Title: I’m A Virgo
Rating: 5 Stars
I’m just going to go ahead and say it. Boots Riley is the wild, creative genius that we need right now. I first encountered Riley when I watched the brilliant, insane Sorry To Bother You (written about here) back in 2018. He’s now back with I’m A Virgo.
Cootie is a nineteen year old Black man living in Oakland (also the setting for Sorry To Bother You). He was raised by his aunt and uncle. They are extremely protective of him. In fact, they have never let him out into public. Why, you ask? Well, the fact that he’s thirteen feet tall probably has something to do with it. Growing up so sheltered, he has, to say the least, an innocently naïve view of the world informed, to a large extent, by an obsession with a comic book series featuring an Ironman type superhero simply known as The Hero.
Unsurprisingly, they can’t keep him secret forever, especially since he’s reached the age where he’s eager to go out into the world. He is discovered by two young men and a young woman. Amazed by his size, they effectively take him under their wing and usher him into their world.
As to be expected, he becomes quite the viral sensation (becoming known as Twamp Thing). As he becomes more known, he meets and falls for a young woman who has the superpower of unbelievable speed.
All along there are strange periodic power failures. We find out that the power failures are actually intentional to keep the poor people weak and subjugated. One of Cootie’s friends, the young woman Jones, is a truly charismatic speaker attempting a general strike against the power company in protest of the outages. The Hero, actually a real life person, heroically intervenes but only to defend the property rights of the ownership class. Cootie, horrified with the actions of his real life idol, decides to take on the role of the supervillain to battle the power company. The Hero, Cootie, and Jones are all on a collision course that culminates in the final episode.
The main thing that I love is how unpredictable the series unfolds. Even with its wild strangeness, the story is not chaotic. There is a structure and order to it. Much like in Sorry to Bother You, Riley clearly has purpose and vision and is executing it to perfection. It’s a wonderful marriage of message and entertainment.
There’s so many themes going on here. You see how a sweet, naïve, lovable young Black man is turned into a literal caged monster because of the systemic racism that sees all large Black men as dangerous.
The Hero, representing law and order, is wearing white and saying all of the right things. However, it’s clear though that he is only interested in enforcing the law and order that reinforces the existing economic order. His justice is a false justice. His comic book series is nothing more than propaganda to prop up that false injustice.
Entire groups of people are treated as barely citizens. You have the people of the Lower Bottoms, who collectively have been shrunk down to six inches in height. They are truly a lower (smaller) class of people that have to fight to be even recognized.
You see Cootie almost immediately start being taken advantage of. His agent, of course a white man, leaps into action when he first sees Cootie and has him posing uncomfortably for hours on end in absurd settings just for a little bit of money. Cootie is just another advertising product to be exploited.
Although the series builds towards a standoff between The Hero and Cootie, the true hero is Jones. With her spellbinding ability to make abstract concepts visually compelling and doing the hard work of organizing a general strike, it becomes apparent that if real change does eventually come about, it will be because of the actions of people like Jones. There is no shortcut. There is no final battle between good and evil. Progress must be worked for and fought for.
I’ve just talked about the ideas. The presentation of the series is amazing. I haven’t read about it, but I’m guessing that the impressive visuals of presenting a thirteen foot tall man in a conventional world is some combination of perspective, very creative use of props, and CGI. I found Cootie’s attempts to fit into a world much too small for him quite convincing.
As a filmmaker, Riley is clever. One scene, when Cootie is confined, seemed reminiscent of King Kong, once again making a commentary about a racist society equating a Black man to an animal. At one point, there’s a thread of a plot involving a video that is so compulsively enjoyable that no one can tear themselves from it. Intentional or not, that is a direct call to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
One final note is about the blog title. Without going too much into it, the series ends with a several minute stirring and compelling denunciation of capitalism. I found it to be absolutely brilliant.
Riley is a communist activist. Sorry to Bother You also had a strong anti-capitalist bent. I found it extremely amusing that I’m A Virgo is an Amazon Prime presentation. After all, Amazon is (at least as of this writing) a trillion dollar corporation. Even among its highly compensated office workers, it has a reputation for high stressful working conditions that regularly leave employees in tears. Amazon warehouse workers have industrial accidents at significant higher rates than average and are driven by automated systems to work so hard that they sometimes feel the need to urinate in bottles. Amazon delivery drivers, who aren’t even considered Amazon employers, have to deliver packages at a punishing rate (again having to urinate in bottles) in substandard vehicles with safety issues. It’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has, over the years, come to bear an uncanny resemblance to Dr Evil.
What does it mean that Amazon greenlit a project with such an anti-capitalist message? Are they so secure in the power that they wield and their hold over society that they see Riley’s message as absolutely no threat to their sprawling empire? Or is there some rebel faction in the bowels of Amazon that saw this as an opportunity to shoot off a flare of desperate rebellion?
Or do they understand that even communists have money and as part of their grand plan to own all of the capital in the world, are they now going after communist money?
dorkenstein 