We are presented with a future world in the movie, In Time, in which time has become so precious that it has now become currency. Somehow, our bodies are born (or implanted with a device) that begins ticking when we reach the age of 25 so that those who work get paid in time and have to buy their necessities like food and rent using the currency of time.
There are also time zones (don't think like what we have -Eastern, Central, etc., but different parts of a larger city), segregated communities that you must pay time to get into. Just think of gated cities within a much larger city - this is a way to keep the very poor out of (what can only be assumed to be) a middle class or upper class time zone, because the more Will pays as he heads towards the wealthiest part of town, the price continues to go up. So, in essence, there still is free passage among the city, but only if you can afford it. But since many can't afford it, the poor are stuck in their slums.
The movie focuses most of its time on poor characters who are working day-to-day and struggling to survive. When wages go up, the prices of goods go up, so there's no real way for the poor to get ahead. And of course, in such a dog-eat-dog world, there are also gangsters who try to steal peoples' time - the Minutemen. And when the clock runs out on someone, he/she is dead. Even the timekeepers, the police of this dystopian society, are barely paid decent wages in order to stay alive. Sadly ironic, the ones that are entrusted with enforcing the system don't get paid enough (sounds familiar). In addition, the police are interested in the suicide of one wealthy man yet there are tons of murders in the ghetto everyday. Where does this society's priorities truly lie? In the preservation of the monopoly of time by one particular class.
The rich, on the other hand, are trapped in a different kind of gilded prison (think of why Henry gve Will almost all of his time before he died and let his clock expire). Philipe Weis thinks that this time as currency thing is just the next step in evolution - that it is unfair, he says, but so is evolution. With decades, even centuries on their clocks, they continue to look the same as they did when they were 25 even though they might be 107. The one creepy Freudian thing is when Phillipe Weis introduced his mother, wife and daughter (Sylvia) who all looked very similar. Sylvia and Will hit it off and that's when Sylvia said that all the wealthy needed to do was stay out of trouble and they could live forever. Play it safe = live forever. So, unlike Will who lives by the phrase, "Carpe Diem", Sylvia never took chances until she met Will.
Your job for this blog is to 1. apply at least one philosopher or philosophic concept to any part or parts of this movie that you find apply to this movie. 2. Find a weakness in the movie, whether it be in the plot, concept, etc. and explain why. 3. Tie in the Through the Wormhole episode we saw w/ the movie and any of the concepts introduced in the episode. If you missed the episode, get some notes from one of your classmates.
Due Friday, May 17 by class. 350 words total for your response.
1) I was initially thinking that this movie was going to be something like the book 1984 where the elites have brainwashed the society into thinking that this is how the world has always been. So pretty much throughout the whole movie I thought that at some point there would be reference to a time before the world was like this or some showing of how the world has gotten this way. This made me think alot about the allegory of the cave. I was wondering if maybe there was time before all this technology including time existed and that maybe they would be similar to those in the cave that don't know what reality was like or could be like again. The ending scenes of the movie also got me thinking about the ending of the allegory of the cave story.Will and Sylvia are the ones escaping the cave and seeing a world where no one has to worry about whether those minutes could be their last as they move to convince the rest of the world of this too. The time keepers and those elites that still oppose this idea could symbolize those in the cave that deny the man of his experiences when he returns.
ReplyDelete2) Some of the timing within the movie just didn't really add up. For example after Wil “kidnaps” Sylvia from her father party in New Greenwich and they are fleeing back to Dayton, While driving they hit one of the traps left out by the minute men. Before Will and Sylvia leave the party will is told by the time keeper that he has been left with two hours. Its night time or at least it's fairly dark outside once the two end up leaving, but once the scene with the trap happens it's bright outside? How is it that Will has supposedly been left with a mere two hours to live and they can still make it through the night? I'm pretty sure there's no way to explain that it's obviously a plot hole.
3) The most obvious connection between In Time and the Through the Wormhole episode was the portion where they went from studying eternal life to then trying to figure out eternal youth. They even directly said “living forever at 25” which is exactly the same as In Time. I never really thought of the consequences that could come from living forever but still aging while we watched the movie. In the episode they mentioned how traumatic it would be to live to be 300 but still keep becoming more brittle and worn down as the years go by. I feel like that'd more cruel than anything. If that were the case i think that the negatives outweigh the positives of living that long. Living longer but living longer through constant pain and agony doesn't even really sound like living anymore more like suffering!
- Riana Richards
The suicide done by Henry, the guy with a century on his clock, made me think of one philosopher that I just read about:Kierkegaard. As stated by Henry as he was talking to Will, “we want to die.” Henry had lived for 105 years up to that point, and he had plenty of time to live to be twice that age, but he gave all his time to Will before he timed out and fell into the river. Kierkegaard studied the concept out existentialism. I’m sure we’ve all heard the term of an “existential crisis” before, how a person begins to question their purpose in life, which in turn sends them down a huge rabbit hole of more questions, which can possibly lead them to take their own life. Kierkegaard was focused on finding a personal truth, something he called “the truth for me.” He wanted people to find their own meaning in life, especially when we live in a world where there is so much craziness going on that it can feel overwhelming at times. This meaning would be the motivation for our lives, keeping us from ending it all, but most importantly helping us make the most of our time on Earth.
ReplyDeleteOne weakness that I thought made no sense during the movie was the concept of time and how could steal it from other people. Your clock starts as soon as you turn twenty-one years old, and you feel a sort of THUMP when it happens. From that moment on you have to use time as a form of currency to buy the things you need to live:food, water, clothes, a place to live etc. But you are also able to go to work and get paid with time, so your clock keeps ticking and you get further away from timing out, even if it is another ten minutes. People are also able to share time with each other, prolonging a person’s life span. They would grab each others hand, a sound cue would play(something to the effect of a person gulping down water) and a person’s clock would begin to rise. Most people have a mutual agreement before they share time, but others just flat out steal it. You would think there would be some way to put a lock on your time, that way you can not just get jumped while you are walking out and about and have all your time sucked right out of you. I guess that is why the very rich people with centuries of time have bodyguards to protect them from something like that happening.
One concept that was discussed in the Through The Wormhole episode was immortality and never worrying about death again. Morgan Freeman explained how scientists are making some strides in preserving life, but we still have a long way to go until we can live forever. My question is, should we live forever? Maybe if you’re someone like Tony Stark, someone who’s a futurists and enjoys innovation and constant upgrades you would jump at the chance to keep living. But what if you’re just a normal person, what reason would you have to live for so long? How would you make life enjoyable and have meaning if you just kept on living? I feel that after a point you might get bored and want to die, just like Henry from In Time. Or maybe that’s just me, maybe you would be perfectly fine with living forever?
-Jordan Matthews
I believe the phrase Carpe Diem can be applied immensely to this film. The different people in the different districts display varying levels of worry about how much time they have left. The poorer districts really display the phrase Carpe Diem as it is literally essential to their lives to seize each day. As they run out of time, they literally don’t have time to waste, personifying Carpe Diem exactly. The richest people in the film, specifically in New Greenwich, don’t worry about having to seize each day and live it like it is their last. Instead, they only focus their power and time on gaining more time, and not dying in an accidental way. It is a horrible way to live the way the richest people in the film live. I could not imagine living for a thousand years. I found one weakness in the movie to be how people transferred time back and forth to one another. It seems like every time anyone gave or took time, they took the exact amount of time they were trying to give or take. I think it would be much more common to have one person trying to take ten minutes and accidentally take an hour or something like that. I do not think people would be that accurate with their rough estimates as shown in that movie. I think if I were to be in that situation in the movie, I would accidentally take all of someone’s time, or accidentally give someone all of my time. I also find it very interesting that people desired to live forever in that movie, but in our reality, no one really wants to live forever. We all value our time much more highly than the people in the film. According to the Through The Wormhole episode on time, time feels shorter as we age. In the film, everyone stays at the age of twenty-five. I wonder if, once the characters reach the age of twenty-five, they start to experience time passing faster, or, if they just experience it as the exact same as they were beforehand.
ReplyDeleteJake Stollman
ReplyDeleteOne philosophy I would associate with the film In Time is “Social Darwinism.” This is “the theory that individuals, groups, and peoples are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals.” In Time exists as social darwinism on steroids: a dystopian world where money (time) rules. If you run out, you die. Even in similar situations in the present world where daily income is measured in pennies, should you run out, you still have your basic life functions to help you survive for a time after this runs out, hopefully enough time to find another income source. Not so for this world. Should you run out of money, you perish instantly. The more time/money you have, the longer you live. Time is life. Timing out is death. The world of In Time is a battleground of having time while still living. The rich survive, the poor do not. This is the essence of social darwinism.
One problem with the economy of In Time is the fact that time is constantly running out, and as prices increase, less or no time seems to be produced. It is an inexorably disappearing resource. In this system, in order for the market itself (in this thought experiment, we are outright ignoring morality, something the creators of the economy of In Time did as well) to survive, communism is the absolute worst choice, and massive gaps in net worth is this best option. As the film itself states, “for a few to be immortal, many must die.” Think of a great pile of snow in the sun, representing time currency melting away by the second. If you create a tall, thin tower with an open top and pack all the snow in there, it will melt from the top to the bottom in a relatively long time. However, if you spread the snow out in boxes on a flat plane, it will all melt in the sun quickly. This is the same as wealth: If you have one billion years that evaporate at one second/second, the market will survive for a billion years. If you spread that wealth to a billion people, the flat plane of many thin boxes of snow, the market will only last a single year. This is the dilemma of In Time, and balancing it between the two extremes is what amounts to politics in that future.
One thing we learned about in the Through The Wormhole video was that lysosomes, certain types of cells in our body, sometimes accumulate foreign objects they do not recognize. When enough of these agents accumulate, we age. It seems the economy of In Time has solved this issue.
All of the people with the exception of the people in the slums think of the phrases ”Memento Mori” and “Carpe Diem” and laugh because they have enough time to instead of seize the day they can say seize the century because they could live for as long as they desire. This is a bad thing because when we become immortal we lose the respect for life that we have when we know that we live only a short time. Plus in this universe it makes it easier because the poorer people live in different areas so the rich don’t even have to see their dead bodies.
ReplyDeleteIn this movie they don’t show us who is incharge of this society above the Timekeepers like do they have a president or a king who really runs the show? We should have found this out because if someone stole over a hundred million dollars I’m more than positive that the president would have gotten involved by at least giving a speech on the matter. Also are there ranks of Timekeepers like in our current police force or is it based on age? We never got the answers to these questions in the movie.
In the Through the WormHole episode we watched the other day we touched on many different ways that people could become immortal either through downloading ourselves to a machine or by changing our cells so that they don’t have the piece of DNA that makes us age and eventually die. All of these ideas have the potential to work but the episode didn’t talk about population and what we will do with all of the new people that would never die to free up resources for new people. In Time brings up an interesting way of going about the problem of an ever growing population ;however, if the population continues to have negative growth like I think it does in this movie you are eventually going to run out of time and therefor people. So instead a smarter idea would be to send the younger immortals away to a different planet and have them colonize it and when that planet runs out of space you repeat the process. This way you don't need to kill of vast amounts of civilians.
In Time is a movie about how time is currency and people survive based on the amount of time left on their clocks. Will Salas and Sylvia Weis work together to change the time zone system so that no one has to die and everyone can share time and live where they want. In this movie, I have noticed that some of the ideas shared in the movie go along with some of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical ideas. For example, Kant believes that actions such as murder and theft are absolutely prohibited under any circumstances. This was called Categorical Imperative, which can be defined as “a moral law that is unconditional or absolute for all agents, the validity or claim of which does not depend on any ulterior motive or end” (https://www.britannica.com/topic/categorical-imperative). You can also see some of this belief with the timekeepers in In Time, they believed they needed to preserve the time-zone system, and believed that Will and Sylvia’s bank theft was immoral and wrong, even though they were stealing for the good of the general population. A general weakness in the movie was the overall economy in their government system. The economy was always declining because as wages went up so did the prices of everything, which meant people in the ghetto continued to die and poor people remained poor through the entirety of their lives; no matter if the life was 27 years or 50 years. Getting rich only happened by chance, and those who were poor and became rich were criticized and accused of stealing a wealthy person’s time; this was the timekeepers’ thought when Will Salas suddenly had a century, while it was actually given to him by a wealthy man named Henry Hamilton. You can also tie In Time into the Through the Wormhole episode called “Does Time Really Exist?”. The episode talks about the idea of time being a human construct and that it only exists because we, as humans, created it. In Time somewhat relates to this idea because time represents currency and their system around it was constructed by the timekeepers in order to maintain a structured society
ReplyDelete1. Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher in the Age of Enlightenment. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, he argued that space, time, and causation are simply sensibilities; "things-in-themselves" exist, but their nature is unknowable. This concept relates to the 2012 movie “In-time” starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried because in the movie time is currency. Time is everything, if you run out of time on your clock/watch then you die, when you get paid time gets added to your clock and when you have to buy something time gets taken away. Plus time is always ticking. In the movie, once you turn 25 you stop aging and your clock starts. This concept in this movie relates to what Immanuel Kant believed in because they don’t quite understand why the system works like this, why their clocks start when they turn 25 or why time is currency. They merely are “things-in-themselves” but their nature is unknowable. Immanuel Kant also said “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” This relates to the movie “In-time” because Will Salas, the main character, believed that the different time zones were unfair and that people should not be dying in the ghetto when people in New Grenich are living forever. So, Will Salas stole millions of years and distributed them to poor people around Dayton and destroyed the time zones. He acted to a maxim that he wished would take over the world and it actually happened.
ReplyDelete2. There is not a singular flaw in this movie, it is absolutely amazing and should have won every Oscar.
3. I am somewhat confused how the film “into the wormhole” is similar to the movie “In-time.” The documentary talked about how subatomic particles could exist in different places in space at one time, how two particles can be in one place at one time, and if we could see every universe at the same time, we would all see the same object in a different place. I don’t completely understand how this concept has anything to do with ‘In-time” but if we were talking about how it related to “Inception” then I would be able to talk about how Mal exists in all these different places at the same time and how that relates to the subatomic particles in their dreams.
-Brody Hiipakka
Every Oscar, Brody? Actually, yeah, I looked up the year it came out and that was a really weak Oscar field. It should have at least won something.
DeleteRiley Montgomery
ReplyDeleteIn In Time we see David Hume’s philosophy that our moral judgements are reflections of our emotions and internal passions and that we tend to act positively when they are associated with desirable outcomes. People in the universe of In Time steal and commit other bad times so they can live longer. They don’t make decisions because of a universal moral code, they make decisions for themselves. I noticed a lot of things in the movie that don’t add up or make sense. When Justin Timberlake’s character pretended to be bodyguard, for example. You would think that Weisman’s security team would recognize the most wanted criminal and also the man that robbed Weisman of lots and lots of money and his daughter, even is he is wearing a pair of sunglasses and a hat. You would think that the security team would know one another and know when there was someone there that isn’t supposed to be. It also does not make sense that it is so easy to rob a bank. There are no guards. The only police we see seem to be concerned only with time. This movie connects to the Through the Wormhole episode because they both discuss immortality. While the movie plays with a science fictional concept that allows humans to live forever the episode explores scientific ways we may prolong the human lifespan that are actually realistic. Scientists have been able to find a way to preserve organs for a very long time but yet to do so with an entire human body and keep it functioning in the meantime. There is a man that is trying to map out the whole brain to better understand it. He says that if we can find where our conscious we could perhaps transfer it to a machine to continue living after our bodies fall apart. This is similar to In Time in that people’s minds are locked into these 25-yr old bodies, kind of like how people’s minds could be locked into robust machines. I personally don’t think that there should be so much research dedicated to the immortality. I think they’re are more important projects that could be more helpful. We should not want to live forever. For people to still have families there would be too many people on the planet and it is not natural to live so long. Part of the joy of life is knowing that it is a journey that will someday end and it is something to not take for granted.
Alright, so this movie takes place in like a dystopian civilization where your time that you have left on this earth is your currency. You basically trade your time for basic day to day things, for instance, if you want to make a phone call then they take away one minute of your accumulated time. Of course, just living your life also costs time. Every person who lives in this society has a watch that keeps track of your time. That so-called watch starts ticking down once you hit the age of 25. This brings up an interesting philosophical concept, that we have discussed in class, form the baroque era; this concept is none other than the famous Latin line “Cape Diem”. These people must live their lives on this constant fear that the next day may be there last if they do not meet the quota, at least that’s the case for the ghetto areas. The protagonist wants to change that, how? Well he is going to overflow the market with time and act like Robbin hood. He basically gives away time to the poor and the so-called timekeepers really hate this.
ReplyDeleteI suppose the only plot hole I have found in this movie is that how do they control the flow of time. We’ve seen that they can transfer time from person to person by just touching them, but what mechanism allows them to like stop the flow or not do it? Is there some sort of blocker or something? This just doesn’t make much sense in my opinion. Because anyone could steal your time if they wanted to or you could just transfer it on accident.
If I must connect it back to one of the through the wormhole videos, it’s the one with time. They basically talked about how time is always changing and that it could also just be static. Could a person live forever like this movie depicts? Maybe they have the technology to just slow down time entirely for one person who knows.
The movie In Time was very fascinating. When I’d first seen it awhile ago, I loved the way it satirized the value that humans have placed on money. If money was measured from a life or death standpoint, such as time, it would literally be detrimental. I think a weakness of the movie was some over dramatized scenes toward the end. When Will handed the little girl the time, why didn’t he take a few for himself, knowing he’d run out soon? There was 1 billion years on it, a little for himself wouldn’t have put that big of a dent on it.
ReplyDeleteThe philosopher that most connects to this movie is John Locke and his beliefs that everyone has rights that are inherent to them. He believed that every human on earth has the right to life, liberty and property. In the movie, both life and liberty are being restricted from the people of the ghetto. Because the government is raising the time price of essential items, they are losing time , so therefore, losing life. They are also losing their will of liberty, or freedom because in order to live, they must work. Some may work so hard, and still not be provided an ethical amount of time (the beginning of the movie when Will did not get paid as much as he should’ve). In turn, the property aspect is restricted too because some may not have the time to buy shelter resulting in many homeless people.
I think that some beliefs that humans can live longer, as seen in the Through the Wormhole video, can be vital to human existence. Similar to In Time, I think richer people would be more eligible for these life- expanding processes, which would overpopulate the Earth and leave a short-lived life span for the poor. The video brought up the possibility that we could live longer, but keep aging. This is not what is seen in In Time because in the movie everyone peaks at 25. If this process actually fell through, there would be an overpopulation of older people. If someone has lived a long, fruitful life, what is the true gain of having a longer life? Because we’d still age, we’d live longer and have to endure back pains, diseases and decay for a longer period of time. Being old forever seems like torture.
Conversely, if we stayed young forever, how would we manage overpopulation? I think the world would turn into a foil of In Time, where only the fittest (wealthiest) survive.
1. The philosophical ideology I would most associate with the movie In Time is that of Darwinism. The idea of "survival of the fittest" is a heavy part of the movie's theme. In the movie people must be productive and work to earn their wage. Their wage is the time that they are allowed to live. If you run out of time then you die. If you are not good enough to make time or you are not fit to live in the society then you do not survive and that is what social darwinism is all about. Also the movie seems heavily influenced by Marx. The government seems to have a lot of control of the means of production and the prices of the products. Also the end where everyone has equal share of the currency is Marxist porn where there is an idealistic society where everyone is the same.
ReplyDelete2. I also think that the movie was made to be a criticism of crony capitalism. However, very little of the society that is portrayed in the movie seems to have a free market at all. In fact as I said much of the practices of the government are very socialist in nature. The government can raise the prices of bus fare and coffee at their will. It seems that it is clearly a command economy as there is little ability of entry for those that would like to start a business of some sort. However, the idea of inequality is an accurate critique of a free market because unlike Marx and other believers in his ideology some people are just better than others at things. I will never be as good a basketball player as Lebron James but I may have other strengths that he doesn't, like the potential for a college degree. Now it is important to limit hyper-inequality that is inevitable in any free system but the movie doesn't accurately depict a realistic solution.
3. Missed a lot of school this past week and did not see the Morgan Freeman movie so I can't comment on their relationship. I've asked around and nobody has responded but I need to turn this bad boy in so my apologies. When I return Wednesday I will do this part if necessary
As a dystopian world, In Time isn’t half bad. I really enjoyed this movie. I thought it was very different and cool that time served as a means of “money” but also served as one’s own lifespan. It’s crazy that people would have to live day to day. I couldn’t possibly imagine having only one year after my 25th birthday and everything you do can add or deduct time. People can even steal time from you and easily kill you by taking all of your “time.” This movie definitely reminds me a lot of Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” idea. The people at the top stay at the top because they monopolize time and knowledge. Those who question the system (like the main characters) are a threat to this because they’re not “meant” to be a certain “class” or “time zone” in this sense. Though, Will Salas gained his time fair and square, and gambled for even more time. The time he had was taken from him, and that’s when he realized that it doesn’t matter if he gains a bunch of time, the system doesn’t let people like him move up. This movie exemplifies Darwin’s idea mainly because throughout this movie, people are forced to live day by day and work and do whatever they can to get more time. Those who can manage to get more time, survive for as long as they can keep finding ways to get time.
ReplyDeleteAs said several times in the movie, “For a few to remain immortal, many must die.” I think the idea that people can remain immortal for as long of time as they’re able to get and manage and not lose or have it stolen from them. People in more wealthy communities always have their arms covered. If women aren’t wearing long sleeves, they’re wearing long gloves.
I think something similar to this idea of immortality may be a reality for humanity one day. In the past few hundred years life expectancy has doubled. Who knows how life expectancy 50 years or a hundred or even a few hundred years from now will look like. Will it raise? Will humans create more health discoveries, and will they prolong life? Who will get them? The rich? Researchers have already identified tons of genes that relate to aging. Gene therapy is also a process being executed - inserting genes into someone’s DNA to try to help/treat/prevent a disease. Another process discussed is cryopreservation. This is essentially creating a pool of freezing, circulating water, so that the organ may be preserved and ice crystals won’t form like they would if an organ would just be frozen. This isn’t the most optimal, but it’s a big step in the right direction of understanding how to properly preserve human organs, and possibly in the future, full bodies. We’ve already come an extremely long way with technology since the first introduction of it. Our advancements are increasing rapidly and nobody knows what could be possible 2-3 hundred years from now. We could become an extremely advanced world, or we could somehow demolish life on earth.
The only weakness I could find in the movie was the fact that everything seemed to happen kind of fast to me for some reason. All of a sudden Will is kidnapping this girl and she seems 100% okay with it even though he didn’t even explain himself completely to her immediately. I don’t know why she seemed so okay with it - I’d think a kidnapped girl would be a little bit more scared and want to just go home and not get into extreme trouble - especially considering the fact that people kill other people in the streets in “the ghetto” for time. Although, she did want to live more and felt she couldn’t live because of how much time she had… but how much time you have should mean you should be living more! Short ‘happy’ life vs long boring life?
Rebecca Burke