Sleep Dealer Review
“Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”
- Martin Luther King Jr. “Beyond Vietnam” Speech given April 4, 1967 in New York City
For decades, America has been welcoming (or at least tolerating) immigration from countries south of us. Generally, while eschewing any caste system in American society and while touting ourselves as the place to come and pursue the American dream, we have relegated these immigrants to jobs that we do not aspire to see our children having to take. Imagine that America got to the place where we do not wish to remain open to such immigrants (I know it is hard, but try). What if we could build a wall to keep them out, make life less viable in the countries where they come from by buying up all the rights to their water (del Rio water is the name of the corporation in the film) , and then setting up sweatshops full of a technology that would allow them to wire themselves up and then do their work in America, sans benefits, protections, livable wages, education, medical care, or even relationship. Imagine if they could be kept in Mexico where they did their work by means of virtual reality tech.
Sleep Dealer imagines that reality for us.
The movie opens with a Mexican family trying to get enough water to grow anything on its land. It attempts to access water that was once the fountainhead of a meager existence, only to find that it is fenced off and guarded by video cameras installed by the American companies that own the water. An attempt to acquire water is met with a drone attack. And who is piloting that drone? Non other than a fellow Mexican hired by one of the American water cartels to rain down retribution on some distant cousin in Mexico trying to grow food for a family. It’s a harsh reality. The only option? Get a “node job” and become a “sleep dealer” - a worker who lives his entire work-life in Tijuana in a long corrugated metal culvert converted into a “factory” – imagine a factory with thousands of workers in it that looks basically like a large sewer pipe. His job involves inhabiting a robot on an American high rise building virtually by means of the life draining techno-wiring of a VR system implanted into his nervous system for that purpose.
That is the setting of this dystopia.
The ending will tell you all you need to know about how you would feel about this level of exploitation if you had been born in Mexico and if you were presently on the receiving end of policies that seem to be heading where this dystopian vision heads.
I will not spoil the movie for you.
One of the things I appreciated about this film was how it reminded me (as I was reminded last week when reporting on Basma Abdel Aziz’s Egyptian dystopia in Cairo) that Americans do not “own the genre” and that non-western dystopian visions exist as well – and we have much to learn by viewing the future from the eyelids of “the brothers who are called the opposition.”
Question for Comment: Have you ever been exploited?
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