The Scythe and the Sickle

...Death should be represented with a scythe and Time with a sickle; for Time can take only what is ripe, but Death comes always too soon.
—Hilaire Belloc, "The Mowing of a Field", Hills and the Sea

Boycott, O reader, the movie "In Time". Say impolite things about it whenever possible, and mock people who like the damn thing.

Why? Two reasons.

First is the clumsily handled class-war rhetoric, a blatant Marxist paradigm. It's bad enough when films even have the Marxist theme, but it's worse when they beat you over the head with it. And as if that weren't enough, the film actually makes the class allegory of The Time Machine look subtle, and in that, one of the classes eats the other one.

See, they use time as currency, and the rich are virtually immortal, while the poor literally live hand to mouth. Leaving to one side that, in America, you'd actually have the poor living centuries while the rich live millennia (apparently our poorest are still in the top 35% of global wealth), time is a great equalizer (twin paradoxes to one side). It gnaws equally upon king and thrall, there is no escape from its peculiarly-geometried clutches.

As if the heavy-handed metaphor weren't bad enough, the secondary bad effect of Marxist nonsense is also in play: blunting real, valid criticism of social inequality, by being an over-the-top strawman of its own position. The rich are not gods, they are not immortal, and the poor are not living that precariously even in countries vastly less wealthy than the US.

Of course, a realistic discussion of social inequality in the modern world would probably be preoccupied with the indignity of dependency upon the state dole, so, yeah, I don't know what I was thinking, expecting a Hollywood movie to talk about it.

The second reason to boycott it is, all bad "science fiction" movies that are actually bullshit fantasy movies should be boycotted. What, exactly, is the method by which life is extended in this manner? Is it some direct control of time? Is it some drug? Nanomachines? And how exactly is it that society is so little changed by the possibility of immortality? Every story about invisibility is actually about how people change when nobody's watching them, so why isn't this movie about how people change when death is not a certainty? It's unforgivable, to have a story with that kind of issue and restrict oneself to class warfare bromides.