"sorry to bother you" -- a critique of capitalism but not more



Original prompt: Use 3-6 authors or media from our semester to discuss ONE of the films we watched together [Sorry to Bother You, Jupiter Ascending, or Sleep Dealer] - your essay should not exceed 700 words (10 points)

“Sorry to bother you” depicts the dependency of capitalist success on the exploitation of laborers, including continual allusions to racial exploitation and the role that white supremacy plays in blunting worker solidarity by providing white workers a “psychological wage.”

Taylor writes that most Americans experience the “widespread alienation of low-wage and meaningless work, unaffordable rents, suffocating debt, and poverty.” (1) Sorry to bother you depicts this alienation in a gradation from the everyday to the extreme. The opening minutes are relatable: high school moot court, a 9-to-5 job in a cubicle in a large corporate building, managerial imperatives to “stick to the script,” and dismissed questions about whether pay will increase.

The film’s critical intervention is to attack Cash’s idea that “my success is not affecting y’all,” and that he can “root from the sidelines” as a Power Caller. Cash is not without his reasons for having this belief: Cash’s professional success as a “power caller” keeps himself and his uncle housed. But the film makes clear that Cash’s success is not benevolent, but directly dependent on the exploitation of vulnerable workers. Regalview’s biggest client is WorryFree, a company that sells the labor of people who sign away their lives to work, eat and sleep in their workplace. The company’s model can be understood as gaining profit through the enclosure of living and eating spaces, heightening the exploitation of workers by further divorcing them from their products and means of production (2). As a power caller, Cash calls SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son (in the original script [3] — names and companies minorly changed in the final film), pitching a WorryFree contract for phone assembly. “With our focused work force, we’ll get your phones assembled twice as fast at half the cost [of Chinese workers]. You can double your market share over [Motorola],” he tells Son. Cash’s friends repeatedly point out to him that he selling “slavery.” This class’s readings articulate that the logic behind chattel slavery and wage slavery is indeed the same: “The slave owner was…continually forced to find his profit not in the high price of cotton and sugar, but in beating even further down the cost of his slave labor,” Du Bois writes (4), and Taylor: “there are 400 American billionaires because there are 45 million people living in poverty.” (5) The film makes clear that Son’s success, and the success of capitalist companies in general, is dependent on continually increasing the exploitation of workers to keep up with competitors. Equisapiens are also an illustration of this logic: with WorryFree’s workers already approaching maximum exploitation, the creation of equisapiens was necessary for WorryFree to expand and keep up with competition. The equisapiens do not represent the corruption of a successful business: they are the natural and necessary progression of the very logic that drove that business’, and all business’, success in the first place. Cash’s journey is one of realizing that his own success comes out of the very same capitalist logic: his salary keeps his uncle from becoming a WorryFree worker, but that salary comes from securing huge amounts of those very same WorryFree contracts — or from keeping equisapiens in line, the demand that finally strikes his realization.

The film’s presentation of the “white voice” further alludes to the way that race is used to disrupt dissent against capitalism. The white voice isn’t real, Langston says, but is what white people “think they’re supposed to sound like…like your bills are paid and you’re happy about your future.” The white voice is a manifestation of the perception of white people as “an undifferentiated mass with a common experience of privilege, access, and unfettered social mobility,” as Taylor writes, the political effect of which is to “[obscure] the class antagonism among whites.” In other words, the acceptance of the fantasy of the “white voice” is a “psychological wage” (6) that placates white workers, even as they experience exploitation from the same logic as workers of color.

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Extra that’s on my mind but didn’t fit into the main discussion above (related discussion in my MS148 final):

“Sorry to bother you” offers an explicit critique of capitalism, but fails to present a meaningful alternative to undermine it. Despite depicting the ideological realism that prevents direct critiques from driving systemic change (the protester throwing a soda can at Cash, Cash attempting to raise concern over equisapiens), the film itself limits itself to the very same kind of critique, opening up space for but not pushing into that space new possibilities for organizing society. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” writes Mark Fischer in Capitalist Realism, crediting the quote to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Zizek — in the case of Sorry to Bother You, it is easier to imagine the normalization of genetically engineered horse-people and an accomplished organizer rambling about chlamydia at the climax of a major action than it is to imagine the realistic organization of a union.

The closest this film comes to depicting a genuine alternative is Cash’s transformation into an equisapien and his storming of the WorryFree CEO’s house at the end of the film, evoking historical materialist ideas that, at a sufficient point of exploitation, the working class will spontaneously rise up and the structure of capitalism will no longer be sustainable. But this is the last scene of the entire film, more of a comedic gag and spectacle of vengeance than a suggestion that lasting change beyond trade-unionism will actually occur.

This critique is more than a pedantic theoretical one: cultural critiques have flocked to laud the film for its depictions of the problems of capitalism — strengthening the very ideological dialogue that sustains capitalist realism and taking away room for imagining alternatives. The film’s shortcomings illustrate once again Benjamin’s point that “[t]o see things as they really are, you must imagine them for what they might be.” (7)

Sources:

1. Taylor 194
2. Marx 714
3. https://thescriptlab.com/wp-content/uploads/scripts/Sorry-to-Bother-You.pdf
4. Du Bois 8
5. Taylor 194
6. Du Bois 626
7. Benjamin, “Retooling Solidarity”, 127