Sleepy People
Based upon the short story
by Jonathan Lethem.
Featuring music by Adrian Belew, Climber,
and Andy Partridge.
For screening and DVD information,
please contact:
The story, upon first reading, might appear to be serving up any number of possible metaphors:
- the lumpish American husband who works in the yard and sits barely conscious in front of the TV, being herded around by his wife. Male protector/provider reduced to the role of passive icon.
- Or perhaps the plight of someone who lives with an artist.
- Or even just a way of illustrating how people sleepwalk through their lives.
SLEEPY PEOPLE is populated by gangs of kids half-heartedly terrorizing neighborhoods, an older generation that gathers in bars to form militias, and people who mysteriously just sleep.
At the center of the story is a woman trying to love a man who’s caught up in some remote
world of strife - A psychic/emotional/symbolic terrain that takes him out of the real world
and poisons his potential relationship with her.
All of the characters in SLEEPY PEOPLE struggle, and in many ways, take great risks
to ascribe their own interpretations to the sleepy man,
his purpose, and the result of his “actions”.
In observing their world, we, the audience, are put in the position of having to do the same.
“Sleepy People is very much a lucid dream among my fictions … it seems a very important story to me, because it feels one hundred percent felt and intuited and, as I say, written by means of a completely open exploration into my own themes. There is very little mental ideological armature insisting itself upon that story. I’m very fond of Sleepy People.”
- Jonathan Lethem, from an interview in Depauw University’s Science Fiction Studies