April 5, 2012 at 1:50 P.M. I was forced to copy this text from a public copy shop. Regrettably, several "errors" were inserted in the text before I could do so. I will attempt to correct these "errors" and to copy the essay again.
April 4, 2012 at 1:00 P.M. As a result of what, I believe, is obvious sabotage, the printer at my local NYPL (Inwood) branch has been disabled, possibly on a permanent basis. I will continue to copy my texts from other locations around the city and at various branches of the library which, sadly, may then be subjected to similar sabotage efforts. I hope not. I will also make use of print shops scattered throughout Manhattan. The greatest victims of these illegal tactics are poor New Yorkers whose only access to the Internet or printing services are associated with this library branch. Evidently, New York's public officials are unable to control this situation. My plans and opinions have not changed. I can never be certain of being able to write from one day to the next. Obstructions and cybercrime are a daily reality. I will continue to struggle to write as much as I possibly can under very difficult conditions. ("How censorship works in America" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")
April 2, 2012 at 1:45 P.M. A card was deliberately jammed into the copying machine at my local NYPL branch. This is designed to prevent the use of this copier. I am not the only person using the public library. Many persons in Manhattan have no other access to the Internet or to a copying machine, Mr. Menendez. ("How censorship works in America.")
Theodore Sider, "Time," in Earl Conee & Theodore Sider,
Riddles of Existence: A Guided Tour of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 44-61.
Peter Gallison
, Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time (New York: Vintage, 2003).
Errol E. Harris
, The Reality of Time (New York: SUNY Press, 1988).
Roger Penrose,
The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) (2nd Ed. of a work that first appeared in 1989).
Roger Penrose,
Cycles of Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).
Alexander Nehamas
, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Also Sprach Zarathustra ("Thus Spoke Zarathustra") (1885).
Martin Heidegger,
Sein und Zeit ("Being and Time") (1927).
Charles Maturin,
Melmoth the Wanderer (London: Folio Society, 1993). (1st Ed. 1820).
Richard Ellman,
Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988). ("Sebastian Melmoth" was the name taken by Wilde during his final Parisian exile.)
Mark C. Taylor,
The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
"The poor die and the rich don't really live."
"In Time" is an ideas-based science fiction movie that features a subtle and ironic performance by Amanda Seyfried. Ms. Seyfried is an intelligent actor with a sly wit and, seemingly, genuine interest in ideas, who understands the black comedy as well as political subtexts in an excellent script based on the writings of Philip K. Dick. As I recall, the script is attributed to the film's director, Andrew Niccol.
Justin Timberlake is best or most generously described as "adequate" in a classic leading man/action hero role which may be his first acting experience on the big screen.
Olivia Wilde in a brief supporting role is touching and shockingly beautiful. The camera lingers, lovingly, over her delicate features. Ms. Wilde plays the
mother of the Timberlake character in a wicked comment on Hollywood's fascination with youth and continuing refusal to allow women actors, like all other human beings, to age on-screen. It would be most fitting if Ms. Wilde were related to Oscar Wilde.
The premise of the film is that in a near-future dystopia the minutes and hours of a person's life become currency. At age twenty-five persons stop growing physically older, but have only a year to acquire the additional "time" of their lives.
This bizarre situation results in great amounts of time falling into the hands of a few persons while very little time is left for most others. Time can be given or taken -- usually, taken involuntarily or unjustly. Human lives are literally "stolen" by wealthy persons who may exist for centuries. The thought of, say, Donald Trump living forever in New York may bring us less than total joy.
Something similar to this grim conceit is already possible in America. The movie is saying that, in a literal sense, "time is money." People's lives -- their "time" -- is certainly currency in our criminal justice system. ("So Black and So Blue in Prison" and "Justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal.")
Disparities in wealth ("It's nobody's fault what they're born with!") produce shorter life-spans for billions of persons; also much longer life-spans for the wealthy 1% in First World states. Genetics?
Issues of global justice are dramatized in the finale of the film as the "poor in time" invade -- or "occupy"? -- the equivalent of Wall Street. This movie and several others that have appeared recently reveal American anxieties about terrorism and immigration. It is also clear that there is intense hatred for the rich in America at the moment, especially for "elites" in the financial community.
Poor people today have shorter life-spans everywhere in the world. In parts of the Third World, for instance, average persons are lucky to live into their late forties. Many poor persons can also expect "reduced quality of life" in everything from education to health care and/or nutrition during their fewer years of life. Not very fair, is it? ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")
The primary theme of the movie is the quality versus quantity of life dilemma. This troubling question is faced, every day, by many persons who struggle against terminal illnesses, like cancer and AIDS.
As Heidegger suggests in "Being and Time," human life simply
is the resolution of this dilemma no matter how healthy any of us happen to be when we discover ourselves as "travellers in time." The narrative presents us with the unavoidable question: "How should we live in time?" ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
For today's audiences this question has become even more poignant with the transition from a Newtonian understanding of time, as strictly linear, to the postmodern understanding of time as a spiral, individual, biological, chemical and social, as distinct from something merely mechanical. We live in a quantum universe where "effects" may, in some sense, precede their "causes":
"The 'interval' creating this opening involves a spacing that insinuates time into every structure and system constructed to exclude it. Attempting to clarify his best-known and most notorious undecidable, Derrida writes that
differance is the 'becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time.' Since there can be no structural organization without the timely interval of this spacing, systems and structures are neither static nor eternal[,] but emerge
historically and are always changing. Such change is not prefigured or programmed but is subject to the uncertainty and unpredictability of chance. In the space-time of the interval, the aleatory emerges and what emerges is aleatory. The ceaceless
play of chance in the gaps of systems eventually upsets every equillibrium [and] makes homeostasis finally impossible." (Taylor, p. 97, emphasis added.)
The space where human beings can "be," in time, is
between change and stasis. This space has become a shrinking sliver of reality in postmodernist cultures. Hence, paradoxes surrounding entanglement relations at the subatomic realm may be dissolved with multidimensional understandings of time that complicate the notion of "locality." ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" then my forthcoming essay: "Double Fantasy: Entanglement, Dialectics, Postmodernity.")
At the outset of our story, a youthful, Byronic figure, reminiscent of Goethe's Faust or Charles Maturin's "Sebastian Melmoth" ("Sebastian Melmoth" was the name taken by Oscar Wilde in his Parisian exile) -- perhaps a cinematic version of Wagner's "Flying Dutchman" -- weary of life, sighs about the existential mystery in the opposition between living forever versus eternally.
Our challenge in life and this movie -- possibly in all art -- is to live NOW, fully and intensely, if only for a little while, or a moment or two. Like a colorful butterfly (whose life is a matter of minutes), it may be better to live beautifully, if fleetingly, than to linger in mediocrity forever. It may be impossible to hold the minutes and hours of our days frozen, forever, but it is not impossible to live the minutes and hours
eternally by dwelling in our time so completely that we would wish every second to be exactly and only what it is.
For those entranced by this Romantic notion, I prescribe Keats and Shelley -- in small doses -- also Shubert's music and any good recording of Puccini's "Madam Butterfly." ("'The American': A Movie Review.")
"How old are you in real time?"
This mysterious Faustian figure ("Neil Caffrey" in the t.v. show "White Collar"), played by Matt Bomer, provides our hero with the gift of centuries of life, then presents him with the curse of "making it count." This is the challenge we face in life: Affirm the moment. Nietzsche says: "Become one of the Eternal Ones!"
The bulk of the movie is about
how one lives "eternally," in the moment, for others. Albert Camus remarks that "it may be shameful" -- if not impossible -- "to be happy by oneself." ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script" then "'The English Patient': A Movie Review" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Each of us lives with a "clock" set to stop at a particular hour. We exist within networks of different temporal orders in a quantum universe that provides increasingly briefer "histories of time." Therefore, opportunities for genuine "connections" with others are also fewer and fleeting. Every death is personal, to paraphrase J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan," another myth referenced in this film, where death is a "crocodile" that will devour each of us "in turn." ("'Finding Neverland': A Movie Review" and "Stephen Hawking is Right On Time.")
Perhaps this is "Sylvia's" discovery in the story:
True wealth is authenticity, moral action, praxis and love, as her unique affirmation of the shared and fleeting moment ticking away that is made meaningful and poignant only by its very transitoriness. ("God is Texting Me!")
It is not time that passes. We pass. We die. We also leave something of ourselves behind in the lives of others affected by what we have felt and done, or created. This is how we really "give" time to others. Sylvia's Patty Hearst-like rebellion is about self-becoming. Like Rose in
Titanic, Sylvia rejects her golden prison. ("Bernard Williams and Identity.")
Sylvia chooses freedom over safety and comfort, preferring revolution to centuries of boredom. She prefers justice to wealth. Accusations of anti-semitism in the form of Mr. Weiss, Sylvia's father, ignore his daughter's "crusading' (as it were) for the poor. Sylvia (Ms. Seyfried clearly enjoys herself in this role!) takes over the movie about half-way through the narrative with a pretty pout and a stamp of her foot: "Is it really stealing," Sylvia asks, "if it is already stolen?" ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me'" and "'Che': A Movie Review.")
Dostoevsky's comment that "all wealth is theft" comes to mind. Mr. Timberlake is simply blown off the screen, in a manner of speaking, by the women in the movie. Ms. Seyfried makes her spoiled little rich girl droll and ironic as well as far too interesting for her earnest companion.
I suspect that Sylvia will soon dump her proletarian boyfried in order to take over dad's bank then go into the movie business.
"I don't have time!"
Greed is questioned in this movie as a motive for lasting commitment or action, even with regard to true wealth, which is equated with youth. Eternal youth, the movie says, is something everyone has a "shot at" and not only the characters in this movie. Youth is a spiritual state. How old are you in
your real time? ("Magician's Choice" then, again, "God is Texting Me!")
This insight about greed is not concerned with the ostensible age of the characters nor with how many riches they have accumulated. Authenticity is about "being-in-the-moment" that is vanishing into the past as we project ourselves into the future. ("Out of the Past" and "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
The opposite of greed is letting go of "things" in order to "be." We must relinquish the desire to possess objects in order to own ourselves. "It is better to be," Eric Fromm argues, "than to have." ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey Ethics" then "New Jersey's Politically Connected Lawyers On the Tit.")
With all of the time that anyone would wish to have safely in his vault, Mr. Weiss is only another kind of slave. Mr. Madoff is a target of this criticism. The film gestures at distinguished predecessors --
Logan's Run, The Fugitive, even the
Matrix films and
Inception receive subtle
hommages.
The director, Mr. Niccol, is mindful that his film is also a trajectory in time and underlines this point by weaving different temporal signatures into the imagery of key scenes. Action sequences and jump cuts alternate with slower camera movement and classic over-the-shoulder shots. ("'Inception': A Movie Review" and "'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")
An excellent performance is offered by Cillian Murphy as the archetypal "pursuer" who is usually representative of guilt in psychoanalytic terms. Mr. Murphy's character embodies the law in all of its blindness and stupidity, but with meticulous memory and always dutiful.
Les Miserables becomes a Noir sci-fi thriller. Justice is always particular; the law is always universal. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
Youth, we are told by Mr. Niccol (our clever director), is a metaphysical state that some fortunate persons inhabit for a lifetime, a spiritual bliss, a kind of grace. Almost all creative artists are youthful in this important sense. Others are born old. ("Serendipity, III" and "The Northanger Arms on Park Avenue.")
We meet Sylvia, as an old woman at the start of the film -- despite her chronological age -- before her meeting with the ostensible hero of our story. By the end of the movie, Sylvia has become "young," loving, passionate, purposeful and fascinating beyond her physical beauty. ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")
Mr. Timberlake's character, like most men, begins with a boyish fascination with
himself (gambling, preening, spending), then grows into a socially and politically responsible person. Ironically, our society does everything possible to prevent men from making this transition. Several refrences to Friedrich Nietzsche make this point obvious. Accordingly, I will give this German philosopher the last word:
"All joy wants eternity!"
Nietzsche proclaims the relation between joy and "eternal recurrence" as he "philosophizes with a hammer":
"Pain, too, is a joy. ... Have you ever said 'Yes' to a single joy? ... Then you have said yes, too, to
all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored. If ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, 'You please me happiness! Abide Moment!' then you wanted back
all. All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored -- oh, then you loved the world.
Eternal ones, love it eternally and evermore; and to woe, too, you say: go, but return!
For all joy wants eternity! ..." (
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Bk. IV, 19.)
