National Post (National Edition)
‘We’re all performing all the time’
Director Boots Riley explains what it’s like to use a ‘white voice’ Chris Knight
Never in my years of interviewing celebrities has anyone, even Bryan Cranston from Trumbo, mentioned the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, also known as the TaftHartley Act. Until now. The anti-union U.S. legislation, derided as the “slave-labour bill” by opponents, is brought up by writer/director Boots Riley in a discussion of his debut feature, Sorry to Bother You.
Riley is probably best known as the lead vocalist of the hip-hop band The Coup and the rock band Street Sweeper Social Club. But he’s long had a left-leaning social conscience, inherited from his father, Walter; The Coup’s first album, in 1993, was Kill My Landlord. They later released Steal This Album and, tellingly, a disc called Sorry to Bother You.
Leftist philosophy similarly and smartly infuses the movie of the same name. A union-organizing drive features as a main plot point, and the setting is a day-aftertomorrow America in which citizens sign up for WorryFree, a job-for-life outfit that looks alarmingly like prison. (Slogan: If you lived here, you’d be at work already!)
Riley quickly warms to the topic of social change. “A lot of what we see as social movement over the last 50 years has just been ‘let’s show that we’re against whatever. Let’s let our voices be heard, and that will cause the change.’ And it’s not historically accurate. I mean, that’s one of the reasons that not much change is happening.”
A general strike, he thinks, would have more efficacy than any Occupy movement, but Taft-Hartley makes that difficult. And fighting those laws? “That sort of movement is not going to come from the existing unions because you’ve got people who have careers – they don’t want to go to jail ... So there needs to be a new movement that takes solidarity strikes to another level, that is led by folks who have the agenda of social change as opposed to just having a union job.”
It’s fascinating stuff, but lest you think Sorry to Bother You is two hours of anti-capitalist preaching, think again. There’s an engaging, often darkly hilarious story about a black telemarketer (Lakeith Stanfield) who discovers that he is much more successful if he speaks in a “white voice.” David Cross provides said voice, which is dubbed over the soundtrack and is meant to sound like magic.
Riley says he directed Cross to sound like one of his characters from TV’s Mr. Show, an office manager with a thing for Tofutti ice cream. He also had to tell Patton Oswalt, who does the white voice for another character, that he wasn’t white enough for the main part.
“I need the lead character to be the whitest voice out there,” he remembers telling Oswalt. “As white as we could get. And I realized that David Cross has a much whiter voice than yours. And he was like: Oh yeah, his voice is whiter than mine! He was really happy about that.”
Cautiously, I ask Riley if he has a white voice himself. “It’s been a while since I’ve had to use it,” he says. “I did telemarketing and did it consciously at one point.”
But vocal modulation isn’t a black-and-white issue. “The whole point is that we’re all performing all the time,” Riley says. “It’s all performance, even for white people.” In the film, someone explains that the white voice is the one that says everything is OK.
The white voice also makes an appearance in Spike Lee’s new movie BlacKkKlansman, which opens this August. John David Washington plays black cop Ron Stallworth, who manages to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan over the phone; Adam Driver is his white colleague who shows up at meetings when a white face is needed.
When I mention the coincidence, Riley points out that his script came first – in fact, it was published by McSweeney’s in 2014, which helped secure funding for the movie. And as much as Sorry to Bother You feels like a response to Trump-era racism, it actually has its roots in the Obama years.
“What’s going on is the same s--t,” says the director. “There’s different dressing on it and yes, it is more, certain things are more drastic, but the thing behind it all that’s powering it all is the same economic system. I don’t think it’s going to change with the guy in office. That underlying system can only change by social movements gaining some teeth.”
As Riley sees it, every movie has a political outlook. “Even Hangover 2. They just have so many different political outlooks that sound exactly like what the status quo is putting forward. So we don’t register them as political outlooks.”
He bristles just a little when I refer to this movie as satire, in the best, Swiftian sense of the word. “It’s interesting ... calling it satire because all these movies put across a viewpoint, and it’s called satire only when it puts across a different viewpoint than the status quo.”
Regardless, Riley says he’ll be making more movies and television, and we can expect to see his politics baked into them. “Put it like this,” he says. “I wouldn’t be making art if I wasn’t passionate about something other than the art. My passion about things in the world is what drives the esthetic. I wouldn’t make any art that didn’t fulfill my ideals of the world.”