‘I’m a Virgo’ Is an Assault on Capitalism, Streaming on Amazon
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“All art is propaganda,” Cootie is told in Amazon’s new series I’m A Virgo. Cootie leans a lot about propaganda over the course of the show. His friend Jones is a Black activist trying to fight the effects of the “crisis of capitalism” that is bringing so much hurt into the world. Cootie, meanwhile, could use some consciousness-raising, since he has spent the first 19 years of his life hiding in his parents’ house because he is — apologies for not mentioning this sooner — 13 feet tall and super strong.
I’m A Virgo, created by Sorry to Bother You writer/director Boots Riley, certainly qualifies as propaganda. It very much believes in the causes Jones (Kara Young) is fighting for, and in the need for people — whether they are giants or regular-sized — to stop looking at life with simplistic morality. But it also functions as a dark comedy, a fable, and a superhero origin story, among many other things. It is, like Cootie (played by When They See Us Emmy winner Jharrel Jerome), an awful lot to take in at once. At times, it feels almost as patchwork as the outfits his mother LaFrancine (Carmen Ejogo) has to stitch together for him out of much smaller clothing. But like Cootie getting to stand at his full height, it’s also awesome in every sense of the word.
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Like Sorry to Bother You, I’m A Virgo takes place in a slightly askew version of Oakland. The city is patrolled by Jay Whittle (Walton Goggins), a wealthy comic book creator who has turned his famous character, a gadget-wielding crimefighter simply called The Hero, into a real-life vigilante. (Between this and The Righteous Gemstones, it’s a hell of a summer for people who enjoy Goggins playing to the most eccentric end of his range.) The house next door to Cootie’s sits halfway up to the sky, resting on giant springs. Though Cootie’s size catches everyone off-guard, he turns out to be only one of many Oaklanders with some sort of power or other. And he initially bonds with Jones and her friends Felix (Brett Gray) and Scat (Allius Barnes) over their shared love of an extremely graphic, deeply philosophical, despair-filled cartoon series, which once produced an episode that rendered anyone who watched it catatonic.
So we’re working with metaphor from the jump, as LaFrancine and her husband Martisse (Mike Epps) talk about the long and tragic history of once-in-a-generation Black giants, and their hopes that Cootie can use his stature in service of fighting a revolution. But even within this highly-stylized world, Riley and his collaborators are able to insert enough humanity to keep the show’s larger arguments from feeling like lectures. There is, for instance, a genuinely sweet romance between Cootie and fast food worker Flora (Olivia Washington), who isn’t entirely normal herself, and some potent moments in depicting how deep Felix and Scat’s friendship runs.
The most effective joke of the season, which features seven half-hour episodes, exists outside the text: Riley has somehow made an anti-capitalist manifesto for one of the companies that has had the greatest impact on accelerating our descent into end-stage capitalism. But even when other gags don’t quite land, the whole thing is so eccentric, and so distinct, that it’s impossible to not give I’m A Virgo your full and rapt attention.
Cootie adores comic books and needs Jones, LaFrancine, and others to help him realize that characters like The Hero exist to support a deeply unfair status quo. Between this and the much more nihilistic The Boys, Amazon has somehow cornered the market on stories about how detrimental superheroes’ takeover of popular culture has actually been. Tonally, the two shows couldn’t feel more different, with The Boys deliberately aiming for a level of slick bombast and technical wizardry meant to evoke the MCU, while I’m A Virgo feels deliberately homemade, with lo-fi special effects that stand out precisely because of how rough they look.
“I’m either a villain, or a clown,” Cootie laments at one point. “I want to inspire people.” That Riley could get something as odd, subversive, and delightful as this made for a mega-corporation feels pretty inspiring on its own.
The first season of I’m A Virgo is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video. I’ve seen all seven episodes.
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