As Sleeper begins, a Reynolds-Wrapped Miles Monroe (Allen) lies on a gurney. He's been unconscious for two hundred years, revived by scientists/rebels of the underground movement who view Sleepers — members of the population who lie dormant in "cryogenic immersion" — as one large terrorist cell at their disposal. Co-owner of the Happy Carrot Health Food Restaurant back in the day, Miles asks his attendants for a fairly typical breakfast (wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk) and is greeted with puzzlement:

    Dr. Melik: Those were the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
    Dr. Tryon: You mean there was no deep fat, no steak, or cream pies, hot fudge?
    Dr. Melik: Those were thought to be unhealthy. Precisely the opposite of what we known to be true.
    Dr. Tryon: Incredible.

    Paging Dr. Atkins! In short shrift, the dissidents are captured and Miles alone escapes. He manages to elude security forces by disguising himself as a labor-saving robot. Looking like a servile crash-test dummy, he is delivered to the bourgeois poet Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton), whose loft feels like a Soho smart home, with its domestic robot (shades of iRobot's Roomba), flatscreen TV that plays a twenty-four-hour music channel, surveillance cameras and Orgasmatron.
   When guests arrive for a party, Miles is introduced to a drug of the future called an Orb (think time-release Zoloft in a Magic Eight Ball). The revelers anticipate the libertine fabulousness of Studio 54. When Luna and her guests emerge from a dip in the pool, she dryly remarks, "I thought we should have had sex, but there weren't enough people." Still, the possibility of futuresex is constrained by an apparent disgust for the exchange of body fluids, unwittingly commenting on the finite window between the sexual revolution and the age of AIDS.
    As the film wears on, Luna reluctantly joins Miles in an underground mission. While Luna is divided on her loyalties to her government, she’s clear about wanting to seduce Miles. As a woman of her time, she can boast impressive bona fides: an undergraduate degree in Cosmetic Sexual Technique & Poetry ("You have to know it in case something goes wrong with the machine") and even a Ph.D. in Oral Sex. Her credentials foreshadow a future in which sex has been de-eroticized by overthink, as does her seduction technique: "Do you want to perform sex with me?" she chides Miles. Sensing his anxiety at her directness, she reassures him: "Sex is different today: We don't have any problems. Everybody's frigid."
    This punchline resonates across Woody's entire oeuvre: a deep-seated fear of impotence or frigidity. (This phobia was even a working title for Annie Hall: anhedonia — lacking the capacity to experience pleasure.) But thanks to the miracles of post-post-modernism, problem solved: urges are satisfied through technology.
    The Orgasmatron itself foretells of cybersex. Inside the machine, the mind is manipulated and ejaculation has little to do with abandon; it's simply the final stage in a sequence of programs. Stimulus is the input, release is the output. In Allen's view, promiscuity of the future didn't even involve the brief social rituals of a one-night stand; in seconds, you're good to go. Today's Orgasmatron is undoubtedly the Internet, offering a buffet of visual stimuli, interactivity, anonymity and speed.
    In the margins of Sleeper's sex chat and political intrigue lies the absence of family. Woody's '80s and '90s dramas, including Hannah and Her Sisters and Husbands and Wives, revolved around the fraught relationships in sprawling extended families (often in Mia Farrow's own Upper West Side apartment). In Sleeper, technology allows Woody to simplify, making the family — indeed, all intimate connections — obsolete.
    In the final act of Sleeper, Luna and Miles discover that their fearless leader was actually killed a year ago by a bomb, but that the terrorist cell has been activated that very day to witness the historic cloning of their leader from his one surviving organ — his nose. After Miles and Luna literally quash the proboscis in question, they have saved the planet — or at least subversives and free-thinkers — from certain extermination. Crisis averted, Luna playfully interrogates Miles about his belief system and finds indifference.
    On religion: "I'm what you'd call a teleological existential atheist." When Luna rebuts that she believes that there's somebody out there who watches over us, he cynically retorts, "Unfortunately, it's the government."
    On politics: "It doesn't matter who's up there. Political solutions don't work — they're all terrible."
    On science: Luna tells Miles that "meaningful relationships between men and women don't work. It was proven by science." Miles has a ready answer: "Science is an intellectual dead end."
    Stumped, Luna asks: "So then what do you believe in?"
    "Sex and death."