MORAL OF THE MOVIE

Capitalism, like any political system, has its faults. Sorry To Bother You highlights how, in an ultra-capitalist system, anything and everything can be exploited for financial gain with no exceptions. This often leads to people living lucrative and comfortable lives at the expense of others. Nevertheless, as one of the movie’s characters says, “If you get shown a problem, but don’t see a way you can have control over it- you just decide to get used to the problem.” Thus, it is up to us to be conscious of these issues with our current political systems and choose not to get used to them; rather, we should take control over them with the power of democracy.

WHO I THINK WOULD MOST ENJOY THIS MOVIE

This is a film for fans of satirical allegories cut from the same cloth as those of George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm, etc.). Sorry To Bother You, however, is a bit more colorful, explicit, and surreal. So, if that sounds like something that tickles your fancy, then you will definitely make the most of this unique cinematic experience.

ADDITIONAL NOTES/COMMENTARY

The film’s title is reminiscent of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) because Sorry To Bother You does to capitalism what An Inconvenient Truth did to our understanding of human impact on the environment. The title, Sorry To Bother You, is both a reference to the familiar telemarketer line but it is also referring to how our perspective on capitalism will be bothered due to the film’s own reflection of the political/economic system. In essence, we live Given the recent study that found Nike, Adidas, and Apple among others to be linked with forced Uighur labor in factories across China, the anti-capitalist criticisms that are highlighted in this movie remain relevant today. Now, the film takes a very exaggerated approach, as most satires do, but it does so in a very strange yet familiar way. All of the hierarchies and situations in the movie are very recognizable, albeit surreal at times. As such, this is a very poignant film that discusses the faults of the current U.S. political system through surrealism and hyperbolic metaphors. For example, one of the film’s main attention-grabbers is how black telemarketers use their “white voice” (similar to the one in BlacKkKlansman) to get ahead professionally. This is a clear-cut metaphor of how the system is set out to favor people with white skin while people of color can only move up the ranks by assimilating to their white counterparts. There’s so much more that this film covers, but, for the sake of brevity, I’ll leave it up to you to figure out for yourself the film’s countless other critiques against the current U.S. political/economic system.