At the end of his life, Ernest Becker wrote a sequel to The Denial of Death that attempted to understand the historical development of capitalism, and its impact on contemporary psychology. In Escape from Evil (1975), Becker acknowledges that money is “the new universal immortality ideology” (p. 73): “The thing that connects money with the domain of the sacred is its power…The social-structural forms of immortality striving that succeeded each other up to modern times have been a kind of mask or façade over the deeper-going immortality symbol, money” (pp. 81-84). Becker understood that money and capitalism are historically unique in their potential to harness mass striving for self-esteem while consolidating power at the feet of an elite class.
Musician Boots Riley’s directorial debut, Sorry to Bother You, is a magical realist film that depicts a disenfranchised African American telemarketer whose aspirations for immortality are co-opted by the capitalist machine. The film’s structure highlights bedside conversations between protagonist Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) and his partner, Detroit (Tessa Thompson). In one he laments, “At some point, like we’re gonna die…our kids are gonna die, our kids’ kids are gonna die, and at some point no one on earth will have existed, and at some point, the sun will explode and everyone will have died, and no one will know what I’m doing, and what I’m doing right now won’t even matter…”
Sorry to Bother You broaches what is arguably the most fundamental issue in any reception of Becker’s work: What does it mean to exert “authentic” agency when one becomes aware of the web of illusion in which one lives?
Cassius’ insignificance angst is exploited when he learns that by using a “white voice” at his job, he can rise up the ranks to the mystic position of “Power Caller,” where he sells slave labor on behalf of a prototypic neoliberal corporation called WorryFree. Upon his meteoric rise he begins to feel that he is “important” because he is “making shit happen” and “doing something [he is] really fucking good at.”
The film is a successor to On the Waterfront (Eliza Kazan, 1954), where Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) compensates for failed immortality as a boxer by trading morals for access to the inner circle of corrupt union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). Both films underscore that capitalism operates not only by colonizing symbolic desires to overcome mortality, but by enacting the literal threat of death through violence when necessary (e.g., in order to disrupt worker collectivization).
Sorry to Bother You highlights a significant way in which capitalism’s dominance has assumed a new guise since the Waterfront era. As Becker (1975) anticipated: “the talent to mystify others is the queen of tyranny” (p. 143). In contrast to the brute force employed by Johnny Friendly in Waterfront, WorryFree CEO Steve Lift uses subtle psychological coercions characteristic of modern self-entrepreneurship. He trivializes the “ludicrous and offensive” comparisons of WorryFree’s labor policies to slavery by protesting that there is no threat of physical violence for his workers.
Of course, Lift’s image-marketing is a thin front for the mechanisms of racial dehumanization and threat of violence behind the practices of WorryFree and the functioning of the modern economy. Whereas Waterfront symbolized the physical exploitation of the working class through its ex-boxer protagonist, Sorry to Bother You employs the effective technique of portraying capitalism’s dehumanizing processes on a continuum from the potentially real to the more fantastical and grotesque. Cassius is motivated to avoid becoming “stuck” like the football players from high school (demonstrating how black bodies are exploited for violent entertainment). Cassius’ use of white voice to gain corporate prestige reflects how “code-switching” from black-typical to white-typical linguistic norms is seen as the only way for black individuals to achieve professionalism.
…modern capitalist individualism does not resolve people’s existential dilemmas, but merely changes their form. Today, individuals may critically recognize the arbitrariness or even meaninglessness of routes to heroism…[y]et this critical self-awareness may result in resigned cynicism more often than liberated revolt.
On the more fantastic side, people seek fame in the film by literally being beaten on live television in the popular program “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me.” In perhaps the film’s most disturbing turn, WorryFree proposes a program that turns its employees into literal work horses, or “equisapiens.” These often-whimsical depictions of dehumanization exhibit the means of exploitation employed by the powerful through the deliberate animalization of the underprivileged. The film reveals how the mutual reinforcement of symbolic and material dehumanization propagates an exploitative system. Cassius eschews blackness for the prestige of whiteness only to become an agent in the racial violence of capitalism.
Finally, Sorry to Bother You broaches what is arguably the most fundamental issue in any reception of Becker’s work: What does it mean to exert “authentic” agency when one becomes aware of the web of illusion in which one lives? Becker struggled with this question in Escape from Evil; at times he writes as if mere awareness would be sufficient to demand social change: “the gauge of a truly free society would be the extent to which it admitted its own central fear of death and questioned its own system of heroic transcendence” (p. 167).
And yet modern capitalist individualism does not resolve people’s existential dilemmas, but merely changes their form. Today, individuals may critically recognize the arbitrariness or even meaninglessness of routes to heroism like appearing on “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me” or becoming a viral meme. Yet, given the juggernaut of contemporary society, this critical self-awareness may result in resigned cynicism more often than liberated revolt. Even when individuals assert themselves against threats to freedom, this very resistance can be assimilated to the elite agenda.
During a union protest sequence in the film, a protestor throws a can of soda that hits Cassius in the head. The event is televised and rapidly launches the can-throwing protestor into stardom as the soda company benefits from its new rebellious image. The event itself is further assimilated by being represented in Internet memes and Halloween costumes. Later, Cassius is horrified when Lift suggests he be planted as a “Martin Luther King” of the equisapiens—an inside man to maintain the appearance of resistance under status quo conditions. Even when Cassius subjectively resists this offer, his actions throughout the remainder of the film suggest he may have unintentionally fulfilled Lift’s prophecy. Ultimately, Sorry to Bother You is a “meta” critique of society that, like Becker (1975), remains skeptical of “the easy hope that by the spread of reason men will stand up to their full size and renounce irrationality” (p. 160).
Harrison Schmitt is a second year PhD student in Social Psychology at the University of Arizona. He received his B.A. in psychology from Fresno State. His research interests center broadly around the role of culture and social class in coping with stress, from things like chronic environmental contamination to debt.
Daniel Sullivan is an Associate Professor in the Social Psychology Program at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on cultural differences in the experience of existential threat. With Jeff Greenberg, he was the co-editor of Death in Classic and Contemporary Film: Fade to Black (2013, Palgrave Macmillan).
Isaac F. Young is completing his PhD at the University of Arizona. He is interested in cultural, existential, and emotional processes. For example, he researches how certain dimensions of culture (e.g., individualism-collectivism) afford a sense of embeddedness in versus alienation from one’s surroundings, as well as on how emotions mediate these processes.