Imagining the future from the margins: cyborg labor in Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer

摘要

Sleep Dealer is a feature-length, science fiction film by Alex Rivera that explores relations between Latin America and the U.S. from an unusual location: impoverished southern Mexico, sometime in the near future. We argue that the film's multi-sited, polyvocal views on migration, labor exploitation and violent, proliferation of borders deliberately creates dissonance, wonder and ultimately hope. Rivera's decision to locate his futuristic sci-fi film in rural, agrarian, indigenous Mexico challenges hegemonic conceptions of a future that is already known. We also suggest Rivera's film allows viewers to imagine simultaneous co-production of futures (plural and collective) by destabilizing pervasive notions of progress and ethics. Instead Rivera proposes a relational understanding of how the world works. Encouraging viewers to identify with Memo, a cyborg-laborer and the central protagonist, Rivera asserts the power of human agency, the significance of everyday, mundane choices. Memo, Rivera insists, and others who appear to possess little control over their destiny, are capable of imagining and creating their own future. In this way, Rivera's filmic strategy invites viewers to assess their own situation, their own personal values and reflect on the future they might choose to imagine. Rivera asks: how does one create an ethical life in a world of increasingly rapid, exploitative, material and discursive exchanges linking the powerful and the powerless, the core and periphery, the blessed and the damned? Rivera's imaginary landscape in Sleep Dealer is a field of hopeful experimentation, negotiation and possibility.