‘Sleeper’ Revisited
Sex, death and liking Woody Allen movies, three things that come once in a lifetime
Certain films capture your heart at 15, but how awkward and old-fashioned would they make you feel if you watched them with a teenager now? And what horrifying things might they reveal about the person you once were? Avoid embarrassment, and the waste of £1.49 in rental fees, by letting us take the risk on your behalf.
Sleeper (1973)
Elevator Pitch
In 1973 Miles Monroe (Woody Allen) is put in a cryogenic deep freeze following a botched medical procedure. After a couple of centuries he’s awoken by renegade scientists who want a man with no history, someone whose anonymity will be crucial in bringing down the despotic Leader of their surveillance state. On the run from the authorities, Miles falls in with the vain and pampered poet Luna (Diane Keaton) and together they try to prevent the Leader being cloned from his last remaining organ: his nose.
Unusually for a comedy movie, the plot of Sleeper actually makes sense. It’s inspired by the H. G. Wells novel The Sleeper Awakes (1910), in which the man who has slept for centuries is the richest and best-known man in the world. The way Sleeper flips this premise, taking Miles’s nobody-ness and making it the central joke, is a genuinely neat touch. It also reflects a broader sci-fi literacy that enriches the film (sci-fi author Ben Bova was a science advisor). A lot of the sketches are spoofs of popular sci-fi tropes, including the use of Douglas Rain - the voice of HAL in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - as a bossy computer.
All this neatness and sci-fi erudition is a little superfluous, because the film is really just a sequence of period-specific sketches. There’s a whole sequence in which the scientists ask Miles to identify the subjects of a load of old photographs, enabling Woody Allen to do a series of jokes that might have been fab in the early ‘70s but are now utterly meaningless to anyone under the age of 65.
Given that this is a piece about a Woody Allen film, and you know what’s coming, it’s worth noting a revealing little side note in this scene with the photographs. It ends when the scientists produce a copy of Playboy magazine and ask Miles to ‘explain’ it. During all of this we get a brief glimpse of the centrefold. It’s a real-life Playboy centrefold - a 1972 picture of model Lena Forsén naked, apart from her boots and hat - and one that has since become incredibly famous. This edition of Playboy was, with wearying inevitability, lying around the lab in the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute when the guys there were looking for a default test image for digital processing. They decided that a nude model (admittedly, a cropped image showing her neck and shoulders) would be just the ticket. The photo went on to be central to the development of internet images in general, and Forsén has been called ‘the First Lady of the Internet’. As an indication of the cultural milieu in which Sleeper (and the internet) was made, this is as good as anything else.
Delights
Some of the sketches are pure comic delight: not the ones that feature Allen’s trademark nervous banter, but the ones that go heavy on the slapstick. There’s a wonderful sequence with the skin of a giant mutant banana, and a bit where a groggy Miles eats a rubber glove and then proceeds to blow it up like bubblegum, which I first saw 40 years ago and remains one of my favourite jokes. Right at the end, when Luna is raving about the handsome, brilliant and brave rebel leader, Miles counters with ‘Yeah, but can he do this?’ followed by a ridiculous little dance. I have been basing my entire character on this ever since.
It’s also a really good-looking film, which, again, it really doesn’t have to be. The production design by Dale Hennesey (who also worked on more po-faced sci-fi including Logan’s Run (1976) and Fantastic Voyage (1966)) is terrific, all sterile sci-fi white wipe clean interiors like George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971). The costume design by Joel Schumacher is a lot better than his Batsuit-with-nipples of his Batman films. There’s some inventive use of mid-century brutalist settings and futuristic googie architecture. There’s even a beautifully-designed presentation about the cloning of the Leader’s nose, which features some delightful fonts.
Discomforts
So, here we go. Woody Allen. A lot has been alleged and little has been proved, but whatever the truth or untruth of the serious allegations against Allen (which have never made it to court despite being investigated), they’ve ruined his relationship with the public at large because they key into things that have made us uncomfortable for decades. Marrying your partner’s daughter is just not good behaviour, and there’s always been something twisted about the portrayal of women and relationships in his films.
The romantic plot in Sleeper isn’t as unpleasant as that in Manhattan (1979), which features a 42-year-old Allen and a 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway; but it’s still pretty bad. Diane Keaton’s character Luna is a self-important idiot, but what’s notable is Miles’s absolutely relentless negging. He is a self-defined ‘funny’ man whose every joke is a put-down, whose every literary reference is an insistence on his own intellectual superiority, and who likes nothing better than simultaneously desiring and deriding a woman who’s a lot younger than he is. (Keaton is ten years younger than Allen; when Sleeper was made she was in her mid-twenties, Allen in his mid-thirties.) The relationship is that of a skeevy lecturer with a pretty student. Perhaps we just have to be grateful that Allen didn’t go into academia.
Can we show the kids?
I first saw Sleeper at about 15 and I thought it was the best thing ever. I was a massive Woody Allen fan for about the next 10 years: I’ve even watched What’s Up Tiger Lily (1966) and Shadows and Fog (1991), which isn’t something many people can say. There was a time, back there, when Woody Allen’s way of being in culture, and consuming it, was deeply influential.
There’s a running joke in his 1980 movie Stardust Memories in which people, including a group of alien visitors, keep telling his film director character that they prefer his ‘early, funny’ films. And Sleeper is one of the best of the early, funny films. If anyone’s going to enjoy it, it's probably the kids. Young men, most probably of all.
Is it as good as you remember?
Well, no, but it was one of my very favourite films for a while so it had a lot to live up to.
My tastes have changed somewhat in the last forty years. It would be worrying if they hadn’t. Watching it now, I’m much more aware of where some of the good jokes were stolen from: the shaving sequence that’s very obviously a nod to the mirror gag in Duck Soup, the schtick with the ladder that could be Buster Keaton, the fight with the futuristic kitchen that could be Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle (1958). But it’s still funny. I largely stopped taking Woody Allen seriously when he started to take himself seriously and stopped trying to be so funny. Comedy is a serious business.
What leapt out to me in this rewatch was that intellectual snobbery that pervades the film. In Sleeper, when Luna wants to praise something, she says: ‘It’s pure Keane. No. No, it’s greater than Keane: it’s Cugat.’ This is a joke about the pitifully mainstream and middlebrow tastes of this anodyne society; she’s referencing the kitsch painter Margaret Keane and the easy-listening musician Xavier Cugat. Another way of describing Keane is that she was a talented woman exploited by a controlling man; another way of describing Cugat is that he was a huge force in Latin American music.
And yes, to an extent this is unfair: the metropolitan elite of the early ‘70s would have found it easy to laugh at both of them purely on the basis of their art, which was - as a matter of objective fact - popular and mainstream. There is no serious evidence of racism or misogyny here. But this joke does reflect a certain lack of curiosity on Allen’s part: a cautious, self-protective preference for pre-approved cultural output, and a bullying disdain for everything else, anything not considered respectable by the holders of luxurious apartments in upper Manhattan.
The positive side of this was that his movies were on-ramp. For a start I definitely discovered trad jazz thanks to him, and beyond that, his intellectual snobbery made me aspire to know more, to learn about the things he was referencing. What’s Up Tiger Lily and Shadows and Fog aren’t very funny, but they inspired me to seek out ‘60s Japanese movies and Fritz Lang’s expressionist masterpiece M (1931). I’m pretty sure I’d seen Marx Brothers movies before I saw Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), in which Allen’s character is saved from suicide by seeing Duck Soup (1933); but I know I watched Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) because of the closing sequence of Allen’s Love and Death (1975).
If I got nothing else from Woody Allen’s films, at least I got a key lesson in being a metropolitan elitist intellectual snob.
For more sci-fi and comedy, try our piece on Doctor Who and the silly TV dads of the 1970s
