The August 2008 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine carried a short story by Matthew Johnson entitled “Lagos.” The story focused on a group of field workers from the Nigerian countryside who drift into the capital city of Lagos in search of employment. They find work all right—in a cramped plug-in factory where they are linked into a global electronic grid. Through this grid, they cybernetically operate faraway machinery, performing low-end mechanical services for rich, first world clientele. Some run vacuum cleaners for wealthy socialites; others various factory equipment. When a glitch in the system causes a particular young woman to get lost in the grid’s cyberwilderness, the frightened field hands call in their village’s witch doctor—who appears to invoke black magic to help the protagonist extricate herself. A fascinating piece of work, “Lagos”—and almost certainly prophetic. Why spend money developing and installing artificial intelligence when you can temporarily load human minds into the equipment for peanuts?
I suggest you dig up your August 2008 issue and reread the story before you go see Sleep Dealer. And see it you should.
You’re probably wondering why I’ve gone to the trouble of providing that lead-in.
Two reasons. The first is I always want to promote top-quality Asimov’s fiction. The second is that Sleep Dealer, an ambitious merger of traditional Mexican migrant romance with near-future techno-SF, deals with some of the very same issues; namely, the risks, the feasibility, and the exacting, at times catastrophic, personal costs of virtual employment—albeit without the mystical qualities of Johnson’s superb short story.
First-time director Alex Rivera manages to bring this unusual grafting off with tenderness and insight. This is due to his obvious affinity for rural Mexican life. The film is full of homages to a shaken but still essential farming culture; a resilient agrarian underclass that is both noble and timeless.
It is out of this beleaguered caste that the film’s hero, Memo, emerges. Memo is an amateur hacker. He uses duct taped electrojunk ingeniously cannibalized to patch into both general satellite communications systems, and, unaware of the consequences, military security feeds.
Memo’s family lives above what was once a verdant river delta but is now the parched tablelands surrounding a newly dammed reservoir. They and indeed all nearby farmers must now buy their irrigation needs from a machine gun protected corporate water seller. This privatized, for-profit arrangement is bleeding the people of Memo’s village dry—literally and figuratively. Aqua terrorists are all over the local news—rebel groups that are striking back against the tightening grasp of the global water cartels.
When Memo accidentally taps into the radio traffic of the reservoir’s remote-piloted air defense fleet while they are engaged in a firefight with these aqua terrorists, he triggers a chain of events that culminates in a bloody tragedy.
The result of this tragedy is that Memo is suddenly the primary breadwinner for what is left of his family. He decides to travel north by bus to Tijuana in the hope of finding employment in the sprawling maquiladora-like Sleep Dealer factories that line Mexico’s now fully secure border with the United States.
Sleep Dealers are giant cyberglobal workhouses—covering acres. In them, men and women who have been surgically fitted with stainless steel neuro-outlets are paid to virtually operate distant equipment.
On his journey north Memo is befriended by a beautiful young woman named Luz. Luz is a struggling writer of on-line memory stories - downloadable recollections, with realtime authorial voice-overs. Memo becomes the unwitting subject of a series of such memory stories by Luz. The stories track his day-by-day travails—being mugged, coopting a hovel in the squalid ratworks that terrace the hills overlooking the city, searching for a coyotek—a black market medic who will install Sleep Dealer-ready neuro-outlets for a cut-rate price, exploring Tijuana’s vast and chaotic central markets, starting his own corn and bean garden in the middle of the ghetto, sitting around a campfire with a trio of grizzled hoboes telling tales of cyberwoe.
Memo eventually lands a position inhabiting a welding robot on a skyrise construction project. He guesses but never learns for certain that it is in Los Angeles.
As you might expect, Memo and Luz fall in love. He even forgives her - albeit after a period of angry separation - for selling stories about their personal life.
Over time, Luz’s stories draw the attention of distant on-line eyes; eyes that have been searching for people connected to the very tragedy that forced Memo to leave home. This in turn leads to the film’s curious, unlikely yet generally satisfying finale.
Sleep Dealer is an important picture. It marks a new level of maturity for the Mexican science fiction film industry. This isn’t ghost-inflected fantasy horror. It isn’t a twisted fable with Freudian undertones. It isn’t even allegory. There isn’t a whiff of the Catholic Church. There are no nuns or priests anywhere in it. There is very little slow motion - and what there is works. And—brace yourself—there is no mention anywhere of illegal drugs. Zero. Or should I say nada.
My friends, this is straight Mexican science fiction. And it’s quite good.
Yes, Rivera overreaches at times. The concept of the memory stories is intriguing but underdeveloped. The ending, while emotionally fulfilling, seems rushed and a little too pat. Still, it is grown-up enough not to rely on cheap explosions and futuristic car chases. Sure, there are some fireworks—but only what is necessary to complete the scenes.
The migrant romance genre demands that the male lead — here, Memo—be rough, seemingly unlettered and at least partially indigenous. Mexican television actor Luis Fernando Pena fits the bill perfectly. He’s a compact, ball cap wearing Mexican everyman, but there is a latent intensity to him, a languid power, something that smolders behind his eyes that makes you sit up and take notice.
The genre further requires that the female lead—here, Luz—be as non-Mexican in appearance as possible. Preferably she should be European—though South American will suffice. Leonor Varela, an elegant, angular Chilean actress who has done substantial US television work, has all of the necessary ingredients. Moreover, she can act.
There is believable chemistry between these leads, despite, or perhaps because of, their physical differences. He is short, tough and laconic. She is tall, artistic and inquisitive.
We want them to end up together.
The camera work, by veteran Lisa Rinzler, shies away from effects, and dwells instead on terrain—bleached and sere—and urban vistas—dilapidated and beaten-down. The images of the shattered farmland encircling Memo’s home are fierce and striking. The sweeping frames of the city and the Sleep Dealer factories —all taken from Tijuana’s desolate heights —are clogged with shadows and mud.
The unremarkable though adequate score is by indie faves tomandandy, a musical team made up of Thomas Hadju and Andy Milburn. It reinforces the cinematography—lending itself to the places and things of the film, not the people and their plight. It lacks the emotional resonance one expects from a character-driven picture. This may indeed be purposeful.
The underlying science fictional ideas of Sleep Dealer, and all of the societal, political and cultural issues that come with them, are compelling. What will things be like when hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of plugged-in workers spend their days doing blind, slow-motion dances on traction pads, and seeing the world through VR goggles as merely a three dimensional cartoonscape? What effects will this kind of work have on the people who are forced to engage in it? How will it change our bodies? Our minds? Our souls? Sleep Dealer does not itself pretend to address these issues. But it opens the door for them.
The film is peppered with amusing little jibes at modern culture, and flashes of insight into the political future of the border region.
In the end, though, the real magic of Sleep Dealer springs from the film’s connection to the land, to rural Mexico and its people. That is palpable throughout—and a pleasure to behold.
Sleep Dealer
U.S. Release Date: April 17, 2009 (limited)
Director: Alex Rivera
Screen writers:Alex Rivera and David Riker from a story by Alex Rivera
Running Time: 90 minutes
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