[Reader-list] Science Fiction from the Global South

[Paul D. Miller]

I just thought I'd pass this along

Paul/Dj Spooky

Science Fiction From Below
Alex Rivera, director of the new film Sleep Dealer,
imagines the future of the Global South.

by Mark Engler

Foreign Policy In Focus - May 13, 2009

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6116

Tapping into a long tradition of politicized science
fiction, the young, New-York-based filmmaker Alex
Rivera has brought to theaters a movie that reflects in
news ways on the disquieting realities of the global
economy. Sleep Dealer, his first feature film, has
opened in New York and Los Angeles, and will show in 25
cities throughout the country this spring.

Set largely on the U.S.-Mexico border, Sleep Dealer
depicts a world in which borders are closed but high-
tech factories allow migrant workers to plug their
bodies into the network to provide virtual labor to the
North. The drama that unfolds in this dystopian setting
delves deeps into issues of immigration, labor, water
rights, and the nature of sustainable development.

Rivera's film drew attention by winning two awards at
Sundance--the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the
Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best film focusing on
science and technology. Los Angeles Times film critic
Kenneth Turan wrote of the movie, "Adventurous,
ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, Sleep Dealer.
combines visually arresting science fiction done on a
budget with a strong sense of social commentary in a
way that few films attempt, let alone achieve."

Rivera spoke with Foreign Policy In Focus senior
analyst Mark Engler by phone from Los Angeles, where
the director was attending the local premier of his
movie.

M.E.: How do you describe your film?

A.R.: Sleep Dealer is a science fiction thriller that
takes a look at the future from a perspective that
we've never seen before in science fiction. We've seen
the future of Los Angeles, in Blade Runner. We've seen
the future of Washington, D.C., in Steven Spielberg's
Minority Report. We've seen London and Chicago. But
we've never seen the places where the great majority of
humanity actually lives. Those are in the global South.
We've never seen Mexico; we've never seen Brazil; we've
never seen India. We've never seen that future on film
before.

M.E.: Your main character, Memo Cruz, is from rural
Mexico, from Oaxaca. In many ways, the village that we
see on film is very similar to many poor, remote
communities today. It doesn't necessarily look like how
we think about the future at all. What was your
conception of how economic globalization would affect
communities like these?

A.R.: One of the things that fascinates me about the
genre is that, explicitly or not, science fiction is
always partly about development theory. So when
Spielberg shows us Washington, DC with 15-lane traffic
flowing all around the city, he's putting forward a
certain vision of development.

Sleep Dealer starts in Oaxaca, and to think about the
future of Oaxaca, you have to think about how so-called
"development" has been happening there and where might
it go. And it's not superhighways and skyscrapers. That
would be ridiculous. So, in the vision I put forward,
most of the landscape remains the same. The buildings
look older. Most of the streets still aren't paved. And
yet there are these tendrils of technology that have
infiltrated the environment. So instead of an old-
fashioned TV, there is a high-definition TV. Instead of
a calling booth like they have today in Mexican
villages, where people call their relatives who are far
away, in this future there is a video-calling booth.
There's the presence of a North American corporation
that has privatized the water and that uses technology
to control the water supply. There are remote cameras
with guns mounted on them and drones that do
surveillance over the area.

The vision of Oaxaca in the future and of the South in
the future is a kind of collage, where there are still
elements that look ancient, there is still
infrastructure that looks older even than it does
today, and yet there are little capillaries of high
technology that pulse through the environment.

ME: How far into the future did you set the film?

A.R.: I started working on the ideas in Sleep Dealer
ten years ago, and at that point I thought I was
writing about a future that was forty or fifty years
away, or maybe a future that might not ever happen.
Over this past decade, though, the world has rapidly
caught up with a lot of the fantasy nightmares in the
film. That's been an interesting process.

But, you know, a lot of times we use the word
"futuristic" to describe things that are kind of
explosions of capital, like skyscrapers or futuristic
cities. We do not think of a cornfield as futuristic,
even though that has as much to do with the future as
does the shimmering skyscraper.

M.E.: In what sense?

A.R.: In the sense that we all need to eat. In the
sense that the ancient cornfields in Oaxaca are the
places that replenish the genetic supply of corn that
feeds the world. Those fields are the future of the
food supply.

For every futuristic skyscraper, there's a mine
someplace where the ore used to build that structure
was taken out of the ground. That mine is just as
futuristic as the skyscraper. So, I think Sleep Dealer
puts forward this vision of the future that connects
the dots, a vision that says that the wealth of the
North comes from somewhere. It tries to look at
development and futurism from this split point of
view - to look at the fact that these fantasies of what
the future will be in the North must always be creating
a second, nightmare reality somewhere in the South.
That these things are tied together.

M.E.: It's interesting that at the recent Summit of the
Americas, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave
President Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins
of Latin America. This is a book that was written over
30 years ago, but that really emphasizes the same point
that you are making now, that underdevelopment is not
an earlier stage of development, but rather is the
product of development. That development and
underdevelopment go hand in hand.

A.R.: Exactly. And I think that you can also add
immigration into that mix. Because the history that
Open Veins lays out is a lot about resource
exploitation and transfer from South to North. And
today, of course, one of the main entities that places
like Mexico export is workers.

M.E.: There's a quote from the film that says a lot.
Memo's boss, who runs this sort of high-tech Mexican
sweatshop, says, "We give the United States what it's
always wanted. All the work without the workers." Can
you describe this concept of the "cybracero" that you
have been developing?

A.R.: The central idea for this film occurred to me
about ten years ago when I was reading an article in
Wired magazine about telecommuting. The article was
making all of these fantastic predictions that, in the
future, there won't be any traffic jams anymore, and no
one will have to ride the subway, because everyone will
work from home. Well, I come from a family that's
mostly immigrant, a family in which my cousins are
still arriving and working in landscaping and
construction. I tried to put them into this fantasy of
working from home - when their home is Peru, 3000 miles
away, and their work is construction.

And so I came up with this idea of the telecommuting
immigrant, where in the future the borders are sealed,
workers stay in the South, and they connect themselves
to a network through which they control machines that
perform their labor in the North.

The end result is an American economy that receives the
labor of these workers but doesn't ever have to care
for them, and doesn't have to fear that their children
will be born here, and doesn't ever have to let them
vote.

When I started this project, the idea of a remote
worker was political satire. About eight years ago, it
became a reality in the call centers of India and in
the idea of off-shoring information-processing jobs
that could be done in real time by people on the other
side of the planet.

My movie goes further by putting forward a vision of
remote manual laborers. What if somebody in India could
drive a taxi in New York or bus dishes in a restaurant
in Los Angeles? I wonder, do we live in a world where
it would be acceptable to have someone in Jakarta
laying the bricks for a building that's being built
next door to us?

I think under the rules of the economy that we live
with, if that were technically possible, it would be
considered morally acceptable. It's just another stage
of globalization. Yet it seems so surreal, and it makes
me wonder: What kind of social order would that
produce? What kind of communities would that produce?

M.E.: At the same time, I think in the film you suggest
that this new technology also has the possibility to
connect people across great distances. I wonder how you
weigh the alienating effects of technology with some of
its redemptive potential?

A.R.: To me, Sleep Dealer is a parable, a myth. There
are three characters: One is a remote worker. The
second is a remote soldier - a person who is in the
United States but flies a drone that patrols the South.
And the third character is a kind of writer, a blogger,
who connects her body to the network and uploads, not
words that she is typing, but rather her memories. And
by sharing her memories she is able to let people see
these far-away realities that maybe they're not
supposed to. She's able to use technology to erase
borders for a moment.

And to me, that is the tension of the moment we're
living in. We live in a moment when the military is
using technology to wage remote war. Corporations are
using technology to move extraordinarily quickly around
the globe to take advantage of weak environmental
standards and weak labor standards.

And yet, we're living in the moment of the social
forums, which are organized over the network. We're
living in the age of the Zapatistas, who in 1994 sent
messages by horseback, messages written on paper, to
Internet cafes where they could be sent out as press
releases and could be used to build a global network of
solidarity. We're living in a time when I'm starting to
hear tremors from the labor movement about creating
cross-border unions, which will also be built over the
network.

So I think we're in this moment when we don't know who
will be more empowered by this connectivity and by new
technology. And that's the battle in Sleep Dealer. It's
over the future of this connected planet and what kind
of globalization we'll be living in.

M.E.: Beyond immigration politics, the commodification
and privatization of water is a major theme in the
film. How did you choose water as an issue you would
focus on?

A.R.: When I look at dramas of immigration, one of the
things that I find unsatisfying is that they always
focus on an internal dream, a dream that someone has of
going to America and making his or her life better.
And, instead, what I wanted Sleep Dealer to start with
was this idea that immigrants from Latin America, in
the places where they're born, are usually living
somehow in the shadow of U.S. intervention, that
immigrants come here because we - the United States - are
already there.

In my film I wanted to have a presence of U.S. power in
my character's village. And so I put in a dam. The dam
controls the local water supply, and it makes
traditional subsistence life much more difficult. In
reality, in Latin America, it's been banana plantations
controlled by paramilitaries. It's been gold mines and
copper mines and silver mines. It's been oil fields.
It's any number of situations that have made it hard
for the people there to survive.

I chose water because it also has a symbolic and
spiritual dimension to it. When my characters have
their first kiss, they are by a little river. When they
make love, they go down by the ocean. It would have
been a lot harder to do that with petroleum.

M.E.: But, of course, struggles over the control of
water are not purely metaphorical.

A.R.: When you talk to people about this, the idea that
an evil corporation would go in and take the water from
the people sounds so bombastic, so bizarre, that it
feels like science fiction. And yet it's absolutely
happening today.

A lot of people are familiar with the story of
Cochabamba, Bolivia, where an American company,
Bechtel, privatized the water, and there literally was
a water war. All of this stuff can sound like a bad
Kevin Costner movie - the idea of a water war - and yet
it's one of those realities that, if you were to graph
it, is only going to trend upwards in terms of its
intensity in the future.

M.E.: The characters in the film are moved to take
action about water privatization. Yet this takes the
form of a highly individualized type of action - they
don't join a social movement. I wondered about the
absence of more collective resistance in the movie.

A.R.: Well, I think you've hit on the Achilles' heel of
political narrative film. Narrative film is driven by
psychology and by identifying with a character. And I
think that's why there are so few truly transcendent
political films. In narrative cinema we're used to
identifying with one person, and so even if the story
is anti-imperial or anti-racist or anti-misogynist,
it's usually one character's journey in overcoming
those things.

In Sleep Dealer there are three characters that
represent three vast segments of our society. Those
characters are in conflict at first, and then they come
together. And their story is meant to have larger
resonance than just the three individuals.

But I think that devising a narrative where political
hope and political power doesn't belong to one actor,
but is somehow made collective, that is very, very
challenging. I look at The Battle of Algiers as an
incredible model, where there is a single character --
Ali la Pointe -- who we meet, but then his subjectivity
sort of bleeds away from him and is given to a social
movement by the end of the film.

That film is a masterpiece; I am but a learner. When we
were writing Sleep Dealer we were trying to think about
what the future of what a radically networked social
movement would look like, but we couldn't get there.
Instead, I think the contribution of Sleep Dealer is in
being a parable, a myth, that thinks through some of
the impulses of globalization.

M.E.: How did you first come to this type of work?

A.R.: I grew up in upstate New York, and when I was 15
years old I met Pete Seeger. Without knowing who he
was, I ended up doing volunteer work for one of his
organizations. After meeting him I learned about his
life using music and song as a part of social
movements. When I went to college, that's what I went
to study--music and social movements.

M.E.: So you had taken up the claw-hammer banjo?

A.R.: I did learn how to play the five-string banjo,
actually! I can still do it. But at a certain moment I
decided that the banjo wasn't the future of social
movements. And I decided that through film and video
you could express much more complicated and subtle
arguments about the world than you can through song.

M.E.: I think you're pissing off all of the political
songwriters out there.

A.R.: With song I think you have an access to the
spirit, access to the heart. But with film we have two
hours with people trapped in a dark room. You can refer
back to something that happened 60 minutes earlier in
the film, and you can play with what your viewers
remember, and you can build really intimate
relationships with characters. You can lay out both an
emotional journey and an intellectual argument. I don't
think there's anybody who will say that you can do all
of that in a song.

M.E.: Are you concerned with being pigeonholed as a
political filmmaker or having the movie labeled as a
"political" film?

A.R.: I'd be happy to be pigeonholed as a political
filmmaker. For me, making a film is so difficult and so
challenging that I only want to make films that are
relevant to the world we live in.

M.E.: Do you see a trend toward politics, or maybe away
from politics, in science fiction filmmaking today?

A.R.: Science fiction has always had a radical history,
all the way from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Terry
Gilliam's Brazil, which is a comedic portrait of
fascism, up to Gattaca, which looks at the way that DNA
profiling could be used by the government, to Children
of Men, to Michael Winterbottom's Code 46.

Science fiction has always been a space for radical
critique on one hand, and, on the other, for selling
Happy Meals. I do think that science fiction today is
at risk of being completely co-opted by superhero
movies, big franchises, and xenophobic fantasies about
space aliens. It has that face as well. But I think the
long history, going back almost a hundred years, is of
science fiction as a place for forward-thinking,
radical thought.

M.E.: Perhaps unique among these movies you've
mentioned, Sleep Dealer is a bi-lingual film, with the
vast majority of the dialogue in Spanish. How did you
think about language in the film?

A.R.: We need to know in our guts that we are going
into a future that will be multi-cultural. I think we
are seeing in the news right now that America might not
be the only world power in the future, that English
might not be the international language of choice. So,
for me, doing a science fiction set in the South and
doing it in a language that was not English was
fundamental. I'd love to do a science fiction in
Nahuatl, or in Tagalog, or in Pashto. The language is
just part of a gesture that says, the future belongs to
all of us.

I think the situation we're in is very striking. It is
as if you met somebody and you asked them, "What do you
want to have in your future?" And they said, "I don't
know. I've never thought about it." In the cinema,
that's what we have for the entire global South. We
don't have any cinema that reflects on the future of
the so-called Third World. There's zero.

Why is it that we've seen comedies from the South,
we've seen romances from the South, we've seen action
movies from the South? We've seen everything but
reflections on the future. To me, the first step to
getting to the future that you want to live in is to
imagine it.

[Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is a
senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and the
author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over
the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be
reached via the Web site
http://www.DemocracyUprising.com ]