How identity and class is explored in Sorry To Bother You and Snowpiercer, and how this leads to personal and social change by Matty Venning

Boots Riley’s 2018 debut film Sorry To Bother You portrays the story of Cassius ‘Cash’ Green, a poor black telemarketer who begins speaking in a ‘white voice’ in order to progress within the company and thus earn a higher income for himself and his family. Throughout the film Cash offers up his sense of morality and identity, and through doing so distances himself from the ones that he loves in order to maintain success. At its root, Sorry To Bother You can be seen as an absurdist critique on capitalism, as well as a commentary on the treatment of the identity of people of colour in white-dominated professions. In contrast to this, Bong Joon-Ho’s 2013 film Snowpiercer explores class struggle and the effects of solidarity within groups of oppressed people. After the world experiences a devastating natural disaster, Earths last survivors are confined to a train that is on a continuous loop around the world, with the train itself being divided into the wealthier passengers at the front, and the poorest at the rear who live in appalling conditions. Though the roots of these films do differ in many senses they ultimately both tap into the idea of capitalism, and its eventual effect on class and identity. Capitalism at its core is an economic system whereby a small elite group known as the bourgeoisie control property in accordance with their values, and ultimately control how much property they supply to the lower class workers, who sell their labour. Within this we are presented with many different class systems, “A class is defined by the ownership of property. Such ownership vests a person with the power to exclude others from the property and to use it for personal purposes. In relation to property there are three great classes of society: the bourgeoisie (who own the means of production such as machinery and factory buildings, and whose source of income is profit), landowners (whose income is rent), and the proletariat (who own their labor and sell it for a wage).”(Rummel, 2018).

In Snowpiercer it quickly becomes apparent that the train itself is a metaphor for the class system of capitalism, with the rich and powerful being right at the front, and the poor being right at the back, however, Joon-Ho presents this in a way that is not quite so simple. We are also presented with the middle of the train, as the lower class are unable to reach the top without travelling through the entire system. These middle carriages are the only ones that contain windows, providing the unique opportunity to look to the side as apposed to straight forward down the train, as well as containing a school for the children born on the train. These children are significant as this life is all they have ever known, and are thus a product of what the train represents. They have the ability to look beyond the train to the outside world, while still being enforced with the capitalised ideologies that dictate life on the train. The children are being subjected to Ideological State Apparatuses, which are a “certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialised institutions”(Durham and Kellner, 2012), and thus they become capitalist machines, as apposed to free thinking individuals. This highlights the dystopian science-fiction nature of the film, as it seems that the future of humanity is set to further enforce the repressive states that it is suffering from.

Another character that is representative of the middle class is Namgoong Minsu, a character who designed parts of the train and worked on it prior to the Earths destruction. While he literally lives in part of the middle of the train, he also represents the middle class. The middle class are people that are representative of both parts of capitalism, as they often have to work to live, but also who have some agency over the lower class, for example higher levels of education, which Namgoong clearly has. The middle class in Snowpiercer is often seen through the eyes of facsism, “recent developments in lower middle class politics prove that social desperation may be compounded with political confusion into and independent political impulse of such fanatic power and such ambiguous direction that it may become the chief source of confusion in an age of confusion… they are therefor potentially the chief source of social disease in modern history” (Niebuhr, 1937). Though Niebuhr makes a relatively bold statement here, he is enforcing the point that the middle class are often the enforcers of facsism, as are the middle class axe-men in Snowpiercer. These axe-men are not part of the lower class, however they are not necessarily part of the upper class either, they seem to simply fall somewhere in the middle. Facsism “rejected many established values – whether left, right or centre – and was willing to engage in acts of wholesale destruction to usher in a new utopia of its making” (Payne, 1996), and thus the axe-men are enforcing the social injustice of capitalism through facsism. Namgoong also represents the middle class in another sense, as the lower class are only interested in looking forwards towards the front of the train, however he and his daughter are often looking out the window. This foreshadows Namgoong’s knowledge that for this system to be destroyed the train has to be destroyed with it, as it acts as a container for the injustice. This suggests that the solution for ending the capitalist society in Snowpiercer lies outside of the train and in old world, which is beginning to thaw, thus suggesting that new life may soon be formed there. We get further proof that Namgoong is aware of this as he continually collects the the explosives necessary to destroy the train. This is perhaps why Joon-Ho’s depiction of class is more complicated than it may seem, as he presents us with a layered depiction of the different levels between the same class system, as opposed to just upper, middle and lower.

In Sorry To Bother You, the idea of class is presented to us through the viewpoint of Cash, who is a lower class man looking to make ends meet financially, and subsequently adopts a job as a low level telemarketer. After adopting a white persona in order to be more appealing to the customers, Cash gradually sacrifices his morality and identity to progress further up, which works as he eventually becomes a ‘power caller’. Throughout the film Cash continually sacrifices his own morality and and identity to obtain a higher class and social status, and in doing so begins to lose his sense of self and identity. Despite the films inherently anti-capitalist viewpoint, Riley is not simply trying to make an entirely anti-capitalist film, as it is also about the real effects that the system has on Cash’s mind as he becomes part of the system as opposed to a character trying to disrupt it. Riley shows to the audience how one persons consciousness changes as their capital grows, and how capitalism ultimately “dehumanises even those who benefit from it, though workers and the poor and oppressed should have little patience or sympathy for those who benefit unequally from the exploitation they reproduce.” (Sculos, 2019).

Towards the end of the film, Cash gets an offer to be promoted to the top of the company to be the manager of a new species of workers called ‘Equisapiens’, which are people that have been transformed into horses, which in itself acts as a metaphor for the working class being treated as sub-human by the upper class. Upon realising the grotesque nature of WorryFree, Cash attempts to expose and overthrow WorryFree, though this ultimately fails as the public show support to Steven Lift and his company, and end up raising their stock. Cash perhaps fails as he “placed his hope in the automatic negative reactions of people—people who have been conditioned by capitalism to view all technological developments as progressive and liberating—to resist those changes.” (Sculos, 2019), and thus he shows us that the public will not change with sudden action or information, change must occur through repeated resistance and uprising from a group of people. Among the many problems that capitalism presents, Karl Marx notes in his 1848 book

The Communist Manifesto the idea of the ‘authentic self’. While the working class have a need for financial stability, there is still a sense of retaining authenticity in their work in accordance with their basic human morality. We see Cash lose this sense of the authentic self by going against his morals to obtain capital, and in return he loses his previous self and identity. Through class struggle, workers ultimately come together to enact social justice to the flawed and ultimately unfair system that they are a part of. This not only improves working conditions for the lives of the workers, but ultimately reaffirms the idea of the authentic self. Both films do explore this in a sense, as we see the characters in Snowpiercer having to unite together to rise through the social classes, and we see Squeeze in Sorry To Bother You construct a workers union in order to improve their working conditions.

We may link capitalism and class in both of these movies as the main characters in Cash and Curtis are each examples of the products of a capitalist society, they are both acting in a way to uphold or disrupt the ideas of class struggle. In Snowpiercer we see Curtis achieve his goal of causing a social uprising and reaching the front of the train, only to discover that this was a planned inside job to get him to become the new leader of the train. Ultimately all this does, should Curtis accept, is maintain the class system that was already in place, only now with the people who were at the rear of the train rising to the position of the previous bourgeoisie. This shows the cyclical nature of the train and the fact that while the train is still traveling around the Earth, the class system will forever remain in place. Curtis eventually breaks this cycle by blowing up the train, leaving only two characters left alive, free to start their own new world. In Sorry To Bother You Cash maintains the idea that we do live in a capitalist society that is very difficult to break out of if you are not already on top. Cash fails to find a way to get rid of his financial troubles while maintaining his authentic self, and thus both characters identity remains synonymous with their class within their socio-economic systems.

Despite differences in parts of each films respective message, the idea of race and capitalism can be explored alongside each other. In a 2016 interview with 247HH.com, Boots Riley claims that “Culture comes out of the way that we survive” (Riley, 2016). In this interview Riley states that capitalism and race are linked, and need each other to operate. In order to gain power, capitalism essentially had to steal things, primarily land and labour. While capitalism started with utilising white labour, they eventually realised that they needed the trust of white people, so they in turn looked outside of Europe and decided to steal from Africa, starting with their minerals and labour. This was justified to the white Europeans by saying that these Africans were a different type of people, they were others that could not be related to them on a human level. Through this, the capitalists were inventing race to accommodate slavery. Not to say that racism had not existed before this, but as Riley states, “before that they talked about things in nations, its not like there weren’t wars or people didn’t hate other people before that, but it was always talked about in terms of nations. It was nations and sometimes there would be descriptions of people, but the idea that this nation and that nation were related because they looked the same was not one that existed” (Riley, 2016). In this sense, Riley is saying that this notion of race was offered in order to have a reasoning behind racism, and thus the expansion of capitalism, and the white people that they were trying to protect, did not feel at all related to them despite suffering under the same system, albeit in differing ways. Capitalism therefore necessitated racism, and the white working class were fed information that poverty and race acted as the cause for their situation, and not the system itself. This notion of race and poverty necessitating capitalism is furthered by the fact that capitalism greatly benefits from poverty, as if every person was employed, there would be no one to take certain jobs from people and keep wages low, so the bourgeoisie had to justify poverty with the choice and action of black people in order for the white people to distance themselves from poverty and avoid this issue. As a result, Riley’s statement that culture comes from survival reflects the lack of opportunities that black people face in the white professional capitalist environment, and thus the distinction of Cash’s two identities in Sorry To Bother You ultimately stems from a long standing issue of the systemic racism present in capitalist societies.

Cash is subsequently presented to us as a character that is stripped of his identity in several ways, that of his love towards his family, but perhaps more notably his identity of being a black man. As the movie progresses and we see Cash further adopting his white persona, he moves further up the ladder of capitalism and away from his black identity. In the scene where Cash is starting his job as a telemarketer, he is told to use his ‘white voice’. Here Cash is displaying what is known as ‘code switching’, which is something that occurs when a person switches between two different modes of speaking during a conversation, whether that be another language or dialect. In Cash’s case, he is told to change his dialect to that of a white mans in order to make the customers sign up to their scheme. Differing dialects within a certain language represents a person, where they come from and how they have grown up, and in some cases, like Cash’s, he is told that his dialect communicates to the customers that he is black. Historically in American English, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has been subjected to negative connotations “Thus, contributing to stereotypes furthering labels and misrepresentation of speaker intelligence, motivation, and intention… these variants can be labeled as ‘street talk’… often perpetuating a further negative connotation supporting ideas suggesting producers of these dialects are inferior to that of those who cast judgment.” (Bukowski, 2019). Bukowski shows here how we may link Cash’s avoidance of the use of AAVE to the systemic racism of capitalism. What Cash is trying to sell is catered towards the working class, a class that were taught that being black was synonymous to poverty, to a lack of education, or making bad choices, so in that sense Cash recognises that he needs to change his persona in order to sell more, or in his words to ‘be who the customer wants to be’, that being white, confident and rich.

The idea of putting on a ‘persona’ was describes by Carl Jung, who “Described the public face of the individual as the Persona, drawing on the Greek masks of ancient drama. Persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, a kind of mask designed to ‘impress and conceal’ and to meet societal demands.” (Fawkes, 2015). As this public face begins to get adopted and ultimately approved by society, we unconsciously begin to identify more and more with this newly accepted part of ourselves. We see both Cash and Curtis experience the authentic self on some level. For Curtis, he actually feels like he is being perceived as something he’s not, that being a leader of the lower class. Despite this he proceeds to act as the leader, he takes the lower class through the train in order to give himself and his fellow passengers a better life, before ultimately finding out his real path. For Cash, he focusses on the new found acceptance with his adopted persona and thus discards of his authentic self through the encouragement of those around him. At one point he caves to the social pressure of fulfilling a stereotype to appease those around him by rapping, despite that being against his wishes, conflicting his persona and his authentic self, with his persona ultimately winning.

Ultimately, the endings of both of these themes offer a view of the future of work that is somewhat open ended and up for interpretation. In Snowpiercer we see the last two characters left alive with a glimmer of hope for a new world. The ice is thawing and there is life in the distance, yet, how possible is this new life? We are left unsure as to how these characters will adapt to a life outside of the system that they have been raised in. In Sorry To Bother You, Cash ultimately breaks free from his white persona and reverts back to his old life, albeit as an equisapien, yet he does not necessarily overcome the issues that he was facing at the start of the movie. He is once again a moral person, but he is still a poor moral person subject to the hardships of a capitalist society. You may argue that both films suggest that one must find a personal solution to the specific society that they are subject to. Cash ultimately decided that his morals were more important to him, subverting the idea that property and capital must control you as a human, while Curtis decided to completely dismantle capitalism due to his own morals and beliefs, despite that being potentially damning for society. Thus, both movies suggest that the future of capitalism and class struggles are dependant on the idea of identity, and what one is willing to give up in order to obtain personal freedom.

Bibliography

247HH.com. Boots Riley - How Capitalism Needed Racism To Operate. Youtube, 247HH.com. 29 Feb 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmyWvjszBOw

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Fawkes, Johanna, “Performance and Persona: Goffman and Jung's approaches to professional identity applied to public relations”. Public Relations Review. Volume 41, Issue 5. 2015, Pages 675-680.

NIEBUHR, REINHOLD. “Pawns for Fascism—Our Lower Middle Class.” The American Scholar, vol. 6, no. 2, The Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1937, pp. 145–52, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41204269.

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Sculos, Bryant W. "Sorry to Bother You with Twelve Theses on Boots Riley’s" Sorry to Bother You": Lessons for the Left." Class, Race and Corporate Power 7.1 (2019): 6.