Last night I went and saw In Time, and despite the name of this post I wont really review it, I’ll just discuss some of the concepts that the movie brought up.
The one film criticy thing that I will say though is that Justin Timberlake 
the worlds best actor. All though the movie was better than I was expecting.
Well the basic concept of this film is that, every single person on the planet has been genetically engineered to have a biological clock inside them, except the time on people’s clock is transferable. So in this world time has become money. The way it works is that when you are born you have one year on your clock, which starts ticking at the age of 25 at which point you stop ageing. So you and me and most people hear that and realise that means that the average life expectancy is going to be 26 (baring accidents) which makes me suspect that the people who genetically engineered this system into us were arseholes.
And now a bit of a plot summary which I will hopefully hide so as to not spoil the movie for anyone (I’m not sure if this will work for e-mail subscribers so stop reading now if you want to see the movie)
The whole story rests upon the fact that there are a few people who can live for a very long time, millions of years. Interestingly it didn’t seem to have a occurred to many that for one person to live a million years requires 2 million people to have died at the age of 25.5, for example. The main character(Will) only realises this when he is told by a person who is 105 years old and commits suicide by giving Will another 119 years – all that he has left on his clock. So Will decides to go and take time of the wealthy to even things up, at first through gambling but, when the police take almost all of his time, (he was suspected of stealing the 119 years, apparently policy is to leave suspects with only 2 hours time on their clocks to discourage escaping) he turns to bank robbery.
Eventually he and Sylvia, daughter of a multi-millionaire managed to steal enough money and give it to the poor that the economic system collapses. I’m not 100% sure how that happened, particularly since it seems like all the business owners and the government are centrally coordinated, a huge influx of time into the system should just lead to hyperinflation but the economic system will still remain, in this case it is hard-wired into people so unless they un-genetic engineer the entire human race we would be stuck in this horrible form of capitalism. Will and a number of other people keep on saying that if the time were shared around equally then there would be enough for everyone to live a full a life, which bugged me because logically share all the time around equally and we will all live for 26 years, hardly a full life (why the genetic engineers are arseholes).
So obviously the movie is supposed to make us think about how evil capitalism is and how wrong it is, which it does. Although there are a few differences, the most obvious one is that in our universe there are enough resources to enable everyone to have a full life (i.e. 27+), in that universe the one key resource is fixed (per capita). The other difference is that it is much easier to show that the accumulated wealth of the few has been taken from the many, because everyone starts with the same amount. Of course under contemporary capitalism it isn’t significantly different, it is just much harder to explain that the people who are giving you money are actually taking away a cut of your labour in order to enrich themselves.
So much so I feel the need to explain that above statement, lets say you work for a publicly listed company that is making a profit as all good companies should. Excellent you say, but then you wonder why the profits are going to the shareholders, they did not make, sell or market any products or services they are getting the profits because they paid for a piece of paper saying they would get a share of the profits. Since they didn’t do any of the work that made this profit then they didn’t really earn it, it was the workers, people like you that made the companies money.
The other big difference is that the economy in the movie should be deflationary, when someone dies through misadventure their left over time is wasted, so on a per capita basis the time supply should be decreasing, leading to a higher purchasing power for every second of time. In the movie there is actually inflation but that is explained (in the film) by the wealthy wanting a bigger share of the wealth.
There is also apparently no disease in this universe, and I also suspect that a lot of injuries could lead to instant death. The clock is actually displayed on your right forearm, which suggests that a serious injury to your forearm could injure your biological clock and lead to death, however time is transferred with your right arm meaning that an injury there could lead to serious damage to the biological clock system, and there must be some sort of connection going across the chest that may also be vulnerable to damage, having said that people do get shot in the chest so maybe I’m just thinking too much.
One thing the movie does show is that the idea/myth of capitalism as a meritocracy works to sustain the system, everyone wants to be immortal and there are enough stories floating around of immortals that people want to keep the system going that allows a very small minority to live near enough to forever. I have always found it sad that hope is an emotion that helps keep the majority of the earths population in misery
So not that I have managed to make myself depressed – Capitalism, bad; In Time, not so bad.
I 99% agree! Just one thing I will say in defense of shareholders: they bought their shares. By doing this they 1) took a risk, and 2) supplied some necessary capital to the company to sustain it at certain critical points – and thus, perhaps, did contribute to production and marketing. Therefore it may not be totally unfair that they get back their money + some interest.
Not that I like it working to the sheer degree it does, of course, but you can hardly blame the shareholders for that…
I very nearly added a sentence about the contribution shareholders make but I decided not to for reasons of space. But yes shareholders do contribute money primarily through the IPO when the company is first listed, but chances are a decent amount of the shareholders didn’t contribute in this way and instead paid someone that did.
As for your first point I don’t really see a reason why taking risks in itself should be rewarded, and even if it is to be rewarded the risk has the potential for high rewards as well as high losses, control of the company is like an extra bonus on top.
But I don’t blame the shareholders either, it is just the world we live in, I reckon the capitalism denies everybody the opportunity to be fully human regardless of their income or position.
But being fully human is about so much more than work and money! An unjust economic system, though it might create much suffering, can’t prevent people being fully human, and the most beneficent arrangement possible can’t ensure it. It seems to me that to say other wise is to patronise the human being.
Very interesting movie review – thanks!
My point really was that in the current economic system we have to spend the bulk of our time concerned with work and money to the detriment of the full expression of our humanity, particularly since the work that we do is so often disconnected form the social good that it (sometimes) provides. It isn’t fully human to only be yourself outside of work hours when you aren’t worried about paying the bills or too tired from working. But yes definitely patronising.
Next time you stop working, invite some people round for a dinner party!
Advice-giving can be annoying, but one could also investigate getting a job which allows more humanness in work hours also.
I mean ‘discussion’