The Sleep Dealer

 Sleep Dealer Poster

We went to see the independent movie Sleep Dealer sponsored by the Spanish Department at UC Davis.  Alex Rivera, the director, was there to field questions after the movie.  I've never been to a movie where the director was present so this was a rare treat.

Alex Rivera usually makes documentaries, but had thought of the premise for this movie over ten years ago.  According to Rivera, Sleep Dealer is the first science fiction movie filmed, set in, and from the point of view of a Latin American country.

Sleep Dealer takes place in the near future in Mexico.  The protagonist, Memo (played by Luis Fernando Peña), is a young man wanting to expand his digital life, but is stuck on his dad's traditional corn and bean farm (milpa).  After he innocently causes an incident leading to the destruction of the family farm, he heads to Tijuana for work.  This is really when the sci-fi part kicks in.

In this near future, people can choose to have nodes, small round data ports, installed into various parts of their bodies.  These nodes can be connected via cables to computers and links the brain and nervous system directly to the network.  People can experience different sensations, download memories, and directly control robots and other mechanical items remotely.  This movie may sound like the movies Avatar or Surrogates, but actually came out before them.

Memo meets a beautiful woman, Luz, who helps him get nodes so he can find work.  In this future, the United States has closed the US/Mexican border, but still needs migrant labor.  The Mexicans provide the menial labor remotely from big computer/cable hubs and do all the work we use migrant labor today, but by controlling robots from across the border.  Memo gets a construction job on a San Diego high rise.

 

Luz "Writing" a Story

I wont go into the main story more than this since it has many messages about migrant labor, wealth distribution, government/business collusion, and other meaty topics.  I want to talk about Luz, played by the talented and beautiful Leonor Varela.  In the story, Luz describes herself as a "writer."  What is unique is that writers in her future don't actually type or write words to record language.  They tell a story through their memories and narrate it, almost like an experiential diary.  The images of her memories are transferred through the nodes to a server and match up to the narrated story she tells.  After she finishes telling the story, it is then put out on the net and story buyers can hook in through their nodes and connect to the story she shared.  She mentions she writes to connect people to others through her memories and stories.

Trailer 1


While watching the movie I thought a bit about this definition of "writer."  Luz no longer uses words symbolized by letters to "write"her stories, yet she is called a "writer."  I found this an interesting perceived evolution of communication.

After the movie I asked Rivera, "With Youtube, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other online social networks and media, we can communicate anything instantly through video and writing.  You have captured that sense of instant information, but now your characters don't even have to write, they just share the information directly from their brains.  What made you think to change how we define "writers" to this new definition?"

Rivera shared that he wanted Luz to believe her writing serves as a personal connection between the characters in her memories and the "readers", which is the goal of all writers.  With that in mind, he believes that our world is getting more visual and it will be natural that the mass culture would rather experience these things directly like this than through reading.

I grappled with his answer as I drove home.  According to studies, people are reading many more words today than they did twenty years ago due to the internet.  Like you are doing right now, people are absorbing the internet mostly through written words.  Now though, due in part to better technologies, it is easier to post video and animation online to tell a story.  Two examples of this are the success of hulu.com and youtube.  Both provide pure video content.  I usually include at least one or two youtube videos per week in my blog.  Maybe we are heading toward Luz's definition of a "writer."

I also considered the source of this idea of a "writer."  Rivera is a movie maker.  He wrote the story, but we do not read the script.  We watch and experience the story through moving pictures and audio he created.  Luz's job as a "writer" is not too much different than his as a screen writer, hers just requires fewer steps.

I highly recommend watching this movie.  It is not the deepest political movie or most profound, but it will make you think.  I found it interesting that I watched it with American eyes and expectation and had predictions on plot lines which were very wrong.  It is funny how my cultural and cinematic bias on how a story should unfold was a new discovery of my own American perceptions of stories.   That is one of many reasons to watch the DVD.

Trailer 2

x