At the end of Boots Riley’s 2018 debut feature, “Sorry to Bother You,” Cassius (LaKeith Stanfield) gets stretched and mutilated beyond recognition until he becomes a horse — all in service of the film’s cutting narrative about how capitalism is crushing us all. In “I’m a Virgo,” Riley’s new Amazon Prime Video series, that stretching comes before the story begins: 19-year-old Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) is 13 feet tall, and he ends up under attack when the city of Oakland learns about the giant living in its backyard — again, all in service of a cutting narrative about how capitalism is crushing us all.
“I believe that people should democratically control the wealth that we create with our labor,” says Riley, 52. The writer-director has identified as a communist since before he gained recognition for founding the political hip-hop group the Coup in 1991. “How do you get the working class to organize together? Through them understanding where their power is, and under capitalism, our power is in the withholding of labor. There needs to be a mass, militant, radical labor movement that turns more radical as it goes on, until the people actually take over the places that they work and change the nature of society.”
“I don’t know if my politics have evolved [since ‘Sorry to Bother You’],” he adds. “The thing that has evolved is my artistic approach to talking about the same thing.”
Between Cassius and Cootie, Riley is clearly fascinated by extreme body imagery and depictions of sub- and superhumans. “Often, even with my music, I’m trying to make you feel something. Physically feel something,” he says of this motif in his work. “That might be dancing; it might be sexual; it might even repulse you. I don’t want to make stuff that you go do chores while it’s playing in the background. What I want from my art is real engagement with it, and to me, good art is visceral.”
The appeal of making Cootie 13 feet tall was in the “immediate contradictions that show up just from his existence.” More specifically, Cootie’s height helps to exaggerate the way that his Blackness prevents the powers that be from seeing his interiority and individuality. That’s where the show’s title comes from.
“No matter what this person feels about themselves, that’s not going to outshine what everyone else feels about them. It doesn’t really matter that he thinks [of himself as] a Virgo,” Riley explains. “What’s happening to him has to do with the world’s idea of where he fits in. It’s a 13-foot-tall Black man in Oakland called ‘I’m a Virgo’ — that’s why it sounds so funny. Because we automatically think, why the fuck does he care that he’s a Virgo?”
The villain in Cootie’s story started out as his hero — literally. The Hero (Walton Goggins) is a Bruce Wayne-like billionaire with his own line of idolizing comics, which Riley uses to examine his own relationship with what he labels as propaganda.
“When I was 12, I really wanted to be a superhero. I was really into comic books, so I relate to Cootie, but also to The Hero,” Riley says. “Had I not been saved, first by Prince, then by joining a revolutionary organization, that would have led into that ideology around superheroes, which justifies what police do.”
Riley uses The Hero’s storyline as a stylized argument against policing and prisons, but interestingly, the mogul’s melancholy inner life also finds its way to the screen.
“To make the characters human, I have to find what part of me resonates,” he says. “Most people, even if they’re doing terrible things, believe they’re doing the right thing. It doesn’t serve the analysis to have this person doing the wrong thing because they’re bad. They’re doing the wrong thing because they got it wrong.”
Riley’s instinct to put a small piece of his own politics into his villain is guided by an experience from his 20s, when he and a friend were pulled over by a cop in Oakland: “My friend was like, ‘Look, fuck you. You’re just part of the occupying force.’ And the cop was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He broke it down in five minutes to him, and the cop was crying and walked away.”
“I’m not just against police because they’re sometimes brutal, or they sometimes murder people,” Riley says. “It’s about what they’re here for in the first place and what position they have under capitalism. People think, ‘Maybe if they weren’t murderous and brutal, then it would be okay,” and then you can have other propaganda that makes them seem nicer. But it really doesn’t matter what kind of person they are. It’s about their function under this system.”
As with “Sorry to Bother You,” “I’m a Virgo” features characters who become newly class-conscious and find themselves embroiled in major labor conflicts. After slipping out from under his parents’ watchful eyes, Cootie enters the real world for the first time and makes new friends, including a staunch leftist named Jones (Kara Young). He begins searching for ways to use his monstrous size in the fight against capitalistic evils.
It’s not lost on Riley that he’s releasing the show while on strike himself, as a member of the Writers Guild of America. He says he has deals in place for three movies, two of which are already written and “will go as soon as we’re done striking.” In the meantime, he’s thrilled that the WGA strike has given the timing of “I’m a Virgo” a “context happening in the world for the work I’m doing.”
“All of my work has some sort of struggle, often to do with strikes and labor,” Riley says. “I’m loving that people are seeming to get it. Not only is it happening right now with the WGA and SAG, but in the last three years, there have been 2,918 strikes and work stoppages in the United States. Depending on the poll, anywhere between 40% and 51% of people in the U.S. would rather have a socialist world. We’re in a place we haven’t been at before in most of our lifetimes, and that’s what I’ve been trying to help instigate.”
The irony of airing a show with these politics on a platform owned by corporate behemoth Amazon doesn’t escape Riley either — he’s got critiques to spare.
“Two of the biggest investors in Amazon, the Vanguard fund and the BlackRock fund, are also two of the biggest investors in Netflix. In Disney. In Warner,” he says. “The people that own these companies are just using different avatars for different ways of doing business. You got Disney with sweatshops making stuffed animals, and you also got Amazon with union-busting in their distribution centers.”
That said, the number of people Riley can reach has always been his biggest priority.
“There’s no clean way to get stuff done. The Coup’s first album came out on EMI Records, which was a major international megacorporation,” he says. “I’ve never been out there pushing, ‘Let’s make a gentler capitalism,’ or trying to get people to buy from Peet’s instead of Starbucks. The small capitalists are trying to be the bigger capitalists. We need to tear it all down. That’s the corporate anti-capitalism that’s sold to us, that there’s companies that are better.”
“But the only reason people have ever heard of my art is because that’s what we’ve been doing.”