Listen to the audio version of the article
Cootie is a black boy from Oakland just under twelve feet tall. His 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 teach 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 strip The Hero, dedicated to a superhero. When through the hedge he meets the neighborhood kids, 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 giving shape to militant and radical discourses on capitalism, unemployment, crime and the police. Riley, frontman of rappers The Coup, has already brought his own style and themes to the cinema in Sorry to bother you, and in the series I’m a virgin he chooses to widen the shirts and also reflect on superheroes, so dominant in our popular culture. His thesis is that, even when the works that concern 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 super-powered proletarians of I Am a Virgin, which include not only the giant protagonist but also his beloved and super-fast Flora, the aforementioned Jones and a miniaturized neighborhood of Lilliputian dimensions, will instead fight against the injustices of capital. Before this anti-system crescendo takes place, staged in a riot of ideas and with fiercely analog special effects, I’m a Virgin begins as a fairytale coming-of-age story, which reflects 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. Just seven episodes, each under 40 minutes long, but with plans to continue for more seasons, are enough to declare 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
Amazon Prime video