A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects
In SLEEP DEALER (2008) and ADVANTAGEOUS (2015), filmmakers Alex Rivera and Jennifer Phang, each explore worlds where humans must sacrifice their identity, both consciousness and physicality, to support the hyper productivity of the techno-capitalist world order. SLEEP DEALER tells the story of Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), who must leave his family’s homestead in Oaxaca to earn a living in Tijuana. Gwen (Jacqueline Kim), in ADVANTAGEOUS, is a single mother struggling to sustain employment at a corporation that sells radically altering plastic surgery. Studied together, students will consider the ways in which the two films use the mode of science fiction to explore the treatment of a human workforce in a society that devalues its employees to prioritize inordinate supply and demand expectations.
UCLA Film & Television Archive in partnership with UCLA Cinema & Media Studies Program
Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles
TBC
Discussion Questions
- How does memory function as a humanizing quality and technological trail in each film’s dystopian future?
- What is the relationship between nostalgia and trauma as experienced by Memo and Gwen?
- In what ways does romance function as a narrative device to shape the protagonists’ character arc in both films?
- In SLEEP DEALER, how does water function as a metaphor for communication?
- How is labor feminized in ADVANTAGEOUS?
- Science-fiction films are typically dominated by Hollywood’s “universal” story structure that works within the conventions of action-driven melodrama, resolving social issues in private, emotional, and moral terms that reinforce the status quo. Science Fiction Against the Margins complicates these conventions of mainstream cinema by considering how certain independent and international media creators use speculative cinema to explore alternative representations of race and ethnicity, gender politics, and national identity. Class discussion prompts might include: Work together to define what is a film genre?
- Map out your definition by thinking about how films are organized and coded through narrative/story themes, types of characters, iconography and prominent symbols (i.e., objects, production and costume design). From here, construct a definition of science fiction film, including examples. Building on Vivian Sobchack examination of science fiction as a genre, what is an argument for how sci-fi can function as a hybrid genre?
Bibliographic References
