These are the questions I wish the film would address in Detroit’s interactions with Cash as his life, and his priorities, quickly change. This only leads to more questions: Has Detroit been using a “white voice” longer than Cash? Did she develop hers after he developed his? Is it okay that she uses “white voice” because she only does it occasionally? Is “white voice” only truly insidious when you use it all the time?ĭetroit (Thompson) and Cash (Lakeith Stanfield) are in for a weird ride in Sorry to Bother You (Photo credit: Annapurna Pictures) The film’s art-opening scene is even more confusing because, once Detroit takes the stage to address a crowd of woke gallery attendees, it quickly becomes clear that, like her boyfriend, Detroit also uses a “white voice” (that of British actress Lily James). Is it because her rambling spiel is meant to suggest to viewers that Detroit herself doesn’t actually know what her art is about, or is the scene a way to shorthand the distance that’s growing between them? Why make Detroit’s art a plot point at all if we aren’t supposed to know its mission, and her values?
But once she begins explaining, he starts to fall asleep and we barely hear what she says. In one telling scene, Cash visits Detroit at her studio and asks what her new art exhibit is all about. What does Detroit stand for? Is she a feminist? Womanist? Communist? Socialist? A combination? It’s almost like the film would prefer that Detroit’s “political” fashion do all the talking. They are not fleshed-out characters so much as they are figureheads-collections of radical Black iconography, symbolism, and buzzwords all signaling vaguely to rich concepts on which we never see them build. But it’s frustrating, in 2018, to feel as though Black women in film are still so often deployed to symbolize their community and support Black men. In the 1970s, when blaxploitation helped spread the ideals of the Black Power movement and highlight socioeconomic realities of Black urban life, such archetypes made sense. Foxy, Sugar, Coffy, and their sisters in blaxploitation cinema were written as ordinary women who became vigilantes to avenge their fallen brothers and lovers their resilience and loyalty to their communities made them icons of Black female power. In movies like Foxy Brown, Sugar Hill, and Coffy, the titular characters were not written to be members of the black community, but rather emblems of it. This has been a component of Black female characters in television and cinema dating back to the blaxploitation era. Her own art takes on a guerilla sensibility-everything is a secret, including her opinions. This seems like the exact sort of behavior Detroit would clock early and critique immediately, but she doesn’t do it until much later. Cash’s sellout opportunity comes when he realizes that adopting a “white voice” (provided by David Cross) at his telemarketing job catapults him to a world of privilege that requires rejecting his friends and coworkers. Sorry to Bother You is a film that openly critiques and lampoons whiteness, as well as the capitalist structure that upholds it and the ways people sell out for success within that structure rather than actively dismantling it.
I can’t blame the characters for not taking her seriously, though, because at no point in the film are her values made plain to the audience. Still, it’s a resistance no one in the film, including her boyfriend Cash (Lakeith Stanfield), the film’s protagonist, seems to fully acknowledge or address. Detroit carries herself as the physical embodiment of radical Black female resistance, and it seems to be Riley’s intention that she is. Even her name, Detroit, invokes a legacy of racial and economic inequality, as well as the rich legacy of organizing to fight it. In one scene, she wears earrings designed to look like penises in another, a shirt that reads “the future is female ejaculation.” No one comments on it. Literally-her clothes are part of her performance-art aesthetic. She wears the clothes of a revolutionary. There’s a phrase that comes to mind when I think of Tessa Thompson’s character Detroit in Boots Riley’s debut feature, Sorry to Bother You: symbolic disrupter. Tessa Thompson as Detroit in Sorry to Bother You (Photo credit: Annapurna Pictures)
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