In class, I mentioned that the future that Sleep Dealer may be gesturing towards is one in which Mexico is liberated from America’s corporate imperialism. In thinking further about this, I wonder why that future is framed as such a hyper-localized vision. That is, why is winning framed as the liberation of a single river for the use of a village, rather than as untangling corporate control of the country’s water supply? Further, why are the probable consequences to neighboring regions dependent on the damn left undreamt? One would imagine that in order for such an object to be profitable, it would need to sell water, not just to the locals in the river basin, but also to industry in the region and to nearby cities, for whom the damn is more economically useful than the river (1). Of these third parties, economically oppressed people who work for those industries and/or live in those cities at a similar level of precarity to the villagers will be negatively impacted by the destruction of the dam. However, because the movie presents the river’s liberation as utopian, it ignores the inherent negotiation between bad actions that is acting in this world when nigh everything will cost someone, somewhere to suffer. In writing this, I am not arguing that therefore the dam was good and desirable, nor am I arguing the opposite. I am asking, why does the movie’s utopian ending frame itself in such a way as to ignore the wider (and potentially negative) network effects of the village’s win? And why are its heroes interested in intervening on material objects (the damn) rather than the logics of profit that make those objects possible and desirable to their makers?
I don’t have an answer, but this question is important to me, because the more that I think about it, the more it appears that the dystopian parallel of this particular utopia is populist ethno-nationalism in which a desire for the economic good of oneself and one’s immediate community (defined ethnically as well as locally) is pursued regardless of its expense to external communities that are living through the same hardships. This dystopian parallel is the one we are living through right now.
(1) This may not hold, if, as mentioned in class (by whom I can’t remember - I’m sorry!), the point of corporatism, as framed by the film, is not profit, but misery for the sake of misery.