Jeremiah Tolbert

I have often thought that the future of sci­ence fic­tion isn’t in tales of first world nations like the United States. The future sto­ries we should be explor­ing and con­tem­plat­ing more are the ones involv­ing (and told by res­i­dents of) life on the fringes, in the fave­las and the bor­der towns, in the devel­op­ing world, where raw human­ity bumps up against the shiny and anti­sep­tic American cap­i­tal­ist way.

Most do not live the lives of rel­a­tive lux­ury we do, but one of the promises of glob­al­ism has been said to be an ele­va­tion of those who are in poverty. Will those liv­ing in Brazil, Mexico, Kenya, or China one day know lives with bet­ter amenities,health care, and basic nutri­tion? Or will the same web of post-​​colonialism, transna­tional bank­ing deal­ing from decks stacked against the poor, and cor­rupt gov­ern­ment regimes keep third world coun­tries rooted in poverty?

The Sleep Dealer is an exam­i­na­tion of American glob­al­iza­tion as it impacts our lives today, where resent­ment to ille­gal immi­gra­tion in America is as high as it ever has been, but where there are still jobs to be had for those who brave the cross­ing (at least, prior to our eco­nomic woes). The world of the Sleep Dealer is not so dif­fer­ent from our own, except in a few very impor­tant ways.

The United States of the sleep dealer is mostly seen indi­rectly, through the lenses of telep­res­ence drones, or in the cramped con­fines of vir­tual oper­a­tor sta­tions where sol­diers pilot drones to pro­tect cor­po­ra­tized water in places like Mexico. America appears to be sealed off com­pletely to immi­gra­tion, at least from Mexico. A wall has been built, and it’s guarded by remote-​​controlled cam­eras with heavy machine guns. A future that seemed much less implau­si­ble 2 years ago when the anti-​​immigration sen­ti­ment seemed to reach its peak.

The U.S. of this future still requires cheap labor, even if it can­not abide the phys­i­cal pres­ence of immi­grants, legal or oth­er­wise. In this near future, vir­tual real­ity tech­nol­ogy, por­trayed in a way that would fit in with any cyber­punk novel (a series of plugs along the arms and shoul­ders that allow a kind of neural inter­face), allows the poor to work within the States. It’s best not to think too hard about the por­trayal of the equip­ment here, which seems more tai­lored toward a par­tic­u­lar visual aes­thetic than mak­ing log­i­cal sense. What was with the gas masks pip­ing in oxy­gen? Nevertheless–

The back­drop of the world in the Sleep Dealer feels lived in, well worn, and not implau­si­ble. Our pro­tag­o­nist is an intel­li­gent young man with an inter­est in escap­ing his tiny, water-​​impoverished farm­stead. He tin­kers with hack­ing telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions satel­lites as a means of escape, but soon he over­hears some­thing that he should not, and the events of the story are set into motion.

In the after­math of a tragedy, Memo (a very Gibsonian name, I thought) trav­els to Tijuana to receive the implants that will allow him to work in the vir­tual labor fac­to­ries. He meets a woman, a writer who sells her mem­o­ries uploaded to the net­work, who takes an inter­est in his painful past and whose sto­ries about Memo are funded by a mys­te­ri­ous buyer.

I’ll say no more about the plot, except to say that while this is a sci­ence fic­tion film, it is also an inde­pen­dent film in that sense that it is not the tightly shot, leave-​​nothing-​​unanswered big stu­dio style of sto­ry­telling. The cin­e­matog­ra­phy is often dream­like, and the story’s gen­tle nar­ra­tion rein­force this. The story in some ways feels like a character’s lucid dream.

It’s a con­tem­pla­tive film in its pac­ing as well. Those expect­ing a tightly plot­ted thriller or action film should look else­where. This is a film that is more inter­ested in let­ting the audi­ence come to its own con­clu­sions than lec­tur­ing morally (or otherwise).

This was some­thing dif­fer­ent than what we are used to see­ing. While some of its ideas may not seem so fresh to long-​​time read­ers of sci­ence fic­tion, I don’t think this is some­thing we’ve ever seen por­trayed this way on the sil­ver screen. It’s worth pick­ing up on DVD or rent­ing at the very least.