ABSTRACT
This article examines the way in which credit and debt have been explored since the 2008 crisis: suggesting a formal analogue in which an abstracted financial capital (credit) has been contrasted against its concrete productive counterpart (debt). The first half of the paper traces this contrast through the theoretical vocabularies for credit and debt that have emerged in the wake of the crisis, in which debt has been separated from credit and the possibility that the former can be read as resisting the latter’s dependence on financialisation has been explored. In the second half, I explore this dyad as it is made evident in two very recent films, Andrew Niccol’s 2011 In Time and Rian Johnson’s 2012 Looper, which offer an alternative model of social debt, one that uses the connection between time and work to actively critique the movement from productive to financial capital. These two films, I want to suggest, engage with the difficulties of representing the ‘concrete’ nature of productive capital by both thematically and formally foregrounding its literalism.
