Sleeper (1973)
Directed by Woody Allen
No — Sleeper is not woke, scoring 7 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Woody Allen's Sleeper arrives from 1973, decades ahead of the vocabulary we now use to appraise such things, and it turns out to occupy almost none of that territory.
Consciousness Markers
The film satirizes consumerism (a futuristic McDonald's sign counting 795 followed by 51 zeroes) and depicts an oppressive police state, but its target is tyranny and conformity rather than a modern eat-the-rich economic critique.
The film is a slapstick satire that delivers its ideas through gags rather than sermons; only the closing musings on sex, death, and revolution carry a faint didactic tone.
Diane Keaton's Luna is given some agency as a rebel, but the film is steeped in Woody Allen's male-gaze comedy and treats her largely as a romantic foil; no feminist agenda is present.
The cast is uniformly white, led by Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, with no diverse casting choices made or commented upon.
There are no LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext anywhere in the film.
Race is entirely absent as a subject; the dystopia is framed around tyranny and control, not racial dynamics.
The future apocalypse here is nuclear and political, not environmental; no climate themes appear.
The film mocks vanity and cosmetic obsession (Luna wanting a more aesthetically pleasing butler head) but offers no body-positivity message; it is a joke, not a stance.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are present; brainwashing is a plot device, not a depiction of neurodivergence.
The film is a speculative satire of a fictional 2173, not a revisionist retelling of real historical events.
Why it received this score
Woody Allen's Sleeper arrives from 1973, decades ahead of the vocabulary we now use to appraise such things, and it turns out to occupy almost none of that territory. A health food proprietor is thawed into 2173 to topple an inept police state. The cast is white, the romance is heterosexual, the apocalypse is nuclear, and the dystopia is a matter of tyranny and conformity. There is no racial dimension to the oppression, no environmental catastrophe to mourn, no economic thesis to unfurl. The future here is a joke about bureaucracy and robot butlers, and it stays that way.
A signal does flicker, faintly. Diane Keaton's Luna has a mind of her own, though the camera treats her as a romantic foil and a punchline about free love. That is the extent of it. The film does lampoon consumer excess: a McDonald's sign counting 795 followed by fifty-one zeroes, an orgasmatron dispensing mechanical pleasure to the idle. But the target is appetite and control, not the modern grievance about wealth. It is a gag, not a manifesto. The vanity jokes land on the side of mockery, never affirmation.
The closing exchange about sex and death carries the faintest whiff of the sermon, a philosophy delivered in one-liners about chemical incompatibility and belief. Elsewhere the ideas arrive as pratfalls, tributes to Buster Keaton and Chaplin and Lloyd, and the film lectures no one. We are left with a comedy that predates the whole apparatus, sits outside it, and grades out near the floor. The vintage is clean. We note it with something close to professional relief.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Miles Monroe, a clarinet-playing health food store proprietor, is revived out of cryostasis 200 years into a future world in order to help rebels fight an oppressive government regime.
Questions about Sleeper
Is Sleeper woke?
No — Sleeper is not woke, scoring 7 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Sleeper have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Eat the Rich at 15.
How does Sleeper compare to other 1973 movies?
It ranks #12 of the 32 films from 1973 we've scored; their average is 11. The wokest is Soylent Green (39).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.