solacekames:

rush-keating:

I think the reason why Sorry to Bother You works in a way movies like Wall Street and Wolf of Wall Street didn’t in the whole “being a rich asshole is bad” message is that it:

– Presents a clear alternative to that message, shows why that alternative is better than being a rich asshole, and gives the protagonist a reason to work toward it that is genuine instead of just hollow moralizing.

– Doesn’t put that much focus on the “lifestyle” of being a rich asshole. There is an orgy scene (CW for that if you’re sex-repulsed btw) but there’s like one tit max from that which isn’t blurred out. Also the cocaine-use is definitely not glamorized. Instead it puts way more focus on the regular everyday characters and what regular everyday people can achieve just by being themselves.

For this reason, I honestly don’t think this movie is that similar to those movies despite the comparisons of it to them.

I don’t think of movies like Wall Street as anti-capitalist at all. They just use capitalism as a backdrop to tell a fairly standard tragic individual-centered story. That backdrop might as well be a crime family or a war—it’s the same kind of static relationship of individual to environment, and the environment never really changes, it just serves as a convenient source for conflict. 

Whereas Sorry to Bother You was squarely anti-capitalist because it centered on individual and collective resistance.

Yeah I dont think those movies are either but it doesn’t stop critics from comparing Sorry to Bother You to those movies. I’m also relieved that, even if Riley was approaching his movie from a socialist angle instead of a capitalist one, he didnt fall back on some of the same tropes used in the above movies because they are tropes. He created something truly unique.

The love interest, Detroit, is an artist who makes a lot of feminist themed things and, despite that, the male characters treat her art with respect and compliment it. The movie does explore the type of compromises she has to make in order to get an audience for her art but she isn’t mocked for being a feminist or an artist. I think, in another movie, she would’ve been turned into a punchline and I’m glad she wasn’t in this one.