Type: Literary Analysis
Pages: 10 | Words: 2761
Reading Time: 12 Minutes

Sleep Dealer is an ultramodern science victim of the year 2008 under directorship of Alex Rivera. This science fiction is laid down in a world, not too different our own, where high speed network helps in bringing distant places together and distant people together globally. It is a story that takes place among three characters that live in extremely different places on earth: a soldier, a migrant, and a writer. The story commences with a Mexican resident Memo Cruz who is a young peasant farmer. His dream is to one day leave his pueblo to seek for employment in the northern big cities. This dream happens to come true in the most horrible likely way after his residence is by mistake identified as a hideout for terrorists in a riotously uncontrolled “Global War on Terror” (RP, 2009).

Global War on Terror in Film

In a depressing future where all borders have been closed, enormous networks of the computer turning memories into commodities, militarization of corporate warriors, and a tech-savvy “campesino” situated in an undersized Santa Ana farm rural community finds out an inexplicable transmission that appears to be a plan for the city of the future. Memo Cruz together with his family resides in a rural farming community in Santa Ana Del Rio that has of late been taken over by a private company. The company that has already taken control of the communities land water supply is now in quest of selling this precious natural resource back to the citizens at an unlawful price. Consequently, aqua-terrorist groups have lately formed, with the open objective of acquiring back the natural resource by force if it was necessary. Regardless of the mounting tension in Santa Ana, however, Memo only contemplates about technology (RP, 2009).

Rudy Gaeta who is a soldier is fighting the global war to eliminate terrorism. He is employed by a security company in America to fly a remote war controlling machine. This machine seems to be a pumped-up version of the Predator Drone. While surfing the neighborhood airwaves one evening, an eavesdropper who is very gifted, Locks onto a prohibited broadcast that is not meant for the public ion general. This broadcast puts down the explicit strategies of coming up with a future that Memo could have never anticipated. After government discovers evidence of his radio intercept, they target Memo who they view as a direct threat. Rudy Gaeta’s first assignment is in southern Mexico where he is supposed to uproot all the terrorists. According to orders from his San Diego office, Rudy sends off a drone that attacks Memo’s residence in Mexico. Displaced by the effects of the attack, Memo leaves the pueblo and travels north to seek for employment so that he could be able to help his family start with life again. He settles for a very big border city of Tijuana.

Along the way Memo encounters a would-be journalist Luz, a bright young woman who happens to be in search of her get through story. Afterward, after selling some of her reminiscences online to a strange client, Luz assists Memo in acquiring nodes necessary for him to make connection to the internet and get a job. As he ploughs his body into the system, memo discovers that hoe treacherous working in a high-tech factory it could be. At the same time Luz endeavors to know the identity of her major client. The three unsuspicious persons are caught up in a plot that could change their world everlastingly.

Luz’s encounter with Memo enables us to see what her writing means in this future. With no-one else in the room, Luz connects net into her body and converses. As she explains how her day was, the computer records pictures from her reminiscences and the resonance of her voice. She sets these documented reminiscences up for sale on the internet on a blog she has named “straight from the brain”. In Tijuana, Memo gets employment with an ultramodern factory where he earns dollars by connecting himself to the internet and therefore controlling a worker drone situated in America.

In his San Diego residence, Rudy, the soldier, is lonesome and disengaged from the world. His free time is mostly spent watching documentaries of other people’s reminiscences. After not so many days after the attack of Memo’s home, Rudy feels that there is something about the attack that was not right. In his search for information from the internet, Rudy traces the story of Luz, buys it and for the first time, in the Luz’s documented reminiscences, he notices Memo’s face, which is the face of his victim of the drone attack. It is through Luz’s stories, successfully through her eras and eyes that he gets to well know Memo. As Memo and Luz get to love each other, Rudy becomes conscious what he’s done.

To some extent so as to get his confidence and to some extent because she likes him, Luz buys nods for Memo. Memo is now able to make reasonably good money from Cybracero, although the connections they use are not so safe and the risk of disability that may be as a result of equipment incidents. He sends a part of his earnings back home to his family members who are astonished at the amount of money he is making. In the meantime Luz makes a report of another reminiscence of Memo, but her purchaser protests that the background information he had asked for was not captured.

Luz is able to get close to Memo and she founds out concerning the milpa, the Del Rio Company, and the passing away of his father. She passes on this reminiscence, and she is paid generously. Afterward, Memo pays her a visit and he is let into her house by a neighbor; there, he take a seat at her console and gets to discover that she has been selling reminiscences of him. After the discovery, memo leaves furiously. The purchaser of Liz’s reminiscences happens to be Rudy, who has been living with doubts about the operation at the Santa Ana. After discovering the reality of what took place, he gets a time off from his place of work and travels to Mexico to meet Memo. He is able to trace Memo and makes a confession that he was the operator of the drone that took the life of his father, but needs to make compensations. At first Memo is Reluctant, but eventually he accepts the offer (RP, 2009).

After hours, Luz and Memo gets to sneak Rudy into Cybracero, where he connects to his Del Rio security system, taking control of his drone. His colleague sees him coming on, and inquires of what’s going on, and he in vain tries to turn aside their inquisitiveness. in due course, we observe that Rudy is piloting his drone headed to Santa Ana, and his colleagues on realizing that he has gone scoundrel, gives him a run after and tries to shoot down his drone. The star drone operative is able to make it all the way to Santa Ana in the Del Rio Water Company dam where he drops off his firepower. This reminds Memo of the days when his father would ineffectively toss a rock at the concrete structure. Rudy’s drone is pulled out, but the dam has been damaged. While on videophone back to his family, Memo’s gets to hear that that the water is again flowing, and the town is commemorating. Because Rudy cannot go back to America, he settles in a village in the outskirts of Tijuana where he does a business of selling water. Memo also settles, but he gives up sweatshop node employment for farming.

Scenarios of the Future in Sleep Dealer

Sleep dealer attacks contemporary issues with scenarios of the future. Migration, technology, labor, land use rights and exploitation are all themes that are relevant and current to the lives of many. Shown from global south perspective, corporatized control of resources, drone warfare, sweatshops that are so inhuman, resonates clear and loud. In a life of an immigrant is a form of time travel. Many immigrants as shown in sleep dealer commence with life in small pueblos, where conditions of life is as it might have been some 500 years ago. Mostly immigrants come from families that were mostly farmers and in a week’s time or two they find themselves in New York which is the most metropolises on earth or in Los Angeles. In a particular life of an immigrant we can be able to see the north and the south of the planet. We can see how divided is the world and how is the life of immigrants as they cross all the divisions. In this movie Alex Rivera tries to tell that immigrants are at the present the future of America.

Rivera tries to make contribution to the film history about immigration. According to him, many movies capturing the subject of immigration inspired him.  He says that “because El Norte changed my life when I saw that, it really impacted me. And there have been movies like that all the way up to La Misma Luna; Sin Nombre; and Sugar, which is out now. There’s been a long history of stories about immigration”. By use of science fiction, Rivera tries to look at the subject of immigration through a family point of view- family that has been divided by the national border. Another part of the story is that immigration is a huge economic, transformative force which is not going to come to an end, but take different forms in future in America , letting in million of workers successfully and at the same time forcing them out. Because it could be difficult to see the big picture of immigration through one family, Rivera employs science fiction, world of fantasy and exaggeration of things to show what would be of this phenomenon and what it is all about in a sense that is more systematic. He states that “The struggle was to try to find a character and an emotional through line to talk about a systemic, massive phenomenon” (Sam, 2008).

On his inspirations for the film are the star wars, and the blade runner.  Rivera grew up in America as a kid with his father who was an immigrant from Peru working in the United States. Whenever he could look at Luke Skywalker I, he could always think of him as an immigrant; his house was destroyed by imperial army, and he was forced to leave his home in pursuit of his dreams. Although he was celebrated in their culture, no one asked Luke Skywalker for a passport, but when he wants to cross the border, he is rooted to break the law, to escape, but the political culture of America is known to attack people who are there to pursue their dreams. Rivera argues that it was his dream to one day use film to say  “Let’s look at people who in our culture are viewed as outsiders–immigrants, workers–and see if I could use science fiction, to use this film to make that person a hero, to say the future belongs to everybody. The future belongs to all of us. The future belongs to Latinos, to Hindus, to African Americans” (Sam, 2008). He argues that the future belongs to each and everyone, and that has not been seen in films.

Rivera imagine sarcastically a future where migrant farmers  (Braceros) may well work in America, but never in reality set their feet in American soil, by taking control of robotic workers through  internet from their mother. The Cybracero idea came into being as a surrealist spoof of anti-immigrant politics and utopianism of the internet in 1997. Extraordinarily, it has become actuality at present in Indian “call-centers” in which thousands of natives labor in America over the internet, but may by no means take part in any other way in U.S. culture.

In sleep dealer where there are immigration issues as part of the story, there is an element of technology. There is how technology is connecting the north and the south. Technology is connecting people who are put apart by borders although this is a backdrop in sleep dealer. In his first film, Rivera looks at his dad as an immigrant, but focused on his connection to the television and how he could use Spanish language channel although he lived in America, to virtually establish connections with his home land. The television on his dad was like a magical portal that enabled him to go home for some hours each night.imn his documentary he shows how Mexican immigrants use money- wiring services in New York, fax machines, home videos to keep in touch with their families in Mexico. They employ technology ion connecting with their villages and to send money back to their villages for reconstruction through remote control.

Technology has enabled creation of new alliances, fresh solidarities that cross borders and solidarities that go round the globe. Technology is the only thing that can facilitate a global labor movement. Technology makes it possible for corporations to relocate their industries in their efforts to avoid labor movement. Technology also makes it possible for the armed forces to do all sorts of frightening things. The moment we live now is a battle over technology. The movie sleep dealer is set in a world that is marked by closed borders, labor that is virtual, and a global network that connects experiences and minds. Three total strangers put their lives at risk by connecting with one another and breaking the obstructions of technology. The movie portrays immigrants as the largest users of technology more than other families. To cross over boarders they need to have phone cards, they use money wiring transfer services to send money back home and conveyance of home videos back and onward. In an interview, Rivera states that “Today, whether it’s the surveillance on the border, night vision cameras, drones, the X-ray technology that they’re using on the border now, all this stuff is like Mad Max or some kind of futuristic nightmare that they want to build, that our tax dollars are going to build, that looks like Blade Runner” (Sam, 2008).

Allegory about the Cyber-trafficking and Feelings of Human in the Film

A frank stranger in an unforgiving and strange land, Memo is taken in by Luz a besieged writer who earns a living by selling her reminiscences on the network. selling has been sluggish, but she get hold of a reliable customer in Rudy an American pilot controlling drone who initiates long-distance air attacks from a skyscraper in San Diego. Rudy is used to adhering to orders and not asking questions about his targets, but when he gets to discover that the “terrorist” he reduced to ashes was Memo’s father, the consequences of being a part of a virtual war begins to pressure on him. The technology that has come between the movie’s characters starts on to converge them together rubbing out the divisions it once put in place.

Although sleep dealer is set in days to come where people get connected to the internet via nodes entrenched in their fleshy tissue, the world of Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer is extraordinarily alike to the current. The border connecting the U.S. and Mexico is sealed, but workers from Mexico can virtually cross over with the aid of a “coyotek,” a back-alley doctor of medicine who entrenches the expensive nodes at low-priced prices. Privatized water, that is already a reality in some parts of Africa, south East Asia and South America has got its way to Mexico. Campesinos struggle to pay a top-dollar to water their small patches of land.

Sleep dealer comes out as an imaginative allegory about the cyber-trafficking of human being memory and feelings, the exploitation of natural resources and migrant labor, and the practicability of leftist opposition movements. A.O. Scott called Sleep Dealer in The New York Times “exuberantly entertaining, a dystopian fable of globalization disguised as a science-fiction adventure…. Rivera—a brilliant young director—takes his audience into a future of “aqua-terrorism” and cyber labor that I wish I could dismiss as implausible.”  We see Memo Cruz together with his family residing in a rural farming community in Santa Ana Del Rio that has of late been taken over by a private company. The company that has already taken control of the communities land water supply is now in quest of selling this precious natural resource back to the citizens at an unlawful price. Consequently, aqua-terrorist groups forms, with the open objective of acquiring back the natural resource by force if it was necessary.

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