Sleeper - "What's Big in the Future"

Sleeper (1973)

K: The thing that struck me from the start is Woody Allen's use of old-timey things. All of his movies start with the same credits. They're not rolling credits, it's like a silent film with one screen at a time. In this movie, the use of ragtime music - the whole Ragtime Rascals thing - with the physical comedy set to that.

H: This movie is like a Chaplin movie, where they speed up the film and people are struggling wordlessly with each other or with objects. It's really funny and really physical.

K: He takes standard physical jokes like slipping on a banana peel and totally makes them his own, with unique twists like an enormously large banana.

H: He makes the jokes bigger literally.

K: And with the bickering between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, he takes very universal things and set them in the future.

H: Any time you're watching a movie about the future, you're watching a movie about the future but you're also watching a movie about that time's conception of the future. This was a 1970s future where people were really concerned about mutant or genetically engineered food, which is why the bananas are so big. You see all the furniture and all the houses and the uniforms and the tinfoil he was wrapped in when he was cryogenically frozen - that's all 70s. Is it possible to make a movie about the future that will still seem like a legitimate future in the future, that will still feel like the future?

K: Movies that are made about the future don't deal with future problems, they deal with problems that have always existed.

H: Or are problems that are unique the time that the movie was made, say the 70s in this case. They still think that in the future they'll be dealing with the same problems.

K: The art people in this movie talk the same way they would in the 70s. In Small Time Crooks (2000), where the blue collar people are nouveau riche, he sets up the same people that way. In Annie Hall (1977) he sets up the intellectuals that way. Whether it's in the future or not, it's the same archetypes.

H: To answer my question earlier, I think 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) still feels like the future.

K: Is it because it's so minimalist?

When I was little, I had a better idea of what the future would look like, more so than now.

H: Do you think it was accurate?

K: No, but I had more of an imagination. I don't know if movies ruined that for me.

H: So you were better able to imagine a future.

K: There are so many movies based on the future now..

H: It kind of dilutes your imagination? Movies help shape our conception of the future.

K: Yes. These are the things that will be different: transportation, housing, government, clothes, food.

H: And they always have some way of keeping people alive from the past, as in Futurama.

I liked how Woody Allen had to pretend to be a robot and how robots worked in the movie.

K: And how bad he was at being a robot.

H: Yeah, none of the other robots are wearing his glasses! That's the tell. It was perfect in a way, a Woody Allen robot.

K: What did you think about his character's commentary on the 70s or on history?

H: It really bothered me, in a good way, that he was duping the people of the future, just talking casually about Chiang Kai Chek - "I didn't really like him" - or Joseph Stalin. He went from understatements like that to outright lying, saying a French president was just a chef. I like to think that historians can figure out and illuminate the past. And if they're that bad at it in the future, you just worry about how they'll misinterpret us.

K: I think he could have gone on and on like that. I was hoping there would be more miscommunication in that sense. He would almost be looked at like a god from the past, this all-knowing figure.

The plot was interesting, that he got turned around as a regular citizen and she became a rebel living in the woods. A little predictable but...

H: It's another example of the times in which the movie was made reflected on the future - the whole rebels in the woods reminds me of the South American rebel groups that hid in the jungle and waged war on capitalist societies.

Like any Woody Allen movie worth it's salt, this one deals about sex. It reminds me of "Brave New World" in its treatment of the subject, where your partner doesn't matter and there were machines for things that we do "manually".

K: He works in his time as this person who's willing to expose insecurities and deal with sex. I'm think of Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask (1972). He takes a jab at the sexual revolution in a lot of his work.

The use of art in this movie is interesting - her poetry, the other guy's art work, the idea that "a butterfly turns into a caterpillar - that's wrong? Oh, ok." That it's not important to know what you're talking about when you're writing.

Also, identity is shown through art - Woody Allen being a jazz musician but jazz being for "black people".

H: It's also about how in the future when people produce art, they expect it to take minimal effort but be something amazing, even when it wasn't.

I think in general that's most of our conception of the future, making things easier. This is just pushing it to the extreme. Even what's supposed to be arduous and difficult - making art - is supposed to be easy in the future.

K: Let's talk about the Leader and the idea of the Leader.

H: I really really liked that scene with all the doctors where they're given a slice of reality, still propagandistic, that the leader isn't doing too well. In fact all that remains is his nose. They're saying, "We're not doing too well, but we have a plan to bring back the leader."

K: He takes that ridiculous idea that they can clone him from a nose and he'll come back as in Bananas (1971) - the idea of politics and leadership that if it's not one person that's going to do it, it's someone else who'll come along and keep us down too, so what are we fighting for? People just stumble into leadership roles, but they can also be created for them. Did you notice how the Leader was always shown in a wheelchair with a German Shepard? Details like that remind me how marketable leaders have to be, like showing him waving at the end of a TV show.

H: My favorite gag, which kept repeating in variation, really reflected a theme of the movie - every time the security forces got out of their van, they tried to shoot him with that rocket launcher with attached plunger (classic!) and the plunger would blow up or the gun would blow up or the van would blow up. It would just malfunction and it was so futile. I wonder why they kept counting on it. I guess because it's the latest and greatest and that's what's big in the future.

K: It was Ricky Gervais, when talking about the Simpsons, that said the funniest thing is taking a joke and just beating it to death. And if it's more awkward, it's better. In this movie, when he's making the instant pudding and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger, you know it's going to keep flowing. He beats it with a broom and he starts to leave and then beats it again.

H: The joke itself is beating you over the head with a broom.

K: It's like the banana. It always comes back to the oversized banana.