“I’m a Virgo”- Boots Riley series via Amazon Prime

He's one of my favorite MCs ever, on my personal top 5.

Very hard to pick but here are my top 5 Boots Riley songs, in suggested order of listening:











(These are all from his work with The Coup but his Streetsweeper Social Club duo with Tom Morrello is very worth checking out as well!)
 
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I hated, "Sorry to Bother you".

Shit was so weird, the points were lost in it. Had a few funny moments, but overall Boots' movies to me are messy films that lose focus over time. Way-out-there concepts are cool, but usually stump most audiences.

I applaud his artistic vision and the ability to story tell in an unconventional way - that being said, his style of storytelling isn't for me, and I'd like to think I've watched some pretty weird shit.
 
I hated, "Sorry to Bother you".

Shit was so weird, the points were lost in it. Had a few funny moments, but overall Boots' movies to me are messy films that lose focus over time. Way-out-there concepts are cool, but usually stump most audiences.

I applaud his artistic vision and the ability to story tell in an unconventional way - that being said, his style of storytelling isn't for me, and I'd like to think I've watched some pretty weird shit.

I feel you....I think he tried to shoehorn too many concepts and messages into that film....it was cool for the first two acts but the last act was too ham fisted and over the top. I am interested in getting it on DVD so I can watch his directors commentary to really get a sense of what he was thinking.
I watched the first episode of "I'm a Virgo" and will finish it...hopefully its more balanced than "Sorry to Bother you"
I like a lot of indie, off-beat, weird shit, like "The Lobster", "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" etc. So I can't really recommend this stuff to everybody. I
 
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I feel you....I think he tried to shoehorn too many concepts and messages into that film....it was cool for the first two acts but the last act was too ham fisted and over the top. I am interested in getting it on DVD so I can watch his directors commentary to really get a sense of what he was thinking.
I watched the first episode of "I'm a Virgo" and will finish it...hopefully its more balanced than "Sorry to Bother you"
I like a lot of indie, off-beat, weird shit, like "The Lobster", "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" etc. So I can't really recommend this stuff to everybody. I

Eternal Sunshine I put up there as genius level film making. The Lobster not so much. I get what it was saying, the ride was just boring. Wes Anderson has an offbeat artsy style and I've only really liked one or two of his films. The Life Aquatic and his two stop-motion films - Isle of dogs and Fantastic Mr Fox.

If you go back some, quirky films like Buckaroo Bonzai and the Repo man. While strange, we're more focused

 
Episode 3 is where it starts to pick up. The Scat hospital scene was well done. And the Eviction Defense Committee was really interesting— I’d never seen or heard of anything like that. The interaction with The Hero in that regard is something Boots says to look out for in the post-show commentary.

‘I’m a Virgo’ Season 1, Episode 3 Recap: Special ain’t so spectacular​

OPINION: Cootie and Flora continue to get to know each other by going on another date, where we get the heartbreaking story about Flora's superpower.

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The Grio: Brooke Obie | Jun 25, 2023

Whew. Boots Riley’s Prime Video series “I’m a Virgo” is nothing short of an anti-capitalist manifesto, and the third episode, “Paco Rabanne,” is the most masterful, emotional ride yet.

It begins on a sweet note, with our gentle giant, Cootie (Jharrel Jerome), the 13-foot-tall Black teen on his first date with Flora (Olivia Washington), the literally lightning-fast Black girl who’s biding her time as a chef in the Bing Bang Burger kitchen. Only their mouths are in focus as they get to know one another and hang on each other’s every word.

But when Cootie tries to talk about being in a relationship, she surprisingly tells him to slow down. She may move at the speed of light, but she’s in no rush to be committed. It’s actually her mission as a chef to feed people healthy, cheap food that will make them slow down and enjoy it. It’s a lovely bit of irony for the girl with super speed.

Across town, Cootie’s friend Jones (Kara Young) has organized the community into an eviction defense committee to block landlords and police from entering apartments in a complex and evicting the tenants. Soon, the Hero shows up and shuts down the committee and the evictions resume.

Still, Cootie admires the Hero’s actions and his catchphrase, “Get your mind right, half-wits.” Flora tries to educate Cootie on the Hero’s dog-whistle slogan and fascist practices, but Flora sees he’s committed to his ideas of the Hero, so she drops it. At this point, Cootie’s parents, his friends and now Flora have told him this Hero is a pig, but Cootie’s going to have to learn the hard way.

Flora doesn’t want the date to end, so she takes him from one restaurant to another and we learn the heartbreaking story of her super speed and what she has to give up of herself to live in a world that could never keep up with her.

Like Cootie’s giant genes, Flora was born with her speedy superpower. And like Cootie, her exasperated parents were fearful of her gifts and sought out doctors and child psychiatrists to understand why she moved, talked, ate and did everything else with super speed. Eventually, as a pre-teen, Flora trained herself to do everything in slow motion.

This allowed her to finally communicate with her overjoyed parents and participate in the world instead of outside of it. “It’s like translating,” she explains of how she restrains herself so that she can be understood, seen, heard and loved — and as a Black woman, I’ve never felt more seen.

Unfortunately for Flora, learning to tame her superpower doesn’t keep her parents’ fractured marriage together. Unlike Cootie’s adoptive parents, Flora’s mother decides it’s all too much for her and she leaves Flora with her dad while she goes off to find herself and calls Flora her “tough girl.” Even in childhood, and even by adult Black women, Black girls are burdened with the strong Black woman trope.

It’s an interesting creative choice from Riley to remove Black mothers from both of these superheroes’ lives. Cootie’s Black mom (presumably) dies in childbirth. We never see her in that opening scene of the pilot episode; we’re just told in exposition that she was Martisse’s (Mike Epps) sister. She’s replaced in Cootie’s life by the biracial mother figure Lafrancine (British actress Carmen Ejogo) who clearly cares for and dotes on Cootie. As far as we know, Flora gets no replacement mother.

For a show full of well-thought-out metaphors, I’m stumped by what Riley’s choice to erase Black mothers means, particularly when so much of our communities’ survival is because of Black mothers. Riley’s work from “Sorry to Bother You” to “I’m a Virgo” centers Black men’s experiences, with women on the periphery, and perhaps in not wanting to show another Black father abandoning his kids on TV, he chose the road less traveled and made a neglectful Black mother instead but wound up with a pattern of Black mother erasure. It’s the first choice in the series that rings false and unnecessary in an otherwise stellar episode.

Back at Cootie’s exploitative mall modeling gig, Felix (Brett Gray) and Scat (Allius Barnes) stop by and Cootie shares that he’s going on a third date with Flora that night. Felix warns him that third dates mean sex and Cootie has no idea what to do. Even though Felix is supposed to join Scat at the comic book store, Felix hangs back to give Cootie some ridiculous sex advice as Scat rides off alone.

Cootie goes home with Felix to change for the date and realizes his clothes are giving him a rash on the right side of his chest down to his waist. Lafrancine had been sewing all of Cootie’s clothes up to the point when he started modeling for Asphalt Royalty; perhaps his body was not used to the cheap fabrics or poisonous dyes. Perhaps it’s his punishment for exploiting himself and modeling negative images of violent and hypersexualized Black men for profit. We don’t yet know.

Cootie smears garlic paste all over the rash as a YouTube video instructs him, but then is overcome by the odor. He sneaks into Martisse’s bathroom and douses himself in Paco Rabanne cologne, which gives the episode its title and lets Martisse and Lafrancine know that their son is about to have sex.

It’s another thing they haven’t prepared him for, and Lafrancine’s whole parenting philosophy is thrown into question by Jones when Lafrancine draws a picture of Jones’ eviction defense committee rescuing tenants from eviction. Jones says the committee is not the savior, and she wants the people to understand that the people save themselves. A leader’s only job is to create more leaders; creating images of saviors, superheroes and icons doesn’t do that. I see what you’re doing, Boots Riley. I see it — even if Lafrancine doesn’t yet.

Meanwhile, Cootie and Flora are having another date so lovely that they’ve decided to leave it and have sex at Cootie’s house, even though his toilet is overflowing at home.

Cut back to Scat, who’s at the comic book store alone. He plays an arcade video game version of his favorite cartoon show, “Parking Tickets,” as the kid who only says his ridiculous catchphrase from the show “Boyoyoyoing!” In an eerie bit of foreshadowing, the character rides a bicycle away from a police officer who’s chasing him with a gun drawn. Scat loses the game and the player dies.

He moves away from the game and watches an episode of “Parking Tickets” that’s playing on the store’s TV. In this episode, a weatherman is forecasting a winter storm before going into a long monologue about the fact that there’s no escaping the coming storm, which will fall on everyone — the survivors and “upon those who are survived by us.” Scat says that last part of the monologue in unison with the weatherman. He’s probably seen this episode a dozen times. Still, when the Boyoyoyoyoing! kid pops up again to interrupt the weatherman’s philosophical musings in order to say his nonsensical catchphrase, Scat still cracks up laughing.

But he’s there on a mission, to get a “Parking Tickets” action figure for Cootie, who’d lied and said the character was his favorite just to fit in with his new friends. As Scat buys the action figure, the clerk recognizes Scat’s super fandom and gifts him a banned episode of the show that had only aired once and led viewers to have existential meltdowns. Scat eagerly accepts it.

Riding away on his bike, Scat mimics the scene from the arcade game, causing havoc for whoever was in his path. He starts flying on his bike and tries to take a photo of himself midair while smoking a blunt but he loses balance, drops the phone and crashes into trash. He’s stabbed by metal shrapnel and stumbles into a hospital. The white woman administrator at the hospital ER refuses to let him see a doctor because he doesn’t have insurance and when he gets loud in defense of his own life and the injustice of her dismissal of him, a Black male security guard throws him out of the hospital.

Hours go by as he sits at the bus stop unable to use a stranger’s phone because he doesn’t know anyone’s number. Neither of them dial 911. Felix happens to drive by and see Scat bleeding out at the bus stop and takes him to the hospital but Scat collapses before getting to the door.

As Felix screams for help, Scat sees the “Parking Tickets” episode he just watched in the comic book store playing on the hospital doors. Nurses and a doctor scramble outside but Oakland has transformed into the winter snowstorm scene from the cartoon as parking tickets rain from the sky. Snow falls “upon we, the survivors, and upon those who survive us,” Scat says along with the weatherman, as he’s dying. He’s wearing a T-shirt with the Boyoyoyoyoing boy on it, but no one pops out with a catchphrase to lighten the mood. This absurdist dramedy is in full heartbreak mode.

 
I think the Crown HQ scene is the best on the show to that point. The Jones Crisis of Capitalism “psychic theater” scene really heightened the conflict. A lot is thrown at Cootie with his dismay at society leaving Scat to die and then, after partially being inspired to action by him, finding himself targeted by The Hero.

‘I’m a Virgo’ Season 1, Episode 4 Recap: Black love and Black lives matter​

OPINION: Cootie and Flora find creative ways to take their relationship to the next level. Later, Cootie and friends Felix and Jones deal with the aftermath of a tragic loss by holding a protest at a local hospital that only cares about the bottom line.

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The Grio: Brooke Obie | Jun 26, 2023

We’re halfway through the first season of Boots Riley’s inventive Prime Video series “I’m a Virgo,” and this fourth episode, “Balance Beam,” is where we get to the white meat of Riley’s communist manifesto.

In the last episode, Krown Hospital kicked a critically injured Scat (Allius Barnes) out of its emergency room for not having health insurance, and he winds up dying in his best friend Felix’s arms before he could make it inside of another hospital. “Balance Beam” opens with Felix trying to make sense of what just happened in front of him. He seeks out Jones (Kara Young) at a house party where she’s making out with her girlfriend but immediately knows something awful has happened just by the devastation on his face.

Let me just pause right quick to shout out Brett Gray as Felix. We’ve seen him be hilarious in the Netflix series “On Our Block,” and we’ve seen him break our hearts in “When They See Us.” In “I’m a Virgo,” Gray gets space for the full range of his talent, and he’s firing on all cylinders.

And so is Riley. He’s given us a cruel, systematic death of a Black boy that’s inherent in the metaphor of a 13-foot-tall friendly Black giant named Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) without giving us a brutal police brutality scene or even a graphic onscreen death for Scat. I entered the series fearful that they might “Queen & Slim” this, and I’m grateful that fear was unfounded, on two fronts.

Not only was Scat’s death deeply emotional instead of graphic, but Riley also does not intercut his death with Cootie and Flora (Olivia Washington) having sex for the first time like in the aforementioned triggering movie. Both of these moments are pivotal to the characters and the series as a whole and deserved to stand on their own, and I’m so glad episode four gives Cootie and Flora their moment to have some weird ass, sweet, hilarious, balance beam sex — innocent for a few hours before the news of Scat’s death reaches them.

Cootie shows her the rash on his right side of red and white raised bumps. She kisses it. They have the most emotionally aware and honest conversations during sex that lead to gratifying experiences for both of them, each using their superpowers (him being a giant, her being faster than the speed of lightning) to benefit the other. Absurdity aside, I’ve never seen such sexually healthy conversations between a man and a woman on television. Do people talk like this? No, and for Flora, she’s already having to slow herself down to the point of minutes feeling like years to her, so she doesn’t have time to waste being shy or dishonest or unfulfilled.

But, I also don’t care much about seeing realistic emotional honesty between a young couple! Riley is trying to paint a picture of what’s possible, of who we can emulate, what we can be — and I’m so here for all of it.

Then the greedy power company knocks everyone’s lights out again.

Back at the party, Jones tells everyone that Scat is dead, and there’s a video of the hospital kicking Scat out without treatment. They’re going down to the Krown hospital’s headquarters to protest. A protester paints a mural of Scat’s face on the side of Krown headquarters, and it’s all too much for Felix.

He’s angry, sick with grief and lashing out at everyone, including the graffiti artist who’s painting Scat but never even knew him. Jones tries to calm him down but he lashes out at her too for organizing a protest when Scat literally died that same night. He insinuates that Jones is an opportunist, using Scat’s death to feed her “fans” in the activist space, and suggests if she wasn’t so wrapped up in community organizing, maybe she could’ve been around to help Scat.

It hurts, but Jones understands his pain and gives him grace. When she finally gets ahold of Cootie and tells him what’s going on, he and Flora join the protest in front of Krown. He’s asking how a hospital that’s meant to heal people can send them away to die for being poor. Jones stands on a car with a bullhorn to answer his question and in doing so reveals her own superpower: She can explain things and make people see and understand how things are connected.

Since episode one, Riley has been making the case for the destruction of capitalism, piece by piece. And in this episode, Jones brings all the pieces together, connecting Scat’s death to the system of corporate greed that’s also lowering wages and raising prices across all facets of their lives. The crisis of capitalism, she explains, compels corporations like Krown – like the power company, like the landlords — to raise their prices and lower the wages they pay to make more profit until people can’t afford it and get pushed out to die. But then, she/Riley explains the kicker: “We get justice for Scat by getting justice for us all.”

It’s a pointed critique of reformist movement demands that center on justice equaling getting “bad apple” police officers fired or demanding police officers arrest themselves. If the whole damn system is guilty, the whole damn system must be dismantled. The crowd of protestors understand and agree, cheering and marching in Scat’s name and their own, while the fascist police descend to arrest them. The police throw smoke bombs into the crowd and Flora jumps into her superhero bag, catching and throwing back the smoke bombs before the police know what hit them.

Cootie remembers one of his last conversations with Scat back in episode two when he said he wanted his name on the side of a building, so Cootie gets to work graffitiing Scat’s name on Krown headquarters. Before he knows it, the Hero (an increasingly absurd Walton Goggins) is right behind him, knocking him out cold. When Cootie comes to, he’s being dragged through the streets in chains by the Hero.

The boyoyoyoyoyoing! “Parking Tickets” show moment we’ve come to expect in the series comes when a fan of the Hero approaches him mid-dragging and asks the comic book publishing icon to look at the fan’s own comic portfolio. Surprisingly, the Hero stops and considers the portfolio thoughtfully before responding in earnest. “There’s no emotion in the faces,” he critiques just before he dawns his own pained expression as he continues dragging Cootie down the street.

 

‘I’m a Virgo’ Season 1, Episode 5 Recap: How they see us​

OPINION: Cootie deals with negative media stories about him, while the residents of the Lower Bottoms — who were literally shrunk down overnight — start to organize against greedy landlords and corporations who've pushed them to the margins.

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The Grio: Brooke Obie | Jun 27, 2023

We’re onto the fifth episode of Boots Riley’s “I’m a Virgo,” “Brillo, If Possible,” and the stakes couldn’t be higher — or in this case, lower. Bear (Craig Tate) — the self-appointed leader of the Lower Bottoms neighborhood of Oakland, whose fight with Cootie outside of a nightclub in the pilot episode made Cootie a local news phenomenon – has been shrunk!

One night, Bear is doing donuts in the parking lot, as usual. Then, the next morning he wakes up naked, drowning in his bedsheets, to discover that he’s shrunk down to six inches tall. Undeterred, he rigs a microphone to a toy car and rides around the Lower Bottoms letting everyone know what happened to him and that his barbecue business is still in effect regardless. As he rides around, he sees that it’s not just him — everyone in Lower Bottoms has been shrunk and is either naked or, like him, covering their nakedness with old receipts.

All season, through Cootie (Jharrel Jerome), a 13-foot-tall Black male teenager, we’ve seen the metaphor of the monsterification of Black male kids. Kids like Mike Brown whose killer cop Darren Wilson described the teen like he was some sort of mystical giant boogeyman instead of a human kid with his whole life ahead of him. Blackness in male form, Riley suggests, can make you hyper-visible in a violent, anti-Black world.

But with the shrinking of the people of Lower Bottoms, Riley also shows how Blackness in any form can mark you for erasure by the agents of white supremacist capitalism. The shrunken Lower Bottoms people have been fired from their jobs since they can no longer show up to work; they’ve been evicted or had their houses foreclosed on because they can’t pay bills, and they’re huddling together to survive a world that has targeted them and pushed them out of sight into the margins of white supremacist capitalist society. It’s a genius metaphor.

As the Lower Bottoms folks try to reorganize themselves, the news plays in the background with a chyron reading: “Hero Captures Twamp Monster,” as two talking heads of the show “Frenemy Fire” debate whether the “thug” Cootie, who was arrested by the Hero in the last episode for graffitiing Scat’s name on a building (aka “destroying property”) should’ve been dragged through the streets in chains, as the Hero did to Cootie, or merely handcuffed.

It’s a hilarious scene, with Riley sautéeing IRL white liberal talking heads who swear they’re “down” and can speak for Black people, even as they shout over the actual Black people in the room. “Go to Oakland and ask [Black people] how they say ‘20,’ because I’m in these streets!” The liberal anchor, who has lots of Black friends and would vote for Obama a third time, argues with the more openly racist anchor. A wide shot shows the Black female anchor we’ve seen all season is also there, sitting in between the two, exasperated but silent. And complicit.

It turns out, the Hero doesn’t have a cell big enough to hold Cootie in, so Cootie’s on house arrest for 120 days. It’s day five, and he’s still reading the Hero comics and justifying it by saying he knows the difference between the ideals laid out in the comic and the fascist who dragged him through the streets and placed him under house arrest for graffiti. “This is what really matters,” he explains, holding the comic up to his mom, Lafrancine (Carmen Ejogo).

Is Riley skewering the U.S. Constitution-defending liberals who still believe in the promise of this country’s “ideals” that have literally never, at any point in history, actually applied to non-white men and (later) women?
I’d like to think so.

Cootie continues to not read the room when a still-grieving Felix (Brett Gray) comes over to work on his prized car that keeps breaking down. Cootie has found the silver lining in Scat’s death in that it makes him recognize that living is also happening even more. There’s infinite life ahead of them, he says, not infinite death. Without realizing it, Cootie echoes the “Parking Tickets” episode that foreshadowed Scat’s death.

But Felix is deep in grief and not trying to hear about silver linings. He’s unable to fix his car and starts talking about it bleeding out like Scat did. Cootie tries to comfort him, saying Felix was a good friend to Scat and he did everything he could. Felix won’t hear it and even throws a low blow, suggesting if he hadn’t been “babysitting” Cootie by helping him prepare for his first sexual experience with Flora (Olivia Washington), Felix would’ve been with Scat instead and maybe he wouldn’t have died. He drives away as the creepy cult of pasty white people in black turtlenecks returns again to try to recruit Cootie as their Messiah. He ignores them until they go away.

But one person who refuses to leave Cootie during his 120-day house arrest is Flora. She’s been spending every day with Cootie until it’s time for her to go to work, and her unconscious lip smacking is starting to get on his nerves. She’s not faring any better with his surprise farts that she says are putting sulfur in her lungs. They get into their first little spat about it, which leads Cootie to promise to shower and Flora to gently demand that he use soap and a washcloth, and, as the episode title suggests, “Brillo, if possible.”

Meanwhile, Cootie is consumed by a “57 Minutes” news segment where people hypothesize about what Cootie could hypothetically do to them and how bad Cootie should feel for what he did to them in their dreams.

This satire is satirizing on all cylinders as the central role of the news media in creating a Black male boogeyman as an old white woman “artistic interpreter” comes on to analyze Cootie’s graffiti of Scat’s name as a threat for everyone to “get away” from Cootie or else.

As cootie showers, angered and fearful about the news segment, his month-old rash looks worse and more painful. Though he’s been fired from his modeling gig at Asphalt Royalty for getting arrested, he’s still been wearing their clothes, which could perhaps be the source of the rash.

He finds comfort in the online psychic reading the daily mantra for Virgos. But when the next video autoplays, he learns that Miss Dee is a fraud and all of her readings for every sign are exactly the same and equally meaningless. While everyone around him (besides Flora) finds his size to be the most fascinating thing about him, Cootie has rooted his identity in being a Virgo and mentions it as much as possible when explaining his thoughts and ideas. His already fragile sense of self folds even more when he learns Miss Dee is a fraud and he has no idea what, if anything, it means to be a Virgo.

On his last day of house arrest, he’s watching the Black female news anchor interview Jones (Kara Young) about the general strike she’s leading for fair wages, housing and health care as human rights in the wake of corporations’ complaints about lack of motivated workers. Krown Hospital workers were the first to strike to try to get the hospital to change the policies that killed Scat.

Jones says if they don’t all come together to strike, the corporations will do to them all what they’ve done to the people of the Lower Bottoms — taking away their abilities to afford to live and work. The strikers are growing in numbers. The message is working.

Cootie nervously scrolls through dozens of videos of police training to fight giants. Then, he watches a video of the Hero announcing he’s built a prison big enough to hold Cootie. Next, it’s a “Law & Order: SVU” episode of police interrogating a bruised-up Flora look-alike about her violent, giant predator lover who assaulted her. Then it’s commercials for an alarm system company depicting a cartoon version of Cootie destroying white people’s homes to sell their products. Finally, his latest “The Hero” comic arrives in the mail and Cootie’s on the cover, wrapped in chains as the Hero defeats him. His dad Martisse’s (Mike Epps) words about how the world would turn him into the villain by any means necessary have finally sunk in.

Cootie rips the comic up, then decides: He’ll be the villain. “I’ll make villains the new heroes,” he tells his parents, who have been preparing for this moment for 19 years. Martisse shares that they’ve been securing the house and building weapons to fit him, including a set of brass knuckles that say “love” and “hate” on them. Cootie picks them up and wears them, an obvious nod to Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.” But what the “right” thing is for Cootie to do next is still unclear — even to Cootie.

 

‘I’m a Virgo’ Season 1, Episode 6 Recap: A hero ain’t nothing but a sandwich​

OPINION: Episode six gives us a day in the life of the Hero, who appears trapped in a cage he created. Meanwhile, Cootie, Flora and the Lower Bottoms crew prepare to fight the power.

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The Grio: Brooke Obie | Jun 28, 2023

We’re nearing the end of the wild ride that is Boots Riley’s TV series debut, “I’m a Virgo.” It’s the penultimate episode of the series about a 13-foot-tall Black teenager named Cootie (Jharrel Jerome), “It Requires Trust on My Part.” For the first time, the episode doesn’t start in Cootie’s world but in his former idol’s world, the Hero.

It’s our first glimpse inside the daily life of the Hero, also known as tech billionaire and Elon Musk’s wet dream, Jay Whittle (a remarkably zany Walton Goggins). It’s morning in his high-tech building/compound that sits in downtown San Francisco, and he’s awakened by the sound of his Alexa-like A.I. assistant. Unfortunately, the law-and-order zealot has accidentally programmed his A.I. to sound like Bill Cosby in his pudding pop heyday. It seems like a self-inflicted punishment, like the slaps he gives himself in order to get out of bed — a feat that he clearly dreads. Before long, he’s up and at ‘em, dancing in his underwear to country singer Glenn Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman,” a song about a lonely, isolated worker who has extraordinary thoughts that no one would believe just by looking at him.

Whittle created the comic book character the Hero and then took on that persona in the world, and it’s just as much a prison for him as the ones he fills with “criminals” who threaten his precious “law and order.” His self-imposed duty of fighting “crime” is his only purpose in the world and without it, he later confesses to his mother (who also lives on her own floor in his building) he would never get out of bed.

As he’s dancing to Glenn Campbell and trying to get dressed, an assassin jumps out of his closet and attacks him before being handily defeated by the Hero and disappearing in a cloud of smoke.

The Hero goes about his day as if it never happened. He starts off in his comic book publishing office, with the only Black artist in the room trying to defend the Hero comics against claims of propaganda. (There’s always one, isn’t there?)

In a moment of profound truth, the Hero readily admits that what he’s been creating for decades with his comics is, in fact, intentionally propaganda. His comics, he says, don’t just reflect reality, “It creates reality because it determines the actions that we take based on that perception.” I want every annoying commenter who has ever negged a pop culture critique with “it’s just a movie/TV show/comic book/novel/story/painting etc., etc.” to watch just this clip. I hope it goes viral!

As the Hero explains his course of action to make Cootie the symbol of villainy, someone tries to shoot into the building, but it’s bulletproof. While everyone else is freaking out, he continues unphased.

Meanwhile, Cootie is all-in on the idea of him being a villain for the people. He tries to get Jones in on his villain plan to pull off a heist that will “change people’s material conditions.” But Jones isn’t for it. Her general strike is gaining traction and she believes it’s the best way to permanent change rather than quick satisfaction. Again, she (who is clearly the voice of Riley) wants people to focus on working together, not lifting Cootie and a small group of people up as saviors.

At the Hero’s publishing company, we meet the Hero’s assistant Edwin, played hilariously straight by Kendrick Sampson. The vibes between the Hero and his Black assistant are giving homoerotic as the Hero sensually hugs and caresses Edwin, looks deeply into his eyes, asks about Edwin’s upcoming date later on that night and demands Edwin play slap hands with him in a way that would be an HR violation if Edwin didn’t seem not just to be into it but honored by it. Still, these two are not friends or equals; Edwin calls the Hero “sir,” and the Hero leaves Edwin to diffuse a bomb in the refrigerator set to go off in an hour by the assassin because the Hero has more important things to do. Edwin eagerly agrees to the challenge.

Back at Cootie’s place, Felix, Flora and the leaders of the newly shrunken Lower Bottoms crew assemble to carry out Cootie’s heist of the power plant. Their goal is to knock out the regulator so that everyone’s power can remain on permanently. The Lower Bottoms crew are down for the heist because they want to harm whoever shrunk all the people in their Oakland neighborhood down to six inches tall. They believe at least 10 corporations stood to benefit from shrinking the people of the Lower Bottoms, and the power company is one of them.

In a cute scene of Lower Bottoms leader Bear shooting his shot with Flora and making Cootie jealous, she retorts, “Why are you jealous? He’s six inches tall.” To which Bear tells her not to sleep on what he could do with six inches, giving us the hysterical title of this episode, “It requires trust on my part.”

Cootie refocuses the team back on the plan, sharing that the banned episode of “Parking Tickets” that made viewers catatonic while watching it was in Scat’s pocket when he died. Cootie wants the Lower Bottoms crew to sneak into the security booth at the power plant and play the DVD to distract the guards while he knocks out the regulator. They all pick their superhero names: Flora claiming the already trademarked 2 Fast, 2 Furious despite Cootie’s protests because it’s her favorite movie; the Lower Bottoms crew is Death by a Thousand Cuts, Felix is V8, and Cootie, in his continued effort to reclaim villain status, calls himself Thug 1.

That night, the Hero goes to the prison to witness a state execution of a Black male prisoner by lethal injection. The prisoner is upright, strapped to a bed, scoffing when the Hero acts as if his presence is a comfort to the prisoner. The prisoner tells the Hero that they’d met before, 30 years ago at the Hero’s first ComicCon. The prisoner used to be a big fan and got his autograph but later realized that it was the Hero’s widespread, mainstream copaganda that directly led to the circumstances that created the prisoner in the image of a villain. In a profound statement that the Hero is too self-absorbed to comprehend, the prisoner shares he was in a kill-or-be-killed situation; and just as he had no right to take someone’s life, the state has no right to take his.

But it doesn’t matter; the California governor has cleared the way for the prisoner’s execution and the lethal injections — three separate, simultaneous fluids that go into the man’s body (thankfully, off-camera) are red, white, and blue. What’s more American than the state-sponsored execution of a Black man?

As we hear the prisoner’s gruesome sounds of dying, we see the Hero’s tear-stained face. He genuinely believes his hype, like Elijah Wood’s student executioner character from episode two: apparently kinder, gentler, fascist murder is justice.


Just as Cootie and the gang are about to enact their heist, Flora pulls Cootie aside and asks for the real reason why he’s trying to break the regulator. I’ve said this before, but Flora’s superpower can’t just be her superspeed; it’s also got to be her level of self-awareness and emotional maturity. Olivia Washington plays her with such confidence and ease and a wealth of humanity that hopefully spawns Flora stans well into the future.

When Cootie gets stand-offish about sharing his inner thoughts with her, Flora explains that since she’s slowing herself down in order to have a relationship with him — months for him are years for her — so she wants to be very intentional about how she spends her time and very clear on what kind of connection he wants to have with her. Yes! It’s propaganda from Riley on how to have healthy and difficult conversations, and I hope it sticks in people’s brains like it is in mine.

Edwin’s date at a fancy restaurant with a young white woman seems to be going well until she loses the game of slap hands. She thought it was harmless flirting, but he is enraged that she broke the rules of the game and thereby “failed the pre-date.” That’s right. Edwin has been sent by the Hero to scout women for him to partner with. She rightfully calls him a creepy, sadistic loser. Edwin tries to defend the practice and his devotion to the Hero by saying that the Hero stands for applying the law fairly, which would equal freedom for Black people. So, he’s basically Martin Luther King Jr.! The woman calls him basically a little bitch.

Devastated from witnessing an execution, the Hero sneaks off to a floor in his building that has replicated his childhood bedroom. His mom bursts in and he turns into a belligerent teenager. He’s no hero. He’s every whiny tech bro to ever exist. His mom recognizes how unhappy his hero fantasy has made him, and she’s confused why he continues to play the game: “You were born into power,” she reminds him. “The laws were made for us,” so why’s he so pressed? Without enforcing his sense of superiority on others, he knows he’d be nothing.

As Cootie puts his plan into action against Jones’ advice, the Hero throws a tantrum when Edwin confesses the pre-date did not work out. He berates and emotionally abuses Edwin as he hugs him tightly and calls him useless and shitty. Still, he remains, clinging to the Black liberal hope that one day, when he proves he’s good enough, the law he loves will love him back.

 
I had some shrooms before watching the last episode and when it opened with that Boyoyoyoyoing shit, it felt like it was made to be viewed that way.

The Jones speech at the end was amazing, I watched that whole scene at least ten times.

The final scene was perplexing as hell, I don't really understand what that rash-turned-infection-turned-alien-pregnancy? was all about.

I'm definitely going to give this another viewing. There were so many concepts and fast-moving developments that it felt impossible to catch everything the first way through and I think it will be easier to understand what everything means knowing the full story.

I'll give it a preliminary 8/10, withholding final judgment until then.
 

‘I’m a Virgo,’ Season 1, Episode 7 Recap: The revolution was (kinda) televised​

OPINION: In the season finale of Boots Riley’s surrealist TV series, Cootie’s revolt against the power company is short-lived while the Hero suffers a personal crisis when he realizes he’s not the good guy.

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The Grio: Brooke Obie | Jun 29, 2023

We’ve come to the end of the road! It’s the final episode of the first season of Boots Riley’s fantastic debut series “I’m a Virgo,” aptly titled A Metaphor for What.”

All season, I’ve been interpreting Riley’s metaphors in these recaps. The main two are a 13-foot-tall Black teen named Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) as a manifestation of our white supremacist capitalist society’s adultification and monsterization of Black teen (and pre-teen) boys like Tamir Rice and Mike Brown; and the Hero (Walton Goggins) as the physical manifestation of our obsession with “law and order” as safety, thanks to the media feeding us copaganda through the news, superhero stories, books, films and TV shows.

But the ending has me stumped. But here’s my best guess as to its meaning:

The finale begins with Cootie (Jharrel Jerome), Flora (Olivia Washington), Felix (Brett Gray) and the six-inch-tall leaders of the Lower Bottoms neighborhood of Oakland successfully destroying the power company’s regulator. Everyone’s power is restored! They return to Cootie’s place with his dad, Martisse (Mike Epps), a former funk singer, freestyling a congratulatory song on his keyboard and accidentally making an overly sexual rhyme that Cootie’s mom, Lafrancine (Carmen Ejogo), objects to. He tries to play off the dirty joke as a metaphor, and Cootie’s response gives us the title, “A metaphor for what?” Martisse mumbles in response, giving no coherent answer.

The news frames the destruction of the regulator as a terrorist attack. Police investigate and find the security guards at the power plant catatonic, the lost episode of the series show-within-a-show “Parking Tickets” out on the table. The officers play the DVD, and we finally see what’s on the banned episode that Scat (Allius Barnes) received from the comic book store clerk the day he died.

It’s all about the life cycle of the “Parking Tickets” show’s comic relief, whom I’ve just been calling the Boyoyoyoyoyoing boy since that’s his catchphrase and the only thing he ever says. The episodes we’ve seen of “Parking Tickets” show him popping up with his catchphrase to lighten the mood, just as another character finishes sharing a deep and devastating truth. In the lost episode, though, we see he’s more than just comic relief, though he’s always only said this nonsensical phrase. As a toddler, when he says it, the adults laugh hysterically to his confusion and delight, so he keeps saying it, as he grows up, from a child into a graduate, into an adult that only says one thing. But nobody’s laughing when he says it as an adult. He’s all alone, unable to connect to anyone.

Then, he falls in love and they grow old together as he continues to say his catchphrase into old age, until his death at 89 years old. As he’s buried in the cemetery, his wife and children around his grave, a minister recites his catchphrase, but no one is laughing.

The episode turns its viewers catatonic while watching and for days and weeks after, likely because of the hard essential truth: comic relief can’t stop any of us from dying.

We can laugh off climate change and do yoga on the rooftops during a smog storm; we can sneer at masks and COVID vaccines while we brunch our way through the continuing pandemic that’s ravaging millions of bodies a month around the world unchecked; we can ignore the growing population of people in this country without housing, food and clean water, as the roads, bridges and train tracks crumble beneath us; and we can close our eyes while the world cha-cha-slides deeper into fascism. But at some point, there’ll be no more TikToks left to scroll, nowhere left to hide, and we’ll have to face the truths we’ve been running from and their consequences.

Cootie and the gang want to celebrate their victory, but the heist crew is already splintering. Apparently, the Lower Bottoms crew totaled Felix’s car, the last beautiful thing he had in his life. And Cootie’s mad at his parents because the weapons they spent 19 years building for him didn’t actually work when he was trying to destroy the regulator. (A metaphor for what!) Felix blames Cootie for everything, saying this scheme to break the regulator wasn’t about liberating the people, it was just about his ego that was hurt when the news media turned him into a villain. Cootie’s rash that’s been growing since episode three is horrifically worse as he continues to wear the designer clothes from the company he was fired from.

When things couldn’t get worse, the news media identifies Cootie as the terrorist that destroyed the regulator and the regulator comes right back on. All of their work was in vain, and the Hero has them surrounded and is attacking the house. Cootie realizes Jones (Kara Young) was right all along. It’s the general strike and collective power that works in the long run, not short-term, feel-good actions that can be undone by the state in hours.

But Jones doesn’t have it all together herself. In a fight with her girlfriend who tells Jones that her lack of consideration is hurting their relationship, Jones tries to use her superpower shield of persuasion to calm her down. But Jones’ girlfriend is not having it. “You win the argument and we both lose,” her girlfriend tells her. Cootie and Jones both have to refocus their superpowers not in service of themselves and their egos but for what is best for the whole community.

As the Hero tries to attack Cootie, Lafrancine runs the Hero over with her van. The creepy cult that’s been stalking Cootie offers him shelter and, with no other options, he reluctantly accepts. He follows the cult inside their church and, of course, is immediately imprisoned there by them, with the cult leader declaring that they need to sacrifice his eye to save humanity according to a sticky note their random prophet named Sam left behind years ago. Fortunately, Cootie escapes and takes down the Hero.

He drags the Hero through the streets in the same manner that the Hero dragged Cootie back in episode four. Begging for his life, the Hero plays on Cootie’s old hopes and dreams, saying Cootie isn’t the villain after all, that Cootie can be a superhero alongside the Hero and be the new face of justice. Ever the naive innocent, Cootie says he would love to work with the Hero and doesn’t want to fight anymore. While he’s distracted, the Hero wraps a chain rope around Cootie’s neck and reimprisons him. As Jones curses the Hero out and tries in vain to unchain Cootie, Cootie tells her to use her superpower.

Playing on the Hero’s belief of himself as a fair and reasonable good guy, Jones gets him to agree to listen to her for only three minutes. Using her superpower, she brings him into her imagination, showing him how he contributes to the crime he claims he wishes to stop.

“If you wanted to stop crime, you’d be a revolutionary,” she tells him. Instead, he’s “a tool that helps capitalism run smoothly — the system that creates poverty and the crime and violence necessitated by it. Lock yourself up,” she tells him.

The Hero flies away in a daze, mind-blown, defeated, leaving Cootie to free himself, with Felix, Jones and Flora (and even the ghost of Scat!) by his side. Jones asks how Cootie knew using her superpower would work on the Hero. Cue the title card.

Cootie’s sense of self has been restored.

But what might’ve been a somewhat happy ending, with one tech billionaire fascist maybe rethinking his life choices, ends on a horrifically vague note. Cootie’s rash has grown into a gaping wound, and he basically scratches his side open to reveal a haunting green intestine. It’s a metaphor for what? I genuinely have no idea. But damn. What a ride.

Hats off to creator, writer and director Boots Riley, showrunner Tze Chun and the whole writers’ room, and especially stars Jharrel Jerome, Brett Gray, Olivia Washington and Kara Young for creating this absolute masterpiece of commieganda. The revolution was (kinda) televised … and perhaps there was no need to see the growing general strike be successful in season one. Perhaps the real revolution was the viewers who were radicalized along the way.

 
I had some shrooms before watching the last episode and when it opened with that Boyoyoyoyoing shit, it felt like it was made to be viewed that way.

The Jones speech at the end was amazing, I watched that whole scene at least ten times.

The final scene was perplexing as hell, I don't really understand what that rash-turned-infection-turned-alien-pregnancy? was all about.

I'm definitely going to give this another viewing. There were so many concepts and fast-moving developments that it felt impossible to catch everything the first way through and I think it will be easier to understand what everything means knowing the full story.

I'll give it a preliminary 8/10, withholding final judgment until then.
That jones shit was great how it was broken down.
 
I think my biggest question other than the very final image is what Bing Bang Burger was supposed to represent, why did they forbid him from eating it and what was the point of the first non-family member Cootie talks to saying he and Cootie’s uncle used to eat a ton of it?

It strikes me as similar to alcohol in that it is forbidden, Cootie thinks it is disgusting when he first tastes it and how he uses it as a way to hang around Flora. But I don’t think it is that direct, has to be more to it than that?
 
This clip reminded me of the Jones monologue in the last episode... Really one of my favorite pieces of TV ever, extremely insightful.




 
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