Picture it & Write

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books, creative writing, In Time, poetry, The Undomestic Goddess, time, writing

I urge people to join in, comment with your paragraph of fiction to accompany the image. It doesn’t have to follow my story or reflect the same themes. It can be a poem or in a different language (provide a translation please :)). Anyone who wants to join in, is welcome. This photograph will be reblogged under Ermisenda on tumblr, and added to the Picture it & Write gallery on Facebook and Pinterest.

Every fortnight we hope to host a photograph suggested by contributors. So, keep those photograph recommendations coming. Submit your favorite images (with credit) for next week’s Picture it & Write!

Have you ever noticed how often time is a major plot point in entertainment?  Everyone is running out of time.  Profilers only have 24 hours to find missing children before it’s too late.  Samantha measures her life in six minute increments as a high powered lawyer in The Undomestic Goddess.  Time is currency in the movie In Time.  The world is going to explode; the island is going to sync and the world is going to end in 2012.  Why do we spend time working to earn money that we end up spending on health supplements and herbal remedies to get more time.  What is our obsession with time?

-Eliabeth Hawthorne

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Problematic Immortality and the Movie “In Time”

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immortality, In Time, movies, reviews

I recently reviewed In Time, the 2011 movie where time is currency.  Sicne writing that review, some other plot points relating to their concept of immortality really bothered me.

A quick recap for anyone who hasn’t heard of the movie: Time is now the currency.  Talk about high prices for coffee, it costs you four minutes of your life.  Everyone is born with a clock on their arm worth one year which begins to tick down when they turn twenty-five.  Time is earned and paid, added and subtracted with a stamp or twist of the arm.  When the clock starts ticking at age twenty-five, that’s it.  You stop growing, stop aging.  Your physical appearance never changes.

Ignoring how creepy it is to be the same physical age as your great grandmother, there’s more problems with this concept that the writers completely overlooked.  As Ermisenda commented, it’s a great concept, but it was not pulled off as well as it could have been.  Think about this for a moment, your physical appearance never changes.

There’s a scene where two of the characters discuss the moment their clock began to count down.  The girl said she looked in the mirror and marveled that she would never look any different.  I realize this is incredibly shallow, but how depressing!  I just got my hair cut, and I’m a little freaked out because it’s shorter than the picture I took in to show them what I wanted, but not being immortal, I have the bright light at the end of the tunnel that my hair will actually grow back.  Now take that to a more serious level.

Your genes have completely stopped.  What happens if you get sun burned?  What happens if you break your leg?  Does a doctor put you in a cast and you are just SOL forever?  What if you get shot, rip a nail off kicking your sheets (so incredibly painful), knock out a tooth?  The writers had a great concept with time being a currency, and they did present the concept that immortality is unnatural and not as great as it sounds on the surface, but after that they really missed the mark.  I revoke my original 3 star rating (I don’t think I actually mentioned a number) and give it a 2.  The improper use of Darwinism as an excuse for warped capitalism and the overlooked complications of the system of immortality has caused In Time to be less than satisfactory.  Am I over-thinking it?  Sure, so if you just want an action movie with a twist, it’s worth watching, otherwise not so much.

-Eliabeth Hawthorne

See the original review of In Time here.

Movie Review: In Time

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Gulliver's Travels, immortality, In Time, Tuck Everlasting

What would you do with all the time in the world?  Immortality has never interested  me, probably because of books like Gulliver’s Travels and movies like Tuck Everlasting and now In Time.

Talk about a movie written for gorgeous young actors!  In the movie, no one is every physically older than 25; they just stop aging.  But there’s a catch: “for a few to be immortal, many must die.”  Money is currency, it is earned and spent.  Coffee is 4 minutes and a bus ride is two hours.  Time is transferred by holding scanners to a person’s wrist or by holding hands.  Arm wrestling takes on a whole new context as the flick of a wrist can mean the difference between life and death.

In Time Review

Meh.  It’s got some good political themes, but they kept making reference to Darwinism and survival of the fittest as a justification for the rich hoarding time and making sure that the poor died before their time, but there’s no evolution.  Traits that make certain genes “superior” are not getting passed down or weeded out.  This arrangement with the clock on the arm seems to be a relatively new development.  People reference being in their seventies or eighties, but no one was anywhere near 200 years old.  People weren’t dying because their genes were inferior, they were dying because the rich raised the price of living in the poor districts, essentially stealing their life.