Outsourcing of Labor
“Sleep Dealer,” the feature directing debut of Alex Rivera (who wrote the screenplay with David Riker), is an unusually thoughtful science fiction film. Set mostly in Mexico, it imagines a future in which local water rights have been snatched up by multinational corporations, and in which people connect to a virtual-reality cybernetwork by means of “nodes,” electronic jacks implanted in their arms and necks.
The film, which makes thrifty use of some basic but effective special effects, follows Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), a young man from Oaxaca who travels north to Tijuana after the death of his father. A self-taught computer hacker, this anxious wanderer is looking for work of some kind, but for vengeance. His dad was killed by a military drone defending corporate-controlled water from “aqua-terrorists.”
In Tijuana Memo meets Luz (Leonor Varela), a beautiful stranger who hooks him up with black-market nodes but whose kindness cloaks an ulterior motive.
Since the American border has been walled off, Tijuana, in “Sleep Dealer,” has become a magnet for migrant workers. In fact, in the city of Tijuana the local people wants to have a job and earn a salary. First they go to the coyotek to get their nodes and their labor can be exported to North, South, and Central America. The nodes used by humans also enable intoxication, intimacy and communication. In the scene that I choose from the movie Mexican workers are connected through nodes. It happens when they are doing various types of jobs in order to get pay after working for long hours, which sometimes causes illucinations.
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