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The Case for Remaking In Time
Jan. 10th, 2015 07:23 pmIn Time is a movie trying to be an action flick and an inspection of wealth-gaps in America. I'm not going to say that you can't have both. But, In Time doesn't.
The premise of In Time is that, via some form of genetic engineering, money has been replaced with time. On the 23rd birthday, people stop aging and a year counter on their arm starts to tick away. You can acquire more time and must trade time for goods or services.
As a larger economic analog, this has certain problems. In the real world, poverty is less essential than some might believe. Wealth generation is possible. Farmland can be tended, minerals mined, new forms of energy employed, each a means of, as far as our current economy is concerned, generating wealth.
In the economy of In Time, there is no time generation, all wealth is a 0-sum game. If any person lives longer than 1 year, it is only because someone else did not. The only means of bringing more wealth into the system is the creation of more humans.
That's both good and bad. It means that this can never be a fully accurate understanding of reality. However, it can be a means of fully understanding 0-sum mentality. It can also take all metaphor away and make quite clear that poverty kills.
In the story, the main character, Will Salas, loses his mother when her time runs out. Because the bus fair went up, she doesn't have enough time to take the bus, so must walk in order to get to her son, so winds up spending more time and winds up dying because he cannot add time to her counter before she just shuts off.
This provides a motivation for his further actions. Later on, he rescues a wealthy man, one who admits to having lived for more than a century, who rewards him by giving Will all his remaining time, more than a century itself. This sudden windfall, and Will's conspicuous consumption, brings on suspicion from the authorities, who take Will's century away and leave him with a remaining pittance of time.
All told, it's still a good metaphor... and then the action movie takes place and we have Will Silas take a love interest/hostage to survive and the movie becomes an action piece that's one part Robin Hood and one part Bonnie and Clyde. At this point, the metaphor is done and the fantasy begins.
There's even a point where the police detective on the case of capturing Will Salas states openly that the point of the system is to keep the poor down. That is the fantasy of simplicity.
That said, I think the metaphor can create its own story, one that does not need action and adventure to sell it. This will take two admissions.
Firstly, the web of conditions that conspire to keep poor people in poverty are not the result of intentional malice on the part of power or the result of unworthiness on the part of the poor. What we see is less conspiratorial and more Lovecraftian. The economics of poverty, including the influence the wealthy have upon those economics, are large, uncaring, and constantly hungry for time and money that some people can't afford.
Secondly, time of life as a medium of exchange is a horrible system. As stated before, it's inherently 0-sum, which means that it inherently kills the poor.
The start of the movie can keep much the same. A man in poverty, working, doing more-or-less the right thing, and losing his mother to a loss of time that, itself, resulted from higher quotas and higher prices. And, yes, let Will Salas get the century gift from the suicidal rich guy. That could easily lead into the "how the other half lives" part of the equation.
Scrap all of the Robin Hood portion of the story. Under the current system, that's only a limited stopgap measure. The problem is the 0-sum system in the first place.
Again, if you live longer than a year, someone else didn't. If you live two years, at least two people didn't live one. And so on. That is the problem. Let the rest of the movie be, instead, the effort to change from a time-based medium of exchange to some other form of currency.
This would be able to carry on the metaphor to other elements of the system, namely victim-blaming. "They wouldn't be poor if they had a good work ethic." "I'm not privileged. My parents put me to work in our company when I was twelve, just to make sure I valued work." "What we should do is make these urban kids sweep the floors in order to pay for the education and food we give them, teach them the value of work."
Of course, we'd also have the calls against "class warfare", now from wealthy people who, on a different system, would genuinely fear dying before they otherwise would (which would be centuries under the time-currency system).
Ayn Rand's words would find some use. The point would clear, the poverty-blaming culture, the "47%" comments, and fear, the greed that isn't even far reaching enough to be properly self-interested is all a part of the problem.
The end... well, it could be a happy ending, in which we return to a currency-based-currency economy. In that ending, we could see how taxation on the wealthy isn't literally taking years off their lives, but investing in a more flourishing society in which the wealthy would, yes, get wealthier.
It could also be unhappy. American cinema could do with admitting that bad things happen to good people. And, that could include wealth and time spent in an effort to produce change stymied by people, on all economic strata, who would have benefitted from that change, if only they were willing to let go of a certain narrative.
Anyway, that's my thinking.
The premise of In Time is that, via some form of genetic engineering, money has been replaced with time. On the 23rd birthday, people stop aging and a year counter on their arm starts to tick away. You can acquire more time and must trade time for goods or services.
As a larger economic analog, this has certain problems. In the real world, poverty is less essential than some might believe. Wealth generation is possible. Farmland can be tended, minerals mined, new forms of energy employed, each a means of, as far as our current economy is concerned, generating wealth.
In the economy of In Time, there is no time generation, all wealth is a 0-sum game. If any person lives longer than 1 year, it is only because someone else did not. The only means of bringing more wealth into the system is the creation of more humans.
That's both good and bad. It means that this can never be a fully accurate understanding of reality. However, it can be a means of fully understanding 0-sum mentality. It can also take all metaphor away and make quite clear that poverty kills.
In the story, the main character, Will Salas, loses his mother when her time runs out. Because the bus fair went up, she doesn't have enough time to take the bus, so must walk in order to get to her son, so winds up spending more time and winds up dying because he cannot add time to her counter before she just shuts off.
This provides a motivation for his further actions. Later on, he rescues a wealthy man, one who admits to having lived for more than a century, who rewards him by giving Will all his remaining time, more than a century itself. This sudden windfall, and Will's conspicuous consumption, brings on suspicion from the authorities, who take Will's century away and leave him with a remaining pittance of time.
All told, it's still a good metaphor... and then the action movie takes place and we have Will Silas take a love interest/hostage to survive and the movie becomes an action piece that's one part Robin Hood and one part Bonnie and Clyde. At this point, the metaphor is done and the fantasy begins.
There's even a point where the police detective on the case of capturing Will Salas states openly that the point of the system is to keep the poor down. That is the fantasy of simplicity.
That said, I think the metaphor can create its own story, one that does not need action and adventure to sell it. This will take two admissions.
Firstly, the web of conditions that conspire to keep poor people in poverty are not the result of intentional malice on the part of power or the result of unworthiness on the part of the poor. What we see is less conspiratorial and more Lovecraftian. The economics of poverty, including the influence the wealthy have upon those economics, are large, uncaring, and constantly hungry for time and money that some people can't afford.
Secondly, time of life as a medium of exchange is a horrible system. As stated before, it's inherently 0-sum, which means that it inherently kills the poor.
The start of the movie can keep much the same. A man in poverty, working, doing more-or-less the right thing, and losing his mother to a loss of time that, itself, resulted from higher quotas and higher prices. And, yes, let Will Salas get the century gift from the suicidal rich guy. That could easily lead into the "how the other half lives" part of the equation.
Scrap all of the Robin Hood portion of the story. Under the current system, that's only a limited stopgap measure. The problem is the 0-sum system in the first place.
Again, if you live longer than a year, someone else didn't. If you live two years, at least two people didn't live one. And so on. That is the problem. Let the rest of the movie be, instead, the effort to change from a time-based medium of exchange to some other form of currency.
This would be able to carry on the metaphor to other elements of the system, namely victim-blaming. "They wouldn't be poor if they had a good work ethic." "I'm not privileged. My parents put me to work in our company when I was twelve, just to make sure I valued work." "What we should do is make these urban kids sweep the floors in order to pay for the education and food we give them, teach them the value of work."
Of course, we'd also have the calls against "class warfare", now from wealthy people who, on a different system, would genuinely fear dying before they otherwise would (which would be centuries under the time-currency system).
Ayn Rand's words would find some use. The point would clear, the poverty-blaming culture, the "47%" comments, and fear, the greed that isn't even far reaching enough to be properly self-interested is all a part of the problem.
The end... well, it could be a happy ending, in which we return to a currency-based-currency economy. In that ending, we could see how taxation on the wealthy isn't literally taking years off their lives, but investing in a more flourishing society in which the wealthy would, yes, get wealthier.
It could also be unhappy. American cinema could do with admitting that bad things happen to good people. And, that could include wealth and time spent in an effort to produce change stymied by people, on all economic strata, who would have benefitted from that change, if only they were willing to let go of a certain narrative.
Anyway, that's my thinking.
