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Keeping Workers at a Distance: The Connection Between Borders and Finance in Andrew Niccol’s In Time

2016; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14650045.2015.1132704

1557-3028

Pablo Gómez Muñoz,

Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

ABSTRACTThis article presents In Time (Andrew Niccol, 2011) as a film that illuminates the role of borders at a local level and their relationship with the transnational interests of financial corporations. In Time imagines a near future in which time has replaced money as the currency. In this world, people have been genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, so, when they reach that age, they have to earn time or they die within a year. The film, shot in Los Angeles, portrays a world divided into “zones” and focuses on two of them: Dayton, a working-class area, and New Greenwich, a financial district. Drawing on this setting, In Time explores the roles of borders in the processes by which the later extracts value from the former. In order to investigate such processes, I consider the different kinds of borders that appear in the film, including not only fences and walls, but also other borders related to wealth, time, etiquette, behaviour, race, and surveillance. Close examination of borders, spatial dynamics, and characters’ behaviour elucidate the rationale behind the socioeconomic structures that the film depicts, who benefits from them, and what their interests are. Focusing on such aspects, this article argues that the different borders that appear in the film control the movement of people and money, thereby contributing to several conditions that benefit financial firms: the generalisation of debt, the casualisation of labour, workers’ resignation, the protection of the financial sector, and the criminalisation of the poor. AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Celestino Deleyto and the editors and referees of Geopolitics for their help with earlier versions of this article. Research towards this article has been carried out with the help of the 2014 Harry Levin Grant awarded by the Franklin Institute of the University of Alcalá (Spain); a FPU PhD Fellowship of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport (FPU13/00316); research project No. FFI2013-43968-P of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness; and research project No. H12 of the Government of Aragón.Notes1. R. Kitchin and J. Kneale, ‘Lost in Space’, Lost in Space: Geographies of Science Fiction (London and New York: Continuum 2002) p. 12; E. dell’Agnese, ‘The US–Mexico Border in American Movies: A Political Geography Perspective’, Geopolitics 10/2 (2005) p. 212.2. Kitchin and Kneale (note 1) pp. 9, 12.3. Dell’Agnese (note 1) p. 212.4. See P. Hubbard, R. Kitchin, B. Bartley, and D. Fuller (eds.), Thinking Geographically: Space, Theory and Contemporary Human Geography (London and New York: Continuum 2005 [orig. 2002]) pp. 158–167; and S. Hall, ‘Geographies of Money and Finance I: Cultural Economy, Politics and Place’, Progress in Human Geography 35/2 (April 2011) pp. 234–245.5. Hubbard, Kitchin, Bartley, and Fuller (note 4) pp. 164–166. See also N. Thrift, ‘On the Social and Cultural Determinants of International Financial Centres: The Case of the City of London’, in S. Corbridge, N. Thrift, and R. Martin, Money, Power and Space (Oxford: Blackwell 1994); N. Thrift, Spatial Formations (London: Sage 1996); and L. McDowell, Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City (Oxford: Blackwell 1997).6. Hubbard, Kitchin, Bartley, and Fuller (note 4) pp. 169–173.7. S. Sassen, ‘When the Center No Longer Holds: Cities as Frontier Zones’, Cities 34 (2013) p. 68.8. Ibid., pp. 67–68.9. Ibid., p. 69.10. S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2013) pp. 81–85.11. Ibid., pp. 87–92.12. G. Popescu, Bordering and Ordering the Twenty-first Century: Understanding Borders (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 2012) p. 81.13. Ibid.14. Ibid.15. Ibid.16. Ibid., p. 82.17. Ibid., p. 8.18. Ibid., pp. 8, 84.19. H. van Houtum and T. van Naerssen, ‘Bordering, Ordering, Othering’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 93 (2002) p. 126.20. M. Shiel, 2001. ‘Cinema and the City in History and Theory’, in M. Shiel and T. Fitzmaurice (eds.), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell 2001) p. 5.21. Metropolis has served as a visual and conceptual reference for later science fiction films, including In Time. Several film scholars consider Metropolis a seminal dystopian film. See G. King and T. Krzywinska, Science Fiction Cinema: From Outerspace to Cyberspace (London: Wallflower 2000) p. 73; C. Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2007) p. 20; and B. K. Grant, 100 Science Fiction Films (London: BFI-Palgrave Macmillan 2013) p. 109.22. D. Desser, ‘Race, Space and Class: The Politics of Cityscapes in Science-Fiction Films’, in A. Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema (London and New York: Verso 1999) pp. 80–96.23. Ibid., p. 84.24. Z. Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press 1998) p. 19.25. ‘In Time Filming Locations. Part 7’, Seeing Stars, available at , accessed 25 March 2014.26. See Bauman (note 24) p. 19; W. Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books 2010) p. 23; Sassen, ‘When the Center No Longer Holds’ (note 7) p. 68; Mezzadra and Neilson (note 10) p. 85.27. Bauman (note 24) p. 93.28. Popescu (note 12) p. 107. On mobile borders see also C. Parizot, A. L. Amilhat-Szary, G. Popescu, I. Arvers, and T. Cantens, J. Cristofol, N. Mai, J. Moll, & A. Vion, ‘The antiAtlas of Borders, A Manifesto’, Journal of Borderlands Studies 29/4 (2014) pp. 503–512; and A. L. Amilhat-Szary and F. Giraut, Borderities and the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2015).29. Mezzadra and Neilson (note 10) p. 132.30. C. Fojas, Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press 2008) p. 160.31. Ibid.32. Popescu (note 12) p. 107.33. I would like to thank Celestino Deleyto for this observation.34. Fojas (note 30) p. 181.35. Desser (note 22) p. 93.36. United States Census Bureau, available at , accessed 5 March 2014.37. Bauman (note 24) p. 18; G. Delanty, ‘The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory’, The British Journal of Sociology 57/1 (2006) p. 32.38. Popescu argues that asking these kinds of questions contributes to understanding the contexts in which borders evolve. See Popescu (note 12) pp. 22, 152.39. C. Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) 2010) p. 28 in Mezzadra and Neilson (note 10) pp. 81–82.40. Mezzadra and Neilson (note 10) p. 92.41. Ibid., p. 159.42. S. Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: The New Press 1998) pp. 145–148.43. S. Sassen, ‘Expelled: Humans in Capitalism’s Deepening Crisis’, Journal of World-Systems Research 19/2 (2013) p. 199.44. Ibid., pp. 199–200.45. P. Sands, ‘Global Cannibal City Machines: Recent Visions of Urban/Social Space’, in L. Krause and P. Petro (eds.), Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture and Urbanism in a Digital Age (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press 2003) p. 139.46. V. Rodríguez Ortega, La Ciudad Global en el Cine Contemporáneo: Una Perspectiva Transnacional (Santander: Shangrila Textos Aparte 2012) p. 11.47. Ibid.48. E. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2000). p. 299.49. Ibid., pp. 305–306, 312–313.50. Sassen, ‘When the Center No Longer Holds’ (note 7) p. 69.51. Ibid., pp. 69–70.52. Popescu (note 12) p. 107.53. Bauman (note 24) pp. 123–124.54. Ibid.55. Ibid., pp. 123–124.56. Mezzadra and Neilson (note 10) pp. 21–22.57. Ibid., p. 84.58. A. Cooper and C. Rumford, ‘Cosmopolitan Borders: Bordering as Connectivity’, in M. Rovisco and M. Nowicka (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing 2011) p. 273.59. Desser (note 22) p. 89.60. Ibid., pp. 88–90.61. M. Fisher, ‘Precarious Dystopias: The Hunger Games, In Time, and Never Let Me Go’, Film Quarterly 65/4 (2012) p. 31.62. ‘The Robin Hood Tax Campaign’, Oxfam International, available at http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/health-education/robin-hood-tax, accessed 17 Feb. 2014.63. D. Felix, ‘Financial Globalization and the Tobin Tax’, Challenge 38/3 (1995) p. 57; and R. Buckley, ‘Introducing a 0.05% Financial Transactions Tax as an Instrument of Global Justice and Market Efficiency’, Asian Journal of International Law 4/1 (2013) pp. 154, 162.64. Buckley (note 63) pp. 156, 161–162.65. Ibid., pp. 166–167.66. See T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press 2013) pp. 517–158; and J. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company 2012) p. 343.67. Piketty (note 66) pp. 515–518; Stiglitz (note 66) p. 348.68. Buckley (note 63) pp. 166–167; Piketty (note 66) p. 518; Stiglitz (note 66) pp. 344–347.