![]() Keeping it all together is Lakeith Stanfield, who has an easygoing way of behaving as if he has been recently, but uncomplainingly, woken from a light nap, even when he has sustained a head injury in mortifying circumstances that have made him a YouTube sensation, even when he is terrified out of his wits. It’s a Swiftian vision of the service industry’s evolutionary future, or perhaps anti-Swiftian. But a bizarre new twist keeps you on the edge of your seat. It is when Cassius goes to the sinister upper floor that things get wacky and strange, and here is where the story could have run out of steam, over-reliant on weirdness. ![]() The call centre has something of The Office, as presented by Ricky Gervais and Steve Carell, particularly in the uptight management figure of Diana DeBauchery (Kate Berlant) who is called on to address the mulish troops. Until the movie takes peculiar narrative left turns – with these theatrical and almost Brechtian effects, and furthermore taking in the crazy worlds of reality TV and social media with their various illusions of customer participation – its comedy is reasonably naturalistic and plain. Tessa Thompson and Lakeith Stanfield in Sorry to Bother You. And even Detroit, when she presents her site-specific performance pieces to an audience, has her Eliza Doolittle moment, finding that she is doing a posh white British voice, dubbed by Lily James. Another power caller, known enigmatically as Mr - (Omari Hardwick) is dubbed by Patton Oswalt. Instead of Stanfield doing an impression, he is dubbed by an actual white actor: David Cross. From a quite different angle, but with equal satiric tactlessness, the white lady in Airplane! (1980) offers to “speak jive” to help the white flight attendant talk to the black passengers.īut the “white voice” is actually more surreal than this. In the globalised world of marketing and direct sales, the imposture of voice is very important, and the illusion of white identity can give black workers a whole new opportunity – not for equality or prosperity, but for cultivating new, speciously reassuring mannerisms of domestic servitude.Ĭomics such as Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and George Lopez have famously had material satirising the “white voice” and its earnest baritone, and how it is not neutral and value-free in the way that white people think it is, but a particular idiomatic style whose foreignness becomes obvious when it is mocked. In its brashness and dystopian stylisations, Sorry to Bother You has obvious similarities to the movie-making of Spike Lee, and specifically his latest picture, BlacKkKlansman, about a black cop who by pretending to be white over the telephone is able to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. Watch the trailer for Sorry to Bother You – video He also has a crisis of loyalty to his call-centre comrades, who are forming a union to fight for decent pay. This he does, and is instantly a mega-selling sensation: all his cloying mannerisms and faux-casual friendliness, which were so awful from a black person, sound great in whitespeak, especially that ingratiatingly insincere declaration in the title.Ĭassius is promoted upstairs to where the “power callers” hang out in workplace luxury, and where Cassius finds out the awful truth about the corporation of which this telesales company is merely a part – and its visionary CEO Steve Lift, played by Armie Hammer. Something in his phone manner deters potential customers until the grizzled old-timer in the booth next to him, played by Danny Glover, tells Cassius to use a “white voice”. ![]() ![]() ![]() His very last chance to earn some money comes when he gets a job at a call centre – that 21st-century mix of the factory and the workhouse – wearing his phone headset in his grim little booth, desperately trying to make cold-call sales. Cassius is living in a converted garage and he is broke, which annoys both his rent-starved landlord and his girlfriend, aspiring conceptual artist Detroit (Tessa Thompson). ![]()
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