The Oakland Renaissance: Sorry to Bother You & Blindspotting

I have never been to Oakland, California. It's a city I know mostly for being the home of the Raiders, a mob of post-apocalyptic Mad Max mutants who are an occasional threat to my beloved Denver Broncos. But in 2018, suddenly Oakland has become more than a hated football rival. It's now one of the capitals of the film world. Oakland-native Ryan Coogler rewarded his hometown with a major subplot in this winter's smash hit, Black Panther. Now in summer you can see two of the best movies of 2018, both created by Oaklanders, shot in Oakland, and set in Oakland, Sorry to Bother You and Blindspotting.

Blindspotting is a dramatic commentary on the city's demographics. Its heroes are struggling with the very old problem of police violence while confronting a new one with gentrification and hipster imperialism. Sorry to Bother You though is a surreal SciFi comedy in an all-out war against capitalism. This Oakland is an arch satire of a real thing, owing a lot to RoboCop. However, don't let Sorry to Bother You's absurdist trappings fool you into thinking it doesn't have a lot of real shit on its mind. Oakland in 2018 is swimming in conflicts between class, race, and culture. Its residents, unsurprisingly, have a lot to say.

I'm from Jersey, about as far from Oakland as you can go without getting wet. Yet what that city is going through doesn't seem very far away at all to me. I've seen fancy condo skyscrapers bulldoze their way through Hudson County. PATH station ads promise a glitzy lifestyle in these soaring palaces. It's nice to be able to park in Jersey City without worrying about my car getting stolen. But this isn't Jersey City anymore. There's a whole different city of steel and wealth that took its place. Newport in the course of just my lifespan was colonized and completely rebuilt for 21st century yuppies. So when the people of Oakland worry about their losing their identity, I know the feeling. Oaklanders, however, are finally getting heard in 2018, and that's what this Renaissance is all about.

So let's review both films in this double feature quickly:

Sorry to Bother You

Fox News lately has been haunted by the specter of Democratic Socialism suddenly being seriously considered as a political movement. Maybe they need to stop panicking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and start panicking about Sorry to Bother You? I can't really recall the last time an American made a movie as openly Marxist as this. I also can't recall any story with this much anti-capitalist baggage being this much fun.

Sorry to Bother You is the creation of Boots Riley, a first-time director and film writer. Riley is best known as a leftist rapper who has led the the band The Coup for decades now. He grew up in Oakland and entered a uniquely Oakland institution: black socialism. (Oakland was the city that founded the Black Panther Party, in case you're wondering why Wankandans keep visiting.) I should point out that I am a painfully white person who doesn't really know shit about rap music. I hadn't even heard of Boots Riley until a few weeks ago. But The Coup's music is actually pretty funky and dance-able, which seems strange when they work with such wet blankets as Rage Against the Machine. I think a lot of that comes from not letting their politics bleed over into outright fury. Riley's movie, Sorry to Bother You has a lot of targets on its mind, but it isn't out to collect the heads of Kulaks just yet.

Tessa Thompson's giant earrings are my a e s t h e t i c.

The star of this show is Lakeith Stanfield, who my uncool readers will know as "that guy from the beginning of Get Out" but my cool readers will know as Darius from the equally absurd Atlanta. Stanfield plays Cassius Green, a hopeless young man living in Oakland, driving a car so beat up that he has to operate the wipers manually. He lives in his uncle's garage with his artist girlfriend, Detroit (the ever great Tessa Thompson). Detroit has radical politics and the greatest taste in earrings in the history of earrings. Unfortunately while the economy is soaring for a few, people like Cashius are down on their luck. Even his uncle is about to lose the house

Cassius, or "Cash" for short, joins a shitty telemarketing company where he discovers the secret to sales: "White Voice". While Cash does his White Voice (dubbed by David Cross) he becomes the white ideal, an impossibly successful and confident huckster. Even white people can't live up to White Voice, it's so powerful that it can literally sell people into slavery. Which is fitting because Sorry to Bother You is set in a horrifying SciFi reality where tech companies have brought slavery back as the newest "disruption" App. Also the slaves have a reality show, and its wildly popular. Sorry to Bother You is might be what would happen if you let Paul Verhoeven direct an episode of Black Mirror. Its satire is beyond over-the-top, but it never loses any of its edge.

As Cash soars upward through his awful company, he loses contact with his friends and girlfriend. The people on the bottom have started organizing and building a union. Can Cash square the circle between his own success and Class Warfare? He wants to save his family's house and build a life for himself, but how does he do that while working for The Man without betraying the community? Here Boots Riley might be asking himself that same question. How can you be successful in Oakland without leaving Oakland behind?

And the biggest question of all: why does Cash's CEO have horse monsters with huge swinging cocks in his bathroom?

Sorry to Bother You is a mess of a movie. It's got a lot on its mind and not all the answers. Detroit's character would be a complete failure if she weren't played by Tessa Thompson. Riley never really figures out what to do with her or justifies out her relationship with Cash, who she loves because "he's real". (Which doesn't really match his use of White Voice. He's not real, or else he wouldn't be such a success.) A lot of scenes are as funny as they are troubling. Detroit stands nearly naked as a crowd throws things at her, in some kind of commentary on something. Then Cash celebrates with a drunken crowd of white coworkers singing the words "N----- shit" over and over to thunderous applause.

But Sorry to Bother You is the right kind of messy movie as far as I'm concerned. Even if it has missteps, its energy only builds to increasingly wild places as the movie goes on. By the time you're snorting coke with Armie Hammer and watching a claymation cartoon starring a cave-woman with huge tits, the movie has reached a crescendo of frenetic satire. Its exciting to see Boots Riley do too much with his first movie when a lot of movies try for so little. His world is a strange, cynical, and hilarious place. It isn't the real Oakland, but hyperrealities have truth to them too.

Blindspotting

Blindspotting is the creation of Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, a pair of actors and (damn good, fire-spittin') rappers. Diggs is the only one of the duo with a Wikipedia page because he made his name playing Lafayette/Jefferson in the stupidly-expensive musical Hamilton that years later I still can't get tickets to. But even though Rafael Casal is something of unknown, that should change very quickly. He is an incredible actor and one hell of an MC. While Diggs and Casal both grew up in the East Bay, Casal was white in Berkeley and Diggs was black in Oakland. A few miles and some melanin shouldn't make all the difference, but it does. Blindspotting confronts that problem directly.

I haven't heard award buzz for either Diggs or Casal, and that is CRIMINAL. Give these guys all the Oscars!

Where Sorry to Bother You is the cartoon version of Oakland, Blindspotting wants to be the real thing. Diggs and Casal started writing the script nine years ago when Oscar Grant was murdered by police officers in a subway station in 2009. (A murder which was depicted in Ryan Coogler's film Fruitvale Station which launched this Oakland Film Renaissance in the first place.) The duo play Oakland natives working out their place in the world as their city becomes more affluent and less black. However while their characters are equals in terms of class and culture, skin color cannot be ignored.

Blindspotting is a film about police violence but spends very little of its time directly confronting that main issue. The characters go about living their lives, complaining about kale drinks and lame tech millionaire parties. But in the background there's always the cops and always that threat that things could go wrong. You never forget the threat is there and neither do the characters, even while they pretend everything is normal. They teach their children how to talk to the cops without getting killed. Fear is their normal now.

Daveed Diggs plays Collin, a convicted felon with just three days left on his probation. While driving his moving truck at night, he witnesses a cop gun down another black man. For the rest of the movie Collin quietly suffers from PTSD. He tries to keep quiet and move on, but is never able to forget that the next man murdered in the street could easily be him.

For most of the movie's running time, Blindspotting focuses on the problems of Rafael Casal's character, Miles. Miles struts around with a gold grill and acts extra hard to keep up appearances. His main fear is that he'll be lumped in with all the white emigrants trying to capture Oakland's culture. To Collin's horror, Miles even buys a gun. He's from Oakland, but has the invincibility of his skin color to protect him. Blindspotting is willing to talk openly about Miles' identity crisis and gentrification. But it keeps avoiding talking about the red and blue guillotine over Collin's head, which Miles' asshole antics can only bring closer and closer.

As much as Blindspotting sticks to realism, this movie breaks with it several times. The movie tilts closer and closer to a musical as the tension rises over its 95 minute running time. Collin in one scene sits in an abandoned house pondering what happened to its residents in lyrics. Later he runs through a graveyard but is unable to ignore the ghosts of black men standing in front of every grave, judging his inaction. By the climax, Blindspotting just lets its hero musically scream out everything he's been hiding inside him. Its a confrontation that could never happen, it's beyond all plausibility. But its the confrontation that this story needed to happen and could not keep bottled up any longer.

Blindspotting is as polished and focused as Sorry to Bother You is scattershot and wild. It only rarely turns directly melodramatic, for most of the movie you'd think this is a light slice of life comedy. But then again is that dark reality that the characters don't want to confront, hiding beyond every joke and every interaction. Casal and Diggs give natural intense performances, clearly they've been ready to play these roles for many years. It is absolutely about time they've gotten their chance. These two have huge careers ahead of them.

Implausible Hope

One thing that's troubling to me is that we're really only paying attention to Oakland now. Just decades ago Oakland was another crime-ridden inner city that mainstream America despised and largely ignored. Only in 2018 after its been colonized by tech companies are we listening to its stories. Before 25% of its black population relocated Oakland wasn't cool enough to be worth our focus.

I can't help but feel this is shockingly unfair. The media in the 2016 election cycle obsessed over Middle America's identity crisis. They wanted us all to feel so bad for the white people in West Virginia who felt they were losing their country. I'm not saying West Virginia doesn't have a story to tell, but why haven't we listened to the people in cities? Kansas won't ever not be Kansas, but Oakland may only still be Oakland for a few more years. Manhattan already has had its entire community bled dry to make room for more hedge funds and real estate scams. It may already be too late to make a difference now.

Regardless of socio-economic status, kale smoothies are nasty, man.

However, neither Sorry to Bother You or Blindspotting are as pessimistic as me. That's not to say they're at all naive. Cash in Sorry to Bother You reveals the villain's evil plan to the world in all its perverted awfulness and white Americans cheer. (Probably the same fuckers who respond to every report of ICE abusing children with shit posts saying "go back to Mexico".) Yet in both films when characters are stuck in what seems to be impossible dilemmas, they stand up, and they fight back. They have the courage to confront the system. And I'm the asshole who thinks any victory, no matter how small, is unrealistic. What happened to me? But this is the reason Jordan Peele's Get Out didn't end with a police murder. We need happy endings in a time like this. We have enough of shitty reality already.

Also the Oakland Renaissance is a positive story in a year where there are not a lot of them. Ryan Coogler pushed open doors with Fruitvale Station and his later blockbusters. Now we're seeing new filmmakers walk through those doors. We don't just need multinational corporations like Disney to pretend to care about race relations in their superhero films once. We need movies like Sorry to Bother You and Blindspotting. Diversity isn't just some "woke" nonsense to fill a quota. Diverse voices are important because the best movies are probably the ones that couldn't have been made just a few years ago.

I can't imagine either of these movies getting made without Ryan Coogler or Jordan Peele. Now what movies are they opening the doors for? Can Hudson County have its Renaissance next?