Sleeper (1973) — A Nostalgic Look at the Future
Essay
Sleeper.
One of Woody Allen’s funniest early films sends an ordinary New Yorker 200 years into the future and finds plenty to laugh at in politics, technology, sex and our faith in progress.
200 years later
Welcome to the future.
Sleeper is one of Woody Allen’s funniest early films, but underneath the slapstick there’s a surprisingly sharp satire of politics, technology and the strange ways people imagine the future.
Released in 1973, the film stars Allen as Miles Monroe, a health-food shop owner who is cryogenically frozen after a routine operation goes wrong. He wakes up 200 years later to discover a world run by an authoritarian government, full of baffling technology, rigid social rules and people who seem to have misplaced most of their common sense.
It’s a perfect setting for Allen’s comic persona. Miles is nervous, argumentative and completely unprepared for what he finds. Rather than giving him futuristic powers or turning him into a heroic rebel, the film mostly lets him stumble through the future trying not to get arrested.
Politics
A dictatorship played for laughs.
The political satire is broad and often very funny. This future society is controlled by a dictatorship that interferes in almost every part of daily life. People are monitored, individuality is discouraged and anyone who causes trouble quickly attracts the attention of the authorities.
Allen isn’t interested in building a detailed political allegory. The regime is deliberately ridiculous, which makes the idea of unquestioned authority look ridiculous too.
Technology
The future has an Orgasmatron.
The Orgasmatron is probably the most famous example: a machine designed to provide instant sexual gratification without any awkward business involving intimacy or emotion. It’s an absurd sight gag, but also a pretty good joke about the belief that technology will eventually remove every inconvenience from human life.
Elsewhere, seemingly advanced inventions are treated with the same suspicion. The future may have better machines, but its people aren’t obviously happier, wiser or more interesting because of them.
Miles & Luna
Allen and Keaton find their rhythm.
Miles’s relationship with Luna, played by Diane Keaton, gives the film much of its energy. Luna initially belongs completely to this new world. She’s fashionable, self-absorbed and rather pleased with herself. Miles finds her irritating. She finds him primitive.
Naturally, they end up together.
Their scenes work because Allen and Keaton are already developing the comic rhythm that would become so important in their later films. The arguments, interruptions and mismatched personalities are much funnier than any attempt to make their relationship grand or romantic. You can already see traces of the chemistry that would later drive Annie Hall and Manhattan.
Silent comedy
Chaplin, Keaton and the Marx Brothers.
Visually, Sleeper owes a considerable debt to silent comedy.
Allen had always admired Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers, and here he gives himself permission to make an almost pure physical comedy. There are chases, disguises, pratfalls and extended visual routines that could have worked without dialogue at all.
One sequence has Miles disguising himself as a robot servant. Another turns a giant piece of agricultural produce into a prop for a wonderfully stupid gag. The film frequently stops worrying about plot and simply asks, “What would be funniest here?”
That looseness is part of its charm.
The look
A future that already feels old.
The production design also helps. Rather than presenting the future as sleek or convincing, Sleeper gives us a slightly absurd version of 22nd-century life, full of white interiors, peculiar furniture and machines that look impressive until someone actually has to use them.
There are echoes of older science-fiction films such as Metropolis and Things to Come, but Allen keeps puncturing the grandeur of the genre. Every time the film threatens to become serious science fiction, somebody falls over.
Why it lasts
The joke is still on us.
That’s probably why Sleeper still works.
A lot of science-fiction comedy becomes dated once the technology it is parodying stops looking futuristic. Sleeper avoids much of that problem because its real target is our confidence that progress automatically makes society better.
Allen’s future has extraordinary technology, but people remain vain, frightened, confused and politically gullible. Two centuries have passed and human beings are still human beings.
There’s also something unusually carefree about the film. Allen’s later work would become more interested in relationships, mortality, art and moral responsibility. Sleeper still belongs to the period when he was primarily trying to make the audience laugh as often as possible.
And he does.
Sleeper · 1973
Fast.
Silly.
Inventive.
It may not have the emotional depth of Annie Hall or Manhattan, but that would almost be beside the point. Sleeper is fast, silly, inventive and packed with ideas. It takes authoritarian politics, sexual anxiety, scientific progress and the future of civilisation, then spends much of its running time turning them into elaborate jokes.
More than fifty years after its release, that combination still feels remarkably fresh.