Allen's film "Sleeper" not only signifies his character's Past (uh...sleeping to be exact, frozen technically, like a cheesecake you buy when someone isn't important enough to have a homemade brithday cake) but also implies the Present of the society he stumbles and wakes into: a world of non-thinkers, slumbering through life. A world of robotically completed tasks, instant gratification and the inability to truly enjoy something (as pursuing and toiling for a vied object is half the fun) is perhaps Allen's critique of his society, and even more so, ours today. Aesthetically and easily pleased and rarely focused, we have been censored. Our lack of contesting what is forced upon us, and our backbone-less natures, reveling in hedonism, not only creates an egalitarian society, swaddling in nihilism, but also creates a cultural amnesia: tha inability to process or create ideas of one's own. Frankly, to have a mind of one's own, whether it suffers for what it believes or not. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 confronts this issue with ease with the images of bruning books, and perpetual climatic statements that examine our own lifestyles. As the possessors of books were deviants, simple or dangerous in Bradbury's novel, so in "Sleeper" were those who did not conform to society, those known as either "Intellectuals," the "Underground" were collectively identified as "Subversives" as well. In Bradbury's society, subversives were the intellectuals, those who dreamed to think more than they could even themselves beleive in and to put it to paper.
Allen's film, as well as 451, copes with contentment issues and whether the individuals in a society based on scripted feelings and actions are truly stable. As Bradbury portrays a television like eye in the entire population's homes as a form of activity, the conditioned responses feed the egos of the individuals answering the questions with the pre-chosen answers for them, manipulating them into a false state of control, where nothing is present that criticizes or objects to them, lulling the individual into hopelessly naive contentment. Likewise in "Sleeper" does this freakishly weakening action occur. As everything is instantaneous, people are content, but are they stable? Luna broke down, as a vision of a child's tantrum, when she confused a metaphor in her poem, a small error indeed. The appearances of Formulas in both Fehrenheit 451 and "Sleeper" acknowledge that our society is dwindling into comforted, inhibited subjects of what is handed to us and considers the statement: "I think, therefore, I am."
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