poor want to go down but the rich keep them high and groundless and penniless. Seattle now has floating slums (RVs).
And now for why you should keep Mayor Jenny Durkan’s new Innovation Advisory Council in your mind when you watch Sorry to Bother You this weekend.
Seattle mayor, unsure how cities work, seeks magical solutions from local wizarding community. https://t.co/XXBV5A03jA
— Queen Anne Greenways (@QAGreenways) August 2, 2018
It takes Durkan’s Innovation Advisory Council—a team of tech industry leaders who will “develop solutions to some of the city’s greatest challenges,” including “homelessness and traffic”—to realize that Sorry to Bother You is really, really, really a documentary.
This Innovation Advisory Council, which has “commitments” from “Amazon, Artefact Group, Expedia Group, Flying Fish Partners, Microsoft, Tableau, WTIA and Zillow Group” could easily be inserted into the floating world of Sorry to Bother You without a single change. This is why the film is a documentary. Think about it when you leave the theater: How far is her Innovation Advisory Council from Riley’s fictional corporation WorryFree? There is no such thing as a company that just does everything it can to make its employees happy as happy can be; that has, as its final goal, the welfare of its workers. You know this. You also know there is no high-tech fixes for obvious social problems like poverty (simple solution: more taxes on the rich) or bad traffic (simple solution: a major reduction in the number of citizens in cars, the most inefficient mode of transportation).
But what we do is float and bang into each other like objects in zero-gravity. This is the apartment in Sorry to Bother You. It also Durkan’s Innovation Advisory Council.
