‘Use your white voice’: race, sound, and genre in Sorry to Bother You

ABSTRACT

Looking primarily at Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018), this essay explores the way race informs the relationship between the ‘body genres’ of comedy and horror. Riley’s film works through genre hybridity and ‘genre switching’, and this essay examines the links between the film’s genre reflexivity and the other kind of reflex – the ‘involuntary bodily response’. By locating its critique – by assaulting genre – at the level of sound, the film offers a way for us to think about our own involuntary responses, our own reflexes, when it comes to racial categories and racial identity. Looking particularly at the ‘white voice’ device, I argue that the film’s formal and stylistic strategies also enact a deeper critique, revisiting and re-activating the ways in which the basic conditions of the cinematic illusion have been suffused with racialized meaning in American film. In particular, the film’s strategies reflect how an imaginary Blackness has worked to generate genre and to animate the links between genres – especially comedy and horror. By reflecting on embodiment and disembodiment – and the synchronization of sound and image – Sorry to Bother You exploits genre, working it like a puppet, or like a monstrous filmic body.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• sound
• genre
• reflexivity
• horror
• comedy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Cash’s artist-girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) gets the same treatment when she is in the art gallery space, when she is voiced by white British actress Lily James.

2. Vivian Sobchack notes that the ‘creature film’ has always tended to occupy a border between horror and sci-fi. (See Sobchack 1980, 47; Grant 2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alice Maurice

Alice Maurice is Associate Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema (Minnesota, 2013) and the editor of Faces on Screen: New Approaches (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press). Her work has appeared in journals including Camera Obscura, JCMS, The Moving Image, and a number of anthologies. Her current research focuses on the face, identity, and transformation in American cinema.