It’s only when Cassius performs a rap for his white bosses and their friends - just the N-word on repeat, not actual rhymes - that Cassius exploits his own natural voice, using it to meet their white expectations of his black identity. In one scene, Green’s girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) uses her white voice in a performance art piece. Its privileges begin to bleed into other parts of his life: He uses it casually as a party trick, and he accidentally says good morning to his girlfriend in his nasally white register. Suddenly he’s a Power Caller, moved upstairs to the sleek co-working-style space where he has to use his white voice all the time. White voice is, effectively, everything a stereotypical “black voice” isn’t.Ĭassius deploys his white voice on calls, and uses its effect to secure a promotion. “There’s a performance of whiteness that has to do with people aligning with their own oppression, or aligning with their own oppressors.” White people perform whiteness and privilege, and Sorry to Bother You considers what happens when black people take on that same performance - and align with their oppressors, to succeed in a sinister capitalist system. As it’s laid out in the movie, their performance of whiteness is their version of the opposite of, or response to, the racist tropes of blackness,” he says. “It’s what white people think they’re supposed to sound like. In Sorry to Bother You’s universe, using a white voice doesn’t just mean “talking proper,” or with a certain Southern or coastal accent, explains director Boots Riley, who came up with the movie after his own telemarketing stint, and included the dubbed white voice as he was finishing the script in 2012. David Cross, who plays Stanfield’s white voice, describes his vocals thusly in a featurette for the film: “If you could put a Brooks Brothers jacket and a pair of dockers on a voice, that’s what we’ve got.” Langston clicks on his headset and begins talking to a potential client - except instead of Danny Glover’s deep croak, it’s an upbeat voice, one that sounds like a gingham Vineyard Vines button-down became sentient while sitting on the deck of a lake house, sipping a beer kept chilled in a Georgetown koozie. Langston gives him a word of advice: “I’m not talking Will Smith–white,” he says. He’s selling encyclopedias no one really wants, and can’t make it through one call without being hung up on. Cassius Green ( Lakeith Stanfield) is new to telemarketing company Regal View, and having a hard time getting the hang of the company’s sales pitch. “You don’t talk white enough,” veteran telemarketer Langston (Danny Glover) advises his young deskmate in an early Sorry to Bother You scene. Photo: Peter Prato/Annapurna Pictures/Annapurna Releasing, LLC.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |