“I am trying to repel audiences and pull them in at the same time,
so they gain a different kind of awareness of what they’re watching.”
Boots Riley’s art was inspired by his early experiences connecting with people as a labor organizer and party promoter. He doesn’t like the idea of being an authority or a superstar. He just wants to show people a good time and leave them with a better sense of how to rebel against capitalist greed and systemic racism. In his film Sorry to Bother You, service workers at a call center discover that they’re selling indentured servitude—and some are being fed a biotech drug that turns laborers into half-horse, half-human “Equisapiens.” In response, the workers launch a series of strikes to take down seemingly the whole city of Oakland. His television show, I’m a Virgo, centers on Cootie, a thirteen-foot-tall Black teenager in Oakland whose friends are fighting gentrification while he dates a Flash-like speedster and fights a billionaire media mogul who moonlights as an Iron Man–style vigilante cop. As if that weren’t weird enough, I’m a Virgo features an animated show-within-a-show called Parking Tickets, one episode of which is so existentially bleak that it sends anyone who watches it into a state of catatonic despair.
Annalee Newitz spoke with Riley about his work in an interview for The Believer, and we are happy to reprint an excerpt from it here. You can read the entire conversation here.
I. “They’re saying no, but why?”
THE BELIEVER: I wanted to start by talking about Oakland, because this has always been your home, and most of your work is about Oakland in some way. And yet you always give us this version of Oakland that is fantastical or absurd. Can you talk about world-building, and what it means to take this familiar place and transform it for your fiction?
BOOTS RILEY: I was involved in constructing fake worlds early on with my music, because the stuff I wrote was about a thriving movement that was only in my mind. It was nowhere in existence. I wanted to excite people about joining it, you know—get people excited about the possibilities of what that movement could be.
It’s just a different way of being realistic. So, for instance, when I started working on Sorry to Bother You, I was writing what I thought was a workplace comedy. And I got to where I wanted to include the “white voice” thing, and I did it in more of a realistic way. But as I was explaining it, I realized I was missing a piece. I was missing how it felt. I didn’t want that idea to just be name-checked. I wanted it to have a visceral feeling to it. So in one scene, I decided to do something that wasn’t realistic [where Cassius, played by LaKeith Stanfield, speaks in a “white voice,” overdubbed by David Cross]. It creates a feeling of disembodiment. It makes you feel something, as opposed to just knowing something.
It really has to do with the character’s reactions, right? Because you can have a supposedly totally realistic movie and you don’t believe in it—you don’t care. But you can have elephants flying around the room, and as long as they react like real people, you believe in them.
Also, I’m trying to create a roller coaster ride. That’s one place where I disagree with Martin Scorsese’s critique of Marvel movies. He said, Oh, they’re just like amusement parks. Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think you can do that in a good way or in a bad way. I’m trying to take people through this ride, and I’m breaking rules as a way to catch people off guard. I wasn’t like, I want to make it fantastical. It’s just like, This works.
BLVR: I’ve heard you say that you think everything is propaganda.
BR: Yeah, everything has a political outlook to it, right?
BLVR: Do you think that all expression is propaganda?
BR: The word propaganda got popularized in different ways at different times. But our generation knows it as a derogatory word for what other countries do. However, in the 1980s, if you were to call Red Dawn—which was my favorite movie at the time—propaganda, people would have been like, Oh, you’re crazy. That’s just freethinking.
BLVR: But it’s completely propaganda.
BR: The real meaning of the word is just, you know, art that’s meant to try to get you to do something. Often with the Coup, I would feel like, Wow, we executed this thing on a level comparable to [that of] other artists that I think are good. But then [critics would dismiss the artistry because] it’s a political thing, right? But if there’s some other song that’s saying exactly what we’re used to hearing, then they can focus on the technique of it.
BLVR: Oftentimes you get the opposite pushback in a leftist political space, where if you’re doing something that’s fun or joyful or science-fictional, it’s like, That’s not serious.
BR: Matter of fact, a bunch of people claim the Coup isn’t political.
BLVR: Because you’re too silly?
BR: Yeah, exactly. I have a background where I was going door-to-door selling newspapers, talking to people, trying to get them to join a union campaign. Even as a teenager, I could see what was effective, and it was rarely We’re against this thing right now. What people went for was the possibility of success. They went for something that was affirmative and joyful. So in my work, the comic aspect of it comes from trying to have that joy.
BLVR: A lot of your characters are torn between selling out to people in power and doing something meaningful or progressive. Why are you so interested in characters who are kind of morally compromised?
BR: It’s more interesting. It’s also a lot of the people I know, maybe on smaller levels. It might be a political organization where suddenly we need to sell all this cocaine so we can get a community center. Or trying to figure out the right path in life. To a certain extent, that’s me. You know, there’s one aspect of my story that’s like, Oh, he was involved in radical organizations from age fourteen. Then there’s the other side of the story. From the age of eleven, I was doing door-to-door sales. I was a party promoter when I was nineteen, finding loopholes for liquor licenses when I was selling [liquor], and kids were running around with alcohol. There were all of those contradictions.
BLVR: Do you feel like you use any of that early experience with sales to sell your work to, say, Amazon, which co-produced I’m a Virgo?
BR: I mean, sure.
BLVR: Do you feel like you’re sort of switching between personas a little bit when you do that?
BR: I don’t know. It’s all the same, because when you’re selling door-to-door, after a while, you start trying to figure out, OK, what are the people you’re trying to sell to really saying? They’re saying no, but why? You want to know what’s important to them, for manipulative reasons. But I learned how to listen to people like that. So the first art form that I was really good at was having a conversation with people. I was good at showing them how our ideas were the same.
Read the rest of the interview over at The Believer.