Communist in the land of Lilliputians – Weekend
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The most unusual show of the season, “I Am a Virgo,” a surreal series advocating the victory of communism in California, was released on Amazon Prime Video streaming.
In the most ordinary African-American family in Oakland, a baby is born too big – the size of a six-year-old, so that his mother can hardly hold him in her arms. Years go by, a boy named Kuti (Jarrel Jerome) grows up and by the age of 19 he is already four meters tall. His parents hide him from the neighbors and do not let him out into the street – they say, the outside world is unkind and dangerous, let’s wait until adulthood, baby! We will find out the reason for their concern later, when they show their giant son an album with clippings about the plight of the giants who managed to be born like this in past times: at best, they became circus freaks, and not a single one found a quiet life.
But Kuti still sticks his nose over the high fence – and immediately finds company in the person of the neighboring teenagers. Bosom buddies Felix (Brett Grey) and Scat (Allius Barnes) are just harmless fools, but their friend Jones (Cara Young) is a committed communist who wants to transform the life of the poor neighborhoods of Oakland. In addition, she has superpowers: when she begins to broadcast about social injustice and the ugly grimaces of capitalism, listeners fall into the world created by her imagination, as if into an immersive performance. But before Cooti’s life is getting better in the new environment, poor Scat dies tragically – falls off his bike, is not admitted to the hospital without insurance, and bleeds to death. Then Jones proposes to fight the damned owners: the Kranz private hospital, the energy company that turns off the lights every evening in the area instead of updating the infrastructure, and other sharks of capital that make life unbearable for the poor, creating superprofits for them.
The bizarre series was conceived and directed by Boots Riley, a self-described communist rapper and activist who had already filmed the anti-capitalist satire “Sorry to Bother You” in 2018 about an unemployed man who got a job in a call center, began calling customers with the “voice of a white man” – and sales went up. Riley is also known for a tragic curiosity: in 2001, his hip-hop group The Coup released an album with blown-up twin towers on the cover, and managed to do it before the attack – this guy has some kind of gloomy prophetic gift otherwise.
In the series about the adventures of the ingenuous giant, Riley saddles his favorite horse: Jones declares through his mouth that unemployment is beneficial to capitalism, poverty gives rise to shadow business, and the violence in it is no different from the violence of the “legitimate”, which is simply delayed. In one of the episodes, Elijah Wood appears for about three minutes as a “humanist” who wants to improve the death penalty by inserting a needle with an injection into the vein of a suicide bomber “from a more humane angle” – such are Riley’s jokes.
Among other things, Riley is at war with pop culture, because “all art is propaganda,” as Oakland’s main villain Jay Whittle claims (Walton Goggins in this role looks like a rampaging Klaus Kinski). We have already seen serial anti-comics debunking the cult of superheroes: in The Boys they are just scum, in Doom Patrol they are goners whose superpower is equal to disability, in The Umbrella Academy they are a dysfunctional family suffering from nervous disorders. Here Goggins plays the most disgusting super after Homelander from The Boys – his superpower, like Batman, is concentrated in money and gadgets. Whittle himself writes comics in which the Hero acts (yes, just like that modestly – just a Hero), who considers himself the protector of the disadvantaged, and in each issue shouts to the bandits: “Turn on your brains at last!” It’s not until Cutie and Jones decide to fight capitalism that they realize that the Hero sees bandits as the underprivileged who fight for their rights.
The series is full of unique surreal gems, like the “forbidden” cartoon “Parking Ticket”: those who watched it become numb, experience an existential crisis and fall into a trance. With this cartoon, Kuti wants to immobilize the guards of the power plant in order to return the light to the residents of the area. He will be helped by the Lilliputians from the Lower Bottom suburb – another metaphor for Riley, speaking of the humiliation of the “little man”.
As a Rolling Stone reviewer snidely remarked, the show’s funniest joke lies in the fact that the anti-capitalist agitation came out in such an underbelly of capitalism as Amazon. “On the other hand,” a Time magazine columnist wittily retorts, “what looks like venality to you, we will call the “seizure of the means of production”.” Be that as it may, we have not yet seen such a surreal comic universe – bite it, Marvel.
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