Sleep Dealer

For the last (formal) post of our JMC 309 class, we got to watch the 2008 film Sleep dealer, which, to be quite honest, I didn’t know existed before this class. But I’m glad I got introduced to it because WOW is it quite a DOOZY. The movie is set in a distant future Oaxaca, Mexico that is heavily militarized, has closed borders, and has technology that allows people to work virtually: meaning that their virtual actions affect a real location elsewhere in the world (aka America) which is then used for jobs such as building a skyscraper. 

In terms of relating to race and the environment, it is safe to say that this movie is a dystopian future story that utilizes many realistic aspects of our current culture. As we head into a more technological age, especially with COVID-19 seeing more online workers work from home, we start to wonder how our worlds’ cultures will advance from this. Will we still want to work digitally? And if so, should ALL work start to become digital?

And by realistic aspects, I mean that there was not one thing about this movie that I found to be not to be just something we already do with a technological spin on it. We already exploit people of color in other countries by outsourcing our work to them for an unfair amount of pay and we’ve heard of people working non-stop in horrid conditions until they literally collapsed and died (coughcough AMAZON coughcough)

Other realistic aspects in the movie is the setting of the movie itself. In the movie, we see a locally owned river become privatized by the Water Company who turns around to sell the water for $1/gallon. In real life, this has been a constant throughout American history; where someone will take over parts of a land by controlling the natural resources (water, oil, fish, etc) and use it to turn a profit, often overselling to the point where that resource becomes scarce and the person is free to hike up the price. And the most devastating part is the effect it has on local communities, who are forced to subjugate to this new expense in order to survive, while the companies don’t care if they die.