Sleep Dealer (2008) is a movie that has yet one more go at the now standard notion of humans connecting their nervous system / mind directly to computer networks. The concept remains fresh and intriguing and opens so many doors to all kinds of philosophical, sociological, existential and political exploration that it’s no surprise that it spawned a whole tradition – almost a subgenre now I’d dare to say – of moviemaking around it.

The earliest contact I had with an investigation of this Pandora box of real reality versus simulated reality versus “what is real after all?” was when I read the classic sci-fi novel Simulacron 3 (1964) when I was a teenager. Although this book probably can’t claim to have been the first to tackle the theme, it remains as sort of an intellectual grandfather of later incarnations, and many of the ground rules that are now repeated and accepted for how to go about it were laid down back there. It took a while though before there was wide popular interest in more of the same, an early exception being the movie Brainstorm (1983). As the millennium approached, however, possibly because of the explosion of the internet and other technologies which made this whole alternate universe more concretely relevant and realistic, there was a sudden surge of renewed energy directed to the subject, and after the release of movies such as Strange Days (1995) the public and filmmakers seemed to finally fall in love with it, a movement which culminated in 1999 with the production of The Thirteenth Floor (1999) (which explicitly refers to and is loosely based on Simulacron 3), Existenz (1999) (a Cronenberg movie with the usual implications) and then of course The Matrix (1999).

The Matrix can probably be described as the landmark movie of the genre, which brought the whole concept into mainstream consciousness, bringing about the usual mix of awareness raising and washing down of ideas. But while the average person had arguably stayed largely untouched by all the philosophical conundrums and mind bending consequences of this kind of technology, the idea had been alive and kicking and breeding in the sci-fi literature, which had meanwhile been augmented by classics like Ender’s Game (1977 short story, 1985 novel) (in which a child is unwittingly induced to commit genocide when his ability to play games is used to control military drones) and Neuromancer (1984) (the archetypical cyberpunk novel).

Enter Sleep Dealer, 2008.

Before watching the movie, I was curious to see how the director would manage to explore those issues without just re-hashing bits and pieces of what is now a somewhat mature cafeteria of ideas. I was not disappointed. The director, Alex Rivera, had some aces up his sleeve, one of them being his South American  ancestry. Right at the beginning of the movie, the main (Mexican) character watches his father being killed by an American military drone in a completely stupid military operation which serves no purpose but to keep the paranoid marketing of constant war going. Now, of course there is a political point being made there. The director, however, chooses not only to let it go and not to spell it out (which to me is even more powerful than ranting about it, the scene speaks for itself) but he also has the main character react to it in what is a much more personal and human way than the one we are used to in American movies. What do you do if a member of your family gets killed by an oppressive alien government for no reason at all in front of you? Well, if you’re Mel Gibson, you grab your machete and start hacking, killing as many as possible, and give the whole thing an immediate “us vs them” meaning in terms of politics and ideology. Which I wouldn’t really feel justified to condemn under the circumstances, I suppose. But this is definitely not the only possible reaction, and it’s surely not on the list of urgent priorities of the main character in Sleep Dealer that he should join a guerrilla or start blowing things up. No, instead his main worry and concern is about his family, his mother, his brother, the people whom he loves and who will now have a very hard time meeting their basic survival needs. So he decides to leave town and look for a job that can give him enough money to support his family, even if this means being alone and isolated and letting his health and identity be put in jeopardy.

Now, this is an immensely powerful statement. Some would call the main character of the movie “alienated” or even naive. I beg to disagree. He is in fact shockingly in touch with his own humanity and with what really matters. He doesn’t really want to fight anyone or to use his abilities to destroy. He wants to connect. All through the movie, what he wants to do is to connect, to share, to meet the scary unknown otherness face to face. “I didn’t call to fight with you”, he tells his brother when he is criticized for having left their family behind. His perseverance is rewarded when what is supposed to be his “enemy” empathizes with him and out of guilt and shame offers to help him. Somewhat unrealistic? Perhaps, if taken literally. But that’s more or less how Gandhi managed to get the English out of India.

The movie makes a very strong point out of how much more fundamental than the impersonal entities and institutions and nations and ideologies which divide us, our emotions and underlying common humanity stands. Families are more important than jobs, feelings are more important than ideology, working together is more important than borders. If we are to thrive and blossom both as individual human beings and as a species, love must overcome fear. This is a message that speaks very deeply to me, and which I think is lost in the sometimes blind monomaniacal pursuit of supposedly objective material “prosperity” and “success” which in the end leaves people alone and unfulfilled.

Sure, there is a strong political message about immigration and social control which most of the time is not even metaphorical. But the movie manages to get the point across splendidly precisely by not being metaphorical about it, by not making it cerebral, by showing in all its glory the absurd reality that comes out of the actual physical materialization of certain attitudes. There is a scene in the movie in which the main character visits the wall which supposedly prevents immigrants from crossing the border. And then what immediately strikes you as most surreal as you look at it is that such a wall is being seriously (well as seriously as such a thing can be) proposed and has been partially built at enormous cost. Isn’t it inconceivably ironic that one of the most iconic utterances associated to a standing idol among some of the conservatives voices who demand and mobilize for the construction of this aberration is precisely “Tear down this wall” ?

And once again (wisely and effectively) without discussing it too explicitly but instead by letting us see it through the eyes of  a specific person with an identity, a story, a conscience and a soul, the movie raises some points  which still seem to somehow elude a large fraction of governments, politicians, policy makers and ideologues everywhere (as if history didn’t teach us this lesson again and again) : that restricting immigration in a draconian implacable fashion inevitably end up entailing totalitarian practices, that the pseudo-economic argument about “stealing jobs” is much more about xenophobia than anything else, and that in modern economies the migration and growing virtualization of the jobs themselves makes the very notion risible. (This is what a serious, working border wall would look like.)

But although the movie does tackle these issues head-on, it also transcends the political context in which they are posed to reframe them as an expression of the more basic and ultimately more important issue of connectedness in general. So this absurd physical wall ends up representing not only a criticism to immigration policies that manage to be simultaneously oppressive, unrealistic and counterproductive even to their stated objectives (i.e. supposedly protect the US economy and labor force), but a much deeper criticism to the actual broader psychological forces behind it, a criticism of a culture of fear in which human beings find themselves unable to connect and relate to each other at meaningful, emotionally rewarding, existentially fulfilling levels. The wall is an appropriate and universal symbol for lack of understanding, for the essential existential loneliness and isolation that each human faces, and whose ultimate resolution is to connect to other human beings. It’s impossible not to think of The Wall (1982).

And still regarding this message about connectedness, another aspect of how the director goes about some artistic and iconographic decisions which I liked very much is the way in which he chooses to depict the technology for jacking in to the network and (this is explicitly underlined) to other people. First of all, he does not make the physical connections (which are actual holes) go into the spine or the brain. No, they go into wrists and the back and into other place which he goes out of his way to have perceived as being the body – not the mind – of a person. And the connectors themselves are (even unrealistically form a technological standpoint) extremely needle-like, and convey in a very primal fashion the sensation of being invaded, penetrated, touched.

The metaphorical link to sex is overwhelmingly obvious, and even made explicit the first time the connecting nodes are discussed in the movie. But the point is then driven home by making the metaphor concrete and depicting the potential that this technology has for, above and beyond tearing down all sorts of social, political and economic walls, and maybe even more importantly than between people’s conscious minds, it has the potential to tear down walls between people’s experiences and emotions, and its actual use during sex is very concretely depicted and then suggested as possibly the main and most significant redeeming feature of a technology that could otherwise be seen as used (in the movie) mostly for dehumanization of the main character.

“How could I tell her the truth? I was just figuring it out myself. My energy was being drained… sent far away. What happened to the river, was happening to me. I don’t know what I’m doing. I work in a place I’ll never see. I can see my family, but I can’t touch them. And, well, the only place I feel… connected… is here… with you.”

Which maybe brings us all the all through the metaphor and, without the need for any new technology, to the immensely powerful role of sex as the ultimate tool and symbol for integration, connection and tearing down of walls. When two people have sex, they actually, physically, literally connect and put their senses intimately in touch with each other in such a way that what one feels, the other feels (even though of course they may *experience* it differently). On one hand, this has the potential to be an invaluable resource to nurture intimacy, closeness and peace, and establish communication and connectedness at levels that would not otherwise be possible. On the other hand, it leaves one’s self exposed and bare and unless one is existentially able to let go the fear, and unless one can get in touch with finding sincere fulfillment and rejoice in feeling empathy for the other, one may feel the urge, the need, the urgency to go around building all kinds of walls.

Now, this is absolutely horrible. And in fact everyone seems ready and eager to pay lip service to underlining how horrible it is. And I agree. But the bottom line is – what are those among you who now mourn in easy words about a tragedy that already happened, but who were silent and indifferent as the victim was going through unbearable suffering and utter loneliness, what are you actually going to *do* about it? Are you going to do anything different next time? Are you prepared to change anything? I thought so.

Unfortunately, as in all circumstances like this, the first cry I hear is for more control. Sensitivity training. Mandatory ethics seminars. Codes of behavior that must be acknowledged and signed. Stricter laws. Cyberbullying must be a federal crime punishable by many years in prison. Right, more control must be the answer.

Instead of all that, I have this crazy idea here which is so revolutionary that is probably going to sound insane :

How about actually CARING about others?

Seriously, the *real* problem is not some idiots doing idiotic stuff. I am reasonably sure that if the victims were convinced that the reaction of society around them would be of almost unanimous disapproval and horror towards the idiots and of support towards the victims, they would not suffer so greatly and not be so hopeless. The *real* problem is that when idiots do something like this to someone, the reaction of those around them should be something along the lines of “WHAT? Dude, you’re a creep and an idiot, and I don’t want to have anything to do with you.” but instead for a million reasons it is not. It’s not socially convenient to antagonize anyone. It doesn’t really bring any profit to show support for someone who was been wronged. So people just go on and do business as usual.

And then when a tragedy happens because nobody seems to care, well, we need someone to pay for the guilt of everyone else, right? And since the guilt is so great, the punishment must be terrible, awful, cathartic. And then everyone can go home feeling smug about how righteous they are. Now, reality check : do you think that the victim would really be in peace if nobody in his social circle did anything about his suffering and by calling the police he could have the idiots arrested? Would that make him feel less lonely, isolated, alienated? Would he even *want* his roommate to go to jail and have his life destroyed? How does that fix anything?

Of course, the idiots should suffer the consequences, and the adequate level or harshness is rather arbitrary and not the point I’m trying to make (although I do think that the main purpose of any reaction should be to protect the victim and future victims). The point I am indeed trying to make is that this suicide was a collective work, and the two idiots are, if we take some steps back, just convenient sacrificial scapegoats, as was the victim. They are all paying for society’s sins.

What makes someone feel that there is no way out is not simply falling prey to the stupid actions of random idiots. The *real* problem is that most of the time nobody cares. Of course now that something tragic happened everyone speaks up, but how about all the silent lonely suffering that he had to go through? How about the silent lonely suffering that many others are going through right now? As long as they don’t do anything tragic, then it’s ok?

So in my personal opinion the main fault was *not* with the idiots, idiotic as they are, and using them as scapegoats for everyone else’s inaction and implicit quasi-approval is just too convenient. They should suffer the consequences, yes, but if those consequences are essentially only those enforced by the police and government and the way people are actually socially treated everyday goes on as usual, this will prevent nothing. The *real* problem is actually living in a society which as a whole and on average is indifferent to the suffering of others most of the time, and this is considered the pragmatic thing to do and perfectly acceptable.

More control is absolutely not the answer. Regulating social interaction by force to the last detail and impose insanely harsh penalties for being stupid will only create even greater hypocrisy and alienation. We don’t need more control. We need more actual caring actions in everyday life instead of inflamed rhetoric about it when a tragedy happens. We need more people who will stop and listen when someone else looks sad, not more people going to jail. What needs to happen is not making everything a federal crime. What we need is basic human decency, not a police state.

But even if we want to work at the societal level, the real battle, the one that might have saved the victim’s life, is to be fought elsewhere. It’s absolutely amazing that we live in a society in which there is still a *debate* about letting gay people get married, a society in which it’s socially acceptable to vociferously rant about gay people burning in hell. These are some of the real issues here. Unless people stop being harassed by society as a whole for not fitting their favorite prejudices, this kind of situation will persist. Converging on some circumstantial idiots and making them bear the full load of the guilt as if they were not just rather irrelevant pawns in this sordid game only serves the purpose of avoiding the real issues.

And the main issue here, I would say, is : what really made the victim feel that he had nowhere to run, no escape, no safe harbor? Was it the actual actions of the idiots? Or rather the (predicted or actual) reaction of the social surroundings? Notice, we are all confronted with injustice and evil from time to time. But when we are, say, mugged, the reaction of the people around us is in general *not* to laugh at our misfortune and then ignore or ridicule it. Now of course we feel safer and better if our aggressor is caught and punished but much, much more important than that is the support that we receive from those around us, the way that our misfortune is perceived and handled by others. If everyone is completely indifferent to your suffering and then the police bolt of out the blue, arrest your roommate and disappear, does that really make you feel safe and cared for? Is that a world in which you want to live? Or is it more like a world that makes you want to jump from the George Washington bridge?

Now, will this issue really be addressed by “solutions” like “mandatory ethics training”? What message will someone get from society if what they concretely observe is “Ok, you’re surrounded by people who do not care whether you live or die and who are totally not there in your moments of deepest despair and who believe you’ll go to hell for being who you are and by the way you can’t get married because we don’t really like your kind around here but hey, it’s ok, we’re going to give mandatory ethics training to everyone so that they know which words to use without getting in trouble.” You tell me. You tell me how effective you think this is in preventing people from wanting to jump from the George Washington bridge.