SLEEP DEALER

'''SLEEP DEALER. Alex Rivera, dir., story, and script''' with David Riker. USA/Mexico: Likely Story, This Is That Productions (prod.) / Maya Entertainment (US dist.), 2008.

Near-future corporatist dystopia — classified as cyberpunk by Lysa Rivera — set in the El Norte area on the US-Mexican border. The film is mostly in Spanish, with some English (and available with English subtitles), with serious examination of questions of labor supply, drone-inflicted terror to support corporate interests — specifically water rights; the plot is summarized well in the IMDb Synopsis. In addition to high-tech cybernetic connections for drone piloting, relevant here for data-port "nodes" installed by "coyoteks" that allow in this case Mexicans to work in virtual sweatshops like Cybracero — like "coyote"-tech, the name is significant — using a kind of telepresence to do work in the United States. Cf. and contrast waldos in contexts such as THX 1138.

Like MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, SLEEP DEALER gets back to mythic basics with tyranny associated with The Hoarding of the Waters and liberation with freeing water flow. Visually, this means contrasts of dry wastelands and flowing water, but also dry cities, the "virtual sweatshop," telepresence views (especially of the skeleton of a skyscraper under construction), and uploaded memories. Note also penetration of body when nodes installed and used as female port for long male plugs.

Discussions of SLEEP DEALER can be found in (1) "The Virtual Realities of US/Mexico Border Ecologies in Maquilapolis and Sleep Dealer" by Sharada Balachandran Orihuela and Andrew Carl Hageman, Environmental Communication Vol. 5, Iss. 2 (2011), which includes considerations of the "convergence" in the film and essay "of ecological, transnational, gendered, and technological modes of analysis." (2) Lysa Rivera's "Future Histories and Cyborg Labor: Reading Borderlands Science Fiction After NAFTA," q.v. at link.

RDE 11-12/III/17