In the sign of the giant fighting against power
Cootie is a black boy from Oakland just under twelve feet tall. His uncles and uncles raised him by protecting him from the world, scaring him with an album of newspaper clippings about the sad fate of other giants. They build him a custom-made house and educate him to read, but his only friends are on TV (where a cartoon on existential anguish is broadcast with the voice, among others, of Slavoj Žižek) and in the comic The Hero, dedicated to a superhero. When through the hedge he meets the kids in the neighborhood, he discovers that real life is quite different. Particularly among them is Jones, an activist with the super power to illustrate her political speeches in a sort of theatrical representation.
And it is here that director and author Boots Riley is at its best, pushing the pedal of the absurd to the extreme while at the same time embodying militant and radical discourses on capitalism, unemployment, crime and the police. riley, frontman by rappers The Coup, has already brought his own style and themes to the cinema in Sorry to bother youand in the series I'm a virgin chooses to widen the shirts and also reflect on superheroes, so dominant in our popular culture. His thesis is that, even when the works about them are clever enough to hide it, superheroes are still on the side of the ruling class, in fact his Hero is a billionaire like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. Riley has recounted, in various interviews, how reading superheroes as a boy and dreaming of being like them he would have ended up becoming a cop, if he hadn't found other passions. And indeed, even when they are rebels, superheroes (with some exceptions) stand up for the protection of the social order and do not seek to revolutionize it. The proletarians with superpowers of I'm a virgin, which include in addition to the giant protagonist also his beloved and super-fast Flora, the aforementioned Jones and a miniaturized Lilliputian-sized neighborhood, will instead fight against the injustices of capital. Before this anti-system crescendo starts, staged in a riot of ideas and with fiercely analogical special effects, I'm a virgin begins as a fairy tale coming of age, reflecting on the paradoxes of the American black condition. The ritual passages of love and death (a boy that the health system refuses to cure), are in turn political, because they are revisited through a gigantic protagonist who is a literal metaphor of how society magnifies the relative threat of black delinquency. Only seven episodes, each under 40 minutes in length, but with plans to continue for other seasons, suffice to state I'm a virgin as one of the most original, intelligent and imaginative, current and militant series of recent years.
Boots Riley
I'm a virgin
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