The movie "In Time" s about a dystopian future where the amount of time you have to live is used as currency and it's earned through labor. The people that live in the ghettos of this dystopian world live day to day as the they try to scrounge up enough time to keep themselves alive. Working everyday isn't enough to keep themselves alive and with the cost of living rising many are forced to beg, borrow, and steal for the necessary time. In contrast the people on the higher rungs of their society can live live for thousands of years off of the work of those in the ghettos. This stratification and society leads to Justin Timberlake's character deciding to steal back what the rich have already stolen from the poor in an effort to force change.
Marx says that the worker depreciates in value with the more wealth and product they produce. The worker becomes a commodity by selling themselves and as a thing to be brought they are worth less then what is produced. The more wealth that is accumulated by the rich the bigger the gap between themselves an the workers. By selling themselves for as labor they are alienating themselves from the half that is profiting off of them. To exploit someone you must first believe they are unlike you and alienation through labor as well as the objectification of workers makes the exploitation possible.
The exploitation and alienation seen in the movie are the foundation of capitalism , not only in their society but ours as well. In the movie Justin Timberlake and the red haired rich chick are the catalyst for change in their society which seems weird because of the obvious malaise in regards to the situation. It could be argued that everyone's too busy trying to stay alive to start a revolution but there's nothing else for them to live for or pacify them besides the hope that maybe someday they'll have enough time to quit worrying. If that's the case then they've alienated themselves to the point were they only see themselves as workers and Marx refers to this as the estrangement of man from his own body. Because they have stopped living for themselves and no longer live for the sake of living they've separated themselves into two existences, the worker and the human.
In regard to your last paragraph, it would've fit a lot better with marxist theory if the workers would've gone on strike and simultaniously offered up their necks for the betterment of society. (It's not too outrageous considering that past actual revolutions, where failure would result in death, have happened anyway. It also would've resulted in a much more powerful movie.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Burns. People would spontaneously die in the middle of the revolution they were fighting. In fact, it may hurt the Bourgeoise more in this case if there were to be large amounts of people who "timed out" during the revolution. There would be far fewer workers to make time box things, crippling the people who profit off their production and allowing wealth to be less dispersed among the Proletariat. That would've made more sense in the movie as well.
ReplyDeleteThis movie always troubled me in the fact that people must spend their time in order to make time.The only way anyone could add to their clock was to work. This means spending the time they earned yesterday, only working to have time for tomorrow. Their lives have become a cycle of nothing but laboring for the next day. In this sense I would agree that a revolution, although certainly leading to many deaths, would have produced a more dramatic plot. The choice is to either work to survive in the desperately cyclical economic world they have been born into, or break from the change and truely live/enjoy life even if it means watching your clock time out.
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