WEEK TWO: Time, Memory, Mortality

For our second week, we are going to consider philosophical issues surrounding not only “time” but also two existential phenomena for which time is of immense significance: memory and mortality.   As Deleuze explains in the lecture I posted last week, cinema has a very unique relationship to time, and filmmakers are able to manipulate time in ways that are quite literally impossible in our experience.  In fact, we do not even experience "time"; rather, we experience things in or over time.  In his Critique of Pure Reason, Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant speculated that time (along with space) is one of the conditions for the possibility of experience.  That is to say, though we never experience time directly, experience itself is impossible without time.

Most of the options for your “blog films” this week-- Back to the Future (1985), The Final Cut (2004), Memento (2000), The Terminator (1984), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)-- involve manipulations of time (via time-travel) or manipulations of memory (which makes possible the continuity of our experience in and over time).  However, our primary film for this week, the 2004 movie In Time (written and directed by Andrew Niccol and starring Justine Timberlake), approaches the question of time more symbolically.  In the film, which is set in a not-too-distant-future dystopia, people stop aging at 25 years and are engineered to live only one more year.  However, a person can buy more time and, consequently, can live as long as he or she can “afford.”  Niccol's film takes the old adage “time is money” quite literally, as the residents of this futuristic world pay their bills with time, borrow, steal and exchange time, and are divided into classes on the basis of their ownership (or lack thereof) of time. In order to help us think through the metaphorical association of time with money, we will supplement our textbook readings this week with a passage from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx entitled "Estranged Labor."  (The full text of "Estranged Labor" is here.)  After reading Marx, and before watching In Time, it will be important to consider the manner in which Marx's critique of capitalism (which depends not only on estranged labor, but also the concepts of private property, surplus wealth and the drive to accumulate both) can be applied to metaphorical "property" like time.

One caveat:  In my view, In Time is not an "excellent" film, but it is a film with an excellent idea (even if a poorly executed one) at its center.  

As I announced in class, we will have a screening of the film on Sunday, January 27 at 5pm in Buckman 108.  (I've set up a Facebook event for it here and would appreciate your "joining" if you plan to attend.)  In the meantime, here is the trailer for In Time: