By no stretch of the imagination am I a scholar of science fiction, but I've long been interested in the thematic of dystopia that tends to recur in the genre. The visions of dystopia are historically specific, in that they seem to address — often by realizing — the present political anxieties of the moment in which the work in question is rendered. The neon orientalism of the near-future Los Angeles of Blade Runner, for instance, could be read as an actualization of the fear of Japanese economic hegemony that occupied the American political psyche in the 1980s and early 1990s. I similarly see Sleep Dealer as an artifact of its moment. Released in 2009, it presents a United States that has readily settled into the imperial defensive crouch it assumed in the years immediately after 9/11: one of assertive military machismo belied by an ambient hum of chronic anxiety, which Richard Grusin articulates nicely in his study of post-9/11 premeditation. (The bombastic assertions of the host of Drones, with unironic allusions to the "bad guys," are uncannily similar to the narrative of self-serious patriotism readily assumed by the news media in those years that made the bombing of Iraq so palatable.)
All of this is the backdrop for what I take to be the film's larger or more salient project: the conditions of mediation that allow the putative American citizen to accept the violent xenophobia that undergirds their new economic situation, one that has effectively precluded any need for outsiders. Rather than obscuring racial anxiety beneath a pretense of economic self-interest — "they'll take our jobs!" — the new socioeconomic paradigm is comfortable with its franker insistence on cultural homogeneity. The film doesn't dwell much on the "typical" American; we're left to speculate as to whether he or she is fully aware of the violent exploitation of overseas labor that permits this new economic condition to prosper. But it is not reckless to assume that he or she lacks the capacity to care. The film presents an infrastructure of hypermediation that constrains affect and emotion by design: juxtapose, for instance, the raw funereal displays in the pre-meditated village of Santa Ana with the ease with which Luz exploits Memo's trust for purely mercenary purposes. The damming of the river is a pretty obvious metaphor here: it stymies a natural condition that otherwise allows embodied life to prosper.
Dystopian fiction is social commentary; it works when its audience recognizes itself in a darker future. The contemporary neoliberal subject is complacent in the conception of his own autonomy and security. He sees little incentive in questioning the origin of the tools that permit this delusion. The dam is fixed. One wonders what things would look like if something happened to it.
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