A Few Ideas on Sorry To Bother You

This isn't a full blog post but a series of small ones about individual points of directorial decision in STBY. Here goes:

Racial Makeup of WorryFree: We know WorryFree's advertisements and "tours" don't give the full story. Every ad they had (minus one or two, maybe?) featured smiling white people, not black people given no choice. Despite their claims of being a choice, WorryFree really ends up being a last resort. (Anyone with plural brain cells kind of realizes that they'd rather live freely if given the option.) Cassius' uncle is a perfect example: going bankrupt leaves him limited options, and he would choose WorryFree over jail or homelessness. In this way, WorryFree is likely a blacker institution, as African-Americans are statistically far poorer than other races. But of course, the advertising doesn't paint itself as a last resort, so it shows off white people who chose to be there.

Activator as cocaine: We discussed this briefly in class, and it reminds me a lot of a scene in the music video for Public Enemy's Night Of The Living Baseheads. In the scene (2:19, but also check out the rest of the video because it's great) the reporter looking for "baseheads" (that is, crackheads, people addicted to crack) bursts into a wall street office and finds well-dressed white executives doing lines of cocaine. In a sense, these people are the same as the crack-afflicted "baseheads" in black communities. The only difference is the form of the cocaine. As for why it's in a spiral, or why Lift snorts a line two or three feet long: I think those are just one-off gags for cartoonish effect. This movie has a lot of those. I wonder how the WorryFree people are given the cocaine? I feel like I would be suspicious if I was in this forced commune and was offered cocaine. I worry about the internal systems of WorryFree in general though.

Why Horses? and are all the horse people black? We had a very limited pool of horse-people to choose from, but several were black. And with Riley's political commentary throughout this movie, it makes sense that they would be. A few details lend themselves to this theory: First, as Mitchell said, capital gain has been made off the backs of black men for a very long time. You could also say that capital gain has been made off the backs of horses for a very long time. You could also say that black men have been worked like horses to create capital gain for a long time. The connection makes sense. Another thing: black men have been stereotyped to be bigger and stronger than white men. Horses are strong animals. It also makes sense to turn your workers into the strongest animal possible. As for the horse-people we met, there's a higher possibility they were black simply due to the fact that more people at WorryFree are black (see my first paragraph). It's implied that many of them are black due to the fact that Cassius (a black man) is chosen to be their "Martin Luther King Jr," another black man. Why couldn't he be their Ghandi, or their Emma Goldman (besides the fact that MLK is the most recent, popular example of nonviolent peace leader for oppressed group)?

The VIP Room: Remember near the beginning of the movie when Cassius sees the VIP room in the bar, Salvatore tells him the password (which he knows for some reason), and he goes in only to be elbowed and splashed and not enjoy it at all? Yeah, I still don't know what that was about. Maybe "people not at the top get pushed around in areas of prestige"? Maybe a quasi-dream sequence representing his anxiety about his low-paying position? That's a big question I still have about this movie. Also Squeeze. What's Squeeze's deal??