Holding Up Mirrors: How Sorry to Bother You succeeded Where Don’t Look Up Failed
In 2021, Adam McKay released Don’t Look Up on Netflix. The film centers around two astronomers discovering that a meteor the size of Mount Everest will strike the earth in half a year, killing everyone and everything. Utterly terrified, they try to warn the world of the impending doom with unbelievably mixed results. Politicians are more concerned with re-election and news reports try to make light of an apocalyptic event.
The film was met with very clashing reviews. Some saying that it’s a funny and poignant satire about major government’s reaction to the climate crisis, others say it’s an obnoxious and poorly edited film that’s too smug for its own good. Me personally, I’m in the latter half of that argument. The actors involved certainly do their best, and I’m glad that climate scientists feel vindicated or at least related to the scientists in this film, but to me it’s a slog to get through. While I’m not usually one to compare certain works of fiction to each other, I’d like to compare Don’t Look up to Another dark-comedy satire. That movie, one of my personal favorites, is Sorry to Bother You by Boots Riley.
Sorry to Bother You follows Cassius Green, a rookie telemarketer that finds an unlikely pathway to success. But with that success comes immediate conflict with his friends, who plan on unionizing against the company that Cassius works for. While Don’t Look Up deals with the bleak horror of the climate crisis, Sorry to Bother You deals with the bleak horror of late stage capitalism. With that brief description out of the way, let’s get into the comparisons.
Variety, The Spice of Comedy
What different people find funny is one of the most subjective things on earth. More sophisticated people can sneer at fart jokes all they want, but that won’t stop some people from chuckling at them. So I won’t say that Don’t Look Up is objectively unfunny. But the film does have a problem when it comes to the assortment of jokes. Nearly every comedic event found in Don’t Look Up can be put into two camps; the world not understanding the severity of the situation and “politicians, ammiright?” It’s really hard for a comedy to be consistently funny when it only has two jokes to work with. Sorry to Bother You, while primarily satirizing capitalism, knows not to completely rely on that for its humor. From how poorly maintained Cassius’ car is to poking fun at physical comedy game shows, Sorry to Bother You has enough different jokes to let the capitalism satire to breathe.
Mirror, Mirror
While the limited comedy is a problem, the Major issue with Don’t Look Up is the way it portrays it’s world. In my opinion, a good satire is like a funhouse mirror; it creates an exaggeration of something to poke fun at it or point out it’s flaws. Don’t Look Up is weirdly selective with what it chooses to satirize, or at least how far it satirizes. The politicians and billionaires are (rightfully) made fun of for prioritizing profits and personal gain over actually saving humanity, but everything else is played straight. It’s cartoonish antagonists don’t feel complimentary to the everyday people in the story. In Sorry to Bother You, almost everything is exaggerated to some extent. Tying back to the varied comedy, the general world building makes it so that when the antagonists over the top plan is revealed to the audience, it actually makes sense in the context of that world. If Sorry to Bother You is a funhouse mirror, than Don’t Look Up is just a cracked mirror.
An evil telemarketing company, a corporation making millions off of slave labor, and one Oakland man at the center of it all who discovers a secret that threatens all of humankind. Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” is the dystopian social satire being hailed as one of the best movies of the summer. On Tuesday we sat down with with Riley, the poet, rapper, songwriter, producer, screenwriter, humorist, political organizer, community activist, lecturer and public speaker—best known as the lead vocalist of The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club.
He talked about the power of work stoppages and strikes in the film:
I believe that since the beginning of the New Left, progressives and radicals have turned more to spectacle and gone away from actually organizing at the actual point of contradiction in capitalism, which is the explication of labor, which is also where the working class has its power. And we’ve gone in favor of demonstrations, that don’t necessarily have teeth, but they show where our head is at. And I feel like we have to put—give these demonstrations more teeth, by being able to affect the bottom line and say, you know—and say, “You can make no money today, or you can make less money and give us what we want.”
