In Time : The First Hollywood Movie of the Occupy Wall Street Era

Abstract

Released in 2011, In Time was written and directed by Andrew Niccol and stars Justine Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. It was distributed by Twentieth Century Fox and offers a worthy insight into contemporary reality and the changing way in which capitalist exploitation is perceived and experienced by popular consciousness. Set in 2169, In Time presents us with a dystopic future in which wages are paid, quite literally, in chunks of codified time. Goods are paid for in the same way; by sacrificing and exchanging portions of accumulated time — a cup of coffee costs four minutes, for instance. A digital countdown is embedded into the fabric of every human being; a series of blinking luminous numbers on the forearm denotes how much time you have. Some have more than others. While those in the salubrious areas have accumulated millions of years, those in the ghettos live day-to-day, selling what little time they have in order to pay for food, rent and transport, simultaneously trying to make sure that the hours and minutes of their body clock do not drop to zero—for then death occurs instantaneously.