|
Last summer the UK Guardian polled scientists on their taste in sci-fi flicks. Blade Runner was the clear favorite, followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the first two-thirds of the Star Wars trilogy. Rounding out the top five were Alien and Solaris.
No offense to the top five, but when it comes to sci-fi films that actually predicted the future, you can’t overlook Woody Allen’s Sleeper. For more than three decades, the 1973 comedy has been dismissed as mere slapstick, but its absurdity is its point. In presenting a totalitarian state that has rewired desire, and a populace so anaesthetized that it’s blissfully unaware that it lives in a police state, the comedy looks across the chasm of time — and in many cases gets it right.
The seeds of Allen’s thinking on carnal matters were first exposed in the 1972’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. Daring even for the climax of the Sexual Revolution, the film explored a range of taboos: homosexuality, exhibitionism, transvestism, even bestiality. In one skit, an excommunicated Masters & Johnson researcher brain-injures his assistant by giving him a four-hour erection. (Hello, Viagra.) The final segment of Everything was a teaser for Sleeper — a Fantastic Voyage-inspired journey to the center of a man’s loins during sex. Allen himself played a reluctant sperm, hesitant to leap into the void.
Not content to parody historical attitudes, Woody took to the future.
Very much a commentary on the Me Decade, Sleeper is sci-farce on the surface, but beyond artfully mocking cybersex, cloning, genetically modified foods and global terrorism, it provides trenchant commentary about intimacy and relationships. If Everything enabled Woody to explore the boundlessness of lust, in Sleeper he speculates on what happens when desire is annexed by the state.
As Sleeper begins, a Reynolds-Wrapped Miles Monroe (Allen) lies on a gurney. He’s been unconscious for two hundred years, revived by scientists/rebels of the underground movement who view Sleepers — members of the population who lie dormant in “cryogenic immersion” — as one large terrorist cell at their disposal. 
Co-owner of the Happy Carrot Health Food Restaurant back in the day, Miles asks his attendants for a fairly typical breakfast (wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk) and is greeted with puzzlement:
Dr. Melik: Those were the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Tryon: You mean there was no deep fat, no steak, or cream pies, hot fudge?
Dr. Melik: Those were thought to be unhealthy. Precisely the opposite of what we known to be true.
Dr. Tryon: Incredible.
Paging Dr. Atkins! In short shrift, the dissidents are captured and Miles alone escapes. He manages to elude security forces by disguising himself as a labor-saving robot. Looking like a servile crash-test dummy, he is delivered to the bourgeois poet Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton), whose loft feels like a Soho smart home, with its domestic robot (shades of iRobot’s Roomba), flatscreen TV that plays a twenty-four-hour music channel, surveillance cameras and Orgasmatron.
When guests arrive for a party, Miles
is introduced to a drug of the future called an Orb (think time-release Zoloft in a Magic Eight Ball). The revelers anticipate the libertine fabulousness of Studio 54. When
Luna and her guests emerge from a dip in the pool, she dryly remarks, “I
thought we should have had sex, but there weren’t enough people.” Still,
the possibility of futuresex is constrained by an apparent disgust for the exchange
of body fluids, unwittingly commenting on the finite window between
the sexual revolution and the age of AIDS.
As the film wears on, Luna reluctantly joins Miles in an underground mission. While Luna is divided on her loyalties to her government, she’s clear about wanting to seduce Miles. As a woman of her time, she can boast impressive bona fides: an undergraduate degree in Cosmetic Sexual Technique & Poetry ("You have to know it in case something goes wrong with the machine") and even a Ph.D. in Oral Sex. Her credentials foreshadow a future in which sex has been de-eroticized by overthink, as does her seduction technique: “Do you want to perform sex with me?” she chides Miles. Sensing his anxiety at her directness, she reassures him: “Sex is different today: We don’t have any problems. Everybody’s frigid.”
This punchline resonates across Woody’s entire oeuvre: a deep-seated fear of impotence or frigidity. (This phobia was even a working title for Annie Hall: anhedonia — lacking the capacity to experience pleasure.) But thanks to the miracles of post-post-modernism, problem solved: urges are satisfied through technology.
The Orgasmatron itself foretells of cybersex. Inside the machine, the mind is manipulated and ejaculation has little to do with abandon; it’s simply the final stage in a sequence of programs. Stimulus is the input, release is the output. In Allen’s view, promiscuity of the future didn’t even involve the brief social rituals of a one-night stand; in seconds, you’re good to go. Today’s Orgasmatron is undoubtedly the Internet, offering a buffet of visual stimuli, interactivity, anonymity and speed.
In the margins of Sleeper‘s sex chat and political intrigue lies the absence of family. Woody’s ’80s and ’90s dramas, including Hannah and Her Sisters and Husbands and Wives, revolved around the fraught relationships in sprawling extended families (often in Mia Farrow’s own Upper West Side apartment). In Sleeper, technology allows Woody to simplify, making the family — indeed, all intimate connections — obsolete.
In the final act of Sleeper, Luna and Miles discover that their fearless leader was actually killed a year ago by a bomb, but that the terrorist cell has been activated that very day to witness the historic cloning of their leader from his one surviving organ — his nose. After Miles and Luna literally quash the proboscis in question, they have saved the planet — or at least subversives and free-thinkers — from certain extermination. Crisis averted, Luna playfully interrogates Miles about his belief system and finds indifference.
On religion: “I’m what you’d call a teleological existential atheist.” When Luna rebuts that she believes that there’s somebody out there who watches over us, he cynically retorts, “Unfortunately, it’s the government.”
On politics: “It doesn’t matter who’s up there. Political solutions don’t work — they’re all terrible.”
On science: Luna tells Miles that “meaningful relationships between men and women don’t work. It was proven by science.” Miles has a ready answer: “Science is an intellectual dead end.”
Stumped, Luna asks: “So then what do you believe in?”
“Sex and death.”
Sleeper ultimately suggests a vacillating preference between intimacy and promiscuity. Woody was able to stare directly into the heart of desire, believing intimacy to be our best hedge against mortality. He argues for a true progress — not only of technology that can mask over our shortcomings, but one that can enhance our own humanity, not diminish our capacity for desire.
Following Sleeper, Allen’s work would focus on repression and the toll exacted on relationships. 1975’s Love and Death would include the provocative one-liner: “The best thing is twelve-year-old blonde girls, two of them whenever possible.” Perhaps he foretold, like Charlie Chaplin, his own predilection for younger women. Certainly, for all Woody’s striving to norm the polymorphous perverse, no one could have foreseen Mia Farrow’s status as simultaneously his ex-wife and mother-in-law.
n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
| Jerry Weinstein is a refugee from scholarly book publishing and a reluctant ghostwriter. He teaches online contemporary lit classes for Barnes and Noble University (really!), mediates e-commerce conflicts for eBay, and has contributed to Time Out New York and Show Business Weekly. |
©2005 Jerry Weinstein and hooksexup.com.