There is no question that corporate-controlled technologies are an already alive dystopia for workers across classes, races and documentation statuses. This is a fact that is unfortunately cliché to name in a place like this (a university stuffed with money, resources that in my rewritten near-futurity would be immediately redistributed away from the police and affiliated parties ((my own fellowship included!)) in blissful seconds). As I watched Sleep Dealer I unintentionally daydreamed up my own running list of today's horrors: from Jeff Bezos’ wristband surveillance uniforms for his low-paid warehouse workers, the black-boxing of prison algorithms, BDS criminalization and the related silencing and harrassment of anti-Zionist academics, Nestle theft of private water for profit during drought (#stolenspring) to even more obvious connections within farm and migrant labor in the US. One of the most violent man-made technologies is obviously the US-Mexico border itself.
As was lamented in the last minutes of class, there is no clear way out. But I want to qualify that: there can be no clear way out as discussed in a U of C classroom after a semester of norm-repetition and policing, in a setting of unspoken mixed levels of compensation and even costs to take this same class --a place where no matter how civil we are as a classroom culture (something I don’t think everyone agrees with), in my experience imagining new strands of revolution or solidarity requires trust that takes more time and commitment than we have here. Our class is embedded in programs that, no matter how beautifully praxis-oriented, still currently are having their spots blown by this low-hanging McSweeny’s article. I also tend to disagree with the notion that U of C rigor (or precision in knowing and searching for the known) is the route to any sort of ethical clarity regarding my personal course of action; I doubt that “what am I supposed to do?” can be answered without decolonizing my own thought process. Because I bring that politic to this stint of mine in academia, I found Sleep Dealer to have a startlingly utopian happy ending. I was just so shocked that people with different jobs and backgrounds would find each other, be sweet on one another, and then actually bring that back to free the river, despite trauma and harm and righteous blame.
But utopian is the wrong word, because we know that when resources disappear, affinity is always created, for better or for worse. For this reason, I think it is a political mistake in this moment to think that Marez's futurity and its relatives (tactical media? hacktivism? blocking a freeway? uploading a PDF to a fileshare server?) are futile. I like what Patrick said about theory’s limits, and even more appreciate framing theory as a tool to experimentally constrain and route thought. We risk having too much negatively-registered affect (Shame! Pressure! Guilt! Blame!) bound up in a one-goal, fixed futurism, because as long as we can improvise, the future is always going to be unknowable. Perhaps one type of training in futurity occurs when we read across theoretical traditions, trying out our stances through the works of others.
That's also why I bought the way that the plot moved through this film and didn't want a neater ending. The hero genre does not feel compelling to me in addressing the horrors of waterway privatization. Planet protection IRL is and is going to be a frenetic, emotional, relational struggle whether it succeeds or not. I question whether people at the front lines of crisis have a need for, let alone access to, discussions around strategy that perform but does not live out conviction. In that sense, I am always thrilled to see people on screen do without so much narrative exposition, whether vaguely through transaction in the case of Memo and Rudy, or because of the shock of beauty and attraction as with Memo and Luz.
We will be okay, then, even if being okay just means feeling connected or sovereign seconds before the bomb drops (queers in love at the end of the world). In that sense, Sleep Dealer gives us bonus optimism – the protagonists saw and named justness within their trio, attempted to respond to a harm, actually achieved a freeing task of sorts while receiving a feeling of unbound subjectivity (what clarifying moments those are!), and even escaped to tell the tale. Such things happen if we are able to bring the vulgar and clear, politically vulnerable light to what is always obvious to the exploited. If we shift moral indignation into active disgust (a dynamic Ngai discusses in Ugly Feelings), then perhaps bombing the dam begins to feel pretty possible (Ngai 338).
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Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Mass. :Harvard University Press, 2005. Print.