Sorry to Bother You
Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You is the most important work of American Marxist cinema since Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer. The films have much in common. In Sleep Dealer, Mexican workers in the United States occupy en-soul machines, and this en-soulment resolves one of the GOP's defining issues: stateless labor. The labor market needs it, but the party’s white base hates any color that is not like its own. With en-soulment, brown Americans still supply their labor to the US economy, but without the physical presence of their brown bodies. They enter a factory in a Mexican city, plug their bodies into the global labor network, and remotely operate machines located in the United States. Sorry to Bother You also has a future concept of labor. It concerns WorryFree, a corporation that, like Uber, claims to be reinventing work, but is in fact extracting almost absolute surplus labor from workers. The film also has an image of a huge horse-like cock.
by Charles Mudede