Hauntological cinema: Resisting epistemic erasure and temporal slippage with Sorry to Bother You

Paul McGuinness,Alex Simpson

doi:10.1177/00380261211054264

Abstract

Through a hauntological analysis of Boots Riley’s Afrosurrealist comedy, Sorry to Bother You (2018), we explore how fiction can empower sociologists to think beyond the limits of empiricism to better encounter experiences of erasure and senses of temporal disjuncture that characterise capitalist realism. The panoramic power of cinematic world-building enables representations of the ontologically reified but empirically elusive atmosphere of capitalist realism. Sorry to Bother You, we argue, rearticulates through Afrosurrealism the absurdity of capitalist realism’s whitewashing of its innately racialising violence. Drawing upon the thought of Mark Fisher (1968–2017) we examine the film’s central allegorical spectres: the code-switching comedy of the insidious White Voice, the body horror of the Equisapien human–horse hybrids, and the reality warping influence of shadowy megacorporation Worry Free. By resisting the empirical trappings of capitalist realism, hauntology is able to critique the wavering repression of the no longer and the not yet – the ignored legacies of unresolved traumas and a nostalgia for a future we were promised but never arrived. In response, Sorry to Bother You re-presents to a mass audience the spectre of a positive abolitionism and brings into focus an acid communist horizon using hauntological techniques that visualise experiences denied a presence under capitalist realism. This article aims to highlight the ontological and political potentialities of such works of art and their analysis.

Highlights

Boots Riley’s directorial debut, Sorry to Bother You (2018), is an Afrosurrealist comedy that follows the travails of Cassius ‘Cash’ Green, a young black man struggling to stay afloat amid the crashing tides of economic and technological ‘progress’
Riley’s film makes visible the repressed violence of capitalist realism – the fatalistic acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism – and presents a world in which ratified futures are underwritten by the violence of the past, guaranteeing a capitalist realist forever-present that vanquishes critical subjects of sociological enquiry beyond a ‘veil of oblivion’ (Bauman, 2016)
Through our analysis of Sorry to Bother You, we examine how fiction can be employed to reach beyond the limits of empiricism, giving form to obfuscated experiences and subjugated knowledges

Summary

Introduction

Boots Riley’s directorial debut, Sorry to Bother You (2018), is an Afrosurrealist comedy that follows the travails of Cassius ‘Cash’ Green, a young black man struggling to stay afloat amid the crashing tides of economic and technological ‘progress’. The film begins with Cash, filled with existential dread, living in his uncle’s garage, inveigling his way into a job at a seedy telemarketing farm, RegalView. Upon discovering his supernatural gift for projecting a White Voice, which makes his sales pitches irrefusable, Cash is catapulted up the corporate ladder, promoted to the fêted position of PowerCaller, followed soon after by a breakneck drop into a sinister world of bioengineered human–horse hybrid slaves. Riley’s film makes visible the repressed violence of capitalist realism – the fatalistic acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism – and presents a world in which ratified futures are underwritten by the violence of the past, guaranteeing a capitalist realist forever-present that vanquishes critical subjects of sociological enquiry beyond a ‘veil of oblivion’ (Bauman, 2016)

Objectives

Conclusion