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

Abstract

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.