I think (SPOILERS) the main character is owned by his need for approval, and it never ebbs. Focus ends up being upon his co-workers' estimation of him, as he breaks ranks with them and sticks with his success, but nowhere is the same focus and interest put on this as it is on the big bosses' lagging estimation of him, as he is initially failing in his efforts to rap for him--to be the ongoing big success for him. When he turns things around, we're not supposed to be thinking on his succeeding, on his suddenly, not really finding the rhymes but certainly finding the conviction, the sure sense of himself that he knows is what sells people, to finally prove hugely effective; we're only supposed to be thinking on how appalling he and his crowd are that they could chant back at him his own lyrics, "nigger talk, nigger talk--nigger, nigger, nigger talk." Even at the end when he gets transformed into a horse-man, this is after being a horse-man has its time of looking particularly good, as it's being exemplified as being a tremendous powerhouse, not as it is initially offered to us, as a state of abject subjugation, of helplessness. And he gets to use this guise in a way that makes seem empowered, as he visits a particularly scary and awful fate to the horrible boss. In the new age of violent populism that emerges by the end of the film, with this fortuitious transformation, in effect he gets to be the renown athlete he was in highschool, which temporarily secured him a sense of worth that lasted precisely until he hit the workplace. He gave away all his worldly goods--at precisely the right time; as it's best to be “loincloth” when you mean to play Samson, or Spartacus, and a capitalist age, turns revolution.
The character doesn't actually do anything to wow people that required much work to nurture. He instantly has the best "white man voice" anyone's ever encountered, once he learns the secret to doing so--namely, imagine you’re already someone who owns the world. His girlfriend is different--when we see her art, it's very, very able: we sense the tenure of time that went into inculcating it. She's a reminder of his inadequacy, which remains in a sense even after he's become a success, even as he meant to present it as his levelling even.
The film left me confused as to what it meant to say about sadomasochism. The girlfriend stages a show where anyone can grab cellphones or paint gel-balls and throw them at her, while she stands before them, naked. The phones hurt her; the paint, despoils her. When the event gets interrupted by her boyfriend, who shows concern and tries to stop it, she instructs his dispatch from the gallery, and demands the event begin again. The film allows here no give for us to inquire as to her mental health, it's not Kink where's she been conned into thinking she's empowered, for she's in the mode of being the entirely reasonable mate to her currently astray boyfriend. She's a fixture of solid sense and of righteousness currently, so this event is only an expression of wisdom. Yet what is it telling us?--that those who incur pain and humiliation can do so for fundamentally empowering reasons, that aren't empowering in, say, the sense a psychiatrist might deem a person's prostitution of herself as getting to control the timing of one's abuse, or lending self-integration after feeling disintegrated, or some such, is "empowering," but so at root: true, like Africa. She's avid evidence of the time that has come, of beatings and warfare, of thrown rocks and blood and sacrifice, and the face that’ll maybe grimace at it but can and will engage it. If you couldn’t make yourself the same as she--which I can’t, but many today hoping for an age of warrior populism, surely can--you don’t belong.
Okay, but none of the masochism shown in the rest of the film matches with that, something that portends what’s coming and what you sanely want in. It’s the now, of game shows where people bizarrely desire to be shamed and humiliated and tortured, and not ever where you get to be like she and be be shown to be dominatrixes, militatant and authoritative conductors of the abuse you get hit with. Every one of their jobs means being a shamed, powerless victim. It would seem we should be drawn to thinking of how they might be willing participants in their own abuse, that the abusers are wanted, which would make this late-stage capitalism a matter of giving people the abuse they had come to crave, with the horrible bosses, as essentially servants of this need. But this masochsim isn’t allowed that kind of creep, where preferred bizarre pasttimees show up the malformed actual preferences of people at work, as when we see people at their horrible jobs all they plot is how to get even--they are conventionally sane in their motivations: people as we are supposed to know them.
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AFTER-THOUGHTS
All the critics love the film. I think there's a scene of Kink porn in the film, which liberates the viewer to feel okay in watching them. They are all but encouraged to yell, "slut, slut, slut," at her, as they throw shit-paint and cell phone-rocks at her, and to feel unconflicted about doing so -- her boyfriend objects, but he's slime right now -- which should complicate how revolted we are when the elites chant "nigger talk, nigger talk," for it being an exercise of violence and degradation the film has shown approval for -- excitement, not just disgust, at seeing staged -- and only doesn't because the film assumes we don't want that level of awareness of ourselves. Someone should argue this film as porn, as exploitive, as perverse, not high invention and righteous anger only.
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"Sorry to Bother You" (spoilers ahead and throughout) has almost unanimous critical acclaim, yet the film's main character, someone who was a big thing in high school but became pretence afterwards, is shown as receiving a high estimation by every authority-figure who comes upon him, and the scene of the greatest tension in the film is plausibly the one where he is at risk of losing some of this--and isn't this narcissism?; that is, being highly observant as to how those in authority are appraising you and to secretly like the fact that again and again they esteem you better than anyone else? It isn't... because the film shows one shouldn't care to garner their praise for their being assholes, of much less worth than your friends? We think we know this for certain, but are we sure that's how it's been cultivating us? How would we have felt if in the rapping scene he actually failed to regroup and impress, if he was dismissed as maybe not all that, after all, and never recovered? If it had done so, I suspect THEN it would have been a film that discouraged narcissism, because we would have been shocked at our own feeling past-over, abandoned. It's supposed to have us feeling that he is caught out at the end of the film in being someone no one could possibly admire, a horror, but the end of the film is an age of warfare-populism, not late-capitalism, and he's now conveniently of a form which could plausibly take on an Avatar Na'vi without massive exogenous mecho-assistance--everyone would admire him, for being an emblem of power. Even his being more a type--a warrior; a horse-warrior of the populist apocalypse--than a distinct person, fits the new sexy.
We're supposed to be cautioning against polarized binaries, yet the elite are articulated in this film so that if you shot them all in the head, it would be less than they deserved--and in recognition of this, they get visited upon, in a house-invasion, by childhood demons brought to life... we probably don't forget how well-hung they are, either: another weapon for use here. We're not supposed to sense gross exaggerations in how they've been articulated. This human-slaver, is them. A violent, grotesque distortion of what remains a human being, so to become inaccessible for empathy.
We're supposed to regret that an America has become profoundly perverse in its preferences, as half the nation, owing, ostensibly, to its being ignored, is in drugs and porn, sadistic violence, masochistic tastes... thorough self-destitution--and yet here in the film is staged something very akin to a slut-shaming porn video, a Kink video, where the victim is ostensibly in control, though in truth nowhere near as much as she might convince herself she is to maintain self-respect, and we'd be less interested, if she was, and it's presented so that it's outside any valid negative response on our part. If you have problems with it, with this "empowerment culture" of the empowered "self-implicating," this Kink, then you probably don't have the constitution for the age we're moving into, and so are--probably feminized, actually. It's a conquest of taste where you lose out if you have the true disposition for sustaining any.
Narcissism, voyeurism (a shocking closing-in on people having sex, shitting in a toilet), sadism... all I think endorsed, the thrills of them, mascarading as helping us see more clearly what we've insisted on understanding as "normal" as actually grotesque. I don't think there is any validity, myself, for a film like "Observe and Report" to be so blasted, and for this one to receive such acclaim. Possibly more problematic, actually, for obviously more-effectively disguising making those with actual grotesque preferences, as those simply of vision to recognize them and call them out. Please see the film, and discuss. Staged here is our current populism vs. establishment fight, very much from the populists' point of view.
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