Sleep Dealer

Just based on our classmates’ reaction to the readings, I wanted to hold off on my response until I saw Sleep Dealer and could connect them (especially because I knew nothing of the film going in to class yesterday, and Why Cybraceros really threw me off out of context).  Max’s post especially resonated for me as we watched the film in his question of where is the physical?  In this Matrix-esque, not too far in the future setting, we are offered a glimpse of what Cybraceros would look like to Alex Rivera a mere 11 years after his ‘fake propaganda’ video was made, and the physical is no longer confined to a computer with a joystick, but a dramatically more vivid and disturbing place where humans are equipped with nodes that connect directly to their central nervous system, giving them the ability to ‘plug in’ to a network where memories can be uploaded and stored and work can be completed from a remote location.  The physical is arguably in two places in this sleep dealer system – the workers physically present in a row, standing in a blank windowless  tunnel (much what I found myself picturing the iCloud’s datacenter to look like from “Secret Servers”), miming their way through a day’s work, and presumably from Memo’s experience, a robot/machine/computer stands physically in his place of employment in the US, carrying out the actual physicality of his miming to complete the job.  Pretty frightening imagery, and not only does it speak to the current intolerance and tension in some areas of the country, but it also poses a threat to last week’s discussions of the global cultural economy.  If you’re confining entire groups of people to their home country and literally only allowing their labor to cross the border, how are ideas and cultures shared?  How would anyone learn anything from anyone else, and how would people survive without experiencing other places and people?

I couldn’t help but make these connections to recent weeks – with Foucault and Deleuze, the people of Mexico are constantly controlled and imprisoned with guards watching them from the high towers as they collect their rationed water that they had to pay for, and judging by the scene where agent Rudy Ramirez attempts to enter Tijuana from the US, future border control has gotten crazy out of hand, further imprisoning and controlling them.  And in Appadurai’s discussion of memory and the imaginaire, we see it come to life in the form of the TrueNode system where Luz (and anyone connected with nodes) can connect and upload their memories for anyone to purchase and watch their ‘nostalgia and reruns’.  This was a very provocative film and I am glad we had the opportunity to see it – I’m not sure it would have crossed my radar for quite some time otherwise.  Did anyone else share my reactions or draw other connections to recent readings?